Tonight Show” with Jay Leno announcing that America was at war.
“My glory—” began Marjorie, in a state of shock, one hand clasped before her mouth as the other worked the remote to bring in CBN. “You hear that, Douglas?” she called out. “Russian submarines have attacked two of our ships. We’re at war again.”
Freeman had put the phone down and was already doing up his necktie in an old-fashioned Windsor knot, so old that it was now said to be back in style. He had already called Fort Ord to make transport arrangements and issued a series of orders marshalling elements of the marines’ rapid deployment force.
“My glory!” Marjorie repeated, slumped down in the recliner. “That’s
“Yes,” Freeman agreed. “Sure as hell is.” It may have been the light of the TV flickering, but for a moment Marjorie could have sworn Douglas was smiling.
“Still, Marjorie,” he added, “must have been meant to be.” She suspected in a vague sort of way that it might be a jibe at her, but it was clear he also believed it.
“I hope it’ll be quick,” said Marjorie, “like Iraq.”
Freeman’s smile was devoid of condescension — one of those a parent gives when obliged to break a truth of life gently to his offspring, the truth that in life you couldn’t hope for nonstop, easy victories. He took nothing away from the men who had fought in Desert Storm, in which he himself had led part of the Seventh Armored in the decisive outflanking movement north that caught the Republican Guard with their pants down. But the Iraqi war, for all its moments of undeniable American and Coalition bravery, had been, when all was said and done, a hundred- hour ground war. Even the dimmest private would see that Siberia was a far different situation, that any comparison to Desert Storm was naive to say the least.
He spoke quietly. “Marjorie — Iraq is desert. Some high country to the north, but in the main, a desert. Siberia has everything, by which I mean every natural land, water, and ice barrier on God’s earth. And taiga — pine, birch, and fir forests — far as the eye can see. Wermacht used to talk of ‘distance illness,’ the endlessness of Russia. And Marjorie—” He was looking in the mirror, straightening the khaki tie. “—the Krauts didn’t even get to Siberia. They were in the
“What?” Marjorie asked, though her attention was distracted by a CBN broadcaster. Somehow they’d got one of their cameras twenty-four miles across the strait from Alaska to Little Diomede Island and had it set up on the sloping but still steep western side of the small American outpost near the Eskimo village of Inalik. The CBN’s camera was filling the TV screen with the ice-covered basalt that was the bottom half of Big Diomede or, as CBN was calling it, “Ratmanov Island.”
Freeman shot a glance at the TV, and Marjorie had seldom seen such a look of outright contempt on his face as he watched the CBN announcer in a fur-lined Eskimo parka telling Americans how the U.S. Air Force were already assembling fighters and fighter bombers on the Alaskan Peninsula for what was “certain to be” an aerial bombardment of the 11.2-square-mile Ratmanov Island. The island was so heavily defended, the reporter continued, “that many military experts believe it to be
“It’s
He flashed a winning smile. “Sorry, Marjorie.”
“Aren’t you going to tell the then?”
He looked at her, puzzled, as he unconsciously felt for what he called his “backup,” his vest-holstered Hi- Vel.22 automatic beneath his tunic. “Tell you what?”
“You said there was one other thing about Siberia that made it so different. Oh, dear — you aren’t going to tell the you expect it to be a long war, are you?”
“Yes,” answered Freeman, slipping in a rubber-banded clutch of three-by-five index cards—”Arctic Ops”—into his pocket. “Siberia,” he told her, “is twenty times the size of Iraq.” Actually it was more than twenty-three times as big, but he knew civilians preferred round numbers. Suddenly Marjorie realized he’d been dressing with more ceremony than usual for duty at Fort Ord. “You’re not going?” she charged.
“Ordered by the president, Marjorie,” he said. “No choice.” It was only the second lie he’d told since leaving Europe, the first during a news conference in Paris on his way home, in which he had apologized, under direct orders from General Grey, for having called his Russian counterparts a pack of “vodka-sucking sons of bitches.” It was quite wrong of him, he said later, to have said anything against vodka—”Hell, I have it on good authority that you can run tanks on it.”
“If I didn’t know better, Douglas,” said Marjorie, “I’d think you enjoyed it.”
On the way to Fort Ord he heard on the radio that CBN was reporting that U.S. air strikes against Ratmanov from Elmendorf Air Force Base near Anchorage and from the bases further west on Cape Prince of Wales were imminent.
“That’s right, you bastar—” He stopped short, old-fashioned about using rough language in front of women. “Wonder is,” he told the blond chauffeur, “they don’t tell the Siberians how many planes are involved.”
“They’re probably working on it, General.”
CHAPTER SIX
With most of the U.S. ‘s seventy-six F-117A Stealth fighters still in Europe, only five were immediately available to Alaskan command, the F-117A’s primary role being radar avoidance attack, not defense. Led in by a Wild Weasel F-4G Phantom jamming Big Diomede’s radars with white noise, the five Stealth fighters, despite their relatively low maneuverability-something not known by the public at large — thundered only four hundred feet above the white blur that was the eastern half of the Bering Strait.
Coming in at seven hundred miles per hour, executing both “high” and “over-the-shoulder” toss bomb release runs, they sent Paveway 2,300-pound laser-guided ordnance, along with twelve-foot-long, modular-glide bombs, sliding down the “icecream,” or laser, cone toward the eastern cliff face that sprouted retractable Flat-Face, Squat-Eye, Spoon-Rest, and Low-Blow radar arrays that serviced batteries of four barreled eighteen-inch-diameter surface-to-air missiles. Seconds after the four nose canards behind each laser seeker-detector nose assembly whistled through the dry Arctic air, their explosions lit up the face of “Ratmanov,” or Big Diomede, in crimson- curdled orange balls of fire. The thunder rolled between the two islands on the clear night, jagged sea ice reflecting the light so that Big Diomede was lit up like some huge, black-veined massif that had only suddenly burst through the frozen sea. It was an illusion created by enormous slivers of ice sliding from the island’s cliff face from the heat and the concussion of the bombs crashing into the sea ice below.
The following Aardvark, or F-111F fighter bombers, came in on the deck at 570 miles per hour to deliver their “slide” beams for more laser-guided bombs, pilots expecting to run into heavy antiaircraft fire on the approach, weapons officers centering the cross hairs on the infrared screens. Closing on the target, lasers were activated to “lock on” and, seconds before the “slide” bomb launch, the electronic warfare officers tensed, expecting heavy AA fire. But there was none. On the second approach by the F-111 fighter bombers, flying low to deliver more bombs, the aircraft presumably radar safe in the “frying pan” static set up by the F-4G Phantom Wild Weasels, Big Diomede suddenly erupted, spewing streams of red and green tracer crisscrossing the sky in deadly tattoo, the white noise now settling down so that the F-111 pilots knew that either the Wild Weasels had stopped their jamming or the Russians had outjammed the jammers.
Whatever the cause, over forty batteries of ZSU Quad twenty-three-millimeter cannon and Soviet SA-10 missiles filled the air above the strait, each gun firing over ten thousand rounds a second. The twenty-three- millimeter fire created a curtain of red-hot metal in the narrow corridor that the Wild Weasels had believed secure
