Ian Slater - Arctic Front

“General, I’m—”

“Listen, Lamonte, I’m not having you invading America’s dinner hour with your blood-and-guts footage — least not before any next-of-kin is notified. You got that?”

“I haven’t got pictures of any wounded, General. Wasn’t close enough — too much debris in the air.”

The general said nothing, and there was an unnerving silence, broken only by the wokka wokka wokka of the rotors on the marine expeditionary unit’s Ch- 47 transports. Most of the leathernecks were disgusted — some relieved — that they were to be used only for mop-up, or, as one sergeant put it, “roundup” duty.

On the ground everyone was waiting for Freeman to respond to Lamonte. Everyone knew that “Ratmanov Rick,” as he’d already been dubbed, must have at least the FAE strikes in glorious technicolor and that the Pentagon’s PR types would be scrambling for damage control.

“We’ll check your tape out,” Freeman told Lamonte.”Make sure you’ve got nobody’s mug shots on there. I don’t want the mother of some—”

“Fine,” chipped in Lamonte.

“You got any film left in that thing?”

Freeman knew very well that it was a video camera and how to run it — he’d taken enough shots of his children when they were young — but he enjoyed affecting ignorance about such matters in front of the press; it gave him tactical advantage when they least expected it.

“Not much, General,” said Lamonte.

“How much is that?”

“Couple of minutes.”

“All right, follow me.”

Lamonte, visibly relieved the commandos weren’t going to confiscate his tape and equipment with it, followed Freeman toward the cliff side of the basin. The general carefully made his way over bodies, Siberian as well as British and American, till he got an angle for the video from which no faces of American dead could be seen. “All right,” he told Lamonte. “Take a shot here — no further than five paces from me. Alright?”

Lamonte couldn’t believe his luck: the legendary Freeman on tape, surrounded by SPETS, oily smudged air wafting across the basin from persistent pockets of FAE and smaller fires still burning, would have a dramatic effect before the lens. And that look of Freeman’s — helmet on, chin strap tight. The New York anchor would flip. The son of a bitch had the pose down to a T, as if he’d practiced it before a mirror. Tough face but creased with concern, as moved by the enemy dead as his own, the cerulean blue sky and black-and-white jagged cliff behind him a perfect backdrop. Christ, he’d win an Oscar.

“Thirty-second clip,” instructed Freeman, not breaking the pose. When Lamonte had finished, Freeman called Brentwood and several Delta men over. “Get in the next shot, men!” he told them.

“Big of him,” said Choir Williams sarcastically, his earlier mood of high optimism now gone, wiped out when the FAE had burned the rest of his mates alive.

“ ‘E doesn’t realize it,” chimed in another Brit, “but ‘e’s putting himself on trial. They’ll have to weigh this glory bullshit against the shots of the jelly.” He meant the FAE.

“Freeman knows that,” said Brentwood. “That’s the point. Do we want to win or not?”

“Well, jocko,” posited Choir, his familiarity with an officer nearing contempt, a tone that only the closeness of commandos could tolerate.”You weren’t one of those who was cooked, were you now?”

Brentwood didn’t reply, refusing to be drawn into it any further. It wasn’t for him to judge; the American people, the Pentagon, every barroom “expert” would do that. All David Brentwood knew was that they were running up the Stars, and Stripes and the Union Jack over Rat Island.

“You bastards!” It was one of the marine medics shouting at the SPETS prisoners while helping another marine steer Shirer toward a Medevac chopper, the first-aid bandage they’d put about his eye already soaked with blood.

The President of the United States was not as forgiving of his general as David Brentwood thought he would be. Mayne didn’t question Freeman’s decision to use FAE — after all, the White House and the Chiefs of Staff had given him the authority, and Mayne knew the burden of such responsibility.

“My congratulations, General, on your victory,” said Mayne tersely over the satellite hookup between the White House and Freeman’s Cape Prince of Wales HQ. “Now what in hell were you doing disobeying an order by your commander in chief?”

“Mr. President. I didn’t lead the attack. I went in when I thought the situation warranted it.”

“Don’t dance with me, General. You may have thought the situation warranted it, but I thought I made it clear to you, what we need is your strategy, not your bravado.”

“Mr. President, I understand, but if you’ll forgive me, we didn’t have time for a cabinet meeting on that Starlifter. Sometimes you have to know all the rules in order to break one of them.” He paused. “When necessary.”

President Mayne conceded the point but then, with Trainor and che Joint Chiefs of Staff listening in, he told General Freeman of the pipeline sabotage and how this meant an increased surveillance responsibility for the navy on the West Coast and substantially less naval force to protect Freeman’s flank. Outside the White House the sleet was turning to rain, splattering against the windows, sweeping torrentially across the forlorn patio. “You’ve done the job, Douglas. You’ve knocked out Ratmanov and secured the shortest route to Siberia, but I have to tell you that Intelligence…” He paused, and Freeman could hear him conferring momentarily with Trainor and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, including General Grey.

“Douglas… Signal Intelligence as well as Human Intelligence confirm the Siberians have moved the Fifth Army eastward, spearheaded by their Thirty-first Motorized Division.” He was referring to the famed Thirty-first “Stalingrad” Motorized Division, whose forebears had crushed the best the Wermacht had, causing Von Paulus to surrender the entire German Sixth Army.

Freeman knew that what the president was telling him was that Ratmanov had been the easy part. The hard part was about to begin.

The criticism of Freeman’s use of FAE on his own troops was savage; editorial writers across the country lost no time in pointing out that he had lost 51 percent casualties, the highest in any one action since the Tet Offensive and the marines’ fighting retreat from Chosin Reservoir in Korea.

“Well, Dick,” said Freeman philosophically, running the fingers of one hand through his thinning gray hair while he held the offending editorials in his other, “It’s a short step from hosanna to hoot!”

“Yes, sir.”

“By God!” said Freeman, his ire rising, slapping the editorial. “In Europe they said the attack on Minsk was the most brilliant since Sherman wheeled and drove through to the sea. Now they’re pillorying me. Those sons of bitches always root out the negative. And those powdered pricks hiding behind their goddamn cameras, criticizing us with a five-second clip. If they can’t find anything to bitch about, they make it up.” He looked angrily across at Norton. “I don’t read anything here about that pilot of ours.”

“Shirer,” put in Norton.

“Yes, Shirer, that’s it. Remember him from Korea. Brave man. Went in on the deck to try and protect us. No editorials about what those animals — the Siberian ‘elite’—did to him, what they would have done to all of our boys if we’d lost that godforsaken rock.” He picked up his reading glasses and walked over to the map, shaking his head, stopping, taking off his glasses, and tapping Ratmanov.”They don’t think I bleed for those boys, but damn it. Seventy-four casualties, Dick, seventy-four! We lose more than that on the roads every day.” His glasses were tapping the bunch of editorials in his other hand. “Criticism like this, it’s — it’s disproportionate. Fecal diatribe. First operation in history where we went in outnumbered ten to one! Yes, yes, the MEU followed, but we got ‘em by the balls, Dick, and—”