Arctic Front wi-4 Page 14

  Should the Americans, now that they held Korea, decide to cross the Yalu River that separated China’s Manchurian provinces from Korea then wheel westward onto the Great Northern Plain of China, the Jews would seize their chance and cut the rail line, thus effectively cutting off Khabarovsk and Vladivostok farther south on the coast. Disaster would follow. Khabarovsk and Vladivostok were the linchpins of the entire Siberian offensive against the Americans on the eastern flank.

  This was true not only for the entire Far Eastern TVD in the war against the Americans but for any air war against Japan, should the Japanese, less than two hundred miles east of the coast, decide to attack as a military down payment on the oil they would have to get from the American North Slope if their industry was not to grind to a halt.

  Personally, Nefski confided to his subaltern, a KGB lieutenant, he doubted the Americans would risk incurring the wrath of the Chinese by striking through North Korea, but with Korea in their possession, it was a temptation: a left hook from Najin in North Korea northeastward, less than two hundred miles around the coast on the Sea of Japan to attack Vladivostok. The military consequences of Vladivostok being cut off were too horrendous to contemplate, but it was precisely that that Nefski had to think about. Losing the ice-free port would mean the entire Soviet Pacific fleet would be cast adrift — with no home base, no supplies.

  And if this wasn’t enough to fire Nefski’s determination to root out the Jewish saboteurs whom he believed were responsible for the local attacks on the Trans-Siberian Railway link, then his humiliation during the short-lived Minsk Treaty was. He and other KGB officers had been “required” to make public apologies to the Jews for certain “irregularities” during the war. Indeed, Nefski and his aide had been imprisoned for forty-eight hours by the Jewish underground, destined to face charges in what the Jews called “open court.” Open court! Well, everything had changed very suddenly with Novosibirsk’s rejection of Chernko’s cowardly Minsk Treaty. The following day the Jews had fought sporadic actions along the rail line 160 kilometers between Khavarovsk and Birobidzhan, cutting it in several places; but with Siberia’s decision to continue throwing its vast resources and armies against the Allies, and military reinforcements being rushed out from western Siberia, the Jews were on the run again — the hunted, not the hunter.

  “Kings for a day, eh?” Nefski remarked to his subaltern, without taking his eyes off the tram cars that had fascinated him ever since he was a child and afforded him the warm, secure feeling of someone safe looking out at a hostile world. Then Nefski, with a full stomach to stoke his confidence, explained to his subaltern that even if Ratmanov fell, which he doubted, an attack by aircraft from American carrier-based fleets that might steam toward the Sea of Japan from the Americans’ Aleutian bases was highly unlikely. First there would be the blizzard facing them as well as the zhelezny zjanaves—”iron curtain”— of antiaircraft missiles and gunfire that would be thrown up at them by the formidable defense network of the Kuril Island screen, four hundred miles off the coast. And even if they got past the Kuril Islands, the Americans would then be met by swarms of Soviet fighters rising to meet them north of Japan from bases dotted along the six-hundred-mile-long shield of Sakhalin Island just off the Soviet coast. And this quite apart from the koltsa— “rings”—of AA missile and gun emplacements around Vladivostok and inland around Khabarovsk itself.

  Nefski glanced at his watch, frowned, and pushed the button for “cells.” “What are they doing down there?” he asked sharply, the sour stench of his kumiss, the fermented mare’s milk so beloved by the Yakuts, filling the overheated, stuffy KGB office. His subaltern tried to hold his breath as Nefski spoke, surmising that the colonel’s breath was so foul that if they could pipe it down the narrow, winding, stone staircase to the cells four stories below, the Jews would agree instantly to tell Nefski whatever he wanted to know about who was who in the Jewish resistance.

  “They had some trouble with the woman,” the subaltern explained, pulling a file. “After we brought her and those three brothers of hers in.” He was reminding Nefski of the time they had pretended to shoot the youngest to get her to talk. “She apparently went bonkers when we picked her up again after Novosibirsk rejected the Minsk treaty.” He laughed. “They all thought they were about to be liberated when Chernko signed at Minsk. ‘Next year in Jerusalem.’ “

  “If she’s crazy,” said Nefski, “she’s no use to us. This time we won’t be generous — to her or her gangster brothers. No more blanks to frighten them. This time we’ll use—”

  “No, sir,” interjected the subaltern, “I don’t mean crazy mad, sir. I mean violent.”

  “Then for God’s sake give her an injection.”

  “That’s what they’re doing, sir,” answered the subaltern, trying to hide his anxiety. He prayed nothing had gone wrong downstairs. If he helped Nefski break the Jews, it would mean a promotion from lieutenant to captain.

  Nefski lit another Sobraine off the first, the lieutenant grateful for the infusion of the thick tobacco smoke to counter the foul smell of sour cheese. Nefski had completely misunderstood his subaltern’s anxiety about the woman, mistakenly interpreting it as concern. “If you’re going to be an old woman about this, Ilya, I don’t want you here. These vermin pose as great a threat to our supply line as did the Czechs.”

  Nefski was referring to the bizarre incident of the Czech legion in World War I who, ironically, on their way home and fed up with delays, had held most of the Trans-Siberian Railway during the bloody civil war between the Reds and the Whites. Canadian and U.S. forces in Murmansk were trying even then to hamper the Revolution.

  The lieutenant didn’t comment, the analogy between a few score of zhidy—”yids”— and the Czech legion being a monstrous exaggeration. Still, he knew Nefski had a point. Despite the fact that they would not know what part of the line was under infrared surveillance hidden in the birch taiga or monitored by the vibration meters of the kind perfected by the Americans in Vietnam to detect even foot traffic along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a rail line could be uprooted by a child with a fistful of plastique and the guts to try. Anyway, with or without the dangers posed by the Jews, the subaltern was certainly not an old woman. Didn’t feel squeamish at all. In fact, and this he did not mention or even hint at to Nefski, the prospect of torturing the Jewess, Alexsandra Malof, a pretty, dark-eyed, and well-endowed nineteen-year-old, excited him. Compared with the usual run of ugly, stodgy peasants they had to deal with it would be a pleasant change. Sometimes Nefski let his men do an “Iraqi”—which meant the most diligent and loyal interrogators were given an hour or so alone with the woman in the cell.

  The thought of the Jewess naked, tied to the bare birch bunk, breasts rising quickly up and down with her fear, thrilled him long before he heard them dragging her up the narrow staircase. He had an erection and so busied himself by the records cabinet, going over her file so that his back was turned to Nefski who, if he saw the subaltern’s condition, would make a great joke of it. Turning his head slightly to look out at the top of the stairwell, he glimpsed her and saw that after only several days of solitary she’d lost weight. But starvation initially gave some prisoners a more determined, alive look, separating them, as Comrade Nefski often said, into the “quick and the dead,” and made the ones who wanted to live more exciting. Yet their stubbornness was in the end a death sentence. When you took them back to cells after the initial interrogation and held out food as a reward, there was almost nothing they wouldn’t do.

  As they hauled her through the door, he turned, holding the file low in front of him. He heard a high, buzzing sound and saw the fax light come on. Nefski was standing by the window, gazing out — his usual “disinterested” ploy — and so the lieutenant tore off the fax as the two guards pushed her into the chair. She was one of those women whose long, dark hair looked beautiful no matter what you did to them. He glanced down at the fax. It would make Nefski very happy: Novosibirsk “fully concurred” w
ith Comrade Nefski’s “assessment of the Jewish problem.” Indeed, Novosibirsk HQ pointed out, it was partly because of sabotage in the Baltic states that many Russian gunners had found themselves firing dud rounds during the battle for Minsk. Comrade Nefski was instructed to “take all measures necessary for the solution of this problem in your sector of the TVD.”

  She wasn’t wearing a bra. This was normal procedure, of course — some of the Jews had even tried to use shoelaces tied together to hang themselves rather than face KGB interrogation. And because she had done nothing to help the guards on the way up, resisting them as they dragged her full weight over every step, she was perspiring heavily; the faded, thin blue cotton prison tunic was clinging to her body like a wet sheet.

  Nefski didn’t bother turning from the window as he spoke. Ilya grinned, the colonel always pulling this lidery— “big-shot”—bullshit, not deigning to look at the prisoner. That was fine. It gave Ilya more time to look at her. Already she’d responded by not responding, her lucid brown eyes focussing on some distant point beyond him — Jerusalem perhaps? He could feel the resistance in her like electricity in the air. He knew she wasn’t going to cooperate — not yet. This was a waste of time. Still, they always did this part by the book, and he opened the file, moving to the left of Nefski’s brutish, wooden desk to take notes. But now Nefski unexpectedly turned and shook his head. No notes. Ilya slipped the file away and closed the drawer with a satisfying click. No record of the interrogation; it was a good sign. They’d have a bit of fun with her. After all, Novosibirsk had given them carte blanche.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The “Snick” David Brentwood heard off to his right about twenty yards was no file cabinet shutting but a SPETS AKMS butt stock unfolding, extending the 7.62-millimeter submachine gun’s length from twenty-eight to thirty-five inches. Not as heavy as the AK-47, the Kalashnikov 74 didn’t have the heavier hitting power of the AK-47 but with less recoil gained greater accuracy.

  The burst hit an SAS trooper before he touched ground, and although Brentwood couldn’t see the barrel flashes, he heard the heavy thump of the SPETS burst hitting the man, his body dangling, its radiant heat a shiver in David’s Starlight goggles in which green snow enveloped the man as he fell dead into the soft powder. The trooper’s chute, its flapping audible, still invisible to David, was dragging the man along through the snow in a tug of war with the anchor of his equipment pack.

  Fifty yards away Brentwood landed softly, shucked off his chute, and within seconds was crawling, sweat turning to ice about his collar, using his boot knife to quickly probe the snowy ground in front of him for mines. He saw then heard a ragged series of orange flashes off to his left, the air reeking of cordite. A “Bouncing Betty,” a Siberian M-16A1 antipersonnel mine, had jumped, disintegrating five feet above the orange-flickering snow, the mine’s shrapnel whistling through the snow-curtained air. He heard an agonized scream somewhere behind him and saw a flare illuminating another chute coming down, the SAS soldier kicking frantically in pain, hands clutching raspberry-colored goo that had been his face. In the same light Brentwood glimpsed SPETS — three of them — forming a defensive triangle no more than twenty yards away at ten o’clock. Mentally he marked the spot but could do nothing for now until he reached his pack and unhitched the nine-millimeter MP5K submachine gun. In any case it wouldn’t be any good until he knew which way he could roll to avoid the return bursts. Feeling the ice-cold outline of the gun in its plastic wrap and its thirty-round “banana” magazine, he flicked the safety on the left-hand side to the three-round burst position.

  A machine gun’s rip sounded left of him, grenades exploded, and there was a steady, low “bump-bump-bump” as SPETS triangles continued to pour deadly fire through flare light into the white forest of descending SAS troops farther behind Brentwood. He could see at least two troopers dead in their chutes and another torso, the white blur in Brentwood’s infrared goggles the man’s blood bubbling from the headless body. “Jesus — Jesus—” Brentwood said. Two others hit mines as they landed, snow erupting, covering the troopers like icing sugar, deeper granular snow peppering the collapsing chutes like hail.

  Brentwood saw the black blob of a grenade coming his way, followed by an obscenity, but it crashed ten feet beyond him, and he lay deathly still as the uprooted snow peppered him, the grenade’s purplish-blue flash a jagged cross that lit up one of the SPETS it killed, giving Brentwood a start that he was so close to them. Another two were momentarily visible in the flash, and he fired two bursts. One SPETS flew backward like a puppet jerked off his feet, taking the full shock of the burst in his chest; the other man managed to get off a wild burst as he slipped on the snow that had instantaneously turned to ice in the heat of the explosion. Now another trooper, his body sagged in harness, hit the snow, the chute collapsing around him, when suddenly, having faked it, the trooper came alive, announcing his arrival with a long burst that ended with “… fucker!” in an Australian accent.

  Figuring the dead SPETS must be within a safety moat around a rat hole — they’d hardly put themselves in the middle of a minefield but rather would have “sown” the area around the rat holes — David made a split-second decision: if SAS had screwed up, not bringing any MIC LICs — the 330-foot-long mine-clearing line or “hose” charges, cables packed with explosive charges to clear an eight-yard-wide swath through minefields during an infantry advance — then he’d just have to improvise.

  Taking off his gloves he quickly reeled in the tether line that had been attached to the equipment pack. He froze as a chute flare popped high to his right; it wasn’t shapes they’d be looking for as much as movement. As the light waned, the flare drifting east over the high cliffs only a hundred yards or so in front of him, David lined up the six HE grenades. The first three had seven-second fuses, the other three, designated for “room service” by the SAS, only three-second ones. He waited for the next SPETS flare — they’d been coming at fairly regular intervals near where he and Aussie had hit ground. But now that David wanted to see one none came, and he realized that his and Aussie’s drop, and possibly a few others, marked the southern extremity of the drop over the northern half of the island.

  Then a flare mushroomed a quarter mile north of them, its fierce incandescent light macabrely beautiful, the snow acting like a million tiny strobe mirrors, turning night to bluish white day, the dazzling effect belying the life-and-death struggle most of the SAS stick further north were now engaged in, having bailed out only seconds before the abort command from Freeman. David knew he’d have to make, as calmly and accurately as he could, six throws in as many seconds before the first grenade exploded. Six arcs, each shorter than the one before it, using his seventy-pound pack as a shield for the one that should explode nearest him, the overpressure from its V-shaped detonation, as well as its shrapnel, hopefully setting off any antipersonnel mines. It occurred to him he might not even be in a minefield at all but in a mine-free zone used by the SPETS as they’d back-walked to the rat hole entrances after having sown the mines. But if he was in a minefield and took one step forward…

  He slipped off his gloves, flexing his fingers quickly to keep the circulation up long enough. Ten yards or so back of him, Aussie Lewis picked up a rush of movement on his goggles’ green background. His trigger finger slipped off the guard at the same instant that he saw the top of a diamond — another SAS trooper — at one o’clock, thirty feet away. Ten to one, he told himself, it was Brentwood — no clear image to go by, of course, just the infrared blur of helmet and white thermal jump suit, but Brentwood, as leader of the seventy-man SAS stick, had been the first out of the C-141. “You beaut! You little—” Aussie whispered, his voice drowned by an earsplitting roar and earth-shattering “crump” of heavy 120-millimeter Soviet mortars.

  David Brentwood took a deep breath, exhaled half of it, held the rest and tossed the grenades — one, two, three, four, five, the fifth one going off as he let go of the sixth, dropping to the snow an
d pulling his equipment pack against his helmet as cascades of powder snow and fragments of rock pebbles fell on him and a sliver of white-hot metal passed through the thermal suit, gashing his right thigh. A second later he felt a burning sensation on his back — hot or freezing cold he couldn’t tell. It was lumps of snow, now ice, fused by the grenade’s heat.

  Using the pack as a rest he fired two long bursts, tattooing the ground along the twenty-to-thirty-yard line of the grenades’ explosion. Only one more mine went off, with an almost disappointing “pop,” but it was loud enough for Aussie who, though further back, had his face pockmarked by splinters, his goggles scratched so badly they were no longer of any use to him. David clipped on a fresh magazine and was up and running straight into the rough canal-like fissure cleared through the snow by the grenades, firing from the hip, Aussie covering him, two SPETS rising out of “fucking nowhere,” as Aussie would later recount, off to their left, the telltale stutter and flame of their two AK-47s silenced in a long, angry burst from the Australian. The Siberian commandos fell face first “while fucking Brentwood — no fucking apology for my face — does a fucking Babe Ruth for the home plate. Lucky bastard’s first one to see a ventilator shaft, then a sealed-off rat hole. Crafty buggers had it protected under an overhanging rock ledge.”