Darpa Alpha

high risk of blue on blue amongst the Russian helos, Cherkashin, like Rommel in the France of ’44, had clearly decided that he must engage the Americans — in the air, in this case — before they had a chance to land in force and link up with the first wave. Much of the surprise Cherkashin was creating with this helo attack was due to sheer luck in obtaining an “unofficial loan” of the elite helos from the Siberian Sixth Armored’s air wing located just east of Spassk-Dalni, fifteen miles east of the lake’s southeastern shore. In fact, the air battle now under way had begun north of the lake as the MEU’s second wave of Stallions tried an end run around the northwestern half of the lake, hoping to come up behind the Russians that the McCain’s SES had picked up even given the blizzard conditions over the lake. Cherkashin’s Black Shark helos, which NATO Commander Roger Hawkins had nicknamed “Werewolves,” had proved how good they were in tight turns of 3.5 Gs and dive speeds of 200 and more miles per hour with their 50T thermal imagers. The joint Russian-Israeli-built Erdogan version, with its pilot and copilot sitting in a NATO-weapons-compatible cockpit encased in 12.7 mm-proof armor plating and equipped with the world’s first operational helo rocket-assisted ejection system, was particularly deadly. One Super Stallion had already been shot down by an Erdogan’s rapid-firing 2A42 30 mm cannon, its pilot eschewing high-fragmentation rounds in favor of armor-piercing rounds. The gun’s virtuoso performance owed much to the shark-shaped helo having a coaxial rotor but no tail rotor, enabling it to perform a flat turn, its gun free to move through either an unrestricted vertical or horizontal circle as the Shark climbed and dived. With its two 2,200 horsepower, side- mounted turboshaft engines, the helo performed maneuvers that would have seemed impossible to an earlier generation of chopper pilots.

As Freeman often told his team, everything has its limitations, and the swarm of nine Black Sharks was no match for the four American vertical takeoff and landing Joint Strike Fighters led by McCain’s Chipper Armstrong. Each of the big 247-pound, 27 mm gas-operated revolver guns was so deadly that, slaved to the JSF’s avionics, it outshot the Black Sharks’ best in close air battle. And because the Americans’ radar was 87 percent more effective than that of the nine Black Sharks, the thirty American gunners in this second wave of fifteen Super Stallions were able to take their copilot’s voice feed directly from his heads-up radar display without any intermediate step, which gave them a two-to three-second advantage.

Johnny Lee, listening in to radio voices in the frantic chaos and urgency of the air battle, repeatedly heard the American helos being referred to as “Freeman’s Birds.”

“Shit,” said one of Chester’s marines, “they think you’re running the show, General.”

No one contradicted him, because now that Freeman had the map, it seemed as if he was certainly the man best informed to run the show, given that Tibbet was still preoccupied trying to gather in the disparate units of the first wave.

“Johnny—” Freeman began.

“Down!” shouted Gomez, who was kneeling beside Eddie Mervyn’s rigid body when they heard a swishing sound overhead, the heat generated by the flight of the missile creating a tumbling roll of warm air that swept the wood like a prairie Chinook, sending large plops of snow falling from tree and bush.

“That was close,” said the Hummer corporal. “I thought—” He was silenced by the Hummer’s gunner, who said he thought he’d heard the squeak of a tracked vehicle several seconds before, but had since lost all trace of it in the din of more than twenty-four helos diving, hovering, landing, and all of them seemingly firing at once. Some of the errant rounds ripped into the frozen marsh and reeds skirting the lake. Freeman now heard the second wave being put down only a mile and a quarter west of the ABC complex, as planned, but over a mile north of the first wave’s scattered troops. This meant Tibbet would lose valuable time, having to hustle if he was to have his second wave join the first.

What neither Tibbet nor Freeman knew was that by calling in every IOU they had, as well as offering U.S. currency bonuses on the spot, Mikhail Abramov, Viktor Beria, and Sergei Cherkashin had obtained an ad hoc force of 480 troops, which were being ferried in by four high-T-tailed Ilyushin-P transports, each of the planes’ four big D-30 KP engines controlled by updated computer avionics, so that landing on the relatively short ABC runway was virtually hands-off despite the snowfall.

In much the same way, for the first time in out-of-country operations, two of the Marine Expeditionary Unit’s JSFs, the first fighter piloted by McCain’s Chipper Armstrong, the other by Rhino Manowski, set down as instructed by Tibbet’s enciphered ground-to-air communication once radio silence had been broken in the Russian helo attack. While Armstrong’s JSF put down on a slab of frozen marsh by Freeman’s wood, Manowski landed his plane by another “wood island,” as it were, nearer Tibbet, who had now reached cover just outside the perimeter where a platoon of second-wave marines were coming under sustained rocket-propelled- grenade, heavy machine gun, and AK-47 fire. But in the whiteout, this enfilade from the unseen Russian defenders was more smoke than fire, with only a small percentage of the Russian infantry defenders having the use of IR scopes and sights, the weather forecasters having disappointed them as well as the Americans. Amid the cacophony of rotor slap and battle, Freeman was writing quickly on his knee pad, sketching out a plan of attack using Ilya’s map, gambling on his hunch that Ilya’s map of a route through the minefield would be accurate because it had clearly been Ilya’s intention to lure all of the Americans into the tunnel at one end and bottle them up in a killing zone.

“Johnny,” Freeman called out to Lee. “Encrypt this and send to Jack Tibbet: ‘ABC H-block—’”

“Hang on, General,” cut in Lee, uncharacteristic alarm in his voice. Freeman recognized it as Lee’s “computer down” tone, as Johnny’s ungloved hands tapped the foldout keypad again with the same results. “Nothing’s going through, sir. Like it’s frozen.”

“Maybe it is,” said Choir, his voice all but lost to a sudden surge of fighting all down the line.

“All right,” said Freeman, obviously annoyed but unfazed, writing quickly on his blood-spattered knee pad. “Johnny, try the encrypted function again.” Lee did, and it didn’t work. “We only have PL, General.”

“All right, dammit, plain language’ll have to do. Contact Tibbet’s HQ and explain about the tunnels’ approximate location. But obviously we can’t give him any tactical information and we haven’t much time. So while you’re messaging his HQ, Johnny, I’ll see what I can do — dig up a trick or two from the old days — in a follow-up PL message.”

In all his time with Douglas Freeman, Aussie had never seen the general’s hands move so fast — like a Vegas dealer’s — and within five minutes, during which time Lee was radioing Tibbet’s HQ, the general tore off a message sheet, telling Johnny, “Send the following.”

WYFWBAANGHARIUNNEOENOLTDDVONKMLHWME-

DYEMNIIRRLOEEOTPPDUUGBTEEEICROOHNTTD-

KEOTITHEGFCDHTRERAOETOEAMRMRIOFXNOOBUVGUIC

USLSEOSTETEEA.

The din of the battle soon reached an apogee, then dramatically fell off, the snow drifting, piling up, under a bone-freezing wind that was howling down from the Zapadnyy Siniy only a few miles to the west.

“Are we going in, General?” Aussie asked.

“No option,” pronounced Freeman firmly. “We attack.” He had one eye on Johnny Lee who, though the biting wind was freezing his hands, was forcing himself to focus so as not to screw up the burst message to Tibbet. Any pause by Johnny would count as a “space” in the train of letters; a missing 0 or 1 in a binary message would jumble the sequence and thus scramble the message.

“Signature?” Lee asked the general.

Freeman thought of his favorite president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: “All we have to fear is fear itself. We’ll use FDR,” he told Lee.

Johnny was blowing on his fingers and flexing them. “Signature within or without, sir?” he asked Freeman.

“Within.”

“Very well. All set to—” They heard the unmistakable whoosh of a fuel air explosive, the FAE bomb sending an enormous flash of orange through the snow that immediately turned to steam then to sheets of filigreed ice that cracked on the frozen marsh like shattered glass.

“All set to send burst transmission,” Lee informed Freeman.

“Send.”

“It’s gone, sir,” said Johnny, but he looked worried. Any transmission was easy to intercept. Cracking the code?

“Listen up!” Freeman told his fellow soldiers. “We’ve got the best outfit possible here, my team, a Hummer