Ian Slater - Rage of Battle

Freeman’s assumption that Kirov’s army was confused was incorrect. As relayed to the world by the TV reporter who had earlier defied Freeman’s ban on media at the front, the truth was that the Russian armies were stunned — not only by the refueling and resupply of troops and tanks all along NATO’s front but above all by the A-10 Thunderbolts. The snow-filled TV pictures were often blurred but nevertheless plainly showed the subsonic Thunderbolts coming in low, often at acute angles of attack, their maneuverability holding even the supersonic pilots in thrall. At times almost in a stall, nose down, the high-mounted rear jets making them look like enormous insects, the Thunderbolts sent down an orange rain of depleted uranium tracer. This fusillade from the thirty-millimeter cannon lasted for only a second or two but, streaming down at a rate over four thousand rounds a minute while the pilot sat protected in the titanium-sheathed seat, passed through the Soviets’ main battle tanks and anything else in the way like a hot poker through butter. Exploding the tanks’ fuel, if it had any left, or igniting the fifty-odd rounds of tank ammunition, it blew the tank apart.

Most of the more than one thousand T-90s and 80s were destroyed in the ensuing forty-eight hours by the Thunderbolts — long before NATO’s tanks were refueled and ready to move. Ironically, had the NATO tanks been moving, the Thunderbolts would not have been anywhere near as successful. For, as in the dust-shrouded battle of Fulda Gap at the beginning of the war, identification between friend and foe in the blizzard would have been extremely difficult, with many Allied tanks destroyed as a result.

The American public and all those watching the TV reports — now Freeman was offering transport to media reps wherever they wanted to go — did not realize that the reason for Freeman’s order to keep his tanks in defilade was that his decision had been dictated by the critical shortage of gas. Nor was NATO’s Supreme Command anxious to let them know how close the entire NATO front had come to irreversible disaster in the DB pocket. What viewers saw before their eyes on every news report in a jubilant America was yet another example of the tactical genius of “End Run Doug,” as the more sensational papers were calling him. And even The New York Times’s in-depth reporting could not detract from his glory. It was clear to everybody from Florida to Alaska that Freeman had gone on the offensive when lesser men would have counseled caution. The reputation of the once unknown one-star general who had been close to retirement when he’d led the raid on Pyongyang was now secure, it seemed, in the Pantheon of American heros.

While a prisoner, dressed in Stasi greatcoat and helmet, with Stasi identification tags, and captured by the Coldstream Guards during the British advance on Stadthagen, was claiming he was an American called “Brentwood,” General Douglas Freeman was receiving a congratulatory call from the president of the United States.

Four days later, when it was confirmed by a Private Thelman and others who’d escaped when the fuel dump at Stadthagen had “blown” that the man who said he was David Brentwood was in fact David Brentwood, Freeman’s headquarters was informed.

David, weak from pneumonia and en route on a hospital train to Lille in Belgium, oblivious to the fact that news of his exploit was now being broadcast around the world, was greeted ecstatically upon arrival in Lille by normally reserved Belgian civilians, who a week before had thought they would be under the heel of Soviet occupation. In the hospital’s admissions office, a pretty, young female clerk asked David, pronouncing every English word with painstaking exactitude, “This honor medal you will be getting — it is made of gold?”

David, sitting down, his breathing labored, feeling so tired, he could fall asleep that instant, nevertheless managed a wink. “It had better be,” he said. Her name tag, he noticed, was Lili.

“You will be famous, no?” she asked. “Like your General Freeman.”

He liked the way she said “General”—sounded cute. “Don’t tell anyone,” he said, pausing for breath, “but I taught him all he knew.”

She laughed, and he with her. It was the first time he had done so in a long while. He watched her, trying not to be too obvious, as she completed the form. No rings, he noticed. It reminded him of the last letter he’d had from Melissa telling him as gently as she could that perhaps they shouldn’t be too hasty about marriage plans. After all, she reminded him, his brother Robert hadn’t become engaged until he was much older than David. Lili was looking better all the time.

Cold as it looked, rising bleak and forbidding out of the fog, Dutch Harbor was a welcome sight to Lana and the evacuees from Adak after hours of force-six winds, more than enough seasickness to go around on the boat, and air sickness on the Hercules flight from Atka.

When they got ashore, the news of the American-led breakout from the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket was general knowledge, but as yet, news of David’s action had not been received. In fact, the only news about her family was a letter from her mother, its postmark showing that it had been mailed a week before.

At first, after Frank had left her to report to the base commander, Lana had looked forward to reading the letter, but before long it had made her feel thoroughly depressed. Her mother told her how excited she was about Robert’s imminent marriage to Rosemary Spence, lamenting the fact that none of the family could be there, all together again. She was naturally worried about David but reported that Ray was “coming along” and that “your father is still doing too much and has started bringing work home with him after some ‘tiff’ at the office.”

Lana rushed through the remainder of the letter, feeling more angry than grateful. It was good to hear from home, but her mother had started using a kind of Pablum code with her ever since Lana had had what her mother called her “little problem” with Jay — as if avoidance of discussing anything unpleasant would make it go away. She had never been like that until Ray was so badly burned on the Blaine. What did her mother mean, she wondered, by Ray “coming along”? And what exactly was Father’s “tiff” at work?

When Lana finished reading the letter, she realized that what was really eating away at her was what would happen to Frank. They had hardly stepped ashore when he was requested to report to Colonel Morin. She was afraid that he would have to report back to the carrier as soon as possible. She told him he wasn’t ready, that after what he’d been through in the last few days, he needed rest — and that she didn’t have any qualms about telling Morin that.

But he’d gone all macho on her and said that if he had to go, he had to go, that “someone owes those marines back there.”

And she knew he was right. But the thought of losing him, just when she’d felt her life was coming together again, filled her with such anxiety that although all she wanted to do was sleep — she couldn’t.

When Shirer came back from Morin’s office, he told her he didn’t have to go back to the carrier — at least not immediately, not until he and the squadron of F-14s being ferried the following day to Dutch Harbor had flown an attack and reconnaissance mission over Adak.

As wind-driven rain swept the runway at Dutch Harbor, the red-vested ordnance man stepped out from beneath the wing of Shirer’s F-14, holding the red streamers up, showing Shirer that all safety wires had been removed — the bombs and missiles now ready. Shirer gave him the thumbs-up okay, and within a minute the afterburning thrust of the twin Pratt and Whitney turbofans had the Tomcat aloft, leading the other nine in arrowhead formation for the 450-mile mission to Adak. Climbing fast, they leveled out at ten thousand feet, keeping subsonic, wings on full spread to conserve fuel for the nine-hundred-mile return trip. This would give the planes well over an hour above and around Adak, where each plane would drop its concrete Divers to crater the runway, hopefully rendering it unusable for the Russians until a U.S. seaborne and combined-ops invasion could be mounted. Any dogfights, of course, would drastically decrease the time over target to a matter of minutes. With the afterburners kicking in, the Tomcats would consume a third of their fuel in less than four minutes at full war speed.