“Touch you!” he shouted back drunkenly. “Who’d want to touch you, you fat slob?” She threw another onion bottle at him, the onion’s long shoot trailing like a taper, but all her strength had gone in her rage, and the jar missed, hitting her anorak instead, falling harmlessly to the floor, rolling along the worn linoleum. He stuck his head back inside to say that it was his apartment, too. She tried to throw the laundry bag at him but fell.
The KGB duty officer told him there was no way he could come in on his shift tomorrow afternoon looking like that. He could lie and tell Nefski he’d fallen or something, but Nefski would never believe such a story and suspect he’d been drunk and fighting again, for which Nefski would give him a punishment.
“You’d better stay here,” the duty officer told him. “Take guard duty at the dock. Easy work, but don’t go taking a snooze.”
Ivan didn’t like the idea of guard duty at thirty below, in Port Baikal or anywhere else, but in truth he rather relished having told his comrades just what had happened. A man whose wife suspected him of seeing another woman — well, his reputation rose among the boys.
“Colonel Nefski’s back on duty later today,” warned the duty officer. “In case he visits the dock you’d better have a good explanation ready. Tell him you were hit by an icicle or something.” It was a good story, Ivan having seen a number of soldiers who had been injured, some of them seriously, when a huge icicle, having built up after successive snowstorms, thawed a little and fell from a roof’s eave like a club.
The pilot of the SPETS chopper that had been following the three fly-size specks had now lost sight of his quarry. They had disappeared somewhere in the taiga, but the taiga was a sea of snow-covered forest, clearings like those he’d already flown over as numerous as troughs in a sea, and all looking more or less the same. He could spend weeks in a futile search. “Turnback?” he asked the SPETS captain.
“No, go around to the end of the lake. See if they came down there. Maintain radio silence in case they are enemy choppers.”
“Tak tochno”—”Yes, sir,” answered the pilot, taking the Hind out over the edge of the forest. The Hind was now above the southern end of the mirror-finish expanse of ice that was twenty-five miles wide and almost four hundred miles long.
David Brentwood saw the blob of the SPETS chopper looking for them, passing within a quarter mile, and glanced at his watch. The Stallion pilot told him the Hind would probably be doing around 150 knots.
“So,” estimated David, “they should be across the lake in fifteen to twenty minutes.”
“Yeah.”
“Do we still go across in daylight?” asked Robert Brentwood.
“Affirmative,” said David. “If they do report any possible enemy activity to Irkutsk or Port Baikal, men we might as well hit ‘em sooner rather than later. Give them less time to prepare.”
“There’s another consideration,” put in Robert. “You don’t load on your torpedoes and missiles at night if you can help it.”
“Good thinking, Bob!” said Aussie approvingly, Robert Brentwood more surprised than offended by the Australian’s easy familiarity with rank.
“Okay,” said David, “then we go now. Synchronize oh eight one zero hours… now! We leave at eight-thirty.” He glanced across at Aussie. “Hope you and Choir made sure that these jobs—” He indicated the four Arrows, “—are properly winterized?”
“Yes, sir,” said Aussie with exaggerated bonhomie. “Oil in those suckers’d lubricate a desert whore.”
One of the submariners asked Aussie, “You ever think of anything but sex?”
“Sure.”
“Oh, yeah? What?”
“Beer! Lordy, what I’d give for a schooner of Foster’s right now.”
“Freeze your guts out,” said Choir.”I can’t feel my toes.”
“Then wriggle them, sweetheart,” said one of the Delta men. “You never have winter training?”
“What for?” asked Aussie facetiously, despite the fact that the SAS winter training had been a top priority. “That’s only for ski bums.”
“Keep quiet!” said David.
From then on all they could hear was the soft moaning of the taiga, as lonely a sound as any of them had ever heard. For the next twenty minutes it was time for every soldier in the ten-man team and the Stallion’s and Cobras’ crews, who would stay behind, to be with himself, to go over what he had to do — to meditate upon the need for speed and surprise. David smelled the clean fragrance of winter pine that not even deep snow could suffocate, and momentarily he thought of Georgina, of what she was doing at this very moment. In England it would be 11:15 in the evening. A clump of snow fell from a branch, jolting him back to the taiga. He went over the satellite pics again, noting that what looked like it could be a slipway was left of the town near one of the railway tunnels they’d had to build on the cliffs coming around the lake’s southwestern end.
At 8:30 they started the four Arrows, the rattling roar of the engines alarming.
“Christ!” said Choir, usually the quietest of the three SAS men. “They’ll hear us clear to the Pole.”
“Ah, rats,” said Aussie, climbing into the front seat, strapping himself in next to Choir.”Don’t sweat it, mate.” He patted the SPETS shoulder patch on the otherwise all-white winter garb. “They’ll just think it’s a few comrades coming across.”
Choir said something about Aussie being the one who’d been going on so much about the noise, but it was lost to the roar of the four engines. Aussie and Choir found it a squeeze. Although normally there was plenty of room for two, they were both in bulky winter uniforms. And while the case containing Aussie’s sniper rifle was lashed to the fuselage, Aussie, on David Brentwood’s order, had to hold the Stinger’s AA tube like a cylindrical map case between his legs, eliciting an obscene comment from the Delta man with the M-60 light machine gun in the fourth and last Arrow. Choir checked the first few exposed rounds of the forty-millimeter box/belt ammo feed for the M-19 heavy machine gun mounted on the front of the lead Arrow. Each six-ounce round, both ends looking like round lollipops, was in effect a six-ounce grenade, capable of piercing sixty millimeters of armor plate at three miles, the rate of fire in “cooler barrel” Arctic conditions being 350 rather than 320 rounds a minute. Though it could be either electrically or mechanically operated, Choir didn’t like the “beast”; the M-19, for all its firepower, had a bad habit of jamming every twenty-nine hundred rounds or so.
“Not to worry, sport!” yelled Aussie. “If you can’t kill what you gotta kill in nine minutes, Choir, you ain’t never gonna do it.”
As they moved off, throttles closed down to just above stall, the heavy snow and trees absorbing the noise much more than they had anticipated, they made their way cautiously through the trees and light underbrush to the lake’s edge. Choir was still tugging the forty-millimeter belt worriedly. “Don’t worry, mate,” Aussie told him. “Hopefully you won’t have to use it.”
“Right.”
“You mean ‘bullshit’!” laughed Aussie.
“Right.”
The lake hurt their eyes. Though overcast the glare was intense, and within seconds every one of the ten men in the S/D/ sub team had pulled down his sunglasses which, again on Freeman’s insistence, were all Soviet issue, captured on the way to Khabarovsk.
The SPETS chopper saw them.
Following David Brentwood’s lead in the first Arrow, the drivers in the other three Arrows behind opened up the throttles so wide their wrists ached, the midpoint between the railway tunnel up left a hundred yards or so above the lakeshore and the town’s small library and hotel a few hundred yards to the right.