Ian Slater - Warshot

As a mere lieutenant, Stimson didn’t exactly stand on ceremony, but after all, he was HQ staff and he’d never been so casually addressed by an NCO before. Nevertheless, he found himself answering, “Raymond,” before he knew it.

Grinning, the gregarious Australian put out his hand. “Goodo, Ray. Everyone calls me Aussie.”

Stimson nodded.

“Well, Ray,” said Aussie, “I just hope there are Sheilas wherever we’re goin’.”

“I doubt it.”

“Thought you said you didn’t know?”

“Well, no, I don’t, but I don’t think you’ll be going back home.”

“ Yeah, well — you’ re probably right there.” They walked over the crunching snow toward Stimson’s Humvee. “Another Aussie mate and me were billeted on an English estate,” began Lewis as they climbed in and buckled up. “Before the war — in training down at Hereford. Anyway, this Pommie sergeant — a Brit — tells my mate, ‘You Aussies are too crude. Got no subtlety. Watch me,’ he says. So we watch this Brit Lothario chatting up the lady of the manor, nattering on about nature, the farm, how nature’s grand, hinting that the mating season wouldn’t be far off. So my mate, a corporal from Mundubbera — says he gets the Brit’s message, you see — like you have to sort of introduce the idea of sex more gradual, subtlelike. Talk about nature and stuff— like you just don’t hit it, wham! Right?”

“Right,” said Stimson, driving over the potholes back to Freeman’s HQ.

“Yeah, right,” continued Aussie. “Well, my corporal gets this idea, see — like how to approach the lady more indirectly, see if he could get a bit. So he goes into the barn that night and paints a gee-gee — a horse — green.”

Stimson looked across at Lewis.

“Yeah,” Lewis assured him. “‘Green. Anyway, in the morning everyone gets up for breakfast, wandering down past the manor house. The lady of the manor’s up as usual, smiling and greeting us. My mate watches her go up to the paddock as usual and sidles up next to her, lights a cigarette as she’s looking out at the animals. ‘Good morning, my lady,’ he says, real polite like — tips his hat.

“ ‘Morning,’ she says, and my mate gives one of our blokes the office.”

“The office?” asks Stimson.

“The office — the signal.”

“Oh—”

“Yeah — so, bam! Barn door opens and out runs the gee-gee. My mate turns to the lady and says, real casual like, ‘Look — a green horse! How about a fuck?’ “

Stimson was appalled. Lewis doubled up, barely able to hold the rifle steady in the Humvee. Stimson was shaking his head. For a few seconds he actually felt sorry for the Siberians. “You’re sick, man.”

“Bullshit!” said Aussie, one hand gripping the roll bar. The Siberian roads were unbelievably bad. “I’m horny.”

Stimson didn’t know what to make of it all, but then he didn’t know what had gone before, the SAS/Delta training quite simply the toughest in the world. In the SAS there were no drill instructors screaming at you; they talked softly — the training did it all. With over an eighty percent failure rate, only the toughest men managed to climb Wales’ Brecon Beacons in gale conditions with ninety-pound packs of bricks, every brick numbered. Only the toughest could survive being forced to live off the land, having to eat rats raw — the slightest smoke, if you cooked them, being a dead giveaway — and learning to live for days in a shallow trench, not moving, defecating by pushing it down slowly to the slightly deeper depression dug in the trench.

The SAS had been unknown until May 6, 1980, when millions sat enthralled before their TV sets all over the world, watching as the SAS commandos stormed the Iranian embassy in London, freeing the hostages in a dazzling, blitzkrieglike display of rappeling, stun grenade and machine gun assault. And yet the SAS ability to immediately distinguish a hostage from a terrorist, the latter often changing places at the last minute in the hope of confusing would-be rescuers, was only one of their skills. In order to merely pass the course, an SAS trooper had to be able to enter a room, shoot, kill, and be capable of rolling, clearing a jammed gun, and come up shooting dead on target within seconds. They were men whose natural dispositions lay in self-reliance, but who paradoxically were required to get along as a team.

But young Stimson knew little or none of this, and had seen only the wild, slightly ridiculous side of a man whom death had stalked from Ratmanov Island to Baikal. And not all, he knew, were like Lewis. David Brentwood, about Stimson’s own age, they said, was quiet, reserved, more like the SAS Welshman they called Choir Williams, and like Salvini, the American Delta commando, both of whom were now also on their way to Freeman’s HQ.

Near Kultuk, Thomis, hunched in his foxhole, was complaining again, brushing fresh snow off his white overlay. “Let’s get out of these friggin’ foxholes while we still got the breath.”

“Where you gonna go, Thomis?” asked Valdez, fingering the safety on the SAW. “Frappin’ great cliff behind you, man.”

“Yeah, well, let’s pull back into those railway tunnels. Least we’d get some cover.”

“Oh yeah?” posited Emory, who hailed from Georgia. “Those tunnels, man, they’re just big coffins waiting for you.”

“Hey listen, Georgia — I’d rather have a ton o’ fucking concrete over my head than this friggin’ snow hole. This ain’t gonna stop shit!”

The sergeant let them bitch. It wasn’t as if they’d give away their position to the Siberians, who must know it already. Besides, he’d sent patrols out.

Emory thought he heard a creaking noise — but he’d been hearing creaking noises, “like tanks,” all night despite the fact that Charlie Company’s forward patrols and those from the combat support company strung out farther north along the rail line had reported no enemy in sight.

“Holy Toledo!” said Valdez. “Will you look at that!” No one had to — the red tails of the Siberian MLRs north of them streaking out from Minsky’s southernmost flank were arcing out of the fog higher above the lake, their fiery parabolas, seen only briefly above the fog before they disappeared, followed by more speckling in the blizzard, like explosions of firecrackers beneath some vast sheet, where Thomis knew Americans were dying.

Only three seconds later, which told Charlie Company the MLRs were hitting about forty miles away, would they hear the sound of the MLR explosions amid the steady rumble of the big self-propelled Siberian 203mms and the sounds, like wood splitting, of more fracture zones opening up in the lake’s ice cover, trapping so many Americans in the retreat.

“The Siberians were in the rail tunnels,” said Valdez, “near Port Baikal, where they had those midget subs on the rail tracks, ready to slide ‘em into the lake. Tunnels didn’t help them none when that SAS/Delta team hit ‘em.”

“So?” charged Thomis.

“So they got roasted, man. Southern-fried. That Brentwood guy and his outfit popped an AT round in that tunnel, and boom! Scratch one midget.”

“Lucky shot!” said Thomis unconvincingly.

“I thought there were two Brentwood guys in that attack,” said Emory. “One SAS, the other in the navy or—”

“Two Brentwoods? Three?” said Thomis, spitting into the snow. “What’s the difference, man?”

“I heard there was three of ‘em — in the family, I mean.”

“So the three of them are fucking nuts!” growled Thomis, stamping his feet, the snow having melted beneath his boots, so that he had to bunch up snow in front of his foxhole to make his shoulder position against the M-16 more comfortable. “I’d still rather be in one of those tunnels — get some concrete covering my ass — than stuck out here like a fucking tree.”