“I heard the crazy bomber was a woman,” said the mortar loader.
“Whatever he used,” repeated the SAW marine, “that’s him. That’s Aussie Lewis.”
“What happened to the baby?” another marine inquired.
“Who knows?”
“Probably died,” concluded the loader. “Either that or he’s a martyr by now, ready for all those virgins.”
Melissa saw something move up forward in the semidarkness and instinctively gripped her rifle. It was the crew chief checking his watch against the speed indicator, his sudden movement unnerving her, everyone on edge. “Twenty minutes to amber,” the chief announced.
“Twenty
Choir Williams was looking pale again. The fact that he had never complained about his motion sickness was one of the things Freeman admired most about the warrior.
The general moved down the lines, chatting with the marines. It was hard physical work talking against the racket of the three engines, the rotors, and the bone-juddering vibrations that followed the AA fire. But he kept at it, exuding confidence and strength, talking casually to the troops about anything, surprising them with his grasp of detail, as when he passed Melissa Thomas, explaining to her how the end of the Cold War had spawned two Russias: On the one hand there was the affluent, technically savvy Russia, and on the other, the outmoded but still politically powerful Communist Russia. They were in fierce opposition, jockeying for who would rule in the twenty- first century. “The Russians, like us,” he pointed out, “like any sensible army, don’t go into a fight advertising who their officers are. Hell, their Spetsnaz — SpecWar troops — don’t wear any insignia at all. But you can tell who’s in charge.” The general looked at Melissa and her squad. “Anyone know how?”
“Because,” said a loader, “they’re the ones yelling at everybody.”
Freeman laughed easily. “Maybe, but the surest sign is that they’re the best dressed. Lot of them are still like the British officers in past wars. If they can afford it, they have their combat fatigues as well as full-dress uniforms made on Nevsky Prospect.”
“Where’s that, sir?”
“St. Petersburg,” said Freeman, glancing at the airspeed indicator. The Super Stallions were capable of around 170 m.p.h. but with a load of fifty marines and because fragments of the AA hit had bled off some hydraulic lines, they were down to 141 m.p.h. Even so, the warning amber light would be coming on soon. Someone asked Freeman how it was that the terrorist H-block had been missed by satellite surveillance for so long.
“It’s cold,” Melissa Thomas ventured. “Wouldn’t show up on the infrared?”
“No,” said Freeman. “Buffalo’s cold in winter too, but SATPIX’ll pick up any building in Buffalo because of all the heating vents. They show up beautifully on the IR cameras. So our best intel guess is that the terrorist tech wizards have designed a thermoslike roof shield so that the H-building shows up as a thermos, without giving us any idea of what’s inside.” The moment he said this, Douglas Freeman felt an ice-cold tremor run through him. What if the soil analyses, et cetera, were wrong, and the damn place was an empty shell, a trap? He was determined to keep the possibility to himself. His job now was to keep morale as high as possible. “So,” he told Melissa and every other marksman, which, given the marines’ standard, meant every man on the helo, “you should look for the bastards with the best-pressed battle fatigues and shoot
“Ten to amber!” came the crew chief’s voice. Freeman was wondering what had happened when the Harriers dove on the AA position. Had it been completely destroyed, its guns as well as its crew? Or would it be re-crewed and play havoc with the second wave? As so often happened, those in the middle of the action were the least able to discern exactly what was transpiring. He thought of Hitler again and the dark room. The Nazi Fuhrer had been right about that.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The loud “boom” that reverberated across the frozen marshlands and savannahs and through the woodland of Lake Khanka was unmistakably that of an anti-personnel mine exploding. Normally neither Abramov, Beria, nor Cherkashin would have bothered even looking up from their respective offices in the H-block, but this morning was different. With a marine expeditionary unit known to be en route to the complex, the detonation caused each general to immediately check the computer-controlled security display on his monitor. The half-mile-wide perimeter that ran around the ABC complex was mined and patrolled by Beria’s motorized rifle company’s amphibious BMPs, Boyevaya Mashina Pekhoty, infantry fighting vehicles. The BMPs, traveling between dug-in squads of eight men, maintained a 24/7 perimeter watch, while a mobile “Animal Squad” on standby was ready to dash out from the H- complex and replace any of the mines. There was eager competition for the night shift because deer were the most probable trespassers, and the commanding officers, for all their missile-made money, couldn’t get a steady supply of venison due to past overhunting either by the Chinese, who worked the rice fields west of the lake, or by the Russian population east of Lungwangmia.
The phone jangled on Beria’s desk, he being responsible for perimeter defense.
“Major Kermansky here, General. It was a
Beria was gruff. “Don’t show off, Kermansky. What the hell is that?”
“A red fox, sir. Very rare nowadays.”
“Fur any good?” asked the general brusquely. Normally Beria didn’t care a fig about what animal or bird it was, but red fox was an endangered species, and a fox-fur collar would make an exciting gift for his mistress in Avdoyevka, twenty miles east of the complex. ABC had put it under curfew.
“I doubt it,” said Captain Kermansky, one of those recruited with bonus bait from the naval infantry battalion south in Vladivostok and a man who, though he had sold out to ABC, insisted on wearing his old unit’s badged beret and blue-striped T-shirt beneath his battle smock.
“Is none of it salvageable?” asked Beria. Kermansky could be lying, saving the prized red fur for himself.
“No, sir. Sometimes they only get a foot blown off but he was blown to hell.”
If the anti-personnel mine had blown the fox to hell, wondered Beria, how come Kermansky could tell it had been a male?
“I’ll bury it deep,” said Kermansky, as if he was doing the general a personal favor instead of doing what every man in Beria’s infantry company had been told to do in order to prevent any enviro crazy hearing about it on the bush telegraph.
But this time Beria surprised him. “Bring it to me. Maybe I can get a collar out of it.”
“But sir—”
“Bring it to me!” snapped Beria. “Or you won’t see a bonus this week.” With that, the general slammed the phone down. The call, intercepted like all other Russian or Chinese radio traffic by the operators in
“What was that all about?” asked Landing Signals Officer Ray Lynch, bored now that
“Mr. B of ABC,” the translator reported to Lynch, “wants the coat of a red fox that blew itself up on a mine. Says he’d like a collar made from it but his comrade—” The operator paused and called back the intercept note on his monitor. “Some guy called Kermansky, sounded like an officer, he says the fox was blown to pieces. High intel, huh?”
The SES’s officer of the watch shrugged, but nevertheless reminded the translator that any ABC intercepts
