by Ian Slater
“Let’s go!” Freeman told Gomez, who was still shaken by the horror of Eddie’s wound. Eddie had confessed his fear of just such a wound, the one most feared by men, during the days when he was Gomez’s swim buddy at SEAL school in Coronado.
A surge of small-arms firing, at least platoon-sized, could be heard erupting farther west of the lake where the bulk of Tibbet’s marines had landed, closer to the Zapadnyy Siniy Mountains than planned. While Freeman and Tibbet’s HQ group were also west of the lake, they were closest to it and to the H-block, which no one had yet reported seeing in the foul weather. Indeed, the one thing Freeman, Terry Chester, Colonel Tibbet, and their men were certain of was that there was no certainty about the disposition of units in this first wave of more than six hundred troops, and no clear picture of the emerging battlefield. It was impossible to discern meaningful patterns from the mélange of radio traffic that included orders, some frantic, from both the Russians and the Americans, whose transmissions were often jumbled in the frequency-jumping of both sides. It was always the same — not knowing where everybody was and the concomitant worry about the possibility of blue on blue.
This time when Freeman, with Gomez carrying Eddie, retraced their earlier path through the reeds, following their now barely discernible footprints in the falling snow, the general made sure that neither he nor Gomez wandered off the path lest they too detonate a rogue mine.
The vapor the general had been on his way to investigate was still rising from a multitude of tennis-ball-sized bubbles breaking open through the cracked ice that had fissured at the base of the reeds on the high ground where he, Eddie Mervyn, and Gomez had been walking when an enormous gray bird had shattered the ice-polished reeds, flying up into the swirling whiteness of vapor and snow that hung over the marshland. Perhaps, thought Freeman, the Komissarov River, fed by runoff from the Zapadnyy Siniy Mountains, was a conduit of hot spring water pouring into the lake. But there was still no smell emitted by the vapor, which here and there created ballpark-sized areas of dense fog next to areas where there was no vapor rising and where visibility improved up to twenty feet.
It was Gomez who first heard the freight-train shuffles of approaching artillery—122 mms, Freeman guessed — and while the rest of the team immediately fell flat to the ground, the circular rubberized nose cone of the Predator tube that Aussie had slung on his back swung around hard, hitting him in the nose and starting a bleed. While all the marines in the area also hit the dirt, Freeman told Gomez not to move. To remain standing was counterintuitive, but it was better than moving off the path through the reeds and risking detonating a mine.
The two screaming shells fell short with a tremendous “whoomp!” their explosions sending huge shards of ice whooshing through the air. One of the surfboard-sized splinters slammed into a copse of pines and disintegrated into smaller pieces that tumbled down like broken glass around Freeman, Gomez, and Eddie. It told Freeman two things: one, that the Russian terrorists were definitely scanning, and, two, that they’d reacted far more quickly than he’d anticipated on the basis of hearing a simple transmit, sending out their state-of-the-art BMD-3 to investigate the tripping of the anti-personnel mine. Were their inner defenses so much weaker inside the perimeter, Freeman wondered, that they worried about one measly anti-personnel mine going off? There had to be another reason, the general concluded, for the panicky response of trying to kill a few soldiers with artillery.
“You all right?” Freeman asked Gomez who, despite being in A-1 physical condition, was straining under the weight of his comatose friend.
“Yeah,” answered Gomez. “It’ll be better once we get moving.”
As Freeman took point, his right hand, from force of habit, reached for his radio mike, then he checked himself. The best he could hope for was that Aussie, Sal, Choir, and Johnny Lee would see him and Gomez, carrying Eddie, making their way over the two hundred yards to the protection of the wood. As fast as caution allowed, Freeman, followed by Gomez, began to move out through the tall reeds, hearing gunfire closing in from the west, with more artillery rounds screaming in, exploding in and around the position they’d just vacated. Freeman’s ability to retrace their steps out of the reeds with surprising speed, given the bad weather, was due to the general’s photographic memory. His skill in noting and remembering minute details along the way was less innate than learned in battles all over the world, from featureless deserts, where windstorms could obliterate telltale tracks, to Arctic storms, where falling snow threatened to do the same. And Gomez’s ability to keep up a good pace, despite having to bear his wounded comrade on his back, was mute testimony to the extraordinary level of physical fitness Freeman’s SpecWar warriors habitually maintained.
As Freeman and Gomez broke out of the tall marsh reeds below the vapor-covered mound that was the local high ground, they could hear more incoming. The eerie shuffling sound was much closer now, becoming a scream, the rounds’ explosions shaking the ground beneath them, geysers of earth, dirty snow, and reeds shooting high into the frigid air then raining down on the mound twenty yards behind them where there were more eruptions as anti-personnel mines were detonated by the concussion.
In his determination to reach the protection of the wood and the two Russian prisoners, the general, always cognizant of a potential blue on blue in the confusion of combat, especially here in fog and snow, raised his AK-74, the “stay-where-you-are” signal, in the direction of the wood where he hoped Aussie, Sal, Choir, and Johnny Lee were still waiting for him to arrive.
Suddenly Gomez stopped. “Hold up, General.” Then, “You hear that?”
“Yes,” acknowledged Freeman. “There must be hundreds of them over there.”
Gomez, tiring quickly now, realized that the general had mistaken his question. Freeman was talking about the scores of birds gathered in another section of the vaporous marsh. “No,” said Gomez, Eddie’s weight getting to him now. “I mean the Hummer.” It had stopped at the wood now only thirty yards away. The Hummer was topped with two four-tube canisters of TOW anti-tank missiles.
“Where the fuck were they earlier when we needed them?” Aussie challenged. Still, he was glad to see the vehicle. Everybody was glad to see it.
A marine corporal had stepped out of the Hummer, followed by two other marines dressed in “snow whites,” one of whom was Kegg.
“Where’d you get those?” Freeman asked.
“Dead Russians,” one of them said, grinning, until he saw how badly Eddie was injured. Quickly, Kegg helped Gomez, the general asking for saline from the Hummer’s kit.
“Good man,” said Freeman, as Kegg’s marine buddy handed him the pack. Choir also brought a saline pouch. Freeman now turned to the four marines in the fire team nearest the wood’s perimeter. “Where are the two pricks?”
“The prisoners?” said a marine. “We tied ’em up over there behind that brush, General.”
A marine corporal glanced uneasily at the other three marines in his fire squad as the general strode toward the two Russians. They were sitting forlornly in the wood under cover of a huge, snow-laden fir, its branches gnarled and deformed over the years from the bitter, grit-laden westerlies that came sweeping down from the Wanda Shan in China and on through the nearby foothills of Zapadnyy Siniy before howling, bansheelike, across the thirty-five-mile-wide expanse of the lake, on whose closer shore ABC had built its Stalinesque H-block, which at the moment lay hidden by the blizzard that had made a mockery of McCain’s optimistic weather forecast.
“I’m tired of this damn weather,” Freeman opined formally to no one in particular, but his tone alerted his teammates that the general, in the manner of George Patton, was about to voice a direct request to the Almighty to intercede on behalf of Operation Bird Rescue. Before this, however, Freeman gave instructions for Gomez and a marine corpsman to do what was possible as soon as possible for Eddie Mervyn who, despite having received an infusion of saline, seemed to have slipped further into coma. Freeman prayed they
could keep Eddie alive long enough for the SpecWar warrior to be medevaced out by one of the choppers in the second wave.
Both Russian captives were visibly alarmed when the American general, whom Abramov, Beria, and Cherkashin had described as a madman, suddenly took off his helmet and, holding it under his left arm, his AK-74 cradled in the other, bowed his head. The Russian duo were clearly alarmed by the general’s body language. Was it the prelude to executing prisoners?
While the four marines, including the corpsman who was helping Gomez with Eddie, exchanged uneasy glances, the general’s SpecWar team, with an ease obviously born of practice, formed a protective square around their general who, amid the sounds of intermittent gunfire far and near, began his prayer, his hair turning white with the snow that showed no sign of abating.
“Almighty God, we beseech Thee in this battle to afford us better weather so that we might vanquish our terrorist foes and destroy their evil here and forevermore. Amen.”
With this, Freeman put his helmet back on and turned to Salvini. “Sal, cut ’em loose.”
As Sal drew his SAS knife, the younger of the two ABC Russians, a lean, short man in his early thirties who didn’t speak English, stiffened in fright, looking imploringly at his comrade, who did know some English, for an explanation of what was happening. Had the mad American’s prayer been for his prisoners? A last rite before he executed them?
“General!”
It was Gomez in shock, his face crumbling, his shoulders shaking in a futile effort to dam his emotions, so that the moment he’d called the general, every man present knew that Eddie Mervyn was dead. Freeman’s eyes were turned intently upon the two prisoners, not wildly ablaze with anger but with an unblinking cold rage. It was the kind of rage they’d seen in the eyes of Comrade General Abramov, the commander of the tank and armored company, when Abramov had been told that one of their terrorist clients had tried a double cross on a big payment for a railcar full of Igla shoulder-fired MANPADs shipped from the nearby railhead at Kamen Rybolov and across the wooden bridges of the marshes to the south. There was no pity in the comrade general’s eyes. Instinctively, the two Russians, still sitting on the ground, moved their backs against the trunk of the big fir tree, as if it might give them some protection from what the American might do. They watched nervously as the Americans’ general got down on one knee, looking at the dead American who had been his comrade in arms. As inconspicuously as possible, the two prisoners looked at the marines and the rest of Freeman’s team for any expression or body language that might convey what the prevailing mood might be amongst them, whether the grief would turn to anger, both prisoners knowing what they would do had the situation been reversed. The edict from Abramov, Beria, and Cherkashin had been unequivocal: All of the American “gangsters” were to be summarily executed. And the edict wasn’t confined to the Americans, as demonstrated by ABC’s ruthless “cleansing” of those “elements” in the civilian population around the lake who had had the temerity to protest ABC’s takeover. Dozens of corpses had been dumped in the vast, surrounding marshlands.
As Freeman, handing his AK-74 to a marine, looked down at Eddie Mervyn’s boyish face, he was also seeing the faces of the dead, the murdered at DARPA ALPHA, and the smoking funeral pyre of the thousands at Ground Zero. Taking off his gloves, he closed Eddie’s eyes, but the eyelid muscle retracted the lids, and Aussie Lewis handed Freeman two small stones that did the job, Freeman having been as insistent as any DI on Parris Island that his men not carry any change into combat.
Freeman rose quickly from the snowy ground of the wood and then, with an abruptness that belied the gentleness he’d shown kneeling by Eddie, he asked Aussie Lewis whether the wood’s perimeter had been secured.
“Yes, sir.”
“Where are the bastards now?”
“Don’t know for sure, General, but most of the noise is coming from the north of us, about two miles away. I’d say they’re giving Tibbet hell.”
The general didn’t respond, but turned abruptly toward the prisoners, and Aussie Lewis saw in his eyes the metamorphosis from soldier to avenger of all those Americans murdered since 9/11. “Which one of you speaks English? A little!” This phrase was said with such menace that the Russian who spoke English was reluctant to admit to the fact, but he remembered that it was one of this man’s soldiers whom he had told, “I speak a little.” He raised his hand so tentatively, “I do, sir,” that he might have been a schoolboy terrified of his teacher.
“Now you listen to me, you son of a bitch!” The general was taking his sidearm from its holster. “You understand ‘son of a bitch’?” he asked the Russian.
The prisoner nodded, the cold fury in this American’s face so obvious that the Russian’s throat constricted, rendering him temporarily unable to speak, and he could feel his skin now itching like crazy.
“Sir,” interrupted the marine.
“What?”
“Sir, I think I hear armor ’bout a quarter of a mile away to the west.”
This only added to the general’s sense of urgency. He was still glaring at the hapless Russian. “Do you understand—”
More freight-train-like rushes came shuffling through the pristine air, the rounds exploding with a roar which, though muffled by the snow, nevertheless was still deafening, and left the general’s ears ringing.
“Stand up!” Freeman ordered them. “You know why I asked you to stand?”
The smaller of the two whey-faced prisoners looked imploringly at his English-speaking partner. What was going on?
“You want us to stand,” said the English speaker. “We stand.”
“You’re standing,” Freeman told them, “because I do not shoot men when they are sitting. You understand that, you terrorist turd?”
It was clear to Chester that while the Russian didn’t cotton on to every word, he understood readily enough and was terrified.
“Now, you told us you came from the H-block, from the building, but you know nothing about the building. Correct?”
The Russian nodded, his Adam’s apple bobbing nervously. “Correct, Admiral.”
Chester bit his lip to stop himself from smiling. He could see that the Russian was far too terrified to even try making a joke.
“I am a general,” Freeman told them unsmilingly. “And you have murdered thousands of innocent men, women, and children.”
The English-speaking Russian found voice to tell his comrade what had transpired.
“Nyet, nyet!” the Russian speaker was repeating.
“Da!” retorted Freeman, with such resounding authority both men fell silent. He fixed his stare on the English speaker. “Your name?”
“My name?”
“Yes, goddammit. Your name!”
“Ilya. My comrade’s name is Boris.”
“Ilya, you and your comrade know more about ABC’s setup than you’ve told us.”
Ilya was shaking his head as vigorously as Boris had. “We have not been inside much. I swear on mother’s grave.”
It was never good practice to talk too much to prisoners, Freeman knew. Their names and conversation lent humanity to their otherwise sullen or scared faces. But Freeman, as Colonel Tibbet had told his marines, kept in mind the sight of the seemingly endless funeral processions after the terrorist attacks on America since 9/11, and the bravery of the victims, the people on Flight 93 and the scientist at DARPA ALPHA with “RAM” and “SCARUND” written on the note in his hand.
“You steal our plans,” said Freeman, slowly and deliberately, ignoring the cacophony of battle just a mile south and west of him down by the rail line, “then sell them to other terrorists who kill our children. You help them. You are as guilty as they are. You’re not prisoners of war, you’re opportunists, outlawed by your own people in Moscow. You’re co-murderers. Terrorists!”
The Russian prisoners didn’t understand “co,” but “murderers” and “terrorists” they did understand, and now looked grim in addition to being scar
ed. They didn’t whimper. They were, after all, opportunists who had been trained as soldiers. Outlawed by their country as terrorists, regular soldiers turned bad, and they’d been told by Abramov, Beria, and Cherkashin to expect no mercy from Moscow or the “American interventionists” if they were caught. They had crossed the line, becoming fantastically wealthy by Russian standards, their MANPAD bonuses alone catapulting their lifestyle into another world, way above that of the average Russian.
“Koreans,” burst out Ilya. “We are not only people involved. Koreans are helping.”
Freeman was nonplussed. He could hear more incoming. What was this Ilya telling him about Koreans? “Tell me more,” Freeman urged.
The other Russian, Boris, couldn’t conceal his surprise at Ilya having mentioned the Koreans, who Freeman quickly surmised must be either one of ABC’s best customers — or joint manufacturers?
“Tell me more,” Freeman pressed.
“Nyet!” cautioned Boris, and Freeman shot him dead, Ilya jumping sideways in fright.
“Holy shit!” It was the Hummer corporal.