Ian Slater - Warshot

“In his Jacuzzi,” said Phil, “wanking himself off?”

“No,” said another cop. “She was wanking him.”

“Where’s she?” asked Phil.

“Downstairs,” said the Puerto Rican cop. “But lookee here. Have a look at the package.”

“My, my,” said Phil. “Sarge, you see what we have here? Plastique.”

“You mother!” yelled Duguid, a hand coming out of his mink through the bars. “That’s a plant and you know it.”

“Well then, Mr. Duguid,” said the sergeant, “we’ll have to put this aside for evidence.” It joined another two plastic bags, large ones, heavy-duty, each bag containing firearms, including two Uzis, four AK-47s, and a grenade launcher.

Under the Emergency Powers Act, Mr. Duguid was confined for six months, pending “further investigations,” including intensive audit by the IRS and investigation into the illegal importation of prohibited semiautomatic and automatic weapons.

Asked about reports of widespread persecution on ‘Good Morning America,’ the FBI spokesperson, Jennifer Lean, replied, “Sir, we’ve known for years that ever since the lessening of tensions between Premier Gorbachev and President Bush, a large number of ‘illegals’—spies and potential saboteurs — have been placed in strategic areas for just such a situation. We also know that these people did not come with large amounts of money. This would, of course, have immediately raised suspicion, or at least alerted the immigration officials. The question, then—”

“You mean,” interjected the interviewer, “that the money used to purchase such weapons was drug related— that ‘illegals’ are or were involved with using drug money to finance their clandestine war efforts?”

“The money had to come from somewhere,” said the FBI spokesperson, “incredibilized,” as she later put it to her colleagues, that the TV host could be so dumb. It was pointed out to her, however, that a good interviewer isn’t afraid to appear naive so they can get the guest to give them answers they want.

Privately, most of the FBI agents believed the “illegals” had brought in all the money they needed by diplomatic pouch years before, and that drug money wasn’t involved.

While Duguid was being photographed, scowling, to update his file, twelve miles south of Port Baikal, Jason Thomis of Charlie Company — or the “forgotten company,” as they were calling themselves — from III Corps’ Second Infantry Battalion, was digging in with the rest of his platoon along the rail line that ran parallel to the cliffs from between Baikal and Kultuk at the southernmost end of the lake. Thomis’s company had high, precipitous ice-sheathed cliffs behind them, the surface of the frozen lake hundreds of feet below. It allowed them to look down on the blizzard-covered lake as far north as Baikal, the thick whiteness about Baikal trembling and flashing crimson with the thunder of war. Occasionally they could spot A-10 Thunderbolts coming from the far eastern side of the lake after protective F-15 Strike Eagles had penetrated the screen of MiG-29 Fulcrums that had come screaming eastward out of Irkutsk, led by the Siberian ace, Sergei Marchenko. But for the American Eagles, having won the furball with the MiGs and driving the Fulcrums off, it was all in vain. For though the A-10 Thunderbolts were now free to dive beneath the blizzard to engage the enemy ground targets, they reappeared only seconds later without having fired a shot, their pilots confounded by the zero visibility, Minsky’s forward Siberian armored spearheads being so close to the fleeing Americans that it was near impossible to tell friend from foe.

The U.S. M-60 and M-1 tanks were so close in most cases to the Siberian armor that the A- 10s were forced to rise and circle like frustrated birds of prey waiting for the weather to clear, which it didn’t. And all the while the A-10s continued to burn up their precious Avgas as the battle raged beneath them. Now and then an A-10 would make another attempt, only to reemerge, frustrated from being unable to differentiate between the American and Siberian tanks. Many of the American and the pursuing Siberian units were so near one another that even accurate fire from the A-10s’ thirty-millimeter nose cannons, while it would have no doubt set Siberian tanks ablaze, would, through the resultant explosions, have done as much or even more injury to the American ground troops.

Now and then Thomis could see a bulge of dull orange light in the cotton-wool-like cover of the blizzard, the backflash of Siberian-acquired Aerospatiale, MILAN 2,500-yard and HOT 5,000-yard-range antitank missiles. The few that didn’t hit the American targets failed not because they had encountered the kind of thick, anti-infrared smoke that Minsky’s troops were using as cover, but because the armored U.S. target had crashed through the splitting ice opened up by the pounding of Minsky’s eighteen-gun batteries of amphibious M-1974 122mm howitzers.

In addition to hearing the howitzers’ distant thumps, Thomis and his buddies could see contrails of the Siberians’ Multiple Rocket launches arcing momentarily above the blizzard. Unleashed in ripple fire sequence, the fifteen-foot-long, three-hundred-kilogram, twenty-four-mile-range HE and fragmentation rockets were being fired from scores of twenty-ton ZIL-135 trucks which, with sixteen missiles apiece, created plotnost, or saturation density, completely devastating a square mile at a time. It was the equivalent of several battalions of field guns sustaining rapid fire for ten minutes, and four times as great as the mind-numbing pounding of Berlin in World War II by the Red Army’s Katusha rockets.

In addition to this, Yesov’s northern arm, each of his battalions equipped with eighteen mobile trailers of forty B-M21 rocket tube launchers, was unleashing 720-round salvos of the 122mm projectiles screaming down into the American positions. The scarlet trails of the rockets, momentarily visible in the swirling fog and snow, appeared to Thomis and the rest of Charlie Company like hundreds of ribbons before disappearing, the rockets crashing in thunderous unison, momentarily swelling the blizzard in huge blisters of flame.

“Where in the hell’s our MLRs?” Thomis asked no one in particular as the rumble and crash of the artillery and rocket barrages rolled across the icy plain up through the fog, the broken ice-floe sea beneath. All was quiet for the moment, but the northward storm was rolling ever southward, coming closer, the deceptively lazy orange and green tracer arcing out of the swirling white candy-floss roof above the lake only making the danger more, not less ominous.

“Coming up from Khabarovsk,” answered Valdez, manning the Squad Automatic Weapon next to him, traversing the SAW left to right so that its arc of fire, should there be an attack from the taiga, would be able to swing through 180 degrees without endangering any of the other men in the foxholes.

“Anyway,” said another C Company infantryman, “no friggin’ good firing our MLRs into that lot. Take out as many of our boys as they would the Siberians.”

“Then how about the fucking Siberians?” said Thomis agitatedly. “Their rockets must be hitting their own guys.”

“Sibirs don’t mind taking out a few of their own.”

“Neither does Freeman,” said someone.

“Bullshit!” snapped a corporal. “He had to do that on Ratmanov, man. Without the air strike, he’d have lost more marines than he saved.”

“Yeah, well, you weren’t there, were you, Ricky boy?”

“Knock it off, you guys!” interjected the platoon’s sergeant. “Cut the yap and watch your front.”

“What the fuck for?” challenged Thomis. “What are we gonna do if armor comes out of those trees, Sarge? Throw fuckin’ snowballs at it?”