World in Flames

“Ten-second delay!” David called out to the sappers, placing the charges in a three-foot square, the fifth lump of plastique in the middle, the detonator wires connecting. The sappers turned, signaling to one of their colleagues, who ran forward with another khaki vest load.

“Feels like brick,” the sapper nearest the wall said quietly, quickly packing double the amount of plastique into the square.

“Blow us into the fucking river!” said Aussie, standing next to Brentwood ten feet back from the wall, their MACs at the ready, the newly arrived troopers from Group C making a line of seven SAS ready to charge through to number six the moment the wall blew — if it did.

“How many in all?” asked one of the troopers. “Besides Suzlov, I mean.”

“Twenty-nine,” said Brentwood. “Don’t sweat it. There’ll be plenty of targets.”

“Plus SPETS,” added Aussie. “They’re the pricks I want.”

“Calm down,” Brentwood cautioned him. “Can’t help ‘em now, Aussie.”

The Australian said nothing, knowing that Brentwood meant Schwarzenegger, Thelma, and the others with whom they’d shared the indissoluble bonds of the SAS.

“All set!” announced the corporal who’d directed setting the charges.

“Behind the desk!” ordered Brentwood, but there was no need. The long desk of dark, highly polished hardwood that reflected the flares streaking up from the tank columns outside was over on its side in seconds, the SAS men down behind it, chin straps undone lest the concussion lift their Kevlar helmets.

“On safety!” ordered Brentwood — a precautionary order against accidental discharge from weapons hit by falling debris. “Aussie, you—”

The room blurred, the sound like a cracking iceberg, an avalanche of plaster falling on them, the snap of one man’s collarbone distinctly heard, followed by the shattering of the long room’s chandelier, its fragments lacerating the portraits of Lenin, the Politburo, and KGB chief Chernko into thousands of pieces.

“Go!” shouted Brentwood, and within seconds after the blast, the line of seven SAS moved into the choking fog of dust, MACs erupting in an enfilade of orange-tongued fire, none of them knowing whether the wall had in fact been penetrated but taking no chances. As they ceased firing, their bodies still tense as compressed springs, they moved forward over the rubble.

Brentwood had prayed that a hole at least the size of the three-foot-wide pattern would allow them an attack point. In fact, almost the entire brick wall had disappeared, a great gaping hole appearing in the eerie light afforded by the burning Soviet flag behind the desk, a pile of rubble looking like the steaming remains of an earthquake. Then David Brentwood saw three shadows, a sparkle of light — the fire from AK-47s — before them. It was a brave attempt, but the three SPETS, with the loss of one of the C troopers, were dissected by the hail of SAS bullets. Then quite suddenly all was deathly quiet, except for the low moans of the SAS trooper whose broken collarbone made it impossible for him to move, two other troopers coming into the room, dragging him out after one of them had given him a shot of morphine in order to get him downstairs and out of the building as soon as possible.

For a reason no one could explain, the room’s fire alarm was still screaming, though its light had gone out. Lewis reversed his Ingram, using the butt to silence it.

“Flashlight!” ordered Brentwood. “Two of you by the door — what’s left of it.”

“Struth!” said Aussie. “The bastards!”

“They’re gone!” said one of the troopers, looking around disbelievingly at the rubble. Brentwood, blinking hard, eyes gritty with dust, spotted a shoe by itself over near the desk. Behind the desk, its dark teak split asunder by the explosion, he saw a man whose face and eyebrows were plaster-white, dead, eyes staring heavenward, a neat bullet hole mid-forehead, only a faint trickle of purplish blood made dark by the dust congealed on the lapel of his suit, where the blood had dripped from his chin. But no more bodies were found in the rubble.

“Who is it?” asked one of the troopers. “Suzlov?”

“Yes,” answered David. “It’s him.”

“We’ve got three minutes,” said the sapper corporal, his voice devoid of panic but insistent. “We’d better move, Lieutenant.”

“Where the fuck to?” asked another, glancing out at all the tanks.

“All right,” said David. “Red-green flares, Aussie. Out the west window over there. And watch the carpet.” The red-green sequence would be the signal for the SAS troops to don the SPETS overlays and withdraw as best they might.

Aussie took his “Popsicle,” so called because the red and green self-propelled signal flares were no bigger than two frozen juice sticks. As he clipped a new magazine into the grip housing of his MAC, the flare pack in his left hand, and moved toward one of the COM’s west windows, one of the troopers covered him, shining the flashlight low, its beam a few inches above the carpet so they could see any indication of an Astrolite patch.

A few more men from C Troop now passed through the hole that only a minute or so before had been a solid brick wall, one of them Cheek-Dawson, with a tourniqueted bloody left arm in a strap sling, his Kevlar helmet split down the left side, and a hemorrhaging leg wound. “Come on, Lieutenant,” he told Brentwood. “Time to go.”

Brentwood was bending down, making absolutely sure, for the record, that Suzlov was dead, feeling for the slightest trace of a carotid pulse. “He’s cold,” he said.

“Let’s go!” echoed another trooper nearby, as the Australian, crossing the carpeted hallway in two steps worthy of a danseur, made his way to the west window and fired the flares.

“Everybody out of the building!” ordered David. “Assumption Cathedral. Now!”

In less than a minute, even the wounded Cheek-Dawson had reached the ground floor, the order to “clear out” shouted and repeated down the stairwells.

As they hit the cold, dark air, the snow now falling more heavily, they glimpsed dark humps of bodies in the light of the SPETS’ flares, some half-buried in the snowdrifts by the trees to their right, as they headed south for the short, desperate run to the cathedral near where several goshawks lay dead, having been caught in the crossfire.

“Where’s Laylor?” asked David as the fourteen men — all that remained of his and Cheek-Dawson’s forty troopers— headed for the Assumption’s golden domes, which, capped with snow, formed a perfect symmetry.

“On his way,” said one of the troopers.

As they ran, David suddenly called out to Cheek-Dawson, “Suzlov was cold.”

“What the devil are you on about?”

“Stone bloody cold!” shouted David, adopting the Englishman’s swear word to drive home the message, his own voice drowning now beneath the rattle of a machine gun opening up from the top floor of the arsenal two hundred yards behind them, red tracer arcing gracefully through the blizzard, kicking up snow about them.

“He wasn’t killed by us,” David explained. “They murdered him!”

Cheek-Dawson stumbled. David grabbed the Englishman’s collar, propelling him forward toward the steps of the holy refuge. Cheek-Dawson was trying to fit it all together, but nothing would fit. With his arm hurting so badly, near to the point of him blacking out, only sheer will kept him going, that and Brentwood, who, he thought, must be as addled as he himself was from the unbelievable noise and shock of the short, fierce battle and now the thundering roar of the COM collapsing. All he could think of was that all the other Russian henchmen — General Marchenko, the KGB’s Chernko, et cetera — must have gotten out via some tunnel from the COM, or possibly through some other secret exit that Western Intelligence hadn’t twigged to.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

Still too heavy, unable to rise the two hundred feet to the surface, the USS Roosevelt was crawling at a mere four knots, provided by her twin slit-recessed props in her aft ballast tank, moving toward the area directly beneath the four-hundred-yard-diameter hole that her torpedoes had blown in the ice roof. At five knots, it would take her another nineteen minutes even with the assist of the local current before the broken echoes of her active sonar would tell her she was beneath the ice-free hole.

Within another half hour, however, the heat generated by her torpedo’s explosion would be completely dissipated and the ice hole would be starting to crust and freeze over again. Meanwhile the enemy sub, adjudged