Ian Slater - Arctic Front

“Correct. Now, Dick, I go in with the airborne at civil and exactly one hour later — earlier if we radio or fire red flares— you come in with the marine choppers.” Freeman put the glasses back on, tearing off an incoming meteorological report on the fax. Looking down over his reading glasses at Norton he said, “Didn’t think you’d be too keen on a HALO.”

Dick Norton had a flashback to the time he’d been ordered by Freeman to fly in the back seat of an F-16B from Krefeld to Brest to hurry up air resupply from the French port for the beleaguered Fifth and Seventh American Corps and the British Army of the Rhine in the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket. To this day Norton could actually feel nauseated just thinking about the terrifying night flight in the supersonic fighter. Hurtling through space and you couldn’t see a damn thing and it wasn’t nearly as smooth as it appeared from the ground. Everything shook. “I’m not too keen on any kind of jump, General,” Norton replied. “You clear this with Washington?”

“The mission? Of course.”

“No, sir,” said Norton, looking at the map’s order of battle clustered around Galena Field from where the marines would take off. “I mean you leading the drop personally?”

“Dick,” said Freeman, turning to the map, tapping the map, using his glasses as a pointer, “main problem is going to be the palletized drops — we’re going to need hundred and five millimeters. Now Rat Island’s big enough, but our guys are going to be spread all over it, jamming C-4 plastique in every goddamn crack we find. We’ll have to smoke ‘em out, same way we did with the Japs on Iwo Jima. Same situation here — they’re dug in deep. And Siberians haven’t surrendered a fight in—”

“Except for the weather,” interjected Norton.

“What?”

“Same as Iwo Jima — except for the weather.”

“Minor detail,” said Freeman, grinning.

“You know, General, it’s minus twenty degrees over that ice pack.”

“How do you know that?” asked Freeman, not disputing Norton’s assertion but intrigued as to how he knew the specific temperature on the pack. “I can read upside-down type, General. Remember?” Norton indicated the fax Freeman was holding. “Anchorage says the satellite cloud cover indicates twenty-mile-an-hour winds. That drops the temperature to minus forty-six.”

“Chilly,” said Freeman. Before Norton could object further, Freeman slapped his arm on Norton’s shoulder. “Dick. You see? By God, you’re the right man for the job. No one else in this godforsaken peninsula knows that — windchill factor.” Except every Eskimo, thought Norton. “Details, Dick. You and I know that’s what wins wars.”

“And strategy, General.”

“That’s my department, Dick,” said Freeman, turning to the map, slipping his reading glasses back on. “And God’s.” There wasn’t a trace of insincerity. His right hand swept across the Bering Strait. “Speed, Dick! That’s what we need. Now we know where all those rat holes are. I’m personally going to see every one of those blown up — then you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to drop high explosives down those rat holes. It’ll be surrender or the for them, Dick. White flag or beef jerky!”

“If there are SPETS on that island, General — and Intelligence suspects there are — there’ll be no surrender.”

“I know, Dick,” said Freeman, pausing solemnly. “I know. We won’t butcher them. I’m not a butcher. My SAS-Delta team’ll give them fair warning.” For several moments there was silence, broken only by the howling of the Arctic wind outside. “ ‘Bout two seconds. I’ve thought it through, Dick. I’ve tried to think of every damn detail, but I know it’s still a gamble.” He turned to look straight at Norton. “Ultimately all great victories are. Time’s against us, but I say, ‘Go!’ “

Norton nodded, which meant that though he saw the general’s logic and the military necessity as clearly as he’d seen the giant bergs on the way over from Europe — glinting like glass castles beneath the Arctic moon — he couldn’t share in Freeman’s enthusiasm. Never had. Freeman was a warrior to the bone: brave and unapologetic in his quest for glory. All Dick Norton hoped for was that he would be alive after the war, when he would be quite happy to retire, mind and body intact. He had fought in the snows of Minsk by Freeman’s side and did not doubt the general’s determination, and SAS and Delta were the best-trained to jump from high altitudes and make pinpoint landings. Even so he wondered how many would end up on the ice flow, and how they might be the lucky ones. The normal ratio, one that Freeman well knew, dictated that an attacking force must outnumber the dug-in defenders by at least five to one. But denied the luxury of waiting, the need for speed disposed Freeman to go in now with what he had — the 140-man SAS/Delta Force team. The Pentagon boys were saying Ratmanov Island was more than an ancient wrecker of ships — it was a career disaster waiting to happen.

In the predawn darkness of a blizzard, two long lines of SAS/Delta troopers, seventy in each line, made their way along the tarmac at Galena air base on Alaska’s Seward Peninsula toward the gaping hold of the C-141 Starlifter.

“Bloody lovely!” said Aussie, one of the seventy-man SAS squad. The column to his left was made up of men from the American Delta Force.

“What are you whining about now?” asked “Choir” Williams, a fellow veteran with Aussie and David Brentwood, the leader of the SAS force, most of whose troop of twenty men had been wiped out in the Moscow raid.

“Last week you were getting right tired of Wales,” said Choir Williams. “So the president and the prime minister say, ‘What can we do now to placate Aussie?’ and ‘ere we are!”

“Very bloody funny,” said Aussie. “Wales in Alaska. Should’ve known better. All set to go ‘ome. Back to Sydney — up to King’s Cross. Give those sheilas a bit of the old in-out. And where are we? Freezin’ our burn off in another bloody Wales. I’m cursed with bloody Wales.”

“Ah,” replied Choir Williams, his deep Welsh baritone barely audible now as the noise of the C-141’s pitch climbed. “You volunteered, laddie.”

“Musta been bloody drunk!” said Aussie.

“Anyway,” advised Williams who, like Aussie and the rest of the men lining up for the C-141, had qualified in the most gruelling Allied commando courses in the world, “you don’t want to go back to Sydney. All those girls. You wouldn’t know what to do with them.”

“Yes, he would,” called out another Welshman. “Aussie’ll screw anything that moves, ‘e will.”

“You oughta know, Jones,” responded Aussie.

“Yeah?” asked Muldoon. “What’s Jonesy like, Aussie?”

“Very nice,” said Aussie. “But too tight.”

“Watch it!” barked the SAS sergeant major. “Officer on parade. The man himself.”

A few turned to see Freeman, helmet down against the roar of the C-141 engines, and young David Brentwood, at five eight looking decidedly smaller than the general with whom he’d served on the Pyongyang raid.

One of the men in the Delta Force line noted that Freeman and Brentwood looked like father and son together, but it was an illusion created by the close attention Brentwood was giving his superior as they went over last-minute details. The other illusion was that Freeman was going to jump with them. He was certainly dressed for it, in full jump suit and helmet, wrist altimeter, and oxygen mask. But if Freeman, through ordering the decoding of a scrambled message from the president requesting him not to jump, had been successful in sidestepping Mayne’s directive, he had failed to avoid an outright order from Army Chief of Staff Grey who, like Schwarzkopf’s superiors in the Iran war, viewed Freeman as being infinitely more valuable directing strategy on the ground rather than risking his neck in combat. But Grey’s instruction notwithstanding, Freeman was determined to at least go up with the SAS/D force and stoke morale before the jump. Going over the additional infrared shots from satellite pictures taken before the onset of the blizzard, Freeman and David Brentwood had ringed each of the “rat holes” that Freeman had suckered Dracheev’s SPETS into revealing.