Arctic Front

with filthy talk about Eskimos wouldn’t try to scar the land again — they’d know what could happen.

Joe heard the wounded cry of the land in the Arctic storm and knew it would not end until he had placated its soul, healed its hurt. Unhurriedly he put on his kamleika, the gut raincoat that once belonged to his father, and taking the hide strap and its package he crawled out through the sealskin storm trap and called the dogs, now like white lumps of sugar in the swirling snow. From his sod house through the village to the stretch of pipeline that bent in a long, gentle curve in the frozen valley of the Dietrich River on to the southern side of the mighty Brooks Range — the pink noses even gave their names to the sacred places — would take only half an hour. The silver snake would now be caked in an icy sheet, running alongside the wide gravel trail from Fairbanks in the center of Alaska to Prudhoe Bay on the Beaufort Sea. The pink noses called it the Dalton Highway. He took another swig from the bottle. Worst of all, some of his people had been traitors, had gone into the pink nose courts and palavered for money to allow the silver snake to despoil the land.

Joe looked intently at the dogs. Only the lead husky had turned and paid him any mind. They were tired and he was tired and he took another suck at the bottle then murmured to the dogs in the dialect of his parents, who had come from Galena far to the west. But the dogs didn’t know his parents’ dialect, as he only used it when he was drunk. Throwing the empty bottle away, he reverted to the dialect again, shouting into the wind, the words meaning “To hell with it. I’ll use the Ski-Doo!”

Unsteadily he pulled the starter cord at least a dozen times and fell over once before the Ski-Doo gave forth its crackling roar. It backfired several times before settling into its high-pitched whine. He told himself the Greenpeace noses would be as happy as he was, because they were the only pink noses who understood about desecrating mother nature. The Ski-Doo plowed into heavy drift, but Joe gave the throttle sleeve more twist, and the steering skis went straight through it. Dogs were scattering in the village as he whooped at them — an old man shouting at Joe, telling him that he must show more respect for the dogs. But Joe was already through the hamlet, snow-curtained birch slipping by him on either side of the trail he knew like the back of his hand. The irony of the whole situation was that Joe Mell was considered by the Siberian Military Intelligence “canvasser” as one of the least reliable of the half-dozen natives they had suborned and the least likely to succeed in the mission.

* * *

On Ratmanov Island more than two hundred SPETS commandos streaming out of the exits fired at the descending shapes as they became visible only a few meters from the ground. Had they been paratroopers coming down it would have been a massacre; the SPETS’ marksmanship with the AK-74s was highly accurate. They hit everything that had been used to weigh the chutes down. It took the white-uniformed SPETS, all but invisible against the snow, only two or three minutes to realize they’d been obmanuty—”had”— and, fearing an air attack, they quickly retreated to the exit/entrances like ants being vacuumed back into their deep hive, leaving the dozens of American chutes buffeted by wind and rain mixed with snow in the swirling blizzard now blanketing the island.

“Make sure the engineers have double-checked the exit/entrance seals,” ordered Dracheev.

“They’re already doing it, Comrade General.”

“Good! The Americans are obviously going to use their Smart bombs. They have deceived us into betraying our exit points. The chaff must have covered the approach of a reconnaissance aircraft.”

“Their Smart bombs cannot take out the Saddam entrances,” said his aide, but his voice betrayed more hope than conviction. The general asked his radar chief if there were any signs of another American air attack on its way. There were none. His aides crowded around him, the smell of sweat mixing with the oily odor of the tunnel complexes’ gun emplacements on rails behind sealed doors at the cliff face. General Dracheev was biting his bottom lip as he bent over the table’s map trace, computer consoles giving immediate zoom blowups on the screen whenever he touched any part of the island map. He was worried. The whole point of having made Ratmanov self- contained, self-sufficient, was so that it could survive without Novosibirsk having to risk vitally needed aircraft over the narrow strait. But now the American Freeman would know where the exits were, and he was bound to send in air strikes, though the heavy snowfall would work in Dracheev’s favor, effectively cutting the American flyers’ laser beams. Even so, the only exits Dracheev could now use with any reliability were the two emergency exits — R1, a quarter mile from complex one, at the midpoint of the northern half of the island, and R2, above complex two on the southern end of the island, the same distance from Dracheev’s control bunker. Two exits for up to two thousand SPETS.

It had the makings of a disaster. Dracheev knew that if he failed to hold the Americans until Novosibirsk HQ had time to reinforce the Siberian coastal defenses, it would be best if he stayed on the island rather than make a run for it aboard his chopper to the mainland, for he would almost certainly be shot for his failure. But then he had what he called his osenivshaya ideya— “brain wave”—born of the fear of what would happen if he didn’t hold the island — and from the deep anger he had experienced at being duped by the American Freeman’s fake paratroopers, a humiliation made worse for Dracheev by the fact that in addition to his regular troops manning the island’s underground AA network, he was answerable for the effective use of the SPETS, Siberia’s elite force.

“We don’t have much time,” he quickly told his aides in Ratmanov control. “We’ll use two emergency exits. Exit one for complex one, exit two for complex two.”

“Eto originalno”— “That’s original,” murmured one of the SPETS, but Dracheev did not demand an apology. He had made a serious mistake sending out the SPETS before he had visual confirmation that they were really Allied paratroopers descending and not dummies, and the SPETS had every right to expect him to correct it. “I ‘m confident,” he told them, “that the Smart bombs, while they may take out one or two of the exits the Americans have discovered, will not—”

“Samolyoty vraga priblizhayutsya!”—”Hostile aircraft approaching! Rising from Seward Peninsula.”

“All second-level plates are to be sealed!” Dracheev ordered. He meant each exit’s number two hatch, slotted in at the sixty-foot level in every one-hundred-foot spiral stair exit, had to be sealed like the hatches of a diving submarine, just in case any of the Smart bombs’ high-explosive charges were, despite the lack of laser beam accuracy, lucky enough to blow out the top Saddam seal.

Within minutes the bombs started to fall. The lights in Control flickered momentarily as circuits were broken and auxiliary generators kicked in. General Dracheev, his legs shaking involuntarily from the Smart weapons’ bombardment, turned anxiously and angrily to his aide. “The American flyer we captured. Do you think he knows what Freeman’s strategy is?”

“He hasn’t talked yet, General. He’s a tough customer. We’ve tried to…”

“Then try again!” snapped Dracheev. The aide nodded to one of the two SPETS nearby. “Anyone can be made to talk!”

“With pleasure,” said the SPETS who, on his way down the corridor, announced matter-of-factly to his colleague, “The general’s right. Everyone has their breaking point.”

“Even you?” asked the other SPETS challengingly.

“Yes. Of course. I couldn’t withstand what I’m about to do to that American bastard. You’ll see.”

Electronic monitors were telling General Dracheev that four of the manhole covers had been breached and that the other six should not have their secondary hatches opened, even after the air raid had ended, for fear of red-hot debris raining down the shaft.

“Then that’s decided it,” General Dracheev told his SPETS commando leader. “We only use the two emergency exits. Your men’ll have to move swiftly to get out in time—”

“To do what?” asked the SPETS commander. Red lights were blinking all over at the control center’s console, indicating that rock flour, thick in the air from the bombs, had choked off some of the air filters, overheating them.

Soon the red lights faded, the backup filters holding, and the duty officer informed him that all electronic indications were that the six exits he had decided not to use might be usable after all. Dracheev, however, would not be deterred from his plan. He never doubted for a second that an Allied airborne assault would now follow, but to use the six exits would be suicidal. They were almost certainly pinpointed by the Americans and would be among the first targets should another bombardment precede the Allied troop drop. Only this time, Dracheev told them, they’d outwit the Americans. To this end he called a hasty radio conference of the ten company commanders of the two SPETS battalions. He told the commanders, “The Allies’ll realize they cannot bomb us out, that no matter how many bombs they drop, ultimately they will have to use troops. In this, gentlemen, we have the overwhelming