BMD buck and its right track unravel off its steel wheels. The explosion of the BMD’s magazine was so violent that it sent a searing wind through the trees, whipping up dead branches and flinging them against the denuded trunks and the log behind which Freeman, Gomez, and Eddie Mervyn had sought shelter.
“Payback One to Payback Two,” Freeman whispered hoarsely. “You receive?”
“Loud but sliced,” came Aussie’s reply, which meant that Freeman’s transmission was segmented.
“Are you receiving?” asked the general, his speech more deliberate.
“Loud and clear now.”
“Eddie’s gonna make it,” Freeman said, more for Eddie’s morale than from conviction. Gomez and the general had stopped the bleeding, but Eddie’s chances were fifty-fifty unless they could get some lactate into him and stabilize. For that they needed saline. The general quickly considered the options. He and Gomez could carry Eddie to Choir, who had the saline, or Choir could bring it to them. Freeman decided while it might seem more logical for Choir to come to Mervyn, that Choir, Aussie, Lee, and the others in the wood were in a more sheltered and thus safer area in which to
“Let’s go!” Freeman told Gomez, who was still shaken by the horror of Eddie’s wound. Eddie had confessed his fear of just such a wound, the one most feared by men, during the days when he was Gomez’s swim buddy at SEAL school in Coronado.
A surge of small-arms firing, at least platoon-sized, could be heard erupting farther west of the lake where the bulk of Tibbet’s marines had landed, closer to the Zapadnyy Siniy Mountains than planned. While Freeman and Tibbet’s HQ group were also west of the lake, they were closest to it and to the H-block, which no one had yet reported seeing in the foul weather. Indeed, the one thing Freeman, Terry Chester, Colonel Tibbet, and their men were certain of was that there was no certainty about the disposition of units in this first wave of more than six hundred troops, and no clear picture of the emerging battlefield. It was impossible to discern meaningful patterns from the melange of radio traffic that included orders, some frantic, from both the Russians and the Americans, whose transmissions were often jumbled in the frequency-jumping of both sides. It was always the same — not knowing where everybody was and the concomitant worry about the possibility of blue on blue.
This time when Freeman, with Gomez carrying Eddie, retraced their earlier path through the reeds, following their now barely discernible footprints in the falling snow, the general made sure that neither he nor Gomez wandered off the path lest they too detonate a rogue mine.
The vapor the general had been on his way to investigate was still rising from a multitude of tennis-ball-sized bubbles breaking open through the cracked ice that had fissured at the base of the reeds on the high ground where he, Eddie Mervyn, and Gomez had been walking when an enormous gray bird had shattered the ice-polished reeds, flying up into the swirling whiteness of vapor and snow that hung over the marshland. Perhaps, thought Freeman, the Komissarov River, fed by runoff from the Zapadnyy Siniy Mountains, was a conduit of hot spring water pouring into the lake. But there was still no smell emitted by the vapor, which here and there created ballpark-sized areas of dense fog next to areas where there was no vapor rising and where visibility improved up to twenty feet.
It was Gomez who first heard the freight-train shuffles of approaching artillery—122 mms, Freeman guessed — and while the rest of the team immediately fell flat to the ground, the circular rubberized nose cone of the Predator tube that Aussie had slung on his back swung around hard, hitting him in the nose and starting a bleed. While all the marines in the area also hit the dirt, Freeman told Gomez not to move. To remain standing was counterintuitive, but it was better than moving off the path through the reeds and risking detonating a mine.
The two screaming shells fell short with a tremendous “whoomp!” their explosions sending huge shards of ice whooshing through the air. One of the surfboard-sized splinters slammed into a copse of pines and disintegrated into smaller pieces that tumbled down like broken glass around Freeman, Gomez, and Eddie. It told Freeman two things: one, that the Russian terrorists were definitely scanning, and, two, that they’d reacted far more quickly than he’d anticipated on the basis of hearing a simple transmit, sending out their state-of-the-art BMD-3 to investigate the tripping of the anti-personnel mine. Were their inner defenses so much weaker inside the perimeter, Freeman wondered, that they worried about one measly anti-personnel mine going off? There had to be another reason, the general concluded, for the panicky response of trying to kill a few soldiers with artillery.
“You all right?” Freeman asked Gomez who, despite being in A-1 physical condition, was straining under the weight of his comatose friend.
“Yeah,” answered Gomez. “It’ll be better once we get moving.”
As Freeman took point, his right hand, from force of habit, reached for his radio mike, then he checked himself. The best he could hope for was that Aussie, Sal, Choir, and Johnny Lee would see him and Gomez, carrying Eddie, making their way over the two hundred yards to the protection of the wood. As fast as caution allowed, Freeman, followed by Gomez, began to move out through the tall reeds, hearing gunfire closing in from the west, with more artillery rounds screaming in, exploding in and around the position they’d just vacated. Freeman’s ability to retrace their steps out of the reeds with surprising speed, given the bad weather, was due to the general’s photographic memory. His skill in noting and remembering minute details along the way was less innate than learned in battles all over the world, from featureless deserts, where windstorms could obliterate telltale tracks, to Arctic storms, where falling snow threatened to do the same. And Gomez’s ability to keep up a good pace, despite having to bear his wounded comrade on his back, was mute testimony to the extraordinary level of physical fitness Freeman’s SpecWar warriors habitually maintained.
As Freeman and Gomez broke out of the tall marsh reeds below the vapor-covered mound that was the local high ground, they could hear more incoming. The eerie shuffling sound was much closer now, becoming a scream, the rounds’ explosions shaking the ground beneath them, geysers of earth, dirty snow, and reeds shooting high into the frigid air then raining down on the mound twenty yards behind them where there were more eruptions as anti- personnel mines were detonated by the concussion.
In his determination to reach the protection of the wood and the two Russian prisoners, the general, always cognizant of a potential blue on blue in the confusion of combat, especially here in fog and snow, raised his AK-74, the “stay-where-you-are” signal, in the direction of the wood where he hoped Aussie, Sal, Choir, and Johnny Lee were still waiting for him to arrive.
Suddenly Gomez stopped. “Hold up, General.” Then, “You hear that?”
“Yes,” acknowledged Freeman. “There must be hundreds of them over there.”
Gomez, tiring quickly now, realized that the general had mistaken his question. Freeman was talking about the scores of birds gathered in another section of the vaporous marsh. “No,” said Gomez, Eddie’s weight getting to him now. “I mean the Hummer.” It had stopped at the wood now only thirty yards away. The Hummer was topped with two four-tube canisters of TOW anti-tank missiles.
“Where the fuck were they earlier when we needed them?” Aussie challenged. Still, he was glad to see the vehicle. Everybody was glad to see it.
A marine corporal had stepped out of the Hummer, followed by two other marines dressed in “snow whites,” one of whom was Kegg.
“Where’d you get those?” Freeman asked.
“Dead Russians,” one of them said, grinning, until he saw how badly Eddie was injured. Quickly, Kegg helped Gomez, the general asking for saline from the Hummer’s kit.
“Good man,” said Freeman, as Kegg’s marine buddy handed him the pack. Choir also brought a saline pouch. Freeman now turned to the four marines in the fire team nearest the wood’s perimeter. “Where are the two pricks?”
“The prisoners?” said a marine. “We tied ’em up over there behind that brush, General.”
A marine corporal glanced uneasily at the other three marines in his fire squad as the general strode toward the two Russians. They were sitting forlornly in the wood under cover of a huge, snow-laden fir, its branches gnarled and deformed over the years from the bitter, grit-laden westerlies that came sweeping down from the Wanda Shan in China and on through the nearby foothills of Zapadnyy Siniy before howling, bansheelike, across the thirty-five-mile-wide expanse of the lake, on whose closer shore ABC had built its Stalinesque H-block, which at the moment lay hidden by the blizzard that had made a mockery of
