Somehow he missed and felt a warm sensation deep in his left shoulder where the blade had sliced open his SCUBA suit, cutting him deeply. Quickly he thrust his left hand forward again, felt something solid, and drove his knife forward, feeling it go into something soft then hard, the blade rebounding on bone. He gripped his knife’s handle harder, ripping hard left, opening the attacker’s stomach.
Brentwood felt himself being dragged down, the attacker’s body limp, jerking spasmodically now and then. The grasp on Brentwood’s left arm was like steel. With nine minutes left on the ten-minute detonator, his mind’s eye filled with a vision of being pulled down into the countless layers of diarrheA-1ike mud. He pulled his knife back and thrust forward again. But there was no need; as suddenly as it had taken hold, the Siberian’s grip relaxed, the life drained out of him.
Breaststroking and kicking with all his might, Brentwood made his way back to his GST’s hatch and three minutes later was inside the escape chamber, rapping the top of the bottom hatch with his right hand as he began turning the wheel of the top hatch with his left. But now his left hand cramped as he squatted there, his body crouched monkeylike. He switched to the right hand to close the top hatch, his left arm simply refusing to obey his brain, the nerves of the shoulder numb.
He heard and felt the quiet whirr of the GST’s battery going for “burst” speed of seventeen knots which, in the next five minutes, would have them just over a mile and a half away. Brentwood had to stay cramped in the water-filled cubbyhole of the conning tower, as any siphoning of power from the battery to pump out the water would be power taken from the prop. He would have to wait until Johnson figured they were far enough away from the impending explosion before he could start the pump to vent the water in the escape hatch. In severe pain now, Brentwood remained crouched, sincerely hoping that neither Lopez nor Johnson would accidentally bump the “up scope” switch.
As the GST slowed and the venting of the escape chamber began, the water level dropped rapidly, and Brentwood almost drowned, knocked unconscious for a moment, his head lolling dangerously as the midget sub itself trembled violently from he shock wave of the detonation over a mile away.
The explosion, as Brentwood hoped it would, had set off a cruise warhead on the enemy sub, the resulting “Varoomph!” heard for miles, sending an enormous spume of ice shards skyward above the broken surface of the lake, as well as shattering the Siberian GST into thousands of pieces, the noise reaching Brentwood’s GST two seconds later. It stunned the three men; Lopez, though he’d plugged his ears, was unable to hear Johnson’s order for him to disengage battery power and go to diesel, heading at 15.9 knots for the northern quadrant a hundred and ninety miles away, their ETA depending on the currents and the time taken to intercept the loose raft — the latter, clearly visible on the sonar screen, having deflected some of the explosion’s sound waves.
“Why do we need it, sir?” asked Johnson, who believed, correctly, that now his skipper was wounded he, Johnson, would have to be the one to go out through the hole and attach the raft to them.
“We can reload our empty torpedo tubes,” explained Brentwood, his voice heavy, slow — still groggy from his ordeal, now and men grimacing from Lopez’s inexpert dressing of his wound. “Easy enough to do with two of you,” continued Brentwood. Lopez looked alarmed. “Subsurface float buoy’s,” added Brentwood, “on the raft. Just push her over to our sub and shackle her to the ring bolt.”
At one point Brentwood almost passed out from the pain and only then, albeit reluctantly, agreed to lie down on the lower bunk.
“You think the other two GSTs up north’ll still be there?” asked Johnson.
“No reason why they shouldn’t be,” answered Brentwood. “All they’ve seen is an explosion on their sonar screen,” he explained. “They’ll figure one of their GSTs has fallen victim to a malfunction — internally caused explosion. There’ll be no sign of an external attack. Anyway, even if they suspect there was and come looking for us, all the better for us. Either way, we’ll find one another.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Though he knew precisely where they were by virtue of his GPS unit, Choir couldn’t help the wounded Lawson get any closer to the chopper camp unless he was willing to go the last mile by Arrow — something that David Brentwood had forbidden anyone to do for fear that, no matter how small the possibility, it might draw an enemy patrol to the hidden choppers. As a safety precaution, the last mile was to be on foot. This being impossible for Lawson, despite the lingering effect of the morphine shots, he and Choir decided it would be quicker and safer for Choir to go on ahead to the choppers and on the way out, the Stallion, on infrared, could lower a harness for Lawson. Brentwood, Aussie, and Salvini would, if they’d made it across the ice, find their own way through the taiga to the helos.
Before Choir left, he slit open Lawson’s vapor-barrier boot. The Delta commando’s foot was in bad shape from the deep slash of the cable, a piece of rusted, grotesquely twisted wire that had passed through the soft calf into his ankle still in place, scraping against the bone. With the morphine wearing off, Choir knew that what the doctors and nurses back in Dutch Harbor would call “discomfort” would soon set in with a vengeance. It meant that without another shot of morphine, Lawson, despite his Delta training and all the will in the world, would be unable to keep quiet, let alone put any weight on the foot. Choir pulled out the white/green winter camouflage net from beneath the Arrow’s seat and tossed it over the vehicle, propping Lawson up so that the butt of the M-60 rested in his lap with another shot of morphine by his side and an MRE with its regulation 4,200 calories for winter conditions also within easy reach. “Enjoy your picnic,” joked Choir, tapping Lawson encouragingly on the shoulder. “And remember, boyo, drink your four liters.”
“How’ll I piss?”
“Aim high,” said Choir, smiling for the first time that day. “Listen, boyo, if I don’t make it back to you, take the chance and go active with your finder beeper, but give the two hours. Don’t want the Sibirs homing in on the beep if we can help it.”
“I’ll wait,” said Lawson. “You’ll be back.”
Choir, with one last glance at his GPS, started off for the choppers, which he knew were now a mile away. He didn’t go in a straight line, using instead SAS “rabbit” zigzags and back tracks, crouching, absolutely still, listening to detect the slightest untoward noise within the rushing-river sound of the blizzard in the high timber as fresh powder snow started to fall. Passing down through the heavy drifts on the bank of a snaking frozen river, Choir scanned left to right for signs of any footprints or vehicle tracks and took another GPS fix. The choppers should now be no more than a hundred yards ahead, but damned if he could see them, his vision obliterated by either trees or the camouflage nets or—
Then he spotted the nose of one of the Cobras, and as he got nearer, experienced the pleasant fright of recognition as the bigger, almost brutish, shape of the Super Stallion became distinguishable under the snow-dusted net. At twenty yards he stopped and knelt down to make sure no one was following him. Nothing stirred but the blizzard.
He waited a full five minutes, watching. Something was wrong. He couldn’t smell it or see it, but his sixth sense told him. As sure as a mother detects the slightest change of rhythm in her baby’s sleep in an otherwise noisy house, he knew that something was amiss. For a start there should have been some sign of movement around the choppers, their crews surely as anxious, hearing the distant gunfire, to see the returning SAS/Delta men as they would be to see the chopper crews. Yet, peculiarly, he didn’t sense a trap.
Silently, his slow movements completely muffled by the blizzard, he eased forward a few yards and stopped again, noticing what looked like a patch of oil, its coloration and form different from the folds of snow about him. Then he saw it was a canteen shape. He was in a minefield.
Without moving an inch, without blinking, he stared at the choppers, knowing that everyone inside had either been taken prisoner or killed. Whatever an enemy patrol had done, securing the open area by circling it with a ring of antipersonnel mines, they had now gone, not staying with the choppers when they had heard the firing down by the lake, and obviously not having blown the choppers up for fear of drawing attention to themselves. Turning, retracing his footsteps precisely, Choir made his way back through the trees, his earlier footsteps still visible enough that he could avoid stamping on any new ground. After a quarter mile or so he paused, waited, and, sensing no danger, moved on, till, to his immense relief, he spotted the Arrow.
