by Bart Gauvin
Instead of running, Jack ducked back into the car, tossed the first aid kit onto the passenger seat, and reached into the center console to retrieve the notebook and pencil he kept there. Straightening up, he looked forward onto the bridge, where he could see the yellow flickering of vehicle fires starting to illuminate the thick dust.
The story’s up there, he told himself, and started walking towards the carnage.
CHAPTER 55
1319 CET, Sunday 13 February 1994
1219 Zulu
Passenger terminal, Kirkenes Lufthavn, Finnmark, Norway
ANNA HAD ALMOST forgotten the strange group of men in the waiting area, having lost herself in the mundane mid-month reports required of Kirkenes’ small airport, when the ringing of her desk phone pulled her attention up from the forms on her desk. She lifted the receiver and answered, “Kirkenes Lufthavn, may I help you?”
The voice at the other end of the line was rushed. “Kirkenes! This is the Ministry of Transportation and Communication in Oslo, Department of Civil Aviation. The prime minister has declared an emergency. It appears the Russians are attacking our forces in the North. We are initiating an evacuation of civilians from communities in Finnmark by air and other means. We need to know: what aircraft do you have on the ground there right now that can carry people south?”
Anna felt something tighten in the pit of her stomach. She had heard something this morning about tension with Russia, but evacuations? Attacks? She sat stock still. After a moment, she remembered that she needed to respond.
Pulling herself together, Anna said, “I’m sorry, can you please explain to me what’s going on?” The Russian border was only a few kilometers to the east, she needed to know details.
There was a sigh at the other end of the line, then a weary, “Kirkenes, listen, there is no time. The Russians are…”
The speaker by her ear went silent at the same time that the window panes of Anna’s office rattled once with a sharp CRACK from outside. Anna jumped at the sound, but held the receiver to her ear for a few seconds more before she realized that the line was dead. She set the telephone down and stood up, walking to her office window to investigate the noise outside.
Anna couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary through swirls of blowing snow traversing the tarmac. Then she noticed, What are the snow plows doing out there? The plowman cleared the pavement this morning. She watched as the airport’s two yellow plow vehicles drove at high speed from the taxiway onto the runway, one turning left and the other right. The vehicles stopped a third of the way up the runway in either direction. Anna saw a man jump out of each and start trotting back towards the terminal. The men in the terminal, everything was just too strange not to be connected somehow.
Anna’s blood ran cold as her mind raced through all of the unknowns. She needed answers. She headed back out to the ticketing area to see what the few other staff members there could tell her. Anna opened the door to the office part way and stopped immediately. Something wasn’t right, it was too quiet. Then she saw it. The legs of the Scandinavian Airlines ticket agent, a friend of hers, were sprawled across her field of view, framed by the rectangle of the end of the corridor. One of the legs was convulsing, bending at the knee and then straightening over and over. Anna’s hand flew to her mouth as she stood frozen, unable to move.
At that moment one of the men she’d seen earlier in the lobby backed into the frame near the end of the hallway. He had a short machine gun slung over his shoulder, but what caused her heart to nearly stop was the knife in his right hand. He was wiping it clean, leaving bloody streaks on his trousers as he looked down at his handiwork. Then, to Anna’s horror, he looked her way.
She reacted on instinct, slamming the office door closed as she caught a glimpse of the man starting towards her yelling, “Stoi!” The door was a heavy one, since the office was where the airlines kept their on-hand cash. She frantically turned the deadbolt, then looked around in a panic for something to barricade the door. She didn’t need to look far. On one side of the doorframe stood a heavy gray filing cabinet. Anna stepped to her right and pushed against the top of the metal cabinet. It rocked once as the clerk heard the man’s shoulder slam into the other side of the door.
Instinct told Anna that she was fighting for her life as the cabinet settled back onto its base with a bang. She stepped back, giving herself a better angle to push against the metal tower, then she set her feet and gave a strong shove, toppling her desk light onto the floor in the process. The three-drawer filing cabinet teetered on its edge for what seemed an eternity, then crashed downward across the doorway just as the man outside smashed his shoulder into it again.
Now Anna looked for something, anything, to reinforce her barricade. A third attempt to force the door, followed by an angry shout on the other side of the barrier, added urgency to her search. She ran to her desk and crouched behind it, pushing it so that it scraped across the floor. The young woman continued pushing until it slammed into the filing cabinet. Then she yanked it over to wedge the desk between the first part of her barrier and a corner of the wall formed by the utility closet that occupied a corner of her office.
Anna stepped back and took a breath. The man outside the door was talking to her now in rapid phrases of what she knew to be Russian but couldn’t even begin to understand in her current frame of mind. She stood there breathing heavily, then jumped violently as a burst of gunfire shattered the door knob and bolt. The shots were followed closely by another attempt to force the door, which failed due to the tightly wedged cabinet and desk.
Anna Hagen was trapped. Her world, the whole world, had been turned upside down in the past few seconds. She didn’t have the time or the wherewithal to even consider what was going on beyond her current life or death situation. She only knew she had a few moments before the armed man outside the room found another way in, or shot or battered the heavy door into pieces. I have to get out of here.
She ran back to the window, which lead out to the airport grounds. She unlatched it and slid the framed pane upwards. Anna was planning to climb out, but motion to the left stopped her. She looked that way just in time to see four men, each armed with the same stubby weapon, kick in the door leading to the airport’s three-story control tower and storm in. Their entry was followed by a small explosion and gunfire from within the other building. No good. So where? she thought, feeling ever more like a cornered rat. Then it hit her: Cleaning closet.
Anna was desperate now as the attacker continued to batter at the door. She ran to the closet, snatching her winter coat off the back of the chair as she entered. Pushing past mops and brooms, she closed the door and climbed onto the lip of the large cast-iron laundry sink.
Having worked in the Lufthavn’s old terminal for the past five years, Anna knew the building inside and out. Right now, the only pertinent piece of information in all of that knowledge was the access to the insulating crawl space offered through the ceiling of the closet. She pulled herself completely onto the sink, balancing on the rim, and reached up to yank the lanyard for the hideaway ladder to the crawlspace. It pulled down easily, and Anna climbed up until she was on her hands and knees in the cold, cramped space. As the office door finally collapsed under the violent assault, she retracted the ladder, sealing the crawlspace entrance.
Anna held her breath and listened to the man clamber over her makeshift barrier and stomp into the room. She dared not make even the slightest sound, but she was sure her heartbeat, pounding in her ears, was audible even outside the building. After what seemed like an eternity, she heard the man shout something out the window, belatedly realizing she had left it open. She heard his heavy footfalls move quickly back towards the door before returning once again to the window. Is he looking for my footprints? Anna wondered in a sudden panic, trying to remember if the concrete beneath her window had been cleared of snow or not. Then a scraping sound announced the man wa
s crawling out the window, after which Anna heard him shout a question in Russian to some unseen comrade. Then footfalls on the tarmac receded into silence.
Letting out a long breath, she began to shiver, both from the shock and fear of her situation and from the drafty crawl space. Anna struggled into her coat, and crawled towards a vent on the runway side of the building that leaked daylight and cold air into the drafty space. She looked out through the slats to see the two yellow plows sitting in the middle of the runway. For now, no one else was in sight, and she took a moment to collect herself.
Anna considered her options. Stay here: For how long? Can I give myself up? Her shaking returned as she thought about her colleague in the lobby. Was he dead? Of course he’s dead, she told herself. Why kill him? she raged in sorrow. They were Russians, of course. War had come to her country. Would she survive today? Was this how her life would end, here, at the hands of some bloodthirsty Soviet spy? She let out a breath and considered her alternative: Leave: How? Where would she go? How many men might be outside? Even if she did make it out, how would she survive the cold?
Then she heard it. Anna listened for a moment before she realized that the low, repetitive, thunder-clap-like sounds she was hearing to the east, was actually gunfire, artillery from the direction of the border. What now?
CHAPTER 56
1521 MSK, Sunday 13 February 1994
1221 Zulu
Luostari Airbase, Murmansk Oblast, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic
GUARDS COLONEL ILYA Romanov ducked under the still spinning blades as he jogged away from the Mi-8 helicopter at this small, icy airfield a mere thirty-five kilometers from the Soviet Union’s Norwegian frontier. The tarmac was crowded with dozens of helicopters, Mi-8 transports, Mi-24 gunships, even some huge Mi-6 and Mi-26 heavy lift birds, the latter being the largest helicopters in the world, vied for space on and near the Luostari airbase taxiway. In between the helicopters, some of whose rotors were just beginning to rotate amid the whine of engines, hundreds of desantniki from the Red Army’s 36th Independent Air Landing Brigade were trudging in small files towards their assigned aircraft. Each paratrooper carrying his weapon and heavy rucksack wore a white camouflage smock and their distinctively broad-brimmed steel helmets.
Despite himself, Romanov was amazed at the scale of the operation unfolding before him. He had taken part in some large exercises, particularly in the past two years, but nothing close to the magnitude of assaults that were about to launch from this frigid strip above the Arctic Circle. Even in Afghanistan, heliborne assaults had usually been conducted by relays of a few helicopters delivering only part of the assaulting unit to the landing zone at a time. Here, amid the snow skittering across Luostari’s rugged and frost-cracked tarmac, was sufficient aircraft to deliver an entire airborne battalion in a single lift, nearly sixty helicopters in all. That was precisely the plan.
But he didn’t head for one of the helicopters. Instead he trotted towards an Ilyushin Il-22 command plane at one end of the runway. The plane’s four turboprops were just coughing to life under the aircraft’s low-slung wings when Ilya arrived. Standing by the rear stairs leading up to the plane’s passenger entrance, Ilya saw the helmetless, white-garbed figure of a desantnik officer watching him approach. As he drew close Ilya recognized the handsome Slavic face and thick head of black hair of his friend, Guards Colonel Roman Sokolov.
“Ilya Georgiyevich!” the other officer called out in greeting as Romanov drew near. “Welcome to my war!” He spread his arms to indicate the activity bustling in the cold around them.
“Roman Vasilevich!” responded Ilya warmly as he grasped the other colonel’s gloved hand in his own. “Quite the show you’re putting on here. We never saw anything like this in Afghanistan.”
“We weren’t crossing swords with NATO in Afghanistan either, my friend,” said Sokolov as he slapped Ilya on the back and guided him into the aircraft. “Those decadent Westerners are never going to know what hit them when my brigade gets into the game! We’ll finally have a real stand-up fight, instead of trying to hunt those skulking Mujahideen, da?”
Ilya smiled at his friend’s bravado. Sokolov had always possessed a penchant for vigorously parroting the party line, even though Romanov knew him to be a serious-minded soldier whose sense of tactics was unclouded by ideology or sentiment. Sokolov’s act was intended to inspire those around him with aggression towards their enemies, and it was usually effective, though not Ilya’s preferred method for motivating his men. He gave the comment an upward twitch of his mouth and got down to business.
“Your battalion going into Kirkenes is loading up now?” Ilya asked.
“Da,” Sokolov affirmed. The 36th Brigade’s commander guided Romanov to a seat near one of the Il-22’s windows next to a bank of radios. “The first battalion takes off in a few minutes. Strap in,” he instructed Ilya, “We will be taking off shortly.”
Romanov looked around the interior of Il-22’s cabin. Officers and technicians sat at banks of radios up and down the fuselage, while others moved markers around a map of northern Norway and the Kola. The aircraft was built to serve as a flying command post. Sokolov was using it today because his brigade would be conducting assaults against several points in Norway’s far north. The nearest of these would be the Kirkenes Lufthavn, which the planners had assured Sokolov would already be in Spetsnaz hands by the time his desantniki arrived. The last would take place at Banak, two hundred and fifty kilometers to the west.
The 36th AirLanding Brigade’s commander would be airborne throughout the day to provide command and control for the widely spaced operations. And Ilya, whose regiment wasn’t scheduled to fly until the next day, and whose command would be operating over an even greater geographic extent over the coming days, would be riding along to observe.
“Thank you for letting me burden you with my presence today, Roman,” Ilya said as they both buckled into their seats. In the competitive world of Soviet desantnik officers, such help between peers was not necessarily a given, and Sokolov was one of the more competitive of the lot. But Ilya Romanov had built a reputation in this sometimes-cutthroat community for tactical competence and for being a good peer. Sokolov and most other desantnik officers in the Soviet paratrooper world knew Romanov to be a man who would not betray his peers to advance his own career, and one that would always help his brother officers and their units if his help could advance the common mission. In return, he received both respect and help in kind when he asked for it, as he had in this instance.
“Nichevo,” the other officer said with a hand wave as the noise of the engines increased. It’s nothing. If Ilya could learn anything today that would help him keep his own desantniki alive in the coming days, then this outing would be a success.
The Il-22’s engines roared to full power and the aircraft bumped down the Luostari runway. In moments they were airborne and Romanov could see the white landscape of the Kola receding beneath the aircraft. As the Ilyushin banked, Romanov caught a view of the full extent of Luostari airbase. Dozens of helicopter rotors whirled like wheels above the drab olive- and brown-painted aircraft as lines of soldiers in white marched like ants towards beneath them. The first wave of Mi-8s transports, escorted by Mi-24 gunships, began lifting off in white swirls of ice crystals. Then the aircraft banked to the northwest, and Romanov’s view changed to the icy blues and whites of the Arctic sky.
Leveling out, the Il-22 proceeded north, allowing Romanov to look to the west, across the frontier and towards Kirkenes. The Norwegian border town was a mere fifty kilometers from the Luostari airfield, a distance covered in less than fifteen minutes. The pilot kept the aircraft below the patchy clouds, which spread out like a blanket at three thousand meters altitude.
They began to circle over the Storskog–Boris Gleb border crossing station, giving both guards colonels a magnificent view of the border region and into Norway all the way to
the town of Kirkenes and its airport just to the west. Beneath him the rugged tundra stretched away under its blanket of white, here and there patches of dark, windswept rock breaking through the ground cover. To the south, the boreal pine forests of Finland stretched away as far as his eyes could see, and to the north the white and gray landscape ended at the jagged coastline where snow and ice gave way to black, cold water. Amid this wilderness Ilya could see here and there the dirty ribbon of a road, or the colorful smudges of the settlements that populated this high latitude theater of the newborn global war.
Sokolov directed Ilya’s attention downward as they flew over the wedge of snowy frozen lakes and forest where the course of the Pasvikelva River caused Soviet territory to jut northwestwards like a knife towards Kirkenes. From three thousand meters up, Romanov could see dozens of guns and rocket launchers pouring fire towards the northwest, each artillery piece easy to spot, surrounded as they were by halos of ice crystals and smoke thrown out by rapid firing in the frigid atmosphere. Dozens of rockets streamed in their terrible rainbow paths from one side of the frontier to the other, while the invisible one-hundred-twenty-two-millimeter shells of the guns exploded in tight patterns upon the positions of the unfortunate Sør-Varanger Garrison of the Norwegian Army. Romanov did not envy his enemy’s position.
Below, most of the artillery of the Soviet 69th Motor Rifle Division, the spearhead of the Soviet thrust into Norway, was engaging. The Norwegians were only supposed to delay, but the weight of today’s assault would almost certainly annihilate them before they could escape by land or sea. Escape was always a forlorn hope for those Norwegians, the colonel thought, considering the situation from the perspective of his adversaries, but even doomed men need something to hope for. Better a forlorn hope like that than fleeing into the mountains to hunt us like they did the Germans. Lifting his gaze to the west, Ilya could see the yellow flashes and dirty puffs of yet more shell strikes on what presumably was the Norwegian defensive positions nearer to Kirkenes.