Arctic Front wi-4

by Ian Slater

  “No wonder I was—” began Mayne, feeling foolish, only now realizing what he was looking at — that the half-dozen black doughnuts, a white dot in the middle of each the size of a pin-head, were the Siberian ICBM sites set in the deep, V-shaped defiles of towering, glacier-hung granite. These were open missile silos in Kamchatka Peninsula. The next photo was of the ICBM complex at Petropavlovsk which, though difficult to get at with U.S. missiles because of the acute south-north turning angles required to hit a target in deep east-west axis defiles, could nevertheless very easily take out the U.S. Trident and Sea Wolf bases as far away as Washington State and San Diego.

  “It’s their answer, Mr. President,” said Trainor solemnly. “They haven’t blinked. You go nuclear. They go nuclear. Nobody wins.”

  Mayne, shoulders rounded, head bent like an accountant confronted by the overwhelming power of the IRS ranged against his client, reluctantly flipped over the other photographs. More black donuts in the Siberian snows. “Then it has to be all-out conventional,” he said glumly to Trainor.

  “Yes, Mr. President. But, as the Joint Chiefs point out, we’ll have to neutralize the ICBM silos on Kamchatka sooner or later— can’t afford to leave them there so they can pummel us anytime they like.” Trainor pulled over a CIA report.”Siberian conventional ammunition reserves are sixty days. After that we’d risk them going nuclear.”

  Again Mayne was struck by the terrible irony of the nuclear age. You invented nuclear weapons, which supposedly made conventional arms obsolete but in order to make sure nuclear arms would never be used you had to fight modern wars with conventional forces and yet if supplies for the conventional weapons of one side ran out it might revert to nuclear anyway. So this meant you needed even more conventional weapons in the first place to take out the launch sites — to take out the nuclear possibility. It was an equation that the “Massachusetters,” which was Mayne’s term for all the doves, never understood, from George McGovern on down. But it was something with which every president, Democrat and Republican, had to contend once he sat in the Oval Office.

  “Then,” said Mayne, “looks like we’re back in the war room.”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  “Damn!” With that Mayne got up and asked Trainor for a Tylenol 3 and an aspirin 222. Only the “double whammy” stood any chance of dulling the tightening steel band of pain around his head and the thick pain that had waylaid his trapezius and neck muscles so that they felt as hard as bridge cables. Trainor saw him wince on the way down, but once in the corridor leading to the room there was no sign that the president was in pain, and anyone noticing his drawn features, the bags beneath bis eyes from lack of sleep, and the worry lines etched deep into his forehead saw these as the inevitable signs of the enormous responsibility shouldered by the commander in chief. And Trainor knew it was the truth, the strain taking its toll: more gray hair about the president’s temples and a set about his jaw that came from him being a nighttime “grinder,” the nightmare of a new war continuing to sabotage his already war-torn sleep.

  * * *

  It was not a very long meeting for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chief of naval operations, and the president’s special national security adviser Harry Schuman. They were of one accord. As well as ordering the offensive on the western front reactivated, pushing from Moscow toward the Urals, U.S. forces, with Canadian air cover as an assist, would have to engage in an airland battle to attack Siberia’s eastern flank and so establish a beachhead for Allied land operations against the United Siberian Soviet Republics.

  “Cross Bering Strait?” proffered Mayne, seeking unanimous agreement.

  “Yes, sir,” replied the CNO. “But first the navy and air force planes’ll have to knock out Big Diomede’s early warning and AA as well as antiship missile batteries. No chance with a land force. Two Diomedes Islands’ll be surrounded by a sea of jumbled drift ice.” The CNO produced a photograph of the jagged expanse of pressure ridges created by wind and sea action, many of the ridges up to sixty feet in height and six feet thick. “Carrier-launched planes’ll hit it from the south. Air force from the Alaskan peninsula.”

  “How about the Russian subs attacking our carrier?” put in Mayne.

  “Our battle groups’ll have usual guided missile destroyer and cruiser screen as well as helos and air cover — including fighter cover from the carrier itself and helos. Also we have several batteries of heavy guns on Little Diomede. Range to Big Diomede is less than three miles. Or five — depending on angle of fire.”

  “Can our batteries do much against granite?”

  “Some. All depends how deep the Russians are dug in. But our big ordnance bombs should do the job.” His right hand massaging his temple, Mayne said nothing, his mood of deep concentration inviting no comment. When he finally did speak, his tone was subdued. The confidence exuded by “big ordnance” men in the air force wasn’t shared by him. They had never really learned the lesson of Vietnam or Iraq. In Vietnam they’d dropped more bombs on the network collectively known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail than they had in all of World War II, and they still hadn’t beaten the North Vietnamese. In Iraq they’d hit Hussein’s troops with over three thousand sorties within the first week, but at the end of the day the coalition had still needed the ground war to win. And Hussein’s troops, though inferior to the Siberians, were dug in in sand, not granite. Also, the Siberians’ morale was rock solid compared to the Iraqis’. No, Mayne wanted backup — just in case. “Freeman.” It was more a question than a decision. After saying it he looked up at Trainor, the CNO, and the Joint Chiefs in turn as well as soliciting the wisdom of his special adviser Harry Schuman. Trainor heard the breath go out of General Grey, chief of the army.

  The president shifted his gaze to the general. “What is it, Jimmy?”

  “Sir. Douglas Freeman’s a good man, but in his present condition, I don’t think it’d be fair — either to the troops or to him.”

  Mayne was nonplussed.”You think he’s too tired? Hell, General, we’re all tired.”

  General Grey shot a glance of surprise in Trainor’s direction then back at the president. “I thought you knew, sir. CIA report came in about an hour ago.”

  Trainor made no apologies. Reports were coming in all the time. There was a river of reports; you got buried in reports.

  “What, about Freeman?”

  “No, sir — his wife. In critical condition in Peninsula Hospital. Multiple stab wounds, they say.”

  Mayne tried to remember whether he’d ever met Mrs. Freeman — some reception or other for the Desert Storm veterans back from Iraq. A tall, good-looking woman, unpretentious, but the exact features of her face were lost amid a blur of official receptions.

  “When did this happen?” asked Mayne, emotionally reassured by his own concern, that after a war that had claimed the lives of countless thousands he could still feel compassion for an individual. What was it Stalin had said? One death is a tragedy, and more is a statistic. It’s something you had to guard against, particularly as president.

  “Last night apparently,” answered Trainor.”FBI was called in by the MPs at Fort Ord, Freeman’s new HQ — because it had been called in on the police radio as a break and entry, possible burglary. But army intelligence figure it might be one of Chernko’s boys.”

  “A SPETS attack?” asked Mayne, surprised. After all, Freeman was no longer a threat to the Russians.

  The SPETS, short for SPETSNAZ or Voiska Spetsialnogo Naznacheniya, Special-Purpose Forces, were the highest trained, foreign-speaking, Russian commando elite who, among other things, had spread havoc when, dressed in American and British uniforms, they’d been dropped behind the Allied lines in the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket. Under the command of GRU’s, or Military Intelligence’s, Second Chief Directorate, the twenty-five-thousand-man force was the most brutal and best trained of the Russian special forces. But an attack on General Freeman’s wife? After all, hitting a commander’s wife didn’t stop a commander, and be
sides, Freeman was being recalled.

  “It’s to show, I suspect,” put in the British brigadier, Soames, “that they can reach whomever they wish. A caution perhaps against us using Freeman. May not be Chernko of course — he’s pledged his full assistance to us. It could be whoever is taking over his agents.”

  “It’s Chernko’s style all right,” Trainor concurred. “He’s been known to have his sleepers — agents already in place-target our nuclear sub captains while they’re off base here as well as abroad. Two of them got it while they were on leave around Faslane in Scotland — near our Holy Lock sub pens. But the FBI doesn’t figure he’d try that now, not after the surrender. Besides, our forward units are already in Moscow. What’s in it for him?”

  “Quite,” said Soames.

  ‘‘Problem is, gentlemen,” Mayne reminded them, “that KGB or not, General Freeman’s going to be too preoccupied with his wife’s condition. We can’t have him leading any mop-up operation after the bombardment on Big Diomede now.” Mayne saw Trainor about to speak but carried on, “I know he’s thoroughly professional, that he’d do it if we asked him, but the fact is he’ll be too preoccupied with her condition. It’s rotten luck. All other things considered he seemed the perfect man for a mop-up. But I don’t want the life of one American — not one — endangered because of some minor detail overlooked by a man too overwrought by family concerns back home. Once our naval battle group and air force take out Big Diomede I want it secured, and tightly, with no chance of them taking it back and cutting off our logistical supply between Alaska and Siberia. That’d be fatal. In any event, let’s not worry about Freeman now. Hell, if your boys do a good enough job, Admiral—” He was looking at Horton and then Air Force General Allet, “—there won’t be any garrison left to mop up.”

  Mayne’s confidence was bolstered by the plans of the naval battle group Admiral Horton was assembling out of San Diego, San Francisco, and Bangor, Washington. Even now orders were being issued for extra munitions to be rushed up to Little Diomede, for while its few guns on its more exposed western side couldn’t hope to do any significant damage to the eastern cliffs of the Siberian island three miles from them, Little Diomede’s gun emplacements would, along with the infamously changeable and hostile weather of the Bering Strait, run interference for the main naval battle group attack approaching from the Aleutians to the south and led in its center by the carrier USS Salt Lake City. Big Diomede was about to be subjected to a storm of firepower. While the island might withstand it, it was almost certain to destroy the will of the Siberian garrison so that Marines could be sent in and merely take it over. But all this wouldn’t be necessary if Novosibirsk and all the space program brains of Akademgorodok failed to get the approval of the Soviet Pacific Fleet to go along with the Siberian decision. In any event, preparations were underway to reactivate an element of the joint American-British SAS — Special Air Service commandos — the Allied equivalent of the SPETS, based in Wales, whose main squadrons, of seventy-two men each, were in the process of being demobilized.

  Mayne doubted they’d be used, but both he and the Joint Chiefs believed that the preparations would be another clear signal to the Siberians. If there was no Soviet naval attack in the next twenty-four hours, this would confirm quite clearly that the Soviet Navy, traditionally the most conservative of the Russian forces, were not in concert with Novosibirsk. The White House knew that if Novosibirsk lost its vital sea arm, it could not hope to prosecute any war for very long — let alone win one — and neither Freeman nor any other general would be needed.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Freeman’s sister-in-law, Marjorie Duchene, stood in silence by the general as he looked helplessly down in the intensive care unit of Monterey’s Peninsula Hospital, watching the comatose figure of his wife, the array of blinking monitors, IV drips, and translucent green color of the oxygen mask transforming Doreen’s appearance utterly. Here the general felt as useless as a conscript on his first day at boot camp — powerless to do anything but stand and take it. All he could do, as the chief resident informed him, was wait. For Freeman it might as well have been a prison sentence. The very idea of waiting, of being confronted by a problem he could not attack, do battle with, was anathema. He knew what he should be doing. He and Doreen had talked it over often enough, intending to empower each other to “pull the plug” if either of them was ever struck down by some such incontinent, paralyzed condition. But ironically the man who had been so thorough in his professional life — on more than one occasion astounding logistical officers with his attention to minor details of supply and combat support — was now faced by the fact that neither of them had actually got round to doing it — to making a “living will.”

  * * *

  Back at the house the silence of the rooms was all the more oppressive because of the thunderous crashing of high tide and surf which, Freeman noted in his diary, were he an enemy commander offshore, would be disastrous for any amphibious operation. Pacing the rooms, flicking on the TV, seeing protesters against any impending war with Siberia, Freeman muttered an obscenity and switched it off. He was like a caged lion, spitting out his contempt for those whose selfishness was so profound that they would not fight for the very freedom that allowed them to protest. There was only one place for conscientious objectors — front-line stretcher bearers. That put their high principle to the test.

  But it wasn’t all anger with the protesters that was adding to his concern, or — dare he say it? — ”anxiety” about Doreen, but rather guilt, a civilized luxury he rarely allowed himself. It was not the usual guilt of a military life — that he hadn’t spent enough time with her; that now he had the time to give her, to make up for the long separations, she was probably not even aware that he was around. Rather it was the guilt he felt for being angry at her for being in a coma. It was bad enough he’d been put out to pasture but now, just as war threatened to reopen with the Siberian breakaway from Moscow, Washington would keep him out of it because of her. He knew it was selfish, but he knew that to command men in battle was what he had been born for, and he knew Doreen would be the first to understand. It was why he loved her. Yes, it was his duty as a husband to be with her, but if he couldn’t do anything for her, what was the point of him staying around to—

  “Thank God you’re back home,” said Marjorie in her bubbly God’s-in-his-heaven-all’s-right-with-me-world voice. “I’m sure Dory knows you’re here, Douglas. It must be a comfort to her deep down. You know what they say about some stroke victims, that just knowing a loved one is nearby—”

  “Yes, yes,” said Freeman irritably.

  “I’m sorry, Douglas,” Marjorie said, mistaking his irritability for anxiety about Dory. “Why don’t you go out to the pool, and I’ll make some coffee and bring it out? Maybe you’d like to just sit awhile?”

  Freeman gave in; it was the only damn thing you could do with relatives. Sit by the pool till she got so tired of her own goodness or the cold front locking in Monterey that she’d hightail it back to sunny Phoenix. She was one of those people who said God had planned it all. He believed the same thing in his own way, but whenever she said it she made it sound so pious and self-satisfied — leaving no room for the possibility of human intervention — that she sounded positively evangelical.

  By the pool, Freeman fell silent, Marjorie patting him understandingly on the arm as she placed the coffee cups atop the bubbled plastic table. Again she’d completely mistaken his mood, his staring down at the pool an attempt to turn her off for a while, but she was as unrelenting as a Soviet artillery barrage, her vigor something he would have admired in any soldier. In her case it seemed nothing more than the energy of a certified airhead.

  She was a good woman, doing the right thing, but by God he wished she’d go back to Phoenix. At heart her optimism was born of the same kind of deep-seated confidence that Freeman held in the face of life’s vicissitudes, but something about her unquestioning conviction that “all is for the best”
only moved him to seek the opposite view, if only for argument’s sake, a perversity alien to his usual nature.

  “My,” she said, pouring the coffee in an irritating up-and-down motion that he saw no point to. “I was reading the other day about those Brentwood boys. Three heroes — all in one family. My, and the article said one of them was with you in Korea and the Dortmund-Bellfeld pocket.”

  “Bielefeld,” grumped Douglas. “He wasn’t with the there. He’d been dropped outside the pocket by mistake — smack into the Russian lines.”

  “You must be very proud of him,” she continued, oblivious to the correction. “Medal of Honor winner and all.”

  “Proud of all my boys who—” He was about to say “are” instead of “were in my command.” He pulled the coffee toward him. “Young David Brentwood. He’s a good man. Wounded in Russia but back on his feet in no time.”

  For a moment that indicated to him that he’d been away from the front too long, Freeman almost found himself in violation of security — about to tell her that members of the Allied outfit in which Brentwood served, Britain’s Special Air Service, were blood brothers with America’s Delta Force.

  “And the two other brothers,” continued Marjorie. “The one on that Roosevelt boat.”

  “Submarine,” Freeman corrected her.

  “But that poor other brother — Ray — the one whose face was all burned on that other boat.”

  “Guided missile frigate,” said Freeman, carelessly dropping in two sugar cubes as if they were dumb bombs.

  “The miracles those surgeons did on him. My oh my. If ever I saw the hand of God at work, Douglas, that was it.” A zephyr passed over the pool, wrinkling it, and he watched it like an omen before the surface was placid again. “And they have this special mask now — looks like one of those hockey goalies — to help the healing and…”