over the ice, pulling themselves up rough stairways of stone, up gulches, scrambling up little gulches and whatever. It would take an hour for all of Bravo to make it up.
But now he had twenty-five guns, M-16s, full auto, and he could hear the firing beckoning him onward, and it was time to go.
“Almost there,” he said.
“Bob, a lot of us are going to get killed,” said one of the men.
“Yeah, Bob, it doesn’t look like we’ll have much of a chance against all that.”
“Yeah, well,” said Dill, “I get the impression the Russians don’t know we’re here. And, like, those other guys are counting on us. I think there’s a pretty good fight going on, and we ought to be there helping.”
Dill knew he wasn’t an eloquent man and even by his standards his little speech had been pretty lame, but at least he hadn’t whined and sounded utterly preposterous, and so he simply walked ahead through the snow, slipping between the trees, trying to figure out if he was going in the right direction or not. He thought they were with him, but he didn’t want to turn around to look, because it might scare them away.
He came to a meadow shortly. Up ahead there appeared to be a kind of fireworks display going on; he couldn’t make it out.
It was all wrong somehow, nothing at all like what he expected. He had no idea if he was in the right place. The feeling was all wrong too; there was a crazy sense of festival to it, none of the noise was distinct, but simply a blur of imprecise sound. He couldn’t see anything well, just sensing confusion, as if too much were going on, really, to decipher.
“Bob, is this where we’re supposed to be?”
“I don’t know,” said Dill. “I’m not sure. I hope we’re on the right hill.”
“We have to be on the right hill. There’s only one hill.”
“Uh—”
Dill now saw someone emerge before him. He smiled, as if to make contact, and realized in a second he was staring at a Soviet Special Forces soldier with camouflage tunic, black beret, and an AK-47 at the high port. The man was the most terrifying thing Dill had ever seen. Dill shot him in the face.
“Jesus, Bob, you killed that guy.”
“Bet your ass I did,” said Dill. “Now,
All up and down the line, without orders or thought or guidance behind them, the troopers began to fire.
They dropped to one knee and began to squeeze bursts off into the Soviet position, stunned at how quickly and totally the scurrying figures fell before them, and how long it took the Russians to respond and how easy it all had been.
Yasotay stared in stupefaction. In that second he knew the position was lost.
Delta moved in from the right, firing as its men deployed. The helicopters were a ruse, the infantry was a ruse, the brilliant American commander had somehow gotten the Delta unit up the hard cliffs to the right in the dark — impossible, impossible! thought Yasotay bitterly — and sent them in.
Now it was only a matter of seconds.
He saw the defenses were disintegrating, that he could not fight an enemy on two fronts, he was flanked, his complex scheme of drawing the frontal into the trenches had come undone. Now the job was simply to get the tunnel defense team down, and devil take the rest.
Yasotay fired a burst at the rushing figures from the right, but like the brilliant troops they were, they came low and hard, with disciplined fire and movement. He could see them now at the far end of the trench, firing their M-16s from the hip, long, raking bursts into his troops, while others broke off and hit his trenches from the side. More and more of them were coming, and as they came, they killed without mercy.
It sickened Yasotay that men so good should die so fast.
Yasotay pulled his whistle out and bleated two brief blasts, waited a second, and then bleated two more.
He watched as his soldiers rose in a scurry from their positions, first the Red Platoon, then the Blue Platoon, each putting out a covering fire as the troopers from Delta closed in from the right and the infantry poured over the main trench at the front. He saw the choppers landing and still more men pouring out and scrambling toward him; then it was time to run himself.
Turning, he slithered through the fire back to the ruined structure that housed the elevator shaft access. Time was short; flares hung in the sky, hissing and popping; everywhere tracers arced through the atmosphere, and where they struck they kicked up blossoms of dust. It all had a terrible slow-motion sensation to it, the desperate run to the elevator shaft, the insistent bullets taking his men down.
He made it.
“Tunnel team inside.”
Fifteen men, the maximum, wedged their way into the car; with the fifteen below, that would give him thirty.
“The gun?” his sergeant major yelled.
The gun? Here it was. Yasotay had to face it, the hardest choice. He had one heavy automatic left. He thought of the mad, fat American standing out in the snowy meadow firing the M-60 from the shoulder as their own fire splashed around him. Before he died, goddamn him, his bullets had shattered the breach of Yasotay’s H&K-21. Now he had one belt-fed weapon, the M-60; if he took it, he doomed the boys up top. They wouldn’t have the fire to hold the Americans off. Yet if the Americans got into the tunnel, he’d need the damned thing.
“Major Yasotay,” the sergeant major shouted again. “The gun?”
Yasotay hated himself.
“In the elevator,” he said. “It has to go down.”
“Gun forward,” yelled the sergeant major, and the weapon was passed through the crowd until it reached the elevator.
“You boys, God bless you,” Yasotay called. “You hold them. You hold them till hell freezes. It’s for the motherland and your children will love you for it.”
“We’ll hold the bastards till Gorbachev comes to accept their surrender,” said a voice in the darkness, sheer bravado, for now it was very late, Yasotay could tell.
He bent quickly to the computer terminal still mounted in the seared metal side of the elevator shaft.
He typed ACCESS.
The prompt came:
ENTER PERMISSIVE ACTION LINK
He typed in the twelve numbers the general had made him memorize, pressed the command key, and the thing winked at him.
OK
He stepped inside the elevator, and the door closed with a pneumatic whoosh, sealing him in for the journey down and sealing out the vision of night combat left behind.
2300
“And where have you been, dear Comrade Arbatov?” asked the KGB man Gorshenin. “The alert for a possible defection went out at seven P.M. when you failed to arrive for your communications duty.”
“I was detained, comrade,” said Arbatov, blinking, wondering why Magda hadn’t alibied for him. Like some idiotic spy melodrama, the lamp in the KGB security office on the third floor had been turned so that it broadcast a steady, irritating beam in his eyes. So stupid! “On a mission. As I explained to Magda Goshgarian, who agreed to stand in for me.”
“The notification of your defection comes from your own unit commander, Comrade Klimov.”
“Comrade Klimov is mistaken.”
“Hmmm. Comrade Klimov is not the sort to be mistaken.”
“Yes, well, this once, he’s mistaken. Look, would I have come back to finish up my night duty if I were trying
