“Hold fire!” It was Freeman bellowing above the other nearby sounds of battle. “Follow me!” The general, breaking cover, Eddie Mervyn at his side, was running hard toward the lake but skirting its icy perimeter as Sal, Choir, Aussie, Johnny Lee, and the forty-man platoon followed.
“Good shooting, marine!” Chester told Kegg, and, seeing how shaken the boy was by what he’d done, knowing that there were eight, possibly nine, men cooked alive inside the BTR, added, “DARPA ALPHA, Kegg! Good shooting, marine!”
Kegg had difficulty hearing the lieutenant because of the noise off on their left flank where, he guessed, Colonel Tibbet’s HQ section must be engaging the Russians. And what the hell, wondered Kegg, was the general up to, running pell-mell, leading the first two squads of Chester’s four-squad platoon?
Kegg started in fright as Freeman’s team, closer to the lake with Chester’s first two squads, opened up on a five-ton Russian truck that came roaring through the steamy vapor, packed with helmeted troops and heading straight for the drowning BTR. An officer on the running board was shouting and waving his AK-47 at Freeman’s team and the lead marines. But neither the officer nor his troops in the back of the truck had seen Chester’s other two squads now emerging from the tall grass by the wood, the truck coming under such an enfilade of fire from these marines’ M-16s, SAWs, and H K submachine guns and Chester’s burst of six rounds in half a second, that it had no hope. Out of control, the vehicle started sliding at speed toward Freeman and his team, striking a hard clump of stunted and wind-knotted reeds by the lake’s edge with such force that it flipped and rolled. Bloodied bodies were strewn across the ice, weapons, mostly AK-47s, slithering, some of them sliding so far that they disappeared into the rain-freckled water of the marsh where the BTR was sinking, the tip of its whip aerial just visible, which told the ever-observant Freeman that the lake here was about ten feet deep.
Several of the Russians, still able to function, scrambled frantically on the ice, trying to retrieve their weapons, but Freeman’s team and Chester’s first squad of ten marines gave ABC’s troops little chance of recovery. Only one man from the truck survived the marines’ storm of depleted uranium. The ice seemed to come alive as frozen chips, some red with blood, flew into the air.
Then, suddenly, a head popped to the surface, followed by a pair of thrashing arms; a BTR crewman had survived. Though gasping frantically for air and dog-paddling furiously, the Russian plunged his right hand back into the water and came up firing his 9 mm pistol at Aussie, who dealt with the interruption with a burst from his H K. “Silly prick!”
“Look after these two,” ordered Freeman, indicating a forlorn and soaking-wet duo. One of them, rescued by Freeman, who had extended his unloaded AK-74 to the floundering man, was the only survivor of the BTR, the other, though slightly wounded, was the only trooper from the truck who had not been killed in the short but furious exchange. While Aussie, whose right calf had been nicked by one of the truck-borne soldiers, was having it attended to by the corpsman, it took Johnny Lee, the team’s interpreter, only five minutes, with the help of a grim-looking Eddie Mervyn, to conclude that neither of the two prisoners knew anything about the H-complex other than that they had been summoned for perimeter defense as part of some reciprocal arrangement between ABC’s H-block commanders.
What worried Freeman was that most of the dead soldiers were wearing blue-striped T-shirts beneath their sandy green battle jackets. Naval infantry. Together with Spetsnaz, SpecOps, and airborne infantry, these naval troops were the best the Russians had, and Freeman knew that despite the massive drawdown of military assets following Putin’s ascendancy to Boris Yeltsin’s throne amid the ruble’s nosedive, the naval infantry remained an elite fighting force.
“He keeps saying,” said Johnny Lee, pointing to one of the two prisoners, a thin, wiry type who had a bad burn on his left arm and was cradling it with his right, “that he and his comrade are POWs, says they’re—” Lee had to shout against the rattle of small-arms fire and the ear-ringing explosions of nearby battle. “—entitled to protection under the Geneva Convention.”
“Geneva what?” opined Aussie, smarting under the corpsman’s alcohol swab. “Tell ’im I haven’t seen that film.”
“No joking, Aussie,” Lee replied. “He’s claiming they’re regular troops called to secure the ABC perimeter, and as such—”
“And as such,” cut in Aussie, “they’re aiding and abetting fucking terrorists. If they’re regular troops, they shouldn’t fucking be here. Even Moscow’s declared ABC persona non grata. Right, General?”
“Correct,” said Freeman, adding quietly to Aussie, “at least for twenty-four hours.” The general then turned to Lee. “If I thought they knew anything more than the route out from ABC, Johnny, I’d shoot ’em if they didn’t cooperate.”
Chester, having managed to make radio contact with Tibbet’s HQ group so that close-in hand signals in the near-zero visibility were no longer needed, ordered nine of his ten four-man teams to spread out.
“Captain,” Freeman called to Chester, “I’d like my team to concentrate on finding entry. Those truck tracks should be visible for a while. I’ll call you the moment we get in.”
“You betcha,” acknowledged the marine lieutenant. “Stay well.”
“I’ll try,” said Freeman, turning over the two prisoners to Chester. Then he addressed his six team members. “Okay, guys. Everyone marine ID’d?”
They were, with small, infrared diamond shapes on the fronts and backs of their helmets and camouflage battle jackets.
It began snowing. “Aw, shit!” announced Sal. “That’s all we need.”
The four marines of the tenth fire team, ordered by Chester to stay behind to provide a perimeter defense for the arrival of the second wave of Stallions, if they’d come in zero visibility, plastic-stripped the two Russians. A corpsman, having given the burn victim a shot of morphine, assisted the team’s sniper in unlacing the Russians’ boots. And with a hastily invented sign language, they told the two POWs they’d be shot if they tried to run. The two navy infantry comrades nodded their heads vigorously. They understood.
“D’you think,” began one of the marines in a voice barely audible amid the increasingly confused sounds of the battle farther in, “the general was kidding about shooting these guys if he thought they knew more — you know, just shoot them?”
“Geneva Convention!” interjected the burn victim anxiously.
“Hey, you know English.”
“Little bit.”
“Yeah, well you know what shut the fuck up means?”
“Da!”
“The Geneva Convention,” said the sniper authoritatively, “does not apply to masked terrorists and those who aid and abet terrorists in any way.” The other three marines were impressed, more by their buddy’s matter-of-fact delivery than by the answer. After all, they knew how marines had viewed terrorists and fellow travelers in Iraq.
As Freeman led his team along the edge of the lake’s frozen western marsh, he could feel the pressure of the twenty-four-hour deadline mounting. Could the first wave hold long enough for the second wave, which would have to fly in on instruments alone, to land in the increasing foul weather? And could he find traces of the truck’s tires on the frozen ground before the snow hid them, showing him and his team the way back to ABC through the minefield that surrounded the H-block? And he of U-turn fame had brought in the first wave sans white coveralls. He had rolled dice with the meteorological officer’s report and lost. But his team was moving in the harmony that comes only with practice, with knowing how each man operates, with being able to recognize one another, even in the dark, by footfall alone. Everything was starting to look white, the rattle of machine guns sounding farther west now, away from the edge of the lake itself but still in the marshy area. The team could hear shouts, in English and in another language that Johnny Lee told Freeman was neither Russian nor Chinese. So far as Freeman knew, his team had been landed in the right grid, but he’d sensed from his short radio communications with Tibbet that while the colonel had been careful not to give coordinates, he had indicated, via slang, that his HQ platoon was on Freeman’s left, as it should be, but more than half a mile farther west, while Chester’s fire teams were spread out a hundred yards to Freeman’s right. Murphy, he of Murphy’s Law, was always waiting in the wings, as Freeman and his team had found out at Priest Lake, but despite everyone not landing precisely where he should, it sounded as if the first wave was at least moving in the direction of the terrorists’ H-block.