look than usual. The red light turned green.
“Go!”
The stick fell out as smoothly as could be expected under the circumstances, only one paratrooper fouling — his fifteen-foot static line still holding the deployment bag, but his connector links breaking too early in a wind shear. He was jerked hard against the fuselage, the soft, crimson explosion of his head seen but not heard by the next two men in line.
Four “Saran-wrapped” Lynx helicopters going out on the skids of their C-130 transport also got into trouble. Despite the multiple braking chutes on the C-130’s palette, the latter crashed through the ice cover of a pond at the edge of the salt marsh, disappearing in about fifteen feet of water. Another badly damaged Lynx was lost when its palette, having been blown off course into the timber, ended up in a mass of splintered treetops, dangling chute segments hanging forlornly, ripped by severed branches that had been broken off like matchsticks under the impact. Several of the branches had pierced the weather-protective wrap of the helo, impaling fuselage and tail rotors, warping the chopper’s main blades and its chaff dispensers. The result was thousands of varying lengths of the silvered antiradar foil blown about aimlessly in the storm like silver streamers from some abandoned New Year’s party.
One of the two remaining Lynxes’ AH1’s landing skis had been bent, but a paratrooper master sergeant had it fixed within five minutes — taking his assault knife, stripping a fir branch and lashing it with parachute cord to the ski, just as he would have splinted a broken leg. There was a tree-toppling crash that resounded throughout the entire drop area — one of the six eighteen-mile-range ultralightweight titanium 155mm field howitzers hitting and passing through the marsh ice. The other five guns, though two were almost buried in snowdrifts, were quickly assembled and their small but powerful-tracked vehicle haulers brought up, as well as Humvee-mounted PADS — positive azimuth determining gyro systems.
The PADS meant that within ten minutes the howitzers were laying direct Copperhead and RAP — right with boat tail — HE rounds fire against the BAM railhead just over three miles to the south. The accuracy of the four- round-a-minute fire was also due to one of the Lynx choppers serving as “fire control” after it and the only other serviceable Lynx had hauled their “baskets”—flip-bottomed mesh boxes of Heat-SFW, self-forging high-explosive, antitank warhead mines — scattering them in a rough circle around the quarter-mile-square drop zone. This left only one side, a southern exit toward the BAM, open for the attack on Nizhneangarsk Station itself — an attack that hopefully would not only sever the vital east-west supply line afforded Yesov by the BAM railway, but also cut off the Siberian Sixty-fourth and other divisions already moving east between Baikal and Yerofey Pavlovich.
For the moment, despite the loss of some of his bombers and helos, Freeman was as satisfied as a commander could expect to be — with only a two percent casualty rate of sprained ankles and jarred spines. Except for the man lost aboard the C-130, there had been no concussion-caused deaths, scores of men landing on the frozen, reed-tufted marsh, feet flying out from under them on the ice before they could roll properly and release their chutes.
Colonel General Litvinov, the military commander of all Siberian northern forces, including Kirensk garrison, 140 miles northwest of the north end of Lake Baikal, received a panicky call from Nizhneangarsk. It was from the recently appointed commander of the railhead’s two infantry regiments—4,500 men, eighty tanks, thirty-six 122mm self-propelled howitzers, twenty-eight armored personnel carriers, and two antitank batteries of fifty-five men each. The commander’s tone was rising by the second, for despite bad weather moving in — another arctic blizzard forecast— patrols were reporting that beneath the heavy overcast, American airborne troops in their hundreds, possibly thousands, were landing only four miles away in the taiga.
Litvinov, however, remained calm. He could afford to be; he was well away from Nizhneangarsk. Besides, he was under strict orders from Novosibirsk to keep his division of eighteen thousand — six thousand fighting men and twelve thousand in support — at Kirensk. Marshal Yesov had stressed that the Kirensk division must be so held for possible deployment to Yakutsk, eight hundred miles to the northeast, should the Americans decide to attack there. Along with Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, and Krasnoyarsk, Yakutsk was one of the most strategically and industrially important cities in Siberia.
“What can we do?” shouted the general from Nizhneangarsk, whose two regiments had been assigned the specific responsibility of guarding the BAM railhead, his anxiety fueled by the memory of his one-time superior at Nizhneangarsk. The latter had been arrested by the OMON before the cease-fire for what Novosibirsk was pleased to call “insufficient initiative” in having failed to recapture those prisoners who had escaped through the taiga following the Allied raid on Port Baikal. Whether or not this was the real reason for his execution or a cover for a power struggle in Novosibirsk, the general had been court-martialed and shot by OMON enforcers.
“The
“I don’t care what you call them,” said the Nizhneangarsk commander, “they’re already cutting… communica—”
“Put your deputy on the extension,” demanded Litvinov. “Immediately. And you stay on the line.”
When the two Nizhneangarsk officers were on the line, Litvinov curtly announced, “General, you’re dismissed. Colonel, you are now commanding general of Nizhneangarsk defenses. How many Americans do you suspect have landed?”
“Two — possibly three thousand, sir,” answered the colonel — now General Fyodor Malik.
The newly promoted general had to ask Litvinov to repeat the order; the line was fading by the second.
The demoted general was in shock, not knowing whether to feel relieved, insulted, or both. He knew he was afraid. Family connections had got him his command, but Uncle Vilna couldn’t help him now. He was shaking. He could hear Litvinov’s voice on the phone again through the frying sound of the static.
“All you have to… General,” Litvinov advised his newly promoted colleague, Malik, “is… send a message to… ort Baikal. Give them the coordinates of the U.S. Airborne and they’ll take care… Tell them… release the Aists.”
Malik frowned, but then, aware of his previous commander watching him, smiled knowingly. “Of course. I will call them immediate—” The line went dead.
The demoted general’s voice, now wavering between outrage and unmitigated fright, was tremulous and rising. “And how will you get any message to Port Baikal now?” he shouted. “No phone! What are the Aists? How can we—”
“By helicopter,” Malik replied, unsure as to how he should address his former boss. “We’ll send two helicopters with the message,” he explained. “They’ll be there in two and half hours — less with drop tanks and no troop load.”
“And what will happen then?”
Malik wondered if the comrade was serious, but merely put his confusion down to his hyperanxiety.
“The Aists,” Malik explained calmly. “You heard, Litvinov has released them. Once they’ve got the coordinates, they’ll slaughter Freeman and his troops.”
“How do you know it’s Freeman?”
“Because,” said Malik, the new authority growing on him by the second, sweeping over him now like the pleasure of a mounting orgasm as he carefully but quickly wrote out the coordinates and gave a copy each to both Hind D chopper pilots. “Of course it’s Freeman. It’s his style — to attack where you least expect it.” Malik straightened up from the desk. “Freeman loves the underdog’s position. Makes winning all the sweeter for him. But now he’s made a bad mistake, Gen — uh, Colonel. But now he’s finished.”
Malik told the two helicopter pilots that en route over the 350 miles of taiga between Nizhneangarsk and Port Baikal they must remain on radio silence rather than risk detection by an American AWAC. Even if the American
