“Animal’d still smell it out there,” challenged Aussie.
“Yes,” conceded the general. “But there’s one thing, however, that’ll override human scent — any scent — so that even a fox with its nose to the ground’ll miss it.”
“Snow!” said Choir.
“Ten minutes to green!” shouted the crew chief.
“Snow!” said Freeman in disgust. “And we’re in NATO khaki green.”
“Shit!” said Aussie. “Must’ve fallen this morning.”
“And still falling,” said Freeman. “I’m going up to see the pilot. Bad enough we should have to try landing in snow, let alone sticking out like a whore’s tit once we deplane. Might as well paint targets on our ass.” He jabbed a finger at the laptop. “Our LZ is by a wood near this marshland. We could find cover in these woods outside the H-block perimeter.”
“Five minutes to green!” warned the crew chief. “Lock it up!” It was a new order occasioned by upgraded lock-in pins that secured the webbed shoulder and waist harnesses in the event of a hard landing.
“Maybe no snow’s fallen on the LZ,” said Aussie hopefully. “I mean maybe that was just a sick old fox. Couldn’t smell worth a damn, even though there was no snow to cover the mine?”
“Too many maybes,” said Freeman, but as he glanced down at the vastness of eastern Siberia he couldn’t see any snow, only the sheen of the lake. It was enormous. The marines heard a gut-punching thud as the hydraulics began alternately bleeding and gorging with fluid that would fully extend the helo’s huge rear ramp door. An enormous Russian sky stretched before them, but it came to an end farther west in what the SES had warned was a “significantly bruised line of L-3s,” thunderheads, stretching north to south like malevolent ships of the line. The Stallion, flying at 150 m.p.h. with a tailwind, was soon out of the mountainous and hilly country east of the lake, which they could see was completely frozen. Then they were descending over flatter, lower ground ten miles west of the lake, the land here a mere sixty-five yards above sea level, frozen but still no snow. Aussie could be right, the fox having detonated the mine not because snow had smothered the scent of it but because, quite simply, foxes, like humans, Aussie pointed out, aren’t always at the top of their game.
“Fact remains,” Freeman told Aussie, “I should have insisted on arctic white coveralls just in case.” He signaled the crew chief and asked him to check with the pilot for any sign on radar of snow clouds. The answer was that he couldn’t be sure but the line of L-3s was moving east toward them. Freeman turned his attention back to the dots — too slow for fighters, slow enough for helos — and a concomitant mass of smaller dots, as if a mass of iridescent pepper had been shaken on the screen.
“What do you think?” Freeman pressed the pilot. “Helos dropping chaff?” By “chaff” he meant strips of aluminum foil that would confuse enemy radar. In this case it would be impossible for the helos of the approaching MEU to get an accurate idea of the helo force approaching.
“That’s my guess, General,” the copilot said while feeding the larger dots on the radar screen into the computer’s memory to see whether there was a match between the radar signatures of the large dots and the known radar signatures of enemy aircraft types. The monitor’s orange-striped matchup bar was flashing the accompanying text: “Hind Mi-24,” a kind of attack helo.
“Bandit. Six miles and one o’clock.” In the Stallion’s cabin the red light was pulsing.
“Three minutes,” announced the chief. “Eight miles.” And Freeman knew that if the first wave faltered, failing either to keep the defenders inside the H-block’s perimeter or destroying the H-block itself, Moscow might summon the troops believed to be based in Kamen Rybolov, nine miles south of the ABC complex, to join the rebels. For a split second, Freeman recalled Patton telling the troops of Third Army that “Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser,” and Freeman’s 2IC, Robert Norton, saying that Russians liked to win just as much as Americans.
“It’s not snowing, sir,” the chief informed him, “but it looks like one mother of a rainstorm up ahead, another arctic blast coming in over China’s Wanda Shan Mountains.”
“Good,” said Freeman, which surprised Melissa Thomas. “Rain we can use.”
“One minute.”
“Bandit. Two miles! Evasive action.”
The radio seemed to explode in multichannel chaos, the Stallion descending, Cobra gunships and Mi-24s mixing it up. “Watch him, watch him! Lock him up, lock him up! Good kill!”
The general rose, grabbing the PA mike, grumpily brushing the flexi-cord away from his face. Melissa remembered how Kegg had told her, “The old man’s a dead ringer for George C. Scott.” She didn’t know who George C. Scott could be, but the phrase “dead ringer” bothered her, and in the midst of the din all around, she had the strangest premonition, stronger than any she’d ever had, that while Douglas Freeman might win this battle and pass into legend, it would be his last, that though victorious, he would, like Admiral Lord Nelson, die at the moment of his greatest triumph. She immediately told herself it was nothing more than a figment of her imagination, but the stark image of him falling in this, his last battle, gripped her like no other premonition ever had.
“Holy shit!” someone yelled, the big Stallion rising higher and higher, popping flares, orange blossoms in a mad rain; then the Stallion descended once more.
“Marines!” Freeman shouted, to the accompaniment of rain drumming with such intensity against the Stallion that even the general had to shout in his command voice to be heard. “You’re marines. Half fish. Remember, weather is not neutral. Use this to your advantage. Use it!” The red light was steady, ten seconds till touchdown.
In the cockpit pilot and copilot were sweating profusely. What they’d assumed to be frozen ground or marshland below was obscured by a furious rush of hail that was hitting the Stallion’s rotors and fuselage like a mad sower throwing bullets instead of grain.
“Brace!” came the pilot’s warning.
A jolt, and the off-center touchdown was of such force that against all intent, weapons flew from the hands of several marines only milliseconds before the huge helo’s front wheels took the full weight of men and matériel, the noise of the big rotors in the downpour sounding like an enormous car wash. Freeman, his team, and the forty marines of Bravo Company’s First Platoon ran down the ramp, its zebra-painted edges a blur as they deployed into waist-high reeds and a cold rush of unfamiliar odors. From somewhere on their left flank, how far away it was difficult to tell, there came the deafening noise of other rotors scything through the downpour and the sounds of battle already under way. The rain had reduced visibility to zero, the urgent throbbing and roar of Cobra gunships and marine Harriers mixing it up overhead adding to the ceaseless crackling of small-arms fire and the distinctive swoosh of air-defense missiles, heard but unseen overhead, all combining with the frantic screeching of thousands upon thousands of birds and other wildlife, creating an ear-ringing cacophony and confusion that was enough to unnerve even the most hardened veteran.
Their Stallion was lifting off for the 170-mile return journey to patch, repair, refuel, and repack for a second wave of 750 marines from Tibbet’s battalion, waiting aboard Yorktown. All of which meant it would be an hour and a half at the earliest before any reinforcements might arrive for the men deplaning and unslinging the Hummers, mortars, and other weapons that were vital to any offensive against the ABC complex.