Ian Slater - Warshot

“Why the hell didn’t they get out?” asked David. “I mean, why the hell—” Then he stopped, the answer frighteningly obvious. As he had told Lewis, the Siberians— Novosibirsk, to be correct — obviously hadn’t wanted their SPETS, OMONS, whichever, to get out. Obviously, all they’d been told was to shell the ChiCom positions and hold.

“Purple-flare time, mate,” said Lewis. “Get those friggin’ Wokkas in here fast.” He meant the CH-47 Chinook evac choppers from Kalga. There was nothing to rescue now but themselves, and they had to get out the word about who had really broken the cease-fire. It wouldn’t be believed by the ChiComs, of course. In any case, Beijing was probably now only concerned with having the opportunity to gain more territory. But maybe the truth would make some difference to internal Chinese resistance.

Flickering high above them, the parachute flare turned night to day, transforming the two acres of snow into an undulating mauve blanket. It also unleashed a fierce Siberian counterattack. In seconds the air was flailed with the crack and whistle of small arms fire punctuated by the stomach-punching crump-crump-crump of heavy hundred-millimeter mortars.

“Least the ChiComs won’t use their artillery this close to their own,” said Aussie Lewis, clipping in another mag and immediately realizing the foolishness of his remark. Both he and David Brentwood knew that, unlike the Americans, the Chinese commander would have no compunction about sacrificing a hundred or so infantry — more — to gain a position. And every SAS/D man on the mountaintop now knew that the Siberians, caught out in their deception, would be more intent on killing Americans than worrying about being overrun by the Chinese.

“Jesus — what a mess!” uttered Aussie, his words lost to the feral roar of David Brentwood’s Heckler & Koch submachine gun and the crash of mortars. “Where are those friggin’ chop—” began a Delta trooper ten yards to Brentwood’s left, but he never finished, decapitated by shrapnel, the stump of what had been his neck bubbling white with blood in David’s infrared goggles.

His F-15 and F-18 strikers already aloft from Yerofey Pavlovich, Second Army’s forwardmost air base, flying ahead to provide an air umbrella, the pilots searching for breaks in the blizzard but not finding them, General Freeman looked at his watch. It was 0200 hours, cold, and still overcast. He tapped the pilot of the C-130 transport. “Let’s go, son! Can’t wait here all night.”

With that, the big Hercules lumbered forward on the Marsden steel-web runway, followed by another whose 220 paratroopers, together with Freeman and his 219 paratroopers in the first aircraft, would be responsible for securing the Nizhneangarsk drop zone — a frozen salt marsh ten miles east of Lake Baikal’s northern end. The remaining airborne troops would follow and be jumping from eight much longer, 245-foot C-5 Galaxies, each holding 345 men.

Freeman had few worries about the two-hour, 575-mile flight to the BAM — Baikal-Amur mainline — railhead at Nizhneangarsk. Although there would be three thousand men in all, the biggest airborne operation since the disastrous American and Allied drop over Arnhem in ‘44, he was confident the Siberians wouldn’t be expecting him. As added insurance, a USAF squadron of Wild Weasels, electronic jammers, was already airborne to scramble the radars ringing Yesov’s crack Sixty-fourth Division at Nizhneangarsk. The problem would be, once the Siberians made visual contact, how quickly Yesov’s Nizhneangarsk garrison could move up their heavy artillery and tanks to the drop zone. Freeman regretted the operation had to be carried out at dawn, but with any operation involving more than a hundred men, he knew it would have been suicidal to try it at night, when the zone on the frozen marsh was no more than a quarter-mile square in the taiga.

The jamming around Nizhneangarsk was only partly successful, the Wild Weasels, four hundred miles from Yerofey Pavlovich, coming under attack by a squadron of MiG Fulcrums, diving from fifteen thousand. Freeman’s assumption that the Siberians could be fought off by the Eagles and F-18s proved correct — most of the furballs, or dogfights, going in the Americans’ favor — but one C-130 transport was taken out; whether by the Fulcrums or friendly fire was not known. In the confusion of dogfights and thick cloud, no one knew. What Freeman, aboard the lead Hercules, did know, however, was that already over three hundred of his paratroopers were dead, cutting his force to two-thirds before he’d even reached the drop zone.

Inside the roar of the Hercules, the beefy-faced jump-master stood up, both gloved hands outstretched in front of him, palms forward as if about to push against an invisible wall, his voice raised against the thundering roar of the engines. “Get ready!”

There was a long shuffling noise, the heavily laden paratroopers still sitting, but moving closer now to the edge of the long plank seats.

“Stand up!” yelled the jumpmaster.

“Stand up!” repeated Freeman, the first of the stick, but at this moment no longer the boss aboard the aircraft.

The jumpmaster’s hands moved from the palms-out front position to his sides, as if he was describing the big one that got away, and as one the paratroopers rose awkwardly with their heavy gear, hooked up and checked that snap hooks were clipped on properly to the overhead cable without allowing too much slack on the long yellow static line. Each man checked the static line of the man in front of him.

The light still red, the jumpmaster’s right hand shot out, down to the right like an umpire pointing at the bag. Obediently Freeman, as the first of the stick, crouched at the door, looking out into the enormity of a swirling gray world of cloud mixing furiously with snow, his tight chin strap giving his face an older yet even more determined look than usual. The red light turned green.

“Go!”

The stick fell out as smoothly as could be expected under the circumstances, only one paratrooper fouling — his fifteen-foot static line still holding the deployment bag, but his connector links breaking too early in a wind shear. He was jerked hard against the fuselage, the soft, crimson explosion of his head seen but not heard by the next two men in line.

Four “Saran-wrapped” Lynx helicopters going out on the skids of their C-130 transport also got into trouble. Despite the multiple braking chutes on the C-130’s palette, the latter crashed through the ice cover of a pond at the edge of the salt marsh, disappearing in about fifteen feet of water. Another badly damaged Lynx was lost when its palette, having been blown off course into the timber, ended up in a mass of splintered treetops, dangling chute segments hanging forlornly, ripped by severed branches that had been broken off like matchsticks under the impact. Several of the branches had pierced the weather-protective wrap of the helo, impaling fuselage and tail rotors, warping the chopper’s main blades and its chaff dispensers. The result was thousands of varying lengths of the silvered antiradar foil blown about aimlessly in the storm like silver streamers from some abandoned New Year’s party.

One of the two remaining Lynxes’ AH1’s landing skis had been bent, but a paratrooper master sergeant had it fixed within five minutes — taking his assault knife, stripping a fir branch and lashing it with parachute cord to the ski, just as he would have splinted a broken leg. There was a tree-toppling crash that resounded throughout the entire drop area — one of the six eighteen-mile-range ultralightweight titanium 155mm field howitzers hitting and passing through the marsh ice. The other five guns, though two were almost buried in snowdrifts, were quickly assembled and their small but powerful-tracked vehicle haulers brought up, as well as Humvee-mounted PADS — positive azimuth determining gyro systems.