Arctic Front

kneeling beneath the camouflage net of the Stallion, ready with his squad automatic weapon, and Salvini, one of the Delta men, his M-60 resting on his knee, right hand on the grip.

* * *

In Port Baikal, the overtime midnight-to-eight shift over, Nefski’s subaltern came home to his small, drab apartment block, one of the largest buildings in the town. Taking off his greatcoat, he kissed his wife, her Buryat face lined with the travail of being a garrison wife. He told her that she looked tired.

“Kak vsegda”—”Like always,” she replied, surprised by the kiss.

Hanging up his coat in their apartment’s tiny hallway, he glanced at the laundry bag that hung from the knob on their bedroom door and announced generously that he’d take it down the hallway to the communal laundry for her.

“I’ll do it,” she said. She always had.

“Rest,” he said.

“Rest?” She hadn’t heard him tell her to rest in twenty-two years. Not even when their second child, now a KGB border guard like his father, had been born did he tell her to rest. Whenever he was off guard duty she was expected to be his servant — the only thing he’d do would be to take his boots off, then it was “You have the samovar going?” And always, like this evening, it was going. Except tonight there was no question about the samovar — His Royal Highness had become Comrade Highness. Peeling one of the onions she’d had in the line of glass jars she kept in the window to catch what winter sun she could, Tanya’s eyes began to water and, taking the kitchen rag from its rack by the old age-veined porcelain sink, she wiped her eyes. Seeing the rag was ready for washing, she took it out into the hallway. “Ivan!” she called. The moment he looked back at her from the front door, he was a picture of guilt, a thief running away with the laundry bag. Another peculiar thing — he’d changed into his best weekend trousers.

“What’s the matter with you?” she asked.

“Nothing. Can’t a man offer to help his wife now and then?” he shot back defensively. “All the time we hear about Siberian women complaining they are slaves, you never get help. Well? I’m giving you help, woman.”

“In your Sunday clothes?”

“Ah! I spilled coffee on them,” he said, meaning his uniform.

It was a dim, sickly, thirty-watt bulb in the hallway, but even so she could see he was blushing. Immediately she suspected another woman and grabbed the bag from him.

“Ah—” he uttered disgustedly, snatching his greatcoat from the hallway and jerking open the door.

“Where are you going? Ivan, where—”

“Out!” It meant he was going to the Port Baikal Hotel to get blind drunk.

Tanya was convinced it was another woman now. And when, her heart beating in panic, she inspected the trousers, she found the evidence. He’d tried to sponge it off, but the edge of the stain was stiff, as if it had been starched. She sat in the hallway for half an hour without moving, but all that time a volcanic rage was welling within. Finally she made her way to the kitchen, the soup nearly burnt dry, where she took one of the onions from the jars, laid it on the countertop, and sat waiting for him.

The moment he came in she screamed and threw the jar, aiming for his head. He recoiled, getting an arm up in time, the jar hitting him below the left eye. Closing, raining blows against him, she told him she’d never let him touch her again, shouting that he was to get out and never come back. She didn’t care if he died in the snow.

“Touch you!” he shouted back drunkenly. “Who’d want to touch you, you fat slob?” She threw another onion bottle at him, the onion’s long shoot trailing like a taper, but all her strength had gone in her rage, and the jar missed, hitting her anorak instead, falling harmlessly to the floor, rolling along the worn linoleum. He stuck his head back inside to say that it was his apartment, too. She tried to throw the laundry bag at him but fell.

* * *

The KGB duty officer told him there was no way he could come in on his shift tomorrow afternoon looking like that. He could lie and tell Nefski he’d fallen or something, but Nefski would never believe such a story and suspect he’d been drunk and fighting again, for which Nefski would give him a punishment.

“You’d better stay here,” the duty officer told him. “Take guard duty at the dock. Easy work, but don’t go taking a snooze.”

Ivan didn’t like the idea of guard duty at thirty below, in Port Baikal or anywhere else, but in truth he rather relished having told his comrades just what had happened. A man whose wife suspected him of seeing another woman — well, his reputation rose among the boys.

“Colonel Nefski’s back on duty later today,” warned the duty officer. “In case he visits the dock you’d better have a good explanation ready. Tell him you were hit by an icicle or something.” It was a good story, Ivan having seen a number of soldiers who had been injured, some of them seriously, when a huge icicle, having built up after successive snowstorms, thawed a little and fell from a roof’s eave like a club.

* * *

The pilot of the SPETS chopper that had been following the three fly-size specks had now lost sight of his quarry. They had disappeared somewhere in the taiga, but the taiga was a sea of snow-covered forest, clearings like those he’d already flown over as numerous as troughs in a sea, and all looking more or less the same. He could spend weeks in a futile search. “Turnback?” he asked the SPETS captain.

“No, go around to the end of the lake. See if they came down there. Maintain radio silence in case they are enemy choppers.”

“Tak tochno”—”Yes, sir,” answered the pilot, taking the Hind out over the edge of the forest. The Hind was now above the southern end of the mirror-finish expanse of ice that was twenty-five miles wide and almost four hundred miles long.

* * *

David Brentwood saw the blob of the SPETS chopper looking for them, passing within a quarter mile, and glanced at his watch. The Stallion pilot told him the Hind would probably be doing around 150 knots.

“So,” estimated David, “they should be across the lake in fifteen to twenty minutes.”

“Yeah.”

“Do we still go across in daylight?” asked Robert Brentwood.

“Affirmative,” said David. “If they do report any possible enemy activity to Irkutsk or Port Baikal, men we might as well hit ‘em sooner rather than later. Give them less time to prepare.”

“There’s another consideration,” put in Robert. “You don’t load on your torpedoes and missiles at night if you can help it.”

“Good thinking, Bob!” said Aussie approvingly, Robert Brentwood more surprised than offended by the Australian’s easy familiarity with rank.

“Okay,” said David, “then we go now. Synchronize oh eight one zero hours… now! We leave at eight-thirty.” He glanced across at Aussie. “Hope you and Choir made sure that these jobs—” He indicated the four Arrows, “— are properly winterized?”

“Yes, sir,” said Aussie with exaggerated bonhomie. “Oil in those suckers’d lubricate a desert whore.”

One of the submariners asked Aussie, “You ever think of anything but sex?”

“Sure.”

“Oh, yeah? What?”

“Beer! Lordy, what I’d give for a schooner of Foster’s right now.”

“Freeze your guts out,” said Choir.”I can’t feel my toes.”

“Then wriggle them, sweetheart,” said one of the Delta men. “You never have winter training?”

“What for?” asked Aussie facetiously, despite the fact that the SAS winter training had been a top priority. “That’s only for ski bums.”

“Keep quiet!” said David.

From then on all they could hear was the soft moaning of the taiga, as lonely a sound as any of them had ever heard. For the next twenty minutes it was time for every soldier in the ten-man team and the Stallion’s and Cobras’ crews, who would stay behind, to be with himself, to go over what he had to do — to meditate upon the need for speed and surprise. David smelled the clean fragrance of winter pine that not even deep snow could suffocate, and momentarily he thought of Georgina, of what she was doing at this very moment. In England it would be 11:15 in the evening. A clump of snow fell from a branch, jolting him back to the taiga. He went over the satellite