Dracheev’s force, however, paid a much heavier price: seventeen of the eighteen holes or caves were hit, wiped out, AA quad mountings and SAM launchers blown off their rail mounts, inclining roofward or pointing at the ice floes at ridiculously inoperable angles. They were too heavy to manhandle back onto the rails — the latter buried in any case by collapsing rock piles and scaffolding.
From a distance it looked like a dust storm was issuing forth from the cliff, the rush of black and white rock — now gravel-pouring down the cliffs like molten waterfalls plunging to the ice floe fifteen hundred feet below, the air steaming up as if volcanic vents had been unzipped all along the cliff’s base, the bodies of some of the more than fifty-three SPETS, AA, and missile crews momentarily visible in the Allied-made avalanche.
“Let the up, goddamn it!” ordered Freeman, getting up off the litter. “I’m all right.”
“General, you took a bad fall. Concussion sometimes doesn’t—”
“Let the up!”
It delayed the takeoff of the Apache chopper, which had been turned into an air ambulance heading back to Cape Prince of Wales. It was now sprouting two litters for wounded on either side.
At the moment when his control room shivered, photographs splintering from the enormous shock waves of the Allied charges on the cliff, Major General Dracheev knew his garrison was defeated. His SPETS would fight to the death if asked, but it would be nothing more, he told his duty officer, than apodpolnaya boynya— “underground abattoir.”
It was impossible to get a message through the jammed hub of wounded up to R1 and so, tearing off a piece of his bed sheet, sticking it on the bayonet of an AK-74, he personally made his way through the choking dust of the tunnel leading out to the nearest AA gun emplacement.
Weaving his way carefully through the burning remnants of what had been a ZSU quad, he saw the bodies of its crew, or rather what was left of them, cast about the tunnel so violently that it only added to his resolve. The stench of human ordure mixed with the sulfurous stench of the C-4’s aftermath and incinerated guano, hitherto frozen by the ice, almost overwhelmed him. Dracheev saw two Apaches, now alarmingly big, passing up then out of sight above the cliff. “Hello!” he called from the tunnel, his voice echoing out from the cliff as he disgustedly thrust out the AK-74, the white sheet slapping stiffly in the breeze.
The surrender formally took place eleven minutes later at 1411 hours, though there was sporadic fighting by groups of SPETS along the island, until Dracheev was taken aboard one of the Apaches and, using a booster hailer to overcome the noise of the chopper, told his troops below it was all over.
“Brentwood!” It was Freeman congratulating him. “Good job, son. Damn good job.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Brentwood, but his mind was clearly on something else. Behind him Aussie Lewis, Choir Williams, and others were steering the SPETS to the ad hoc weapons dump in the basin. There AK-47s, 74s, even HK MP5K and rounds of nine-millimeter Parabellum along with grenades clattered on the heap. Many of the SPETS had to come up so fast they’d not had time to put on their white overlays; they were already shivering. But no one suspected for a moment that it was from fear, a strange air of equality between the two forces even in the SPETS defeat.
“Ah, General,” began Brentwood, his tone betraying his unwillingness to go on, “ah, we’ve got a bit of a problem here, sir.”
“What?”
“Sir, that CBN reporter you ordered off Little Diomede at the beginning—”
“What about him? Where’s Morgan?” Freeman was looking about.
“Morgan bought it, sir,” said Brentwood.
Freeman, hands on hips, stared at the pile of weapons. “Son of a bitch.” He turned to Brentwood. “The news guy, too?”
“No, sir,” replied Brentwood. “He’s still with us.”
“Well, can’t kill those bastards.” Someone thought he said, “Unfortunately,” but this was pure speculation, the men around Freeman waiting for the general to explode on hearing that the reporter hadn’t followed orders.
“Deliberate?” shot back Freeman.”Or couldn’t they get him off in time?”
“Ah — deliberate, I’m afraid, sir.”
“Send him to me.”
The cluster of SAS men looked at one another. Normally there might have been a wink or two, relishing the reaming out of one of the “news nits,” as the SAS called them; all of them hated the press. But none of the Brits were in the mood for entertainment just yet; too many of their closest friends were charred lumps, wasted by the FAE that the American general had called in.
“What’s your name?” Freeman asked the CBN reporter.
“Lamonte, General — Rick Lamonte.” He indicated his press card pinned to the Arctic fox collar. “CBN.”
“That the Communist Broadcasting Network?”
“No, General.”
Freeman grunted. “You send all your equipment to Major Brentwood here. Understand?”
“General, I’m—”
“Listen, Lamonte, I’m not having you invading America’s dinner hour with your blood-and-guts footage — least not before any next-of-kin is notified. You got that?”
“I haven’t got pictures of any wounded, General. Wasn’t close enough — too much debris in the air.”
The general said nothing, and there was an unnerving silence, broken only by the wokka wokka wokka of the rotors on the marine expeditionary unit’s Ch- 47 transports. Most of the leathernecks were disgusted — some relieved — that they were to be used only for mop-up, or, as one sergeant put it, “roundup” duty.
On the ground everyone was waiting for Freeman to respond to Lamonte. Everyone knew that “Ratmanov Rick,” as he’d already been dubbed, must have at least the FAE strikes in glorious technicolor and that the Pentagon’s PR types would be scrambling for damage control.
“We’ll check your tape out,” Freeman told Lamonte.”Make sure you’ve got nobody’s mug shots on there. I don’t want the mother of some—”
“Fine,” chipped in Lamonte.
“You got any film left in that thing?”
Freeman knew very well that it was a video camera and how to run it — he’d taken enough shots of his children when they were young — but he enjoyed affecting ignorance about such matters in front of the press; it gave him tactical advantage when they least expected it.
“Not much, General,” said Lamonte.
“How much is that?”
“Couple of minutes.”
“All right, follow me.”
Lamonte, visibly relieved the commandos weren’t going to confiscate his tape and equipment with it, followed Freeman toward the cliff side of the basin. The general carefully made his way over bodies, Siberian as well as British and American, till he got an angle for the video from which no faces of American dead could be seen. “All right,” he told Lamonte. “Take a shot here — no further than five paces from me. Alright?”
Lamonte couldn’t believe his luck: the legendary Freeman on tape, surrounded by SPETS, oily smudged air wafting across the basin from persistent pockets of FAE and smaller fires still burning, would have a dramatic effect before the lens. And that look of Freeman’s — helmet on, chin strap tight. The New York anchor would flip. The son of a bitch had the pose down to a T, as if he’d practiced it before a mirror. Tough face but creased with concern, as moved by the enemy dead as his own, the cerulean blue sky and black-and-white jagged cliff behind him a perfect backdrop. Christ, he’d win an Oscar.