Ian Slater - Arctic Front

Aussie wasn’t alone in his estimation of the operation. A quarter-mile north in Freeman’s drop zone, Brooklyn, another trooper, declared the operation “FUBAR”—fucked up beyond all recognition — as he hunkered down by an ice-veined rock a hundred yards from the Rl exit that Freeman and Morgan were now moving toward, Morgan calmly ejecting one mag and inserting the other in a smooth, three-second change that would have done any drill instructor proud.

The approaching choppers were no longer the size of gnats but football-sized as they began to rise for the final “hop stop” over the jagged lip of the cliff tops into the big FAE-cleared strip now occupied by Delta and being fiercely contested by SPETS who were oozing out of the R1 exit at an alarming rate. In fact, thanks to the FAE’s ancillary benefit of having overwhelmed the ventilator filters, there were still over a thousand SPETS filling the tunnels leading to the bottom of the R1 shaft, eager to join their comrades above.

But the SPETS heading for R1 were now the victims of their own ingenuity, for to use R2 would be to split their forces, the southern contingent boxed in by the minefields they had sown on the lower half of the island to help trap the enemy paratroops. General Dracheev, although surprised by Freeman’s coldblooded daring in ordering the FAE drops though it risked the lives of his own men, now almost wished that Freeman had ordered in more FAE strikes to the south to clear a wider defense area for his own men now that R1 was so overcrowded. SPETS were pouring out into the thirty-foot-diameter rock basin that bulged protectively from the exit on the landward side of the cliff.

A Delta Force spotter, fifty yards to Freeman’s left and on slightly higher ground, saw the SPETS come streaming out and tried to get a radio man to tell Freeman he’d seen at least thirty of the enemy exit in just over a minute. The spotter killed three of them before he’d been forced back from higher ground by fire from an RPK 7.62-millimeter light machine gun, too far away to toss his grenades. But the SPETS jamming was still effective, and the radio man couldn’t get the message through to Freeman. Instead, a runner was dispatched — and cut down before he’d gone five paces.

The frustration of the seventy-plus SAS/Delta Force survivors, of men trained for lightning-fast IKO — in-kill-out — action, but who, because of the minefields, had been bottled up, forced into open-ground warfare without the assist of heavy mortars and the like, manifested itself in Freeman. He now saw the choppers getting smaller, Norton having presumably seen that despite all the noise and thunder of ordnance being thrown at the cliff face, most of the dug-in AA batteries were still intact, putting up a wall of lead that had already created seven gaping holes in the chopper line of attack. Norton had obviously decided that to take the marines in would have been nothing less than suicidal. It was a call he’d have to square with Freeman, if Freeman survived, but it was his call.

“Two oh three!” yelled Freeman, his shout immediately attracting AK-47 fire, albeit inaccurate, the SPETS probably on the move deploying a defensive line. Morgan and others responded to their fire immediately in an enfilade of semiautomatic fire erupting from the C-shaped Delta Force line, whose northern and southern arcs spread out left and right of Freeman. This time the sustained firing of Delta Force successfully covered the ten-yard dash by one of the two Delta men equipped with an M-203, in effect an eleven-pound M-16A2 rifle with a circular-ribbed, forty-millimeter-diameter grenade launcher — a replacement for the old M-16A1’s forestock — with the 5.56-millimeter mag serving as the handgrip when pulling the trigger of the launcher. “You figure that basin of theirs is about thirty, fifty yards from here?” Freeman asked the commando.

“Split the difference, General — forty.”

“Suits me, son. Lob six of those babies right in there. Start with HE and alternate with smoke and tear gas canisters. One after the other, son, quick as you can and we’ll have a fuckin’ rat trap sooner’n you can fart!” Freeman turned to Morgan, who was firing another burst on the other side of the M-203. “Henry, get your flank ready. Hand signals. Gas masks on. We go on ten.”

“Go on ten. Got it.” A loud bang stunned Freeman, the SPETS bracketing them with heavy mortar, and even as he was signalling the crescent of Delta men on his right to ready for an attack on ten, he couldn’t hear anything but buzzing in his ears, as if they were covered by a mass of wasps. Then he lost sight of his men, a thick cloud of tear gas enveloping both Delta flanks — from where he couldn’t tell. Through the buzz he heard the crash of the first grenade in the basin, said, “Good shooting!” but couldn’t hear himself, and was struck by the terrible thought that the SPETS, many of whom he knew were trained in English, might have picked up his shouted commands. Whether the tear gas fired at them had been a coincidence or was their own, backblasted by a change in the wind, he couldn’t tell. Either way he knew he had no choice. He heard a second explosion, this one clanging, the HE grenade shrapnel ringing in the rock basin. There were screams of men hit, his or theirs he couldn’t tell. Another grenade went off, then more — coming from the SPETS. He tried to look through the smoke but could see nothing. Next moment it cleared. Morgan fired, and there was a soft, red explosion — blood — no more than twenty feet away. The SPETS shooter slumped, not making a sound, his nose and right cheek missing. Freeman brought his wristwatch close to his face: nine seconds. Grasping the Winchester tightly he yelled, “Go!”, the sound of his voice coming to him as if in the distance, through a long pipe.

La Bataille du Bassin— The Battle of the Basin, as the French papers were later to describe it — was not, as the headline suggested, some vast, sprawling engagement in the Arctic but it was fierce and unyielding to the seventy-plus Delta/SAS men who charged, following Freeman, through the tear gas screen to engage the enemy in a swirling, smoke-filled cauldron of firefights. The sounds of the battle reverberated off the rocky amphitheater as Americans, British, and Siberians closed hand-to-hand after exhausting their magazines and when the attacking Delta/SAS Force was so near the Siberians that further fire endangered their own men.

Morgan and Freeman were side by side as they reached the rocky basin’s rim. Freeman had no option but to fire the lead slug, a metal projectile punching through three SPETS in the congested basin, blowing holes the size of sledgehammers and sending flesh and bone flying as if they themselves had exploded. Before the third SPETS fell, Freeman, a formidable sight coming through the haze of battle with his shotgun, had already pumped — Delta hands eschewing semi-automatic shotguns because of their proneness to jam — one of the four flechette cartridges into the barrel and fired, then another, then another— in all, sending out 180 grek- or polyethylene-bedded steel darts in an expanding cone that killed at least six SPETS outright, injuring another half dozen or more.

Seven Delta Force fell under sustained AK-47 fire from the SPETS who, a moment before Freeman fired, had been a compact mass about the R1 exit. A shouted order from among the SPETS preceded the closing, or rather the attempted closing, of the R1 manhole. But by now another Delta commando had fired his lead-slug-loaded shotgun from only ten feet away and with a deafening ring, akin to the sound of some enormous bell being hammered, the steel manhole cover, once cold and therefore undetected and untouched by the Allied infrared guided aerial bombardment, was now billowing smoke like some fumarole.