“Last week you were getting right tired of Wales,” said Choir Williams. “So the president and the prime minister say, ‘What can we do now to placate Aussie?’ and ‘ere we are!”
“Very bloody funny,” said Aussie.
“Ah,” replied Choir Williams, his deep Welsh baritone barely audible now as the noise of the C-141’s pitch climbed. “You volunteered, laddie.”
“Musta been bloody drunk!” said Aussie.
“Anyway,” advised Williams who, like Aussie and the rest of the men lining up for the C-141, had qualified in the most gruelling Allied commando courses in the world, “you don’t want to go back to Sydney. All those girls. You wouldn’t know what to do with them.”
“Yes, he would,” called out another Welshman. “Aussie’ll screw anything that moves, ‘e will.”
“You oughta know, Jones,” responded Aussie.
“Yeah?” asked Muldoon. “What’s Jonesy like, Aussie?”
“Very nice,” said Aussie. “But too tight.”
“Watch it!” barked the SAS sergeant major. “Officer on parade. The man himself.”
A few turned to see Freeman, helmet down against the roar of the C-141 engines, and young David Brentwood, at five eight looking decidedly smaller than the general with whom he’d served on the Pyongyang raid.
One of the men in the Delta Force line noted that Freeman and Brentwood looked like father and son together, but it was an illusion created by the close attention Brentwood was giving his superior as they went over last-minute details. The other illusion was that Freeman was going to jump with them. He was certainly dressed for it, in full jump suit and helmet, wrist altimeter, and oxygen mask. But if Freeman, through ordering the decoding of a scrambled message from the president requesting him not to jump, had been successful in sidestepping Mayne’s directive, he had failed to avoid an outright order from Army Chief of Staff Grey who, like Schwarzkopf’s superiors in the Iran war, viewed Freeman as being infinitely more valuable directing strategy on the ground rather than risking his neck in combat. But Grey’s instruction notwithstanding, Freeman was determined to at least go up with the SAS/D force and stoke morale before the jump. Going over the additional infrared shots from satellite pictures taken before the onset of the blizzard, Freeman and David Brentwood had ringed each of the “rat holes” that Freeman had suckered Dracheev’s SPETS into revealing.
“Starting to snow again,” said Freeman. “Goddamn it! Well, we can’t wait, Brentwood. Another hour damn things’ll be all covered in fresh snow. Be one big white blanket over that island. Cover up the bomb scabs. Anyway, the moment we take off,
“I know, sir,” acknowledged Brentwood, not meaning to butt in, but his adrenaline was up for the jump. “I’ve told everyone in SAS/Delta. Diamond glow recognition.” It was the foot-long Velcro diamond pattern that, like the inverted V of the Allied forces in the Iraq war, would distinguish friend from foe.
“Good!” said Freeman. “Then we’re all set.”
By now most of the troops in the two long columns, the first men in being the last men out during the jump, were inside the cavernous interior of the Starlifter. Last man in was Brentwood. Freeman was already walking up the center of the deck, nodding cheerily as the 140 men took their seats facing one another and began to buckle up. The plane’s engines reached fever pitch as it began its lumbering run down the tarmac. It was to take off and head eastward, away from the strait, to give the big C-141 time to gain sufficient height before it turned for the high- altitude, low-opening drop. The higher altitude would give the jumpers more time to steer themselves to the assembly points on the island, the PED — palletized equipment drops — scheduled to take place ten to twenty minutes after drop zone perimeters had been secured.
“You ready?” asked Freeman on the bullhorn.
There was a roar that for a second could be heard above that of the plane.
“Dumb question. Right?” hollered Freeman.
“Right!”
Freeman was walking down the center of the deck, holding onto the webbing net. “No need to tell you,” he told the paratroopers over the bullhorn, “how important this is. Those F-14s from
There was a chorus of approval and the stamping of para boots, which annoyed the air force jumpmaster intensely. The stomping was creating a minor dust storm inside the Starlifter.
“Well, Brentwood, we’ll have snow to contend with but least we won’t have the press. They aren’t gonna Vietnam me, Captain. All those goddamn liberal lap dogs in the press running around saying they didn’t lose us Vietnam — that the army did. Goddamn it, no one seems to realize we could have ended that war in half an hour. Two A-bombs on Hanoi would have done it. But we didn’t. We get any marks for that restraint? Not on your life. You know what would have happened, though, if those squealing bastards had been taken prisoner by the Commies. They would have wanted the U.S. Air Force to turn that place into a parking lot. Well, they’re not going to be allowed to do a Baghdad Pete on us. I’ve told the CO of that Patriot battery on Little Diomede to send that CBN son-of-a-bitch reporter and his Arctic fox headgear packing back to the mainland. They can all get pissed in Anchorage while we’re setting these Commie bastards straight.”
“Yes, sir,” said David Brentwood, remembering how a reporter once asked him, a thrice-decorated soldier, how he got used to it. You never did. The first moments of a battle were always as bowel chilling as the first time. Yes, you learned certain things, sensed when a firefight was more concentrated and more dangerous in one instance than in another, when there was twice as much noise as accuracy; you learned to husband your strength, ration it and not blow it all in the first few minutes; but you never got used to it.
“Sir?” It was the air defense duty officer. “Bandits. Looks like F-14s. Coming fast from the south. No more than a thousand feet. Trying for the exits one more time.”
“
“They’re not stupid,” said the air defense officer, trying to regain his bruised dignity. “I mean this Freeman. He will realize that some of the exits have probably not been used. That the pilots won’t see them.”
“So?” said Dracheev. “He’ll send his men looking for them.” With that the Siberian general looked up from the dull red light of Ratmanov Control — a hundred feet of solid rock above him. “All the better then.”
The air defense officer was even more offended, resentment growing by the second. Dracheev had obviously confided his plan only to the SPETS. Although this was normal procedure— SPETS always insisted their operations be kept as secret as possible — it still rubbed the wrong way. “Who in hell do they think they are?” the air defense officer asked his subaltern. “The elite.”
In his sod house in Little Diomede’s Inalik village, the hunter, the high cheekbones of his Eskimo forebears catching the light of the golden hurricane lamp, civil twilight, before daybreak, still an hour away, puffed heavily on his walrus-bone pipe.”It’s a lot of trouble.”
“It’s a lot of money,” countered the CBN reporter.
The hunter took another pull of salmon jerky. The silence was broken only by the unsettling groaning of the pack ice off frozen Lopp Lagoon, north of Cape Prince of Wales. They could see the navigation light right on the
