area of the Diomedes, Dracheev headed down toward his bunker from the first periscope level.
The concrete stairwell was watched over by a KPV Vladimirov heavy machine gun post, only part of its 135- centimeter-long barrel visible in the ball turret mounted in the door. At the machine gun the reinforced concrete stairwell took a downward-sloping U-turn to yet another closed door. Here, at the second of the three levels, another machine-gun inset had to be swung open to allow the commander and his aides into this eighty-foot level of the hundred-foot-deep bunker. The floor was a two-foot-thick antidetonator slab of reinforced concrete and high tensile steel. The next flight of stairs led to the air lock, in the event of chemical attack, outside the main command bunker at the one-hundred-foot level. All three levels were separated by at least ten feet of rock. The upper level contained a SPETS guard detachment, whose dormitories, canteen, and bunks were on the second level, which also contained all communications consoles, a conference room, and two bedrooms for Lieutenant General Dracheev and his aide, a SPETS colonel.
The lowest level was comprised of electricity generators, water tanks, along with air, water, and sewage filtration units. Other nuclear shelters like it had been built, but this command post had earned its name as a “Saddam” bunker because it had pressure-pumped, quick-setting, rubberized cement poured beneath it as well, filling every nook and cranny at the base of the enormous command center with what was effectively a hard, rubberized foundation four feet thick that even extended five to six feet outside the bunker to fill the gaps between the hewn-out rock shaft and man-made steel walls of the deep, rectangular bunker. This allowed it not only to withstand the shock waves of a nuclear burst but also to “move” on the rubberized foundation in the event of earthquakes and other natural realignments that radiated out from the inherently unstable Aleutian chain.
The Allies had heard rumors of such bunkers for years — ever since the Iraqi war, when they had failed to get Saddam as he moved from bunker to bunker. The Allies were better acquainted with the layout of the Siberian bunkers for the troops. It was a fundamentally simple design, combining the best German engineering with the best British steel to create a series of interlocking H-shaped “pipe tunnel” garrison complexes drilled out of the basalt.
The complexes, one deep below the northern half of the island, the other beneath the southern half, consisted of a series of prefabricated high-tensile steel “sewer pipe” tubes or rooms leading off from a connecting cylindrical tunnel corridor to form an H. Each of the sewer-pipe-shaped chambers was a one-hundred-foot-long, ten-foot-diameter barracks containing at least one hundred troops, who slept on fold-down bunks at the ends of the tube. It was an astonishingly cost-effective and efficient design, borrowed from the Federation of Nuclear Shelter Consultants and Contractors. Each H unit was only one hundred and fifty feet from end to end and barely two hundred feet left to right. An extra twenty feet of concrete extended from either side as an added margin of protection for the tubular barracks. In twenty H barracks, ten north of his command bunker, ten south, Dracheev housed a thousand troops together with a sick bay and kitchen stacked with dried foods. The air vents were cleverly concealed at surface level in natural rock chimneys and fissures all equipped with chemical attack filters. Dracheev’s command bunker, while midway between the two, was not connected by the usual ten-foot-diameter, tubular, bombproof corridor but a narrow two-and-a-half-foot-diameter crawl pipe so that in the event of the island’s secure, buried land lines somehow being cut and radiotelephone links severed between the three elements, communications could be shuttled by the use of runners. The tunnel was only wide enough for one man at a time.
Though neither the British nor the Americans knew the extent of Ratmanov’s subterranean defenses, Freeman, en route to Alaska, doubted that the Russians would have failed to make any garrison as bombproof as possible, so that even as the B-1 bomber with its short-range attack missiles taxied down Elmendorf runway, Freeman was addressing himself to the problem. “Dick—” From force of habit he looked behind him to speak to Colonel Dick Norton, who had served as his aide in Europe and whom he had requested for this operation, momentarily forgetting he was still en route from Europe. “Reach, isn’t it?” he asked the young major who’d been appointed by the Pentagon as his interim aide.
“Ready and waiting, sir.”
“I want Three Soc up here and deployed at Cape Prince of Wales, ready for disembarkation in twenty-four hours.” Three Soc — Special Operations Capable — was the name for the twenty-two-hundred-man marine expeditionary unit, the smallest MAGTAF — Marine air-ground task force — unit out of Camp Smith, Hawaii, based on the Pacific Fleet’s
“Yes, sir,” answered Reach, but even as he conveyed the order to one of the 727’s console operators for encoding he wondered aloud to Freeman whether it wouldn’t be better to collect the FMPac’s Hawaii-based marine expeditionary brigade. It was a force of almost sixteen thousand: fifteen thousand marines and five hundred and fifty navy, medical, and support liaison staff, in turn supported by forty Marine A-V/8 Harrier fighter bomber jump jets, F-18s, forty-seven assorted amphibious vehicles, troop-carrying hovercraft, and a hundred helicopters.
“Hell—” said Freeman, watching their ETA for Elmendorf Air Force Base change on the computer screen due to strong polar winds. “We’re not going ice skating.” The general could see Reach still didn’t get it.
“It won’t be amphibious, Dick — ah, I mean Reach. Johnny, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, it won’t be amphibious, John. I want airborne. And fast.”
“Airborne!” said Reach. “A chopper assault?”
“What? Hell, no,” responded Freeman. “Siberians’d pick ‘em off those heavy assault Chinooks like flies with their SAMs. I mean HALO — high-altitude, low-opening chutes. Drop ‘em right on that goddamn Rat Island before the Rats know what’s hit ‘em. Anyone drifts off target — they’ll be all right. Wait on the ice until later. Marine choppers can pick ‘em up after they’ve taken in the MEV to mop up.”
Major Reach was astonished by Freeman’s plan, as was the British brigadier, now being apprised of Freeman’s request for a seventy-man squadron of joint British/American troops from the SAS — Special Air Service — unit out of Hereford in Wales, the same unit in which David Brentwood, Lana Brentwood’s younger brother, had so distinguished himself during the SAS’s breaching of Moscow’s innermost defenses.
“But General,” protested Reach, “don’t you think the hovercraft amphibians could launch an assault against the island? They have infrared, high-resolution optics—”
“No, I don’t. Pressure ridges between the Alaskan mainland and Diomedes stretch the full twenty-five miles. That’s no goddamned hockey rink out there, Reach. You ought to know that. It’s pack ice — thirty feet thick and rougher’n Granny’s tits. Up and down, movin’ all about. Those hovercraft’d get a good run going on that air cushion, then bang! An ice ridge, big as a house. Besides, it’d be a turkey shoot for those Rat batteries. Might as well give ‘em invitations to a ball. No, Major, I want the best parachute troops we’ve got.”
“Why don’t we call Fort Campbell?” suggested Reach. “Hundred and First Airborne. Get them and their 105 howitzers aboard those big C-141s. They could be up here within twenty-four hours. Or we could get the Eighty- Second Airborne’s Ready Brigade out of Fort Bragg?”
Douglas Freeman looked sternly at Reach. The young major seemed amiable enough, but two things about him were bothering the general. The first was that Reach either didn’t know or had forgotten that the Screaming Eagles of the 101st Airborne were now only air mobile, no longer a parachute-delivered force, despite the retention of their gung ho title. The second thing was that Reach didn’t know the Eighty-Second Airborne were still in Europe, trying, along with the Brits and U.S. Ranger battalions, to penetrate the Ural Mountains on Siberia’s west flank. In any event, the marine expeditionary unit wasn’t to be a spearhead but would only go in after, if the SAS and any other special forces Freeman could dig up could first “unplug,” in the general’s words, “the Rat’s maze” that was Big Diomede.
“Reach?”
“Sir?”
“You’re fired! Don’t know a goddamn thing about the ice, and you still think the Eighty-Second is in North Carolina. You also think the One-Oh-One uses chutes. Nothing personal, Major, but I can’t afford to have you around. You don’t do your homework. You get yourself back to G-2. Bury yourself in Siberiana, and if God’s with you, you’ll get a second chance with me. But not against Rat Island. Your ignorance is too damned dangerous, son.”
In the silence between the Boeing’s banks of electronic consoles all that could be heard was the Boeing itself, its four twenty-one-thousand-pound Pratt and Whitney engines in a steady roar as if endorsing the general’s decision.
