“Sorry, mate!” said Lewis, lighting his cigarette. “Sure you don’t want a fag?”
Rogers smiled and said something, but beneath the rumbling roar of the Sea Stallion’s three engines, Aussie couldn’t hear him.
After flying thirty miles south-southwest of the Second Army for a distance of seventy miles above the frozen Shilka River, where the outside temperature was minus forty degrees Centigrade, the four choppers swung southeast for the five-hour run over the vast, white landscape of birch, pine, and beech taiga to Tankhoy on the southeastern side of the 390-mile-long, banana-shaped lake. Here they would deplane for the final forty-five-mile east-west run from the southernmost tip of the lake around to Port Baikal situated on the southwestern end.
They were two hours into the flight, the taiga a whitish blur beneath the haze of the falling snow, when Choir heard the high-toned alarm sounding, the weapons officer saying something that ended with “… locked on.” Stallion One pitched so violently that Aussie almost lost his grip on the sniper rifle case. One of the submariners, walking back from having relieved himself, was thrown to the floor, sliding as the Stallion yawed hard to port. They heard a soft thump, barely discernible beneath the roar of the turboshaft.
“Splash one Havoc!” said the copilot on the internal radio. “Way to go!”
“What’s going on?” asked a sickly-faced Rogers. Robert Brentwood handed him another brown paper bag.
“One of our Cobras got the bastard!” announced the Stallion’s copilot excitedly.
“Hey! Hey!” two of the four submariners said, celebrating, as if suddenly brought to life by the information, their hands meeting in high fives.
“Brilliant!” said Aussie, lighting another cigarette, his tone killing any excitement in the cabin as surely as any missile. “So much for our fucking camouflage.”
“They don’t know where we’re going,” said David Brentwood, trying to reassure the submariners. “We could be reconnaissance choppers out looking for the forward units of their Thirty-first. Anyway, target’s a long way off.”
“That’s what worries me, sport,” said Aussie, electing to take the most negative implication of David’s observation.
“Not like you, Aussie, is it?” said Choir, surprised. “To be fretting so.”
“Hey, why don’t you take a flying—”
“Knock it off!” said David. “We’ll be okay. We’re all a bit edgy. Only natural.”
“Like All-Bran!” said Aussie, winking at Robert Brentwood and Rogers. “You blokes got all the Russia stuff down pat?” He meant the instructions above the various dials in the midget subs that would be written in the Cyrillic alphabet.
“Yes,” answered Rogers, head back hard against the fuselage now, eyes half open, a drooling, seasick look about him.
“More than we need,” said another submariner. “You get us to one of those GSTs, and we’ll take her down.”
“No problem,” said Aussie easily, his mood swing uncharacteristic of him and something David Brentwood didn’t like. “Hey, Brentwood!” Aussie shouted across at Robert. “You know Russki?”
“Some,” said Robert. “Enough to make sense of an intelligence report. Technical specs, that sort of thing.”
“We,” began Rogers, finding it difficult to get enough spittle to talk, “if you can get us to one — we can take her down.”
“Yeah, yeah!” said Aussie. “So you told me.” But now the phrase “take her” had shifted Aussie’s attention — he was thinking of a “bird” he said he’d had once in Wales. Yelling at them through the trembling of Stallion One as it dipped and rose over the contours of the taiga, more like a frigate in a rough sea, he was describing his good fortune to the submariners. “Jugs on her like this!” His palms cupped as he made an up-and-down motion. “I swear, biggest nungas you ever saw.”
Choir shook his head at the submariners.
Back at Second Army headquarters east of Yerofey Pavlovich, an eager young PR lieutenant came in and requested he be allowed to speak to Gen. Douglas Freeman on an important matter, refusing to tell Dick Norton what it was about. Freeman had come out, exhausted from giving his undivided attention to the minutiae of logistics that would be required to break out southwest toward Irkutsk and north to Yakutsk if the “Brentwood boys” succeeded.
“What’s on your mind, son?” asked Freeman. Norton, sensing the general’s mood, made a tactical retreat toward the coffee urn at the far end of the HQ hut.
“Sir, I’m Lieutenant Simpson, sir, and I’m responsible for your PR in the media pool in Khaba—”
“Don’t waste time,” Freeman ordered. “Spit it out.” This, with astonishing courage, the lieutenant proceeded to do. “Sir, the La Roche papers are murdering you. Not only back home but in Japan, the U.K. — all over the world, sir. And—” The lieutenant paused but then got right to it. “And the monocle doesn’t help — sir.”
“The monocle, sir. Well, sir, it — it looks ridiculous, General.” He hurried on. “They’re calling you ‘Von Freeman’— the La Roche papers — and the Siberian propaganda radio is calling you a Nazi.”
Norton, seeing the general’s hand drop to his waist, thought that Freeman — fatigued from having been on his feet for over forty-eight hours without a break — might actually draw his revolver and put an end to the lieutenant.
Freeman stared at the lieutenant who, having said his piece, was leaning back at an impossible angle as Freeman advanced on him. “You cheeky sonofabitch! I oughta have you—
“General?”
“Is he correct?”
“Ah — well, that’s what they’re telling me, General.”
“The press.”
“Goddamn fairies!” Freeman exploded, rounding on Norton. “It’s your goddamned fault!” With that Freeman tore the monocle from its cord and threw it to the ground, crunching it under his boot. “You see that?” he bellowed at the lieutenant.
“Yes, sir.”
“Tell those fairies that that’s what I’m going to do to the Siberian Thirty-first.” He turned about to get the attention of everyone in the hut. He already had it. “Or they will do it to us. We beat them or we the. Here — in Siberia. Every one of us. The U.S. Second Army does
“Yes, General,” said Norton. When Freeman had disappeared through the green curtains that separated his war room from the rest of the hut, someone manning the radar said in low tones, “Is he going to blow us all up?”
“Shut up!” commanded Norton. “If I hear any more smartass—” The cruise alarm began its familiar howl. “Incoming!” came the warning over the PA. “Incoming!”
There was a shuffling noise outside the headquarters hut, for even though the cruise was still 150 miles — seventeen minutes— away, many of the men were already heading for the sandbagged shelters.
Mine clearance was still going on up ahead so that soon the Second Army would be on the move again, but so long as the missiles kept coming from Baikal, Freeman knew he couldn’t advance in any meaningful military sense of the word. And yet retreat would not only mean a triple humiliation for Second Army but the Siberians, smelling blood, their supplies building up along the Transbaikal for Yesov’s attack, would be content with nothing less than the destruction of the entire army.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
