Ian Slater: Arctic Front

“Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” Johnson said in celebration, the message itself unintelligible, but the sine waves of the message and its source clearly identified on the sonar screen. When the other two subs answered, Johnson transferred the sonar blips onto the superimposed E7 ONC — operation navigation chart. Two were in the northern section of the lake in the southwestern corner of the navigation chart’s “8 5” grid, one of the subs at latitude 54 degrees, 11 minutes north, longitude 109 degrees, 03 minutes west, the other twenty miles farther north.

But there was still a serious problem for Brentwood. While he now knew the exact position of the two northern subs, as well as the one heading for him, the information narrowing his search area by over 70 percent, he knew that if he fired the torpedo at the oncoming GST the two northern subs could break out of their quadrant on battery power — silent running — and come looking for him. Then it was pure mathematics: one would fire and in order to protect himself he would have to fire back, and the second would immediately have the vector, its torpedo getting him in the cross fire.

“Johnson.”

“Yes, Captain?”

“We’re not going to fire the fish.”

“We aren’t, sir?” said Johnson, looking painfully confused.

“No. We wait. How far away is our Snoop?”

“Ten minutes.”

Choir waited till he saw the Hind spitting orange, then he turned hard right and hard right again and applied the brakes. A mistake — the Arrow spun uncontrollably on the skating-rink surface of the ice so fast that it threatened to throw the wounded Lawson out of the cockpit had it not been for the fact that he was strapped in. But it did throw the chopper’s aim off as the Hind swept low, a twin path of machine-gun bullets chopping up the ice to Choir’s left. The chopper went into a sharp climb, banking hard left in a tight turn to come back at Choir. It was only in semihover for two seconds, but it gave Aussie the time he needed, the chopper centered perfectly in the Haskins’ ten-power scope, its belly filling the cross hairs as Aussie squeezed off the armor-piercing, HE/incendiary bullet toward the Hind over a mile away. The noise of the sniper rifle was a there pop in Choir’s ear as he pulled the throttle wide open again, heading for the tree line growing bigger by the second.

The Haskins could hit a ten-gallon drum at over a mile with the ten-power scope, but the Hind was a much bigger target. The HE/incendiary tore into the chopper’s starboard gas tank like a poker through foil, the explosion barely visible to any of the SAS/Delta crew. The first squall of the blizzard had enveloped the southern end of the lake, completely swallowing Choir’s Arrow and, with the downed Hind, any hope of Irkutsk finding out about the American-crewed sub in the lake.

Once in the cover of the taiga, Choir immediately reduced speed; even so he almost wiped out the Arrow against a snow-covered stump. Driving more slowly now, the noise much decreased, absorbed by the snow-thick forest, he stopped the engine and listened for the other Arrow. There was no sound but the mounting fury of the blizzard. This was where, Choir knew, their SAS/Delta training paid off, a regular soldier’s forced march merely a morning run for them.

Choir took off his sunglasses and looked at his compass. “ Six miles to the choppers,” he said. “How you holdin’ up, boyo?”

Lawson didn’t answer.

“Hey,” said Choir, “you all right?” There was still no answer. Choir unbuckled, leaned forward over the driver’s column, and felt for the Delta man’s carotid artery. It was beating, slowly but steadily. Lawson had a babylike expression on his face.

“You bastard!” said the normally polite Choir. With Aussie’s second morphine shot in him, Lawson had been blissfully out of it all the way across the ice.

It didn’t take him long, but by the time Robert Brentwood got into the SCUBA suit that was the fold-down bunk’s mattress, his face was glistening with perspiration and the approaching blip of the other sub was much larger on the screen, now being only nine hundred yards — a half mile — away. Brentwood spat into the SCUBA helmet’s face mask, rubbing the spittle around on it so as to prevent condensation.

“Nice shooting!” David told Aussie, watching the faint glimmer of the Hind’s debris burning as he helped Salvini lift the M-60 from the Arrow’s nose.

“Thanks, mate,” Aussie told David. “Wasn’t a bad shot at that. Now all we have to do is walk to the choppers.”

“What d’you say?” asked Salvini. “Must be eleven to twelve miles?”

“Nearer eleven,” said Aussie, “as the crow flies. Everybody up to it?”

“No worries, mate,” said Salvini, borrowing the Aussie’s accent.

“ ‘Sat a fact, mate? A dozen Foster’s you’re the first to beg— beg for tiffin.”

“Is she any good?”

“Tea break!” responded Aussie. “Tiffin’s a tea break. Fuck a duck! Don’t you Yanks know anything?” Aussie zipped up the Haskins case and gave his boot to the Stinger’s sight, rendering it virtually useless. They could carry only so much.

“Hey,” said Salvini, “you’re travelin’ light. This M-60 weighs a ton, man. Plus I’ve got the two oh three,” he added, slapping the grenade-launcher barrel on his personnel M-16.

“Oh, tell the about it, Salvini,” said Aussie, shouldering the sniper rifle case.

“Knock it off, you two,” said David Brentwood. “We’re not into the woods yet and We’ve got—”

“Shush!” It was Aussie. “You hear that?”

All Brentwood and Salvini could hear was the blizzard, its cold dropping the temperature another ten degrees to minus forty, turning their perspiration to ice — a major danger, even to the Arctic-trained commandos. You had to keep moving, cool off gradually, otherwise the perspiration could encase you, despite the layers, in a sheath of ice. Hypothermia could set in without you knowing it. You’d start to feel peculiarly warm, slow, and comfortable, the agony of frost nip passing through frostbite and then — to nothingness.

“Can’t be anything,” said David to Aussie’s inquiry, though he was conscious his ears were still ringing from the battle.

“A motor?” proffered Salvini, still hearing only the blizzard.

“Nah,” said Aussie. “ ‘S gone now.” They started off, Aussie pulling back his parka’s Velcro mouth guard then ripping the wrapper from a Hershey bar. As far as he was concerned, it was the only good part of the rations. “Thought I heard a dog.”

“Sure you didn’t fart?” asked Salvini.

“Oh, very droll. Very fucking—”

“Shut up!” ordered David. “Save your energy.” They had a minimum of eleven miles with heavy pack. They should make it in less than two hours, providing they kept a strict east-northeast heading. David slipped the compass string about his neck, not standard marching procedure but he didn’t want to veer off the 22.5-degree heading by even a few yards. He would need to glance at the compass often without having to dig into his pockets, letting in the frigid air.

As Robert Brentwood sat in the pitch darkness of the five-foot-diameter, six-foot-high escape hatch, the luminescent glow of the pressure gauge became visible only when the escape chamber was already half full of water. The surge was less violent now than the initial rush of water, but he was still uncomfortable. Compared to his last semiannual “submarine survival” update course in the Norfolk, Virginia, water tank, the claustrophobia he was suffering now was markedly more severe. He hadn’t suffered from it when he first joined the navy — it had crept up on him over the years, the fear kept at bay in the much larger nuclear subs. But even there it had become exacerbated after he had lost the USS Roosevelt off Iceland. Now, six hundred feet below the two-to-four-feet-thick ice roof, the sense of claustrophobia was pressing in on him.