by Joe Buff
Shaped charge detonations created explosive force in all directions. The guard shack was blown into tiny pieces. The machine gun nest burst from within—burning fragments of sandbags flew everywhere. Nyurba, still lying flat, for a moment stunned and disembodied, felt himself being pelted with hot sand.
Assault rifles and machine guns fired in every direction with rising intensity.
BTR-70 armor was plain steel less than one inch thick. An RPG-27 rocket warhead roared at the one by the gate, hitting the vehicle’s front dead-on. The double armor-piercing jets burned their way completely through and out the back. Gas tanks ignited instantly. The armored car shuddered as ammo inside cooked off. The triangular side doors blew open. Flames shot out, not troops. Pools of fiery gasoline spread under and around the vehicle. It sagged and threw off gouts of impenetrable black smoke as all eight tires began to burn.
The ringing in Nyurba’s ears cleared. He was dimly aware of Kurzin’s voice on his radio headset, shouting something.
Nyurba looked around and saw killed and wounded, from both sides in the battle, lying everywhere, whole or in pieces.
He was pelted again, by chips of asphalt and concrete. The machine guns in the guard towers, and the heavier gun on the surviving BTR-70, were spraying the area, taking a toll on their friends and Kurzin’s attackers alike.
Their job is to protect the silos at all costs. Their own troops are being sacrificed to pin us down and decimate us.
Nyurba heard Kurzin’s voice again, more clearly. He was using the burning BTR as a smokescreen, leading a platoon to get in RPG-27 range of the other armored car. But that BTR was almost a kilometer away, five times the effective range of the RPG rockets. His men fired smoke grenades to enhance their concealment as they ran across the wide-open asphalt. Each produced a cloud of white smoke, contrasting with the black from the BTR.
The snipers and other commandos were dueling with the machine guns in the four guard towers. Those machine guns fired repetitive short bursts. The squadron, all contained inside the fence line except for the snipers, was caught in enfilade—deadly fire from several directions at once. Suppressive fire from the men’s AN-94s was having little effect. The guard towers held the high ground and their walls were made of solid concrete.
Then one guard tower, overlooking the gate area, shifted its fire, dueling with a sniper. He began to pick off the machine gun crew one by one. Fire from that tower stopped. Men with grenade launchers under their rifles were trying to land grenades inside the other tower near the gate, but their grenades kept hitting the roof or the outside of the tower, or missed and landed on the ground. Each grenade went off with a bright flash, making a dull concussion that Nyurba could feel in his gut. Grenade fumes created a gray haze around the guard tower, but not enough to make its fire ineffective. Two RPG rockets streaked by the tower, one aimed too high and the other too low; both went off in the dead grass and started small fires.
“Antiaircraft missileers,” Kurzin yelled in Nyurba’s headphones. “Watch for the Mi-24s to come back. Expect them to approach from any bearing.”
No sooner had he said that than the two helicopters appeared above the trees. The BTR crew, confused about who was fighting whom, aimed its turret at the helicopters and began to spit tracer rounds.
“Missileers hold fire!” Kurzin ordered.
The Mi-24 crews, equally confused, launched antitank rockets at the BTR. The Mi-24s were armored, very tough targets, hard to shoot down. Green heavy machine gun tracer rounds and bright yellow antitank rocket motors darted in opposite directions, leaving trails of criss-crossing smoke. The BTR, its rounds moving much faster, scored a kill. Pieces flew off an Mi-24’s fuselage. A big chunk of a main rotor came off. The helicopter spun wildly and landed on its side in the defoliated strip, and its fuel exploded. A split second later a salvo of Mi-24 antitank rockets detonated all around and on the BTR. Flames came out of holes in its armor, through its shattered windshield, and from past the edges of the shut passenger doors.
Rockets and missiles on the downed Hind-F began to cook off from the heat of the fuel fire, exploding in place or launching themselves erratically. Some ran along the ground, setting more dead weeds on fire. Some took off skyward and disappeared in the distance.
The other Hind-F crew, enraged, began to pulverize all the men it could see on the ground.
“Missiles free!” Kurzin shouted. “Knock the goddamned thing down!”
Commandos knelt and fired their SA-16s at the helicopter. Each missile went faster than Mach 2, and used a combined infrared and ultraviolet target homing seeker to ignore heat flares the Hind began to launch in self-defense.
Missiles hit the helicopter, their warheads detonating. But the warhead charges weighed only four pounds, not enough to get through its armor. The helicopter zigged and zagged but kept flying; its chin-mounted tank-killer cannon kept
firing.
Soldiers and snipers, on the ground or in guard towers, continued shooting at each other too. Nyurba looked up from where he and the headquarters platoon were still pinned down in the open. The pit of his stomach felt empty. The commando assault had lost its momentum. Russians still controlled the high ground in the remaining guard towers, they had the advantage of air power with that Hind-F, and time had always been on their side. The mission had reached dire straits, and was in imminent danger of failing at the start.
Nyurba saw a figure in the distance stand, with an SA-16 on his shoulder and another in his left hand. It was unmistakably Kurzin.
“Get down, sir!” Nyurba yelled into his lip mike.
Kurzin ignored him. He launched one missile at the helicopter, which did it no damage. He placed the other missile launcher on his shoulder, and just stayed there brazenly amid the drifting smoke and flying debris.
Kurzin achieved his goal. The Mi-24 turned to face him, to present its narrowest target profile, even as the Gatling cannon swiveled to bring him into its sights.
The gunner walked his fire toward the latest threat. Asphalt chunks and concrete dust churned, amid bright flashes and zinging bits of white-hot, razor-sharp fragments from the cannon shells. Kurzin staggered, as if he’d been hit by some of the shrapnel. But he never flinched. Nor did he fire. Cannon shells drew closer.
Missileers near Nyurba seized their chance. The whole right flank of the Mi-24 was exposed to them, and the helicopter’s weapons were all pointing the wrong way—a perfect setup.
Nyurba saw Kurzin disintegrate. His missile never launched.
The SA-16s near Nyurba launched. Three of them struck the Mi-24 at once, around the machine’s transmission at the base of its rotor shaft. It couldn’t take such concentrated punishment. The shaft snapped. The rotors continued to spin in midair. The body of the Mi-24 dropped like a stone, inside the complex.
Other men, furious that their commander had had to sacrifice himself, fired RPG-27s at the downed Mi-24. They intentionally aimed at the pilot and gunner compartments. Nyurba could see both men frantically trying to get out of their stricken aircraft. The RPG warheads struck, hitting below the cockpit windows. When the flashes and smoke of their detonations cleared, Nyurba watched both crewmen burn alive.
The commando group was still spread out in disorder, pinned down—and now leaderless. Nyurba was second in command.
“Rocketeers!” he ordered. “Hyperbaric rounds, target the nearest guard tower. Snipers, concentrate on the more distant towers.” Only two of the snipers acknowledged. The other two must be dead. “Missileers, watch for additional aircraft!”
Two men had reloaded their RPG-27 launchers with the new fuel-air explosive hyperbaric rounds. These were designed for troops in foxholes with overhead cover. The commandos fired them at the guard tower.
The rockets soared away from Nyurba toward the tower. His perspective foreshortened, he could see their exhaust flames and smoke trails from behind as if in slow motion. But by now there was smoke and flame everywhere, and wafts of other trails from missiles
and rockets and tracers filled the sky.
The hyperbaric warheads impacted the front of the concrete guard tower, below the lip from which the machine gun was shooting. They dispersed their fuel aerosol into a cloud, and a split second later the igniters set off the cloud. The guard tower was engulfed in a blinding red flash that created an overpressure so strong Nyurba felt as if he’d been hit by a hundred-pound bomb. When he pulled himself together, his ears hurt worse than ever and the guard tower was a wreck, chunks of concrete and bodies landing and bouncing on the torn-up asphalt.
Other hyperbaric rounds took out the remaining guard towers.
Suddenly, all firing stopped. The commando team had no targets. Medics were busy treating the wounded.
Secondary explosions from the Hinds and armored cars continued as more ammunition cooked off. Above them, Nyurba heard a deep thud in the distance. Smoke and flame rose anew, this time near the mines in the lane through the trees for the power pylons. More forces from the support base or the town of Srednekolymsk were probing this way.
Air began to whistle as it was sucked into bunker ventilator shafts. Filtered for contaminants, that air was feeding emergency diesel generators down below. The mine going off by the power lines toppled a pylon, shorting out or snapping the cables—main power to the base complex was dead. The proof was that seconds later, gray smoke belched out of the diesel exhaust shafts. This vividly reminded Nyurba that there were Russians, and SS-27 ICBMs, alive and intact in the underground chambers.
He stood, examining the battlefield. About a third of his men were killed or wounded, and another ten or twelve were occupied helping those who were hurt.
I’ve got barely forty effective combatants.
Timing was critical. Russian reinforcements would get here soon. The crews inside the silo bunkers probably heard and felt nothing of the assault, because they were behind such strong shock hardening and acoustic-vibration damping insulation. But the camera pods on the surface, aimed at the silo lids, fed into the bunkers so the crews could monitor each missile launch. They would have caught some glimpses of the fighting. And hardened, buried communications lines came in from the regimental command bunker at the support base. The silo crews would have been warned of a security alert hours earlier, since their normal rotation out had been postponed. Nyurba had no idea what the support base had told them since then, if anything, because he had no idea what the support base itself yet understood about what was going on amid the silo field.
Nyurba made a difficult choice. In this situation, he had to divide his forces. The only underground cover inside the entire fenced-in complex was the entryways to the three control bunkers. Occupying all three entries meant the company could give each other covering cross-fire against the impending Russian counterattack. The team had brought enough specialists to go after two bunkers at once; such redundancy was built in from the very start of planning, in case some Air Force missile experts or SERT Seabees were wounded or killed. But headquarters-platoon casualties so far were unexpectedly light; its role had been to take cover and save ammo, not draw fire. Going after two bunkers simultaneously gave the highest likelihood of achieving the ultimate goal—liftoff of at least two properly armed ICBMs.
“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” Nyurba shouted into his lip mike, projecting his voice so the nearest men could hear him directly. “First headquarters squad, take control bunker one! Second headquarters squad, go for control bunker two! Medics, use control bunker three entryway as a dugout to shelter the wounded! . . . Snipers, remain in position and feed me situation reports on the surface! . . . Everyone else, take ammo and explosive charges from the wounded and dead with you, and form up at bunkers one and two! Even number squads take two! Odd numbered squads head for bunker one! Five men closest to bunker three, proceed there to defend the wounded! Forward!”
Chapter 23
Nyurba, leading a squad of men, stooped under the concrete overhang that sheltered the entrance to control bunker one. The entryway was deserted, emphasizing the eerie lull in the aftermath of the violent open-air firefight. He quickly took the stairway down, and followed it as four long flights made sharp right-angle turns. He knew these turns were designed to help weaken surface blast overpressures and stop flying debris; he was almost one hundred feet underground. The next turn led to a flat area, not stairs. After a quick check for enemy microphones, he quietly verified on his special ops radio that the commandos going after bunker two could hear him. They responded, five-by-five. He told them to listen on his open mike, and follow the deception gambits he would use.
The man in charge of that group, a Marine Recon major, acknowledged the order. He was now second-in-command of the company, and would take over from Nyurba if necessary—the same way Nyurba took over when Kurzin died.
Nyurba had one of his men, a Delta Force sergeant, use a tiny mirror to peek around the final corner. There was a surveillance camera, in a vestibule, all as expected.
Nyurba whispered his deception plan, parts rehearsed for most of a year and parts made up as he went.
His Seabee chief and a SERT petty officer pretended to be loyal defenders, retreating before an overwhelming assault. They removed their packs, then backed down the steps until they were visible to the camera, with their weapons aimed up the stairway. Someone near the top of the stairs, part of the entryway’s rear guard, fired into the air, in case the camera had a microphone. To the echoing sound of these shots, Nyurba’s men flopped over dramatically, facedown, as if they were dead.
The men guarding the top of the stairs fired several more rounds. Two Delta Force corporals fell into the vestibule—more supposedly loyal Spetsnaz, giving their lives protecting the Motherland’s missiles. They landed faceup, writhing in agony from mortal wounds. In reality, they were unhurt, busy inspecting for a second, hidden camera or microphone.
There was none.
The sergeant reached his arm around the corner and shot out the camera with his pistol. The bullet ricocheted, but he’d aimed so the spent slug was unlikely to hit the men on the floor.
Soon all the commandos with Nyurba were inside the vestibule at the bottom of the stairs. The slain Spetsnaz came back to life and got up to join their comrades.
The stark and stuffy vestibule was lit by bare fluorescents hung on springs. In front of them loomed the outer steel blast door, the first of two that protected and led into the control bunker. It was painted an ugly military-institutional shade of dark green. Signs on the walls gave security warnings and instructions about radioactive decontamination. Just in case, Nyurba took measurements. He found no leakage coming from the H-bombs in the silos. In a full-scale thermonuclear war, these decontamination instructions would take on significance, but he wondered who might be alive out here to read them. He reminded himself that his mission, if something went wrong, might itself be the cause of that war.
Nyurba harnessed the ugly mixture of angst and determination these thoughts brought up, to bring more power into his acting performance. He started to put into play the next moves in an intricate, preplanned con job, one that he’d never have needed if they’d been able to properly waylay fresh silo crews at their intended roadblock this morning after all. He figured enough time had gone by for an imaginary counterattack by nonexistent additional loyal troops to have trapped and slain the pretend traitors—the ones who’d “killed” four Spetsnaz in front of the camera and then shown an arm with a pistol from around the corner of the stairs. He picked up the intercom handset that hung on the wall, so he could speak to the men in the bunker. The intercom undoubtedly was used for crew changeover procedures, but he had something else in mind. The crew still on duty would not be gullible. He needed to trick them, but what he said had to sound unquestionably true.
“Hello!” he said into the handset. “Hello!”
Someone answered, the junior officer who led the crew. “Kto eto? Tcho takoye?” Who is this? What’s going on? The voice was husky, under stress. The accent su
ggested its owner was an ethnic Russian who’d spent his youth in what was now Ukraine, before moving to Russia proper after the Soviet Union collapsed.
“Slyshi khorosho.” Listen carefully. “This is Lieutenant Colonel Nyurba, Army Spetsnaz counterterror. A nationwide coup is occurring.” He felt safe using his real last name. It was common enough, and he didn’t expect this silo crew to survive.
“A coup?” The young man sounded worried, but not surprised—there’d been failed reactionary coups against Gorbachev in 1991, and Yeltsin in 1993.
“Yes. Listen to me. Rebel forces have taken over the support base, and penetrated the command bunker there. We were able to overpower them here, so the missile complex itself remains in friendly hands.”
“Was that what went on just now in the vestibule, sir?”
“Four good men died. My men. I feel responsible.”
“What do you want us to do?”
“The rebels in the command bunker will try to convince you to make an unauthorized launch, or, much worse, use their electronic link to the silos to permanently disable the missiles. That would leave Russia defenseless against a nuclear attack.”
“Mother of God.”
“Yes. The situation is that serious. So you must do three things immediately.”
“Tell us what they are, Colonel.”
“Sever all fiber optics from the command bunker.”
“We can’t, sir. They’re hardened.”
“Don’t you have tools for maintenance? For firefighting? Axes, metal saws, so on?”
“Yes.”
“Use them. But first send men through the tunnels into each silo. Protect the missiles from interference by the rebels at the support base the same way you defend your control bunker systems. Cut all connections from the command bunker simultaneously. Simultaneously. Do you understand?”