The snow had stopped falling. Beyond them, under the steady roar of the choppers’ engines, lay the enormous folds of snow-covered Siberian cedar, larch, black spruce, and pine, broken here and there by clear, low- lying areas of
“Oh, isn’t this nice!” yelled out Aussie, jerking his head toward the panorama of forest and sky. “Just what the doctor ordered.” David Brentwood mustered as tough a look as he could, for even though he knew Lewis was one of the hardest men he’d ever served with, he doubted whether the newcomers aboard would be able to ignore the Australian’s inverted sense of humor. His brother and the other submariners, though David wouldn’t have had their job for the world, must, he thought, feel particularly vulnerable — quite literally fish out of water.
There was a “white out.” It was a phenomenon the pilots knew about but, contrary to widespread belief, the condition wasn’t something that occurred in a roaring blizzard. Rather, the sudden and, for those who had never experienced it, terrifying loss of perception could only be likened to that lightninglike anxiety suffered by panic attack victims. It occurred most often in clear albeit overcast conditions because of the contrast between the different whites of old and fresh snow.
The mistake of Stallion Two’s pilot was that in the moment of exhilarated relief during the exit from the falling snow to clear weather, he went off instrument flying to visual assist too quickly. In that split second he lost all depth perception, thinking he was far too high above the taiga when in fact he was far too close — only sixty feet above the blur of spear-shaped firs. His copilot realized it the moment the nose went down and pulled the stick, his feet jabbing the rudder control for uplift; but a rotor caught, and they were gone in a single somersault, rotors still spinning but upside down, cutting and slashing into the timber. The self-closing gas tank, built to absorb fifty- millimeter armor-piercing shells, imploded like a collapsed drum, spewing gas over red-hot bearings. The chopper disappeared below Cobra Two in a silent ball of saffron flame and snow, the latter rising like talc, coming down in a fine shower of rain that did nothing to extinguish the twenty-foot-high flame now licking the pines. There was a bang that everyone on the remaining Stallion and two Cobras heard.
“Holy mother of—” began Choir, but then, like the rest, he fell silent beneath the high whine of their Sea Stallion’s three General Electric turboshaft engines, its pilot instinctively going for height after the crash of the other Stallion before settling down again to the dangerous NOE flying. The submariners’ grim-lipped sonarman, Rogers, was sweating, praying again.
“Do as I tell you, damn it!” barked Cobra One’s pilot at his copilot/weapons officer. “We can’t go back. Endangers the whole mission. You know the fucking rules.”
The pilot was back on instrument flying and put on his sunglasses; not that this would be any protection against white out, but it might reduce the equally hazardous risk of ice blink, once they negotiated the passes of the range. In ice blink mirages of something twenty or more miles away across a vast sheet of ice could loom up with stunning clarity as if they were only a few hundred yards ahead.
“Relax, fellas!” It was Aussie. “Not as bad as you think. It helped us in a way.”
“What the shit d’you mean?” asked Rogers, uncharacteristic anger momentarily overcoming his air sickness and fear.
Aussie was lighting another cigarette. “Won’t be able to tell what it was — wreckage’ll look like a scrap yard. And same paint as their own, red star and all. And the guys — in Siberian uniforms.” Aussie looked at his watch. Freeman had even taken care to make sure
“Yeah,” said one of the submariners, “but what if they’ve already spotted us? “
Aussie smiled. Choir and Davey had already seen it, Choir explaining it to the submariner. “Well, laddie, if anyone sees us, they’ll think we’re part of the rescue party. Same paint job— from any distance at all it’d be hard to tell. We’re too far inside enemy territory for them to think we might be—”
“You hope,” said the submariner.
“Ah, that’s not all,” said Aussie confidently. “You see, mate, when we start up those noisy Arrows anyone within cooee distance’ll think it’s one of their damned snowmobiles joining the search for the downed chopper.”
David Brentwood clicked on his throat mike. “Captain?”
“Go ahead.”
“This is Captain Brentwood. Suggest we divert south for a while — avoid any search party coming out of Port Baikal.”
“No problem.”
It took two minutes for the Stallion pilot to signal the two Cobras — intercraft radio silence being strictly enforced and requiring either hand or “craft maneuver” signalling before the three remaining choppers swung south on the last leg through or, if necessary, up over the six-thousand-foot Khamar Daban range before they could take a fix on Tankhoy, twenty-seven miles across the ice from Port Baikal.
Fifteen miles from where the Stallion had gone down, an argument was building between the ten members of a SPETS squad standing by a Hind helo.
“Hinds, Havocs!” shouted the SPETS leader.”You can’t tell from here even with binoculars. They were more than a mile off.”
“Whatever you say, Comrade,” replied the sergeant. “But I say we’re wasting time. Let’s go on to Ulan-Ude. Our orders are to relieve one of the sections at the head of the Thirty-first’s spearhead.”
“There are already two thousand of us at the Thirty-first’s spearhead,” said the leader.”I say let’s follow those three choppers.”
“Make up your mind, comrades,” advised the Hind captain assigned to transport the ten SPETS. “Personally I think we should go on to Ulan-Ude, as the sergeant says. We’re getting low on gas anyway.”
“Did you see them?” snapped the SPETS leader, a big man, well over six feet and broad but not an ounce of flab on him.
“No,” admitted the Hind pilot.
“You?” the leader asked the gunner.
“Too far off, sir,” said the gunner, and, quickly trying for compromise, added, “Why don’t we call Irkutsk, leave it up to them?”
The nine other SPETS waited for their captain to bawl out the air force pilot for forgetting they were on strict SPETS operational procedure — no radio contact allowed in the event it might be picked up by distant American AWACs. Tightening the sling of his AK-74, the SPETS leader then lifted his right fist, waving it in a circular motion. The Hind coughed, sputtered, and snow swirled about the SPETS as they clambered aboard. The Hind’s nose gunner, immediately in front of and beneath the pilot, was cursing, strapping himself in behind the twin 12.7- millimeter machine guns in his armor-plated cubbyhole. He had a girl, a Buryat, waiting for him in Ulan-Ude.
