A tremendous, ear-punching boom was followed by a huge, roiling orange-black ball of flame rising several hundred feet above them through the rain. Two Cobra gunships had collided. Their burning debris fell slowly through the downpour, momentarily illuminating a small wood on their left flank. To his dismay, Freeman saw snowy ground and ice-encrusted marsh ahead, a mass of ice-sheathed reeds looming and fleetingly turning orange in the fire’s light, the reeds, some instantly dried by the heat, rattling furiously in the explosion’s aftermath.
Beyond the marsh they could see the gray of rain and nothing more, no H-block or any other structure. The most they could hope for in that moment was that the marines of Bravo Company’s second and third platoons and the assault force’s four Stallion-ferried anti-tank Hummers and six light fast-attack vehicles had been put down close by. A quick GPS check by platoon leader Lieutenant Terry Chester confirmed that the Super Stallion had delivered his marines and the general’s SpecOps team to within a quarter mile of the LZ’s center, a prodigious feat of flying, given the atrocious weather.
“Down!” shouted Freeman upon hearing the peculiarly rushing, shuffling noise of incoming, the Russian 122 mm round exploding in the woods in a yellow crash and sending white-hot fragments singing and ripping into a small stand of trees, shrapnel whizzing into and out of the wood.
“I’m hit!” cried a marine.
“Corpsman!” shouted the platoon sergeant, but the marine medic was already there. The young marine who’d been struck in the head by wood splinters was bleeding profusely. Stunned, he sat up and looked at his M-16 with a puzzled expression. The corpsman shouted at him to keep his hands away from his face. Thick smoke almost completely obliterated the marsh directly ahead, only about sixty yards away. It looked as if swamp gas was rising until its whiteness suggested a smoke-making round had landed there.
“Keep your eyes open,” Freeman ordered unnecessarily, as everyone was straining to see, anxious to link up with fellow marines from Bravo Company on either flank, and simultaneously fearing the danger of blue on blue, what correspondents, such as Marte Price and her ilk, would call friendly fire.
“BTR, two o’clock!” yelled Aussie Lewis, crouching down by the wood, pointing at the vehicle’s presence no more than a hundred yards away. One of the most brutish of the Soviet-designed troop transports, the Bronetransporter was a huge, eight-wheeled armored personnel carrier, its two armor-lidded front eye slits, boatlike hull, sloping sides, and tortoiseshell-like top giving it the appearance of some lumbering, metallic reptile from another age. That, however, as Lieutenant Chester knew, was an illusion.
“Freeze!” he ordered. “Javelin only.”
The BTR, a type 60, Freeman thought, by the looks of it, would probably be carrying twelve troops inside, each soldier most likely armed with the new AKS-74U, a weapon that Freeman had chosen for himself. A shorter-barreled, folding-stock version of the AK-47, it was designed for easier use in the confined space that was the rear troop section. This meant the twelve Russian troops’ weapon would have a shorter range than most of the weaponry the marines carried. But he also knew the AK-74 had more whack per cartridge than most regular submachine guns.
By now, Freeman, like Chester, was wondering whether the Russians had spotted the platoon, both the general and Chester, in unconscious unison, training their binoculars on the enemy war wagon, Freeman quickly tapping the digital focus button for as sharp an image as possible through the curtain of rain. The BTR’s turret, with its heavy 14.5 mm and lighter coaxial 7.62 mm machine guns, was slewing left to right like a trap shooter unsure of which sector he should be watching.
“Amateurs,” Aussie told Freeman. “They don’t know where the hell they’re going. In panic mode — maybe here, maybe there.”
“Kegg?” called out Lieutenant Chester.
From long battle experience, Freeman’s vision, unlike that of Kegg and most of the marines, wasn’t held captive by the BTR. Instead he was scanning through a full 360 while taking care not to show himself above the reeds at the edge of the marsh that fringed this western sector of the vast lake. Mines were much less likely to be buried here because of the glutinous mud. He glimpsed a marine. It was Kegg, moving smartly forward with the Javelin anti-tank unit. But Freeman was more interested in looking beyond at the rising clouds of steamy vapor of the kind that he’d seen rising from the hot pools of New Zealand and Yellowstone. He could smell animal excrement, which struck him as odd, given that the ground was frozen. Perhaps he had stepped in a fresh pile of it.
Adjusting his throat mike and popping the digital earpiece from the matchbox-sized collar unit into his ear, the general made contact with Lieutenant Chester. Chester’s voice sounded scratchy, the platoon commander having just inhaled a pungent odor.
“Captain, something weird going on here. That vapor up ahead. You see any hot springs on the chart pre-op?”
“No, sir. Could be swamp gas.”
“Could be,” acknowledged Freeman, “but I’ve got a gut feeling we ought to stay put.”
Chester agreed, if for no other reason than he, like Colonel Tibbet and the others now under Freeman, knew that much of the general’s legendary reputation rested upon one simple fact: He was a meticulous observer. It was something first noted by Bob Norton, his old 2IC in Third Army. Norton, in a lecture at the Army Staff College, pointed out that most women could tell you the eye color of their close friends and acquaintances. Most men could not. Freeman could. There was something about the vapor he’d seen that bothered him. There was an eruption of marines’ small-arms fire off to their left, maybe 150 yards, at what was probably the first Russian they had seen in the marshes so far. The BTR’s turret immediately slewed in the direction of the firing, the BTR itself growling, exuding a coal black plume of diesel exhaust into the rain.
“C’mon, Kegg,” Aussie hissed. “Fire the fucking thing!”
The marine was using a tree at the edge of the woods to steady the weapon. It had been only twenty, thirty seconds at the most since Lieutenant Chester had summoned Kegg, but the BTR was picking up speed across the frozen marsh where shoulder-high stalks of ice-sheathed grass were starting to bend as the rain deiced them.
Suddenly the Russian behemoth foundered, its slanting chin breaking through the plate-thick ice. It was only a momentary pause, however, and the amphibian, its exhaust and bilge jet spouting up high at the rear, continued crashing forward in the marsh, deep enough now that the BTR was afloat, looking to Kegg like a mechanical hippopotamus moving inexorably toward the marines.
Young Kegg, having snapped the Javelin’s launch unit to the disposable launch tube and steadying the fire-and-forget fifty-pound weapon assembly against an aged Mongolian oak tree, looked through the four-power scope, centered the hulking BTR in the green and black of his infrared world, and fired. The kick motor flared, with minimal backblast for Kegg, then the one-two punch of the missile hit the BTR, the Javelin’s initial charge blasting down through the topmost layers of the BTR’s roof, the second, shaped charge piercing the armor proper. The BTR was now a crematorium. The vehicle stopped, its wake of dark, chocolate-colored diesel and exhaust-blown reeds pushing forward over it like a flood. Freeman saw the rear door open and heard the feral screams of rage and terror as two, perhaps three, Russian soldiers — it was difficult to tell how many in the fiery swirl of bodies and debris — came splashing out. One man was afire, trying futilely to swim toward the splintered and icy edge of the marsh, when the BTR’s munitions blew, making it look as if a cyclonic fire had hit.
Melissa Thomas felt her heart pounding in her chest, half in fear, half in — God help her! — empathy for the enemy as marine rifle fire ended the swimmer’s misery.