Ian Slater - Warshot

As if to support Dick Norton’s pessimism, the snowfall eased and Freeman, through the ten-power binoculars, could see white blobs on white, the tiny, hard snow racing at him like huge tracer. Through the dancing screen of the snow particles, he could see what appeared to be clouds of steam — the “up-blow” of snow and moisture from the Aists’ one-foot-high cushion of air, billowing out from beneath the bulbous rubber skirting on each of the huge craft.

Behind and all around him, Freeman could hear the sappers and mortar crews arriving, and behind them the clank of the two howitzers’ anchor spades in the snow and ice.

Norton, too, could see the Aists — there were not eight, but ten — still out of the howitzers’ effective range but steadily growing bigger, like blunt-nosed destroyers, their superstructure bulky and bullying in appearance. They were big targets, but Norton knew there was no way two howitzers could handle the Aists, with the Siberian crafts’ maneuverability. Freeman announced that if he were the Siberian commander, he would deploy the 250 troops aboard each Aist into the taiga for a flank attack before using the PT-76 tanks, four aboard each Aist, and their five-mile-range Grail SN-5 missiles. The second thing he’d do, he said, would be to use the Aists, which could not traverse the timber taiga, for a swerving S frontal attack against the railhead. Norton’s accurate estimate that such a maneuver would mean no less than two and a half thousand enemy shock troops coming at them was interrupted by someone shouting that the fleet of Aists — which Norton could now see clearly through his binoculars — were moving closer to the taiga. They were about a hundred yards apart and five miles away, to the right of the American position, and now turning to their left — to the Americans’ right — the up-blow from the assembled Aists’ skirts forming a huge flour-white cloud of snow. Norton could see their shock troops unloading, streaming out of the white cloud like small wooden sticks, disappearing into the snowy umbrellaed taiga.

The Aists closest to the forest having spewed out their human cargo, now moved off and were forming up in single file so as to deny Freeman any effective lateral fire. Their commander was obviously intent, as Freeman had predicted, on a frontal attack against the Americans, the second part of what was obviously going to be a scissor offensive. One blade would be made up of the shock troops from the Aists moving now through the timber, cutting in toward Freeman from his right flank and putting stiffener into Malik’s two motorized regiments, which had been driven back into the forest from the railroad only a short time before. The other blade would be the Aist attack itself.

Freeman grabbed the field phone and relayed his instructions, his paratroopers taking up positions all along the rail line left and right of his Humvee, picking the spots where the rail lines, encrusted with ice, formed the rim of a slight rise in the ground, the rise having been man-made in order to lift this section of the Trans-Siberian above flood level. It created a natural firing mound behind which Freeman’s sappers also set up their mortars, several of the crews already crouching over the dial sights, the two howitzer crews — pathetically, it seemed to Dick Norton, yet bravely — aligning the guns against the missile-armed Aists.

Freeman’s two remaining Lynx choppers, one of them with the patched fuel tank, rose like huge dragonflies frightened by noise, their cargo nets of pressure mines slung pendulously beneath them as they headed to the right, west of Nizhneangarsk, to do what Freeman, still glued to his binoculars, called, “A little oat sowing.” Still watching the Aists for the first wink of a missile, he shouted over the roar of the choppers to Dick Norton about the mines. “Mightn’t help stop their infantry, Dick… but it sure as hell’ll slow ‘em up. Damned if I’d like to be feeling my way through the forest, fearing any moment I’d be wearing my balls for a necklace.”

“Yes, sir,” said Norton. “But the Aists — I know their missiles aren’t any good over five miles, but what are you going to do when they—”

“Oh, you beautiful bastards!” yelled Freeman without taking his eyes from the binoculars. Norton took up his and, in the circle of eye-blinding white, saw the Aists — or rather one of them, obscuring any view of the others, which had apparently lined up behind the leader. It presented Freeman’s artillerymen, for all the good the two 155mms could do, with the smallest possible cross-section of target, and only one target at that. It was a frontal attack, all right, just as Freeman had predicted. Hopefully, thought Norton, the hero of Pyongyang and Ratmanov had also figured out a defense!

“We’ve only got two friggin’ guns,” said one of the loaders, pulling on his helmet but careful not to strap it lest an explosion’s concussion tear his head off. “Why the hell doesn’t the old man open up, now we’ve got ‘em in range? Might be lucky and pick off the lead one, anyway. Least do some friggin’ damage.”

“Don’t ask me,” commented the battery officer. “General told us not to fire until he gives us the green light.”

After calling the Aists “beautiful bastards” for the second time, and several of his treetop spotters reporting there were twelve and not ten of them, Freeman gave the two-howitzer battery and the sappers the order to fire. Norton involuntarily jumped, startled by the feral roar and crash of mortar bombs and sapper charges. Freeman was pushing him down for safety behind the Humvee as the frigid air came alive with the singing of deadly ice particles whizzing overhead.

At first Norton thought the Aists’ frontal attack had begun already, although he knew that the Grail missiles were still not in range. It was a minute later as he glanced back at the two 155mm howitzers, seeing their belching flame and hearing the clang of ejected casings, that he realized what was happening and why all the explosions seemed so close. It was because they were close. The two gun crews, like the sappers, were following Freeman’s orders to the letter, ignoring the rapidly approaching Aists, now only seven miles off and closing fast. The mortar crews were firing their bombs in a 180-degree left-right “fan arc,” its farthest point only a hundred yards or so in front of them, and not at the Aists, now less than six miles — four minutes — away from them, racing toward the Americans at seventy-plus miles per hour across the perfectly unobstructed ice. Instead of firing at the Aists, the Americans were firing into the three-foot ice several hundred yards out into the lake. For the howitzers it was point-blank range.

“Give the bastards a bit of their own medicine! Goddamn Mongols!” declared Freeman as ice chips smacked into his Humvee, the explosions from the heavy mortars and the sappers’ C-4 HE packs acting like depth charges, chopping and smashing up what had been the mirrored surface of the lake. Within minutes it was a boiling jumble of mini icebergs, rolling over and over in the man-made turbulence, some of the bergs’ jagged tops rising over five feet above the water.

Then Norton saw it in a flash: the Aists, with a draft of only one foot, might have difficulty negotiating above a bumpy terrain. As it turned out, there was no difficulty; there was only disaster, the Aists balking for a moment or two, clearly decelerating, their up-blow of snow increasing, then, ironically, rapidly decreasing as they hit full throttle, hoping to get enough air cushion to overrun the Americans. In Freeman’s elegant phrase, the icebergs, sticking up like giant knives, “ripped the ass off” the Aists, causing a pileup the likes of which Norton had never seen. One Aist’s Drum Tilt fire-control radar took off like a flying saucer. Another Aist’s bow ramp imploded, pierced by the ice, the Aist rolling, its lift fans coming to pieces with the sound of some monstrous air conditioner suddenly filled with metal chips, particles of ice having passed through the protective mesh, buckling the fans’ blades.