there were twelve and not ten of them, Freeman gave the two-howitzer battery and the sappers the order to fire. Norton involuntarily jumped, startled by the feral roar and crash of mortar bombs and sapper charges. Freeman was pushing him down for safety behind the Humvee as the frigid air came alive with the singing of deadly ice particles whizzing overhead.
At first Norton thought the Aists’ frontal attack had begun already, although he knew that the Grail missiles were still not in range. It was a minute later as he glanced back at the two 155mm howitzers, seeing their belching flame and hearing the clang of ejected casings, that he realized what was happening and why all the explosions seemed so close. It was because they
“Give the bastards a bit of their own medicine! Goddamn Mongols!” declared Freeman as ice chips smacked into his Humvee, the explosions from the heavy mortars and the sappers’ C-4 HE packs acting like depth charges, chopping and smashing up what had been the mirrored surface of the lake. Within minutes it was a boiling jumble of mini icebergs, rolling over and over in the man-made turbulence, some of the bergs’ jagged tops rising over five feet above the water.
Then Norton saw it in a flash: the Aists, with a draft of only one foot, might have difficulty negotiating above a bumpy terrain. As it turned out, there was no difficulty; there was only disaster, the Aists balking for a moment or two, clearly decelerating, their up-blow of snow increasing, then, ironically, rapidly decreasing as they hit full throttle, hoping to get enough air cushion to overrun the Americans. In Freeman’s elegant phrase, the icebergs, sticking up like giant knives, “ripped the ass off” the Aists, causing a pileup the likes of which Norton had never seen. One Aist’s Drum Tilt fire-control radar took off like a flying saucer. Another Aist’s bow ramp imploded, pierced by the ice, the Aist rolling, its lift fans coming to pieces with the sound of some monstrous air conditioner suddenly filled with metal chips, particles of ice having passed through the protective mesh, buckling the fans’ blades.
The Aist, still rolling, now capsized, the display of its enormous black bottom looking somehow obscene, covered as it was in a froth of chocolate-mousse-colored bubbles; one of the hovercraft’s enormous push propellers, still functioning, having whipped up hydraulic fluid into a frenzied spill that soon all but obscured the rubber skirting. “God damn it, Dick!” yelled Freeman, one hand putting his helmet back on after a concussion had blown it off, the other hand pulling out his Sig Sauer nine-millimeter. “Looks like Tacoma Demolition Derby out there! Goddamn Mongols!” He fired until his magazine was empty, oblivious of shots being fired his way, slapping in a new clip, firing again into the boiling sea of blood and ice and dying Siberians amidst which Norton again didn’t feel it politic to point out that these weren’t Mongols, but Siberians. He knew what the general meant. Freeman had told Washington he would avenge the slaughter of III Corps. But even so, Freeman had given strict orders that any Sibir who put up his hands — gave any sign of surrender — was to be treated accordingly, fished out, assisted as required, and put in line to be airlifted back to Khabarovsk.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The immediate effect of the Aist disaster meant that now Freeman’s paras could give all their attention to preparing in-depth defenses of Nizhneangarsk. Freeman opted for a “broken diamond” of razor wire, two hundred yards a side, the pattern which had been used to telling effect against the Japanese in the jungles of New Guinea in ‘42 to ‘45. The fact that there was so much snow to help hide the spring-coiled razor wire as it was unraveled to form a diamond shape helped his plan. The left top run of wire went out for fifty yards or so beyond the end of the top right run, creating die impression to anyone approaching the railhead that the top of the diamond was open — that there was a gap blown open in the perimeter defense. Either that or they’d assume there’d been a break in the wire. But once through the break, they would in fact have entered a trap, wire on their left and right, coming to a closed V. Dug in behind the bottom of the wire V would be a corresponding V of American machine guns.
To keep the approaching Siberians unloaded earlier from the Aist occupied, Freeman sent patrols a mile east of Nizhneangarsk around the lake’s edge so as to avoid the mines and to engage any Siberians who tried making their way out of the taiga to the less obstructed lake edge. In this way, the Siberian shock troops were being herded back into the forest and ultimately into the diamond of wire. In this, Freeman, as he’d anticipated, was aided by the slow going of the Siberian troops due to the mines that had been scattered by the Lynxes in the forest between Nizhneangarsk and the Aist troop drop-off point.
Personally directing the layout of the razor wire at the railhead, Freeman was pleased to notice that while they had plenty of snow with which to hide the bottom V, the blizzard itself was letting up, which meant that he could soon expect air drops to resupply and thus consolidate his position. It meant he could also now order M-1 tanks westward on the Baikal-Amur-Magistral line to Nizhneangarsk to meet any counterattack that might be contemplated by Litvinov’s northern army around Yakutsk.
The long-range effect of Freeman’s taking the railhead, quite apart from the fact that M-1 tanks were now rolling westward to Nizhneangarsk under heavy fighter protection, was that he had, as hoped, not only struck the Siberians a counterattack on their home ground, which would strike a blow at Siberian morale in general, but in doing so had created the massive diversion of vitally needed Siberian troops from the south around Baikal. This not only caused Yesov to lose the momentum of his eastward lunge, but simultaneously enabled what was left of III Corps to make the eastern side of the lake and to escape into the taiga and join the troops heading south. In all, Freeman having thrown Yesov off his stride had bought valuable time for Second Army to continue its buildup on the Chinese border.
Still, Freeman knew that a breakthrough of his in the south — any attempt to take the general offensive against the Chinese — would be impossible unless the Nanking Bridge was blown, cutting the logistical tail of the PLA, the vital line of supply for Cheng’s northern Chinese armies.
As if to underscore the tentativeness of his Nizhneangarsk victory, there was a sudden swish of air, like that of an automobile passing another at high speed on a highway, and Freeman was yanked down into oil-stained snow by Dick Norton, both of them lifted bodily by the concussion of the hundred-millimeter shell hitting Freeman’s Humvee twenty yards away. There was a soft
“What in hell—” began Freeman, but immediately hit the ground again, as did Norton and the others, a second round hitting the burning hulk with a loud
The general’s outrage was directed at something none of the Americans had seen during the chaotic fighting amid the Aist pileup: some of the Siberians being hauled out of the frigid waters of Lake Baikal were still fighting.
The last three Aists had floundered, but seven of their twelve PT-76 up-gunned cannon amphibious tanks had been able to roll off the Aist before the latter had been taken out by the now point-blank howitzer fire. These seven tanks were now firing their hundred-millimeter cannon even as they swam with flotation boards out toward the American positions at ten kilometers an hour, navigating their way through, and largely protected from American fire by, the very icebergs that had incapacitated their mother ships.
Perhaps Norton was the only one who fully understood Freeman’s outrage at the appearance of the amphibious PT-76s. They had been the nemesis of his armor earlier in the war. The “goddamned coffeepots,” as he called them, had been used to killing effect in North Korea, the relatively light, amphibious PT-76s, at only fourteen tons, able to move with much more maneuverability in the flooded Korean paddies than could the heavy Abrams M-1s’ sixty tons. But if the NKA had unleashed hundreds of them in the flooded rice paddies where they could move
