adopted a Mexican drawl, showing his teeth. “—I don’ wan’ no stinking rubles!” There was a patter of laughter, quickly lost in the plane’s huge interior, the jumpmaster landing his boot with a mud on the decking to get everyone’s attention as he stood up and announced, “Get ready!” Automatically every paratrooper, despite his heavy pack, slid forward, seemingly effortlessly, to the edge of the folded metal seats, some making last-minute adjustments to their chin straps.
“Who is that joker?” Freeman asked Brentwood, nodding toward Aussie.
“Australian called Lewis,” Brentwood answered. “He’d make book on the sun not rising. Took a lot of bets before the Moscow raid. Before the target was known we were doing practice jumps over Scotland. Aussie was convinced we were rehearsing for Korea, not Europe.”
“Must have lost a bundle,” said Freeman.
“No.”
“How come?” asked Freeman, realizing the moment he’d asked the question what the answer was. After the Moscow raid there’d been hardly anyone left to collect.
Across from Brentwood the Delta Force commander was looking down his line. Though the SAS stick would be first out, he was making sure that every sixth man, assigned the 5.56mm M-249 squad automatic weapon, was strapping it tightly to the equipment pack. The SAWs would be fed by the new transparent plastic magazines of two hundred rounds so the shooter could see at a glance how much ammunition remained. In addition, several of the Delta Force men carried M-203 dual purpose rifle/grenade launchers with FETS — flare, explosives, tear gas, and smoke grenade packs.
Normally the jumpers would have been wearing the tried and trusted T-10 general-purpose drop chute, but the big twenty-eight-foot-diameter umbrella chutes couldn’t be maneuvered as well as the arching, rectangular MC1-1B chutes. The latter could be steered by pulling down the left-right riser bars above the jumper’s head, causing more air to spill on one side than the other, allowing the jumper to shoot forward at over four meters a second. In all the MC1-1Bs would make it aerodynamically a much more controllable drop, of the kind made by sports jumpers. The latter, however, as SAS/D instructors frequently pointed out, were unencumbered by 70- to 120-pound battle packs.
The red light was on. “Stand up!” yelled the jumpmaster.
“Stand up!” came the shouted response followed by a sound like a herd of elephants rising with planking strapped to their flanks. Normally, with the 120-pound pack, it would have been a lot louder but even with the QAP — quick attack pack — of 70 pounds, mostly ammunition, emergency rations, radio and grenades, it was still an effort for the 140 paratroopers.
“Hookup!”
There was sudden, tension-splitting laughter punctuated with a few catcalls. The huge rear ramp went down, and had it not been for the dimly lit interior, the jumpmaster’s face would have appeared as bright as a Day-Glo buoy. So used to the massed jumps of the 101st Airborne and the static line used during most drops, he had forgotten for a split second that it was a HALO jump — free fall. Each paratrooper would dive head first, falling at 130 feet per second until, no more than two and a half minutes from jump-off, each man would pull a rip cord at two and half thousand feet above the island, steering the double-ply nylon air foil canopy to the snow-covered target.
The green light was on.
“Go!”
The shock of the cold hit Brentwood’s face with the force of a body blow, and for a split second it was deja vu, going down over Moscow, only this time the scream of the wind was louder, the cold already penetrating the double thermal suit, the oxygen mask fogging the infrared goggles momentarily. His arms were hard against his sides, his feet up behind him, forcing his head down to counter the tendency to spin. The air screamed like a banshee around the bulbous headgear. It was a third larger than the usual helmet in order to accommodate the starlight goggles, creating more resistance than usual. Now he was pulling his left arm and leg in unison, in tighter to his center line, the maneuver giving him left drift.
Far below him he spotted a flash of light through the goggles, light which he took to be the last of the Tomcat’s bombs, and used it as an aiming point. Several seconds later he felt the shock wave of the explosion hitting him. A fierce crackling invaded the echo chamber of his helmet as radio silence was broken by the C-141, General Freeman shouting, “Mission aborted… mission aborted… field…” The rest was a surge of static. What the hell? Brentwood knew that by now most of the SAS stick would be out of the plane, possibly even one or two of the Delta force. He looked at the altimeter, couldn’t make it out for a second, then saw he was less than a minute away from two and a half thousand feet. Then he glimpsed a bluish white dot, two of them, flitting by a thousand feet below him like tiny fireflies, and guessed, correctly, that it was one of the twin-engined Tomcats, probably on afterburner. It was split-second timing by the navy but cutting it a bit fine all the same.
Then the unfinished part of the message he’d received from the C-141 made sense, hitting him with the force of a high explosive shock wave as he saw orange pinpoints of light, like flashlights switching quickly on and off beneath the dim blanket of snow, racing up at him from the northern part of the island. The “field” in the radio transmit must be “minefield,” set off by the Tomcat’s bombs. The C-141 had broken radio silence to tell Brentwood and the other SAS already speeding down toward the island that Ratmanov had been seeded with mines. The whole island was a minefield. More splotches of light, white swellings on the infrared’s green background, confirmed it. Worse — by now the snow would have covered any footprints, giving no clue to the pattern of mines laid — if there was any — nor indicating the positions of the rat holes. The Siberians had had at least an hour to—
There was another surge of static in his helmet from the C-141. But now all he could pick up was “… abort… abort…” and all he could see was the snow field becoming wider and wider as he neared touchdown. Had the mines been scattered willy-nilly, or were they, in SPETS fashion, laid so as to funnel attackers into deadly triangulated COF—”cones of fire”? But no matter how the mines had been laid, David knew the Allied paratroopers — mostly, if not all, SAS — would find themselves unable to move, forced to fight and the where they landed.
For a split second David thought of increasing the leftward drift and heading out over the cliffs for the relative safety of the ice floe. He’d save himself, but he’d be no use to anyone else. The altimeter showed he was at three thousand feet, two thousand nine hundred… In three and a half seconds he’d be at twenty-five hundred. Pull the cord or drift eastward, away from the island?
He pulled the rip cord, heard the snap, felt the sudden deceleration, and tugged hard on the right toggle, feeling that side of the chute curl and brake as he went into a tight, controlled spiral, the sky around him alive now with lazy arcs of red and white tracer, the air exploding with the rattle and bang of AA fire, the screams as men died in the harness and the pop of flares adding to the cacophony of sound. Suddenly all was bright. A moment of civil twilight; then the flare dropped away from him. He could hear bursts of machine-gun fire like paper tearing. Quickly he paid out the fifteen-foot-long tether line attached to his equipment bundle, evening the pull on both toggles, his heart threatening to burst out of his chest. Below he could see long, black shadows piercing a white, flare-lit circle of snow.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The fax traffic, preferred by many MVD offices over the regular military channels, was informing Novosibirsk HQ that at this very moment, at 10:03 a.m. Thursday morning — that is, 11:03 a.m. Wednesday on little Diomede, only two and a half miles across the date/boundary line between the U.S. and USSR — with a half hour to go before the Bering Strait passed out of utter darkness into civil twilight, an Allied airborne attack was underway against Ratmanov Island.
Another fax, classified as
