And if it doesn’t work, Macintyre?
It’ll work. It has to.
You can’t let them have the nukes, no matter what it costs. If they get them, you lose. You have to plan for that—and you know what they do to prisoners.
Val’s eyes scoured the tunnel walls, trying to pick out some escape from the grim reality. Finding none, she made up her mind. I need Tampier, she decided.
Val called for her runners, sending them off to gather the leaders. Then she worked her way towards her ammunition cache.
Twenty minutes later she had what she wanted. Faces blackened from camouflage and grime, the garrison’s assembled leadership sat facing the room’s center with their backs propped against the cold stone walls. On the bare floor Val took chalk and drew the major corridors and routes of the counterattack. With the sketch illuminated more by the women’s wills than by the beams of flashlights and the glow of chemical light wands, Val issued what she felt could be her last order.
The oddity of it all was not lost on Christine. Especially odd, Christine realized, was how familiar it felt. There was something soothing about Val’s clipped words when she briefed the mission. Christine felt a strange sense of normalcy as she watched the leaders nodding their understanding. The desperation of earlier hours of fighting receded, replaced by a grim calm. The plan was simple and direct. The counterattack force would infiltrate through the blocked elevator shaft and then through the “mouseholes” they had chipped through the walls. A second group—very few soldiers, for the bulk of what was left was needed for the attack—would draw the Russians towards them and hold the thin defensive “line” of positions along the hallways. Two SAWs were to be handed off to those detailed to hold the Russians by the nose. The M60s and most M203 gunners would join the teams counterattacking. Ammunition was to be redistributed and the attacking force was to carry a double load of grenades, along with wire cutters and other equipment for clearing a path through the obstacles they’d built in the tunnels. The Russians would be locked into trying to squash the defenders and bunched up enough to provide a target for the counterattack force. The Americans would throw their concentrated weight against the enemy.
Christine waited in a near-trance for her name as Val briefed. As Val ran through the sub-unit missions, the young lieutenant’s anxiety level slowly rose—she’d heard nothing about her part.
Then Val pulled Christine aside.
“Lieutenant Tampier, you will take your demo specialist to area seven, level three. There you will prepare one Atomic Demolition Munitions for timed detonation. You will provide your own security.”
~*~
In area seven, level three, Christine and Sgt. Lucia Panjwani started the timer, initiating the ADM’s firing sequence. Sgt. Panjwani insured the power cable assembly was securely in place, then bolted the ADM firing device’s cover back on. Wordlessly, the two women slid bayonets from their sheaths and fixed them to their rifles. Determined to personally take down some of the enemy before the bomb took them all, the lieutenant and the sergeant headed back for the fighting.
Below Infernesk Munitions Depot
In the pitch-black of the elevator shaft, a long vertical line of Val’s soldiers pulled themselves up the maintenance ladder. Clipping their way through the barbed wire they had laced to prevent the Russians from following them down, the counterattack force inched its way upward.
Val waited just behind her lead team, her eyes locked on the dull green dots of two chemical lights above. Stuffed under the elastic camouflage bands around the tops of the point soldiers’ helmets, the lights glowed just enough for the lead team to disarm the booby trap tripwires above them. They advanced more by feeling than seeing their way, and the caterpillar stop-and-go was more maddening than rush-hour traffic. The force climbed three rungs, paused while the lead team disassembled an obstacle or a grenade tripwire, then pulled themselves up another two.
Val’s first knowledge that they had found the elevator door came when she heard the crunches of a prybar at work. Scraps of wood fell down the shaft as the point worked the barricades loose. They passed down the boards they’d placed to close off the doors, then finally the prybars were handed down, bucket-brigade style, until they reached the soldier at the end of the ladder, who passed the material through the open level three door.
This was the counterattack force’s most dangerous moment. Everything depended upon surprise, upon their enemy being so engrossed with fighting the garrison’s stay-behind element below that they had not secured their rear. Lined up as the Americans were along the shaft, it would take no more than a couple of grenades, maybe no more than one Russian with his rifle set for automatic fire, to eradicate Val’s plans to punch through to the surface.
Surrounded by soldiers above and below her, Val had never felt so alone. In the clammy air only the low crunches of tools working against wood cut the tension, and her nervous sweat had nowhere to go. Dust drifted down into her eyes and her arms ached from holding onto the ladder. When the chemlights above her winked out, she knew the pair of soldiers on point were slithering through the pried-open doors. She strained to hear the telltale cracks of rifle fire that would tell her that their chances were gone. Minutes passed as the pair on point felt their way down the hall. Then the fire team above Val went out into the corridors, securing a space large enough for the rest of the force to deploy. Val pulled herself up to the elevator door, one step from breaking out of shaft’s gloom, and waited for the signal.
~*~
With a half-dozen Russians giving chase and moving at a dead run, Ann Shapiro turned a corner and sprinted down the wide hallway. One step, she counted in her head, two, three, jump! She cleared the low obstacle, counted again—this time to five, then ducked onto all fours. She scrambled along the hallway for about three meters, then rose and dashed the few remaining meters to where her partner lay.
“They’re right behind me—half a squad and they got a damn machine gun,” she gasped out as she rolled behind the sandbags and slid her weapon into the firing port. She cocked her head. Gauging the footsteps to be far enough away, Shapiro dropped the magazine out of her M16 and clicked a full one into the weapon’s magazine well.
“Go easy, Sharpie. We ain’t got all the bullets in the world.”
“It figures. Not only do I get to play hide and seek and tag with a mob of Russian gangbangers, I get to do it in the middle of an ammo dump that’s short on bullets.”
“At least you got good company.”
“Shit. The major took just about everybody else to go counterattack, and left me with you.”
“So?”
“So what have you done for me lately?”
The sounds of approaching enemy cut off his answer.
“Company’s coming.”
A second later, the shrill whistle of a booby trap let them know the Russians had turned the corner. Shapiro and Cruz silently counted one, two, then heard the Russians curse as they banged into the first obstacle. Set at a height about halfway between the ankle and the knee, four thick boards wrapped in barbed wire had been bolted to the walls. There were groans as the lead Russians bashed their shins and tumbled one over the other. Shapiro and Cruz fired low. Cruz methodically spaced his shots, shifting the barrel of his M16 an inch at a time. Shapiro squeezed out four sets of three-round bursts. After ten seconds they stopped
“I want my ‘A-one’ back,” she muttered, thinking of how the earlier version of the rifle had a “full auto” position on the selector. “This three-round shit is for the birds. Whoever made this thing sure as hell didn’t think about fighting in buildings.”
The rattle of equipment and the thud of running feet told them the Russians were again on the move, a message that was confirmed by a steady beat of incoming fire. Shapiro and Cruz flattened.
“It’s like in the movies. One round every two strides.”
“More than that.” A line bullets whacked into the wall a foot above their heads. “That’s th
e MG I saw.”
“I wonder if they’re high-stepping to save their knees from the next obstacle?”
A scream answered his question. Russian machine-gun fire went wild as the gunner plowed into the second obstacle, another set of barbed wire wrapped boards bolted across the hallway. These, however, were set about level with a man’s neck. Where Shapiro had ducked and crawled under, the charging Russian machine gunner took the wire full in the face. For a split-second the two Russians traveling just to the gunner’s left and right rear took their fingers off their triggers as they ducked. Cruz heaved a grenade. Shapiro emptied a magazine.
The hallway was quiet.
“C’mon, Sharpie. Cover me.” Cruz rolled up and out of the position. Not knowing what his plan was, Shapiro followed.
They edged their way along the wall to where the Russians lay strewn around the obstacles. Cruz slung his rifle, then unclipped his flashlight from his belt. He screwed the red filter off the light and ran the beam over the fallen Russians. Shapiro squinted—from hours in the tunnels’ gloom the even meager white light hurt her eyes. She closed one eye, just as Lt. Tampier had taught her, to keep her night vision from whiting out.
From around the corner, Shapiro heard the sounds of the follow-on force.
“Whatever you’re up to, Cruiser, hurry. These guys have friends.”
Shapiro’s one-eyed gaze darted back and forth from the corner to Cruz. Cruz poked among the bodies, tugging off grenades and cramming them into his cargo pockets. He half rose and swept the flashlight over the dead enemy, then paused.
“Got it!”
Cruz yanked a weapon away from a Russian corpse, then tugged away a small box.
The oncoming footsteps grew louder, then stopped. Too-close incoming snapped overhead. Shapiro sent three rounds down the hallway.
Cruz clicked off the flashlight. “We’re outta here.”
Rifle fire followed them as they backpedaled out. A hundred meters and two turns down the twisting corridors they found their next position, set in one corner of a shop area. Shapiro and Cruz settled in behind a pile of stacked steel desks and scrap metal. For a few minutes they waited silently, listening for the attackers. When the Russians did not show the tension eased.
“They’ll be about a platoon of ‘em, Cruiser, maybe more.”
“Yeah.”
She stared at him. “I can’t believe you got your butt—and mine—in a sling just so you could go souvenir hunting.”
“Forget the souvenirs, I got their grenades. And something else. You want to know what I’ve done for you lately?” He pulled the Russian gun and box of ammunition up between them. “Here.”
“So what? Some bad guy’s rifle?”
“It’s the machine gun, stupid. You figure out how to work it—it can’t be that hard. And it fires full auto.”
Shapiro looked over the gun. The buttstock had a nasty crease where one of their bullets had grazed it on the way to killing its owner, but otherwise the weapon appeared undamaged. It took her only a minute to get familiar with it. She locked the belt in place, chambered a round, and pointed the gun’s business end toward the hallway they’d just left. Then she looked back at her partner.
“I take it all back, Cruiser,” she smiled. “You really know how to treat a lady.”
They ducked when a grenade burst at the room’s other edge.
~*~
As the counterattack force pawed its way out of elevator shaft and groped down the corridors, in Val’s mind the fear of what might happen was replaced by the ugly knowledge of what soon would. Dying stacked one on top of the other along the access ladder had been a nightmare that passed unrealized. Now they would have to find their enemy, a fear that they were deliberately moving to meet.
They spread out slowly, soldiers trickling out of the shaft and into the more open corridors. As she had briefed, Val pushed three-soldier teams out well in front.
Of these soldiers, one was armed with an M203 with a fragmentation grenade ready in the chamber. Although the arming range was in excess of the short distances in which they had engaged the Russians below, here the work areas were open enough and the hallway long enough that the 40mm grenades might come in handy. The other two carried M16 rifles, both set to fire three-round bursts. All three carried grenades: fragmentation on the right, smoke on the left. The last soldier also carried, curiously, two signal flares. That there was no one to signal in the tunnels—and obviously no height for these flares to rise to—should have made them no more than extra weight. Yet more than once in the last several hours one of Val’s soldiers had sent a sparkling green or red star cluster spiraling down a hallway or across an open space. The light show of the charge bouncing off the walls, then bursting in the middle of or behind the attackers had also more than once illuminated the Russians and caused them to take a fatal “Now what was that?” pause.
They padded forward noiselessly. They had long since become very good at tracking down rattling equipment and wrapping it. Eliminating the noise from loose gear was made all the easier by the loss of hearing that combat in the tunnels had brought. Then, too, there were no sounds of boots scuffling down the hallway. If there had been light for a casual observer to see, that observer might well have noticed that there were no boots. Instead, Major Macintyre’s garrison had taken cans of black polish to their running shoes. The garish colors and symbols of a dozen popular brands of high-tops and aerobic training footwear were buried beneath layers of black dye, complemented by the complex’s added grime. The silencing of the Americans’ footsteps more than made up for the lack of military appearance.
The point teams felt their way down their appointed hallways with two soldiers leading, one on each side of the hall and the third following three to five meters back, or just close enough to keep in hazy view the “cat eyes”—two inch-wide strips of luminous tape sewn to the backs of the helmet camouflage band—of the soldiers in the lead. Thus formed, the little “open-vee” formation was flexible enough let the trios of soldiers on point accomplish many tasks on their own. Where they came upon a room or side corridor, the soldier on the far wall would “pull security” by keeping watch along the original direction of their movement. The soldier nearest the entrance and the trailing soldier would team up to check out the area. Whoever was nearest the entryway would drop to their belly and peer around the door’s edge as the trail soldier moved up. Then the prone soldier would scoot back, rise, and the two would go in together, rolling around the corner and shoving their backs to the inside walls.
To the trail soldier also fell the task of messenger. They expected to make contact, and once they did their experience told them that shouts would blend with gunfire, that both would echo off the walls, and that the chaos would let no one know what was truly happening. Most likely both lead soldiers—if both survived, and that depended on whether the Russians or the Americans saw their enemy first—would be pinned in place. Once the shooting started, then the man or the woman in the rear had the job of running like hell back to the section leader.
~*~
The first indication Mary Parker had that the enemy was near was not noise, but smell. She sniffed the acrid traces of gunpowder and the stale ash-smells of smoke grenades. Susan Phillips, edging her way along the wall just opposite of Mary, rolled her tongue around her mouth to chase away the taste. The sputter of a firefight in the making helped them home in. Ahead the hallway grew lighter. With their back-up man—Pfc. Dave Merlin—just a few feet behind, Parker and Phillips slipped forward to a ‘T’ intersection.
Blinking her eyes, Mary peered out and around the corner. They had come out onto a metal walkway that ran around a parking-lot-sized room. A huge block and tackle hung from a metal track on the room’s ceiling. A few working overhead lights turned the shop floor below into a crazy quilt of light and darkness, and that quilt was laced with abandoned machinery. It was also crowded with Russians.
Parker gestured to Phillips to look down. Her partner
nodded, then motioned for Phillips to look up. Directly across the room from them Phillips counted over twenty Russians slowly picking their way down the gangway towards the floor below, with more behind. Merlin scooted forward to take in the scene, then hustled back to find section leader Cpl. Toni Demiliozak.
Having once been chided for not taking advantage of an opportunity, Demiliozak was not about to make the same mistake twice. Sending a runner to the rear to inform her major, she hustled the rest of her squad forward. She halted them not three meters from where Parker and Phillips lay at the corner and crawled forward to check for herself. It took her only one look to decide.
Demiliozak smelled blood. As Parker and Phillips crept out onto the gangway to provide left and right security, Demiliozak brought up her squad. Their squinting eyes darting first to the oblivious enemy entering the cavernous room, then to the Russians on the floor below, Demiliozak’s soldiers peeled off left and right along the gangway until they formed a line. The sounds of rifle fire that drifted from the corridors beyond the great room masked the clicks of Private Ronald Moletti locking a fresh belt into his M60 machine gun.
Demiliozak checked up and down the gangway, then across to the lengthening line of enemy. One of the Special Security troopers must have felt her gaze, for he turned his head. Their eyes met.
The American corporal and the Russian Special Security soldier yelled at the same time. The Russians on the walkway swiveled. Having made ready and taken aim, Demiliozak, Parker, Phillips, Merlin, Moletti, and the others pulled triggers.
With the reinforcing Special Security force caught standing in the open and lined up against a wall, the execution lacked only blindfolds.
~*~
Spurred on by the sounds of gunfire, Val rushed the rest of her force down corridors, aiming to hit the enemy in flank. She fell in just behind the lead trio of soldiers, leading her force through the maze of turns and passages. At an intersection they took fire. Val shucked one of her own smoke grenades, dropped off a pair to pin the enemy, then led the rest of the force on. A lone Russian appeared in front of them. Without breaking stride the soldier beside Val leveled his M203 and fired, the round striking the Russian square in the chest. Too close to detonate, the 40mm bullet carried the Russian back. Instinctively, Val shot the dazed enemy dead. The attackers kept going.
The Best Defense Page 29