The frustration of the seventy-plus SAS/Delta Force survivors, of men trained for lightning-fast IKO — in-kill-out — action, but who, because of the minefields, had been bottled up, forced into open-ground warfare without the assist of heavy mortars and the like, manifested itself in Freeman. He now saw the choppers getting smaller, Norton having presumably seen that despite all the noise and thunder of ordnance being thrown at the cliff face, most of the dug-in AA batteries were still intact, putting up a wall of lead that had already created seven gaping holes in the chopper line of attack. Norton had obviously decided that to take the marines in would have been nothing less than suicidal. It was a call he’d have to square with Freeman, if Freeman survived, but it was his call.
“Two oh three!” yelled Freeman, his shout immediately attracting AK-47 fire, albeit inaccurate, the SPETS probably on the move deploying a defensive line. Morgan and others responded to their fire immediately in an enfilade of semiautomatic fire erupting from the C-shaped Delta Force line, whose northern and southern arcs spread out left and right of Freeman. This time the sustained firing of Delta Force successfully covered the ten-yard dash by one of the two Delta men equipped with an M-203, in effect an eleven-pound M-16A2 rifle with a circular-ribbed, forty-millimeter-diameter grenade launcher — a replacement for the old M-16A1’s forestock — with the 5.56-millimeter mag serving as the handgrip when pulling the trigger of the launcher. “You figure that basin of theirs is about thirty, fifty yards from here?” Freeman asked the commando.
“Split the difference, General — forty.”
“Suits me, son. Lob six of those babies right in there. Start with HE and alternate with smoke and tear gas canisters. One after the other, son, quick as you can and we’ll have a fuckin’ rat trap sooner’n you can fart!” Freeman turned to Morgan, who was firing another burst on the other side of the M-203. “Henry, get your flank ready. Hand signals. Gas masks on. We go on ten.”
“Go on ten. Got it.” A loud bang stunned Freeman, the SPETS bracketing them with heavy mortar, and even as he was signalling the crescent of Delta men on his right to ready for an attack on ten, he couldn’t hear anything but buzzing in his ears, as if they were covered by a mass of wasps. Then he lost sight of his men, a thick cloud of tear gas enveloping both Delta flanks — from where he couldn’t tell. Through the buzz he heard the crash of the first grenade in the basin, said, “Good shooting!” but couldn’t hear himself, and was struck by the terrible thought that the SPETS, many of whom he knew were trained in English, might have picked up his shouted commands. Whether the tear gas fired at them had been a coincidence or was their own, backblasted by a change in the wind, he couldn’t tell. Either way he knew he had no choice. He heard a second explosion, this one clanging, the HE grenade shrapnel ringing in the rock basin. There were screams of men hit, his or theirs he couldn’t tell. Another grenade went off, then more — coming from the SPETS. He tried to look through the smoke but could see nothing. Next moment it cleared. Morgan fired, and there was a soft, red explosion — blood — no more than twenty feet away. The SPETS shooter slumped, not making a sound, his nose and right cheek missing. Freeman brought his wristwatch close to his face: nine seconds. Grasping the Winchester tightly he yelled, “Go!”, the sound of his voice coming to him as if in the distance, through a long pipe.
La Bataille du Bassin—The Battle of the Basin, as the French papers were later to describe it — was not, as the headline suggested, some vast, sprawling engagement in the Arctic but it was fierce and unyielding to the seventy-plus Delta/SAS men who charged, following Freeman, through the tear gas screen to engage the enemy in a swirling, smoke-filled cauldron of firefights. The sounds of the battle reverberated off the rocky amphitheater as Americans, British, and Siberians closed hand-to-hand after exhausting their magazines and when the attacking Delta/SAS Force was so near the Siberians that further fire endangered their own men.
Morgan and Freeman were side by side as they reached the rocky basin’s rim. Freeman had no option but to fire the lead slug, a metal projectile punching through three SPETS in the congested basin, blowing holes the size of sledgehammers and sending flesh and bone flying as if they themselves had exploded. Before the third SPETS fell, Freeman, a formidable sight coming through the haze of battle with his shotgun, had already pumped — Delta hands eschewing semi-automatic shotguns because of their proneness to jam — one of the four flechette cartridges into the barrel and fired, then another, then another— in all, sending out 180 grek- or polyethylene-bedded steel darts in an expanding cone that killed at least six SPETS outright, injuring another half dozen or more.
Seven Delta Force fell under sustained AK-47 fire from the SPETS who, a moment before Freeman fired, had been a compact mass about the R1 exit. A shouted order from among the SPETS preceded the closing, or rather the attempted closing, of the R1 manhole. But by now another Delta commando had fired his lead-slug-loaded shotgun from only ten feet away and with a deafening ring, akin to the sound of some enormous bell being hammered, the steel manhole cover, once cold and therefore undetected and untouched by the Allied infrared guided aerial bombardment, was now billowing smoke like some fumarole.
The warmer air of the hundred-foot-deep tunnels streaming through the ragged, baseball-sized perforation blown out by the Winchester’s slug immediately created a fog as it hit the Arctic air, adding to the confusion of the smoke-filled basin. Freeman went down, the victim of a SPETS stun grenade concussion, the Winchester clattering on the R1 cover. Brentwood’s small band of SAS survivors breached the basin’s rim to the right.
“Medic!” Morgan shouted, and then died, lungs pulped to a pink mass by an AK-74 burst at near-point-blank range. Brentwood evened the score, emptying a mag into the SPETS, punching him back into other comrades falling about him. Not pausing for a second Brentwood popped one, two, three grenades down through the hole in the R1 cover, the thumps and clanging of the explosions sending ricocheting metal zinging about amid the screaming and choking tear gas, adding to the general confusion and making it impossible to know friend from foe for at least seven seconds.
It was a relative silence in the roar of noise, and noticed only by the final group of four SAS and one Delta paratrooper who, like Brentwood and Aussie before them, had had to work more slowly than Freeman’s “cavalry” through a grenade-shovelled path in the minefield in order to reach the basin.
No one except Dracheev, in his Saddam bunker a hundred feet down and a mile away, realized what the immediate implications of the Allied grenade attack in the shaft were. One moment the Siberian commander had been watching his men moving toward the R1 shaft, the next they stopped. Within seconds he could detect the unmistakable reek of cordite and throat-searing whiffs of tear gas streaming back through the tunnels. He knew immediately that the top section of Rl must now be penetrated. In fact, the whole of R1 had been penetrated insofar as the sheer mass of bodies — some barely alive — writhing in the hellish cauldron of the top fifty feet of the R1 shaft was preventing the steel trapdoor hatch at the sixty-foot level from being closed, thus risking the integrity of the entire system, the shaft jammed with dead and dying.