Freeman stared at the lieutenant who, having said his piece, was leaning back at an impossible angle as Freeman advanced on him. “You cheeky sonofabitch! I oughta have you—NORTON!”
“General?”
“Is he correct?”
“Ah — well, that’s what they’re telling me, General.”
“Who?”
“The press.”
“Goddamn fairies!” Freeman exploded, rounding on Norton. “It’s your goddamned fault!” With that Freeman tore the monocle from its cord and threw it to the ground, crunching it under his boot. “You see that?” he bellowed at the lieutenant.
“Yes, sir.”
“Tell those fairies that that’s what I’m going to do to the Siberian Thirty-first.” He turned about to get the attention of everyone in the hut. He already had it. “Or they will do it to us. We beat them or we the. Here — in Siberia. Every one of us. The U.S. Second Army does not retreat. Is that clear?” There was silence. “Norton, get the a WAM here immediately.” It was an Xm93 wide-area mine.
“Yes, General,” said Norton. When Freeman had disappeared through the green curtains that separated his war room from the rest of the hut, someone manning the radar said in low tones, “Is he going to blow us all up?”
“Shut up!” commanded Norton. “If I hear any more smartass—” The cruise alarm began its familiar howl. “Incoming!” came the warning over the PA. “Incoming!”
There was a shuffling noise outside the headquarters hut, for even though the cruise was still 150 miles — seventeen minutes— away, many of the men were already heading for the sandbagged shelters.
Mine clearance was still going on up ahead so that soon the Second Army would be on the move again, but so long as the missiles kept coming from Baikal, Freeman knew he couldn’t advance in any meaningful military sense of the word. And yet retreat would not only mean a triple humiliation for Second Army but the Siberians, smelling blood, their supplies building up along the Transbaikal for Yesov’s attack, would be content with nothing less than the destruction of the entire army.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The snow had stopped falling. Beyond them, under the steady roar of the choppers’ engines, lay the enormous folds of snow-covered Siberian cedar, larch, black spruce, and pine, broken here and there by clear, low-lying areas of oleniy mokh— “reindeer moss”—in reality flat areas of snow-covered lichens — and beyond this the five-thousand-foot barrier of the Khamar Daban Range. The effect of their sudden exit from the falling snow of the predawn light caused ambivalent feelings. For the two Cobras’ crews, clear weather meant good tank-killing conditions, but the S/D strike force and pilots aboard Stallions One and Two following the Cobras were not so joyful. The choppers might very well be like “needles in a haystack” against the vastness of the taiga, but even needles caught reflective sunlight that could be seen for miles beneath patches in the overcast but clear subarctic sky.
“Oh, isn’t this nice!” yelled out Aussie, jerking his head toward the panorama of forest and sky. “Just what the doctor ordered.” David Brentwood mustered as tough a look as he could, for even though he knew Lewis was one of the hardest men he’d ever served with, he doubted whether the newcomers aboard would be able to ignore the Australian’s inverted sense of humor. His brother and the other submariners, though David wouldn’t have had their job for the world, must, he thought, feel particularly vulnerable — quite literally fish out of water.
There was a “white out.” It was a phenomenon the pilots knew about but, contrary to widespread belief, the condition wasn’t something that occurred in a roaring blizzard. Rather, the sudden and, for those who had never experienced it, terrifying loss of perception could only be likened to that lightninglike anxiety suffered by panic attack victims. It occurred most often in clear albeit overcast conditions because of the contrast between the different whites of old and fresh snow.
The mistake of Stallion Two’s pilot was that in the moment of exhilarated relief during the exit from the falling snow to clear weather, he went off instrument flying to visual assist too quickly. In that split second he lost all depth perception, thinking he was far too high above the taiga when in fact he was far too close — only sixty feet above the blur of spear-shaped firs. His copilot realized it the moment the nose went down and pulled the stick, his feet jabbing the rudder control for uplift; but a rotor caught, and they were gone in a single somersault, rotors still spinning but upside down, cutting and slashing into the timber. The self-closing gas tank, built to absorb fifty-millimeter armor-piercing shells, imploded like a collapsed drum, spewing gas over red-hot bearings. The chopper disappeared below Cobra Two in a silent ball of saffron flame and snow, the latter rising like talc, coming down in a fine shower of rain that did nothing to extinguish the twenty-foot-high flame now licking the pines. There was a bang that everyone on the remaining Stallion and two Cobras heard.
“Holy mother of—” began Choir, but then, like the rest, he fell silent beneath the high whine of their Sea Stallion’s three General Electric turboshaft engines, its pilot instinctively going for height after the crash of the other Stallion before settling down again to the dangerous NOE flying. The submariners’ grim-lipped sonarman, Rogers, was sweating, praying again.
“Do as I tell you, damn it!” barked Cobra One’s pilot at his copilot/weapons officer. “We can’t go back. Endangers the whole mission. You know the fucking rules.”
The pilot was back on instrument flying and put on his sunglasses; not that this would be any protection against white out, but it might reduce the equally hazardous risk of ice blink, once they negotiated the passes of the range. In ice blink mirages of something twenty or more miles away across a vast sheet of ice could loom up with stunning clarity as if they were only a few hundred yards ahead.
“Relax, fellas!” It was Aussie. “Not as bad as you think. It helped us in a way.”
“What the shit d’you mean?” asked Rogers, uncharacteristic anger momentarily overcoming his air sickness and fear.
Aussie was lighting another cigarette. “Won’t be able to tell what it was — wreckage’ll look like a scrap yard. And same paint as their own, red star and all. And the guys — in Siberian uniforms.” Aussie looked at his watch. Freeman had even taken care to make sure they were of Russian make. “What are we, Davey?” Aussie asked Brentwood. “ ‘Bout a hundred miles from the lake? Twenty minutes from touchdown? Hell, it’d take ‘em fifteen minutes or so just to send out a search party — even if anyone did see the explosion. By then we’ll be down, or close enough. What we’ve gotta do now is head south for a while, out of sight of any pain-in-the-ass search party.”
“Yeah,” said one of the submariners, “but what if they’ve already spotted us? “
Aussie smiled. Choir and Davey had already seen it, Choir explaining it to the submariner. “Well, laddie, if anyone sees us, they’ll think we’re part of the rescue party. Same paint job— from any distance at all it’d be hard to tell. We’re too far inside enemy territory for them to think we might be—”
“You hope,” said the submariner.
“Ah, that’s not all,” said Aussie confidently. “You see, mate, when we start up those noisy Arrows anyone within cooee distance’ll think it’s one of their damned snowmobiles joining the search for the downed chopper.”