advanced warning aircraft were hundreds of miles off, their rotodome radar could nevertheless pick the helos up if they used their radio and, though it was unlikely, might be able to get an American fighter through the fog and the ring of Baikal’s AA gun and missile defenses. “Meantime,” Malik told the commanders of his two motorized rifle regiments, “we’ll prepare a little surprise for Freeman here.” With that, Malik strode to the map and drew in two arrows aimed at hitting Freeman’s Airborne simultaneously on the American’s western and eastern flanks. “Get every civilian in town that you can find. Issue them with greatcoats and take them to the front. Any resistance to your order and they’ll be charged with
The major was stunned.
“It will slow them down,” Malik explained. “The Americans are soft about prisoners. Freeman will also be slowed down by the blizzard coming south. It will be here in a few hours. By then our Aists at Baikal’ll do the rest.”
Malik couldn’t hide, nor did he wish to hide, the look of satisfaction on his face as he now saw the wisdom of Novosibirsk’s long-standing insistence, based on the experience of the Nazis, that all military garrisons be manned as far as possible by troops from another oblast. A garrison made up in part of local conscripts or volunteers were naturally tied too closely to their fellows in the town, rather than to the iron fist of military necessity. It meant there would be no difficulty in having his troops round up the locals for the surrender.
As Freeman’s troops continued to advance on Nizhneangarsk, fog was rolling over the frozen marshes, and the general ordered Dick Norton and his two aides in the Humvee to pray for good weather. “God damn it,” opined Freeman, “the Almighty answered Georgie Patton’s prayers at Bastogne — He can answer mine.” Only Dick Norton knew he wasn’t joking. But later, as the cold front kept moving south, a disgruntled captain, whose Humvee windscreen was being constantly splattered with lumps of snow kicked up by the treads of Freeman’s Humvee, was heard to mutter that apparently this day Second Army was out of favor with the Almighty.
“By God,” said Freeman as he, too, saw any hope of close air support disappearing, “we’re being punished for White House stupidity! If I’d been allowed to pursue these sons of bitches when we had ‘em on the run before that goddamn cease-fire, we’d—”
“General, sir!” FORs — forward observer reports — were flooding in on the Humvee’s FLAP — flat panel lap display — to the effect that Nizhneangarsk was falling without a fight. And apparently Intelligence had screwed up; those surrendering weren’t crack troops at all, but the infirm and inexperienced — old men and young boys. “Even women, General…”
“Maybe,” proffered an incredulous Dick Norton, “your prayers
“Possibly,” conceded Freeman. It was difficult in the now heavily falling snow to tell whether the general was grinning with the anticipation of easy victory or whether he was grimacing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Hundreds of miles to the south, atop A-7, the barrel of Aussie Lewis’s Heckler & Koch 11 A1 was steaming in the early morning fog. “Like a bloody Chinese laundry,” he quipped as he reached forward, right thumb squeezing the barrel’s plastic-coated handle, rotating it hard left, pushing it forward, then back and hard right, dumping it out on the snow, slipping in the spare, the gun back on full automatic in less than six seconds. “Too fucking slow!” he told himself, and he was right, but he’d taken a second to make sure the spare barrel wasn’t plugged with snow. In minus fifty degrees, snow would turn to ice in the barrel, and bam! You’d blow your head off.
In a wide left-right sweep, the gun’s backwash warming his face, Lewis dropped at least five, maybe six, of the Siberians, but they kept coming, and a few yards to his right David Brentwood was tossing his last frag grenade even as they heard the beautiful, bowel-turning roar of the Spectre reappearing, lighting the clouds in giant, swelling red sores. The fire-spitting dragon went into a tight anticlockwise corkscrew, forcing many of the would-be attackers back into the heavy timber, crackling now from the Vulcan’s forty-millimeter and 105mm howitzer rounds as if on fire.
“You bloody beaut!” yelled Aussie Lewis in praise of the Spectre. “Jesus Christ, you Yanks can make machines,” he told David. “I’ll give you that.”
“One o’clock, two of—” called David, but Aussie — or was it Choir Williams? — had already fired, downing two Siberians. The real trouble, however, was that in the moat of snow-filled craters that lay between the heavy timber and the rough hundred-yard-diameter circle of SAS/D men still holding out on A-7’s summit, any fighting between the circle and the timber confused the Spectre’s operators. The gunship’s sensors couldn’t distinguish between friend and foe, especially when both SAS/D men and the Siberians were wearing American uniforms. Already David Brentwood suspected that several SAS men had been killed in the initial well-intentioned enfilade from the Spectre, and radio contact with the gunship confirmed the confusion.
“We’ll try to keep ‘em bottled up in the trees,” the gunship’s pilot told Brentwood, his voice fighting to be heard in the cacophony of air and ground battle. “But you guys’ll have to establish a chopper zone…”
“Roger!” responded David Brentwood, asking urgently, “ETA for the choppers? Repeat, ETA—”
“Fifteen minutes max,” answered the Spectre, the pilot’s voice quickly lost in the roar of the twin Vulcans tattooing the gray blur of timber below with what seemed solid tracer, more explosions and flares, the Chinese now attacking the Siberians, who in turn were attacking the ring of SAS/D men.
“Fubar!” shouted Aussie, clipping in another mag of 5.56mm, by which he meant he was in the middle of a fog in a fog of war, confusing even for the usually confused state of close-quarter battle; a situation, in short, that in the SAS/D lexicon was definitely, undeniably fubar-”fucked up beyond all recognition!” Chinese were fighting Siberians who were fighting Americans who were fighting everybody. “Where are those fucking choppers? I’m out of ammo!” yelled Aussie. David Brentwood tossed him a drum. It was the most anxious he’d ever seen the Australian, the man who was normally so cool, stressed now by the fear not so much of dying, but of dying at the hand of his own mates. “Jesus Christ, Choir!” yelled Aussie. “Stop! You mad fucking Welshman!” Choir Williams had stopped, though just in time, his 180- degree arc of fire kicking up snow just short of Lewis and David’s position. Salvini, on the far right, saw another two SAS men badly hit and sent up yet another purple flare for the Medevac choppers to see — if they ever came.
“Where are the bastards?” Aussie began, but then ducked, his Kevlar helmet pushed hard into the snow, legs drawn up into the fetal position, his right arm pulling David Brentwood down by the collar as a heavy mortar round went off, shaking the earth, showering them with a black-white spew of snow and earth. “Our chopper pilots wankin’ themselves off or something?” He saw a tongue of machine gun fire in the timber and answered with a long burst with the HK 11.
“Well, I’m not!” It was a man called Edison, nicknamed “Lightbulb,” who’d dragged himself over to Aussie and Brentwood’s position, his left leg a mass of bloody pulp, but Edison not yet in shock. “Down to my last clip,” he told Aussie. David tore the last one he had from his vest and picked out a body twenty feet in front of him, one of the Siberians he’d stopped, whom he might ransack for ammo and—
They heard the distinctive
“Fucking cavalry’s arrived,” said Lewis, and gave a shape moving through the aspen stand fifty yards away a quick, deadly burst. Suddenly the sky was brighter than the sun, so intensely lit that for a moment all firing stopped, as the Spectre turned to oxblood-red, then black, the sound of it exploding creating a ringing in David’s ears. And only now did they hear the sonic boom of the MiG fighter, a Fulcrum-29 that had downed the Spectre and was now screaming low overhead, banking in a tight turn away to the west. No one had predicted a lone MiG would dare Bingo fuel — an empty tank — at the farthest extent of his plane’s operational radius and try to interdict the gunship.
