Ian Slater - Arctic Front

A few laughs, some groans.

“You’re right. It’s awful. All right then — how about this? Guy comes home and his wife points to the light bulb and says, ‘That bulb’s been flickering on and off all day. It’s not the bulb — it must be the wiring or something. Will you fix it?’

“ ‘Do I look like an electrician?’ says the guy and flops down in front of the TV. ‘Get an electrician.’

“Next day he comes home and she tells him the tap in the basement is dripping — driving her nuts. Will he fix it? ‘Hey— do I look like a plumber?’ he says and flops back down in front of the TV. Next night he comes home, the light’s working fine— and no more dripping tap.

“ ‘You did it yourself!’ he says.

“ ‘No,’ she answers. ‘That young guy down the lane out of work. He fixed them.’

“ ‘What’d he charge?’

‘“I asked him, and he said he didn’t want any money. Either I could go to bed with him or bake him a cake.’

“ ‘Geez!’ says the husband. ‘Hope you baked him a cake!’ and she says, ‘Do I look like Betty Crocker?’ “

Laughter was mixed with the whine of the undercarriage going down. Buckling up, Freeman turned to his interim aide. “You know what causes the largest percentage of pre-invasion casualties, son?”

“Airborne, sir?”

“If you like.”

“Practice jumps, sir. Chutes that don’t open,” replied the captain. “Friendly fire.”

“Vehicle accidents,” said Freeman. “Most of our young Turks are under twenty-four, Captain. Drive like maniacs. Any man convicted on a speed or reckless-driving offense answers to me — personally — and his CO pays the fine: five hundred dollars. Got it?”

“Five hundred dollars, General?”

“First offense. A grand for the second.”

“Yes, sir.”

“How old are you, son?”

“Twenty-one, sir.”

Freeman nodded.

“Now when we reach Cape Prince of Wales, Dick Norton, my aide from Europe, will take over your job in my HQ. I want you to understand there’s nothing personal in this. It’s just that we’ve got very little time to spring this thing, and Dick and I’ve worked before. Planned the SAS Moscow raid. Understand?”

“Yes, sir. No problem.”

The young captain was enormously relieved. Rumor was that when you worked for Freeman it was a steam bath: twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, on call every second, and God help you if you screwed up. Only man that worked harder than Freeman’s aide, they said, was Freeman himself.

“But—” continued Freeman, “to stress that I’ve full confidence in you, son, you’re invited along for the jump.” In a rush — like the feeling when he’d slithered down the bannister when he was a boy — cold-bowel fear struck the captain. Freeman was going to take the airborne in himself. Given his reputation in the Pyongyang raid and the fact that the general had led the Allies’ armored breakout from the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket, it shouldn’t have been a surprise, but it was.

“Dick Norton,” said Freeman happily, “is gonna have a pup! Goddamn, he hates flying. Course,” said Freeman confidently, “I’ll need him to stay behind to coordinate the MEU follow-up. He’ll come in after in the choppers. But I’ll kid him a bit. You watch his face, Captain. Go white as flour — sort of like yours.” He slapped the captain heartily.”Just kidding, son. No one’s going in who hasn’t had HALO training. You come in with the choppers, too.” The captain’s legs felt weak.

As the wheels hit then grabbed the tarmac, Freeman saw the drops of condensation on his window, wind-driven into long tears. “Just hope to Christ that that Siberian son of a bitch isn’t anticipating an airborne assault. Course it won’t be necessary if that big bird from Elmendorf does its job.”

In Alaska, high above the Yankee River’s winding ribbon of gray ice that cut through the predawn darkness of the Seward Peninsula’s mountains, the four crewmen aboard the Rockwell B-1B, its four thirty-thousand-pound GE-F 102 turbofans on afterburner, could see the two white dots of the Diomedes jutting up westward through the white ice pack as the bomber rose to “stand off” position.

In a direct line eighty miles from Big Diomede, the B-1’s wings were now fully extended for greater stability as it fired off ten million dollars in the form of eight SRAM AGM-69Bs— short range attack missiles — each with a one hundred mile range. They streaked in eight white contrails from the bomber’s “revolver chamber” rotary launcher. The B-1’s EWO ignored the missiles the moment the launch was over, alert now only to the Eaton defensive avionics system; another crewman kept a close eye on the Singer-Kearfott inertial navigation system. The sound of the earsplitting explosions as the three-thousand-pound warheads hit Big Diomede’s eastern cliffs was heard almost instantaneously in Inalik village on Little Diomede, followed seconds later by the shock wave. The latter started loose ice and rock falling; it crashed a quarter mile north of the village in a dirty spill of unearthed boulders and rubble that spilled onto the ice-fringed shore. The multiple cracks on the thick ice floes sounded to the villagers like the splitting noise of stiff sealskins drying in the bitterly cold wind.

Meanwhile the commander of Little Diomede’s Patriots was primarily concerned about possible Soviet air strikes against his hydraulic-legged canisters, which for quick action against any incoming missiles bound for Alaska needed to be on the surface and ready to go. So far he could only conclude that the Soviet MiGs were not being used against Little Diomede because they were being saved to deter any possible American invasion force across the fifty-two-mile-wide strait, a force that Big Diomede’s radar would give the Siberians ample warning of.

Most depressing of all to the Patriot commander this minute was the information that he reluctantly had to convey to the general in charge of Alaskan Air Command. Although the eight SRAMs had all hit Big Diomede, sending boulder-size ice and rock fragments flying over a thousand feet into the air before they rained down on the ice floes — a few hitting Little Diomede — there was no apparent “in depth” damage done to the Siberians’ radar-guided ZSU-23s. For while the enemy cliff face, as seen through his infrared goggles, — was badly scarred — the SRAMs’ explosions had sheared off great sheets of ice that fell crashing down onto the frozen strait over sixteen hundred feet below — the impact of the SRAMs had done nothing to silence the deeply revetted missile batteries.

The enormous and foreboding cliffs of Big Diomede were impervious, it seemed, to any attack but that of an atomic bomb, a course of action that once initiated would set off a nuclear chain that would destroy both sides. For the young captain on Little Diomede in charge of the Patriot defense unit, Big Diomede had grown in menace over the preceding months. Its summit was often obscured by clouds so sharply, it was as if someone had drawn a line with a rule along its five-mile length. But this morning, as changing pressure ridges from the ice reflected the pale winter sun, and the previously downed American aircraft wreckage flickered harmlessly here and there at its base, the enemy island seemed more brooding and threatening than ever.

David Brentwood was tossing in his sleep, willing the snow to stop, but the white storm that kept up during the Moscow raid wouldn’t abate. He could smell it — the cold, fresh tang of the blizzard, shot through with the reek of burning armor. And through it all the warm, metallic whiff of blood from those SAS who lay dead in the Cathedral of the Assumption, the latter’s strangely beautiful gold baroque columns dimly visible in the creeping dawn light as the Russians closed the net in the counterattack about the blazing hulk of a T-80 which Choir Williams had stopped with a round from the “little genie,” a light and disposable French Arpac anti-tank launcher/missile pack. David felt the heavy weight of the squad automatic weapon weighing him down, every muscle aching from the fatigue of the jump and the fierce fighting in and around the cathedral across from the Council of Ministers. He knew the spell in the counterattack couldn’t last for long once the enemy grader tank that was rumbling up pushed aside the burning T-80 blocking the remainder of the Russian column. Down to the last three magazines for the SAW, David selected semiautomatic fire and waited, Choir Williams and a few remaining SAS troops having made good their escape covered by David, who had ordered them to do so. Now, with only Captain Cheek-Dawson, the leader of Troop C, whose job it had been to secure the perimeter against the Kremlin guards streaming out of the Armory, David readied for the Russians to attack again. Cheek-Dawson, having propped himself awkwardly against one of the cathedral’s columns, his leg shattered to the bone, told David to leave him with the SAW and the last of the grenades so that he could do a “spot of bowling.” The grader came, but a counterattack was halted because of Chernko’s surrender at Minsk. But as Cheek-Dawson would have said, it had been a “near-run thing,” as vivid and as immediate as…