Warshot

“Where in the hell’s our MLRs?” Thomis asked no one in particular as the rumble and crash of the artillery and rocket barrages rolled across the icy plain up through the fog, the broken ice-floe sea beneath. All was quiet for the moment, but the northward storm was rolling ever southward, coming closer, the deceptively lazy orange and green tracer arcing out of the swirling white candy-floss roof above the lake only making the danger more, not less ominous.

“Coming up from Khabarovsk,” answered Valdez, manning the Squad Automatic Weapon next to him, traversing the SAW left to right so that its arc of fire, should there be an attack from the taiga, would be able to swing through 180 degrees without endangering any of the other men in the foxholes.

“Anyway,” said another C Company infantryman, “no friggin’ good firing our MLRs into that lot. Take out as many of our boys as they would the Siberians.”

“Then how about the fucking Siberians?” said Thomis agitatedly. “Their rockets must be hitting their own guys.”

“Sibirs don’t mind taking out a few of their own.”

“Neither does Freeman,” said someone.

“Bullshit!” snapped a corporal. “He had to do that on Ratmanov, man. Without the air strike, he’d have lost more marines than he saved.”

“Yeah, well, you weren’t there, were you, Ricky boy?”

“Knock it off, you guys!” interjected the platoon’s sergeant. “Cut the yap and watch your front.”

“What the fuck for?” challenged Thomis. “What are we gonna do if armor comes out of those trees, Sarge? Throw fuckin’ snowballs at it?”

“The Hueys’ll be here by then,” answered the sergeant.

“Oh yeah?” pressed Thomis. “When?”

“Soon.”

But none came. Thomis and his buddies cared nothing about the logistical nightmare that had descended upon Freeman’s headquarters — that was HQ’s problem. All that second platoon, C Company, wanted was “out,” and no amount of explanation by their CO, Major Truet, could make them see that Freeman, as CINCFE — Commander in Chief Far East — had to divide his already overextended chopper forces, especially his Apache gunships, to try to inflict what damage they could west of the lake on Minsky’s airfields while ordering what Chinook and Huey transports he had south to the Chinese border. The simple fact was that Charlie Company, the farthest south of III Corps, was simply too far to reach, given that those choppers not assigned to attack the Siberians’ thrust, now in progress on III Corps’ main front around Port Baikal, were urgently needed to stem the ChiCom breakthrough farther south.

CHAPTER TWENTY

In and around the battle of Port Baikal at the southern end of the lake, American III Corps, reeling from the forward elements of Yesov’s right hook, spearheaded by Minsky’s armored regiments, was rapidly approaching disaster. For the Americans it was a carnage unparalleled in American arms, for not since the marines’ fighting retreat from Chosin Reservoir in the Korean War had there been such a savaging of Americans at close quarters. At one point an entire company, Bravo, from III Corps’ motorized division, was lost within five minutes, disappearing into the lake in a massive sinkhole as the ice, already treshchina-pauk—”spider splintered,” as the Siberians called it — by the pounding of their artillery, suddenly gave way beneath the 103-ton American HETS — heavy equipment transport rigs — and armor that tumbled into the five-thousand-foot deep.

Twenty-three men who had managed to escape the sinking trucks clambered frantically for a grip hold on jagged chunks of car-sized ice floating in the freshwater sea. Other clumps of water-sodden men, having been spilled from the trucks and trailer units as vehicles careened off the ice, were now slithering on the mirrored finish of the floes like so many stricken animals. Many of them died like animals, clubbed to death by OMON and SPETS commandos, who, preferring not to waste ammunition or give their positions away by shooting, moved like ghosts through the blizzard, their white overlays making them indistinguishable from the Americans whom they beat to death, referring to it in their reports to Yesov’s HQ as the reznya tyuleney— “seal slaughter.” To be sure that the American public, especially U.S. students eligible for the draft, got the message, SPETS video close-ups of American dead, though not how they died, were quickly sold to French TV and CBN by Novosibirsk’s Ministry of Information. Within an hour photographs of hideously bluish-black bodies of American dead were flashed around the world, the French TV anchorman, Andre Focault, in Paris, talking “of the unnecessary and undeniable carnage, the direst result of General Douglas Freeman’s violation of the ceasefire… spawned by American arrogance in Asia.”

The La Roche networks and newspapers had a field day with the stills of decapitated Americans littering the blood-smeared floes, the La Roche tabloids calling for Freeman’s “immediate recall.” Only the Jewish lobby, many of whom knew what it meant to live under Siberian domination in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, spoke out against what they called the blatant bias of the networks in showing “such revolting pictures of our dead.”

The networks said they were just reporting the news.

But whatever was said, or shown on the networks, nothing could really convey the full horror of the reality, the smell of disemboweled Americans, or rather what was left of them after the Siberian 203mm howitzers rained down on III Corps’ retreating east flank, a retreat that area commanders were frankly reporting to Freeman was becoming a “rout.” Except for three rifle companies, over three hundred men cut off in the vicinity of S-Three, southernmost of the Siberian breakthroughs, the American line had simply collapsed as men, panicked by the world of shifting, disintegrating ice beneath them, fought each other to get on the few remaining trucks, which in turn were slowed by the necessity of having to put on chains, the blizzard dumping fresh snow on the lake, the ice around and in the corridor marked out for III Corps disintegrating like splintered glass as Minsky’s 203mm kept up their relentless barrage, the OMONs and SPETS on the periphery clubbing and drowning any III Corps stragglers.

North and south of III Corps, the rolling barrages of the Siberian artillery kept up, Yesov’s pincers already beginning to close the trap. Minsky’s guns midway between the north and south pincers “overshot” III Corps, creating a virtual moat between the main body of the retreating Americans and the western shore of the lake, still ten miles eastward. The fury of the Siberian bear, as Yesov was being called, and Minsky’s Slutsk division, was being described by many as unstoppable — the Siberian pincers moving as inexorably as two lava flows of a volcano, “spewing death,” as Iran Radio ecstatically proclaimed, on the Americans, who were “futilely” trying to outrun its fury. In fact more Siberians were wounded, though not as many killed, than Americans. But for Freeman’s III Corps, given the overwhelming number of Siberian divisions — over forty-four in all, versus the Americans’ eleven — it was an unmitigated disaster. The mood was quickly conveyed to everybody else in Second Army, including David Brentwood, who, like his former SAS/D colleagues-in-arms— Lou Salvini from Brooklyn, and the Welshman, “Choir” Williams — was now arriving in Khabarovsk in response to Freeman’s order for the SAS/D team to reassemble. Another comrade of David, the profane Aussie Lewis, was already in Khabarovsk on what he thought was going to be some well-deserved R&R.

David Brentwood was in Khabarovsk less than half an hour before he realized how grim the situation was, how III Corps’ retreat was a humiliation that eclipsed any prior victory by Second Army before the cease-fire. To make matters worse, while temperatures north of the lake around Yakutsk continued plummeting, those around the Amur hump in the areas between latitude forty-two and fifty, covering northeastern China, Mongolia, and southern Siberia, were continuing to rise in Yesov’s favor, as his meteorological offices had predicted. These warmer temperatures were turning the already inadequate sixteen-hundred-mile Siberian Khabarovsk and Baikal roadway into quagmires for the U.S. armor, artillery, and trucks trying to relieve Baikal. The sixty-three-ton M1A1s atop their heavy extractor/transporters, and the eleven-thousand-pound M978 road tankers needed to satisfy the voracious two-gallon-per-mile thirst of the M-1, along with the hundreds of ten-ton trucks hauling vitally needed spare parts, were all bogging down into the “slush stew,” as Norton called it.

* * *

When the survivors of the decimated III Corps began arriving at the naval hospital at Dutch Harbor, Alaska, Lana Brentwood’s fear for Frank Shirer grew proportionately. She thought she had seen it all earlier in the war —