Ian Slater - Warshot

“Technicality,” charged Choir.

“Technicality my ass. Ha! And you thought you could pull one over—“

“Mr. Brentwood, sir?”

David Brentwood looked around. It was the quartermaster again. “Yes?”

“Sir, General Freeman’s HQ says, ‘Go.’ Bridge down or not, he wants to have you guys in the area if they call.”

“Hey,” said Aussie, his eyes turned on the hapless quartermaster. “Shouldn’t you be in fuckin’ bed?”

The sheen above Dennison and Robert Brentwood, now like a dull mirror on a darkened ceiling, wasn’t moonlight, for in patches it was particularly intense. A minute later they realized that the blobs of concentrated light, not moving, were fixed floodlights on the bridge, and crisscrossing the dull, silvered roof of ligns that was the river-air interface were enormous black rectangular shapes — the shadows cast on the water by the gargantuan X-shaped truss girders.

They surfaced slowly, silently, in one of the shadows, and their worst fears were confirmed. Bridge floodlights, spaced a hundred yards apart, were switched on along the southern side of the bridge, and far over to their right, toward the eastern shore about two hundred yards from that side of the river’s edge, was a long, black, snakelike object. As his eyes adjusted to the infrared lenses, Brentwood recognized it as a long line of river craft of all shapes and sizes, from small sampans and medium-sized junks to the big propane barge, all halted and forced to cast anchor a quarter mile upstream from the bridge.

And it was then that he saw the two men — Rose and Smythe — tied to the outer rail of the bridge, a hundred feet above the midway point on the span between piers four and five — like two black crosses, still clad in their rubber wet suits. Far below them, in the penumbra of the floodlights, the huge black shadows of the trusses shivered in eddies about the massive concrete piers, and now there was a lot more noise — shouted commands on the bridge, the distant rumble of another approaching train, only this time an empty one coming down from the north.

Brentwood knew it would be impossible to scale the pier and place the “earmuffs” as planned. But just as quickly, with the speed of a sub captain firing a snap torpedo shot, he knew what he must do, like seeing a fuzzy slide jump into focus.

There was barely time to convey the information to Dennison, including the GPS coordinates of the new rendezvous point he’d decided on. Even with the racket on the bridge added to by the rattle of the goods train, Brentwood was cognizant of just how far the human voice could carry over water, and quickly reverted to sign language during the lull that followed the train. It took him only a minute to explain it, but to Dennison, who expected a searchlight from the right bank to have him in its beam any second, it seemed much longer.

As Dennison checked his COBRA pack, he got a whiff of foul air blown down by the north wind from the flooded levees. Slipping beneath the dark water, the last thing he saw through his mask was the two blurred cruciform shapes of Rose and Smythe tied against the outer pedestrian railing of the seemingly endless black bridge. Going deep to forty feet, he took out the penlight and, pressing it hard against his watch, arched his body to prevent even such a dim light as this from being seen. It was 0133. He started the count, Brentwood having told him he must wait twenty minutes before he could go back up, and even then it would perhaps take another half hour before Brentwood was ready. But even now Dennison found his thumb impatiently slipping the safety off the Remington 7188 machine/shotgun, his left hand feeling the ventilated barrel shield beneath the waterproof plastic sheath that held the gun and its eight-shot 00 rounds. He was eager yet nervous, because along with the new rendezvous point, Brentwood had also told him that even with this quiet shotgun he didn’t want any more fuss than was necessary — that he must be able to do it with two clicks — two shots.

Northeast of lake Baikal the five hundred Siberian tanks due to roll south from Yakutsk Oblast to engage Freeman before he could build enough armored strength to capitalize on his victory at Nizhneangarsk were held back for four hours at Udokan. Clear skies were reported in the sector above which American planes ruled supreme at the outermost limit of the Siberians’ formidable AA network. But soon, invading the clear skies, there came threatening scuds of the storm line of cumulonimbus anvils which would soon swallow the clear sky and further engulf Nizhneangarsk to the south.

The storm, as in the case of those preceding it, was also coming down from the Arctic, blowing over the permafrost with a polar wind whose chill factor drove the thermometer in the Yakutsk Oblast to minus fifty-six degrees with the mercury still falling. It hadn’t yet plunged to the minus eighties, but it was cold enough for exposed flesh to freeze in seconds, and metal was becoming brittle.

Still, the Siberian armored division from Yakutsk had pressed south under Yesov’s orders. “You are fighting on home soil,” the marshal exhorted his men, pointing out that the Americans might have made a name for themselves in Iraq at Mediny Ridge against the Soviet-built T-72s, but that was in another world — one of sand and baked earth— and the lessons of Mediny had been learned. Also, here the advantage would be with the Siberians, for whom winter was not so much something to resist but to act in concert with, to use, so much so that the Siberians’ knowledge of snow fighting was said to be Vsosano smolokom —”bred in the bone.”

When Dick Norton heard that the Siberian armor was on the move south from Udokan, he knew that Freeman, with nowhere to retreat even if that was his style, was now in a make-or-break situation, whether he liked it or not. And every other officer on Freeman’s staff was as deeply worried as Norton, several unhesitatingly expressing their concern to Norton that this time “Fighting Freeman” might well have “bitten off more than he can chew.” With several officers using the same cliché, Norton was concerned that the growing air of uncertainty among the senior commanders would spread by that rapid process of osmosis whereby fear is borne effortlessly like a virus from the officer corps to the grunt. He knew they wouldn’t tell Freeman of their doubts — that was his job, and he was dismayed, for when the second storm struck, American planes would be yet again denied the opportunity to move effectively against the Siberian armor — this time consisting of main battle tanks moving south with formidable surface-to-air missile cover.

It wasn’t as if Freeman was unconcerned with the weather. He had all but driven Major Harvey Simmet, the HQ met officer, to distraction by calling for hourly reports. But he seemed overconfident to Norton, as if he knew as much about the terrain as the Siberians who had lived there all their lives.

“What you have to understand, Dick,” explained Freeman as he stood proudly watching his M1A1s heading north, “is their permafrost. In places it’s over a thousand feet thick. Siberians worried for years about how to get their oil and natural gas up from beneath that goddamned concrete. Buckles everything you try to drill it with. Diamond bits wear out here faster than anywhere else in the world. Then this bright spark comes along from Novosibirsk and figures out you don’t need miles and miles of piping underneath to tap the natural gas — or anything else, for that matter. Know what he does?”

Norton shook his head. It was time for what the general’s headquarter staff called “Jeopardy.” If you didn’t know the answers, Freeman took you prisoner in a ten-minute rundown on little-known minutiae.