Authors: Joe Buff
Main opposition forces lack cohesion and discipline. Good.
The commando groups from the three control bunkers linked up amid this carnage and frenzy, Abakans trained on each other until they were sure they met with friends. At first Nyurba was enraged when he saw his medics and other men dragging travoises improvised from backpack frames, each holding a seriously wounded teammate who should have been lethally overdosed with morphine and abandoned. Platoon leaders said they
were
obeying his orders, making the wounded permanently unavailable for hostile interrogation—by bringing them home. He realized that, consciously or unconsciously, he’d phrased the order to give his team this out. He assisted a Green Beret lieutenant who’d taken shrapnel in one leg and had a bandaged, splinted compound fracture. He must have been in unspeakable pain. Using a bent metal rod as a crutch, the lieutenant was too proud and tough to be pulled, like so much baggage, on a travois.
Like the others with wounds, the medics had made the Green Beret’s dressings especially thick. They knew, as Nyurba knew, that radioactive particulates could enter the bloodstream through breaks in the skin. There was plenty of nuclear contamination in the air all around them, outside their masks.
Nyurba did a head count: twenty fit, twenty badly wounded, and five wounded who were—generously speaking—ambulatory. He carefully verified with each squad that everyone not present was accounted for as definitely dead; Russian forensic pathologists would have rogue cadavers galore to analyze.
We’ll never escape and evade through the forest like this.
“Change or hide insignia,” Nyurba ordered through his gas mask. “Riffle the Russian corpses.” Concealed by the swirling, noxious, opaque, and multicolored haze, the team removed their Spetsnaz wolf-formation badges, tore off shoulder patches or drenched them in gore, and grabbed uniform markings from bodies strewn everywhere. It was vital they not be recognized as the same unit that had talked its way in at the start of the battle.
Some of the corpses, on closer examination, weren’t quite dead. Nyurba had to look a mortally wounded private in the eyes; he couldn’t be over eighteen. Too weak from loss of blood and shock from burns to be able to talk, the teenager pleaded for help with those dark brown eyes. Nyurba watched the confusion cross his battered, sweaty face as he finished him off with his fighting knife—a gesture of mercy. The kid had no legs and his groin was nothing but smoldering ash. He knew he’d remember those trusting brown eyes for the rest of his life. He removed an insignia badge from the body and fastened it to his own chest.
Having kept his sense of bearings while his squadron regrouped aboveground, Nyurba told them to head for the entrance gate—or whatever was left of it. This would bring them to the route from the support base and Srednekolymsk. He had a hunch that Russian casualty-clearing efforts would have already started, and his intention was to blend in.
We were supposed to pass as Russians all along. We’ll pass as Russians now.
Nyurba’s read of the situation paid off. As they trudged along toward the gate, the ends of the travoises scraping noisily on the concrete, more and more Russian medics scurried around, helping whomever they could. One directed Nyurba and his men—filthy, exhausted, coughing repeatedly inside their gas masks—to the field ambulance staging area.
“What happened to those missiles?” Nyurba asked the medic. His lungs hurt when he spoke; it felt like he was getting pneumonia. “Are we in a nuclear war?” He peered at the sky, but it was too smoke-obscured for him to notice any auroral effects.
“I heard someone say they were terrorists, sir. Two went off in space over Moscow. Everything near there got fried.”
“Three launched.”
“The last was a dud, sir. If you can believe the rumors.”
That’s all I needed to hear.
He led his men toward the ambulances. They moved with renewed strength and spirit, knowing this mission phase was a success.
Most casualty transport were commercial trucks pressed into service for the emergency. A harried, emotionally dazed dispatcher said that hospitals at the support base and in the town were overwhelmed. Nyurba had no intention of going to any hospital. The most practical route of egress was the Kolyma.
He told a tractor-trailer driver to take his people to the waterfront. Nyurba sat in the cab. The trip on the excellent concrete road was short. The mines his men planted earlier were cleared. Their victim, the hulk of a blown-up tank, sat partly blocking one lane, turret-less, bathed in firefighting foam. Firemen used their engines to pump water out of nearby streams and ponds, to hold forest fires back from the sides of the road.
All roadblocks were for vehicles approaching the complex—sealed off against spies and journalists—not for those leaving with troops who badly needed trauma care. Regional authorities were muddled, psychologically overwhelmed by the SS-27 liftoffs. They focused on rescue and recovery, and further site defense from outward, not on interdicting escapees. Perhaps someone in charge, from optimism or face-saving ego, made the assumption that the attackers had all been killed, or committed suicide.
The EMP hitting the Kremlin, plus rigid central control, is buying us getaway time
—
but for how long?
Civilian and military boats, ships, hydrofoils, and hovercraft were tied up in a hodgepodge at the Kolyma piers. Reinforcements were still arriving for a battle that no longer raged, while wounded, some with hideous burns, were being rushed to other hospitals downriver. Nyurba picked what he wanted: an old Skat-class air-cushion landing craft, official capacity two dozen troops. The six-man crew made no effort to refuse when the commandos demanded transportation. They climbed aboard the vessel, using the troop ladders at both sides of its blunt bow. The casualties, wheezing inside their masks due to lung problems from the missile fumes, moaned louder with this mishandling.
His fit men easily bound and gagged the crew. The enclosed, soundproof passenger area became overcrowded with commandos. The separate tiny control cabin’s fittings were worn and scuffed, but the small armored windshields on all four sides gave good views. A SEAL Chief knew how to operate the hovercraft—it wasn’t very different from the U.S. Navy’s LCACs, just smaller. An Army Ranger acted as radio man; a card by the transceiver gave their call sign of the day. He listened for news of pursuit or blockades downriver; static was extreme, but no cordon for rogues was set up. Nyurba’s medics had Red Cross flags, since these could give certain protections under recognized rules of war. He ordered two to be flown from staffs on the Skat. They’d help the vessel blend in now as a regular unit bringing injured men toward aid.
When will the Russian dragnet gel? How far will it reach?
The Skat was powered by two turboprops and one gas-turbine lift fan. The turboprops, in cowlings on tall projections at the stern, drove giant propellers; rudders in those tails worked just like those on airplanes. The turbine provided high-pressure air to a rubbery skirt surrounding the vessel’s bottom. The fuel tanks were full; the crew had topped them off upon arriving.
With the lift engine pushed to full power, the Skat rose on a cushion of air. Mist blew out from under the skirt. The chief turned the Skat downriver, north, and shoved the throttles all the way forward. Soon they were making more than fifty knots.
Looking back at dumpy Srednekolymsk, Nyurba noticed something painted on one of the Skat’s twin tails, so faded with age he could barely make it out—a hammer and sickle.
R
ear Admiral Meredov was quickly responsive to Jeffrey’s request, and very efficient about it. His aide gave Jeffrey a course to steer at flank speed under the ice, to surface and meet a civilian icebreaker unaffected by the EMP in this far-eastern part of Siberia. She told him the ship had a helicopter pad—a common arrangement, to scout ahead for the best route through difficult ice conditions.
When
Challenger
rendezvoused, Jeffrey was surprised to see, on the photonics mast display screens, not a helo but a Yakovlev-38U, a two-seat trainer version of the Russian Navy vertical takeoff and landing plane. The old Yak-38 resembled a Harrier, except its fuselage was longer and thinner, and its wing and tail were distinctively Russian in styling. The helo pad had to have been reinforced to take its weight and withstand the force and heat of its lift jets. That and the fact that the Yak was being refueled on the pad implied that the so-called civilian ship was a naval auxiliary, thinly concealed. She flew the Russian Federation flag, three broad stripes, white over blue over red.
Lieutenant Bud Torelli, the Weps, noticed that her superstructure bore several long, thin rectangular boxes covered by tarpaulins. He said these were almost certainly antiship and antiaircraft missile launchers.
She’s an auxiliary cruiser, an outright warship, disguised.
The other photonics mast showed that same Tu-204, Sable Seven, circling both vessels at a polite distance. It was there, Jeffrey assumed, for two disparate reasons. One was to help make sure that the rendezvous went off okay. The other was to make sure
Challenger
was really
Challenger
—not an American SSBN who’d tricked the Russians and snuck in close to launch its two dozen MIRVed missiles on flat trajectories with very short transit times. From this location, they’d reach anywhere in Russia in ten or twelve minutes.
I don’t blame them for being very, very cautious. They think we think
they
just tried to nuke the U.S.
Surfaced, her antenna masts exposed again,
Challenger
’s radio room received fragmentary updates for Jeffrey and Bell. The earth’s ionosphere and magnetic field were still distorted. The Van Allen belts were excited and swollen by nuclear gamma rays, X-rays, and ionized bomb debris. Several dozen unshielded satellites in low earth orbit had gone dead, and more would in the weeks to come from lingering radiation and energetic charged particles—although special methods of pumping high-frequency radio beams into space could ease this problem. Geosynchronous satellites and ones in high earth orbit were safe, as were ground stations outside the pancaked area. But reception was poor; transmissions via these satellites had to pierce the layers of persisting disruption from the exoatmospheric blasts.
The substantive news was that the Kremlin seemed harder hit by the EMP than expected. Jeffrey knew that shielding needed diligent maintenance or it wouldn’t hold up. The slightest bit of dirt or grease where it shouldn’t be, or one loose fitting, or a faulty backup battery, could cause even military-grade EMP protection to fail. Fiber-optic cables themselves might be immune to voltage surges, but their electrically powered signal amplifiers were vulnerable—and too many had been knocked out. It appeared that the Kremlin’s minions were sloppy.
Technicians were scrambling to get the Hot Line hot again; in the meantime Russia’s president was incommunicado, not by choice. Unfortunately, the American ambassador in Moscow, who wasn’t forewarned for security reasons, had taken the weekend off with his top aides at a
dacha
—country cabin—in the affected zone, and couldn’t be reached. Washington hoped that the German embassy was suffering similar problems. The U.S. and Russia were holding their H-bomb forces at DEFCON 2 or the equivalent, but the status quo of restraint was very volatile under the circumstances. The SS-27 warheads exploded in space at what had been 7
P.M.
on a Saturday night in Moscow. Urban traffic there was at a standstill, gridlocked, the microchips essential to modern vehicles all destroyed. Aircraft near Greater Moscow had been rendered unflyable, their avionics cooked. Airports in the pancaked zone were unusable without the severest risks, their radios, radars, navigation aids, and landing guidance systems all inoperable. Most planes in the air at the time of the EMP had managed to make forced landings, but some had crashed—the death toll was already extending beyond the missile complex at Srednekolymsk. Berlin, ever opportunistic and ruthless, so far seemed to be treating events with a studious silence. Jeffrey hoped to deliver them a sucker punch very soon.
The opening act in this drama, now that the icebreaker was here, would be to keep the Russians waiting. Jeffrey went to the XO’s stateroom to pack an overnight bag. And he took his own sweet time about it.
More than once, Nyurba ordered the SEAL chief to steer the air-cushioned Skat on shortcuts over tundra or swamps, saving miles compared to the wide, island-studded Kolyma’s winding course in the Arctic lowlands. He, the chief, and the radio man kept coughing up thick phlegm that they spat on the vibrating deck. At least, here in cleaner air, the commandos were out of their gas masks. Other vessels rushed upstream; the Skat, one of the fastest things on the river, overtook many heading down. In the sky, planes and helicopters flew back and forth, but none approached the Skat, which could defend itself with machine guns and shoulder-fired missiles he intentionally left unmanned.
At a medic’s request, Nyurba gave two pints of blood for the wounded, standing with a needle in his arm in the control cabin. His blood flowed from a vein to refill expended plasma packs—the wounded needed whole blood desperately. Two pints after a hard week was a lot; he felt dizzy. He drank water and ate field rations to replenish himself. He visited the men to offer comfort, distressed by how maimed they were in body and mind.
Jeffrey said good-bye to Bell, and wished the crew good fortune. Lugging the overnight bag, he paraded from
Challenger
’s hull into the icebreaker, up the ramp of a brow the big ship lowered from a gangway using a deck crane. He wore his winter greatcoat and formal hat and Navy blue dress uniform—including four gold rings that COB removed from Finch’s jacket to sew on his sleeves that already bore three. Jeffrey was led aft by the icebreaker’s weather-beaten master, a gaunt part-Asian man, fiftyish, whose fingers and teeth were stained by nicotine from cheap Russian cigarettes of which he thoroughly reeked. Now, he didn’t smoke; the Yak’s refueling had just been completed.
Looking over the icebreaker’s side, Jeffrey saw the crane stowing the brow.
Challenger,
her bridge crew already below, was moving away. She dived, a magnificent sight. She’d head north, to disappear under the ice cap, and Bell would make sure to lose any tail. Meredov’s base was in range of her dozen-plus Tactical Tomahawk cruise missiles, from anywhere within a huge area stretching up to the North Pole; Jeffrey would refuse to move any farther once he got to that headquarters.
The pilot, a no-nonsense, thirtysomething very fit Slav, strapped Jeffrey into the trainee seat, giving him a flight helmet. He climbed into the rear seat and lowered the cockpit canopy. Engine noises rose from idling whines to bone-shaking roars. The aircraft jumped into the sky, carrying external fuel tanks instead of bombs or missiles—but it did have a nose gun.
The Yak-38 hit five hundred knots. After a blur of Laptev Sea icebergs and white caps and surf, then a stretch of desolate tundra, Jeffrey looked down and around at a crazy-quilt patchwork of untouched taiga forest, winding rivers and tributaries, repulsive overindustrialization, and open-pit strip mining. The pilot helped Jeffrey listen to a news update that Meredov relayed to the plane. Drunken looting and panicky riots had broken out in crowded downtown Moscow. With no government explanation forthcoming for the paralyzing fireworks in the sky, with police unable to mobilize and blazes burning unchecked, anarchists and hooligans seized the chance to unleash years of pent-up rage. The frenzied mob-rule lawlessness and violence rapidly spread. As paranoid as ever of interference from abroad, Russians lynched Westerners at random, and stoned embassies indiscriminately.
So much mayhem so quickly is outside the envelope of scenarios considered in the mission plan. We’re going way off the map, into uncoordinated guesswork and ad-libbing.