Shouting through the linoleum-ripping sound of machine-gun fire, the crash of grenades, and the crack of half-a-dozen different kinds of small arms, the pilot of a Hind that had been parked behind the hotel, out of view of the S/D team, was now shouting at Nefski, asking that he be allowed to take off immediately to alert Irkutsk HQ from where, just possibly, some ad hoc underwater communication link might be rigged somewhere along the western shore of Baikal, seeing that Port Baikal’s communications had literally been shot to pieces. “Maybe they can get the message to the subs’ trailing aerials.”
The pilot could see Nefski didn’t have a clue what he meant. “The subs trail VLF — very low frequency — aerials. It’s one way to—”
“Stop them!” Nefski screamed, pointing out at the ice, his finger trembling in the direction of the escaping commandos. “Stop them, you fool, before they reach the other side of the lake!”
“It’s them or Irkutsk!” pressed the pilot resolutely, impatient with Nefski’s vengeful streak. “I can’t do both, Colonel.”
“Yes, you can!” Nefski shouted back. “It’ll only take you a few minutes to get them. Then go to Irkutsk for all I care. Get them and then break radio silence!” raged Nefski. “So what if you draw U.S. fighters to you through our AA screen.”
“Their AWACs’ll jam my message,” said the pilot angrily, seeing Nefski wouldn’t give way. “Come on then,” the pilot shouted to one of the ground crew members. “Haven’t you finished?”
“There you are, sir,” said the ground crew foreman, hastily extracting the hose and snapping the armored lid shut on the self-seal tank. “It’s full.”
“About time.”
Lifting off, he was only fifteen feet above the ground, behind the KGB troop trench. At least eleven KGB were dead or wounded, one sitting — difficult to tell whether he was actually dead or merely stunned from the concussion — not moving as the Hind passed over him, nosing higher. The pilot could now clearly see the two white triangles, twelve to fourteen miles away, heading for the other side of the lake nine miles beyond them. “Ota wnmtsy”—”They’re crafty,” he told his weapons officer below, seeing that the two Arrows — the bruised sky of the approaching blizzard racing southward — had separated well abreast of one another. There was at least a mile between them, virtually making an attack on both at precisely the same time an impossibility. “Well, we won’t play cat and mouse, Oleg,” the pilot told his weapons officer. “We’ve got lots of time. We’ll take them one by one.”
On the ice Aussie saw a fine, foglike vapor streaming behind them, but since the temperature was well below freezing he knew it couldn’t be fog. Then he got a whiff of it. “Hell! We’re leaking fuel.”
“I know,” shouted David, his eyebrows and the edges of his sunglasses caked in ice.
“What’re our chances of the Arrow reaching the other side?” called out Aussie, his voice quickly whipped away in the slipstream.
“ ‘Bout fifty-fifty,” said David. “I’ll try to take her on as straight a line as I can, use less—” There was a flapping noise, then the vapor became a cloud, the engine coughing.
“For Chrissakes!” yelled Salvini. “Gimme a break!” The Arrow’s speedometer needle quavered between fifty and forty-five, then fell to twenty, ten; then the Arrow conked out, only the air cushion sustaining it. The Arrow slid a hundred yards farther, with a snuffling noise, under the residual momentum of the now-dead fan. As they came to a stop, David Brentwood, Aussie, and Salvini saw Choir’s Arrow, with the wounded Lawson aboard, slowly pulling away from them, off to their far left. Whether or not Choir or the Delta commando looked back, they couldn’t tell, but it didn’t matter, for there was only one rule in this situation and that was that Choir had to keep going. He couldn’t break radio silence to call for help either from the Cobras or the Stallion who, as Wain had pointed out before the mission, wouldn’t take off before nightfall.
“Blizzard might help us,” said David as he saw the purplish-black sky gathering power and moving rapidly southward toward them. As they alighted from the Arrow, Salvini, out of habit, took out his foot-long, saw-edged ranger knife and did a proper job on the fuel tank so the gasoline could be dispersed away from them by the wind whipping up in front of the blizzard.
“I dunno,” said Aussie, breathing hard on his gloved fingers, swearing at the frozen zipper of the Haskins case, breathing on it, then quickly extracting the rifle, and flicking out its bipod legs. “He’s gonna get one pass over us at least.” He moved left of the Arrow, Salvini using the vehicle as a rest for the M-60 light machine gun, which he swivelled so that the Arrow would give him as much protection as possible.
David had already moved out to the right, south of the Arrow, but turned west now in the direction of the oncoming blip of the Hind, the Stinger in hand, his HK submachine gun slung across his shoulder. He prayed for a “hover” shot. If he got it, it would be the Fourth of July. The chopper, however, didn’t come at them at all. Nose down, skimming the ice like an unstoppable bird of prey, it was heading instead toward the other Arrow farther on.
“Smart fucker!” Aussie called out across the ice.”He’s leaving us for friggin’ seconds.”
David had a bead on the chopper. Anticipating the track, moving the Stinger’s barrel with the missile, he fired — missing the chopper by a good one hundred yards, the round landing farther up the lake with the sound of a brown paper bag exploding. The sudden “boomp” registered on the sonar screens of Robert Brentwood’s GST and the three other submarines, two in the far north, one closing in to investigate the first sonar blip, caused by Robert Brentwood firing at the seal minutes earlier.
The sub now closed on Brentwood’s GST, its skipper assuming that the second chrysanthemum pattern on his screen-coming from close to the surface — might mean that some American armored force had reached the eastern shore of the lake. Alarmed by such a possibility but unable to find out without going to the surface for a thin ice hole, after which he’d have to trail the long VLF aerial, the captain warned the other GSTs by reverting to one of the oldest methods of communication in the world — tapping out a Morse message through the hull, the sound racing through the sound channel.
“Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” Johnson said in celebration, the message itself unintelligible, but the sine waves of the message and its source clearly identified on the sonar screen. When the other two subs answered, Johnson transferred the sonar blips onto the superimposed E7 ONC — operation navigation chart. Two were in the northern section of the lake in the southwestern corner of the navigation chart’s “85” grid, one of the subs at latitude 54 degrees, 11 minutes north, longitude 109 degrees, 03 minutes west, the other twenty miles farther north.
But there was still a serious problem for Brentwood. While he now knew the exact position of the two northern subs, as well as the one heading for him, the information narrowing his search area by over 70 percent, he knew that if he fired the torpedo at the oncoming GST the two northern subs could break out of their quadrant on battery power — silent running — and come looking for him. Then it was pure mathematics: one would fire and in order to protect himself he would have to fire back, and the second would immediately have the vector, its torpedo getting him in the cross fire.
“Johnson.”