pics again, noting that what looked like it could be a slipway was left of the town near one of the railway tunnels they’d had to build on the cliffs coming around the lake’s southwestern end.
At 8:30 they started the four Arrows, the rattling roar of the engines alarming.
“Christ!” said Choir, usually the quietest of the three SAS men. “They’ll hear us clear to the Pole.”
“Ah, rats,” said Aussie, climbing into the front seat, strapping himself in next to Choir.”Don’t sweat it, mate.” He patted the SPETS shoulder patch on the otherwise all-white winter garb. “They’ll just think it’s a few comrades coming across.”
Choir said something about Aussie being the one who’d been going on so much about the noise, but it was lost to the roar of the four engines. Aussie and Choir found it a squeeze. Although normally there was plenty of room for two, they were both in bulky winter uniforms. And while the case containing Aussie’s sniper rifle was lashed to the fuselage, Aussie, on David Brentwood’s order, had to hold the Stinger’s AA tube like a cylindrical map case between his legs, eliciting an obscene comment from the Delta man with the M-60 light machine gun in the fourth and last Arrow. Choir checked the first few exposed rounds of the forty-millimeter box/belt ammo feed for the M-19 heavy machine gun mounted on the front of the lead Arrow. Each six-ounce round, both ends looking like round lollipops, was in effect a six-ounce grenade, capable of piercing sixty millimeters of armor plate at three miles, the rate of fire in “cooler barrel” Arctic conditions being 350 rather than 320 rounds a minute. Though it could be either electrically or mechanically operated, Choir didn’t like the “beast”; the M-19, for all its firepower, had a bad habit of jamming every twenty-nine hundred rounds or so.
“Not to worry, sport!” yelled Aussie. “If you can’t kill what you gotta kill in nine minutes, Choir, you ain’t never gonna do it.”
As they moved off, throttles closed down to just above stall, the heavy snow and trees absorbing the noise much more than they had anticipated, they made their way cautiously through the trees and light underbrush to the lake’s edge. Choir was still tugging the forty-millimeter belt worriedly. “Don’t worry, mate,” Aussie told him. “Hopefully you won’t have to use it.”
“Right.”
“You mean ‘bullshit’!” laughed Aussie.
“Right.”
The lake hurt their eyes. Though overcast the glare was intense, and within seconds every one of the ten men in the S/D/ sub team had pulled down his sunglasses which, again on Freeman’s insistence, were all Soviet issue, captured on the way to Khabarovsk.
The SPETS chopper saw them.
Following David Brentwood’s lead in the first Arrow, the drivers in the other three Arrows behind opened up the throttles so wide their wrists ached, the midpoint between the railway tunnel up left a hundred yards or so above the lakeshore and the town’s small library and hotel a few hundred yards to the right.
Sonarman Rogers, driving the second Arrow with Delta trooper O’Reilly, swung left to avoid the exhaust from the first vehicle, his Arrow shuddering over small, swollen ice ridges on the otherwise mirror-glass-smooth lake. Rogers glanced ahead for a second to get a quick bearing on the terrain. Someone yelled, then someone else, but it was too late. They hit a ridge-only a foot high. The Arrow upended, skittering across the ice, leaving at first a thin but then ever-widening wake of frothing arterial blood.
In the third Arrow, the Delta driver, Lou Salvini, caught a glance, but despite what he saw he didn’t hesitate and closed the gap, the three of them now heading straight for Port Baikal.
The submariner in Robert Brentwood’s Arrow, the man who would have to take over Rogers’s sonar job if they made it, did all he could not to throw up when he spotted what looked like a sodden black-red mop: Rogers’s head, rolling obscenely across the ice, a gray spaghettilike substance trailing it. O’Reilly was still, his neck broken.
David was waving to the Hind coming to investigate, its bug eyes growing by the second. They were all waving. The Hind made a low pass and went into a left turn for another look-see.
“Smile, you Welsh bastard!” Aussie yelled at Choir above the roar of the Arrow. “Smile at the fucking comrades.” Choir waved, forcing a dour Welsh grin into something more gregarious looking while flipping the safety off the M-19 that he didn’t like. “What’s the bloody vertical on this?” he shouted at Aussie, his smile widening.
“ ‘Bout thirty degrees,” said David.
“That’s a lot of—” He waved at the comrades again as the chopper passed overhead. Port Baikal, now six miles away, was clearly visible, a mirage of it looming out on the ice far to their right. They were bucking a head wind now, flowing southward in advance of the forecasted blizzard over four hundred miles due north. David Brentwood glanced at his watch, the speedometer needle quivering between fifty-five and sixty. The Port Baikal old dock was clearly visible, but they wouldn’t reach it for another seven to ten minutes. The most important thing was to go straight to the railway tunnel that was two hundred yards to the left of the hotel and library.
Aussie tried to get a bead on the tunnel and dock, but the vibration against the Stinger tube was giving him a headache. He passed it to Choir who had spotted the slipway — a concave, smooth but definitely gutterlike depression, about ten to fifteen feet wide, that led, like a gradual slide from the mouth of the tunnel to the spread of ice-free water by the dock where the Angara River began its exit from the lake.
Nefski’s subordinate wasn’t the first to see the approaching snow vehicles, which he thought were some kind of
“Ours, I guess,” he said disinterestedly, without taking a second look, still nursing the bitter fight he’d had with his wife and generally feeling pretty sorry for himself. “Haven’t seen snowmobiles like that before, though.” Then again, he told the other guard, they certainly made as much racket. It wasn’t until another three minutes had passed that, his mind off his wife for a moment, he told his comrade grumpily, “Better tell the duty officer. Who’s on?”
“Nefski.”
“Shit! You tell ‘im. I don’t want him to see this.” He pointed to his black eye. “Bastard’ll put the on punishment.”
The other man slung his rifle and walked over the hard-crusted snow, his breath going before him like steam as he made his way toward Nefski’s office in the old library.
“Colonel, sir. There looks like a patrol coming in.”
Nefski was alarmed. Despite the fact that they were hundreds of miles from the most forward troops of the U.S. Second Army, he was immediately suspicious. He didn’t know of any patrols supposed to be coming in. “Call out the squad!”
“Yes, sir,” said the guard, walking outside to start the siren.
‘We’re almost ready now, Colonel. Be about another—”
“Get them into the water — now! Move!” shouted Nefski.
“But, sir, some of the men are over in the hotel…”
“I don’t care. We don’t have the time. Get the winches moving. I’ll call the ho—” The library wall was disappearing in front of his eyes, forty-millimeter grenades ripping, tearing it open like a pull-tab on a beer carton, debris flying everywhere.
“Hotel-”
“Colonel Nefski. Tell all the submariners to get back to the tunnel immediately. You understand?”
“What’s going on?”
“Tell them!” he screamed. The next moment the line was hissing like a samovar.
