Countdown c-6, page 29
part #6 of Carrier Series
"Can we get a Search and Rescue helo out that far?"
"Not a chance, CAG. We can call the Marines. Maybe they can send something out from Red Beach. They're close enough."
"Do it, then." He raised the microphone again. "Shotgun Two-two, Two-two, this is Home Plate. RTB. I say again, return to base!" The hostiles were closing in, and one lone Tomcat wouldn't stand a chance by itself.
"Shotgun Two-two, this is Home Plate. Respond!"
1154 hours
Near Sayda Guba
Chris was on her knees on a low rise on the ground, staring toward the south. Even without binoculars, she easily recognized the squat, open-topped turret, the quad-mounted 23mm guns. The vehicle was a ZSU-23-4, a deadly mobile flak battery called a Shilka by the Russians, but popularly known as the "Zoo" among American fliers. She estimated that it was still better than a mile off, sitting in the middle of that dirt road she'd seen from the air.
She grabbed the small survival radio clipped to her flight suit, pressing the transmit key. "Steve!" she shouted. "Steve, back off! There's a Zoo-twenty-three down here!"
The turret had already slewed to the right, and its big, blunt radar antenna, code-named "Gun Dish" by NATO, was tracking something to the west and close to the horizon. She could see that the cannons were firing, raising a haze of smoke above the vehicle. A moment later, the sound reached her, a steady, far-off thud-thud-thud-thud as the Zoo tracked and fired… and then, God, God, no! There was Striker's Tomcat, streaking low across the tundra dead in the Zoo's sights, and then smoke was trailing from it, a white smear unraveling astern of the aircraft as it began to break into pieces, and she heard the roar of the Tomcat's engines rising above the thud of the triple-A guns, and then there was nothing but flame and smoke as Steve's plane slammed into the ground.
Several seconds later, the dull whump! of the crash reached her.
Oh, God, please, no!
1158 hours
Air Ops
U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson
"I'm sorry, sir. Shotgun Two-two is down."
Tombstone replaced the microphone, his eyes still on the radar screen.
That was two down out of Shotgun, plus another damaged and limping back to the boat.
"White Lightning is now over the target," the Operations Officer announced. "Lead plane has just dumped his bombs."
Tombstone dragged his attention away from the blank spot on the map near Sayda Guba to the ragged shores of the Kola Inlet near Polyamyy. The Intruders were swinging one after the other into their attack vectors, bearing down on the naval bases and depots lining the western shore of the inlet. He could hear the aviators and B/Ns calling to one another as they made their runs.
"White Lightning One-two-two! Pickle's hot! I'm going in!"
"This is One-two-oh! I'm in!"
"White Lightning Two, this is Lightning One-one. Watch that flak over the inlet. They've got some ships down there, a couple of corvettes, maybe a light cruiser. We're getting heavy fire from the face of the cliff above the base too."
"Roger that, One-one. I can see the gunfire."
"SAM! SAM! I've got a SAM launch at zero-nine-five!
"Watch for fighters. Echo-Whiskey's got bandits spotted at one-eight-zero!"
The hell with this! Angrily, Tombstone picked up a telephone receiver and punched in a number. "Fred? Tombstone. What's the status on the CAG bird?"
"Uh… she's up and ready, CAG. But-"
"Bring her to ready and put her on the line. I'll be on the roof in ten minutes."
"Aye, aye, sir."
He hung up. "Operations Officer!"
"Yes, sir."
"You've got the watch here. I'm going up there."
"Uh, yes, sir. Should I tell-"
But Tombstone had already left the compartment.
1200 hours
Near Sayda Guba
Hanson had started moving in the direction of the crash, her eyes still sweeping the leaden sky, praying for the sight of a parachute. Still, though, there was nothing… nothing… and then she stumbled into an unseen ditch and fell heavily to the ground.
She grunted with the shock, then rose, slowly, mud-covered and shaken.
Get a grip, woman! she told herself savagely. You start blundering around in enemy territory without thinking about what you're doing and you're going to end up dead!
Voices. She heard voices… and the sound of a truck's engine.
Turning, Hanson saw a light truck on the dirt road a hundred yards behind her, much closer than the Zoo. Armed men were piling out of the back, calling to one another as they began fanning out across the field.
Coming for her.
Groping at the hip of her flight suit, she drew her pistol, a 9mm Beretta automatic. She counted twelve men now, and clearly they'd already seen her.
The line was spreading out, the men on the flanks running now to get around her from either side.
She considered running… but where could she run to? They were already close enough to shoot her if they wanted to. She also considered opening fire, going down in some kind of heroic, John Wayne last stand, but that was just plain silly. At a hundred yards, she wouldn't be able to come close to hitting them with a handgun, while they were carrying AKMs, assault rifles accurate to four hundred yards or more. Hanson had never thought much of the old, ultra-macho idea of death rather than surrender.
"Stoy!"
The command snapped at her from her right, and she spun, surprised.
Damn! How had he gotten so close so quickly? A Russian was standing less than twenty yards away, his AK aimed at her.
"Stoy!" he barked again, gesturing with the rifle. "Zdavayetees!
Brawste arujyee!"
She wished that she could speak Russian. Still, it was clear what he wanted. Carefully, making no quick moves, she extended the hand holding the Beretta and dropped the weapon to the ground. The soldier stepped cautiously closer. "Rukee v'vayrh!" The rifle snapped up, a savage gesture, and she raised her hands over her head.
He looked Oriental, not Chinese exactly, but with a Mongolian's flat face and puffy, slit eyes. Those eyes widened as he got closer, and Hanson was uncomfortably aware that he had just realized that his prisoner was a woman.
He spat something harsh. It didn't sound like Russian. His eyes were twinkling and his face was marred by an unpleasant grin as the rest of the soldiers hurried up.
She stood there uncertainly, arms still raised, as rough hands groped and pawed and patted, spun her about, then groped again. One grabbed her left arm, jerked it down, then pulled off her wristwatch and pocketed it. Another grabbed her SAR radio and jerked it from her flight suit. She tried to concentrate on the uniforms surrounding her, instead of the grinning, too-eager faces. Green camouflage… but with a peculiar, high-peaked, visored cap. They wore shoulder boards with the letters BB on them in gold.
She knew that the Cyrillic letter that looked like a B was actually a V. What did VV stand for? She was sure that they weren't speaking Russian as they jabbered at one another.
After they had searched her with elaborate thoroughness, someone produced a length of heavy twine and tied her wrists tightly behind her back. She was expecting them to take her back to the truck, but the one who'd first captured her appeared to have a different idea. "Vpeeryad!" he ordered, and the muzzle of his AK jammed into the small of her back just below her bound hands.
"I don't understand you!" she told him. "I am American, understand?
Amer-"
"Skaray!" He prodded her again, this time in the buttocks, and she stumbled forward, then fell to her knees as the men around her laughed and hooted. Two of them grabbed her then, one taking each of her arms, hauling her to her feet and dragging her forward. They were taking her, she saw with mounting horror, toward that nearby barn she'd noticed during her descent.
Inside, the light falling through the gaps between the boards of the walls was filtered through drifting dust, and the air was thick with the mingled smells of hay and manure. Someone grabbed her arms from behind, holding her tightly while the rest closed in.
"No!" she yelled, desperate, angrier now than she'd ever been in her life. "No, you bastards! No!" She tried to kick, but they held her legs while a grinning Mongol stooped to unlace her boots. Another reached up and started tugging at the zipper to her flight suit.
Evidently, that proved to be too slow. Knives gleamed in the half light as three or four of them roughly began cutting every stitch of clothing from her body. It was slow going, for the material of the survival garment beneath her flight suit was thick and tough, like a wet suit. The men chatted back and forth as they worked, sometimes laughing as though at a hilarious joke.
Then she was on her back in the hay and they were all around her, pinning her down, spreading her legs, fondling her, laughing as she cursed and twisted helplessly beneath them.
The hay prickled the bare skin of her back and legs, and the air was so heavy with the stink of barn and animals and unwashed, sweating men that she could scarcely breathe. She'd heard about things like this happening, heard horror stories about Russians raping women in Germany in World War II, about Serbs raping Moslem women in Bosnia… but it couldn't, couldn't be happening to her.
Somehow, she managed not to start screaming until the first of them dropped his trousers and lowered himself onto her body.
CHAPTER 27
Tuesday, 17 March
1200 hours
The Kola Peninsula
One after another, the Super Stallions descended from the sky like lumbering, green-and-gray-camouflaged insects. On the LZ perimeters, AH-1 Cobra gunships circled and darted, evil-visaged dragonflies that hovered, stooped, and spat deadly flame as hostile positions were identified and targeted. On the ground, Marine spotters called in death from above. Cobras and blunt-nosed Harrier II jumpjets screamed in at low altitude, slamming enemy strong points, vehicles, and troop concentrations with 2.75-inch rockets, TOW missiles, and rapid-fire cannons.
On the high ground above Polyamyy, elements of the 1st and 3r Battalions, 8th Marines, spread out from their initial LZs, taking up positions on the windswept, barren heights overlooking the Kola Inlet. A cluster of SAM sites and a radar station, smoking ruins now after repeated air and cruise-missile strikes, dominated the top of the cliffs, overlooking a sprawling naval docking facility on the water.
The Marines had just been flown ashore from the LHA Nassau, a floating, flat-topped warren of gray passageways and compartments that experienced Marines referred to, with teeth-gritting sarcasm, as a "Luxury Hotel Afloat."
Some of the old hands joked that after sleeping in tiny racks stacked five and six deep with nineteen hundred other Marines for the past six weeks, the 1/8 and 3/8 were more than ready to take on anything the Russians could throw at them.
Russian Naval Infantry were still holding the ruins, but most scattered after a pair of Harriers shrieked in low across the cliff tops, slashing at the sheltering Russian troops with rockets and free-fall iron bombs. As the Marines moved forward, a dozen tired and ragged-looking men in camouflage uniforms emerged from a tumble-down of bricks and I-beams, hands in the air.
Lieutenant Ben Rivera reached the edge of the cliff, an M-16 gripped in trembling hands. He was scared, yes, but more than that he was excited. He'd missed out on the fighting in Norway the year before, and he'd been dreaming of this moment ever since he'd entered the ROTC program in college.
From the beginning, though, he'd wanted to be a Marine aviator, and he'd made it too, learning to fly Marine F/A-18s… and burdened by no false modesty, he could freely admit to being one of the best.
But Marine tradition still firmly held that all Marines, whether pilots, tank drivers, or cooks, were first and foremost combat riflemen. More to the point, Marine aviators were expected to take their turns as Forward Observers, aviators assigned to the infantry to serve as advance ground controllers.
He'd thought that he'd enter Russia in a Hornet. Instead, he'd come in by Super Stallion, attached to the 1/8. He didn't really mind, for his training had prepared him for just this sort of assignment.
It was just that when the low, rumbling thunder of Marine or Navy jets rolled across the snow-capped peaks of the Kola Inlet, he could grip his rifle and look up from the mud and imagine that the other aviators definitely had the better deal.
Or at the very least, a wider view of the war.
Local resistance appeared to have ceased, and he was searching now for a good spot for an Observation Post. Fifty meters ahead, the ground crested in a low, rounded hummock occupied by concrete block ruins still smoldering from last night's air strikes. Signaling to his radio operator, Gunnery Sergeant Ed Larson, Rivera dashed for the rise, head down, alert for movement ahead of him.
He reached the ruins and picked his way through them, probing the shadows and blind corners. At the east side of the hill, he came to a broken wall, with blast-broken crenellations like gray dragon's teeth rising from a bleached and monstrous lower jawbone. From there he was able to look down into the Kola Inlet itself.
His hilltop actually rose above the head of a smaller inlet opening into the broader waters of the Kola, which measured a good three miles across at this point. Across this smaller inlet to the southeast was the town of Polyamyy itself, an ugly, dismal-looking clutter of buildings that immediately reminded Rivera of some military or industrial towns he'd known, all smokestacks and crane gantries and warehouses, stained gray to black by decades of pollution and neglect. Several hundred meters below Rivera's position, the slopes overlooking the water flattened out enough to shelter a waterfront town, smaller than Polyamyy, but identical in its ramshackle-looking collection of warehouses, factory chimneys, and blocks of military apartments with dingy, neo-Stalinist facades. Moles reached out from the hillside to enclose a rectangle of dirty gray water directly below Rivera's OP. Piers and docks extended from the shore into the inlet on both sides of the moles and across the inlet in Polyamyy itself, and he could see a number of vessels tied to the quays.
Most were submarines. Rivera easily identified the enormous, broad-beamed bulk of an Oscar SSGN; two of the oddly humpbacked Delta IV PLARBs; a half-dozen smaller, sleeker attack subs, Alfas and Victors; and three diesel-electric Kilos, conventional attack subs with anti-air missile-defense systems hidden in the long, squared-off sail. A few larger surface ships were tied up there as well, frigates and corvettes and a single Udaloy-class destroyer.
The majority of those ships and submarines showed damage from air attacks, though as he watched, white smoke spouted from the bow of the Udaloy destroyer, then unraveled into a knife-edged contrail arrowing straight up into the sky, then rapidly curving off toward the north. Udaloys, Rivera knew, were equipped with SA-N-9 missiles as their primary surface-to-air armament, advanced missiles similar to the American Sea Sparrow.
There appeared to be some sort of large, concrete structure built onto the hillside Rivera was crouching on, but from his position he couldn't see what it was. Still, this was an ideal Forward Observer's eyrie, with a smorgasbord of targets that gave new meaning to the expression "target-rich environment."
A rippling, fluttering sound shivered through the air. An instant later, part of Rivera's hillside erupted in a geysering column of black smoke, mud, and debris. Clutching helmet and rifle, Rivera dropped for cover, tumbling into a shallow hole behind the wall, knee- and elbow-deep in mingled mud and snow. The first blast was followed by another, a savage thump that jarred Rivera through the ground and sent loose concrete blocks clattering down the hill in front of him. The next explosion was closer still… then another passed overhead, exploding behind him.
Raising his head just enough to peer between the dragon's teeth of the shattered wall, Rivera brought his binoculars to his eyes and studied the slopes across the narrow inlet rising just to the west of Polyamyy. He thought he could see the source of the arty there, several low-slung vehicles that might be 2S3 or 2S5 self-propelled guns. As he watched, he saw a silent flash among the squat shapes; seconds later, he heard the ripping-cloth sound of an incoming round and ducked for cover. The blast shook the ground.
His company radio man was crouched behind the rubble ten meters away.
"Larson! Get your ass over here!"
Another explosion showered both men with grit and broken gravel, but Larson crawled up to Rivera, who took the radio handset. "King Three! King Three!" he called. "This is White Knight Five! Over!"
"White Knight Five, this is King Three. Go ahead."
He took another sighting on the far hilltop, comparing it with a small map he'd carried folded up in his breast pocket. "King Three, immediate suppression, grid Charlie Delta Three-five-niner-one-one-two. Tracked vehicles, believe two-Sierra-five mounted artillery, Hill Eight-nine.
Authenticate Sierra. Over!"
"White Knight Five, King Three, immediate suppression, grid Charlie Delta Three-five-niner-one-one-two, tracked vehicles…"
As the voice at the other end repeated back the message, Rivera marveled at the stupidity of modern politics. Time and time again, the U.S. Marines had come under vicious, slashing attack, not by a foreign enemy but by American politicians eager to cut military budgets, or to eliminate what they saw as Pentagon waste.
There'd been waste in the military, there was no denying that, though Rivera had always felt that the military all too often became a scapegoat for congressmen trying to divert attention from waste closer to Capitol Hill. In recent years, however, things had gotten out of hand. During some of the sillier periods of the Clinton Administration, attempts had been made to eliminate the Marines entirely, or at least to pare them back; one move still being debated called for eliminating Marine artillery, with the idea that artillery should be strictly the prerogative of the U.S. Army. By that way of thinking, letting the Marines field their own artillery, even for counterbattery fire, was a needless duplication of effort.
In the same spirit of efficiency, they'd blocked letting the Marines buy their own modern M-1A1 tanks, forcing them to continue relying on relic M60s.
"Not a chance, CAG. We can call the Marines. Maybe they can send something out from Red Beach. They're close enough."
"Do it, then." He raised the microphone again. "Shotgun Two-two, Two-two, this is Home Plate. RTB. I say again, return to base!" The hostiles were closing in, and one lone Tomcat wouldn't stand a chance by itself.
"Shotgun Two-two, this is Home Plate. Respond!"
1154 hours
Near Sayda Guba
Chris was on her knees on a low rise on the ground, staring toward the south. Even without binoculars, she easily recognized the squat, open-topped turret, the quad-mounted 23mm guns. The vehicle was a ZSU-23-4, a deadly mobile flak battery called a Shilka by the Russians, but popularly known as the "Zoo" among American fliers. She estimated that it was still better than a mile off, sitting in the middle of that dirt road she'd seen from the air.
She grabbed the small survival radio clipped to her flight suit, pressing the transmit key. "Steve!" she shouted. "Steve, back off! There's a Zoo-twenty-three down here!"
The turret had already slewed to the right, and its big, blunt radar antenna, code-named "Gun Dish" by NATO, was tracking something to the west and close to the horizon. She could see that the cannons were firing, raising a haze of smoke above the vehicle. A moment later, the sound reached her, a steady, far-off thud-thud-thud-thud as the Zoo tracked and fired… and then, God, God, no! There was Striker's Tomcat, streaking low across the tundra dead in the Zoo's sights, and then smoke was trailing from it, a white smear unraveling astern of the aircraft as it began to break into pieces, and she heard the roar of the Tomcat's engines rising above the thud of the triple-A guns, and then there was nothing but flame and smoke as Steve's plane slammed into the ground.
Several seconds later, the dull whump! of the crash reached her.
Oh, God, please, no!
1158 hours
Air Ops
U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson
"I'm sorry, sir. Shotgun Two-two is down."
Tombstone replaced the microphone, his eyes still on the radar screen.
That was two down out of Shotgun, plus another damaged and limping back to the boat.
"White Lightning is now over the target," the Operations Officer announced. "Lead plane has just dumped his bombs."
Tombstone dragged his attention away from the blank spot on the map near Sayda Guba to the ragged shores of the Kola Inlet near Polyamyy. The Intruders were swinging one after the other into their attack vectors, bearing down on the naval bases and depots lining the western shore of the inlet. He could hear the aviators and B/Ns calling to one another as they made their runs.
"White Lightning One-two-two! Pickle's hot! I'm going in!"
"This is One-two-oh! I'm in!"
"White Lightning Two, this is Lightning One-one. Watch that flak over the inlet. They've got some ships down there, a couple of corvettes, maybe a light cruiser. We're getting heavy fire from the face of the cliff above the base too."
"Roger that, One-one. I can see the gunfire."
"SAM! SAM! I've got a SAM launch at zero-nine-five!
"Watch for fighters. Echo-Whiskey's got bandits spotted at one-eight-zero!"
The hell with this! Angrily, Tombstone picked up a telephone receiver and punched in a number. "Fred? Tombstone. What's the status on the CAG bird?"
"Uh… she's up and ready, CAG. But-"
"Bring her to ready and put her on the line. I'll be on the roof in ten minutes."
"Aye, aye, sir."
He hung up. "Operations Officer!"
"Yes, sir."
"You've got the watch here. I'm going up there."
"Uh, yes, sir. Should I tell-"
But Tombstone had already left the compartment.
1200 hours
Near Sayda Guba
Hanson had started moving in the direction of the crash, her eyes still sweeping the leaden sky, praying for the sight of a parachute. Still, though, there was nothing… nothing… and then she stumbled into an unseen ditch and fell heavily to the ground.
She grunted with the shock, then rose, slowly, mud-covered and shaken.
Get a grip, woman! she told herself savagely. You start blundering around in enemy territory without thinking about what you're doing and you're going to end up dead!
Voices. She heard voices… and the sound of a truck's engine.
Turning, Hanson saw a light truck on the dirt road a hundred yards behind her, much closer than the Zoo. Armed men were piling out of the back, calling to one another as they began fanning out across the field.
Coming for her.
Groping at the hip of her flight suit, she drew her pistol, a 9mm Beretta automatic. She counted twelve men now, and clearly they'd already seen her.
The line was spreading out, the men on the flanks running now to get around her from either side.
She considered running… but where could she run to? They were already close enough to shoot her if they wanted to. She also considered opening fire, going down in some kind of heroic, John Wayne last stand, but that was just plain silly. At a hundred yards, she wouldn't be able to come close to hitting them with a handgun, while they were carrying AKMs, assault rifles accurate to four hundred yards or more. Hanson had never thought much of the old, ultra-macho idea of death rather than surrender.
"Stoy!"
The command snapped at her from her right, and she spun, surprised.
Damn! How had he gotten so close so quickly? A Russian was standing less than twenty yards away, his AK aimed at her.
"Stoy!" he barked again, gesturing with the rifle. "Zdavayetees!
Brawste arujyee!"
She wished that she could speak Russian. Still, it was clear what he wanted. Carefully, making no quick moves, she extended the hand holding the Beretta and dropped the weapon to the ground. The soldier stepped cautiously closer. "Rukee v'vayrh!" The rifle snapped up, a savage gesture, and she raised her hands over her head.
He looked Oriental, not Chinese exactly, but with a Mongolian's flat face and puffy, slit eyes. Those eyes widened as he got closer, and Hanson was uncomfortably aware that he had just realized that his prisoner was a woman.
He spat something harsh. It didn't sound like Russian. His eyes were twinkling and his face was marred by an unpleasant grin as the rest of the soldiers hurried up.
She stood there uncertainly, arms still raised, as rough hands groped and pawed and patted, spun her about, then groped again. One grabbed her left arm, jerked it down, then pulled off her wristwatch and pocketed it. Another grabbed her SAR radio and jerked it from her flight suit. She tried to concentrate on the uniforms surrounding her, instead of the grinning, too-eager faces. Green camouflage… but with a peculiar, high-peaked, visored cap. They wore shoulder boards with the letters BB on them in gold.
She knew that the Cyrillic letter that looked like a B was actually a V. What did VV stand for? She was sure that they weren't speaking Russian as they jabbered at one another.
After they had searched her with elaborate thoroughness, someone produced a length of heavy twine and tied her wrists tightly behind her back. She was expecting them to take her back to the truck, but the one who'd first captured her appeared to have a different idea. "Vpeeryad!" he ordered, and the muzzle of his AK jammed into the small of her back just below her bound hands.
"I don't understand you!" she told him. "I am American, understand?
Amer-"
"Skaray!" He prodded her again, this time in the buttocks, and she stumbled forward, then fell to her knees as the men around her laughed and hooted. Two of them grabbed her then, one taking each of her arms, hauling her to her feet and dragging her forward. They were taking her, she saw with mounting horror, toward that nearby barn she'd noticed during her descent.
Inside, the light falling through the gaps between the boards of the walls was filtered through drifting dust, and the air was thick with the mingled smells of hay and manure. Someone grabbed her arms from behind, holding her tightly while the rest closed in.
"No!" she yelled, desperate, angrier now than she'd ever been in her life. "No, you bastards! No!" She tried to kick, but they held her legs while a grinning Mongol stooped to unlace her boots. Another reached up and started tugging at the zipper to her flight suit.
Evidently, that proved to be too slow. Knives gleamed in the half light as three or four of them roughly began cutting every stitch of clothing from her body. It was slow going, for the material of the survival garment beneath her flight suit was thick and tough, like a wet suit. The men chatted back and forth as they worked, sometimes laughing as though at a hilarious joke.
Then she was on her back in the hay and they were all around her, pinning her down, spreading her legs, fondling her, laughing as she cursed and twisted helplessly beneath them.
The hay prickled the bare skin of her back and legs, and the air was so heavy with the stink of barn and animals and unwashed, sweating men that she could scarcely breathe. She'd heard about things like this happening, heard horror stories about Russians raping women in Germany in World War II, about Serbs raping Moslem women in Bosnia… but it couldn't, couldn't be happening to her.
Somehow, she managed not to start screaming until the first of them dropped his trousers and lowered himself onto her body.
CHAPTER 27
Tuesday, 17 March
1200 hours
The Kola Peninsula
One after another, the Super Stallions descended from the sky like lumbering, green-and-gray-camouflaged insects. On the LZ perimeters, AH-1 Cobra gunships circled and darted, evil-visaged dragonflies that hovered, stooped, and spat deadly flame as hostile positions were identified and targeted. On the ground, Marine spotters called in death from above. Cobras and blunt-nosed Harrier II jumpjets screamed in at low altitude, slamming enemy strong points, vehicles, and troop concentrations with 2.75-inch rockets, TOW missiles, and rapid-fire cannons.
On the high ground above Polyamyy, elements of the 1st and 3r Battalions, 8th Marines, spread out from their initial LZs, taking up positions on the windswept, barren heights overlooking the Kola Inlet. A cluster of SAM sites and a radar station, smoking ruins now after repeated air and cruise-missile strikes, dominated the top of the cliffs, overlooking a sprawling naval docking facility on the water.
The Marines had just been flown ashore from the LHA Nassau, a floating, flat-topped warren of gray passageways and compartments that experienced Marines referred to, with teeth-gritting sarcasm, as a "Luxury Hotel Afloat."
Some of the old hands joked that after sleeping in tiny racks stacked five and six deep with nineteen hundred other Marines for the past six weeks, the 1/8 and 3/8 were more than ready to take on anything the Russians could throw at them.
Russian Naval Infantry were still holding the ruins, but most scattered after a pair of Harriers shrieked in low across the cliff tops, slashing at the sheltering Russian troops with rockets and free-fall iron bombs. As the Marines moved forward, a dozen tired and ragged-looking men in camouflage uniforms emerged from a tumble-down of bricks and I-beams, hands in the air.
Lieutenant Ben Rivera reached the edge of the cliff, an M-16 gripped in trembling hands. He was scared, yes, but more than that he was excited. He'd missed out on the fighting in Norway the year before, and he'd been dreaming of this moment ever since he'd entered the ROTC program in college.
From the beginning, though, he'd wanted to be a Marine aviator, and he'd made it too, learning to fly Marine F/A-18s… and burdened by no false modesty, he could freely admit to being one of the best.
But Marine tradition still firmly held that all Marines, whether pilots, tank drivers, or cooks, were first and foremost combat riflemen. More to the point, Marine aviators were expected to take their turns as Forward Observers, aviators assigned to the infantry to serve as advance ground controllers.
He'd thought that he'd enter Russia in a Hornet. Instead, he'd come in by Super Stallion, attached to the 1/8. He didn't really mind, for his training had prepared him for just this sort of assignment.
It was just that when the low, rumbling thunder of Marine or Navy jets rolled across the snow-capped peaks of the Kola Inlet, he could grip his rifle and look up from the mud and imagine that the other aviators definitely had the better deal.
Or at the very least, a wider view of the war.
Local resistance appeared to have ceased, and he was searching now for a good spot for an Observation Post. Fifty meters ahead, the ground crested in a low, rounded hummock occupied by concrete block ruins still smoldering from last night's air strikes. Signaling to his radio operator, Gunnery Sergeant Ed Larson, Rivera dashed for the rise, head down, alert for movement ahead of him.
He reached the ruins and picked his way through them, probing the shadows and blind corners. At the east side of the hill, he came to a broken wall, with blast-broken crenellations like gray dragon's teeth rising from a bleached and monstrous lower jawbone. From there he was able to look down into the Kola Inlet itself.
His hilltop actually rose above the head of a smaller inlet opening into the broader waters of the Kola, which measured a good three miles across at this point. Across this smaller inlet to the southeast was the town of Polyamyy itself, an ugly, dismal-looking clutter of buildings that immediately reminded Rivera of some military or industrial towns he'd known, all smokestacks and crane gantries and warehouses, stained gray to black by decades of pollution and neglect. Several hundred meters below Rivera's position, the slopes overlooking the water flattened out enough to shelter a waterfront town, smaller than Polyamyy, but identical in its ramshackle-looking collection of warehouses, factory chimneys, and blocks of military apartments with dingy, neo-Stalinist facades. Moles reached out from the hillside to enclose a rectangle of dirty gray water directly below Rivera's OP. Piers and docks extended from the shore into the inlet on both sides of the moles and across the inlet in Polyamyy itself, and he could see a number of vessels tied to the quays.
Most were submarines. Rivera easily identified the enormous, broad-beamed bulk of an Oscar SSGN; two of the oddly humpbacked Delta IV PLARBs; a half-dozen smaller, sleeker attack subs, Alfas and Victors; and three diesel-electric Kilos, conventional attack subs with anti-air missile-defense systems hidden in the long, squared-off sail. A few larger surface ships were tied up there as well, frigates and corvettes and a single Udaloy-class destroyer.
The majority of those ships and submarines showed damage from air attacks, though as he watched, white smoke spouted from the bow of the Udaloy destroyer, then unraveled into a knife-edged contrail arrowing straight up into the sky, then rapidly curving off toward the north. Udaloys, Rivera knew, were equipped with SA-N-9 missiles as their primary surface-to-air armament, advanced missiles similar to the American Sea Sparrow.
There appeared to be some sort of large, concrete structure built onto the hillside Rivera was crouching on, but from his position he couldn't see what it was. Still, this was an ideal Forward Observer's eyrie, with a smorgasbord of targets that gave new meaning to the expression "target-rich environment."
A rippling, fluttering sound shivered through the air. An instant later, part of Rivera's hillside erupted in a geysering column of black smoke, mud, and debris. Clutching helmet and rifle, Rivera dropped for cover, tumbling into a shallow hole behind the wall, knee- and elbow-deep in mingled mud and snow. The first blast was followed by another, a savage thump that jarred Rivera through the ground and sent loose concrete blocks clattering down the hill in front of him. The next explosion was closer still… then another passed overhead, exploding behind him.
Raising his head just enough to peer between the dragon's teeth of the shattered wall, Rivera brought his binoculars to his eyes and studied the slopes across the narrow inlet rising just to the west of Polyamyy. He thought he could see the source of the arty there, several low-slung vehicles that might be 2S3 or 2S5 self-propelled guns. As he watched, he saw a silent flash among the squat shapes; seconds later, he heard the ripping-cloth sound of an incoming round and ducked for cover. The blast shook the ground.
His company radio man was crouched behind the rubble ten meters away.
"Larson! Get your ass over here!"
Another explosion showered both men with grit and broken gravel, but Larson crawled up to Rivera, who took the radio handset. "King Three! King Three!" he called. "This is White Knight Five! Over!"
"White Knight Five, this is King Three. Go ahead."
He took another sighting on the far hilltop, comparing it with a small map he'd carried folded up in his breast pocket. "King Three, immediate suppression, grid Charlie Delta Three-five-niner-one-one-two. Tracked vehicles, believe two-Sierra-five mounted artillery, Hill Eight-nine.
Authenticate Sierra. Over!"
"White Knight Five, King Three, immediate suppression, grid Charlie Delta Three-five-niner-one-one-two, tracked vehicles…"
As the voice at the other end repeated back the message, Rivera marveled at the stupidity of modern politics. Time and time again, the U.S. Marines had come under vicious, slashing attack, not by a foreign enemy but by American politicians eager to cut military budgets, or to eliminate what they saw as Pentagon waste.
There'd been waste in the military, there was no denying that, though Rivera had always felt that the military all too often became a scapegoat for congressmen trying to divert attention from waste closer to Capitol Hill. In recent years, however, things had gotten out of hand. During some of the sillier periods of the Clinton Administration, attempts had been made to eliminate the Marines entirely, or at least to pare them back; one move still being debated called for eliminating Marine artillery, with the idea that artillery should be strictly the prerogative of the U.S. Army. By that way of thinking, letting the Marines field their own artillery, even for counterbattery fire, was a needless duplication of effort.
In the same spirit of efficiency, they'd blocked letting the Marines buy their own modern M-1A1 tanks, forcing them to continue relying on relic M60s.
