Ian Slater - Warshot

“Tunnels are fucking death traps,” said Valdez. “Concussion’d pop your eyeballs.”

“So you been told.” Thomis looked away, knowing he’d been caught out on a fundamental point. He knew Valdez was technically right about concussion in a shelter, but knowing Valdez was right didn’t matter. Psychologically, being stuck in a foxhole was a hell of a lot worse, as far as Thomis was concerned. “Huh! Way I heard it, it was a lucky shot that S/D team got in that tunnel. That mad fuckin’ Aussie that fired it—”

“Jesus, man, who gives a shit who fired it?”

“Well, that Aussie said it was a lucky shot. Said so in the Stars and Stripes.”

“So now you believe the fuckin’ papers?” countered Valdez. “I’m tellin’ you once and for all — tunnels are bad news. Besides, if you want to go hide, man—”

“Hey, hey, Davy Crockett,” countered Thomis, “don’t give me your hero shit. You want to hide your ass just as much as I do.” Thomis looked around. “Like everybody does. Ain’t that right?” He looked at Emory on his left for support, but Emory wasn’t going to get involved, so Thomis shot an angry glance back at Valdez over his right shoulder. “Point I’m makin’, Juan, is that SAS/Delta team were the A-one cream of the crop. The best — and they knew just what they were looking for. The tunnel they blasted was no accident — it was their mission to get the sub pen, man. Sibirs’ll just come at us willy-nilly. We’re in a tunnel, we stand a better chance.”

“Man,” cut in the corporal from New York, “wish to fuck that S/D team was here now.”

“Yeah,” said Thomis. “Well, they ain’t. Probably sunnin’ ‘emselves in Khabarovsk. They say it’s gettin’ nice and warm there.”

“Yeah,” said Valdez. “Minus ten instead of minus thirty. Great.”

“Yeah. Well, put it this way — I’d rather be there than here.”

“So what’s new?”

“Relax,” said the sergeant. “It’s gonna warm up here pretty soon.”

A machine gunner at the end of a three-man trench made grunting noises. “Very funny, Sarge. ‘Gonna warm up’!”

“Yeah,” said Thomis. “Regular fuckin’ riot. Heeeere’s Jay Leno! Still say we’d be better off in a fuckin’ tunnel.”

“We’d be better off if those SAS/Delta commandos were here,” said the machine gunner.

“Dreamer!” said Thomis. “They’re probably pissed in Khabarovsk and deep in poontang!”

“Shit!” It was their platoon sergeant putting down the field phone in disgust. “Our land line to HQ is cut.”

“So we use the radio,” said Valdez.

“Yeah, so they can jam it,” said Thomis. “Nice goin’, Valdez.”

“Knock if off,” said the sergeant.

“Maybe it was an accident,” said Emory. “Tree fallin’ or somethin’.”

“Right!” said Thomis. “A tree — knocked over by a fucking T-80. You’re as stupid as Valdez.”

“Thomis!” warned the sergeant. “Knock it off!”

Thomis was shaking his head, his breath like puffs of smoke in the night air. “A tree falling — Jesus!”

He was terrified.

Aussie’s immediate inquiry on seeing David Brentwood was to ask him about his honeymoon. “Has it fallen off yet?”

David ignored the Australian’s vulgarity. The four of them — David, Aussie, Choir Williams, and Salvini — liked one another well enough when they’d been in action, but away from the fighting for a while, each had, albeit briefly, entered a world in which war was no longer the norm, and where fear of death was talked about, so that now their civilian-heightened sensibilities inhibited a camaraderie that for most of them only exhibited itself under fire.

“You look chipper!” Aussie informed David as they shook hands. “Been doin’ the old in-out, have you? She teach you a few tricks?”

“How you been doing, Aussie?” asked David.

“Lousy. Since the cease-fire went down the tube, there’s been no more beer.”

“Oh, the poor fellow!” chimed in Choir Williams, winking at Salvini. “Deprived, are we, Lewis?”

“Nuts!” put in Salvini. “I saw cases of our stuff, piled up in Vladivostok.”

“Japanese beer,” said Aussie. “Horse piss. Nah, I mean the old Tsingtao. Chinese stuff. Beautiful big bottles, too. Drink that stuff all day and no hangover. Nothing.”

“Oh yeah?” asked Salvini skeptically. “What’s so special about it?”

“Don’t ask,” warned Brentwood, smiling across at Choir.

“Okay,” said Aussie. “So you’ve heard it before, smartass. But Salvini’s ignorant. He’s from Brooklyn, and its my duty to educate the poor sod.”

“When the Germans had the beer concession in China,” began Choir, imitating Aussie as best he could.

“Quiet, you Welsh bastard!” cut in Aussie, Stimson telling them that Freeman and his aide, Colonel Norton, were coming across the quad from the HQ communications nut. Aussie took no notice. “The Krauts bottled their beer under the old German Purity Law of 1516. No preservatives allowed. Now, when old Mao Cow Dung beat Cash My Check in ‘forty-nine and booted out all the foreign devils, they still kept the Kraut beer factory in Tsingtao.”

“If you say so, professor,” jibed Choir.

“I do say so and—”

“Atten-hun!” called Stimson. The SAS/Delta team snapped to it, but despite Freeman’s entrance, Stimson sensed an air of equality about the men. There was no disrespect toward the general — he was, even if under attack from the media, especially the La Roche newspaper empire, already a renowned figure to the men he commanded — the new American army’s Patton. Besides, the more media scumbags attacked him, the more his men would defend him — at least those not under fire around Lake Baikal. There, his general strategy was neither divined nor, if understood, countenanced. Freeman’s headquarters’ bulletins quoting “tactical necessity” affording little comfort to those like Private Thomis in Charlie Company who knew that the possibility of being overrun was growing by the hour.

But here in the briefing hut, at least, Freeman’s reputation was secure — so far, his knowledge of the minutiae of battle legendary, as was his fury against many Pentagon directives, such as the one that had distributed “Technicolor” condoms to the white-camouflaged troops in the Siberian midwinter.

“At ease, gentlemen,” said Freeman, taking off his heavy winter coat, the outline of the nine-millimeter Sig Sauer barely visible beneath his tunic. “No time to waste. I’ve called you here because we’re getting the ass kicked out of us on that lake and I have to find some way of taking the pressure off those boys. At the same time, I’ve got to stop this breakthrough down south around Manzhouli in Chinese Mongolia. With those ChiCom divisions swinging west, Yesov’s moving east. They’ll close the box on our boys — what’s left of them — around Baikal and split our entire east-west Khabarovsk/Baikal supply line in two. As if that isn’t enough, my G-2 tells me northern Siberian divisions are moving south toward the lake from up north around Yakutsk to get us in a three-way squeeze. Now the Pentagon has ‘suggested’ I withdraw all forces to Khabarovsk — buy time to consolidate for a summer counterattack. Colonel Norton here concurs.”

There was a long silence, Stimson struck by the fact that none of the four SAS/Delta veterans made the slightest attempt to venture an opinion, though he sensed that none of them was afraid to speak up. It was as if they were telling Freeman, “It’s your decision. That’s why you get a general’s pay.”

Stimson was wrong. The truth was that all of them, including Norton, already knew what he was going to say. Their silence was their consent. They were with him. Now it was now merely a matter of details.