“Starting to snow again,” said Freeman. “Goddamn it! Well, we can’t wait, Brentwood. Another hour damn things’ll be all covered in fresh snow. Be one big white blanket over that island. Cover up the bomb scabs. Anyway, the moment we take off, Salt Lake City’s going to hit the holes with a final F-14 strike. Lasers’ll be chopped up by the snow, but they should get bombs near enough the exits to re-mark ‘em for us.” Freeman looked at his watch.”Tomcats should be halfway over the ice pack now. Remember: SAS out first, top half of Rat Island. Delta’ll take the southern half. Now our PVS-Fives—” The general meant the night vision goggles powered by a twelve-hour, three-volt lithium battery, “—are much better than anything the Siberians have, but they’ll be able to pick us up in civil twilight even if the snow keeps falling—”
“I know, sir,” acknowledged Brentwood, not meaning to butt in, but his adrenaline was up for the jump. “I’ve told everyone in SAS/Delta. Diamond glow recognition.” It was the foot-long Velcro diamond pattern that, like the inverted V of the Allied forces in the Iraq war, would distinguish friend from foe.
“Good!” said Freeman. “Then we’re all set.”
By now most of the troops in the two long columns, the first men in being the last men out during the jump, were inside the cavernous interior of the Starlifter. Last man in was Brentwood. Freeman was already walking up the center of the deck, nodding cheerily as the 140 men took their seats facing one another and began to buckle up. The plane’s engines reached fever pitch as it began its lumbering run down the tarmac. It was to take off and head eastward, away from the strait, to give the big C-141 time to gain sufficient height before it turned for the high-altitude, low-opening drop. The higher altitude would give the jumpers more time to steer themselves to the assembly points on the island, the PED — palletized equipment drops — scheduled to take place ten to twenty minutes after drop zone perimeters had been secured.
“You ready?” asked Freeman on the bullhorn.
There was a roar that for a second could be heard above that of the plane.
“Dumb question. Right?” hollered Freeman.
“Right!”
Freeman was walking down the center of the deck, holding onto the webbing net. “No need to tell you,” he told the paratroopers over the bullhorn, “how important this is. Those F-14s from Salt Lake City’ll keep the bastards’ heads down. Then we go in and whip their ass. I can assure you, gentlemen, that will send Novosibirsk a very clear message: ‘Back off! Before you all lose your ass!’ “
There was a chorus of approval and the stamping of para boots, which annoyed the air force jumpmaster intensely. The stomping was creating a minor dust storm inside the Starlifter.
“Well, Brentwood, we’ll have snow to contend with but least we won’t have the press. They aren’t gonna Vietnam me, Captain. All those goddamn liberal lap dogs in the press running around saying they didn’t lose us Vietnam — that the army did. Goddamn it, no one seems to realize we could have ended that war in half an hour. Two A-bombs on Hanoi would have done it. But we didn’t. We get any marks for that restraint? Not on your life. You know what would have happened, though, if those squealing bastards had been taken prisoner by the Commies. They would have wanted the U.S. Air Force to turn that place into a parking lot. Well, they’re not going to be allowed to do a Baghdad Pete on us. I’ve told the CO of that Patriot battery on Little Diomede to send that CBN son-of-a-bitch reporter and his Arctic fox headgear packing back to the mainland. They can all get pissed in Anchorage while we’re setting these Commie bastards straight.”
“Yes, sir,” said David Brentwood, remembering how a reporter once asked him, a thrice-decorated soldier, how he got used to it. You never did. The first moments of a battle were always as bowel chilling as the first time. Yes, you learned certain things, sensed when a firefight was more concentrated and more dangerous in one instance than in another, when there was twice as much noise as accuracy; you learned to husband your strength, ration it and not blow it all in the first few minutes; but you never got used to it.
* * *
“Vse gotovy?”—”All done?” asked General Dracheev.
“Da!”
“Kharasho!”— “Good! A little surprise for the Americans, eh?”
“Sir?” It was the air defense duty officer. “Bandits. Looks like F-14s. Coming fast from the south. No more than a thousand feet. Trying for the exits one more time.”
“ Neuzheli? “— “Oh really?” commented Dracheev, with ill-conceived sarcasm. “I thought they’d be bringing the mail.” This got a good laugh from the SPETS commander. So even with the snow making it difficult for the F-14s to use their Smart bombs with their normal accuracy, the Americans would chop up the snow a little — maybe even buckle a few of the superhardened steel plates around the exits.
“They’re not stupid,” said the air defense officer, trying to regain his bruised dignity. “I mean this Freeman. He will realize that some of the exits have probably not been used. That the pilots won’t see them.”
“So?” said Dracheev. “He’ll send his men looking for them.” With that the Siberian general looked up from the dull red light of Ratmanov Control — a hundred feet of solid rock above him. “All the better then.”
The air defense officer was even more offended, resentment growing by the second. Dracheev had obviously confided his plan only to the SPETS. Although this was normal procedure— SPETS always insisted their operations be kept as secret as possible — it still rubbed the wrong way. “Who in hell do they think they are?” the air defense officer asked his subaltern. “The elite.”
* * *
In his sod house in Little Diomede’s Inalik village, the hunter, the high cheekbones of his Eskimo forebears catching the light of the golden hurricane lamp, civil twilight, before daybreak, still an hour away, puffed heavily on his walrus-bone pipe.”It’s a lot of trouble.”
“It’s a lot of money,” countered the CBN reporter.
The hunter took another pull of salmon jerky. The silence was broken only by the unsettling groaning of the pack ice off frozen Lopp Lagoon, north of Cape Prince of Wales. They could see the navigation light right on the point — the westernmost point of the cape, the wind coming straight off the flat ice of the lagoon in a soulful wail.
“Well?” said the reporter impatiently, holding his hands over the Sanyo kerosene radiator, its heat waves rising like a mirage in the hunter’s sod hut. “I haven’t got all day.”
“Cash?” said the hunter.
“Hey, you think I carry that kind of money round with me?”
“Yes,” said the hunter.
A professional smile creased the reporter’s face. “How’d you know?”
“I can smell it.”
“Shit you can.”
“Yes, I smell shit. But I smell money, too. Up here you don’t smell right, you the. What you see is important, too. When the-”
“Hey,” interjected the reporter impatiently. “Time’s racing, Jack. Have we got a deal or not? Five grand now. Five when we get back.”
The hunter was thinking. It had been a bad year. The walrus had come south in a heavy fog and gone past the islands before they knew it, so they hadn’t got the usual number to cut up and store with the murre birds — for flavor — in the frozen earth.
“You won’t be able to show any light,” said the hunter. “Those guys in the Patriot bunkers — they could pick you up on infrared.” He thought for a moment. “Course there’ll still be a lot of heat coming up from the rest of the huts after they evacuate us. So you’d be all right in here for a while anyways.”
Читать дальше