Nyurba’s surviving commandos, all wearing gas masks now, clambered up the stairwells of the three missile control bunkers, knowing they didn’t have a moment to lose. The explosion of three silos had repulsed one Russian counterattack, and the heat and toxic exhaust of three missiles launching later on had broken up an effective rally by hostile troops still alive in the area. But those two battalions of paratroopers, overheard on the bunker radio before the SS-27s took off, could be here very soon.
Watching things on bunker one’s soundless and two-dimensional TV screens couldn’t have possibly prepared Nyurba for the hellish situation he was engulfed in on the surface. Dense smoke, thick poisonous fumes, and billowing steam drifted everywhere, surrounding and partially cloaking what he thought resembled the site of a terrible airliner crash. The once wide-open missile field, within the fence enclosure, was impenetrably shrouded in deadly smog and persistent flames from asphalt and mangled debris. What passable ground still existed was pockmarked, cratered, and warped, and blackened things lay underfoot everywhere. Above the steady crackling and roaring of fires, and the staccato pops and bangs of ammo cooking off, Nyurba heard plaintive or agonized screams, but blessedly didn’t see live victims, yet, only scattered body parts. He also heard occasional, halfhearted orders shouted far away, in voices he didn’t recognize. AK-47s and the smaller-caliber AK-74s, their muzzle reports distinctive to a trained ear, sporadically fired in the distance, wildly it seemed and from random directions. Occasionally their rounds snapped by, harmlessly overhead. Whoever was shooting aimed high — assuming they were aiming and hadn’t simply been driven mad or gotten blind drunk. No Russians nearby were in any shape to put up the slightest resistance.
Main opposition forces lack cohesion and discipline. Good.
The commando groups from the three control bunkers linked up amid this carnage and frenzy, Abakans trained on each other until they were sure they met with friends. At first Nyurba was enraged when he saw his medics and other men dragging travoises improvised from backpack frames, each holding a seriously wounded teammate who should have been lethally overdosed with morphine and abandoned. Platoon leaders said they were obeying his orders, making the wounded permanently unavailable for hostile interrogation — by bringing them home. He realized that, consciously or unconsciously, he’d phrased the order to give his team this out. He assisted a Green Beret lieutenant who’d taken shrapnel in one leg and had a bandaged, splinted compound fracture. He must have been in unspeakable pain. Using a bent metal rod as a crutch, the lieutenant was too proud and tough to be pulled, like so much baggage, on a travois.
Like the others with wounds, the medics had made the Green Beret’s dressings especially thick. They knew, as Nyurba knew, that radioactive particulates could enter the bloodstream through breaks in the skin. There was plenty of nuclear contamination in the air all around them, outside their masks.
Nyurba did a head count: twenty fit, twenty badly wounded, and five wounded who were — generously speaking — ambulatory. He carefully verified with each squad that everyone not present was accounted for as definitely dead; Russian forensic pathologists would have rogue cadavers galore to analyze.
We’ll never escape and evade through the forest like this.
“Change or hide insignia,” Nyurba ordered through his gas mask. “Riffle the Russian corpses.” Concealed by the swirling, noxious, opaque, and multicolored haze, the team removed their Spetsnaz wolf-formation badges, tore off shoulder patches or drenched them in gore, and grabbed uniform markings from bodies strewn everywhere. It was vital they not be recognized as the same unit that had talked its way in at the start of the battle.
Some of the corpses, on closer examination, weren’t quite dead. Nyurba had to look a mortally wounded private in the eyes; he couldn’t be over eighteen. Too weak from loss of blood and shock from burns to be able to talk, the teenager pleaded for help with those dark brown eyes. Nyurba watched the confusion cross his battered, sweaty face as he finished him off with his fighting knife — a gesture of mercy. The kid had no legs and his groin was nothing but smoldering ash. He knew he’d remember those trusting brown eyes for the rest of his life. He removed an insignia badge from the body and fastened it to his own chest.
Having kept his sense of bearings while his squadron regrouped aboveground, Nyurba told them to head for the entrance gate — or whatever was left of it. This would bring them to the route from the support base and Srednekolymsk. He had a hunch that Russian casualty-clearing efforts would have already started, and his intention was to blend in. We were supposed to pass as Russians all along. We’ll pass as Russians now.
Nyurba’s read of the situation paid off. As they trudged along toward the gate, the ends of the travoises scraping noisily on the concrete, more and more Russian medics scurried around, helping whomever they could. One directed Nyurba and his men — filthy, exhausted, coughing repeatedly inside their gas masks — to the field ambulance staging area.
“What happened to those missiles?” Nyurba asked the medic. His lungs hurt when he spoke; it felt like he was getting pneumonia. “Are we in a nuclear war?” He peered at the sky, but it was too smoke-obscured for him to notice any auroral effects.
“I heard someone say they were terrorists, sir. Two went off in space over Moscow. Everything near there got fried.”
“Three launched.”
“The last was a dud, sir. If you can believe the rumors.”
That’s all I needed to hear. He led his men toward the ambulances. They moved with renewed strength and spirit, knowing this mission phase was a success.
Most casualty transport were commercial trucks pressed into service for the emergency. A harried, emotionally dazed dispatcher said that hospitals at the support base and in the town were overwhelmed. Nyurba had no intention of going to any hospital. The most practical route of egress was the Kolyma.
He told a tractor-trailer driver to take his people to the waterfront. Nyurba sat in the cab. The trip on the excellent concrete road was short. The mines his men planted earlier were cleared. Their victim, the hulk of a blown-up tank, sat partly blocking one lane, turret-less, bathed in firefighting foam. Firemen used their engines to pump water out of nearby streams and ponds, to hold forest fires back from the sides of the road.
All roadblocks were for vehicles approaching the complex — sealed off against spies and journalists — not for those leaving with troops who badly needed trauma care. Regional authorities were muddled, psychologically overwhelmed by the SS-27 liftoffs. They focused on rescue and recovery, and further site defense from outward, not on interdicting escapees. Perhaps someone in charge, from optimism or face-saving ego, made the assumption that the attackers had all been killed, or committed suicide.
The EMP hitting the Kremlin, plus rigid central control, is buying us getaway time — but for how long?
Civilian and military boats, ships, hydrofoils, and hovercraft were tied up in a hodgepodge at the Kolyma piers. Reinforcements were still arriving for a battle that no longer raged, while wounded, some with hideous burns, were being rushed to other hospitals downriver. Nyurba picked what he wanted: an old Skat-class air-cushion landing craft, official capacity two dozen troops. The six-man crew made no effort to refuse when the commandos demanded transportation. They climbed aboard the vessel, using the troop ladders at both sides of its blunt bow. The casualties, wheezing inside their masks due to lung problems from the missile fumes, moaned louder with this mishandling.