Ian Slater - Warshot

The next instant, the treeline a hundred yards in front of them was vibrant in light, the fuel air explosive detonated overhead, then came the sounds of men screaming, on fire, scrambling frantically from their foxholes, rolling desperately in the snow; other men leaving their positions, running to help, only to be machine-gunned as the Siberian Mi-28 Havoc, its silhouette often mistaken for the American Apache, pulled out of its 150-mile-per-hour dive. The Havoc turned in a deadly pirouette, its slaved fifty-millimeter still firing, the gun’s flame suppressor hiding its position except from those directly in its thermal-image range finder, and they were now dead or wounded. The Havoc’s stream of.50s was hitting them at point-blank range, bodies disintegrating as the depleted uranium armor-piercing, explosive-head bullets tore into the men of Charlie Company, including the two-man AA team forty feet from Thomis, their charred bodies still burning, flung back from their air-to-air Stinger, the shadow of its barrel flickering on the snow in response to the crackling, spitting fire now raging in the curtain of flame that was the forest’s edge. Tall birch burned like oil-soaked torches, and beech trees exploded from the superheated gases. As the burned barbecue smell filled Thomis’s nostrils, he was crying, the Havoc now only faintly visible before it disappeared into the blackness above the forest.

“Stay where you are!” the sergeant was yelling. “Emory, get the fuck back! Stay back!”

Emory was throwing his groundsheet over someone, stomping its edges to smother the fire, but the groundsheet billowed and rose in a soft burst of flame, Valdez seeming to have melted, what was left of his skin dripping like hot wax slipping away from his face, his eyes cooked white, glaring into the burning night. Some of the fuel air gel had splashed onto Emory, and he was slapping it, trying to get rid of it as he stumbled back to his foxhole. The supreme irony was that a radio signal had just come in from Freeman’s HQ informing Major Truet that an evac of C Company — wounded having first priority — would be attempted within the next hour.

Ammunition on the American dead bodies was still cooking off — exploding from the heat — and the sergeant was shouting at everyone to keep their heads down, that an evac would soon be on its way. Thomis, upending his M-16, resting the barrel on his right foot, pulled the trigger, the sound of the shot lost in the general melee; his foxhole, like so many others, was filled with the reek of cordite and urine.

“Look to your front!” the sergeant was yelling, his voice on the edge of hysteria.

“Medic!” shouted Thomis.

The medic heard him, but there were so many others who had also been hit, it would be another ten minutes before he could reach Thomis. “Use your field dressing,” he shouted, and Thomis, hands trembling, felt for his field dressing pack beneath his helmet band.

Inside his 1V13 heavy-armored artillery command vehicle, General Minsky moved from the folding seat immediately beneath the turret — the dull, thick vibration from the 8/600 generator pulsing through his body as he folded the traverse table — easing himself forward to use the PW-1 periscope sight through which, by determining polar coordinates, he could double-check the firing position of the 203mm battery and train the battery’s master gun. But the blizzard was still in progress, and he moved back to the traverse table, having to rely on previously computed positions as he readied for the next phase of the shock attack, a two-inch broken red line indicating the positions of the isolated American company as reported by the Havoc.

Minsky missed the open vent days of the Afghan War. Here it was so cold you had no option but to have everyone shut up, relying on the NBC — nuclear, biological, chemical — air filter for fresh air. Even so, diesel fumes still got through, and at times made him feel nauseated. Still, the battle as recorded on the command vehicle’s data terminal was going well, the Slutsk division living up to its reputation. Its radio operator — aboard this, Minsky’s state-of-the-art command vehicle — was picking up some of the frantic radio traffic from the Americans just hit by the Havoc.

“By God,” said Freeman on being told that III Corps was effectively off the board, “they’ll pay for this, Dick! I’ll teach those sluts and Yesov’s other Mongol hordes that butchering Americans comes at a high cost. Two for one.”

Norton thought it unwise at that moment to point out that the Siberian divisions were not exactly Mongols. But the Pentagon, knowing of Freeman’s affection for the “Good Book,” had succinctly cautioned the general against too hasty a reaction by somewhat sanctimoniously reminding him that “vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.”

“And I,” Freeman had replied, “am his sword!” Gathering the last of his gear for phase one of his three-phase counterattack, the general was looking at the 241 section of the ONC E-7 chart showing the southern end of Lake Baikal, where the remnants of III Corps were being devoured by Yesov’s armor. “Even the goddamn weather’s against us.”

“Should lift in about forty-eight hours, General,” Norton tried to reassure him. “It’s getting colder up north ‘round Yakutsk, but the met boys predict quite a jump in temperatures round the Siberian-Mongolian border.”

“Well,” said Freeman, shaking his head at the enormity of what was happening on the lake, over five thousand casualties already reported, Medevac and MUST — Medical Unit Self-Contained — units overextended. “Jump in temperature might clear the weather, but it’ll be too damn late, Dick. Only jump that’ll count will be the Airborne’s over Nizhneangarsk — and that won’t be any good unless the SEAL team does what it’s supposed to. Each part of the plan depends on the other.”

“I know that, sir.”

“Now listen — if we insert that SEAL team and have trouble extracting, I don’t want them written off. Left on their lonesome. Understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“If they say they’re in trouble, you get an SAS/Delta team in there with everything they’ve got to provide cover.” Freeman held up his hand to stay Norton’s objections. “Yes, yes, I know, it might put any rescue team in the hole, but it’s a matter of policy — Americans have to do everything to get our boys out if they get in a jam. Hell, that’s what we’re all about.”

“We could move a team in now,” suggested Norton.

“I don’t want to increase the traffic unless absolutely necessary. If anyone gets spotted prematurely, the SEALs’ whole operation’d be shot. Besides, closest S/D team we’ve got is the one going in on A-7 to help out that goddamn battery that started this whole thing. You’re right — they’d be the closest to the SEAL objective, but we can only use them after they secure a perimeter for a chopper withdrawal of the battery, if they manage that.”

“That’d be one for the books,” commented Norton. “Younger brother rescuing the older hand.”

Freeman looked blankly at Norton, the general’s mind having been so preoccupied with the minutiae of preparation for what would be his and history’s biggest airborne invasion since Arnhem in ‘44, he had momentarily forgotten that two of the three Brentwoods would be in action at more or less the same time. The general paid it no mind. It was hardly unprecedented; brothers in Second Army were fighting a lot closer together than young David Brentwood would be at Manzhouli and Robert farther south. The general also paid it no mind because he knew that if Robert Brentwood’s SEAL team met heavy resistance, his entire three-pronged counterattack plan against the Siberian-ChiCom alliance would fail, and it was a thought he didn’t want to entertain. It was the first time Norton had seen Freeman willfully turning away from an unpleasant possibility, which was a measure not only of how badly the war was going for Second Army and how tired the general was, but above all, just how vital the SEAL mission would be along with Freeman’s impending jump over Nizhneangarsk.