map as the exit zone. It was the C-arc’s job to protect the backs of Freeman, Aussie, Sal, Choir, and Johnny Lee as Choir used his small metallic “finger” to search for mines. As he moved the two-and-a-half-inch-long battery- powered sonar-activated probe, which extended like a bayonet from the end of his M-16, he listened attentively for the probe’s low-pitched return “warning,” the outgoing pitch so high that it was detectable by only a few individuals whose hearing was well above the 2,000-hertz level. The instrument was so expensive that only one had been issued per four-man fire team. It might have saved Eddie Mervyn from his horrific wound, but in the pressure of battle, not knowing how far away the Russians were, there had been no time to use it.
But now that Tibbet’s second wave was arriving, bolstering the first, Freeman seized the window of opportunity to press forward with the search for the exit hatch.
“No mines here, sir,” said Choir, planting one of his green safety flags and sweeping the finger from one side of the suspected exit zone to the other without getting a mine “tone” over his Walkman-type earphones. Preoccupied as he was with his task, indeed precisely because he was so preoccupied searching for mines, Choir thought of Prince and felt heartsick.
Two minutes later, one of the three marines manning the protective C-arc spotted a T-90’s aerial whipping back and forth and moving his way above head-high reeds two hundred yards away, its diesel engine a subdued but angry growl in the sodden vegetation. Then it disappeared.
“Shit!” said the marine. “Where’d he go?” He radioed back to the Hummer. “You see that tank?” he asked the corporal.
“Affirmative,” came the answer. “Got the fucker on thermal. There are three more a ways back, coming from the direction of the minefield.”
“Tone!” shouted Choir. “Ten o’clock.” He moved farther left. “Tone! They’ve mined this side of the snow hump right up to those four tree trunks that they’re using to hide the air shafts. But they’ve left clear ground on the other side, so that’s obviously where anyone coming out of the tunnels is going to head, if this
“Well,” Freeman ordered, “if we find an opening anywhere in this goddamn hump, make sure we flag it correctly.” He didn’t want to see another Eddie Mervyn incident.
“Let’s probe the snow mound on the mine-free side,” said Choir. “Quickly. Use your bayonets. If that map’s right, we should find a door or something.”
Freeman could hear more armor approaching in the distance. The tanks were moving more slowly than the first T-90 that the Hummer’s corporal had fixed in his thermal sight, but the general could see they were gaining ground nonetheless, and so he told the men to stop digging, ordering everyone back. He would use the Hummer to do the digging. “Corporal!” he radioed the Hummer. “Back up out of these reeds. Get two hundred yards from here. If we lose the radio, I’ll use visuals. One wave with my helmet, hit the mound with a TOW. Second Fritz, use another one. Got it?”
“Two hundred yards, one TOW on your wave, another on each subsequent wave. Got it, sir.”
With that, the Hummer made a tight U-turn, the still partially frozen reeds crunching underneath like cereal, a rush of the vehicle’s bluish exhaust rising, dissipating, and wafting over the C-arc marines and into the reeds around the tree trunks now twenty feet away from Freeman.
“Let’s all get back behind the Hummer!” shouted Freeman. “Soon as the second TOW hits it, we go in, no matter what. Got it?”
“Yes, sir,” Freeman’s marines said in unison, determination in their eyes.
Then everything went wrong.
Running back, Freeman saw the Hummer buck, glimpsed one of its TOW’s contrails, then heard the distinctive boom of a T-90’s main gun firing. The Hummer somersaulted, then disintegrated into gobs of fire; simultaneously a head-punching “whoomp!” told Freeman the T-90 had exploded, and he could see it belching flame and vomiting crimson fire into the dark green reeds.
He didn’t pause. “Everyone back to the mound and we’ll dig out that snow.
Aussie came running back from the Hummer. “All dead!” he reported tersely. “Nothing usable.” He began digging. They all heard the ring of metal against an entrenching tool and fell to the ground, except Choir.
“Not a mine!” he assured them. “Just metal on metal.” It was a door handle; another handle became visible a second later.
“No shovels,” Freeman ordered. “Hands only.” He had no idea how close the exit was to the tunnels, only that the map had shown a narrow tubular exit burrowed out of the rock approximately four feet wide and less than a hundred feet long on a thirty-degree gradient which, as he noted to Aussie, was an extraordinarily sharp incline. If they were approaching the tunnel entrance, Freeman didn’t want to give his team’s presence away by making any unnecessary noise. Drawing on all his expertise in things military
“Right,” responded Choir, already donning his IR goggles and gas mask, his tone confident. After years of working as part of Freeman’s team, and of always thinking one step ahead, he was ready for action.
“Good,” said Freeman who, with Aussie, Sal, and Johnny Lee, began donning his IR goggles and gas mask.
“Choir,” Freeman instructed, “start the proceedings!”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Ninety feet below in a guard station at the foot of the long exit stairway, a guard unit of seven men and three women responsible for the security of the exit end of ABC’s tunnel complex were bored silly. Completely cut off from the action above them and long used to the numbing sameness of production line noises in the three tunnels, there was nothing new to do or discuss, other than the American attack, about which they had been given no news whatsoever. The only thing that mitigated the sheer bone-crushing monotony of guard duty in the three connected tunnels was the substantial
“Did you hear that scraping noise?” one of the card-playing four asked.
“Don’t worry, Andreyovich,” said the number checker, Vladimir. “The exit door must be under a ton of snow. If it is anything, it’s probably one of those stupid deer rooting around for grass. Anyway, in this weather all kinds of crap’s blowing around the lake and the marshes. Plus, last reports from H-block say we can just keep working, no problem. The Americans are getting the shit kicked out of them.”
Andreyovich nodded. “Maybe, but someone had better check. Let’s not risk the bonus. Vladimir, you come up with me.” Andreyovich looked at his cards, the worst hand he’d had in months. “I’m out,” he said, grabbing his AK- 47. “Need to stretch my legs anyway.”
“Good man!” said the numbers inspector, a big, bald, jovial man from one of the hamlets near the railhead that were now all but ghost towns, ABC having combed them for maintenance support workers.
Both guards heard several hollow-sounding bumps as Choir tossed two tear gas canisters and yellow SOS smoke grenades onto the grates of the two air-intake shafts. The yellow smoke laced with tear gas descended quickly, spreading throughout the three parallel tunnels, their connecting passages, and the entrance and exit vestibules at either end of the tunnels. The moment the terrorist guards and weapons assemblers at the exit end of the three tunnels saw the thickening malevolent-looking yellow gas pouring down the ninety-foot-long, cement-lined exit shaft, the alarm horn sounded, its deep, strangled “Arggh! Arggh!” drowning out the usual cacophony of the assembly line. The horn’s unrelenting blasts, accompanied by the scream of
