Arc Light (61 page)

The lights came up.

“Jee-zus Christ!” the acting Secretary of State exclaimed. Lambert had expected the reaction to the tape. “Is this guy for real?” he asked Lambert, who stood next to the President at the head of the conference table.

“He's a colonel in the Russian Army. He's just returned from
STAVKA
Headquarters in Moscow where he is aide-de-camp to General Razov. He was previously military attaché at their embassy in Washington.”

“And you know him well?” the President asked.

“For five years, sir. He was”—Lambert paused—“he was my best friend. Still is, I guess.”

The President looked at Lambert. “Well, then, was he telling the truth?”

Lambert hesitated. “Yes, sir, I think he was—at least what he thinks is the truth.”

There was silence in the room for a moment, and then the President said, “Okay,” turning to the table. “Let's assume those subs may fire at their commanders' discretion.”

“I don't buy it,” the director of the CIA said suddenly. “It's just a gut feeling, sir. Doesn't sound ‘Russian' to me, too de-centralized, too much discretion given to individual commanders. They'd want everything controlled by the center.” He shook his head. “I say he's bluffing.”

“There is a question about the probable verity of this man Filipov's communication,” Bill Weinberg, the former MIT mathematics professor who headed the National Security Agency, said. “We've run our own fail-deadly options through batteries of scenarios. The failure rate was always far too high. If given enough time, somebody fired on false reads no matter how detailed the criteria and how onerous the procedures. We call it an ‘unstable' system—one in which the probability of a mistaken firing is low but constant. The result is that the risk of the system's breaking down, of an accidental firing, at any given time isn't high, but when looked at over months and months it becomes not just a possibility but more likely than not. When you factor in the human element, the self-destructive, self-abusive tendencies of the decision-makers
when subjected to the tension of a wartime footing on a submarine lying low in that Bastion—the air and water growing steadily more stale, the food going from fresh to emergency rations, the lights low to conserve energy, the noise discipline, the worries about home—I would argue that you've got a steadily increasing risk of system breakdown over time. The system,
if
it is their system, is growing more and more brittle with every passing moment.”

The short, rotund man paused to take a bite of Danish, left over from their morning briefing, and wash it down with coffee. Lambert considered getting a pastry from the tray as his stomach growled; instead he just returned to his chair. He didn't care much about food, he just wanted sleep, painless sleep. If only he could shut his office door, curl up on his couch, and gain a brief respite from the agonizing storm of emotions that took considerable energy to suppress.

“So if they're lying, what do you think is going on?” the President asked.

“Well, that's easy,” the NSA chief said, licking his fingers. “Regardless of whether what they're saying is true, one thing is clear. They're saying, ‘Don't touch those subs.' That makes perfect sense under any set of facts. Those submarines are the great equalizer. Measuring our conventional forces alone against theirs, it's a fair fight, but a fight with only one possible outcome.”

“All right,” the President said. “But you haven't said what you think. Could the Russians have that fail-deadly system in place?”

The NSA chief shrugged and said, “Sure, it's possible.” He looked up at the President. “I don't believe it, though. NSA agrees with CIA's assessment.” He turned then to his aide and said, “Could you get me one of those jelly-filled ones, please?”

“All right!” Monk shouted, his words drowned out by yet another immense concussion from the Russian artillery some distance away down the line of their battalion. “Here we go again. Dig . . . !” Monk yelled hoarsely as he rose, his last word catching in his dry throat and forcing him to cough. His voice was giving out after three days of shouting and fighting and almost no sleep. Monk grabbed his men to push them to their positions up and down the line through the man-made fog from the Russian artillery's smoke rounds.

They all dropped their packs and pulled out their entrenching tools. Monk tightened the flimsy metal shovel's blade at a ninety
degree angle from the shaft and began to spade the soft earth at his feet, his raw hands and lower back painfully sore from the dozen or so holes he had dug since the landing.

All of the burrowing men around Monk were quiet except Mouth. “I cain't take this
shit
no more, man,” Mouth said as he chopped at the ground, the blows of his shovel distorting the sound of every third word. “Fuckin' root!” he cursed, chopping down frantically at the obstacle before pulling it up with both hands and resuming his dig. “I just cain't
take
this no more.
No
more, man. This is
it.”

“Shut up, Mouth,” Monk snapped as he heard Gunny begin to issue orders from down the line. “Pile the dirt to your front!” Gunny yelled and Monk cursed his stupidity under his breath. He turned to point his butt at the approaching Russians and scrape the dark brown earth into a pile in front of what would be his sole protection from all manner of deadly things.

“Hold your fire until you hear me open up!” Gunny ordered from his position, which should be the junction between Monk's First and the new Second Squad, their platoon's new half-strength order of battle. “Field packs . . . in front of your fighting hole!” Gunny's voice caught mid-sentence as he himself spaded the ground.

Come on, come on, come on,
Monk thought, his anxiety growing with each thick slice at the earth, using every ounce of strength that he had to add inches to his hole and percentage points to his probability of survival. He knew that every slice of earth scraped out counted, and involuntary grunts began to escape from his lungs as he dug, ignoring the pain now.

“Grenadiers, load shot,” Gunny continued. “Fire the grenade on your first shot and then your rifle; don't take the time to reload grenades! Riflemen, single shots! Automatic weapons, squeeze 'em off—don't waste ammo!” Monk's indentation was growing into a hole now.
Just a couple of more minutes,
Monk thought as he dug on.
Deeper, deeper, deeper.

“Everybody down—pass it along,” Mouth said from the ground next to Monk. Everybody between Mouth and Gunny was lying flat on the ground, bringing weapons up onto their packs. Gunny was pressing the palm of one hand emphatically down to the ground, his other hand holding the radio handset up under his helmet.

“Get down!” Monk hissed to Bone and Smalls next to him in their two-man hole as he dropped into his own nine-inch-deep depression. “Pass it on!”

The smoke was thinning.
They fired their smoke too early,
Monk thought as he scanned the woods through the sights of his M-249, a Belgian-made Squad Automatic Weapon, or SAW. Monk, like most
of the other men, was now humping more firepower than they normally carried, having discarded their M-16s for the heavier weaponry of fallen marines.

Monk checked to ensure that the 200-round box magazine of 5.56-mm ammo was full and properly seated and then grasped the long bolt handle and slid it all the way back, hearing the clack of the spring locking. Monk pushed the bolt back forward to chamber the first round and lock the breech. From there on, he was on auto—
rock 'n'roll,
Bone called it.

Searching the woods ahead for the figures who would pour out of the smoke toward him, Monk saw nothing but trees. Several times he trained his M-249 on a tree, picturing in his mind's eye the slow and deliberate pace of a point man. The sound of shells passing over their heads split the air above, these originating from behind their lines. Even though they were fired by the good guys, Monk lowered his cheek into the dirt. Once the shells left their tubes they killed indiscriminately.

A frantic rip of pops like loud firecrackers tore through the woods from the direction of the oncoming Russians. With each artillery shell that passed over, another string of seventy pops sounded.

Cluster munitions,
Monk thought. Tiny silver disks, antipersonnel bomblets with the explosive power of hand grenades, released from the back of the artillery shells into the air over the Russians' heads. He could only imagine what the men underneath were going through.

Monk looked over at Bone and saw Bone's cheek pressed to the stock of his M-60. Smalls was lying to his left, a fresh 100-round belt of 7.62-mm ammo held in the air with his two hands above and in front of his head.

Monk felt his adrenaline begin to pump despite his fatigue, creating a strange, unpleasant feeling: a profound need to rest accompanied by a jittery need to act. His head, which now ached constantly from lack of sleep and food and from the noise and stress of combat, began to throb with astonishing intensity just behind Monk's eyes, timed, it seemed, with each pulse of his heart. He rubbed his eyes with the fingers of his trigger hand and then squeezed his right arm against his side to stamp out the cold trickle of sweat that ran across his chest from his armpit.

Come on,
Monk thought as he scanned the hazy recesses of the woods ahead.
Get here already.
He pressed his cheek to the cool plastic stock of the SAW and elevated the weapon's butt until the front sight settled onto the rear, and both pointed out into the trees.

Some low limbs shook and then flew out of a running man's way deep in the woods to Monk's left. The man wasn't just running—he
was fleeing, Monk realized, as he swiveled his weapon in the man's direction. No weapon in his hand. No helmet on his head. His face—even from that distance it was clear that he was panic-stricken. And he was yelling “Peso-darenda!” or something like that.

Monk now saw more men running, these with rifles and helmets. As the first man approached their line, Monk thought Gunny was waiting too long. Nearer and nearer he ran.

Monk looked back down the length of his weapon, putting the front sight on the chest of one of the Russians approaching in the distance. There were twenty or thirty soldiers visible now as they jogged forward at a slight crouch, and he could hear an urgent but hushed command spit out in Russian. Monk squeezed the trigger, but not quite far enough to loose a round. He, and everyone else, waited for Gunny.

Out of the corner of his eye, Monk watched the fleeing man near their line, running straight at Gunny. As the man raced the last few yards to the slight rise, still babbling away in Russian, Monk refined his aim on the man nearest his front sight. “Plees-I-surrenda-a-h,” Monk heard as the sound of a single shot set off an eruption of noise from Monk's left and right. Monk's weapon bucked without him even consciously realizing that he had added pressure to the trigger, and the hammering recoil of the half a dozen bullets shot pain into the hollow of his shoulder, long bruised from days of similar abuse.

Monk slewed the weapon from right to left as his eyes filled with moisture.
Fuck it!
he thought to clear his eyes, to clear his mind. First one and then several Russian soldiers fell backward and forward and spun this way and that.
Just fuck it, man!
he thought with a vicious burst from his SAW.

At close range it was possible to witness the bullets' effects. Everywhere parts of men were cleaved away from or punched out of their bodies by the impact and tumble of the projectiles, their hard copper jackets wrapped around lead bodies that in turn encased steel penetrator darts. All was scientifically engineered to kill Homo sapiens, the crowning achievement of centuries of work.

The entire platoon was firing with abandon, and the noise was astounding. Mouth, who now began to squeeze off rounds from his M-16, had momentarily frozen after watching the carnage produced by his 40-mm grenade launcher. A canister of shot—shotgun style—had severed an arm at the shoulder from one man and the head from another directly behind him. Monk fired methodically at the fewer and fewer targets remaining available, a sneer set on his face and his jaw clenched.
Just fuck everybody and every Goddamn thing!
he raged as his weapon bucked. Many times as he trained the SAW on
his target he saw it splay its arms out and tumble to the ground, killed before he could fire.

Monk slowed his fire down to cool the weapon, picking his shots at the mostly crawling survivors. He aimed intently at each evidence of life—a muzzle flash, grass, weeds or leaves blown around by a rifle's gases, or the writhing in pain or crawling forward of a body, so difficult to tell which.

The smoky trails of several rifle grenades fired toward the marines' line all at once caused Monk to lower his head. Instead of high explosives, however, the grenades contained smoke and his view of the killing ground clouded.

Dirt spattered Monk's face as randomly fired rounds thumped into the soil in front. He stuck his head down in the hole, and dirt was spit up onto him again.

“Hold your fire!” Gunny yelled through the cotton of Monk's ears. Monk could not see anything of the killing ground ahead as the smoke rounds continued to come streaking in.

“Listen up!” Gunny shouted. “Riflemen, aimed fire only—three round bursts!” Monk again ducked as the only sound of firing was up ahead from the Russians and from other units engaged on their flanks. The Russians' thick but undisciplined fire was snapping through branches and splintering off bark all around.

“Grenadiers, load shot and hold fire!” Gunny continued. “Automatic weapons, grazing fire—forty-five-degree angles! Stake 'em out!”