slewing as it backed up a few feet for a better defilade position, lowering its bulk for a slighter silhouette, the laser sighting gone. But at two hundred yards the Siberians in the tank, manning the 12.7-millimeter and 7.62-millimeter machine guns and the main 125-millimeter cannon, knew that if they couldn’t knock out the American weapon they ought to be sent back to Novosibirsk gunnery school. The tank belched, the shell’s explosion throwing earth-rooted ice blocks high into the air, creating a wide, jagged, U-shaped gap in the ice wall. But Aussie, Choir, and David Brentwood, knowing what would happen the moment the T-80’s turret had stopped and hearing the whine of the barrel depressing, had abandoned the heavy M-19 machine gun.
They had rejoined Salvini, who was fighting by the three parked Arrows, the latter’s noses hidden by the ice bank. The other wounded Delta commando, Lawson, had dragged himself into the cockpit of one of the Arrows where Salvini was now hurriedly giving him a second shot of morphine, not realizing Aussie had already given him one a few seconds after the wire had sliced into his ankle. Lawson’s leg, elevated to help staunch the bleeding, was now sticking out of the Arrow’s open cockpit, the plastic bubble having been detached to accommodate him, the leg looking like a short log with the four layers of thermal clothing and the ankle now swollen to three times its size.
As they looked down at the gap in the ice wall, the five remaining members of the SAS/Delta team saw that the M-19 and the Arrow it had been mounted on were no more. The crash of a 125-millimeter shell from the T-80 was still smoking and remnants of the M-19 were still skittering across the ice near the frozen lake’s edge. The Arrow was completely gone, except for its skirting, which was wobbling across the ice like a drunken punctured tire from some enormous bicycle.
By now Salvini had lined up his LAW 80—light antitank launcher — and fired it, the round hitting the tank’s sloped composite armor a glancing blow. Nevertheless, the relatively slow-velocity HEAT round did damage, its molten jet of white-hot steel squirting a tadpole-shape inside the tank. They could hear one of the Siberians screaming inside, saw the slewing turret suddenly stop, and waited for the explosions from the rounds stored by the gunner even as they kept the remainder of the Port Baikal KGB border troops from raising their heads or taking too much comfort from the arrival of the T-80.
Salvini was loading another LAW round as David ordered the withdrawal, sure now that the midget sub under his brother’s command must be well and truly away under the protection of the thick ice. “Choir, you drive the first Arrow with Lawson aboard. We can’t get anyone in next to him with that leg of his. Aussie, you and Salvini in the second Arrow with me. I’ll—” They ducked, the whistle of mortars going overhead, crashing on the lake, splinters of ice shrapnel raining down on their helmets, a shard slicing through three layers of Aussie’s winter uniform, barely missing his carotid artery.
“I’ll drive,” continued David. “You ride shotgun,” he told Salvini. “Aussie, bring the Stinger.”
“Yes, ma’am,” shouted Salvini. He fired off another LAW round. This time it hit the glacis plate in front of the driver, penetrating the armor. At first there was only a short jet of flame from the hole but then, with David yelling for Salvini to “run,” David already in the cockpit starting the Arrow, the tank resounded with a cacophony of small- arms fire, its machine gun ammunition exploding like firecrackers. This time they heard murderous screams from the tank crew and saw the cupola flung open, a cloud of thick, white smoke issuing forth as a gunner, trying to escape, was engulfed in flame, the bulging earpieces of his Soviet-style leather tank helmet melting even as he struggled to get free. David fired a long burst from his HK submachine gun; the man was flung back. David dropped the HK into the Arrow’s cockpit beside him, his shoulder bruised and aching from the punishing recoil of the gun having been on full automatic; but it kept the Siberians’ heads down.
Aussie scrambled into the front of David’s Arrow as Choir, heading for the second Arrow, tossed his last two grenades toward the Siberian trench.
“Give ‘em a good-bye shot!” David called to Salvini who, having dumped the M-60 light machine gun into the Arrow, snatched up the LAW and fired a round at the Siberian trench. It hit the far side of the trench but in doing so threw up a thunderous, exploding wall of powder snow and ice over the entire trench. The Americans used the curtain of falling debris to head for the lake, the two Arrows hitting forty-five miles an hour as they reached its shore. One skidded slightly before righting itself in their race away from Port Baikal, the two vehicles already executing a medley of zigzags, two hundred yards apart, the crack of small-arms fire and hastily ranged mortars chipping and denting the ice behind them.
The torpedo Robert Brentwood had fired had hit nothing, running its two-mile maximum range then losing speed, sinking, disappearing into the black abyss of the lake. Renowned for its clarity, the lake gave up all light after a hundred meters or so. The torpedo soon gained momentum under the accumulating PSI, the pressure on it soon so great that it was speeding, aided by its streamlined shape, deeper and deeper. Imploding at four thousand meters, it was still heading for the bottom at over eighty miles an hour, to be lost forever somewhere in the five thousand feet of accumulated silt.
Robert Brentwood had made a mistake, one that might be excused by others as an error made under stress, but a mistake nevertheless, in firing at what he now believed must have been some kind of fish or mammal — it would have to be a seal, given its speed — its curiosity aroused and coming straight for the GST like an enemy torpedo.
“Damn! It’ll mean our torpedo’s launch will have shown up on the other three GSTs’ sonar.”
“Yeah, “said Johnson, “but, sir, there’s been no voice communication in the sound channel. We would’ve seen that on sonar. At least they’re not contacting one another, whether they heard it or not. Besides, they’d have to go to the surface to trail an aerial. For all they know, it could have been an ice charge pack — you know, one of the charges we figure they must be using to expand the thin ice patches before they launch the missiles.”
“So?” asked Lopez. “They’ll still know where we are. No way their sonar could’ve missed picking up our launch.”
Robert Brentwood now had hold of a new possibility born of Johnson’s suggestion. “Could have been an ice charge, I suppose,” he said, trying to think like the other captains aboard the three enemy GSTs. “Anyway, there’s no reason to think it was aimed at them. I mean, seeing there’s been no voice communication, they probably don’t know we’re in the lake. At least not yet.”
“We’ll soon find out,” said Johnson, pointing to the sonar scope. A blip larger than the one that had been made by what Robert Brentwood was sure must have been a seal was snowing up five thousand yards off, just over two miles away.
“Might be coming to see if we need help,” said Robert Brentwood.”Firing point procedures…” But even as he gave the order he knew that should he fire this second torpedo and it hit the oncoming sub, the other two, probably much farther away in the northern sector of the lake, would pick up the explosions on their sonar, unless they were so far away that their sonar mikes were being blanketed by ice growl. What worried him was the possibility that Port Baikal might have gotten the message out on its radio about a sub being taken.
In fact, Port Baikal, even had it not been totally preoccupied with its self-defense, had been incapable of sending out any radio messages, the microwave dish on the top of the two-story library having shattered, crashing to the ground following one of Aussie’s Stinger rounds. The demolition had so alarmed Nefski that, afraid he might lose his prisoners before he had a chance to interrogate them, he’d ordered them removed quickly from the library across to the hotel. However, in the murderous fire that the Americans were pouring toward the library and hotel, as well as at the KGB border troop defenders, several guards and prisoners had been hit. Some, like Alexsandra Malof, were not injured at all, as prisoners and several guards broke and ran toward the woods to avoid the commandos’ fire.
Shouting through the linoleum-ripping sound of machine-gun fire, the crash of grenades, and the crack of half-a-dozen different kinds of small arms, the pilot of a Hind that had been parked behind the hotel, out of view of the S/D team, was now shouting at Nefski, asking that he be allowed to take off immediately to alert Irkutsk HQ from where, just possibly, some ad hoc underwater communication link might be rigged somewhere along the western shore of Baikal, seeing that Port Baikal’s communications had literally been shot to pieces. “Maybe they can get the message to the subs’ trailing aerials.”
The pilot could see Nefski didn’t have a clue what he meant. “The subs trail VLF — very low frequency — aerials. It’s one way to—”
