At the top of the shaft David Brentwood was yelling, “Half with me, half stay topside. Watch the other exits!” Brentwood knew that most of these rat holes would already be warped, even if they’d not been actually penetrated by the air strikes, and would therefore be effectively unopenable by the SPETS. Still, the Siberians would need only one or two exits to enable them to swarm up again. Even now the ten-man Delta squad deployed on the rim were readying to stave off any counterattack by ad hoc teams of SPETS who, having made their way along the cliff tops north and south of the rocky depression, were now attempting to head back to try and retake the R1 basin.
In the basin a medic, readying to give Freeman a shot of antitetanus, almost finished what the Siberians had begun, barely seeing Freeman’s tetanus allergy bracelet in time as the general groggily regained consciousness long enough to give Brentwood an order.
“Yes, sir!” responded Brentwood, looking around, yelling, “Radio!” He had to call again before he saw a whip aerial swinging wildly like a fishing rod through the clearing smoke and fumes that were still issuing from R1. “They still have us jammed?” he asked the radio operator.
“Yes, sir. All static.”
“All right. Get to the cliff top. Aussie, you cover him. Take two more with you.” Brentwood turned to the radio man. “Use your lamp if you can’t get a frequency. Signal Little Diomede for the MEU to come in. They’ll pass it on. Four Apaches attacking first, the transports to follow fifteen minutes later, coming down on the other exits. But no spreading out — just secure the exits. There are still minefields on our flanks.” Brentwood tossed down two more three-second SAS “specials”—stun grenades of the kind SAS had used to clear the Iranian Embassy in London of terrorists in 1980. Stepping back quickly from the cover, he heard Aussie telling him, “Cliff AAs are still active. They’ll blow the MEU Apaches to pieces.”
“Do what I tell you!” shouted Brentwood. “Take another two men with you.” Within seconds two more Delta commandos were moving with Aussie up toward the rim to cover the rear right and left flanks of the signal operator, whose lamp was blinking eastward where anyone but the Siberians could see it. Dick Norton’s scopes on Cape Prince of Wales spotted it the second it began winking — the radio relay from Little Diomede’s Patriot battery not needed.
As the four AH-64s were taking off and heading out over the jagged twenty-five-mile ice flow toward Ratmanov, their Hughes gunbelts fully loaded and rocket pods resupplied, Delta Force and SAS were in their element, doing what they had trained months, in some cases years, to do. Every man of them was highly trained in a cross section of skills, and every one was in top physical shape. Eighteen headed north of the basin to carry out Freeman’s order; twenty-seven headed south, where the AA fire from the recessed, rail-mounted batteries had been heaviest. Map references from the fighter aircrafts’ largely futile attacks on the recessed AA positions were of some help, but the references couldn’t be relied upon to any high degree.
“Clever bastard!” quipped Aussie to the radio man, but the latter didn’t answer, his concentration eastward, lips moving with his Morse message. When he’d received the acknowledgment blink from across the pristine air of the strait he noticed shadows, scattered clouds sliding ominously across the ice pack. “Who’s a clever bastard?” he asked Aussie. Aussie fired a long burst at a SPETS who, looking the worse for wear, was dodging between rocky outcrops thirty yards down from the basin’s rim. The SPETS stopped then fell, twisting about, trying to reach his backpack. He slithered down into a pocket of dirty ice, streaked by FAE detritus.
“Who’s a clever bastard?” repeated the radio man. “Brentwood?”
“What? Oh, yeah, him too. But I meant the old man.”
“Von Freeman,” grunted one of the Delta men, who’d lost two of his best buddies when the general had called in the FAE strike.
“Okay,” said Aussie. “He’s a rough customer, but this is a smart move, boyo!”
“You hope.”
Aussie thought he saw the SPETS move in the snow — or was it a sense of movement created by passing cloud? “Five to one on it works,” he whispered, clipping in another mag, not taking his eyes off the SPETS but not wanting to waste ammunition either.
“You mean what he told Brentwood?” said the Delta man.
“Yeah.”
“What’s five to one on?” asked the American to his right.
“He means,” said the radio man, “you bet ten bucks to win one.”
“Fuck you,” said the other Delta man matter-of-factly.
“Hey, hey,” said Aussie, adopting a quiet yet schoolmasterish tone, still not taking his eyes off the SPETS. “Watch your language. Three to one on.”
“Done.”
There was an explosion so violent that it shook ice from the cliff top, sending it on a sheer fell sixteen hundred feet straight down, where it shattered like glass on the floe.
“Christ, what was that?” said Aussie. There was a towering pall of smoke above R1 seventy yards behind them and the stink of human ordure.
“C-four,” the radio man said quietly, his dull monotone suppressing his fear, so determined not to overreact he hardly seemed to react at all. “Brentwood must have dropped a whole—” He stopped, and the others knew why, for it might well have been a SPETS-induced explosion. Taking his eyes off the SPETS, Aussie glanced back toward the middle of the basin, the towering black column of smoke now hundreds of feet in the air.
Because Joe Mell’s Skidoo conked out — he’d had to clean the plugs and tinker with the carburetor to get it going again — it was civil twilight when he reached the snake. Mumbling that he should have “used the dogs” instead, he cinched the belt charge securely about the four-foot-diameter pipe, took another swig of Southern Comfort, and pushed the button.
They found bits of him as far as two hundred yards away, untouched by the inferno that followed the explosion: the charge had not ignited the oil until it raised the temperature of the crude gushing out of the pipe to its flash point. Forensic analysis of the molecular structure of dime-sized pieces from the charge’s casing recovered by disc metal detectors confirmed what Anchorage FBI had been quick to surmise — namely that the material was of Soviet manufacture and that there had been no timer, a guarantee that Joe Mell, identified by dental records, would never be able to identify Chernko’s Alaskan sleeper.
Only twelve minutes elapsed between Joe Mell’s attack and the two other points of sabotage — one on the North Slope itself, the third at Valdez depot, where the crude was now afire and fouling the pristine beauty of Prince William Sound, huge globular tarballs of unrefined “mousse” crude suffocating every sea creature in their path. The fire at the spill’s periphery was so fierce that it split the ice-cold fir trees lining the sound, their sharp “cracks” heard for miles along the frozen shore.
The environmental catastrophe that was fouling the waters and killing thousands of animals, from seabirds who had become trapped upon landing in the sludge to marmots hibernating in the Brooks Range, enraged environmentalists from Nome to Washington. What would cause the lights of Congress to burn late into the winter night, however, was the stunning realization that the United States — its consumption of fuel in the war five times normal usage — now had its vital oil artery cut.
The pipeline could be mended within a week, but with the Middle East wells afire, the awful vulnerability of the pipeline and of the tankers shipping the oil from Valdez meant that most of the Pacific Fleet’s submarines would have to be deployed to protect the 1,900-mile-long tanker route from Valdez to Cherry Point, Washington to Point Conception in California. This meant drastically reducing the number of submarines available to the Pacific Fleet for action in and about the Aleutians and in America’s ability to interdict the Siberian resupply routes from Vladivostok, Sakhalin, and the Kuril Island bases.