Darpa Alpha

“Well,” began Beria, but couldn’t continue until he coughed out the smoke from Abramov’s Havana. “Freeman won’t suck in the morning. He’ll be dead!”

Abramov’s tobacco-stained lower teeth were visible as his jaws closed hard on the cigar. “Dead?” he joked. “In that heat, Viktor, the bastard’ll evaporate!” With this, Abramov picked up the phone again and rang the entrance DO. “You all set with the RDX?”

“All set, sir.”

“Good.”

“Ah, General Abramov?”

“Yes?”

“Sir, shouldn’t we leave right now?” asked the duty officer. “I mean, the guard party as well as production line staff?”

Abramov was again dusting ash off his uniform. “You have the remote?”

“Yes, sir,” the DO answered.

“Well, then, bring it to me. Right now. Tell the guard detail you’ll be back in a half hour, unless you want to stay with them.”

“You’ve notified the production line, General?”

“I’ve got your bonus. If you obey orders, you can forget about your fine. And I’ll triple your bonus. If you don’t, you’ll get nothing.”

“I’m on my way, General.”

“Excellent.”

Money could do anything.

“So,” said Beria, who frequently annoyed Abramov and Cherkashin with just this expression.

“So what?” asked Abramov, getting up and grabbing his cap from the stand, hearing the rain pelting down.

“So this is it. The Americans are on the move.”

“Yes, we know that, Viktor.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Indeed the Americans were moving, and quickly, Freeman telling his fire team of Aussie, Choir, Sal, Lee, and Gomez, the TOW Hummer’s three-man crew, and twelve other marines, including Melissa Thomas, that now speed was everything. Speed with “l’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace!” The Hummer was to be their mobile missile platform. The twelve marines would form a crescent around the exit, and Freeman’s team would hit the exit itself.

“Do we know approximately where it is, General?” Aussie had asked on their departure from the wood.

“Approximately,” answered the general. His force was moving west southwest from the wood toward the midsection of the twelve-mile north-south rail line, between the town of Kamen Rybolov and the hamlet of Ilinka, leaving a new fire team from the advancing second wave to occupy the wood and so protect the hide of Chipper Armstrong’s Joint Strike Fighter in a natural revetment amongst fir and deadwood debris at the northwest sector of the wood. For despite the all-weather capability of the JSF, the weather would have to improve further before either Freeman or Tibbet would unleash it for close air support. Freeman intended to get so close to the enemy that even with the JSF’s state-of-the-art avionics and friend-or-foe detector, the danger of blue on blue was too acute to risk it.

In the air beyond the wood, errant ABC artillery was coming down in unprecedented lines of fire, a nightmare of work for ABC’s gunners who, located between the H-block and the minefield, had to continually change not only the elevation but also the azimuth settings of their guns. It meant added anxiety for Freeman’s force, for, unlike a creeping barrage or a fire-for-effect barrage, there was no discernible pattern that it could plan to avoid. And out here, trudging through the marsh, where snow would soon turn to a muddy slush, the high whistle of enemy artillery rounds, whether coughed out from the T-90s’ main guns or by the big, brutish TOS, seemed much louder in the absence of the noise-dampening wood now a hundred yards behind them. Gomez, out on Freeman’s left, saw a flash, dived, but never reached the white, soggy earth before the air-delivered incendiary bomb exploded in an intense aerosol. The blast lifted him up like a rag doll before dropping him to the earth.

“Corpsman!” bellowed Freeman, and within twenty seconds the marine medic ran fifty meters from the wood through rain and snow, Aussie Lewis using his hands to pack Gomez in snow, snuffing out the multiple globs of fire all over Gomez’s body.

Three minutes later, Aussie rejoined Freeman’s group of nineteen — now four in his team, the Hummer’s three, and the twelve marines.

“How’s Gomez?” Freeman asked Aussie.

“Third-degree burns. Those fucking TOSs, fucking flamethrower bombs. Outlawed by the Geneva Convention. Fucking Russians used them against the Chechens.”

“That was against civilians,” Freeman said. “Not combatants.”

“Geneva Convention banned them against combatants, too,” Aussie corrected him.

“Keep your voice down,” Freeman told him.

“Incoming!”

They all dropped to the snow as a full salvo, thirty of the TOS rounds, screamed upon launch, a long “shoosh” overhead, and crashed into the wood. Ironically, Gomez, helped by a medic and another marine who’d come out from the wood to meet them, was momentarily safer in the open while parts of the wood were burning.

“I suppose,” Freeman challenged Aussie as they got to their feet and the general spat out a gob of dirty snow, “that you don’t think I should have shot those two Russians back there?”

Aussie shrugged. For him to criticize the general would have been what his mother used to call a case of the pot calling the kettle black. The war on terror was exactly that, a war, not a here-and-there situation where you had time for a seminar on human rights. It was an ongoing every night, every day thing for these and other soldiers fighting terror around the globe.

They walked on in the pouring rain for another fifteen minutes, each man lost in his own thoughts, until they paused before what Freeman believed, from the dead Korean’s map, would be another fifteen-minute walk to the exit which should be recognizable by a cluster of hot air vents. “It’s hard, sometimes,” the general told Aussie, “when you’re hunting evil not to become evil yourself. Stress. We’ll all have to answer to God for that.”

Aussie, his eyes temporarily focusing on the curtain of rain, wasn’t surprised either by the answer or by the fact that the general hadn’t sidestepped or dismissed it. It was the kind of dilemma that the general had trained all his men to examine. Here, in this cold, damp clime, Aussie recalled the hot, dry day years before in Iraq where he had been prepared on a mere hunch to take out a civilian who was running toward him, pleading, with a baby.

Freeman and his group continued to spearhead the Hummer by fifty yards, the general preferring to place himself and the others in the snow- and now rain-veiled reeds ahead of the sound of the Hummer. The downpour was a subdued roar as it pelted down on the ant and termite mounds in the reeds and, along with the partially melting sheets of ice, flooded the indigent flora. Unless they kept moving fast, the ice would start crunching underfoot, giving their position away, despite what was now the shoulder-high cover of sodden reeds.

Freeman, moving and thinking fast on point, realized the Russians had been particularly clever, arranging for the incoming fresh air and outgoing bad air vents to be hidden in the tall reeds of the lake and marshlands. These were the last places anyone would suspect of having three tunnels beneath them; tunnels that, from the dead Korean engineer’s info, ran for about three hundred feet back from here near the edge of the lake’s southwestern marsh to directly below ABC’s H-block. It meant that the land mines, like the one that had fatally wounded Eddie Mervyn, must have been sown from where Eddie had fallen all the way back to the H-block.

But there were certain things that the map, the scale of which was approximate, hadn’t shown, and Freeman wondered whether or not there was any kind of security apron of mines immediately beyond the exit.

They were now approaching the area where Eddie had tripped the mine. The general’s senses were in sync. Excited by the sounds of renewed battle all around him, he was absorbing and processing every sight, sound, and