Ian Slater - Arctic Front

“Through minefields? No way. You’d better signal a chopper ride if those troop whirlybirds make it back again.”

“You’ve got an SOS flare haven’t you?” shot back the newsman.

“So? That’s for emergencies.”

“What the hell do you call this? Moment you see those troop Chinooks going in, you pull that tab.”

“You divert a chopper just so you can get pictures, man, you’re gonna be in a lot of shit.”

“I’ll take the rap. It’s worth another grand.”

“Okay,” agreed the hunter, “I’ll fire the flare, but I’m staying here. I don’t like those whirlybirds. I’d rather walk back to—”

“All right, all right,” said the CBN reporter, anxiously looking through the eyepiece again. “Damn that smoke!” Now and then he could see white dots moving against the black cliff where one of the earlier and unsuccessful air attacks had blasted the ice off, exposing the black basalt beneath.

Had it not been for the smoke the reporter would have seen at least twenty dots: seven two-man teams and six individuals abseiling down the cliff face. Apache fire killed half a dozen of the Delta/SAS commandos as shrapnel ricocheted across the race. It killed two commandos outright; others lost their footing or had their lines severed and fell down on the floe. Aussie, Brentwood, and the other teams ignored everything else, focusing only on the particular rat hole below them on the cliff face.

At ninety-five feet, which had taken them less than a minute to reach, Brentwood and Aussie were above the SAM site, either side of it. None of the twenty commandos had used grenades but rather lumps of C-4 plastique with three-second detonator/fuses. They didn’t want to simply snuff out the operating crews but knock the AA batteries and SAM transoms right off their rails, hopefully bringing down the rock ceiling as well.

Two commandos were spotted by SPETS loaders who had gone forward, right to the sheer dropoff of their cave’s ledge, in order to clear rock and ice debris shaken loose by the vibration of their own firing. It was also the only place to get a draft of fresh, ice-cool air now that the ventilators that had kept the weapon bays clear of smoke weren’t up to capacity due to Freeman’s and Brentwood’s attack on the R1 basin. But the remaining eighteen Allied commandos did the job, each man in the seven two-man teams tossing in the C- 4 simultaneously. Only one missed falling, the charge exploding at the seven-hundred-foot level, sending up ice shards, some over six feet long, that caught the cloud-filtered sun before they shattered, killing two of the remaining six individual line commandos as the Delta/SAS team hauled themselves back up the cliff.

Dracheev’s force, however, paid a much heavier price: seventeen of the eighteen holes or caves were hit, wiped out, AA quad mountings and SAM launchers blown off their rail mounts, inclining roofward or pointing at the ice floes at ridiculously inoperable angles. They were too heavy to manhandle back onto the rails — the latter buried in any case by collapsing rock piles and scaffolding.

From a distance it looked like a dust storm was issuing forth from the cliff, the rush of black and white rock — now gravel-pouring down the cliffs like molten waterfalls plunging to the ice floe fifteen hundred feet below, the air steaming up as if volcanic vents had been unzipped all along the cliff’s base, the bodies of some of the more than fifty-three SPETS, AA, and missile crews momentarily visible in the Allied-made avalanche.

“Let the up, goddamn it!” ordered Freeman, getting up off the litter. “I’m all right.”

“General, you took a bad fall. Concussion sometimes doesn’t—”

“Let the up!”

It delayed the takeoff of the Apache chopper, which had been turned into an air ambulance heading back to Cape Prince of Wales. It was now sprouting two litters for wounded on either side.

At the moment when his control room shivered, photographs splintering from the enormous shock waves of the Allied charges on the cliff, Major General Dracheev knew his garrison was defeated. His SPETS would fight to the death if asked, but it would be nothing more, he told his duty officer, than apodpolnaya boynya— “underground abattoir.”

It was impossible to get a message through the jammed hub of wounded up to R1 and so, tearing off a piece of his bed sheet, sticking it on the bayonet of an AK-74, he personally made his way through the choking dust of the tunnel leading out to the nearest AA gun emplacement.

Weaving his way carefully through the burning remnants of what had been a ZSU quad, he saw the bodies of its crew, or rather what was left of them, cast about the tunnel so violently that it only added to his resolve. The stench of human ordure mixed with the sulfurous stench of the C-4’s aftermath and incinerated guano, hitherto frozen by the ice, almost overwhelmed him. Dracheev saw two Apaches, now alarmingly big, passing up then out of sight above the cliff. “Hello!” he called from the tunnel, his voice echoing out from the cliff as he disgustedly thrust out the AK-74, the white sheet slapping stiffly in the breeze.

The surrender formally took place eleven minutes later at 1411 hours, though there was sporadic fighting by groups of SPETS along the island, until Dracheev was taken aboard one of the Apaches and, using a booster hailer to overcome the noise of the chopper, told his troops below it was all over.

“Brentwood!” It was Freeman congratulating him. “Good job, son. Damn good job.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Brentwood, but his mind was clearly on something else. Behind him Aussie Lewis, Choir Williams, and others were steering the SPETS to the ad hoc weapons dump in the basin. There AK-47s, 74s, even HK MP5K and rounds of nine-millimeter Parabellum along with grenades clattered on the heap. Many of the SPETS had to come up so fast they’d not had time to put on their white overlays; they were already shivering. But no one suspected for a moment that it was from fear, a strange air of equality between the two forces even in the SPETS defeat.

“Ah, General,” began Brentwood, his tone betraying his unwillingness to go on, “ah, we’ve got a bit of a problem here, sir.”

“What?”

“Sir, that CBN reporter you ordered off Little Diomede at the beginning—”

“What about him? Where’s Morgan?” Freeman was looking about.

“Morgan bought it, sir,” said Brentwood.

Freeman, hands on hips, stared at the pile of weapons. “Son of a bitch.” He turned to Brentwood. “The news guy, too?”

“No, sir,” replied Brentwood. “He’s still with us.”

“Well, can’t kill those bastards.” Someone thought he said, “Unfortunately,” but this was pure speculation, the men around Freeman waiting for the general to explode on hearing that the reporter hadn’t followed orders.

“Deliberate?” shot back Freeman.”Or couldn’t they get him off in time?”

“Ah — deliberate, I’m afraid, sir.”

“Send him to me.”

The cluster of SAS men looked at one another. Normally there might have been a wink or two, relishing the reaming out of one of the “news nits,” as the SAS called them; all of them hated the press. But none of the Brits were in the mood for entertainment just yet; too many of their closest friends were charred lumps, wasted by the FAE that the American general had called in.

“What’s your name?” Freeman asked the CBN reporter.

“Lamonte, General — Rick Lamonte.” He indicated his press card pinned to the Arctic fox collar. “CBN.”

“That the Communist Broadcasting Network?”

“No, General.”

Freeman grunted. “You send all your equipment to Major Brentwood here. Understand?”