dreaming of this moment ever since he'd entered the ROTC program in college.
From the beginning, though, he'd wanted to be a Marine aviator, and he'd made it too, learning to fly Marine F/A-18s… and burdened by no false modesty, he could freely admit to being one of the best.
But Marine tradition still firmly held that all Marines, whether pilots, tank drivers, or cooks, were first and foremost combat riflemen. More to the point, Marine aviators were expected to take their turns as Forward Observers, aviators assigned to the infantry to serve as advance ground controllers.
He'd thought that he'd enter Russia in a Hornet. Instead, he'd come in by Super Stallion, attached to the 1/8. He didn't really mind, for his training had prepared him for just this sort of assignment.
It was just that when the low, rumbling thunder of Marine or Navy jets rolled across the snow-capped peaks of the Kola Inlet, he could grip his rifle and look up from the mud and imagine that the other aviators definitely had the better deal.
Or at the very least, a wider view of the war.
Local resistance appeared to have ceased, and he was searching now for a good spot for an Observation Post. Fifty meters ahead, the ground crested in a low, rounded hummock occupied by concrete block ruins still smoldering from last night's air strikes. Signaling to his radio operator, Gunnery Sergeant Ed Larson, Rivera dashed for the rise, head down, alert for movement ahead of him.
He reached the ruins and picked his way through them, probing the shadows and blind corners. At the east side of the hill, he came to a broken wall, with blast-broken crenellations like gray dragon's teeth rising from a bleached and monstrous lower jawbone. From there he was able to look down into the Kola Inlet itself.
His hilltop actually rose above the head of a smaller inlet opening into the broader waters of the Kola, which measured a good three miles across at this point. Across this smaller inlet to the southeast was the town of Polyamyy itself, an ugly, dismal-looking clutter of buildings that immediately reminded Rivera of some military or industrial towns he'd known, all smokestacks and crane gantries and warehouses, stained gray to black by decades of pollution and neglect. Several hundred meters below Rivera's position, the slopes overlooking the water flattened out enough to shelter a waterfront town, smaller than Polyamyy, but identical in its ramshackle-looking collection of warehouses, factory chimneys, and blocks of military apartments with dingy, neo-Stalinist facades. Moles reached out from the hillside to enclose a rectangle of dirty gray water directly below Rivera's OP. Piers and docks extended from the shore into the inlet on both sides of the moles and across the inlet in Polyamyy itself, and he could see a number of vessels tied to the quays.
Most were submarines. Rivera easily identified the enormous, broad-beamed bulk of an Oscar SSGN; two of the oddly humpbacked Delta IV PLARBs; a half-dozen smaller, sleeker attack subs, Alfas and Victors; and three diesel-electric Kilos, conventional attack subs with anti-air missile-defense systems hidden in the long, squared-off sail. A few larger surface ships were tied up there as well, frigates and corvettes and a single Udaloy-class destroyer.
The majority of those ships and submarines showed damage from air attacks, though as he watched, white smoke spouted from the bow of the Udaloy destroyer, then unraveled into a knife-edged contrail arrowing straight up into the sky, then rapidly curving off toward the north. Udaloys, Rivera knew, were equipped with SA-N-9 missiles as their primary surface-to-air armament, advanced missiles similar to the American Sea Sparrow.
There appeared to be some sort of large, concrete structure built onto the hillside Rivera was crouching on, but from his position he couldn't see what it was. Still, this was an ideal Forward Observer's eyrie, with a smorgasbord of targets that gave new meaning to the expression 'target-rich environment.'
A rippling, fluttering sound shivered through the air. An instant later, part of Rivera's hillside erupted in a geysering column of black smoke, mud, and debris. Clutching helmet and rifle, Rivera dropped for cover, tumbling into a shallow hole behind the wall, knee- and elbow-deep in mingled mud and snow. The first blast was followed by another, a savage thump that jarred Rivera through the ground and sent loose concrete blocks clattering down the hill in front of him. The next explosion was closer still… then another passed overhead, exploding behind him.
Raising his head just enough to peer between the dragon's teeth of the shattered wall, Rivera brought his binoculars to his eyes and studied the slopes across the narrow inlet rising just to the west of Polyamyy. He thought he could see the source of the arty there, several low-slung vehicles that might be 2S3 or 2S5 self-propelled guns. As he watched, he saw a silent flash among the squat shapes; seconds later, he heard the ripping-cloth sound of an incoming round and ducked for cover. The blast shook the ground.
His company radio man was crouched behind the rubble ten meters away.
'Larson! Get your ass over here!'
Another explosion showered both men with grit and broken gravel, but Larson crawled up to Rivera, who took the radio handset. 'King Three! King Three!' he called. 'This is White Knight Five! Over!'
'White Knight Five, this is King Three. Go ahead.'
He took another sighting on the far hilltop, comparing it with a small map he'd carried folded up in his breast pocket. 'King Three, immediate suppression, grid Charlie Delta Three-five-niner-one-one-two. Tracked vehicles, believe two-Sierra-five mounted artillery, Hill Eight-nine.
Authenticate Sierra. Over!'
'White Knight Five, King Three, immediate suppression, grid Charlie Delta Three-five-niner-one-one-two, tracked vehicles…'
As the voice at the other end repeated back the message, Rivera marveled at the stupidity of modern politics. Time and time again, the U.S. Marines had come under vicious, slashing attack, not by a foreign enemy but by American politicians eager to cut military budgets, or to eliminate what they saw as Pentagon waste.
There'd been waste in the military, there was no denying that, though Rivera had always felt that the military all too often became a scapegoat for congressmen trying to divert attention from waste closer to Capitol Hill. In recent years, however, things had gotten out of hand. During some of the sillier periods of the Clinton Administration, attempts had been made to eliminate the Marines entirely, or at least to pare them back; one move still being debated called for eliminating Marine artillery, with the idea that artillery should be strictly the prerogative of the U.S. Army. By that way of thinking, letting the Marines field their own artillery, even for counterbattery fire, was a needless duplication of effort.
In the same spirit of efficiency, they'd blocked letting the Marines buy their own modern M-1A1 tanks, forcing them to continue relying on relic M60s.
Another target, one not yet successfully hit, had been Marine Air; after all, why should the Marines have their own combat aircraft when America had an Air Force?
Of course, those ideas had been fielded by the same folks who thought that the Navy should lose its strike aircraft. The blind, stupid REMFs who made such suggestions, Rivera decided bitterly, had never been in a foxhole with enemy artillery ranging in on their position.
The bombardment of the Marine position continued, gouts of mud and smoke thundering into the sky with each shrieking rattle of incoming fire. Moments later, though, a Marine sheltering nearby poked his head up and shouted, 'Here come the A-6s!'
'Go Marines!' another voice echoed, but Rivera already had his binoculars pressed to his face, studying the gray, blunt-nosed planes howling down over the Kola Inlet from the north. 'Those aren't Marines,' he yelled, reading the block letters printed on each fuselage. 'They're Navy!'
'Go Navy! Go Navy!' Traditional interservice rivalries were forgotten as the Intruders skimmed the hilltops above Polyamyy in a north-to-south run, coming in impossibly low. Bombs spilled from wing pylons, flashing in the sun as they tumbled end-for-end… and then the hill above Polyamyy vanished in a volcanic eruption of churning orange flame, fireballs boiling hundreds of feet into a smoke-splashed sky.
'Not bad, for squids,' Larson said with a casual shrug. 'Marines would've come in lower.'
But it was better than 'not bad,' Rivera knew. Those A-6s had been dead on target, and the pounding of the 1/8 and 3/8 positions had instantly ceased.
Raising the radio receiver to his ear again, he began to pick out targets among the ships and subs clustered in the water below his position, calling them back to the battle-management people waiting offshore.
In the distance, as the hilltop continued to burn, the first Marine Super Stallions were already touching down outside of Polyamyy itself.
