Ian Slater - World in Flames

The odds were only one in over four million, but a trooper in David Brentwood’s stick of twenty, struck in the chest by either a stray machine gun bullet or shrapnel from the air battle miles away, went limp, going into a tumble. Through Brentwood’s infrared goggles, the blood sucked out of the dead trooper looked like the spiraling vortex of a tornado. Then the wounded man’s weapon load, probably the nine-millimeter shorts, began popping off.

David knew the sound wouldn’t be heard, as they were still too high, but if the man’s automatic altimeter-release chute controls were damaged, the chute wouldn’t snap open at four thousand feet and the man would hit the ground before any of the remaining fifty-nine troopers. David “humped” his back and went into a right-hand downward slide to catch up with him. It was a move sky divers used to form hand-holding circles, but not under the weight of a 110-plus-pound pack, and with the hard buffeting of the Arctic-born air further increased by the corrugated-road like concussions of air caused by the multiple ack-ack explosions away to the southeast.

David saw a white blur through his infrared goggles — another trooper moving in from the other side toward the tumbling man. The white infrared blur was broken by a black patch that David recognized was the bump of the man’s colder backpack. Now, at fifteen thousand, both men closing in on him, the wounded man’s body kept plummeting, uncontrolled, when, in a move that David right there and then knew was one of the neatest he’d ever seen, the other trooper closed against the tumbling man’s body and they became one. The next moment David Brentwood was below them, having overshot, the trooper releasing the wounded man’s emergency chute, still clinging to him. David Brentwood was swearing, the mumbled words resounding back at him inside his oxygen mask. The drill wasn’t for the trooper to pull the man’s chute but to stay with him until the four-thousand-foot level, for while there was lots of cloud cover, one chute opening before they all got to four thousand could be a sixty-second giveaway if the big chute was accidentally caught in one of the periodic searchlight sweeps from the city, the beams crisscrossing, bunching, and crisscrossing again, like enormous bunches of white celery, off to the southeast. Thank God, thought David, they would have good cloud cover to six thousand, below which the last weather report said it would be clear.

But now, falling at over 130 feet a second, a glance at his wrist altimeter telling him he was at twelve thousand, with just under eight thousand — fifty-nine seconds — to go before all chutes would be pulled, David saw the would-be rescuer desperately trying to cut himself out of the tangle, but now falling out of starfish pattern and tumbling himself, dangling by one foot from a maze of twisted nylon. Two seconds later, David saw the wounded man’s chute “thin” to a Roman candle and lost sight of both of them. Suddenly, frighteningly, everything was black. He had a sensation of hurtling into the stark vortex of some gigantic wind tunnel, his face mask hissing under the onslaught of granular snow, stinging his face and drumming off the IR goggles like hail on a metal roof.

Looking down for the blobs of infrared heat emission they said he should see coming up from the drop zone — particularly from the two domes on the Council of Ministers Building, the smaller one on the western side, the larger on the eastern — he saw nothing. Then suddenly, bursting out of the snow cloud, he could see the two blurred orbs and other traces of heat emission from the roofs of the Kremlin complex, though from the fuzz veiling the infrared, he could tell it was still snowing. On one hand, it would make spot-on landing difficult, even given the relatively large area between the buildings. On the other hand, the snowfall would soften the impact. The real key, however, was whether the SPETS guards would have any forewarning.

He glanced at the altimeter needle, saw it was forty-two hundred feet, a gust of wind pushing him hard left. Quickly he corrected, going into a right-hand drop, and before he was ready for it, he heard the whiplike crack of the chute opening above him, the sudden deceleration, so that now his descent seemed to be taking forever — and he felt that the whole of Moscow must be able to see them — all about him the white blurs of starfish flipping, changing into men. There was another crack, then another — a trooper so close to him that he had thought for a second it was the crack of rifle fire. He had no idea who the two men were who had gone down in the tumble. All he could hope was that the trooper who’d gone to help had freed himself from the chute foul-up and that the other had plummeted to earth either in the trees southward in the Taynitsky Garden or into the river itself — well away from the drop zone.

In fact, both men had come down in Red Square just to the north of St. Basil’s, not far from the red-star-topped Spasskaya, or Savior’s Gate. One of the two gate guards, hearing a snow-soft thud, moved forward, but unable to see very far in the falling snow and forbidden to leave his post, he rang for two other guards in the warming room beneath the gate’s barbican to go and investigate, suspecting it might be a piece of equipment from the snowplow now working the square. The plow’s half-slit yellow headlights were barely visible in the blackout as it worked to keep the square as clear as possible for the members of the Politburo and STAVKA for when they left the emergency meeting now under way in Premier Suzlov’s office. The plow also had to keep the square clear for the twenty or so T-90 tanks parked in the lot behind the corner arsenal tower, should they ever be needed quickly in the square — loose, unpacked snow particularly annoying to the machine gunners, who, unlike the main gunner, did not have laser sights.

A minute later, one of the investigating guards pulled out his walkie-talkie. ‘ Parashyutisty!” —”Paratroops!”—he yelled. “Parashyutisty protivnika!” —”Enemy paratroops!” The guards at the Spasskaya Gate alerted the KGB guards officer and the commander of the arsenal SPETS troops. Thirty seconds later, 345 men were pouring out of their barracks within the arsenal, quickly donning winter battle smocks, snatching arms from the racks, the general alarm whooping at all gates, all entrances and exits to the Fortress closing — SAS already landing in the area between the arsenal on the western side and the COM, a half dozen or so running forward from the old Tsar Apartments five hundred yards south, the snow roiling in beams of searchlights that began crisscrossing the sixty-three acres like enormous headlight beams sharply defined in the frozen, snow-thick air.

David Brentwood’s MAC 11 was already spitting flame as he, with six other troopers, who he could see were also firing, came down in the large open area between the Council of Ministers on his right and the Church of the Twelve Apostles to the south. Suddenly his face was smacked violently to the left — there was a ripping, tearing sound on his mask, a flurry of some enormous bird, its talons into his neck as he hit the ground. Before he had time to realize it had been one of the Kremlin’s goshawks, he heard a tinkle of broken glass somewhere behind him. A searchlight died. Next there was a stuttering burst of AK-47 fire, and David saw two of his troop, snow flicking up about, dead, but not before the SAS troopers from A Troop, landing on the broad, flat section of roof on the Palace of Congress, had killed four SPETS as the Russians emerged from the southern end of the arsenal, trying to make it to the trees in front of the COM. Another SPETS was shot, mistaken by a plainclothes KGB for one of the attacking Allied force.