Arctic Front

advantage, for when they try to dig us out they can’t be dropping bombs on their own men.” He turned to the SPETS commander, his tone crisp with confidence.

The SPETS commander, a full colonel, soon understood the reason for the general’s rush of confidence. Dracheev was good on his feet — a commander who didn’t need hours to ponder a problem and used the American general’s initiative as a spur to his own. The SPETS commander heartily endorsed the plan; it was brilliant and would cut the Americans to pieces. The colonel also knew that a citation from General Dracheev for the Ratmanov victory would slash his waiting time for an apartment in half. He told his battalion’s political officer, the Zampolit, that he almost felt sorry for the enemy.

Dracheev’s assumption was that the American general would attack soon after the bombing had shot its wad — and attack quickly. The American would know that every hour he failed to breach Ratmanov’s defenses was that much more time for the Far Eastern TVD to build up Siberia’s eastern flank. Some of the chukchee members of the SPETS — men chosen for their special knowledge of the area — didn’t like General Dracheev, as he was a Yakut from central Siberia. But even so they, like the SPETS commander, had to admit — grudgingly — that he was making it easier for them. It would be nothing more than a seal hunt: all you’d have to do after is go out and club them. American cigarettes, gold teeth, watches. Burial would be the hardest job of course; the American dead would be frozen solid. No good covering them up with the. snow; come spring the stench would keep even walrus away. Best thing, the Yakuts believed, would be to burn them, but General Dracheev probably wouldn’t allow that, fuel consumption being one of his priorities. So in the end the corpses would be left to the blue foxes and the murres. The birds’d clean them to the bone come spring. And there were the golden eagles from Alaska. A feast. For the SPETS the idea of American eagles eating American dead was appealing and spawned many a joke as they waited for Freeman to take the bait.

* * *

Freeman, standing in his blast-protected mobile-home HQ, was dwarfed by the wall map of the Bering Sea. He donned his reading glasses and contemplated the Diomedes halfway across the funnel, showing up on the aerial recon photos as white fists thrusting up through the ice. “I’m glad you’re here, Dick,” he said, turning to welcome Colonel Richard Norton, a solidly built, amiable, at times intensely serious, five-foot-eight logistics officer and New Yorker who’d been with Freeman in Europe. But there was no time to talk over old times. Freeman told the colonel that the Siberian commander wouldn’t be caught “with his pants down” twice. “Other problem, Dick, is half these jokers don’t know a damn thing about Arctic warfare. Like those poor bastards Washington sent up to the Aleutians in forty-two in summer uniform. No wonder the Japs were all over them. I told the quartermaster this evening to make everything ready for an airborne attack on Ratmanov, jump time an hour before civil twilight. Hell, he thought I was talking about some dame called ‘Sybil.’ Then he thought it was the end of the day. So I told him, first light—”

“Eleven oh six hours,” said Norton, taking his cap off, running his fingers through hair as gray as Freeman’s. “Sunset around seventeen forty-one?”

“Correct. Now, Dick, I go in with the airborne at civil and exactly one hour later — earlier if we radio or fire red flares—you come in with the marine choppers.” Freeman put the glasses back on, tearing off an incoming meteorological report on the fax. Looking down over his reading glasses at Norton he said, “Didn’t think you’d be too keen on a HALO.”

Dick Norton had a flashback to the time he’d been ordered by Freeman to fly in the back seat of an F-16B from Krefeld to Brest to hurry up air resupply from the French port for the beleaguered Fifth and Seventh American Corps and the British Army of the Rhine in the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket. To this day Norton could actually feel nauseated just thinking about the terrifying night flight in the supersonic fighter. Hurtling through space and you couldn’t see a damn thing and it wasn’t nearly as smooth as it appeared from the ground. Everything shook. “I’m not too keen on any kind of jump, General,” Norton replied. “You clear this with Washington?”

“The mission? Of course.”

“No, sir,” said Norton, looking at the map’s order of battle clustered around Galena Field from where the marines would take off. “I mean you leading the drop personally?”

“Dick,” said Freeman, turning to the map, tapping the map, using his glasses as a pointer, “main problem is going to be the palletized drops — we’re going to need hundred and five millimeters. Now Rat Island’s big enough, but our guys are going to be spread all over it, jamming C-4 plastique in every goddamn crack we find. We’ll have to smoke ‘em out, same way we did with the Japs on Iwo Jima. Same situation here — they’re dug in deep. And Siberians haven’t surrendered a fight in—”

“Except for the weather,” interjected Norton.

“What?”

“Same as Iwo Jima — except for the weather.”

“Minor detail,” said Freeman, grinning.

“You know, General, it’s minus twenty degrees over that ice pack.”

“How do you know that?” asked Freeman, not disputing Norton’s assertion but intrigued as to how he knew the specific temperature on the pack. “I can read upside-down type, General. Remember?” Norton indicated the fax Freeman was holding. “Anchorage says the satellite cloud cover indicates twenty-mile-an-hour winds. That drops the temperature to minus forty-six.”

“Chilly,” said Freeman. Before Norton could object further, Freeman slapped his arm on Norton’s shoulder. “Dick. You see? By God, you’re the right man for the job. No one else in this godforsaken peninsula knows that — windchill factor.” Except every Eskimo, thought Norton. “Details, Dick. You and I know that’s what wins wars.”

“And strategy, General.”

“That’s my department, Dick,” said Freeman, turning to the map, slipping his reading glasses back on. “And God’s.” There wasn’t a trace of insincerity. His right hand swept across the Bering Strait. “Speed, Dick! That’s what we need. Now we know where all those rat holes are. I’m personally going to see every one of those blown up — then you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to drop high explosives down those rat holes. It’ll be surrender or the for them, Dick. White flag or beef jerky!”

“If there are SPETS on that island, General — and Intelligence suspects there are — there’ll be no surrender.”

“I know, Dick,” said Freeman, pausing solemnly. “I know. We won’t butcher them. I’m not a butcher. My SAS-Delta team’ll give them fair warning.” For several moments there was silence, broken only by the howling of the Arctic wind outside. “ ‘Bout two seconds. I’ve thought it through, Dick. I’ve tried to think of every damn detail, but I know it’s still a gamble.” He turned to look straight at Norton. “Ultimately all great victories are. Time’s against us, but I say, ‘Go!’ “

Norton nodded, which meant that though he saw the general’s logic and the military necessity as clearly as he’d seen the giant bergs on the way over from Europe — glinting like glass castles beneath the Arctic moon — he couldn’t share in Freeman’s enthusiasm. Never had. Freeman was a warrior to the bone: brave and unapologetic in his quest for glory. All Dick Norton hoped for was that he would be alive after the war, when he would be quite happy to retire, mind and body intact. He had fought in the snows of Minsk by Freeman’s side and did not doubt the general’s determination, and SAS and Delta were the best-trained to jump from high altitudes and make pinpoint landings. Even so he wondered how many would end up on the ice flow, and how they might be the lucky ones. The normal ratio, one that Freeman well knew, dictated that an attacking force must outnumber the dug-in defenders by at least five to one. But denied the luxury of waiting, the need for speed disposed Freeman to go in now with what he had — the 140-man SAS/Delta Force team. The Pentagon boys were saying Ratmanov Island was more than an ancient wrecker of ships — it was a career disaster waiting to happen.

* * *

In the predawn darkness of a blizzard, two long lines of SAS/Delta troopers, seventy in each line, made their way along the tarmac at Galena air base on Alaska’s Seward Peninsula toward the gaping hold of the C-141 Starlifter.

“Bloody lovely!” said Aussie, one of the seventy-man SAS squad. The column to his left was made up of men from the American Delta Force.

“What are you whining about now?” asked “Choir” Williams, a fellow veteran with Aussie and David Brentwood, the leader of the SAS force, most of whose troop of twenty men had been wiped out in the Moscow raid.