northern entrance.
There was an enormous explosion, a shattering of glass, and a gust of desert-hot air, the Hind E disintegrating above the COM, sending down a golden liquid rain of gasoline and huge charred segments of what had been the chopper’s engines falling down the side of the building, Laylor’s M-60 machine guns now in a steady rip, their gunners using the light of the burning chopper to better rake the shapes that tried to make it from the old cannons and trees that flanked the arsenal across from the COM in what was now knee-high snow.
“Watch for more grenades!” Brentwood cautioned as his party split either side of the corridor that led to Suzlov’s office about sixty feet away. The cacophony of sound was so deafening outside as Laylor’s fire teams kept changing their position and the SPETS counteroffensive grew that Brentwood had to shout to be heard as he prepared them for the rush. Quite suddenly he realized he hadn’t had time to be frightened.
Because of the noise, he didn’t hear the sound of the opening door, second down on the left, but the light from the chopper lit up the SPETS the moment he’d opened the door to get his line of fire. Schwarzenegger’s burst literally punched the Russian back into the room. They heard a high, terrified “Please!” and saw some kind of cloth being waved from the second office, and then, hands high above them, one woman in uniform, the other a civilian in a yellow dress, came scuttling out. David cursed, ordered Aussie and Williams to frisk and “tape” them. It was thirty seconds lost, but for a fraction of a second in that time, Brentwood’s action delineated the fundamental difference between the two elite forces joined in battle. It was a microcosm, he realized, of what they were fighting about— about how the trainload of nurses and women like Lili and wounded men would be treated by one country as opposed to another. God knew the SAS were no angels, but David knew from bitter experience that a SPETS team would have simply blown the two women away.
He glanced at his watch. They had been in the COM seven minutes. They’d have to be out in another fifteen minutes, allowing three minutes at least to get well clear of the massive building before C Troop’s charges blew. But there was no point in the building coming down until they could confirm that Suzlov and friends had been dealt with.
“Suzlov’s office,” he reminded the group, “sixth on the right.” Suddenly the silence of the building was deafening, and for a moment all he could hear was the ringing in his ears caused by the fierce battle still raging outside, and through one of the shattered west windows he glimpsed small, dark figures of SAS men, four or five of them, who had landed on the Palace of Congress, three still pouring down deadly fire into the arsenal, one crumpled, writhing in the snow. To his right, David could hear the creaking of tanks in Red Square beyond the Kremlin’s east wall as more man twenty or so T-90s positioned their 135-millimeter cannons and 12.70 machine guns for the maximum enfilade of fire, all the way from the Historical Museum at the top of the square down past St. Nicholas’s Tower Gate to the island that was St. Basil’s outside the walls, the variegated hues of the church’s onion domes flickering in the light of the SPETS’ flares. No doubt the entire Kremlin was surrounded now by armor. The cannons had laser-guided fire control, but aiming, David knew, would hardly be a problem for the Russian gunners. It would all be point-blank. If a 135-millimeter hit you, as Aussie had once told Williams in a cheery aside, there’d be nothing left to identify, the hydraulic punch and superheated shell exploding blood and bone, in effect cremating you on the spot.
As Schwarzenegger quickly finished frisking and taping the two women, the other man from Troop B joined him in covering Brentwood, who was now moving along the right wall of the corridor, quickly ducking across into what had been the office of the two secretaries to make sure it was clear before moving farther down the hall. As he did so, Schwarzenegger pushed the two secretaries back inside the office and moved ahead of Brentwood, taking the left-hand side of the hallway, followed by the new man from Troop B, with Choir Williams behind.
Williams, taking up the rear, could hear a squeaky sound, like unoiled carts. It was the sound of more tanks wheeling into position in the vast square. Choir realized that refusing to take up Aussie’s bet about how many SAS would get out after the mission had probably been one of the better decisions of his life. Not that he’d get to spend what he’d saved.
David glanced back, seeing that Schwarzenegger, the new man from B Troop, and Williams were right behind him.
“Fritz,” he whispered, motioning to the new man and Williams behind, “you three go forward. Aussie and I’ll take rooms three and four, with you covering from halfway down.” He indicated the two offices on the right, which, unlike the two on the left, still had their doors shut and so were unknown quantities. “Everybody joins for the party at number six. Got it? No grenades until six. Don’t waste time on the doors. Automatic fire. Keep ‘em or kill them inside. We haven’t got time for housecleaning. Aussie and I’ll zip open six. You two as backup. Ready?”
The explosion was like a whoof of gasoline, the hallway engulfed in smoke, Schwarzenegger’s legs hitting the roof, falling amid the debris, the blood from his severed thighs spurting from them like hoses, the smell of his burned flesh mixing with the stringent afterfumes of the Astrolite, the liquid mine which, sprayed onto the ground or in this case on the red hall carpet, had been detonated by foot pressure. Schwarzenegger was still alive, barely — a grotesque dwarf slithering in his own blood and intestines that were oozing out of him. The moment the Astrolite — a mine of American invention which the SAS did not know the Russians possessed — had exploded, the door of the office before number six was flung open. Three SPETS, so big they completely blocked the hallway, stepped out and fired. But Aussie, with the long SAS hours of “nondistraction” training, had resisted the natural temptation to immediately look down at his wounded comrades and instead had gone for the target with a full burst — its backwash searing the hairs on his hands — the burst cutting down the three SPETS. The man who had been immediately behind Schwarzenegger, miraculously saved from the blast because of Schwarzenegger’s taking the full impact of the mine, was now reeling back, already dead from one of the Russians’ shots, the bullet having passed clean through him, clipping Choir Williams on the shoulder.
“Into the rooms!” Brentwood yelled back to Aussie as he fired a long burst to dissuade any more SPETS from coming out of number six as a blur of two or three of Cheek-Dawson’s C Troop, having come up from the second level, now joined Lewis and Williams in the last office before number six.
“Bloody carpet was mined,” David heard the Australian yelling out at more members of Troop C who were now reaching them from the second floor and about to run down the hallway. “Stay where you are!” Aussie warned. “Fucking carpet’s pressure-triggered.”
His MAC in his right hand as he backed into the cleaned-out office now occupied by the Australian, Choir Williams, and the other men from Troop C, David, not putting down the MAC for a second and still watching the hall, reached across with his left hand, pulled out his Browning pistol from its holster, and shot what remained of Schwarzenegger through the heart.
“Let’s go for six!” shouted Aussie. “One or two of us’ll—”
“Negative!” said Brentwood. In Pyongyang some of Freeman’s troops had found connecting doors between several of the offices in Mansudae Hall, and the NKA regulars had used the connecting doors to backtrack through the offices and bushwhack Americans in the hallways from behind. David decided that, given the short time remaining and the further delay any Astrolite explosion would cause, there was only one way — but he had to raise his voice loud enough to be heard over the battery fire alarms that were now screaming all through the hallway, their beams boiling with toxic smoke. Suddenly another fire alarm started screaming above them in the office. “Fish is done!” said Aussie — but no one laughed, all of them knowing they only had at most five minutes to do the job and get out of COM — one man, visibly in shock, shaking violently, unable to look at Schwarzenegger’s remains.
“All right!” said David. “We haven’t got time for musical chairs. C troopers — plastique! On the far wall — five of diamonds. If we start taking fire through the wall, hit the deck. Got it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Right! Go!” By this time, several more troopers from C Group had entered the room.
“Fucking traffic jam,” said Aussie grimly.
