“You ready?” asked Freeman on the bullhorn.
There was a roar that for a second could be heard above that of the plane.
“Dumb question. Right?” hollered Freeman.
“Right!”
Freeman was walking down the center of the deck, holding onto the webbing net. “No need to tell you,” he told the paratroopers over the bullhorn, “how important this is. Those F-14s from Salt Lake City’ll keep the bastards’ heads down. Then we go in and whip their ass. I can assure you, gentlemen, that will send Novosibirsk a very clear message: ‘Back off! Before you all lose your ass!’ “
There was a chorus of approval and the stamping of para boots, which annoyed the air force jumpmaster intensely. The stomping was creating a minor dust storm inside the Starlifter.
“Well, Brentwood, we’ll have snow to contend with but least we won’t have the press. They aren’t gonna Vietnam me, Captain. All those goddamn liberal lap dogs in the press running around saying they didn’t lose us Vietnam — that the army did. Goddamn it, no one seems to realize we could have ended that war in half an hour. Two A-bombs on Hanoi would have done it. But we didn’t. We get any marks for that restraint? Not on your life. You know what would have happened, though, if those squealing bastards had been taken prisoner by the Commies. They would have wanted the U.S. Air Force to turn that place into a parking lot. Well, they’re not going to be allowed to do a Baghdad Pete on us. I’ve told the CO of that Patriot battery on Little Diomede to send that CBN son-of-a-bitch reporter and his Arctic fox headgear packing back to the mainland. They can all get pissed in Anchorage while we’re setting these Commie bastards straight.”
“Yes, sir,” said David Brentwood, remembering how a reporter once asked him, a thrice-decorated soldier, how he got used to it. You never did. The first moments of a battle were always as bowel chilling as the first time. Yes, you learned certain things, sensed when a firefight was more concentrated and more dangerous in one instance than in another, when there was twice as much noise as accuracy; you learned to husband your strength, ration it and not blow it all in the first few minutes; but you never got used to it.
“Vse gotovy?”—”All done?” asked General Dracheev.
“Da!”
“Kharasho!”— “Good! A little surprise for the Americans, eh?”
“Sir?” It was the air defense duty officer. “Bandits. Looks like F-14s. Coming fast from the south. No more than a thousand feet. Trying for the exits one more time.”
“Neuzheli? “— “Oh really?” commented Dracheev, with ill-conceived sarcasm. “I thought they’d be bringing the mail.” This got a good laugh from the SPETS commander. So even with the snow making it difficult for the F-14s to use their Smart bombs with their normal accuracy, the Americans would chop up the snow a little — maybe even buckle a few of the superhardened steel plates around the exits.
“They’re not stupid,” said the air defense officer, trying to regain his bruised dignity. “I mean this Freeman. He will realize that some of the exits have probably not been used. That the pilots won’t see them.”
“So?” said Dracheev. “He’ll send his men looking for them.” With that the Siberian general looked up from the dull red light of Ratmanov Control — a hundred feet of solid rock above him. “All the better then.”
The air defense officer was even more offended, resentment growing by the second. Dracheev had obviously confided his plan only to the SPETS. Although this was normal procedure— SPETS always insisted their operations be kept as secret as possible — it still rubbed the wrong way. “Who in hell do they think they are?” the air defense officer asked his subaltern. “The elite.”
In his sod house in Little Diomede’s Inalik village, the hunter, the high cheekbones of his Eskimo forebears catching the light of the golden hurricane lamp, civil twilight, before daybreak, still an hour away, puffed heavily on his walrus-bone pipe.”It’s a lot of trouble.”
“It’s a lot of money,” countered the CBN reporter.
The hunter took another pull of salmon jerky. The silence was broken only by the unsettling groaning of the pack ice off frozen Lopp Lagoon, north of Cape Prince of Wales. They could see the navigation light right on the point — the westernmost point of the cape, the wind coming straight off the flat ice of the lagoon in a soulful wail.
“Well?” said the reporter impatiently, holding his hands over the Sanyo kerosene radiator, its heat waves rising like a mirage in the hunter’s sod hut. “I haven’t got all day.”
“Cash?” said the hunter.
“Hey, you think I carry that kind of money round with me?”
“Yes,” said the hunter.
A professional smile creased the reporter’s face. “How’d you know?”
“I can smell it.”
“Shit you can.”
“Yes, I smell shit. But I smell money, too. Up here you don’t smell right, you the. What you see is important, too. When the-”
“Hey,” interjected the reporter impatiently. “Time’s racing, Jack. Have we got a deal or not? Five grand now. Five when we get back.”
The hunter was thinking. It had been a bad year. The walrus had come south in a heavy fog and gone past the islands before they knew it, so they hadn’t got the usual number to cut up and store with the murre birds — for flavor — in the frozen earth.
“You won’t be able to show any light,” said the hunter. “Those guys in the Patriot bunkers — they could pick you up on infrared.” He thought for a moment. “Course there’ll still be a lot of heat coming up from the rest of the huts after they evacuate us. So you’d be all right in here for a while anyways.”
“They wouldn’t be able to see the moving about in this snowfall,” said the reporter. “Cuts down the infrared signature.”
“Maybe,” said the hunter, caught out.
“There’s another way,” said the reporter.
“No,” said the hunter.
“What? You don’t even know the fucking question.”
“Yes I do. You want to know if we could hike across to Big Diomede.”
“It’s only two and a half, three miles,” said the reporter.
“We could get killed.”
“Everybody gets killed. You ever do it?” asked the reporter, fixing the hunter with a challenging stare.
“Sure. Used to do it a lot after Gorbachev — for a while.”
“So?”
“It’s not a walk on an ice rink,” said the hunter. “Pressure ridges push up against one another.” He used his hands, pushing hard against one another, to demonstrate. “Ice as big as buildings.”
“Yeah, and it can be flat, too.”
“And how about the infrared?”
“I told you — not if we go when it’s snowing, Jack.”
“It’s not a hike, you know. You can get—”
“You scared. That it?”
“Yes.”
“So am I,” said the reporter, pulling out a wad of hundreds. “I’d bury this stuff here if I were you.” He started counting. “How long will it take us — not right up on the island but off the ice floe — close enough in so we can hunker down — close enough to get some zoom shots of the airborne going in off the southern tip?”
“Four to five hours.”
“That long? It’s only two and a half miles, for Christ’s sakes.”
The hunter smiled. Here was an ignorant man. What did he think it was, a walk in some park? “Hey,” he said to the reporter, “you the guy who was in Baghdad?”