Ian Slater - Warshot

If he offered her the bread again tomorrow… She could feel her resolve slipping. Remembering the time she had spent in the hands of the Siberian secret police, and now this squalor and degradation, she began to cry. Half choking, she ordered herself to stop, knowing that her very tears were robbing her of vital moisture. She thought of the Russians starving, of her great-grandfather in Leningrad during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45 and of how they had begun eating the wallpaper paste and…

Even with her fear of how she might be tempted to satisfy him, it still took all the courage she had left, but slowly she did it. Dragging the toilet bucket over, she removed the lid tentatively, the flies so insolent they didn’t even bother to move. Steeling herself, remembering how her forebears had survived, she stared at the putrid stools — at the tiny imbedded scraps of undigested rice and chicken innards. Here and there a speck of corn. If her forebears had found the will to do it — to survive — she could. She would not give in.

One of the guards who’d heard Wong laughingly tell everyone in the station house that the white jinu — “whore”—in number 12 “is eating her own shit,” had told his brother-in-law Chen, who’d laughed, too, and who was a blood member of the June Fourth Movement — Harbin’s offshoot of the Democracy Movement. Chen knew it meant that Alexsandra Malof hadn’t broken — hadn’t told her captors about the bridge message. But all evening Chen was grumpy, shouting at his only child, calling him a “little emperor.” “That’s the trouble with the government’s one-child policy,” he told his wife. “It turns them into spoiled brats. When I was young…”

Later that evening, his wife mentioned that Wong had asked another guard and his wife and them over for dinner. Wong could afford it, she told Chen. “While everyone else is on war rations, Wong gets extra food from the prison.” Her unspoken question was, Why can’t you scrounge more food?

“Wong ba,” muttered Chen disgustedly, his wife gaping. It meant “turtle”—the very worst kind of insult. She knew that night they would not be making love.

Personally overseeing the first prisoners brought in, Freeman noticed that their greatcoats were surprisingly devoid of snow, which was coming down in tiny balls so hard that it bounced off the coats, collecting at the collar folds.

The moment he saw that the surrendering Siberians were wearing civilian clothing underneath, Freeman got on the Humvee’s radio and ordered the entire Airborne to ignore prisoners giving themselves up unless they opened fire, in which case they were to be cut down. Apart from that, prisoners were to be simply disarmed and left to find their own way to the rear. “I’m not about to fall for that old ploy,” he informed Norton, “letting columns of refugees cloy your advance.”

General Malik’s planned attacks against Freeman’s flanks by his two motorized regiments were foiled by the U-shaped area of chopper-dropped mines, the two 155mm howitzers meanwhile laying deadly fire on Nizhneangarsk. The blizzard afforded more cover for Freeman’s foot soldiers than for the squeaky Siberian T-80s whose laser range finders were cut by the blizzard, four of the tanks erupting in flame, hit by American LAW 80 rounds, and in one case engulfed by flame thrower. It didn’t mean there wasn’t hard fighting, Freeman’s first battalion engaging a company of SPETS troops in the open area immediately northwest of the Nizhneangarsk tower, where the brine of the salt marshes had turned the edge of the lake a dirty cream color. Here combat was often hand-to-hand, and the two Lynx helicopters with eight ninety-five-pound Hellfire missiles apiece attacked, having dealt with another six of Malik’s lead tanks. One of the Lynx helos that had helped lay the mines, so that the Siberians had only a quarter-mile-wide front on which to attack, was temporarily downed because of shrapnel from a prematurely detonated mine whose fragments were too big for the self-sealing fuel tank to handle. Nevertheless, the Lynx had taken down one of Malik’s vital forward Hind D spotter helos just before the blizzard promised from the north hit full force.

But if there was a general collapse of morale among Nizhneangarsk’s regular troops, there was no such weakening of the Siberian Sixth Guards Regiment aboard the enormous air-cushioned vehicles — Aists — whose huge propellers were speeding them north from Port Baikal under orders from Irkutsk HQ. Though Freeman had as yet no report of them, they were now only a half hour from his paratroopers.

The Siberian Sixth Guards, quite apart from being the best shturmoviki —”trouble shooting”—regiment unit in the Siberian army, had a special reason for wanting to close with Freeman. The Guards were veterans of the Sixty-fourth Siberian Division, which boasted among its battle honors the defeat of the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad, but who had been routed and humiliated by Freeman’s Second Army before the cease-fire. Indeed, it was in part the devastation wrought upon the Sixty-fourth by Freeman’s breakout at that time, following the destruction of Baikal’s sub base, that had convinced Yesov to yield and to sue for a cease in hostilities.

It was only when Freeman’s paratroopers had reached Nizhneangarsk, securing the rail line — the surprise and rapidity of the American paratroopers’ attack having overwhelmed the garrison — that the first of several reports came in from one of the Lynxes that the Aists. — at least eight, maybe more — had been sighted. The report said they were approximately fifteen miles south of Nizhneangarsk, which meant they’d be at the railhead in fifteen minutes — Freeman knowing his paratroopers didn’t have anything like the huge, heavily armed and armored Aists with which to resist.

Colonel Dick Norton felt his throat constrict. “What now, General?”

Standing on a slight rise, arms akimbo in his characteristic, defiant pose, snow peppering him as he overlooked the white on white that was the expanse of the lake stretching south from him, Freeman thought he could see the Aists’ blobs. Or was it a mirage or some other trick of the whiteout? It couldn’t be them, as it was still snowing too heavily, reducing his visibility to no more than a quarter mile or so. It struck him that he may have momentarily been a victim of what he called “Hegel sight”—the ever-present danger he constantly warned his troops about: that in times of excitement, particularly in moments of high stress, you often see what you expect to see, projecting your worst fears outward — in this case to the ice. To a small boy at night, for example, an old coat on a doorknob could easily become the feared intruder. It took training and a victory over fear to see what in fact was there. “Dick, I want those two howitzers up here right now, plus heavy mortars and sappers. Fast!”

As Dick Norton radioed back to the main force, now collecting about the railhead a quarter mile back, he knew they were in serious trouble. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, a couple of howitzers and heavy mortars could do to stop the giant 250-ton, 155-foot-long, fifty-five-foot-wide air-cushion assault Aist crafts. These amphibians, propelled forward by two push, two pull props and driven by two gas NK-12 MV turbine engines at over seventy-five miles per hour, could move about a hundred times faster on the mirror-smooth ice than could the two 155mm guns or their crews. And each of the ten 250-ton Aists, in addition to carrying 250 fully armed shock troops, boasted eight surface-to-air Grail missiles which could make very short work of the remaining choppers — and of anything else.