by Jeff Edwards
Myers and Hicks finished the Mk-26 sweep, and backed away from the device until they were well clear of the danger area. Then they made their way across the ice to Gunny’s position, Myers still carrying the L-shaped magnetic sensor.
The wind wasn’t blowing very hard, but it had a whistling quality that made conversation difficult, so Myers leaned in close and spoke loudly. “Secondary recon is complete, Gunny. No big surprises. I count six shaped-charges of roughly thirty pounds each. Cyclohexyl-based plastic explosives. The Fido samples called out cyclic nitramine with high mercury content. Looks like Russian military-grade RDX to me.”
Gunny nodded. He’d gotten the same readings. “Continue.”
“All six charges are wired to a central initiator, enclosed in an insulated housing. On the RTR-4, it looks like a couple of blocks of electronics, connected to each other, to the charges, and to a cable that runs down through the ice.”
Gunny nodded again. The report matched his own assessment.
“No signs of any anti-tamper devices,” Myers said. “I didn’t spot any proximity detectors, no motion sensors, no tripwires. Nothing.” He shrugged. “I don’t want to jinx anything, but I think our render-safe procedure is going to be pretty simple. I say we take out the initiator with the PAN, and use Niffers to cut all six pairs of firing wires simultaneously.”
The PAN, short for Percussion-Actuated Non-electric Disrupter, was a specialty tool of the EOD trade. Consisting of a long stainless steel barrel attached to an adjustable metal frame, the PAN used blank 12-gauge shotgun shells to fire specially-designed slugs into bomb components, destroying key circuits or mechanisms, and making the bomb inoperative.
Niffer was the common pronunciation of the abbreviation NFR, which stood for Nonvolatile Fast-Response Wire Cutter. A Niffer was a tube-shaped device—about the size of a fountain pen—that could be attached to a small bundle of electrical wires, and sever them on command. Unlike the PAN, which had been invented specifically for Explosive Ordnance Disposal, Niffers had been adapted from the American movie industry, where special effects technicians used them to remotely control pyrotechnic charges for action films.
“Good plan,” Gunny said. “That’s about what I was thinking. But I want to take out that Kevlar cable at the same time.” He jerked a thumb in the direction of the device. “Odds are, that cable leads to a remote trigger. We’d probably be okay if we left it in place. But I don’t want to gamble if we don’t have to. So we take it out of the equation, just to be on the safe side.”
Staff Sergeant Myers nodded. “Understood. How do you want to cut the cable? It’s too heavy for the Niffers, and we’re already using the PAN to disrupt the initiator package.”
“Let’s pop it with detonating cord,” Gunny said. “The cable is Kevlar, so it’s going to be resistant, but a couple of loops of det. cord ought to do the trick.”
“Roger,” Myers said. “I should have thought of that.”
Gunny Armstrong slapped him on the shoulder. “You will next time.”
Myers gave him a thumbs-up, his hand almost cartoonishly large in the thick cold weather glove. “Roger that,” he said.
The Staff Sergeant looked out across the grubby surface of the ice, in the direction of the device. “Is it just me? Or is this turning out to be too easy?”
“Don’t count your chickens,” Gunny said. “When we’ve finished the render-safe procedure on this site and the second site, you can tell me all about how easy this all was while we’re riding home in that raggedy-ass chopper. Until then, make sure you keep eyes in the back of your head, Marine.”
Myers nodded. “Will do, Gunny.” He turned and walked toward the team’s pile of equipment, to select the gear they’d need to safe the explosives.
Gunny Armstrong watched the younger Marine go without speaking. He was feeling it too: the nagging suspicion that this mission was proceeding just a little too smoothly. EOD jobs never went this easily, not even in training exercises.
He kept wondering if they had forgotten something, if all four members of his team had overlooked some critical detail. But as hard as he wracked his brain, he couldn’t think of a thing.
Then again, maybe it wasn’t something they’d missed. Maybe it was a premonition.
The idea brought a grunt of disdain. Gunnery Sergeant Thomas Armstrong did not believe in premonitions. That crap was for the Psychic Hotline; dial 1-800-Mystic-Bullshit.
He shook his head. It was just a case of the heebie-jeebies. His best bet of getting out of this in one piece was to forget about premonitions and focus on doing the job safely and correctly.
He picked his way across the ice, toward the spot where Staff Sergeant Myers was breaking out the gear. Gunny spoke to himself as he walked, his voice swallowed up by the whistling wind. It was an unconscious thing; he wasn’t even aware that he was doing it. “This ain’t gonna work,” he said to himself. “It ain’t gonna fucking work.”
* * *
But it did work. Despite Gunny Armstrong’s growing sense of foreboding, his team rigged their equipment without incident. When everything was set, they all pulled back to a safe distance, and he gave Myers the go signal.
Myers flipped up the protective cover on the remote trigger, and gave the button three quick squeezes. On the third squeeze, the disrupters all triggered at once. All six of the Niffers rammed their metal pistons home, shearing six pairs of firing wires with a noise like the slamming of several car doors. At the same instant, the long-barreled PAN fired a ceramic-tipped steel slug into the center of the initiator package, punching through the insulated housing to shatter the modules of electrical circuitry inside. The det cord ignited simultaneously, the little knot of chemical explosive parting the Kevlar cable with a bang not much louder than a firecracker.
In an instant, the job was done. The small quantities of smoke from the PAN disrupter and the det cord were snatched away by the brisk Siberian wind, and the single echo bounced off the face of the ice and faded to silence.
Gunny felt his unease relax half a notch. One job down, and everybody still had their fingers and toes. If the second device went as smoothly as this one, they might make it home after all.
He glanced at Myers. “We’ll start packing up the gear,” he said. “You get on short-comm and inform the chopper that Response Element Two has completed Site Charlie, and we’re standing by for transport to Site Delta.”
Staff Sergeant Myers acknowledged the order, and began digging in the side pocket of his parka for the new hand-held battlefield phone known as short-comm.
Gunny Armstrong turned toward the other two Marines, and he was getting ready to issue further instructions when he caught a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye. He looked up and saw a helicopter flying toward his team, keeping low to the ice and moving fast. For a couple of seconds, it flew in apparent silence, and then he began to hear the throp of the rotors: barely audible at first, but quickly growing louder as the chopper closed on their position.
Gunny’s brain processed three thoughts in rapid succession. First … The helicopter shouldn’t be here yet. It was supposed to stand off to the south until the team called for it, which Myers hadn’t done yet. Second … It was the wrong kind of helicopter. And third … He was watching the evidence of his premonition brought to life.
He didn’t know what he’d been expecting. An accident, maybe, or a misstep, or a booby trap. But not this.
He pursed his lips and whistled sharply, to grab instant attention. “Hit the deck!” he yelled. “That’s not our chopper!”
As the words left his mouth, he threw himself forward, hitting the ice hard, his body plowing through several inches of grubby snow. The impact with the ice knocked the breath out of him, but there was no time to worry about that. He reached behind him, his hands scrabbling to find the M-4 carbine slung barrel-down across his back.
His right hand made contact with the collapsible stock of the rifle, gloved fingers groping for purchase on t
he smooth carbon plastic of the butt. He got a hold on his weapon and hauled it around into a two-handed shooting grip.
The helicopter was still getting closer, the sound of its rotors growing from a rumble to rhythmic thunder.
Out of the sides of his eyes, Gunny took inventory of his men. They had followed his lead. They were all prone on the ice, with weapons drawn and tracking the inbound chopper.
Hopefully, hitting the deck made them smaller targets, but it damned sure didn’t hide them. The greens and browns of their woodland camouflage were a sharp visual contrast to the dirty whites and grays of the ice.
Bulldozer in a fucking bathtub, Gunny thought again.
He was getting a better look at the helicopter now. The bulbous nose of the aircraft had two bubble-shaped cockpits, one atop the other and set slightly aft. Angled weapons pylons stuck out from the right and left sides of the fuselage, like stubby wings. Gunny recognized it as a Russian HIND-D. A gunship, well armored against small arms fire. Practically a flying tank, with enough guns and rockets to chew his men to ribbons.
The Soviets had used HINDs in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties, and they’d wreaked a vicious toll on the Afghani fighters until President Reagan had authorized the shipment of shoulder-launched Stinger missiles through back-door channels in Pakistan.
A Stinger could take down a HIND gunship. A rocket-propelled grenade might manage it too, with a lucky enough shot. But the EOD team didn’t carry Stingers, or even RPGs, and there wasn’t a chance of punching through that armored Son-of-a-Bitch with the 5.56mm NATO rounds from their M-4 carbines.
The only spots vulnerable to small arms fire were the helicopter’s rotors and the tail boom, both of which were difficult to hit. It was the only choice they had, so Gunny flipped a mental coin. It came up tails.
“Go for the tail!” he shouted. “You can’t get through the armor with M-4s. We gotta shoot the fucking tail off of this thing!”
His Marines answered with two grunts and an Ooh-rah. Gunny grinned to himself. Stupid Jarheads. Goddamn, they were good men.
He thumped the base of the magazine with the heel of his hand to make sure that it was seated in the mag well, slapped the bolt release to jack a round into the chamber, and flipped the fire selector from safe to burst. The weapon felt clumsy in his gloved hands.
Like the rest of his team, Gunny wore BlackHawk/HellStorm ECW Winter Operations gloves from U.S. Cavalry. They weren’t as cumbersome as the Marine Corps-issue cold weather gloves, but he knew from experience that they would still affect his accuracy. He couldn’t risk shooting bare-handed, because his M-4 had been exposed to the open air for hours. The metal parts of the weapon would be cold enough to stick to his skin.
He glanced at the elevation setting of the rear sight, decided that it was close enough, and sighted in on the helicopter.
The HIND’s gunner opened fire, just as Gunny Armstrong was slipping his index finger into the trigger well of his M-4. The turret beneath the helicopter’s chin swiveled in the direction of Gunny’s team, and the four-barreled Gatling gun cut loose with a sound like a high-speed jackhammer.
A swarm of 12.7mm machinegun bullets slammed into the ice a few yards to Gunny’s left, spraying showers of snow and ice fragments into the air. The Marine paid no attention. His focus was riveted on the tail of the gunship.
He popped off a three-round burst of bullets, corrected his aim, and popped off another burst, and then another. The M-4 shuddered in his hand, the shortened stock thumping hard into his right shoulder with each recoil. From somewhere to his left, he heard a scream as the helicopter’s minigun found one of his men.
Gunny rolled onto his back as the gunship passed directly over him, not more than thirty feet above the ice. The right edge of his parka hood scooped up a handful of snow as he turned, forcing it under the insulated fabric where it was jammed against his cheek and ear. The downdraft from the chopper lifted snow from all around him and sucked it into the air like a dirty mist. The sound of the rotors reached peak volume, but it wasn’t loud enough to drown out a cry of pain from one of his Marines. It sounded like Travers, but Gunny couldn’t be sure.
He could smell cordite now, and blood, and the burnt kerosene odor of the gunship’s engine exhaust. He continued firing at the helicopter’s tail rotor, his weapon bucking in his hands as he unleashed one burst after another. His shell casings fell around him, the hot brass sizzling as it tumbled across the ice.
He saw a trio of holes appear in the tail boom of the helicopter, as someone’s bullets found their mark. His weapon locked open on an empty magazine, and then the chopper was past his team, banking hard to starboard and coming around for another pass.
It took the HIND a few seconds to align itself for the next attack run. Gunny used the time to eject the spent magazine from his M-4, scramble for a fresh one, and jam it into the mag well. He hit the bolt release to chamber the first round, and then sighted in on the helicopter again, watching for any sign that the bullet damage to the tail was affecting its airworthiness. The damage didn’t seem to be catastrophic, as the HIND kept right on flying.
Gunny braced himself for the next pass, but it didn’t come. The gunship came to a hover about fifty yards away, its nose pointed in the direction of the EOD team’s position.
A pair of rockets leapt from under the outboard pylon on the starboard wing, shrieking toward Gunny’s people on thin trails of gray smoke. Before they were even clear of the airframe, a second pair of rockets leapt from the outboard pylon on the opposite wing.
Gunny’s brain instinctively solved a dozen complex geometric calculations in the space of two heartbeats, and he knew that one of the rockets was headed straight for him. With a launch velocity not much lower than the speed of a bullet, the rocket crossed the distance in an instant, but somehow he saw it coming the entire way.
His finger yanked repeatedly against the trigger of his weapon, pumping bullets toward the gunship as rapidly as the M-4’s rate of fire permitted—hoping blindly to bring down the helicopter even as it killed him.
He never found out if his final wish was granted. The rocket struck the ice less than a meter from his right elbow. He had only the briefest impression of unbearable light, and heat, and sound. There was a split-second flare of pain, and then there was nothing.
CHAPTER 52
OPERATIONS COMMAND POST #2
OUTSIDE PETROPAVLOVSK-KAMCHATSKI, RUSSIA
THURSDAY; 07 MARCH
1340 hours (1:40 PM)
TIME ZONE +12 ‘MIKE’
“Comrade President?”
Sergiei Mikhailovich Zhukov wiped a trace of gorokhovye broth from his lips with the rough weave of a homespun napkin, and looked up from his lunch. His chief assistant, Maxim Ivanovitch Ustanov, was standing a few meters away from the table. The man was visibly shaking.
Zhukov did not permit himself to frown. The overt nervousness of his assistant was almost certainly a sign of bad tidings, but Zhukov went to considerable effort to avoid directing his temper toward the members of his trusted inner circle. He kept his voice carefully casual. “What is it, Maxim Ivanovitch?”
“Comrade President,” his assistant said again, “there is news. I am afraid that it is not good.”
Zhukov laid the napkin on the table top next to his brown earthenware bowl. Gorokhovye—pea and onion soup, seasoned with pork—was a traditional Russian dish, dating back to the times before even the Tsars. It was simple, but filling and delicious. A common man’s meal, and Zhukov ate it with thick black bread, as was also the tradition.
He waved to a chair. “Please, my old friend. Sit down. Tell me this news that has gotten you so upset.”
Ustanov did not take the offered chair. “Comrade President, one of our patrol helicopters has encountered and destroyed a team of United States Marines on the ice pack, in the Sea of Okhotsk.”
Zhukov spent several seconds absorbing this news. “Special Forces,” he said finally. “They are looking for me. They h
ope to decapitate our revolution by assassinating its leader.”
Ustanov shook his head. “I do not think so, Comrade President. These men … these American Marines … were …” His voice trailed off.
“They were what?” Zhukov asked quietly. “It is alright, Maxim Ivanovitch. You can tell me. What were these Americans doing?”
Ustanov cleared his throat. “They … ah … They were disarming the explosives at the northeastern zashishennaja pozicija.”
“What?” The word was practically a roar. Zhukov stood up so rapidly that he jarred the table, causing gorokhovye to slosh over onto the table cloth.
Ustanov flinched, and took a half-step backwards.
Zhukov regained control quickly. He lowered himself into his chair, picked up his napkin, and began dabbing at the spilled soup. As he worked at the small task, he concentrated on slowing his breathing and leveling his demeanor.
He had a reputation for being as fierce in protecting those who were loyal to him as he was in punishing those who were disloyal. He dealt harshly with underlings who didn’t meet his expectations, but he did not attack his close supporters and confidants.
When he spoke again, his voice was more measured. “Forgive me,” he said. “Your news took me by surprise. I hope you can understand my alarm.” He laid the napkin down again with movements of almost supernatural delicacy. “The ice pack conceals and protects our submarine, but it also prevents us from firing. We must maintain the ability to launch attacks at-will. If the K-506 cannot launch, we lose both our leverage, and our deterrence against retaliation.”
He pushed the bowl away from himself. His appetite was gone. “How many of our launch positions have been compromised?”