Ian Slater - Arctic Front

“Did you pack them?”

“Yeah. Course I did. But we won’t need ‘em with our cold-weather garb,” he added. Beneath each man’s Gore-Tex parka and overpants there were three other layers: fiber pile, quilted jacket and pants, and polypropylene underwear. “She’ll be right, mate.”

“Thought you were cold?” said Choir good-naturedly.

“Not for long, Choir, not for long. Girls all say that I’m one hot—”

There was a scream of air, an enormous flash of light over the next rise. They saw a Humvee thrown at least forty feet into the air, its doors flying off, the black silhouettes of the marines flung from it.

The colonel and the SAS/Delta troopers felt the sudden jerk of acceleration as the driver put his foot down, and while Aussie might have been one of the toughest of the twelve commandos, he had never been under cruise salvo fire before, and wondered what the hell the driver was doing. But the marine wasn’t listening to advice; his helmet hard up against the windscreen, he peered through a tiny hole in the ice, picking up the infrared headlight beam.

“They land a quarter-mile apart,” explained the marine colonel. “Like running a traffic light. Provided you can—” Suddenly he stopped. Night was day, and they felt a warm wind actually push the Humvee forward as the vehicle hit fifty-five miles an hour on the hard snow road, started to skid, and righted in a rain of dirt, snow, and God knew what else falling on the vehicle’s roof as it continued on to Freeman’s HQ. No one said anything until the vehicle came to a shuddering stop, an MP swearing and jumping out of the way just in time, his weapon raised, momentarily fearing it was some kind of terrorist attack. The driver sat there shaking, the MP bawling him out. The colonel toned everything down, and while the SAS/Delta team moved into Freeman’s HQ to be briefed on what the general called the “game plan,” Choir Williams, tongue in cheek, blithely asked, “You making book on this mission, Aussie?”

Aussie didn’t answer until after the briefing, which lasted a half hour.

“Well?” asked Choir Williams. “What odds are you giving now?”“

Aussie was checking his ammo pack. “Why don’t you take a flying fuck at a doughnut?”

“Oh, how kind,” said Choir, turning to David Brentwood. “You hear that, Captain? Is that any way to talk to a tenor? I ask you now.”

Aussie saw ice was already forming on his magazine pouches, and as he replied to Choir Williams his breath looked like a fiery dragon’s. “Why don’t you take a flying—”

“All right,” cut in Brentwood. “Six hours sleep — then it’s off to the lake resort.”

“Resort? Oh, spare me!” moaned Aussie. “Two fucking comedians. I can’t stand it.”

“Don’t worry, Aussie,” said O’Reilly, one of the four Americans, including David Brentwood, in the team.”Least you don’t have to hoof it.”

“I don’t like those friggin’ Snowcat ‘Arrows,’ “ said Aussie. “Make more noise’n a bloody chopper.”

“Not to worry,” responded Choir. “Snow’ll muffle the sound, Aussie.”

“I’d still rather hike in.”

“Not enough time,” commented David Brentwood. “You heard the general.”

“Too bad,” said Aussie, shifting his attention to his nose, one of the most insidious dangers of a winter campaign being that the flesh could freeze so fast you didn’t even notice it.”Least my prick is still warm.”

“You’re hopeless,” proclaimed Choir. “Get in the truck, you horrible man.”

David Brentwood was glad of the repartee among members of the team. Without high spirits, not even the best equipment in the world would be enough on such a mission as this. As the Humvee drove away, David Brentwood went back in the HQ to see his eldest brother. The briefing of the mission had been so detailed and required so much attention that apart from a handshake they’d not had the opportunity to say much to one another. David felt badly about it, but the fact was he hesitated going in to see his brother. They’d never been that close, the age gap between them much wider than it was between Robert and Ray, the second oldest. Besides, having stayed alive during the war so far without having seen that much of one another, David harbored what he knew was an irrational but powerful conviction that seeing one another now and being on the same mission would be — well, just plain bad luck.

He had no idea that Robert, now opening the door, holding up a fifth of Vodka, felt exactly the same.

Nefski drew the blackout curtains but not because of any imminent threat of an air raid on Port Baikal. The blizzard sweeping down the 390-mile-long lake, though abating, was still wrapping Irkutsk, further west from Port Baikal at the mouth of the outflowing Angara River, in thick, protective sheets of white. It would make even instrument flying for the Americans difficult, if they were so foolhardy as to try anything — particularly over the heavily defended eastern perimeter of the lake.

In any event, Nefski welcomed the overcast for another reason: the room assigned him by the local authorities for the interrogation was on the ground floor of the old Port Baikal library, and, as such, anyone passing by could see in unless the drapes were closed. And the room was stuffy, overheated, the result of the ample electricity produced by the hydroelectric dam further up the ice-free stretch of river that flowed westward toward Irkutsk. He wanted a cold room, for cold, hunger, isolation had, in Nefski’s long experience of interrogating prisoners, been the most reliable trinity when it came to extracting information. Given his choice, he’d choose isolation above everything else, and for this reason he’d regretted having put her among the other prisoners during the withdrawal from Khabarovsk; it had broken her weeks of solitary. While she hadn’t been allowed to speak to the other prisoners on the train, their very presence and the fact that the Siberians were retreating from Khabarovsk had given her new hope, her wild, defiant eyes fiercer than ever on the edge of starvation, stoking her fire of resistance.

Nefski pushed away the gooseneck lamp the corporal here at Port Baikal had turned on Alexsandra in his usual inept attempt to equal Nefski’s record for “confessions.” Not wanting to show she was grateful in any way, she shifted her head only slightly, as if the bright light had not been at all uncomfortable. Nefski waited — he had no intention of hurrying it. That was the problem with so many interrogators, like the buffoon of a corporal who was now ogling the Jewess from his post by the closed door. The younger KGB recruits wanted everything done yesterday — all the information to come at once, in a torrent. On the other hand, the Zampolit had a point: time was pressing.

Though he knew she didn’t smoke, Nefski offered her a cigarette to demonstrate goodwill — the fact that he was willing to be civil about it. Or else. He was determined not to let a woman — a Jew at that — put it over him, for though he was a full colonel, having distinguished himself in the regular army’s Maskirovka, or camouflage, units from which he’d gone on to KGB border-troop rank and then to Khabarovsk, he was laughed at behind his back because of his wife. He knew the corporal and other junior NCOs enjoyed their jokes at his expense around their samovar of a morning. They called her the “T-85.” There was no such tank, the eighty-five centimeters, or thirty-four inches, said to be the size of her neck. With a neck like that, it was said that she was worth two 152-millimeter howitzers. Just let her loose in the Thirty-first’s spearhead and let her run at tanks. It would be the end of the Americans.