Ian Slater - Arctic Front

“Relax, fellas!” It was Aussie. “Not as bad as you think. It helped us in a way.”

“What the shit d’you mean?” asked Rogers, uncharacteristic anger momentarily overcoming his air sickness and fear.

Aussie was lighting another cigarette. “Won’t be able to tell what it was — wreckage’ll look like a scrap yard. And same paint as their own, red star and all. And the guys — in Siberian uniforms.” Aussie looked at his watch. Freeman had even taken care to make sure they were of Russian make. “What are we, Davey?” Aussie asked Brentwood. “ ‘Bout a hundred miles from the lake? Twenty minutes from touchdown? Hell, it’d take ‘em fifteen minutes or so just to send out a search party — even if anyone did see the explosion. By then we’ll be down, or close enough. What we’ve gotta do now is head south for a while, out of sight of any pain-in-the-ass search party.”

“Yeah,” said one of the submariners, “but what if they’ve already spotted us? “

Aussie smiled. Choir and Davey had already seen it, Choir explaining it to the submariner. “Well, laddie, if anyone sees us, they’ll think we’re part of the rescue party. Same paint job— from any distance at all it’d be hard to tell. We’re too far inside enemy territory for them to think we might be—”

“You hope,” said the submariner.

“Ah, that’s not all,” said Aussie confidently. “You see, mate, when we start up those noisy Arrows anyone within cooee distance’ll think it’s one of their damned snowmobiles joining the search for the downed chopper.”

David Brentwood clicked on his throat mike. “Captain?”

“Go ahead.”

“This is Captain Brentwood. Suggest we divert south for a while — avoid any search party coming out of Port Baikal.”

“No problem.”

It took two minutes for the Stallion pilot to signal the two Cobras — intercraft radio silence being strictly enforced and requiring either hand or “craft maneuver” signalling before the three remaining choppers swung south on the last leg through or, if necessary, up over the six-thousand-foot Khamar Daban range before they could take a fix on Tankhoy, twenty-seven miles across the ice from Port Baikal.

Fifteen miles from where the Stallion had gone down, an argument was building between the ten members of a SPETS squad standing by a Hind helo.

“Idite za nimi”—”l say follow them in,” said the SPETS leader, referring to the three dots they could see heading for the Khamar Daban Range.

“Zachem?”— “Why?” asked the serzhant. “They’re probably ours. Big one’s probably a Hind, like ours. Other two are probably Havocs.”

“Hinds, Havocs!” shouted the SPETS leader.”You can’t tell from here even with binoculars. They were more than a mile off.”

“Whatever you say, Comrade,” replied the sergeant. “But I say we’re wasting time. Let’s go on to Ulan-Ude. Our orders are to relieve one of the sections at the head of the Thirty-first’s spearhead.”

“There are already two thousand of us at the Thirty-first’s spearhead,” said the leader.”I say let’s follow those three choppers.”

“Make up your mind, comrades,” advised the Hind captain assigned to transport the ten SPETS. “Personally I think we should go on to Ulan-Ude, as the sergeant says. We’re getting low on gas anyway.”

“Did you see them?” snapped the SPETS leader, a big man, well over six feet and broad but not an ounce of flab on him.

“No,” admitted the Hind pilot.

“You?” the leader asked the gunner.

“Too far off, sir,” said the gunner, and, quickly trying for compromise, added, “Why don’t we call Irkutsk, leave it up to them?”

The nine other SPETS waited for their captain to bawl out the air force pilot for forgetting they were on strict SPETS operational procedure — no radio contact allowed in the event it might be picked up by distant American AWACs. Tightening the sling of his AK-74, the SPETS leader then lifted his right fist, waving it in a circular motion. The Hind coughed, sputtered, and snow swirled about the SPETS as they clambered aboard. The Hind’s nose gunner, immediately in front of and beneath the pilot, was cursing, strapping himself in behind the twin 12.7-millimeter machine guns in his armor-plated cubbyhole. He had a girl, a Buryat, waiting for him in Ulan-Ude.

“Polnym khodom!”—”Dash speed!” ordered the SPETS captain. This should take it to 180 miles per hour — but a few miles would be lost because of the extra weight of the ten SPETS and the helo’s four “Swatter” antitank missiles.

The pilot went visual as he could not put on his radar; otherwise he would run the risk of setting off every AA gun and missile battery that was strung along Baikal’s lakeshore, camouflaged in the forests.

He barely managed to get a fix on the three distant helos; they looked like dots of pepper against the white pallet of the western sky. He was watching the gas needle — soon they’d have to be refueled, the nearest POL depot at Port Baikal. Damn the SPETS — they should have gone on to Ulan-Ude. He banked the gunship in the direction of the dots, doubting he’d catch them unless they suddenly jinxed due west and he could take the hypotenuse vector between them. If it was a Hind and two Havocs on patrol out of Port Baikal or Irkutsk further west, it would make him and the SPETS look real idioty. Well, it was the SPETS leader’s decision, not his. The pilot swung the Hind’s gun-sprouting nose up, climbing, going for “high ground” from which he could see better across the taiga. Even so, he lost sight of them for a moment, the three dots heading into one of the passes through the mountain range toward the frozen inland Sea of Baikal.

By now the lead Cobra was looking for muskeg, hoping for an open patch in the forest, no more than a mile or two from the shore, using Tankhoy as a general heading but keeping well away from any sign of habitation. It was the copilot who spotted a promising site, and within seconds the Cobra began a “sway,” signalling the Super Stallion and the other Cobra that he’d found a landing. The air was so clear now he could see a thin wisp of smoke from what had to be Port Baikal across the lake, the smoke rising to the right of creamy white cliffs of the Trans-Siberian Railway’s spur line from Kultuk at the southern end of the lake to Port Baikal. He told his copilot he didn’t know which was best for the commandos: clear weather, which would make it much easier and therefore quicker for them to reach their target, or snowy conditions, which, while slowing them down, would have provided them with more cover.

“They got clear weather, man,” said the copilot/weapons officer. “You can see for miles. They ain’t got no choice.”

“True.”

The Snowcat “Arrow,” technical designation UH-19P, was based on another American air-cushion vehicle speed record-holder, the UH-15. Like the UH-15 hovercraft, the Snowcat was triangular or, as seen from above, arrowhead-shaped, a mid-placed cockpit seating three, the military version placing the driver slightly higher and behind the other two.

Nineteen feet long and seven and a half feet wide, the triangular Snowcat, with an eight-inch clearance, was powered by an 1100cc Toyota car engine, its speed the same as the old record-setting UH-15: eighty miles per hour over water, ninety miles per hour over ice or snow, with a maximum gradient tolerance of thirty to forty degrees, depending on the condition of snow or ice pack. Its payload was a thousand pounds, which could easily handle three commandos and their equipment. In the lead Arrow this included a heavy, swivel-mounted, forty-millimeter M-19 machine gun in front of the cockpit as well as the gun’s box-contained belt feed ammunition — the gun’s forty-inch barrel having a theoretical 180-degree traverse. In practice, as Aussie had discovered on a dry-run assembly, the safest maximum arc of fire was 90 degrees, consisting of a 45-degree swing left or right. The noise that bothered him was, ironically, not the main thrust engine but the air cushion’s lift system, powered by an 1800-horsepower, 1600cc Briggs and Stratton vertical-shaft lawnmower engine, which drove an axial fan, the latter’s six-foot-diameter blade mounted at the back, or widest part of the arrowhead.