David Brentwood took a deep breath, exhaled half of it, held the rest and tossed the grenades — one, two, three, four, five, the fifth one going off as he let go of the sixth, dropping to the snow and pulling his equipment pack against his helmet as cascades of powder snow and fragments of rock pebbles fell on him and a sliver of white-hot metal passed through the thermal suit, gashing his right thigh. A second later he felt a burning sensation on his back — hot or freezing cold he couldn’t tell. It was lumps of snow, now ice, fused by the grenade’s heat.
Using the pack as a rest he fired two long bursts, tattooing the ground along the twenty-to-thirty-yard line of the grenades’ explosion. Only one more mine went off, with an almost disappointing “pop,” but it was loud enough for Aussie who, though further back, had his face pockmarked by splinters, his goggles scratched so badly they were no longer of any use to him. David clipped on a fresh magazine and was up and running straight into the rough canal-like fissure cleared through the snow by the grenades, firing from the hip, Aussie covering him, two SPETS rising out of “fucking nowhere,” as Aussie would later recount, off to their left, the telltale stutter and flame of their two AK-47s silenced in a long, angry burst from the Australian. The Siberian commandos fell face first “while fucking Brentwood — no fucking apology for my face — does a fucking Babe Ruth for the home plate. Lucky bastard’s first one to see a ventilator shaft, then a sealed-off rat hole. Crafty buggers had it protected under an overhanging rock ledge.”
It wasn’t as easy as Aussie made out, the truth being that when David tried to fire into the ventilation mesh, a ricochet from the titanium-hardened grate, its apertures too small for a bullet to pass through, almost took off his knee. While Aussie covered him, David ran ahead, snatched two grenades from the dead SPETS he’d cut down, their faces so black with camouflage paint that he could only make out their eyes, put the grenades against the mesh, and then shoved one of the SPETS hard up against the grenades and ventilator grate before he pulled the pins. The concertinaed explosion blew a grapefruit-sized hole in the mesh and had one of the SPETS’ carotid arteries spurting blood like a hose, making it slippery on the now snow-free rock.
“Thanks for shovelling my driveway, mate,” said Aussie as he and David dropped two tear gas grenades into the ventilator shaft.
It was of no use, for the exit had been sealed off at the sixty-foot level, besides which the ventilator shafts, being of Saddam design and built in the halcyon days of Gorbachev/German friendship, had no difficulty filtering out the tear gas. Aussie and Brentwood looked around for the rest of the SAS stick, but there weren’t any. At least fifty-six of the seventy had landed farther north of them in another minefield into which SPETS were pouring machine-gun and mortar fire from rocky enclaves on high ground. The SPETS were calling it the boynya— “butcher shop.” And it was still dark. Come civil twilight in another fifteen minutes the SPETS would have an even easier time of it, no longer inhibited by inferior night-vision goggles.
Surrounded by mines, the SAS would systematically be cut to pieces, as they were too near the SPETS for any close air support to help. Any strafing or bombing run would kill them as well as the SPETS. The terrible irony was that those SAS dropped farther north than Aussie, Brentwood, and a few others had made a textbook descent right on target having been guided by the heat-emission patterns seen through their PVS-7s. But of those fifty-six-odd SAS troopers there were now only thirty-seven.
They were no more than two hundred yards from an exit, one of the two hitherto unseen by Allied reconnaissance and designated by Dracheev as Rl and R2. But with the minefield between them and the SPETS they might as well have been two hundred miles away. A few had tried Brentwood’s method and had cleared a path, but here the SPETS heavy Vladimirov 14.5-millimeter fire was so concentrated and overwhelming, coming from over two hundred SPETS, that it seemed come civil twilight the SAS, and thus the Allied offensive on Ratmanov Island, was doomed.
South of the main body of SAS, Aussie, Brentwood, and two other troopers began placing C-4 charges about the double-armored cover of the sealed-off rat hole. With only ten minutes till civil twilight they knew their only chance of survival, let alone of doing any damage to the SPETS, was to penetrate the tunnel system. To make matters worse, the tear gas, albeit in weakened form after having been processed by the subterranean filter system, was being vented through the snow around them, adding to the eeriness of the place. For in the bitter, windswept blue of the cold, predawn light, it seemed as if sulfurous fumaroles were leaching up poisons from the earth’s violent interior.
Aboard the C-141 General Douglas Freeman was about to make one of the toughest decisions of his or any other military career. Twelve minutes to the first rays of civil twilight and Freeman didn’t hesitate, but the Pentagon and the president had, “advising” him to call the Ratmanov operation off but craftily leaving the final decision to him as “the man on the ground.” He wasn’t on the ground, but he knew what they meant: “You decide — you take the rap.”
The press, specifically CBN — how the hell did they know? Freeman wondered — had somehow gotten wind of the minefield catastrophe, and sniffing disaster in the air, reporters were collecting like jackals around the carcass of the White House, its authority bleak-looking beneath the low, leaden sky, its rose bushes forlornly naked but for traces of snow on the thorn. Press Secretary Trainor was swearing to get whomever was responsible for the “minefield” leak “by the balls”; he wanted a list of everyone who knew, from the White House ops room to C in C Alaska air command. Had anyone used plain language instead of the scrambler for God’s sake?
“No,” he was told — some CBN bastard was doing a “Baghdad Pete” on them.
“You mean he’s actually on Big Diomede?”
“Either that or close enough. Maybe Little Diomede.”
“I thought Freeman ordered that son of a bitch off?”
The aide, a bright young masters degree from Princeton’s International Relations program, was red-faced. “Ah, bit of a screwup there, Mr. Trainor.”
“Spill it, Simpson, spill it!”
“Ah — one of the Eskimos that came out on Little Diomede’s Evac chopper—” Simpson was looking down at some hurriedly scribbled notes. “Couple of hours before the attack. Well, far as we can tell so far, someone apparently saw the press credentials hanging around someone’s neck and figured it was the CBN guy”
“But it wasn’t!” snapped Trainor.
“Doesn’t look like it, sir. Uh, all rigged up in winter gear, snow flying everywhere around the chopper, they said — hard to see I guess.”
“Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Who said?”
“Uh, Nome control.”
“Is it hard to count?” barked Trainor. “Why didn’t the son of a bitch in charge count the fuckers?”
“Maybe they did, Mr. Trainor. Guess no one was sure exactly how many were in Inalik.”