“Shit!” said Aussie, seeing her twitching, coming back to life. “You’re a fucking genius, General.”
“I’d argue if I could, Aussie,” said Freeman, dragging Melissa, who was now screaming with pain, away from the insects. “Quiet!” he told her as she struggled to stand up, fell back, then succeeded with his help. “We’re taking off the blindfold, Melissa. Didn’t want those ants to get at your eyes.”
“Ants — what — I—”
“Be quiet,” Freeman told her sternly as she collapsed again. “You’ll wake up the neighborhood,” a comment that added to Aussie Lewis’s awe at what he’d just seen on this battlefield. If I survive, he promised himself, I’ll never forget this, ever.
Freeman jabbed her with a one-time morphine syringe, and pushed out a small oval pink pill from his first-aid blister pack. “Benadryl. This’ll help. Make you a bit dozy, but not too much.”
Again, Melissa was trying, very unsteadily, to get on her feet, but the effect of the TOS round’s concussion was still evident in her wobbly walk as Aussie, hustling as much as he dared, led her over to the high brush-and reed-covered ground where wisps of vapor could be seen bleeding from the marsh and which Kegg and another in his fire team suspected of housing the exit door.
On closer examination, Kegg saw there were other large, circular bumps of snow, rocks sticking through, the lake now turning a chafflike brown color, the glistening ice tent that had formerly sheathed them now melting in the downpour that was sending the ants into a further frenzy as they sought to repair the earthquake that had assaulted them in the blast from the explosion of the 222 mm missile and Thomas’s sudden appearance in their midst.
“We’ll have you medevaced ASAP,” Freeman assured Melissa. “Soon as we get this tunnel business wrapped up.”
Aussie handed Thomas her M40A1 rifle. “Can you still use this?” He had to repeat it in the din.
“You kidding?” said Melissa, mistaking genuine concern as criticism of the only female marine combatant in Yorktown’s Marine Expeditionary Unit.
Beneath the superbly camouflaged net roof of ABC’s tank park near the H-block, General Abramov, with Cherkashin nearby, was issuing last-minute instructions to his Siberian Sixth’s second in command, Colonel Nureyev, a short, tough, thickset man whom his tank crews called “The Dancer,” in deliberate contrast to the great, nimble-footed Nureyev of ballet fame, and stressing to all his Siberian Sixth tank captains that, except for a few main battle tanks that had been given weapons-free status and sent out to harass the American flanks, most of the T-90s must be held back. These would be ready to surge around and into the main American force that Abramov was certain would soon launch an attack against the H-block. But no sooner had he explained the situation to the Siberian Sixth, than Abramov saw at least two platoons of Beria’s Naval Infantry company moving through the safe channels in the minefield before turning south toward the exit area about a mile from Freeman’s force.
“What’s the point?” Abramov thundered at Beria, who was standing in his infantry command car. Abramov was incredulous. “You should have kept your men back here, Beria. Didn’t you read the intercept between Freeman and Tibbet that I decoded? Why are you committing your best infantry over there on the lake side near the exit? Dammit, didn’t you read the message? Freeman is only using the attack on the exit as a diversionary tactic, when all the time he and Tibbet plan to hit us here at the H-block, the entrance to the tunnels. So, I’m asking you, Viktor, why are you bothering to commit your crack naval infantry to the damned exit?”
“Because I have read your decode. What’s more, I’ve re-read and re-read it and now I think that maybe Freeman is trying to pull a fast one. I think he intends to make the main attack through the exit.”
“How do you possibly come to that conclusion? You think I’m an idiot? You think I’ve decoded the message incorrectly?”
“No,” answered Beria. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with your decoding, but that you haven’t understood what Freeman means.”
“I’ve misunderstood, you say? What it tells me, Viktor — and, I might add, what it tells Cherkashin — is that we need everybody here, particularly crack troops like yours, to guard headquarters and the computer. The whole thrust of Freeman’s message — if you’d read it carefully—is that he intends to attack the entrance. Freeman knows, and he’s right, that if he destroys us and the computer here at headquarters, the Americans have won. Lathes — all the engineering stuff in the tunnels — can be replaced, but if the DARPA ALPHA information, is destroyed, then we’re finished. My propali! Kaput! Didn’t you read the decode, or what?”
Beria was stunned. What the hell was Abramov ranting about, asking him ad nauseam whether he understood the intercepted message between Freeman and Tibbet?
“Da,” Beria said, employing the sullen tone of a disrespectful peasant, staring angrily at Abramov and his big-prick cigar. “Yes, Comrade General, I saw your fucking decode, but you’re so cocksure of yourself, Mikhail, you’re not seeing what the hell is happening, are you?” Beria paused, using his revolver hand to angrily wave away the thick, bluish gray smoke, the Havana’s stink mixing with the choking fumes of Abramov’s twenty massed main battle tanks. “Aren’t you watching Freeman’s troops over there through your binoculars? If you ask me, they’re more than a diversionary force. They’re marines from the American fleet. They’re tough bastards.”
“Huh,” said Abramov dismissively. “You’re seeing what you want to believe.”
Beria looked hard at Abramov. With the sounds of battle growing closer, he reached inside his battle tunic, pulled out his copy of Abramov’s decoded intercept, and quickly read it aloud, then asked Abramov, “The reference to this Peter Rose?”
“Yes, I saw it,” said Abramov. “It’s probably a good-luck phrase the Americans use in the same way that we—”
“Do you know who Pete Rose is?” Beria pressed, breaking open his pistol. It was always the last check he made before going into action, like rubbing a rabbit’s foot for good luck.
“No,” Abramov answered testily, “I don’t know who he is and, as I said, it doesn’t matter. A go-code or an operational name can be anything. Operation ‘Bird Rescue,’ for example.”
Beria, seeing that each chamber was loaded, snapped the revolver shut. “You see no other significance in the name?”
“No.”
Beria, slipping the revolver into his holster, asked Cherkashin the same question.
“No,” answered Cherkashin, who, up to this point, had been ignoring the argument, poring instead over his pilot’s tactical charts and the meteorological reports, which called for more heavy rain.
“Rose,” said Beria, “was an American baseball player. Famous.”
Neither the air force general nor Abramov showed much interest.
“I don’t follow sports,” said Abramov, with an air of condescension, as a wine snob might address a beer drinker, after which he took obvious satisfaction, as commander of the Sixth Siberian Armored as well as overall garrison commander, in ordering that the bulk of ABC’s forces, at least three-quarters of all personnel, were to secure H-block. His tanks would form a ring of steel around it so that the assault force, which the American was no doubt assembling with a fresh infusion of marines from the second wave, would not be met by a skeleton ABC force as Freeman would no doubt have it, but instead would be annihilated. And if the guards in the tunnels could not hold, the duty officer need only press a button and the RDX would vaporize the enemy in the tunnels — as well as many of ABC’s soldiers. But Abramov knew that such “collateral damage” could always be replaced by ABC’s danger bonuses. Russia was full of desperate men without work, soldiers without work.