by Ian Slater
“Mr. President,” said Eleanor Prenty, walking beside him, “by my count, the supporters outnumber the protesters.”
“Good,” the president told her. “But if Freeman and Colonel Tibbet don’t pull this Bird Rescue off and destroy that damn terrorist complex, we’ll tank in the polls. Excuse me being such a hard-ass, but I can’t do what I want to do in this country unless I’m reelected, and I sure as hell won’t be if Freeman and Tibbet blow it.”
He had no sooner entered the Oval Office than the white phone, the direct line from Moscow, rang.
The Russian president wanted the American antiterrorist force out of Lake Khanka before the twenty-four hours were up. He was taking a great amount of flak from the opposition in the newly elected Duma, the Russian parliament.
The president of the United States told his Russian counterpart that he understood, and would have the Pentagon give Freeman the timeline. “But please, Mr. President, don’t let any of your enemies know. In fact, I suggest it would be better if you didn’t mention it to any—”
“I am not an idiot,” retorted the Russian president. “Then there would be added pressure on me as well as on your General Freeman. But tell this Freeman to hurry up. He wins or loses when the twenty-four hours have passed, and it is getting late. Otherwise I cannot hold the hotheads at bay. It could be general war.”
Freeman couldn’t receive the White House message, however, because his team’s encrypter was out of commission.
Tibbet had received Freeman’s transmit and acknowledged the same, but since then there had been no reply from the general. “Still nothing on encrypt?” Tibbet asked his second in command.
“No, sir. Not on encrypt. Thought he might have fixed it by now or picked up another decoder from another platoon in his sector, but I guess everyone’s lying low till the snow—”
“Not Freeman,” cut in Tibbet, who was looking at his marines strung out on either side of him, lying down behind the escarpment that his platoon was using as protective high ground beyond one of the small, acre-sized woods that stood like islands in the sea of marshlands that bordered, and in some places spread out for miles from, the lake. The escarpment was only a few feet high, but with the piling up of snowdrifts it had grown to nearly twice that height, Tibbet reminding his men that they must lie low until he received Freeman’s situation report. If the general’s “Go” or “Yankee” call couldn’t be sent because the general’s encrypter-decoder machine was down, then his “Yankee” call would come either by Hummer, runner, or in plain language, but not before Freeman judged his team ready for a joint attack against ABC.
“What direction for the attack, sir?” inquired Bravo Company’s Major Hoyt.
Tibbet grimaced in the snowfall. Though the snow was easing off, it was still bitterly cold. He kept flexing his gloved hands to keep his blood moving.
He gave the major the coordinates for the planned attack. “But keep them to yourself until we—if we — get that “go” call from Freeman. I don’t want it going through the company if, God forbid, one of our guys is captured and tells them that we know where the tunnel’s entrance and exit are. Remember, that time they got one of our guys in Iraq and—”
“Arty!” someone shouted, and Tibbet’s group of seven and two fire teams kissed the snow again. The shell sounded like a 220 mm, one of the Russians’ thermobaric rockets. It slammed into a rise of marshland scrub several hundred yards to Tibbet’s left, the shock wave sweeping over Tibbet’s marines like a furnace blast.
“We’ll be in trouble when the weather clears,” said Major Hoyt. “Those TOSs have a cant sensor and computerized fire control. Once they can pick us up visually they—”
“I know that,” said Tibbet. The Russian TOSs were big, ugly boxes of thirty rockets set on a T-72 chassis. He felt anxious and looked at his watch while taking care not to express any more signs of anxiety in front of his HQ group. He estimated that there were now more than 1,200 marines landed, consolidating the line. It was a very thin line, given the huge area of the lake and environs. The 1,200 had sounded like a lot, however, to the marine quartermaster back on board Yorktown, who had to find every item needed, from the “snow whites” he’d sent with the second wave to each of the Marine force’s thirty Land Warrior Micro Air Vehicle Systems. Each LAWMAVS was no bigger than a child’s rubber-band-and-balsa-wood glider, and had a transparent fuselage containing a laser range finder, video camera, and computer. The hair-thin spars of its tiny tail and wings were transmitter antennae. But now, like Chipper Armstrong’s and Manowski’s JSFs, the LAWMAVS, one issued to each forty-one-man platoon in the MEU, were grounded by the atrocious weather.
Jack Tibbet ordered his communications operator, “If we don’t get a ‘Yankee call’ in ten minutes, I want you to send a plain language to Freeman. Get your pad.”
“I’ll punch it in now, sir, and save.”
“No, to hell with it. Send it now.”
“Right, sir,” replied Jimmy.
Tibbet frowned in concentration. “PL message is as follows:
AIRSEYRAENAKDEYE.
Tibbet paused, remembering the emergency keys he and Freeman had agreed on. The first plain-language transmit from Freeman would contain a BIRTE — built-in reverse target (error) with a three-letter key at the end of the message to open it, the three-letter key being any three-letter initials of a U.S. president: HST for Harry Truman, or JFK, LBJ, GWB, et cetera. Tibbet’s reply, also with a built-in reverse target error, was to be signed off with the two-letter initials of a president, such as AL for Abraham Lincoln, JC for Jimmy Carter, et cetera.
“Sign it HT,” said Tibbet. “It’s a hurry-up for Freeman,” he explained to his radio operator. “We can’t broadcast the fact that we’ve had a twenty-four-hour deadline placed on us. The terrorists here at Lake Khanka would love to know that. We might have to go in sooner than we thought.”
“Message sent, sir.”
“Very well,” acknowledged Tibbet.
“Snow is easing,” said Hoyt encouragingly.
“Not fast enough,” said Tibbet. “We can’t even use our MAVs. They were supposed to relay back good pix to us.”
Jimmy, Tibbet’s radio operator, had been monitoring the weather forecasts. “Sir, they say the weather’s changeable around the lake here. And with those mountains nearby, everything can change in a jiffy.”
“They say,” Tibbet said. “Who are they, Jimmy? Farmer’s Almanac?”
“No, CNN, sir. That Marte Price woman. She’s covering the op.”
Tibbet muttered an obscenity. As Tibbet’s radio operator, Jimmy Vanes was one of the few marines authorized to “dial up” CNN pix on a cell, because no commander wanted his troops second-guessing themselves in the midst of a battle because of some talking face five thousand miles away in Atlanta, like those “embedded” correspondents who had reported every hit the U.S. Army took and every terrorist hostage murdered, creating the impression that U.S. and Coalition forces were on the ropes.
“Turn that damn CNN phone off, Jimmy.”
“Yessir. Sorry, I — sir! Reply coming in. Plain language reads: YGAONOKDETEOEGSOTJ. Last two letters ‘TJ.’”
“Thomas Jefferson?” proffered Tibbet.
Jimmy was already breaking the message, minus the two signature letters “TJ,” into two lines. It read:
YANKEEES
GOODTOGO.
“Very well,” said Tibbet. “Pass the word.”
In ABC’s H-block, Sergei Cherkashin rushed in, thumping the snow from his fur hat and gloves. “What a break, huh?” he said, smiling, the frosty air issuing from his breath rising up to mix with Abramov’s cigar smoke.
“What are you talking about?” asked Abramov tersely, still feeling that his armor in its hidden revetment areas could be bombed once the snow stopped and their engines started up, giving off infrared signatures of the kind his two big TOS tracked rocket launchers were looking out for in the American lines along the perimeter.
“They cracked the code of that Freeman to Tibbet message?” Beria asked hopefully.
“No, no, Comrades,” said Cherkashin, stomping his snow-laden boots, “I mean the message from Moscow. My assembly line captain — who, I might add, gentlemen, is keeping the three tunnels working as we speak — heard it not more than five minutes ago.”
Beria and Abramov said nothing. ABC’s assembly line captains were supposed to keep the production lines moving 24/7 no matter what. Did Cherkashin think the U.S. Marine Corps took a day off in battle?
“Well,” Cherkashin began, pouring himself coffee, relishing the moment, despite knowing how much his petty drama annoyed his comrades, “this captain heard it on the ‘banned’ Chechen terrorist radio network. It appears that fourteen hours before the Chechen network heard of it, our glorious Comrade President issued the Americans a twenty-four-hour deadline. Twenty-four hours? And,” Cherkashin glanced up at the old pendulum clock, a museum piece in the sparse, brutal Stalinesque architecture of the H-block, “that means by now these boys the Americans have sent to do a man’s job have only four hours to do us any damage. So, my comrades in arms, this shit Freeman is in a box. Our box. We’ve got more men than he has, plus your twenty T-90s, Mikhail. All we have to do is keep him away from the tunnels for another—”
“He knows about the tunnels.” It was Abramov, hands forming a chin rest, the smoke rising from his head as if he was on fire. “Your stupid computers, Viktor,” he told Beria. “While they’ve been, what did you call it, crunching the numbers, I’ve worked it out with pen and paper.” With that, the tank commander of the Siberian Sixth turned around the notepad he’d been working on and fixed his eyes on Beria who, frowning, stared down through the Havana’s bluish brown haze.
Abramov sat back in his chair. “Well, Viktor, you’ve been crunching numbers, with all your permutations and — what d’you call them — combinations, but they’re all wrong. You haven’t got the message, have you?” Abramov didn’t wait for a reply. “Because you assumed the key, the signature key, in that plain-language message that your experts intercepted is FDR. These three initials were given at the end, so you thought, ‘Ah, it’s a three-line message.’ In fact, it’s a nine-line message, arrived at by the sum of the number of letters in Roosevelt, nine. Obviously the key for their message was the initials of any American president, so the three letters ‘FDR’ are just to tell them which American president’s name to use. It could have been an American actor or something, but the prearranged key between Freeman and Tibbet was presidential initials.”
Viktor Beria gazed down noncommitally at Mikhail Abramov’s jottings. There was no doubt that Abramov had indeed cleverly broken the long line of 129 letters in the plain-language string down to nine lines of fourteen letters each, so that the plain language text revealed Freeman’s message to Tibbet as:
WHENYOURECEIVE
YANKEEGOODTOGO
FROMMEBOTHOFUS
WILLNOTHITEXIT
BUTHITENTRANCE
ANDWIPETHEMOUT
ANDMRPETERROSE
NEVERDIDGAMBLE
GOODLUCKFORUSA
Beria picked up the yellow sheet and sat down in one of the six ugly but functional metal chairs that lined the room’s walls.
Abramov was sitting back now, allowing himself a victorious smile. “So, Viktor, you’re right. We do have a gift.” Abramov drew in a full draft of the dense cigar smoke. “We know that when Freeman radios ‘Yankee good to go’ to the colonel, Tibbet, the Americans are going to attack the entrance. And, thanks to the Chechen radio report, we now know Freeman and Tibbet have to attack effectively in the next few hours to allow for any hope of success and—” Abramov paused for effect. “—it will give us ample time in which to evacuate the tunnels.”
“Beautiful!” said Beria approvingly, his arms spread out like an angel’s wings. “We get all our technicians out and set one big fuck of an explosion at the entrance. Blow his — what do the Americans call those marines, leathernecks? Yes, Comrades. We’ll blow Freeman and his leathernecks sky high. The snow will be red with American blood.”
“I like it,” said Cherkashin, the mood in Abramov’s office so upbeat it was all but palpable. Cherkashin was beaming. He looked at both the infantry and the tank general. “We’ve got him, Comrades, in the box. Once he’s in, we’ll close the lid. He’s finished.”
Abramov exhaled, the usually taciturn, no-nonsense commander of the Siberian Sixth allowing himself the visceral excitement of anticipated revenge. “Yes,” he agreed. “It’s payback time for our nemesis, gentlemen, but a word of caution. Close the entrance’s two blast doors, but don’t leave the outer door unguarded or he might suspect a trap. We’ll load the space between the outer and inner security doors with explosives. We can destroy the enemy without destroying the equipment.” Abramov looked at Viktor Beria. “How big is the outer door, Viktor?”
“Five meters high, ten meters wide.”
Abramov nodded. “And the depth of the space between the entrance’s outer door and its inner blast door?”
“One meter,” said Beria. “Maybe more.”
Abramov sat quietly, thinking. None of the three bothered to go down to the tunnels much; once you’d seen the technicians assemble one MANPAD, torpedo, or missile on the tunnel’s production line, there wasn’t much more to see, and the air, despite the constant roar of the high ventilation shafts, was dank, heavy with the sour smell of perspiration. Abramov, Beria, and Cherkashin preferred being in the ABC H-block, down in its palatially furnished bunker, if necessary, taking care of the consortium’s business, which had never been better since the fundamentalist Muslim terrorists’ decision to carry out bin Laden’s promise to destroy America.
“You know,” boasted Beria, “these boys of mine, guarding the entrance, they might stop Freeman by themselves, without the need for any explosive.”
“Is that a wish or a question?” Abramov shot back as he simultaneously grabbed his landline phone to call the duty officer in charge of the guards at the entrance to the tunnels, asking Beria, “Are you worried about them, Viktor?”
Abramov punched in the duty officer’s number, while answering his own question to Beria. “I wouldn’t concern myself, Viktor. They get their bonuses, same as everyone else here. But look, if they can’t hold, we’ll blow them up with the American bastards. We can’t afford a disruption of production. Ramon and his friends have been unequivocal on this point. And for what his clients pay for our merchandise, you can’t blame him. The Arabs especially are constantly pushing him for product. They want to be the first to use it against the U.S. in the U.S. That’s why they sent El-Hage up here.”
“Yes,” added Cherkashin, “with his blue-eyed boy.”
“Who El Hage sleeps with,” Abramov countered, “is not our concern.”
The duty officer was sorry he’d kept Abramov on hold; he’d been in the bathroom. Abramov fined him a hundred dollars on the spot for not having arranged for someone to man the phone during his absence. “Now,” Abramov continued, “be sure that you seal that second door. Switch off the air flow that’s sucked down from the surface to feed the tunnels. Just have enough air coming in from the intake shafts we have hidden in the reeds around the exit.”
Abramov saw Cherkashin glancing agitatedly at his watch. “I know what I’m doing, Sergei. You look after your anti-aircraft batteries. If this snow stops, you might be busy for a while. The Americans’ll try to use any gunships they managed to put down around the lake. We’ve had BMD patrolling there, but remember the lake is four thousand square kilometers. We’ve been shelling the woods sector in hopes of hitting anything hidden in them, but the snowdrifts have created a lot of hiding places that normally wouldn’t be there on the flats.” Abramov turned to Cherkashin. “Viktor’s right. With such a time limit on them, the Americans are in a box.” He paused, asking his two comrades, “How do the Americans say it? Shooting fish in a barrel?”
Before either man could respond, Ab
ramov advised Cherkashin, “So, Sergei, have your men ready with their MANPADs. Al Jazeera will love it. It’ll be the best commercial we could have wished for. But be thorough. We don’t want to take chances. Seal the exit doors as well in the unlikely event that a few of the bastards escape the explosion in the entrance and manage to make it through the tunnels to the exit shaft.”
“Good,” said Beria.
“Yes,” replied Abramov, “we’ll play it safe.” He couldn’t suppress a smile. “Can you imagine, Comrades, CNN has another special coming up and doesn’t even know it! This’ll be bigger than Katrina.”
“Will there be enough air sucked in from the exit ventilators for our guys in the tunnels?” asked Beria. “I’d say pull them out, but you’re correct. We’ve got a backlog of Al Qaeda and Hezbollah orders.”
“And,” added Cherkashin, “we have Wadi El-Hage here from Hamas, with his blue-eyed boy.”
“What’s the deal with El-Hage?” asked Beria.
Abramov didn’t respond, busying himself with consulting his rukovoditel vzryvchika—blaster’s manual — for the correct amount of RDX with a detonation of 26,000 feet per second in order to annihilate the Americans.
“What’s the deal?” repeated Beria.
“Don’t you read my memos?” responded Cherkashin, miffed that Beria didn’t recall all the work he and Abramov had put into securing the deal between ABC and Hamas. “Our agreement with El-Hage is to give him a hundred Igla and Vanguard MANPADs in return for him having Hamas kill the infidel American general.”
“That was a contingency plan,” Beria conceded, “when we first heard that Freeman had been assigned to track down Ramon and his team.”
Cherkashin’s tone was terse with sarcasm. “Well, Viktor, I’d say having Freeman in our backyard is a fucking contingency!”