Ian Slater - Arctic Front

“You reached anybody down there yet?” shouted Freeman.

“No, sir,” replied the copilot. “Siberians are jamming everything. You’d need land lines to evade that lot.”

Freeman said nothing; he didn’t have to. If the SAS weren’t informed of the impending FAE drops the risk to them was even higher. If the FAEs missed them and he secured the island with Delta Force he’d be a hero, but he knew that while victory would have many parents, defeat would be an orphan — his. The president and the Chiefs of Staff were right — it was his responsibility. It came with a general’s pay.

The SPETS were no longer interested in Shirer. Any information he could give them now was null and void with the SAS trapped and about to be wiped out in the dawn’s early light. Nevertheless, the SPETS resented the American’s stubbornness in refusing to tell them anything but name, rank, and serial number. It transcended all common sense. Everyone broke sooner or later, and if you didn’t, then you outraged your captors’ assumption of omnipotence. The SPETS had orders from Dracheev not to kill the American ace Shirer, and they saw the sense in this, for when the Allied commandos failed to take Ratmanov, Shirer, whose nickname in the Western press was “One-Eyed Jack,” might be useful in a prisoner exchange. Americans were soft — always willing to trade five of yours for one of theirs.

“Last chance,” the SPETS corporal told Shirer, who was tied to a metal chair near the base of one of the ventilator shafts. “Why do they call you a one-eyed Jack?” The corporal’s English was impeccable.

The other SPETS looked at the corporal, switching to Russian. “Why are you asking him that? You know he used to be one of their Air Force One pilots. They wear the black patch on one eye so if there’s a nuclear airburst and everybody else on the plane is blinded, the pilot still has one good eye to fly the instruments. We know that — what the hell are you wasting time for?”

“I didn’t know,” the corporal answered him in Russian. “Bastards think they’re tougher than we are. Need a lesson.”

“So give it to him. But let’s hurry, eh? It’ll soon be twilight. I don’t want to miss out on the fun.”

“You won’t. Here, hold him steady!”

The corporal unslung his AK-47, rested it against the far side of the ventilator, and pinned Shirer’s arms even tighter against the chair.

“That’s it,” said the other SPETS, and took Shirer by the hair, pushing his head back hard on the top of the chair so that Shirer was forced to look up at the heavy, steel-reinforced roof of the ventilator tunnel.

“Look at me!” he commanded Shirer. Shirer, his face contorted by his previous beating and bruised from the scrape against the canopy when he’d ejected, glanced defiantly at the SPETS. He wasn’t going to tell them squat about Air Force One. In one quick movement the SPETS slipped the ballpoint pen from his pocket and drove it into Shirer’s eye.

Shirer was screaming, but the SPETS’ voice was louder, reverberating around the ventilator shaft. “That’s why you’re called one-eyed Jacks.” Grinning, the SPETS looked across at the corporal, who was slinging on the Kalashnikov. “His flying days are over, Comrade.”

“C’mon!” said the corporal impatiently. “You’ll miss the party.”

The “party” had already started in the blizzard over Ratmanov Island as F-18s, their Litton inertial navigation system and Martin Marietta AN/ASQ-173 laser spot tracker and forward-looking infrared giving the Hornets the edge above the blizzard level where the Fulcrums had to pursue them if they wanted to engage. Below, in the blizzard itself, F-15C Eagles on afterburner went into the furball as other MiGs tried to take out the big Starlifter, which was now opening its ramp once more. Freeman, the first man in the Delta Force stick, cinched the straps holding the Winchester 1200 modified riot gun to his pack, its perforated heat shield already frosting under the plastic. Freeman quickly wrapped another layer of waterproof camouflage sheet about it to prevent the four flechette cartridges and the slugging shell in the chamber from getting too cold. If the FAEs did the job properly, he wouldn’t need the flechettes until he got inside the tunnels, but a slugging shell, which could go through an engine block at three hundred yards, might come in handy on the already bomb-rattled rat hole covers.

“General,” Harry Morgan advised him, the major’s voice whipped away by the slipstream, “you’re not supposed to be leading, General.”

“You have any objections, Harry?” Freeman shouted, one hand on the webbing net by the door as they hit unstable air, the other hand busy tightening the oxygen mask before the helmet came down.

“Hell, no, General, glad to have you along. But Dick Norton told the that I should remind you that General Grey—”

“General Grey ordered the not to lead the drop!” Freeman shouted against the wind and roaring crescendo of the Starlifter. “Now did I lead the drop, Harry?”

“Well, not technically I guess. The SAS—”

“Right. Major Brentwood led the drop. Hell, I’m just followin’ up the rear. Besides, what kind of commander would I be, sending men down into that without going myself?”

“Yeah,” a Delta Force corporal told his buddy down the line. “But he won’t be the one at the fucking barbecue!”

“Don’t worry,” his buddy told him. “Jumpmaster tells the Tomcats are coming in with those FAEs. They can land on an angled deck in the middle of the fucking night, man. They can drop those FAE babies just where they want ‘em. Like in Iraq.”

“Iraq! Those mothers were dug in miles from us. These fuckers are only a coupla hundred yards from those limeys.”

“Don’t worry. Our carrier guys are used to putting those birds down on a postage stamp. They’re not gonna screw up.”

The Tomcats didn’t screw up. Coming in low, wings fully extended for maximum stability, they risked lower speed and more vulnerability to the Siberians’ missile and gun AA fire. The snow was now falling only lightly, and the predawn darkness above the island was filled with what seemed to be the crazed patterns of contrails from wing tips and missile stabilizers in a cacophony of sound that made it all but impossible for the Tomcats’ RIOs and pilots to hear one another. Though lighter, the snow still segmented laser designator beams so that the Paveway conversion nose assemblies attached to the FAE pods of jellied fuel could not be taken advantage of. The pilots had to rely as best they could on wind-vector corrections to aid the computer in making the low-level drop. Wind shears, always unpredictable around carriers as much as above airports, were especially so around the island, where constantly shifting pressure ridges changed gusting north winds by the millisecond. The first two FAE pods tumbled, textbook perfect, close to the cliffs, the great, rolling vomit of black-edged flame consuming at least half-a-dozen SPETS’ heavy machine-gun positions, roughly twenty-five men in all, and drowning several elevator shafts in a river of flame. Dracheev’s northern complex could no longer be garrisoned. More than five hundred SPETS beneath were now directed south to the midline where most of the SAS had landed and were now in imminent danger of being wiped out by SPETS clustered in the rocky enclaves about the hitherto unknown R1 exit.

Despite increasing, almost hysterical AA fire, the second Tomcat released its single 12,573-pound “Big Blue 82” fuel air explosive mixture of gelled ammonium nitrate, aluminum powder, and polystyrene soap. The canards afforded it some stability in the fierce wind gusting about the cliff tops, but not much. A hundred feet above the minefields, its cloud detonators released, allowing the slurry of gelled explosive to blow out of the casing; it became a vast aerosol, or chemical mist, over the snow.