When they’d convinced Johnny they weren’t messing around, and then convinced him to get his father on the line, the conversation got very serious very fast. Johnny’s father’s name was Dan Kushniruk, but he told the boys to call him Sarge.
“Are you guys safe?” was his first question.
“Yeah, no one is looking for us,” Perri told him. “Not since the missiles. They’re pretty much occupied with just staying alive now I think.”
He got the boys to walk him through what they’d done the last few days, their attack on the ammo dump. His main concern was for the townspeople still being held hostage.
“I’ve got photos of everything,” Perri told him. “Most of them are from long distance, up on the bluff, but we did a run to the airstrip yesterday to get this radio, so we have some photos from there too. I could upload them?”
“I can give you a website to send them to,” Sarge told them. “Send me everything you’ve got. Look, you have to assume that using that Russian radio isn’t safe. Someone in Gambell could be listening in next time, or someone in Russia. When you’re online, it will be pretty easy for them to track your signal down, triangulate you. If the place you are in is safe, you need to keep it safe.”
“OK.”
“So once you make that upload, I want you to cut this connection and never call me from your base again.”
“What?”
“Don’t call me from your hiding place. Never make a call from the same place twice. Keep the calls under three minutes, less than a minute would be even better.”
“Got it. Should we have a schedule or something?”
“Good thinking son, but not a fixed schedule. What’s your birthday?”
“My birthday? January 7, 2012.”
“And your friend?”
Dave leaned forward toward the phone, “November 19, 2014.”
“Right, so for the next few days you will connect only once a day at 1 pm, 7 pm, 8 pm and 12 pm, got that? That’s the numbers in your birthday. Then you follow your friend’s birthday: 11 pm, 7 pm, 8 pm and 2 pm. You get me?”
“Yeah, I get it, 20 is like 20:00 military time, so that’s 8pm,” Perri said.
“Right. It’s a pretty random pattern but easy to remember and hard for anyone to predict. We get through the next few days like that, then we’ll come up with a new schedule.”
Sarge took them through what he wanted them to report on in their next report later that day: how many civilians were being held hostage, where they were being held, whether any appeared sick or injured, and then the Russian troop numbers, how many were still in Gambell, how many body bags they had seen, how many injured, what uniforms they were wearing, what equipment they appeared to still possess.
“Can you get word out to the press? We want to let people know we’re still here, we’re fighting back,” Perri told him.
“I get that,” Sarge said. “And it’s amazing, the two of you holding out this long, doing what you’ve done. But that would be suicide. Right now the best thing you have going for you is no one knows you are there.”
Private Zubkhov had joined the Spetsnaz three years ago on a dare. His buddy in the 18th Artillery Division had applied and Zubkhov had told him he was crazy. A scrawny stick like him would never get through, they only took men who were totally hardcore, like Zubkhov.
“OK, so, you apply too, we’ll see who gets through,” his friend had said. “I bet you get booted out in your first week. Mental resilience, that matters more than brawn.” He was wrong of course. You needed both. Zubkhov qualified, but his buddy didn’t.
He had brawn, and he had brains. So why was he being left behind to babysit a bunch of grandparents, seven wounded Russian troopers too sick to walk and too tough to just die, and one lobotomized Captain? It wasn’t fair. He was Spetsnaz! From any height, into any hell! The motto had stirred his blood when he first heard it. But if it hadn’t been for the dare, he probably wouldn’t have made it through. The physical tests were nothing for a boy who’d grown up on the steppes, nursed from a frozen teat. But the gung-ho idiocy of his squad members made his teeth grind — there wasn’t one of them who had recognized it was Dostoyevsky the Captain was spouting. He doubted any of them had ever read anything longer than a weapons manual.
Technically, his contract had already expired. He was waiting for his release papers to come through when they’d shipped out; he’d already decided he was done with the special forces. No re-up for him. He’d saved a little money and he had a buddy in Anadyr with a fishing trawler who wanted a partner who could throw in some cash to help upgrade the boat and join the business. He figured he’d probably meet cod who were smarter than some of the guys he was serving with.
So the attraction of being Spetsnaz really started to wear off the moment the enemy started landing goddamn cruise missiles on his head. And when Sergeant Penkov had singled him out to stay behind, that was the last straw. From any height, into any hell? He didn’t realize hell could be a job as a nursing assistant in a schoolhouse on a windy little island in the Arctic. To make things even more enjoyable, it was the rainy season on Saint Lawrence, with day-time temps in the low forties and night-time temps close to freezing.
Sergeant Penkov had every remaining soldier out fossicking through the town and over at the airfield for the supplies they would need for the overland trek. They had to feed 20 soldiers and nearly 200 islanders for up to a week. Zubkhov suddenly became worried there would be nothing left for him, let alone the wounded and his elderly captives.
Looking for the Captain the night of the attack, Zubkhov had stumbled across a small shack down on the dock that looked like it was used by the local supermarket to store dry goods. Rice, pasta, sugar, flour, canned fruit and vegetables, packet soups and bottled water. So he’d spent a morning with a wheelbarrow ferrying it over to the school while no one was looking, and hiding it in a utility cupboard.
It would keep him fed for a few weeks. But it wasn’t anywhere near enough for all of them.
Right now, he had his feet up on a desk in what must have been the school master’s office, which was a grand name for a little hideaway at the back of a classroom with a desk and a filing cabinet. They’d put a transceiver dish on the roof, run a cable down to the transmitter on the desk beside his boots and wired it into one of the undamaged wind turbines. The transmitter was a United Instrument Manufacturing Corporation M01 base set, through which field units could send and receive signals at distances up to 600 km. Until they were able to patch directly into the comms network in Savoonga, it was their lifeline to Russia, and their link to their comrades on Saint Lawrence.
But it wasn’t portable. It sucked too much juice.
“This is your order of priority,” the Sergeant had told him. “Your own well-being is your last priority. The well-being of the wounded is your second priority. And the well-being of this radio base station is your first priority. If it comes down to it, the last thought in that thick head of yours, as you die, should be ‘thank God, the radio is safe.’ Clear?”
He looked at it resentfully. They had of course taken the only working field handsets with them. Penkov didn’t want him moaning to anyone up the line about being left behind. For a moment, he’d fantasized that if he had a second handset, he could just put a call through to his buddy the fisherman in Anadyr and get him to sail over and pick him up. His papers had probably come through while he was over here — technically, he wasn’t even a member of this damn unit anymore anyway. He sighed.
But he decided that since the useless piece of junk was now his responsibility, he’d better refresh his memory on how to use it because he hadn’t looked at one since the early days of his training. He pulled out the manual, flicked through it, and tossed it aside. The base station featured a large LCD screen with a menu and he paged through that. OK, yeah, most of it he remembered. There was a menu that showed connected field units. It showed the type of unit connected, and the signal strength, and a submenu enabled him to select a particular field unit and boost the gain to improve the signal if they were in a hole somewhere.