Ian Slater - World in Flames

But if the SPETS had moved fast and were in action within seconds, as became their elite status, then so had the SAS — all expertly trained, in Olympian condition, and superbly practiced in what to do and above all how to adapt with ingenuity as well as rapidity when confronted by a plan that David Brentwood recognized was off to a bad start. The SPETS had begun engaging them, albeit in poor visibility, before a good many of the SAS were even out of harness. But against losing the edge of complete surprise, Brentwood knew his men’s adrenaline was up and racing in a way that that of men, however good, just hauled out of bed could not be.

“Zdes!” —”Over here!”—called Aussie in one of the Russian phrases. “Zdes!” he repeated to three SPETS making heavy going of it near a wind drift of snow as they cleared the end of the park between the arsenal and the COM, Aussie pumping his forearm in the Russian infantry signal for “hurry up.” Hesitating for only a second, they turned toward him. When they were seven yards from the Australian, a flare changed night into day, but it was too late. In two quick bursts, Lewis felled them. Crouching low, running for the COM door and calling out to three members of Laylor’s A Group and Choir Williams, like himself from B Group, to cover him, Lewis quickly pushed three balls of Play-Doh plastique from his left pouch against the lock of the big door, the ten-second-delay detonator-firing unit inserted like a small matchbox in putty. The searchlights were nearly all out now, easy targets for SAS men, especially those on the Palace of Congress roof.

“Clear!” called Aussie. Choir Williams and the three men from Laylor’s group moved quickly to the protection of alcoves on either side of the door. Now there was a veritable rain of parachute flares fired by the Russians, brilliantly illuminating the yellow sides of the COM building, the trees fifty yards or so in front of them, and beyond, the roof of the arsenal, where a parachute had wrapped itself around a chimney, the SAS trooper crouched behind the chimney, raking the trees below. The dull thump of the plastique was followed by a tremendous crash as one of the doors buckled, its falling weight ripping out its hinges as it slid down the marble stairs into the snow, black, acrid-smelling smoke pouring out of the building, rising quickly, billowing into the snowy air like some abandoned locomotive, the echoing sound of AK-47 fire erupting from inside the building. Another two SAS men, using the explosion as cover, were sprinting through the knee-deep powder now, one of them David Brentwood, who, without so much as breaking his stride, went through the snow-curtained smoke, returning fire, shooting down the two guards, not SPETS, he noticed, who had been blasting away at the door with more panic than accuracy. Probably KGB auxiliaries.

Aussie had started to move into the building with Brentwood, but seeing a rush of six or seven SPETS, and these were not auxiliaries, dashing from the trees, he had stayed to provide covering fire for three men from Laylor’s troop who were setting up the 5.56 light machine gun, which quickly cut down two of the SPETS, three more hitting the ground behind them, another two still charging full bore when Aussie brought one of them down in the final burst of his magazine. Choir Williams felled the remaining SPETS, or at least the one still advancing as Aussie, kneeling by the fallen door, quickly slipped another magazine into the MAC’s handle housing.

“Hey!” It was Brentwood signaling him and Choir. “No time to play in the snow, Aussie. Let’s go!”

“Cheeky bastard!” mumbled Aussie, covering Brentwood’s left flank, Choir Williams on the right, the three of them now in the foyer, the echoing bootsteps behind them those of Thelman and Schwarzenegger. Wordlessly, with no time to be relieved at having found only two men, and these obviously not SPETS, in the foyer, the five SAS men, Brentwood leading, began heading up the red-carpeted stairway as another half dozen or so SAS, some of these Cheek-Dawson’s C Group, entered the foyer, quickly pairing off with the other three members in each of their SAS modules, several of them in Brentwood’s troop down to three-man modules already, not counting the two he’d lost in the tumble drop. There was a firecracker tempo to the increased firing that was now coming from outside among the trees across from the COM, fire returned by Laylor’s light machine-gun crews and other members of Cheek-Dawson’s sapper troop, the air outside COM’s ground floor zinging with marble chips knocked off by the small-arms fire.

Most of the SAS had now taken off their IR goggles, not so much because they were a dead giveaway for any SPETS who got close enough to see them through the almost zero visibility of the falling snow but rather because, while they indubitably conferred an advantage during the landing and had cost twenty-three SPETS their lives before they got more than ten feet beyond the arsenal entrance, the peripheral vision of the goggles was a hindrance on the ground and indeed could reflect and so draw fire beneath the intensely bright light of the flares.

“Sapper mod!” called out David.

“Here!” came an answer. “But there’re only two of us, Lieutenant.”

“Never mind,” said David. “Do it!”

Within two minutes they had found the COM’s main switchboard. Seven seconds later, the entire building was in darkness. David heard the whine of an elevator stopping abruptly. Outside, SPETS fire was increasing. In a way, it was reassuring — the T-90s had not yet entered the complex, the Russian commandos no doubt confident that three SPETS companies could easily deal with the SAS. Besides which, the tanks, whose brutish shapes David had glimpsed before touching down, couldn’t do much at the moment — any cannon fire into the east wing as likely to kill Suzlov and his war cabinet as the SAS.

Moving quickly but cautiously up the staircase, David could smell the surprisingly heavy, musty smell of the huge Old World building, and for some inexplicable reason, it gave him a surge of confidence as he, Aussie, Thelman, Schwarzenegger, and Choir Williams moved from the second-floor level toward the third-floor staircase without opposition, the ubiquitous four-globed chandeliers along the hallways lifeless now, the main switchboard had been taken out in the same power cutoff that would prevent the war council from using the elevators. Some chandeliers began to shake, their crystals casting crazy-patterned shadows in the dim, brooding light of the emergency battery packs that had come on at the end of each of the long, narrow, red-carpeted hallways. David’s target, which he could see clearly in his mind’s eye, was on the third floor of the east wing. There, another hallway leading from the wing’s hub would take him to Suzlov’s office to the meeting where, as Allied intelligence told them, the decision would be made that could lead to a chemical/nuclear holocaust not only for NATO’s forces but for all its noncombatants as well.

Brentwood glimpsed other SAS, a dozen or so, from Cheek-Dawson’s C Troop totally ignoring Brentwood’s troopers as they quickly went about their business, three men in each SAS module hurrying to place their charges on the Irish “J” beams and other supports, the fourth member of each module providing covering fire. The detonators were set for twenty minutes.

Outside, they could hear the chattering of an M-60 7.62-millimeter machine gun from one of Laylor’s A Troop mobile fire parties who were holding off the SPETS while Brentwood’s B Troop and Cheek-Dawson’s C Troop kept moving up the COM stairwell. David heard a series of steady muffled thumps in the background: two of the SAS’s lightweight 60.7-millimeter Esperanza commando mortars, which, as well as laying down several 1.43-kilogram smoke rounds in and about the arsenal, were also firing 1.4-kilogram high-explosive bombs with a fifty-meter damage radius. It was one slight edge that the SAS enjoyed, the SPETS understandably unwilling to lay mortar fire on their bosses in the COM.