by Ian Slater
* * *
The surrender formally took place eleven minutes later at 1411 hours, though there was sporadic fighting by groups of SPETS along the island, until Dracheev was taken aboard one of the Apaches and, using a booster hailer to overcome the noise of the chopper, told his troops below it was all over.
“Brentwood!” It was Freeman congratulating him. “Good job, son. Damn good job.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Brentwood, but his mind was clearly on something else. Behind him Aussie Lewis, Choir Williams, and others were steering the SPETS to the ad hoc weapons dump in the basin. There AK-47s, 74s, even HK MP5K and rounds of nine-millimeter Parabellum along with grenades clattered on the heap. Many of the SPETS had to come up so fast they’d not had time to put on their white overlays; they were already shivering. But no one suspected for a moment that it was from fear, a strange air of equality between the two forces even in the SPETS defeat.
“Ah, General,” began Brentwood, his tone betraying his unwillingness to go on, “ah, we’ve got a bit of a problem here, sir.”
“What?”
“Sir, that CBN reporter you ordered off Little Diomede at the beginning—”
“What about him? Where’s Morgan?” Freeman was looking about.
“Morgan bought it, sir,” said Brentwood.
Freeman, hands on hips, stared at the pile of weapons. “Son of a bitch.” He turned to Brentwood. “The news guy, too?”
“No, sir,” replied Brentwood. “He’s still with us.”
“Well, can’t kill those bastards.” Someone thought he said, “Unfortunately,” but this was pure speculation, the men around Freeman waiting for the general to explode on hearing that the reporter hadn’t followed orders.
“Deliberate?” shot back Freeman.”Or couldn’t they get him off in time?”
“Ah — deliberate, I’m afraid, sir.”
“Send him to me.”
The cluster of SAS men looked at one another. Normally there might have been a wink or two, relishing the reaming out of one of the “news nits,” as the SAS called them; all of them hated the press. But none of the Brits were in the mood for entertainment just yet; too many of their closest friends were charred lumps, wasted by the FAE that the American general had called in.
“What’s your name?” Freeman asked the CBN reporter.
“Lamonte, General — Rick Lamonte.” He indicated his press card pinned to the Arctic fox collar. “CBN.”
“That the Communist Broadcasting Network?”
“No, General.”
Freeman grunted. “You send all your equipment to Major Brentwood here. Understand?”
“General, I’m—”
“Listen, Lamonte, I’m not having you invading America’s dinner hour with your blood-and-guts footage — least not before any next-of-kin is notified. You got that?”
“I haven’t got pictures of any wounded, General. Wasn’t close enough — too much debris in the air.”
The general said nothing, and there was an unnerving silence, broken only by the wokka wokka wokka of the rotors on the marine expeditionary unit’s Ch- 47 transports. Most of the leathernecks were disgusted — some relieved — that they were to be used only for mop-up, or, as one sergeant put it, “roundup” duty.
On the ground everyone was waiting for Freeman to respond to Lamonte. Everyone knew that “Ratmanov Rick,” as he’d already been dubbed, must have at least the FAE strikes in glorious technicolor and that the Pentagon’s PR types would be scrambling for damage control.
“We’ll check your tape out,” Freeman told Lamonte.”Make sure you’ve got nobody’s mug shots on there. I don’t want the mother of some—”
“Fine,” chipped in Lamonte.
“You got any film left in that thing?”
Freeman knew very well that it was a video camera and how to run it — he’d taken enough shots of his children when they were young — but he enjoyed affecting ignorance about such matters in front of the press; it gave him tactical advantage when they least expected it.
“Not much, General,” said Lamonte.
“How much is that?”
“Couple of minutes.”
“All right, follow me.”
Lamonte, visibly relieved the commandos weren’t going to confiscate his tape and equipment with it, followed Freeman toward the cliff side of the basin. The general carefully made his way over bodies, Siberian as well as British and American, till he got an angle for the video from which no faces of American dead could be seen. “All right,” he told Lamonte. “Take a shot here — no further than five paces from me. Alright?”
Lamonte couldn’t believe his luck: the legendary Freeman on tape, surrounded by SPETS, oily smudged air wafting across the basin from persistent pockets of FAE and smaller fires still burning, would have a dramatic effect before the lens. And that look of Freeman’s — helmet on, chin strap tight. The New York anchor would flip. The son of a bitch had the pose down to a T, as if he’d practiced it before a mirror. Tough face but creased with concern, as moved by the enemy dead as his own, the cerulean blue sky and black-and-white jagged cliff behind him a perfect backdrop. Christ, he’d win an Oscar.
“Thirty-second clip,” instructed Freeman, not breaking the pose. When Lamonte had finished, Freeman called Brentwood and several Delta men over. “Get in the next shot, men!” he told them.
“Big of him,” said Choir Williams sarcastically, his earlier mood of high optimism now gone, wiped out when the FAE had burned the rest of his mates alive.
“ ‘E doesn’t realize it,” chimed in another Brit, “but ‘e’s putting himself on trial. They’ll have to weigh this glory bullshit against the shots of the jelly.” He meant the FAE.
“Freeman knows that,” said Brentwood. “That’s the point. Do we want to win or not?”
“Well, jocko,” posited Choir, his familiarity with an officer nearing contempt, a tone that only the closeness of commandos could tolerate.”You weren’t one of those who was cooked, were you now?”
Brentwood didn’t reply, refusing to be drawn into it any further. It wasn’t for him to judge; the American people, the Pentagon, every barroom “expert” would do that. All David Brentwood knew was that they were running up the Stars, and Stripes and the Union Jack over Rat Island.
“You bastards!” It was one of the marine medics shouting at the SPETS prisoners while helping another marine steer Shirer toward a Medevac chopper, the first-aid bandage they’d put about his eye already soaked with blood.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The President of the United States was not as forgiving of his general as David Brentwood thought he would be. Mayne didn’t question Freeman’s decision to use FAE — after all, the White House and the Chiefs of Staff had given him the authority, and Mayne knew the burden of such responsibility.
“My congratulations, General, on your victory,” said Mayne tersely over the satellite hookup between the White House and Freeman’s Cape Prince of Wales HQ. “Now what in hell were you doing disobeying an order by your commander in chief?”
“Mr. President. I didn’t lead the attack. I went in when I thought the situation warranted it.”
“Don’t dance with me, General. You may have thought the situation warranted it, but I thought I made it clear to you, what we need is your strategy, not your bravado.”
“Mr. President, I understand, but if you’ll forgive me, we didn’t have time for a cabinet meeting on that Starlifter. Sometimes you have to know all the rules in order to break one of them.” He paused. “When necessary.”
President Mayne conceded the point but then, with Trainor and che Joint Chiefs of Staff listening in, he told General Freeman of the pipeline sabotage and how this meant an increased surveillance responsibility for the navy on the West Coast and substantially less naval force to protect Freeman’s flank. Outside the White House the sleet was turning to rain, splattering against the windows, sweeping torrentially across the forlorn patio. “You’
ve done the job, Douglas. You’ve knocked out Ratmanov and secured the shortest route to Siberia, but I have to tell you that Intelligence…” He paused, and Freeman could hear him conferring momentarily with Trainor and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, including General Grey.
“Douglas… Signal Intelligence as well as Human Intelligence confirm the Siberians have moved the Fifth Army eastward, spearheaded by their Thirty-first Motorized Division.” He was referring to the famed Thirty-first “Stalingrad” Motorized Division, whose forebears had crushed the best the Wermacht had, causing Von Paulus to surrender the entire German Sixth Army.
Freeman knew that what the president was telling him was that Ratmanov had been the easy part. The hard part was about to begin.
* * *
The criticism of Freeman’s use of FAE on his own troops was savage; editorial writers across the country lost no time in pointing out that he had lost 51 percent casualties, the highest in any one action since the Tet Offensive and the marines’ fighting retreat from Chosin Reservoir in Korea.
“Well, Dick,” said Freeman philosophically, running the fingers of one hand through his thinning gray hair while he held the offending editorials in his other, “It’s a short step from hosanna to hoot!”
“Yes, sir.”
“By God!” said Freeman, his ire rising, slapping the editorial. “In Europe they said the attack on Minsk was the most brilliant since Sherman wheeled and drove through to the sea. Now they’re pillorying me. Those sons of bitches always root out the negative. And those powdered pricks hiding behind their goddamn cameras, criticizing us with a five-second clip. If they can’t find anything to bitch about, they make it up.” He looked angrily across at Norton. “I don’t read anything here about that pilot of ours.”
“Shirer,” put in Norton.
“Yes, Shirer, that’s it. Remember him from Korea. Brave man. Went in on the deck to try and protect us. No editorials about what those animals — the Siberian ‘elite’—did to him, what they would have done to all of our boys if we’d lost that godforsaken rock.” He picked up his reading glasses and walked over to the map, shaking his head, stopping, taking off his glasses, and tapping Ratmanov.”They don’t think I bleed for those boys, but damn it. Seventy-four casualties, Dick, seventy-four! We lose more than that on the roads every day.” His glasses were tapping the bunch of editorials in his other hand. “Criticism like this, it’s — it’s disproportionate. Fecal diatribe. First operation in history where we went in outnumbered ten to one! Yes, yes, the MEU followed, but we got ‘em by the balls, Dick, and—”
Norton said nothing. Part of being Freeman’s aide was the ability to let the general vent his spleen against “rancid reporters,” whose ego, thundered Freeman, “is ten times as big as any general’s I know.” He paused. “Including mine.”
Norton risked a smile but knew that for the time being silence was the most prudent policy. It was still touch and go.
“For crying out loud, Schwarzkopf lost more than that!”
Norton thought it inadvisable to point out that “Stormin’ Norman” had fielded over half a million men, that Freeman’s 51 percent casualty rate for Schwarzkopf would have meant a quarter of a million casualties. But he knew the general was right, too — it was comparing apples and oranges. It wasn’t simply a numbers game, and he suspected that in the supposedly cool, “objective” halls of the Pentagon there was sheer envy of Freeman’s grandstand style.
“Well, General,” hazarded Norton, “you’re going to have a chance to prove them wrong about you.”
It was a sobering thought, and it stopped Freeman’s outrage against the newspapers and TV editors dead in its tracks. The “opportunity,” he knew, was Siberia. Siberia to Ratmanov was as a sea to an island, its danger far more widespread and unknown. The “tooth to tail”—logistical — problem alone would be the greatest military undertaking in history.
Freeman held the editorials over the waste bin. “One of these—” He indicated a Los Angeles Times column, “—calls the ‘profligate’ with my troops, as if I don’t—” The clipping fell from his hand, and snatching his parka he went out into the Arctic night, swearing at a zipper that took too long to engage.
When the cold air hit him it took his breath away, and in the sheen of twilight, filled with the heavy drumming of transport planes overhead escorting the airborne sapper and engineer battalions who were clearing any remaining minefields and the ice crust off Ratmanov’s summertime airfield, he saw a squiggle of water between the ice floes, and reached for his field glasses.
In the binoculars’ circle he saw a seabird covered with oil, flapping and slipping helplessly on the ice in a futile effort to get airborne, exhausting itself on the floe. Another oil-soaked bird watched helplessly nearby. He thought of Doreen, and how he had not thought of her at all during the battle, of how he might never see her again, and of how many American mothers and sweethearts would think of him as a butcher. But he could not cry — not because at that moment he did not want to or would have been ashamed of it, but because he felt himself constrained by a sense of destiny, of mission. He couldn’t explain it to others, but he knew it was true and would not afford him the luxury of self-pity, calling instead to his side Churchill’s stirring rendition of the ancient psalm: “Arm yourselves and be ye men of valor and be in readiness for the conflict, for it is better for us to perish in battle than to look upon the outrage of our nation and our altars. As the will of God is in Heaven even so let it do.”
The brief daylight of the strait was gone and across the darkness that at that moment seemed impenetrable yet across which he knew he must lead the great invasion, lay Sibir — ethereally silent and waiting, a land so vast, so used to consuming her own, that he knew she would not be loath to devour an enemy.
* * *
Back inside there were more faxes of editorial criticism. “Armchair strategists!” Freeman harrumphed.”They’re all suffering from Iraqi fever, Dick — the conviction that you can go in against a dug-in enemy and suffer next to no casualties, based on the erroneous assumption that every enemy commander will be as incompetent as Saddam Insane.” Freeman held up his hand as if to forestall any objection. “I’m taking nothing from Schwarzkopf. Didn’t know what they’d be up against, had every right to expect major resistance. And by God, what those pilots did — our boys and those British Tornadoes going in on the deck like that. Magnificent! Brave as the Argentine flyers when they went for the warships instead of the transports in the Falklands. Course the Iraqis — most of ‘em — don’t want to the for a madman. But the Sibirs, Dick—” Freeman shook his head. “Different breed altogether.”
“General, I don’t mean to interrupt, but I’ve got a marine captain — medical corps — wants to see you.”
“Oh, hell, I told them I’m fine. No aftereffects. Just got a bump on my head, that’s all.”
“He insists on seeing you, sir.”
“All right, Dick. Send him in. Meanwhile, I want you to get the invasion book.” It was a six-inch-thick computer printout of everything from guns to gum that American forces would need for the Siberian campaign. “I don’t want to give Novosibirsk any more time man I have to. Landings have to be made simultaneously and within three weeks. What’s the SITREP on the European front? That’s where the Siberians’ll expect our major push.”
“You’re right, General. That’s why it’s a stalemate. They’ve thrown in another ten divisions — a hundred and thirty thousand fresh troops, and they’re keeping our boys and the Brits stalled. We’re still over a hundred miles west of the Urals.”
But already Norton could see Freeman was thinking of the East Siberian offensive, the general telling him, “We’re going to have to make up for a fall-off in navy protection…”
“Sir. The marine captain?”
“What? Oh, yes. All right, send him in. Meantime you can get a progress report for the on that Kommandorsky battle group of ours. I want the Missouri and Wisconsin pounding the bejaysu
s out of the air field and the sub bases mere. After Ratmanov that’s the one forward bastion we have to knock off. Otherwise the bastards’ll harass our supply lines right across the North Pacific. Salt Lake City’s giving them air cover, right?
“Yes, General.”
“And find out what the Japanese are doing — whether the president’s got them off their ass to help us or whether they’re doing another Gulf, sit-on-your-ass routine.”
“I’ll get on to it right away, sir.”
* * *
Capt. Michael Devine was a small, stocky man with an M.D. that had given him his captain’s bars. It struck Freeman, though he hadn’t noticed it while he was on the chopper’s stretcher litter, that the captain must have barely made the marine height requirement.
“Captain,” said Freeman smiling, “now I appreciate your concern for your commanding officer. Commendable but I feel just dandy. So thank you for coming but—”
“General, that’s not why I’m here.”
“Oh.” The diminutive captain looked even smaller as Freeman cocked his head back in surprise.
“Can I speak plainly, sir?”
“Only way, Captain. Shoot.”
“Sir, you requested — ordered — my medics to take you off the stretcher.”
“I did.”
“I understand they — you argued with them.”
Freeman was scowling. “I told them, Captain, to unstrap the from that goddamn contraption so I could get back to killing Russians. That’s what I’m paid for.” Freeman glowered down at Devine. “What’s your beef?”
“General, it took at least forty-five seconds to get you out of that air safety harness. It takes an enemy mortar crew only thirty seconds to bracket us from the moment we land. That means from the point of touchdown to takeoff my men have thirty seconds to load four stretchers litters and to be clear for the chopper’s takeoff. The kind of delay you caused us could cost the a chopper, crew, and wounded.”
Freeman was reddening by the second. He walked to within a foot of the captain’s face, his voice filling the room. “I’ve never been spoken to like that in my life, Captain. I suppose you’re one of those jokers who thinks talking back to the old man gets you kudos.”