prisoners a more determined, alive look, separating them, as Comrade Nefski often said, into the “quick and the dead,” and made the ones who wanted to live more exciting. Yet their stubbornness was in the end a death sentence. When you took them back to cells after the initial interrogation and held out food as a reward, there was almost nothing they wouldn’t do.
As they hauled her through the door, he turned, holding the file low in front of him. He heard a high, buzzing sound and saw the fax light come on. Nefski was standing by the window, gazing out — his usual “disinterested” ploy — and so the lieutenant tore off the fax as the two guards pushed her into the chair. She was one of those women whose long, dark hair looked beautiful no matter what you did to them. He glanced down at the fax. It would make Nefski very happy: Novosibirsk “fully concurred” with Comrade Nefski’s “assessment of the Jewish problem.” Indeed, Novosibirsk HQ pointed out, it was partly because of sabotage in the Baltic states that many Russian gunners had found themselves firing dud rounds during the battle for Minsk. Comrade Nefski was instructed to “take all measures necessary for the solution of this problem in your sector of the TVD.”
She wasn’t wearing a bra. This was normal procedure, of course — some of the Jews had even tried to use shoelaces tied together to hang themselves rather than face KGB interrogation. And because she had done nothing to help the guards on the way up, resisting them as they dragged her full weight over every step, she was perspiring heavily; the faded, thin blue cotton prison tunic was clinging to her body like a wet sheet.
Nefski didn’t bother turning from the window as he spoke. Ilya grinned, the colonel always pulling this
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The “Snick” David Brentwood heard off to his right about twenty yards was no file cabinet shutting but a SPETS AKMS butt stock unfolding, extending the 7.62-millimeter submachine gun’s length from twenty-eight to thirty-five inches. Not as heavy as the AK-47, the Kalashnikov 74 didn’t have the heavier hitting power of the AK-47 but with less recoil gained greater accuracy.
The burst hit an SAS trooper before he touched ground, and although Brentwood couldn’t see the barrel flashes, he heard the heavy thump of the SPETS burst hitting the man, his body dangling, its radiant heat a shiver in David’s Starlight goggles in which green snow enveloped the man as he fell dead into the soft powder. The trooper’s chute, its flapping audible, still invisible to David, was dragging the man along through the snow in a tug of war with the anchor of his equipment pack.
Fifty yards away Brentwood landed softly, shucked off his chute, and within seconds was crawling, sweat turning to ice about his collar, using his boot knife to quickly probe the snowy ground in front of him for mines. He saw then heard a ragged series of orange flashes off to his left, the air reeking of cordite. A “Bouncing Betty,” a Siberian M-16A1 antipersonnel mine, had jumped, disintegrating five feet above the orange-flickering snow, the mine’s shrapnel whistling through the snow-curtained air. He heard an agonized scream somewhere behind him and saw a flare illuminating another chute coming down, the SAS soldier kicking frantically in pain, hands clutching raspberry-colored goo that had been his face. In the same light Brentwood glimpsed SPETS — three of them — forming a defensive triangle no more than twenty yards away at ten o’clock. Mentally he marked the spot but could do nothing for now until he reached his pack and unhitched the nine-millimeter MP5K submachine gun. In any case it wouldn’t be any good until he knew which way he could roll to avoid the return bursts. Feeling the ice-cold outline of the gun in its plastic wrap and its thirty-round “banana” magazine, he flicked the safety on the left-hand side to the three-round burst position.
A machine gun’s rip sounded left of him, grenades exploded, and there was a steady, low “bump-bump- bump” as SPETS triangles continued to pour deadly fire through flare light into the white forest of descending SAS troops farther behind Brentwood. He could see at least two troopers dead in their chutes and another torso, the white blur in Brentwood’s infrared goggles the man’s blood bubbling from the headless body. “Jesus — Jesus—” Brentwood said. Two others hit mines as they landed, snow erupting, covering the troopers like icing sugar, deeper granular snow peppering the collapsing chutes like hail.
Brentwood saw the black blob of a grenade coming his way, followed by an obscenity, but it crashed ten feet beyond him, and he lay deathly still as the uprooted snow peppered him, the grenade’s purplish-blue flash a jagged cross that lit up one of the SPETS it killed, giving Brentwood a start that he was so close to them. Another two were momentarily visible in the flash, and he fired two bursts. One SPETS flew backward like a puppet jerked off his feet, taking the full shock of the burst in his chest; the other man managed to get off a wild burst as he slipped on the snow that had instantaneously turned to ice in the heat of the explosion. Now another trooper, his body sagged in harness, hit the snow, the chute collapsing around him, when suddenly, having faked it, the trooper came alive, announcing his arrival with a long burst that ended with “… fucker!” in an Australian accent.
Figuring the dead SPETS must be within a safety moat around a rat hole — they’d hardly put themselves in the middle of a minefield but rather would have “sown” the area around the rat holes — David made a split-second decision: if SAS had screwed up, not bringing any MIC LICs — the 330-foot-long mine-clearing line or “hose” charges, cables packed with explosive charges to clear an eight-yard-wide swath through minefields during an infantry advance — then he’d just have to improvise.
Taking off his gloves he quickly reeled in the tether line that had been attached to the equipment pack. He froze as a chute flare popped high to his right; it wasn’t shapes they’d be looking for as much as movement. As the light waned, the flare drifting east over the high cliffs only a hundred yards or so in front of him, David lined up the six HE grenades. The first three had seven-second fuses, the other three, designated for “room service” by the SAS, only three-second ones. He waited for the next SPETS flare — they’d been coming at fairly regular intervals near where he and Aussie had hit ground. But now that David wanted to see one none came, and he realized that his and Aussie’s drop, and possibly a few others, marked the southern extremity of the drop over the northern half of the island.
Then a flare mushroomed a quarter mile north of them, its fierce incandescent light macabrely beautiful, the snow acting like a million tiny strobe mirrors, turning night to bluish white day, the dazzling effect belying the life- and-death struggle most of the SAS stick further north were now engaged in, having bailed out only seconds before the abort command from Freeman. David knew he’d have to make, as calmly and accurately as he could, six throws in as many seconds before the first grenade exploded. Six arcs, each shorter than the one before it, using his seventy-pound pack as a shield for the one that should explode nearest him, the overpressure from its V-shaped detonation, as well as its shrapnel, hopefully setting off any antipersonnel mines. It occurred to him he might not even be in a minefield at all but in a mine-free zone used by the SPETS as they’d back-walked to the rat hole entrances after having sown the mines. But if he was in a minefield and took one step forward…
He slipped off his gloves, flexing his fingers quickly to keep the circulation up long enough. Ten yards or so back of him, Aussie Lewis picked up a rush of movement on his goggles’ green background. His trigger finger slipped off the guard at the same instant that he saw the top of a diamond — another SAS trooper — at one o’clock, thirty feet away. Ten to one, he told himself, it was Brentwood — no clear image to go by, of course, just the infrared blur of helmet and white thermal jump suit, but Brentwood, as leader of the seventy-man SAS stick, had been the first out of the C-141. “You beaut! You little—” Aussie whispered, his voice drowned by an earsplitting roar and earth- shattering “crump” of heavy 120-millimeter Soviet mortars.
David Brentwood took a deep breath, exhaled half of it, held the rest and tossed the grenades — one, two, three, four, five, the fifth one going off as he let go of the sixth, dropping to the snow and pulling his equipment pack against his helmet as cascades of powder snow and fragments of rock pebbles fell on him and a sliver of white-hot metal passed through the thermal suit, gashing his right thigh. A second later he felt a burning sensation on his back — hot or freezing cold he couldn’t tell. It was lumps of snow, now ice, fused by the grenade’s heat.
