David Brentwood clicked on his throat mike. “Captain?”
“Go ahead.”
“This is Captain Brentwood. Suggest we divert south for a while — avoid any search party coming out of Port Baikal.”
“No problem.”
It took two minutes for the Stallion pilot to signal the two Cobras — intercraft radio silence being strictly enforced and requiring either hand or “craft maneuver” signalling before the three remaining choppers swung south on the last leg through or, if necessary, up over the six-thousand-foot Khamar Daban range before they could take a fix on Tankhoy, twenty-seven miles across the ice from Port Baikal.
Fifteen miles from where the Stallion had gone down, an argument was building between the ten members of a SPETS squad standing by a Hind helo.
“Idite za nimi”—”l say follow them in,” said the SPETS leader, referring to the three dots they could see heading for the Khamar Daban Range.
“Zachem?”— “Why?” asked the serzhant. “They’re probably ours. Big one’s probably a Hind, like ours. Other two are probably Havocs.”
“Hinds, Havocs!” shouted the SPETS leader.”You can’t tell from here even with binoculars. They were more than a mile off.”
“Whatever you say, Comrade,” replied the sergeant. “But I say we’re wasting time. Let’s go on to Ulan-Ude. Our orders are to relieve one of the sections at the head of the Thirty-first’s spearhead.”
“There are already two thousand of us at the Thirty-first’s spearhead,” said the leader.”I say let’s follow those three choppers.”
“Make up your mind, comrades,” advised the Hind captain assigned to transport the ten SPETS. “Personally I think we should go on to Ulan-Ude, as the sergeant says. We’re getting low on gas anyway.”
“Did you see them?” snapped the SPETS leader, a big man, well over six feet and broad but not an ounce of flab on him.
“No,” admitted the Hind pilot.
“You?” the leader asked the gunner.
“Too far off, sir,” said the gunner, and, quickly trying for compromise, added, “Why don’t we call Irkutsk, leave it up to them?”
The nine other SPETS waited for their captain to bawl out the air force pilot for forgetting they were on strict SPETS operational procedure — no radio contact allowed in the event it might be picked up by distant American AWACs. Tightening the sling of his AK-74, the SPETS leader then lifted his right fist, waving it in a circular motion. The Hind coughed, sputtered, and snow swirled about the SPETS as they clambered aboard. The Hind’s nose gunner, immediately in front of and beneath the pilot, was cursing, strapping himself in behind the twin 12.7-millimeter machine guns in his armor-plated cubbyhole. He had a girl, a Buryat, waiting for him in Ulan-Ude.
“Polnym khodom!”—”Dash speed!” ordered the SPETS captain. This should take it to 180 miles per hour — but a few miles would be lost because of the extra weight of the ten SPETS and the helo’s four “Swatter” antitank missiles.
The pilot went visual as he could not put on his radar; otherwise he would run the risk of setting off every AA gun and missile battery that was strung along Baikal’s lakeshore, camouflaged in the forests.
He barely managed to get a fix on the three distant helos; they looked like dots of pepper against the white pallet of the western sky. He was watching the gas needle — soon they’d have to be refueled, the nearest POL depot at Port Baikal. Damn the SPETS — they should have gone on to Ulan-Ude. He banked the gunship in the direction of the dots, doubting he’d catch them unless they suddenly jinxed due west and he could take the hypotenuse vector between them. If it was a Hind and two Havocs on patrol out of Port Baikal or Irkutsk further west, it would make him and the SPETS look real idioty. Well, it was the SPETS leader’s decision, not his. The pilot swung the Hind’s gun-sprouting nose up, climbing, going for “high ground” from which he could see better across the taiga. Even so, he lost sight of them for a moment, the three dots heading into one of the passes through the mountain range toward the frozen inland Sea of Baikal.
By now the lead Cobra was looking for muskeg, hoping for an open patch in the forest, no more than a mile or two from the shore, using Tankhoy as a general heading but keeping well away from any sign of habitation. It was the copilot who spotted a promising site, and within seconds the Cobra began a “sway,” signalling the Super Stallion and the other Cobra that he’d found a landing. The air was so clear now he could see a thin wisp of smoke from what had to be Port Baikal across the lake, the smoke rising to the right of creamy white cliffs of the Trans-Siberian Railway’s spur line from Kultuk at the southern end of the lake to Port Baikal. He told his copilot he didn’t know which was best for the commandos: clear weather, which would make it much easier and therefore quicker for them to reach their target, or snowy conditions, which, while slowing them down, would have provided them with more cover.
“They got clear weather, man,” said the copilot/weapons officer. “You can see for miles. They ain’t got no choice.”
“True.”
The Snowcat “Arrow,” technical designation UH-19P, was based on another American air-cushion vehicle speed record-holder, the UH-15. Like the UH-15 hovercraft, the Snowcat was triangular or, as seen from above, arrowhead-shaped, a mid-placed cockpit seating three, the military version placing the driver slightly higher and behind the other two.
Nineteen feet long and seven and a half feet wide, the triangular Snowcat, with an eight-inch clearance, was powered by an 1100cc Toyota car engine, its speed the same as the old record-setting UH-15: eighty miles per hour over water, ninety miles per hour over ice or snow, with a maximum gradient tolerance of thirty to forty degrees, depending on the condition of snow or ice pack. Its payload was a thousand pounds, which could easily handle three commandos and their equipment. In the lead Arrow this included a heavy, swivel-mounted, forty-millimeter M-19 machine gun in front of the cockpit as well as the gun’s box-contained belt feed ammunition — the gun’s forty-inch barrel having a theoretical 180-degree traverse. In practice, as Aussie had discovered on a dry-run assembly, the safest maximum arc of fire was 90 degrees, consisting of a 45-degree swing left or right. The noise that bothered him was, ironically, not the main thrust engine but the air cushion’s lift system, powered by an 1800-horsepower, 1600cc Briggs and Stratton vertical-shaft lawnmower engine, which drove an axial fan, the latter’s six-foot-diameter blade mounted at the back, or widest part of the arrowhead.
Delivery of the three-man crafts, ordered much earlier in the campaign by Freeman, had been delayed not because of any mechanical malfunction but because of the general’s insistence that the usual black skirting for the air cushion be painted white. The delay in delivery meant that the eight “designated drivers,” as David Brentwood had called them, had had only an hour or so to practice the previous evening. Now, with one Stallion, gone, he had only four drivers. But the controls were simple, even if Aussie complained of their “bloody Sunday” lawnmower noise and the rough ride, which frankly had surprised all of them except Robert Brentwood who, as part of his naval training in combined ops amphibious training, was already familiar with the gut-shuddering motion of ACVs, in particular the monstrous, barge-sized marine hovercrafts.
As the four craft from the remaining Stallion slid effortlessly down the rollers of the Stallion’s ramp door, guided by the six-man S/D and four-man sub crew team, the crews of the three choppers, zipping up their thick thermal jackets, were already busy spreading out the camouflage nets over the lone Stallion and two Cobras.