by Kevin Tinto
“I dug out two more pallets and managed to find one of those aluminum bridges you wanted. I got two of those multi-fuel stoves that burn just about anything and at least a hundred Russian MREs.”
“IRPs, Lenny. Individualnovo Ratsiona Pitanee – Povsedyen, as I recall. Toss one over here.” Lenny tossed Beckam a brown cardboard box. Beckam opened the top and confirmed it contained the meal.
Each IRP had a complex mix of foods, and even a small stove for heating and making soups and stews with the ingredients. He studied the Russian stamp on the outside of the pack.
“The good news is they look complete and in good shape,” Beckam said. “The bad news is they expired in 2005.”
“Anything but Vienna Sausage,” Liam said with a shrug.
“You might change your mind when you take a look-see at this stuff” Beckam tossed the IRP back to Lenny. “Remember to take it easy towing the gear. If you try to corner like a Ferrari, you’ll flip the rig and break your neck at the same time.”
“No worries,” said Liam. “We’re from Montana. We’ve been riding snowmobiles since birth. Nothing like running a hundred miles per hour over a frozen lake.”
“And sometimes when it wasn’t frozen,” Lenny said.
The twins laughed and bumped gloved knuckles.
Beckam studied the ice-scape. “The detonation sent substantial energy waves through the ice in all directions. We’re bound to run across a thousand variations of frost heaves and crevasses. So, X-Game champions or not, keep your eyes open and take it slow.”
Chapter 23
Senior Lieutenant Grigoriy Ivanovich had been well-briefed on his objective: Recon the target and gather intelligence. Engage any Americans only as a last resort. Reconnaissance was the supreme priority on this mission. The first Russian Spetsnaz airborne platoon had parachuted into a ‘Myasorubka’ fourteen days earlier and been dead within minutes of airdropping the target. More than dead—vaporized.
According to his briefers, the Americans had stumbled across a ‘high value target’ while trying to steal an aircraft off the ice. That’s all that was said in the official briefing—beyond the nuclear detonation, that was purposely used to destroy the very ‘high value target’ they were being send down to recon. You didn’t have to work in Star City to know the Americans had stumbled across something of such value, they’d fired the first shots of the next Great War—and used a nuclear weapon to do it. His first thoughts mimicked the rumors of an aircraft of alien origin. The Americans had taken what they could, and then destroyed it. If so, their mission was essentially meaningless.
Such had been Grigoriy’s thoughts during the briefing. The fact that his platoon had now escaped death not once but twice before reaching Antarctica reinforced his already low opinion of humanity in general and a cancer known as the Russian billionaire in particular
The Americans were clearly dead-set against allowing Russia access to Antarctica. It didn’t take Grigoriy long to get that message south of the African continent. The Ilyushin 76MD-90A had pulled up to less than a hundred kilometers behind the air-to-air tanker when their airborne gas station had exploded in a fireball.
The Pilot did evasive maneuvers while radioing desperately for any other fuel tanker plane nearby. They hadn’t been shot down, and one hour after turning around, they’d reached a back-up tanker with just enough fuel to allow the Ilyushin a second attempt. Once the Ilyushin air-dropped them and all their equipment, it would turn around and need more air-to-air fuel transfer in order to reach the African continent.
Not that he’d been given the choice…but if he had, Grigoriy would have chosen bailing out over Antarctica rather than try and make the return to South Africa. Those chances look infinitely better than the odds of the pilots and crew on the Ilyushin getting home.
When it came to briefings prior to a mission, Grigoriy tended to believe about ten percent of what he was told. Having a pessimistic attitude, especially when it came to Russian intel and motives, had kept him and his men alive on more than one mission.
His platoon had drawn this lethal mission thanks to an assignment in the Ukraine that had gone wrong. Civilians were mowed down during an intense firefight, unfortunately in direct view of news cameras. Following the incident, the entire platoon of highly trained and motivated Spetsnaz commandos had been reassigned to a penal platoon, in which they had now spent fourteen months out of a two-year ‘temporary assignment.’ The penal platoon had been Stalin’s way of dealing with soldiers who didn’t follow his orders to the letter. During the Great Patriotic War, penal-platoon inmates had been sent only on the most suicidal of missions.
In true Russian fashion, penal platoons continued after the Great Patriotic War, outliving their creator. It was hazardous duty and to be avoided, yet this was Grigoriy’s second time being assigned to a penal platoon.
The first time had been long ago, and it had started simply enough: He’d caught a soldier stealing from the barracks. Instead of confronting him on the spot, he handled his business Spetsnaz-style. He’d alerted several other commandos, all of which earned an instant promotion to sergeant after completion of training.
Grigoriy and his fellow Spetsnaz had crept into the barracks and beaten the thief and his cohorts with locks wrapped in towels until the offender and his bunkmates were unconscious.
Thievery within Spetsnaz was the ultimate expression of treachery and betrayal, and leniency was no way to maintain discipline or set an example within the ranks. Grigoriy’s sentence to three months’ service in a penal platoon had not been for beating the thief. That was expected and a tradition within the Spetsnaz culture. He’d been punished for beating the thief’s bunkmates, who Grigoriy had deemed equally guilty because they hadn’t schooled their fellow Spetsnaz properly.
In the ten years since, Grigoriy had risen in the ranks to become one of the most experienced operators within the Glavnoye razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye or GRU, the Main Intelligence Directorate for the Russian military. Grigoriy was fiercely loyal and known for his ability to keep secrets, immune to the kind of drinking and carousing that made Russian soldiers undependable when it came to classified and sensitive information.
Because they could keep their mouths shut, Grigoriy and his men had abundant experience in state-ordered assassinations of foreign nationals and were routinely assigned missions that caused even the most brutal Kremlin bureaucrat to flood a toilet with his breakfast—and last night’s dinner.
Only three days prior to this mission, Grigoriy had been ordered to wait on standby while equipping his platoon for an extended, self-sufficient Antarctic airborne deployment. Mission: reconnaissance with a full complement of combat weapons and ammunition to cover practically any eventuality.
Then he had received a mind-blowing briefing about the extraordinary developments on the underside of the globe. Another Spetsnaz platoon had been eliminated upon arrival, along with an unknown number of American SEALs, by detonation of a theoretical nuclear device that left no residual radiation signature.
That caught Grigoriy ’s attention. It meant that Russia was effectively at war with the United States—not the occasional mix-up in some backwater Middle Eastern shithole.
A nuclear war.
Which he and his men would be entering shortly.
Grigoriy had almost convinced himself that they would arrive at the target without being shot down, when the state-of-the-art Ilyushin suddenly lost its lock on both Russian GLONASS and American GPS satellites. The alert came via his headset from the flight crew.
“What was our last known location?” he asked the navigator via the secure comms.
“One hundred kilometers from the Antarctic coast.”
“Dead reckoning it is, then. Proceed.”
The navigator clicked his response and the big aircraft’s engines whined, the Ilyushin tilting perceptibly as it corrected course.
As a backup, the pilots would now be using Inertial Guidance Navigation, a relic of the early rocket
age that used analogy accelerometers and gyroscopes to maintain a known course. Not a comforting thought….
Three hours later, with no further comment from the flight deck, the platoon received the long-awaited drop alert. In true Spetsnaz style, no one wished his fellows good luck. No one smiled. No one said anything at all.
Remarkably, Grigoriy and his men all hit the ice without injury and quickly assessed the equipment drop, which had also been a success, every pallet touching down without damage. All satellites covering Antarctica, including American GPS and Russian GLONASS, were inoperable, so Grigoriy ordered his second-in-command to do some dead reckoning of his own. The result? The Ilyushin had dropped them more than 150 kilometers east of their intended LZ.
How very Russian. Once again, he’d been screwed by his command, with the satellite-navigation outage running a close second in the race to kill his men. On the positive side, they were in a real shooting war with a formidable enemy. All things considered, better than drinking oneself to death in a remote Siberian penal colony.
Reconnaissance was the mission, he reminded himself. Also, one positive note: the enemy would also be technologically deaf-dumb-blind. That lifted Grigoriy’s spirits. The loss of navigation and communication systems necessary to operate the American aircraft-carrier battle group did much to level the playing field.
Another ground-leveler? Grigoriy’s commandos had been issued the top-secret and still-unproven Karakatitsa, or “cuttlefish shells.” The shells were a breakthrough in combat garb, using technology discovered while studying the ability of cuttlefish to camouflage themselves. In addition to providing nearly perfect camouflage, the Karakatitsa were also impervious to both infrared and thermal targeting. Or so he’d been told. Grigoriy was skeptical on all three claims.
Chapter 24
Grigoriy applied the brakes and the Taiga 551 slid to a stop. He held a hand up, then closed it into a fist, signaling his men to shut down their snow machines. In the dry, high-altitude atmosphere of Antarctica, the landscape appeared extra sharp, almost painfully clear. Landmarks in the distance seemed eerily close. The clarity made the lazy smoke plumes appear no more than six kilometers ahead, but Grigoriy calculated the distance at closer to fifteen kilometers.
Antarctica, playing tricks on those foolish enough to tread her ice.
He pulled a pair of Swarovski binoculars out of a bag attached to the fuel tank and balanced them on the windscreen of the Taiga in order to steady the image. The series of air-dropped pallets that had supported the now-vaporized Spetsnaz platoon came into crisp focus.
Grigoriy made two immediate observations: his dead-reckoning navigation had been accurate, and someone had blown up the air-dropped supplies. The distance was still too far to get an accurate reading of exactly what had taken place. Either they’d been destroyed by an air strike or spec-ops troops on the ground. Neither circumstance was promising.
Grigoriy spun and addressed a soldier standing next to a Taiga. “Vasily. Analiz.”
Vasily Popov opened a gear bag and extracted a Russian-made Soeks Quantum Geiger Counter. He held up the device and swept it in a 360-degree pattern. “All within acceptable levels,” he reported.
The commander signaled weapons-ready. He scanned and confirmed: no movement on their flank. They might go the way of the first Spetsnaz platoon if the Americans had dropped fresh commandos into the target zone. Grigoriy started his Taiga, and his men did the same.
Moving cautiously, Grigoriy signaled a stop every kilometer, and they surveyed the drop for movement. Within two kilometers, the view became crisp enough for him to see that the pallets had indeed all been blown up—with the exception of two. Those had been plundered to the point that it was unnecessary for the enemy to waste explosives.
“Americans taking Russian weapons and supplies?”
“Astute observation, Vasily. Why would Americans raid an abandoned Russian air drop?”
“Obviously, not all of them perished in the battle and nuclear detonation. The communications blackout affects them as well as us, so they’re stranded.”
“I have trained you well, Vasily.” Grigoriy raised the binoculars once again. “No movement,” he said, wiping at the frozen tears around his eyes.
“What is their mission in such an occurrence?” asked Vasily. “Ambush?”
“Survival,” Grigoriy replied. “Anyone approaching the target would have seen smoke from kilometers away. This was not a matter of stealth. They’ve departed and in chaotic fashion, more concerned with being hunted by the weapons contained in the drop than eliminating any enemy.” Grigoriy used the binoculars to examine the burning pallets once again. “They might have left a lethal podarok, or perhaps three, for anyone foolish enough to examine the drop up close. We’ll approach no closer than one hundred meters.”
Nearing the drop, they ran into Taiga tracks and boot prints leading both toward and away from the drop. That solved the problem of locating the mission target without GPS or GLONASS. They would simply follow the enemy’s tracks. Grigoriy crouched and examined boot prints. Spetsnaz soldiers wore a range of winter boots; BKT tactical boots were a preference in Arctic combat. The sole patterns told Grigoriy that the soldiers wore Bannon. A favorite of Navy SEALs.
“Pachet,” he said. The Russian translation for SEAL.
The entire platoon lifted rifle scopes and scanned the horizon with heightened intensity. After several scans, Grigoriy said, “We recon the perimeter of the drop.” He pointed a rifle barrel toward the boot prints. “Either they returned to the site of the battle, or, after loading gear, they left from here, in another direction. If we find outbound tracks, we know how to track them.” He turned to Vasily. “Advance to the target. Time for our reconnaissance.”
✽✽✽
Taiga tracks led Grigoriy and his men directly to the Antonov fuselage. He had been briefed on the Antonov transport that had crashed on takeoff weeks prior to the firefight and disappearance of the Spetnaz platoon, as well as the cascade of events that had ended with him and his men trapped in Antarctica with limited supplies.
The nuclear detonation had blown the fuselage some distance from the original crash location, it appeared. More than likely, they had been using the fuselage as a defensive firing position when the warhead detonated. They had been lucky…if surviving the blast and being trapped in this hell could be called lucky. The Antonov fuselage had been shielded by piles of ice, pushed up into a large mound, when the original ski-way had been plowed. Only that could have saved them from the intense dose of radiation that should have killed them in hours or days this close to ground zero. Clearly, the surviving Americans had occupied the fuselage from the time of the detonation until their departure, which he estimated at having been hours, not days, before.
He turned and found Vasily standing behind him, the same thoughts readable on his face. “How many, Vasily?”
“It appears four, perhaps five survived,” Vasily said, pointing out the places in the fuselage where SEALs had bedded down on a variety of cargo blankets and soft insulation. “There are empty plasma bags, used medical. I expect a wide range of injuries from radiation poisoning, impact injuries, perhaps gunshot wounds.”
“Radiation level?”
Vasily tapped a mitten on the Geiger counter. “Nominal.”
“A clean bomb?”
“A clean bomb with no signature. It’s a nuclear blast, but not one we’ve had any training on.”
“The mystery continues,” said Grigoriy.
Vasily picked up a gear bag he’d dug out of the wreck. Vienna Sausage cans rattled around inside.
“They ate well,” said Grigoriy.
Vasily gave him a wry smile. “Better than Russian infantry anyway.”
It was time to move on. Although no American SEALs seemed to be lingering nearby, plenty of danger remained in the surveillance stage of their mission. Grigoriy fully expected to lose lives, perhaps even his own, as they approached what he’d been told was a letha
l blast zone. Of course, that did not include what he hadn’t been told.
Grigoriy called out to the rest of the men, “We move on the target. Harness and line on each man. We stop the Taigas a thousand meters from ground zero. On foot at that point.”
✽✽✽
Grigoriy stood outside the debris field and ice heaves surrounding the crater at what had been ground zero of the mysterious nuclear blast. A debris field of ice and rock rising to a height of thirty-meters or more prevented them from gaining a direct view of the blast crater this close up.
“Find me a safe route to the to the summit of debris.”
“Da, ser,” Vasily responded instantly. He turned to the platoon and issued crisply ordered: “Skoby. Verevka. Ledorub.”
Crampons. Rope. Ice axe.
Grigoriy nodded his approval. Breaking their necks while climbing the debris was a stupid way to endanger the mission.
The Spetsnaz platoon bustled into action and, within minutes, each soldier wore crampons over boots, had climbing lines attached to harness, and had ice-climbing axes strapped to their wrists.
“Vasily. Naydite mne marshrut starika!”
Find me a route that even an old man can climb.
Grigoriy’s order solicited good-natured snickers throughout the platoon.
Twenty minutes later, he stood at the top of the crater’s debris wall, gaping at the shimmering blue of the blast crater. The surface appeared perfectly smooth. The ice-skating rink in Gorky Park would be proud to contain such perfect ice.
Frozen within the blue crystal were a series of bizarrely shaped, metallic sculptures. Burned and twisted, they stood out from the ice in various shapes and sizes, rising to three or perhaps four meters in height, like a series of blackened and evil apparitions rising from a lake, bedtime stories told to terrorize Russian children from time immemorial. Clearly there had been a large, metallic structure underneath the ice, that despite having been blown with a nuclear warhead, had left these twisted and torn metallic spires. From the size of the blast crater, it was obvious this was a small, single-kiloton detonation. Similar to the Cold War nuclear “suitcase” weapons. Between one and three kilotons, at most.