Ian Slater - Arctic Front

The warmer air of the hundred-foot-deep tunnels streaming through the ragged, baseball-sized perforation blown out by the Winchester’s slug immediately created a fog as it hit the Arctic air, adding to the confusion of the smoke-filled basin. Freeman went down, the victim of a SPETS stun grenade concussion, the Winchester clattering on the R1 cover. Brentwood’s small band of SAS survivors breached the basin’s rim to the right.

“Medic!” Morgan shouted, and then died, lungs pulped to a pink mass by an AK-74 burst at near-point-blank range. Brentwood evened the score, emptying a mag into the SPETS, punching him back into other comrades falling about him. Not pausing for a second Brentwood popped one, two, three grenades down through the hole in the R1 cover, the thumps and clanging of the explosions sending ricocheting metal zinging about amid the screaming and choking tear gas, adding to the general confusion and making it impossible to know friend from foe for at least seven seconds.

It was a relative silence in the roar of noise, and noticed only by the final group of four SAS and one Delta paratrooper who, like Brentwood and Aussie before them, had had to work more slowly than Freeman’s “cavalry” through a grenade-shovelled path in the minefield in order to reach the basin.

No one except Dracheev, in his Saddam bunker a hundred feet down and a mile away, realized what the immediate implications of the Allied grenade attack in the shaft were. One moment the Siberian commander had been watching his men moving toward the R1 shaft, the next they stopped. Within seconds he could detect the unmistakable reek of cordite and throat-searing whiffs of tear gas streaming back through the tunnels. He knew immediately that the top section of Rl must now be penetrated. In fact, the whole of R1 had been penetrated insofar as the sheer mass of bodies — some barely alive — writhing in the hellish cauldron of the top fifty feet of the R1 shaft was preventing the steel trapdoor hatch at the sixty-foot level from being closed, thus risking the integrity of the entire system, the shaft jammed with dead and dying.

At the top of the shaft David Brentwood was yelling, “Half with me, half stay topside. Watch the other exits!” Brentwood knew that most of these rat holes would already be warped, even if they’d not been actually penetrated by the air strikes, and would therefore be effectively unopenable by the SPETS. Still, the Siberians would need only one or two exits to enable them to swarm up again. Even now the ten-man Delta squad deployed on the rim were readying to stave off any counterattack by ad hoc teams of SPETS who, having made their way along the cliff tops north and south of the rocky depression, were now attempting to head back to try and retake the R1 basin.

In the basin a medic, readying to give Freeman a shot of antitetanus, almost finished what the Siberians had begun, barely seeing Freeman’s tetanus allergy bracelet in time as the general groggily regained consciousness long enough to give Brentwood an order.

“Yes, sir!” responded Brentwood, looking around, yelling, “Radio!” He had to call again before he saw a whip aerial swinging wildly like a fishing rod through the clearing smoke and fumes that were still issuing from R1. “They still have us jammed?” he asked the radio operator.

“Yes, sir. All static.”

“All right. Get to the cliff top. Aussie, you cover him. Take two more with you.” Brentwood turned to the radio man. “Use your lamp if you can’t get a frequency. Signal Little Diomede for the MEU to come in. They’ll pass it on. Four Apaches attacking first, the transports to follow fifteen minutes later, coming down on the other exits. But no spreading out — just secure the exits. There are still minefields on our flanks.” Brentwood tossed down two more three-second SAS “specials”—stun grenades of the kind SAS had used to clear the Iranian Embassy in London of terrorists in 1980. Stepping back quickly from the cover, he heard Aussie telling him, “Cliff AAs are still active. They’ll blow the MEU Apaches to pieces.”

“Do what I tell you!” shouted Brentwood. “Take another two men with you.” Within seconds two more Delta commandos were moving with Aussie up toward the rim to cover the rear right and left flanks of the signal operator, whose lamp was blinking eastward where anyone but the Siberians could see it. Dick Norton’s scopes on Cape Prince of Wales spotted it the second it began winking — the radio relay from Little Diomede’s Patriot battery not needed.

As the four AH-64s were taking off and heading out over the jagged twenty-five-mile ice flow toward Ratmanov, their Hughes gunbelts fully loaded and rocket pods resupplied, Delta Force and SAS were in their element, doing what they had trained months, in some cases years, to do. Every man of them was highly trained in a cross section of skills, and every one was in top physical shape. Eighteen headed north of the basin to carry out Freeman’s order; twenty-seven headed south, where the AA fire from the recessed, rail-mounted batteries had been heaviest. Map references from the fighter aircrafts’ largely futile attacks on the recessed AA positions were of some help, but the references couldn’t be relied upon to any high degree.

“Clever bastard!” quipped Aussie to the radio man, but the latter didn’t answer, his concentration eastward, lips moving with his Morse message. When he’d received the acknowledgment blink from across the pristine air of the strait he noticed shadows, scattered clouds sliding ominously across the ice pack. “Who’s a clever bastard?” he asked Aussie. Aussie fired a long burst at a SPETS who, looking the worse for wear, was dodging between rocky outcrops thirty yards down from the basin’s rim. The SPETS stopped then fell, twisting about, trying to reach his backpack. He slithered down into a pocket of dirty ice, streaked by FAE detritus.

“Who’s a clever bastard?” repeated the radio man. “Brentwood?”

“What? Oh, yeah, him too. But I meant the old man.”

“Von Freeman,” grunted one of the Delta men, who’d lost two of his best buddies when the general had called in the FAE strike.

“Okay,” said Aussie. “He’s a rough customer, but this is a smart move, boyo!”

“You hope.”

Aussie thought he saw the SPETS move in the snow — or was it a sense of movement created by passing cloud? “Five to one on it works,” he whispered, clipping in another mag, not taking his eyes off the SPETS but not wanting to waste ammunition either.

“You mean what he told Brentwood?” said the Delta man.

“Yeah.”

“What’s five to one on?” asked the American to his right.

“He means,” said the radio man, “you bet ten bucks to win one.”

“Fuck you,” said the other Delta man matter-of-factly.

“Hey, hey,” said Aussie, adopting a quiet yet schoolmasterish tone, still not taking his eyes off the SPETS. “Watch your language. Three to one on.”

“Done.”

There was an explosion so violent that it shook ice from the cliff top, sending it on a sheer fell sixteen hundred feet straight down, where it shattered like glass on the floe.

“Christ, what was that?” said Aussie. There was a towering pall of smoke above R1 seventy yards behind them and the stink of human ordure.

“C-four,” the radio man said quietly, his dull monotone suppressing his fear, so determined not to overreact he hardly seemed to react at all. “Brentwood must have dropped a whole—” He stopped, and the others knew why, for it might well have been a SPETS-induced explosion. Taking his eyes off the SPETS, Aussie glanced back toward the middle of the basin, the towering black column of smoke now hundreds of feet in the air.