Sonarman Rogers, driving the second Arrow with Delta trooper O’Reilly, swung left to avoid the exhaust from the first vehicle, his Arrow shuddering over small, swollen ice ridges on the otherwise mirror-glass-smooth lake. Rogers glanced ahead for a second to get a quick bearing on the terrain. Someone yelled, then someone else, but it was too late. They hit a ridge-only a foot high. The Arrow upended, skittering across the ice, leaving at first a thin but then ever-widening wake of frothing arterial blood.
In the third Arrow, the Delta driver, Lou Salvini, caught a glance, but despite what he saw he didn’t hesitate and closed the gap, the three of them now heading straight for Port Baikal.
The submariner in Robert Brentwood’s Arrow, the man who would have to take over Rogers’s sonar job if they made it, did all he could not to throw up when he spotted what looked like a sodden black-red mop: Rogers’s head, rolling obscenely across the ice, a gray spaghettilike substance trailing it. O’Reilly was still, his neck broken.
David was waving to the Hind coming to investigate, its bug eyes growing by the second. They were all waving. The Hind made a low pass and went into a left turn for another look-see.
“Smile, you Welsh bastard!” Aussie yelled at Choir above the roar of the Arrow. “Smile at the fucking comrades.” Choir waved, forcing a dour Welsh grin into something more gregarious looking while flipping the safety off the M-19 that he didn’t like. “What’s the bloody vertical on this?” he shouted at Aussie, his smile widening.
“ ‘Bout thirty degrees,” said David.
“That’s a lot of—” He waved at the comrades again as the chopper passed overhead. Port Baikal, now six miles away, was clearly visible, a mirage of it looming out on the ice far to their right. They were bucking a head wind now, flowing southward in advance of the forecasted blizzard over four hundred miles due north. David Brentwood glanced at his watch, the speedometer needle quivering between fifty-five and sixty. The Port Baikal old dock was clearly visible, but they wouldn’t reach it for another seven to ten minutes. The most important thing was to go straight to the railway tunnel that was two hundred yards to the left of the hotel and library.
Aussie tried to get a bead on the tunnel and dock, but the vibration against the Stinger tube was giving him a headache. He passed it to Choir who had spotted the slipway — a concave, smooth but definitely gutterlike depression, about ten to fifteen feet wide, that led, like a gradual slide from the mouth of the tunnel to the spread of ice-free water by the dock where the Angara River began its exit from the lake.
Nefski’s subordinate wasn’t the first to see the approaching snow vehicles, which he thought were some kind of snegovoy traktor— “snowmobile”—but rather he was the one the guard called over, wondering what they were. Ivan went to the big stand holding Schneider 11 x 80 power binoculars by the tunnel’s entrance, morosely pulled the canvas cover up, and bent forward to adjust the focus. A blur of dots snapped into sharp relief against the ice.
“Ours, I guess,” he said disinterestedly, without taking a second look, still nursing the bitter fight he’d had with his wife and generally feeling pretty sorry for himself. “Haven’t seen snowmobiles like that before, though.” Then again, he told the other guard, they certainly made as much racket. It wasn’t until another three minutes had passed that, his mind off his wife for a moment, he told his comrade grumpily, “Better tell the duty officer. Who’s on?”
“Nefski.”
“Shit! You tell ‘im. I don’t want him to see this.” He pointed to his black eye. “Bastard’ll put the on punishment.”
The other man slung his rifle and walked over the hard-crusted snow, his breath going before him like steam as he made his way toward Nefski’s office in the old library.
“Colonel, sir. There looks like a patrol coming in.”
Nefski was alarmed. Despite the fact that they were hundreds of miles from the most forward troops of the U.S. Second Army, he was immediately suspicious. He didn’t know of any patrols supposed to be coming in. “Call out the squad!”
“Yes, sir,” said the guard, walking outside to start the siren. Begi!”— “Run!” ordered Nefski. “There are two subs in, you idiot!” Before the Klaxon began its long wail, Nefski had grabbed the phone from its cradle and was pushing the red button for the dock. “How long till you leave?”
‘We’re almost ready now, Colonel. Be about another—”
“Get them into the water — now! Move!” shouted Nefski.
“But, sir, some of the men are over in the hotel…”
“I don’t care. We don’t have the time. Get the winches moving. I’ll call the ho—” The library wall was disappearing in front of his eyes, forty-millimeter grenades ripping, tearing it open like a pull-tab on a beer carton, debris flying everywhere.
“Bogomater!”— “Mother of God!” He fell to the floor, the phone banging beside him, its Bakelite cracked beyond repair, his nose bleeding. Luckily through the dangling earpiece he could hear the phone in the hotel ringing three times.
“Hotel-”
“Colonel Nefski. Tell all the submariners to get back to the tunnel immediately. You understand?”
“What’s going on?”
“Tell them!” he screamed. The next moment the line was hissing like a samovar.
In the tunnel a skeleton crew of four men worked like navvies at the winches that would let down one of the fifty-foot-long by fifteen-foot-wide toroidal subs, its eight “anti-lake-access” torpedoes looking for all the world like stovepipes attached to its superstructure, the bulges of the four cruise missiles wider but shorter on the outer casing.
The first sub was a quarter of the way down the hundred-yard ice slipway; retractable wing vanes extended from either side of the black, egg-shaped sub like the outriggers of a canoe to stop the midget from rolling before it reached the water. The four Siberians working the winch, not realizing that it wasn’t the sub that was under fire but rather the library and hotel, frantically redoubled their efforts — a line of twenty to thirty KGB border guards racing toward the slipway. Behind them came the squeak of a tank heading down from its defilade position on the steep forested slope along the narrow road leading westward from the town.
There were screams of men hit, one flung backward like a rag doll under the impact of the forty-millimeter, while at the far end of the tunnel, the two-man Goryonov 7.62-millimeter machine-gun crew were dead, one slumped over the gun, the other, his face missing, flung back over the sandbags by the rail tracks that had carried the midget submarines the last few miles to the slipway. There was more screaming now, mixed with a sound like wasps swarming as the three Arrows surged up the incline from the lake, stopping about twenty yards abreast, close to a heavy ice bank that formed the eastern wall of the slipway. The line of border guards fifty yards ahead across the slipway and now slightly above them poured fire in their general direction. David Brentwood, hard up against the ice wall, smacked Choir’s shoulder hard so that he’d feel it through the Kevlar vest. “Get the M-19 off the Arrow and on its bipod. Aussie, three o’clock high!”
Aussie Lewis looked up, squinting despite the shades, and saw the twin bubble nose of the Hind rising from behind the hotel into the sun, its pilot now realizing it had been an enemy force they’d seen on the lake.
The chopper, relying on the glare to blind its opponents, was in Aussie’s line of sight for only three seconds — the time it took him to fire the Stinger from two hundred yards, which was virtually point-blank range. The explosion was crimson, spilling fiery fuel down around the hotel, some of the gasoline sweeping across four or five of its defenders, sending them screaming, rolling into the trench behind the border guards’ ice wall, distracting their comrades and kicking up so much ice and snow in their efforts to douse themselves that two of the three Delta men had no difficulty lobbing six grenades in as many seconds, the grenades’ flashes lost in the sunlight but going off deep in the trench, killing at least another three defenders.