Countdown

CHAPTER 27

One after another, the Super Stallions descended from the sky like lumbering, green-and-gray-camouflaged insects. On the LZ perimeters, AH-1 Cobra gunships circled and darted, evil-visaged dragonflies that hovered, stooped, and spat deadly flame as hostile positions were identified and targeted. On the ground, Marine spotters called in death from above. Cobras and blunt-nosed Harrier II jumpjets screamed in at low altitude, slamming enemy strong points, vehicles, and troop concentrations with 2.75-inch rockets, TOW missiles, and rapid-fire cannons.

On the high ground above Polyamyy, elements of the 1st and 3r Battalions, 8th Marines, spread out from their initial LZs, taking up positions on the windswept, barren heights overlooking the Kola Inlet. A cluster of SAM sites and a radar station, smoking ruins now after repeated air and cruise-missile strikes, dominated the top of the cliffs, overlooking a sprawling naval docking facility on the water.

The Marines had just been flown ashore from the LHA Nassau, a floating, flat-topped warren of gray passageways and compartments that experienced Marines referred to, with teeth-gritting sarcasm, as a "Luxury Hotel Afloat."

Some of the old hands joked that after sleeping in tiny racks stacked five and six deep with nineteen hundred other Marines for the past six weeks, the 1/8 and 3/8 were more than ready to take on anything the Russians could throw at them.

Russian Naval Infantry were still holding the ruins, but most scattered after a pair of Harriers shrieked in low across the cliff tops, slashing at the sheltering Russian troops with rockets and free-fall iron bombs. As the Marines moved forward, a dozen tired and ragged-looking men in camouflage uniforms emerged from a tumble-down of bricks and I-beams, hands in the air.

Lieutenant Ben Rivera reached the edge of the cliff, an M-16 gripped in trembling hands. He was scared, yes, but more than that he was excited. He'd missed out on the fighting in Norway the year before, and he'd been dreaming of this moment ever since he'd entered the ROTC program in college.

From the beginning, though, he'd wanted to be a Marine aviator, and he'd made it too, learning to fly Marine F/A-18s… and burdened by no false modesty, he could freely admit to being one of the best.

But Marine tradition still firmly held that all Marines, whether pilots, tank drivers, or cooks, were first and foremost combat riflemen. More to the point, Marine aviators were expected to take their turns as Forward Observers, aviators assigned to the infantry to serve as advance ground controllers.

He'd thought that he'd enter Russia in a Hornet. Instead, he'd come in by Super Stallion, attached to the 1/8. He didn't really mind, for his training had prepared him for just this sort of assignment.

It was just that when the low, rumbling thunder of Marine or Navy jets rolled across the snow-capped peaks of the Kola Inlet, he could grip his rifle and look up from the mud and imagine that the other aviators definitely had the better deal.

Or at the very least, a wider view of the war.

Local resistance appeared to have ceased, and he was searching now for a good spot for an Observation Post. Fifty meters ahead, the ground crested in a low, rounded hummock occupied by concrete block ruins still smoldering from last night's air strikes. Signaling to his radio operator, Gunnery Sergeant Ed Larson, Rivera dashed for the rise, head down, alert for movement ahead of him.

He reached the ruins and picked his way through them, probing the shadows and blind corners. At the east side of the hill, he came to a broken wall, with blast-broken crenellations like gray dragon's teeth rising from a bleached and monstrous lower jawbone. From there he was able to look down into the Kola Inlet itself.

His hilltop actually rose above the head of a smaller inlet opening into the broader waters of the Kola, which measured a good three miles across at this point. Across this smaller inlet to the southeast was the town of Polyamyy itself, an ugly, dismal-looking clutter of buildings that immediately reminded Rivera of some military or industrial towns he'd known, all smokestacks and crane gantries and warehouses, stained gray to black by decades of pollution and neglect. Several hundred meters below Rivera's position, the slopes overlooking the water flattened out enough to shelter a waterfront town, smaller than Polyamyy, but identical in its ramshackle-looking collection of warehouses, factory chimneys, and blocks of military apartments with dingy, neo-Stalinist facades. Moles reached out from the hillside to enclose a rectangle of dirty gray water directly below Rivera's OP. Piers and docks extended from the shore into the inlet on both sides of the moles and across the inlet in Polyamyy itself, and he could see a number of vessels tied to the quays.

Most were submarines. Rivera easily identified the enormous, broad-beamed bulk of an Oscar SSGN; two of the oddly humpbacked Delta IV PLARBs; a half-dozen smaller, sleeker attack subs, Alfas and Victors; and three diesel-electric Kilos, conventional attack subs with anti-air missile-defense systems hidden in the long, squared-off sail. A few larger surface ships were tied up there as well, frigates and corvettes and a single Udaloy-class destroyer.

The majority of those ships and submarines showed damage from air attacks, though as he watched, white smoke spouted from the bow of the Udaloy destroyer, then unraveled into a knife-edged contrail arrowing straight up into the sky, then rapidly curving off toward the north. Udaloys, Rivera knew, were equipped with SA-N-9 missiles as their primary surface-to-air armament, advanced missiles similar to the American Sea Sparrow.

There appeared to be some sort of large, concrete structure built onto the hillside Rivera was crouching on, but from his position he couldn't see what it was. Still, this was an ideal Forward Observer's eyrie, with a smorgasbord of targets that gave new meaning to the expression "target-rich environment."

A rippling, fluttering sound shivered through the air. An instant later, part of Rivera's hillside erupted in a geysering column of black smoke, mud, and debris. Clutching helmet and rifle, Rivera dropped for cover, tumbling into a shallow hole behind the wall, knee- and elbow-deep in mingled mud and snow. The first blast was followed by another, a savage thump that jarred Rivera through the ground and sent loose concrete blocks clattering down the hill in front of him. The next explosion was closer still… then another passed overhead, exploding behind him.

Raising his head just enough to peer between the dragon's teeth of the shattered wall, Rivera brought his binoculars to his eyes and studied the slopes across the narrow inlet rising just to the west of Polyamyy. He thought he could see the source of the arty there, several low-slung vehicles that might be 2S3 or 2S5 self-propelled guns. As he watched, he saw a silent flash among the squat shapes; seconds later, he heard the ripping-cloth sound of an incoming round and ducked for cover. The blast shook the ground.

His company radio man was crouched behind the rubble ten meters away.

"Larson! Get your ass over here!"

Another explosion showered both men with grit and broken gravel, but Larson crawled up to Rivera, who took the radio handset. "King Three! King Three!" he called. "This is White Knight Five! Over!"

"White Knight Five, this is King Three. Go ahead."

He took another sighting on the far hilltop, comparing it with a small map he'd carried folded up in his breast pocket. "King Three, immediate suppression, grid Charlie Delta Three-five-niner-one-one-two. Tracked vehicles, believe two-Sierra-five mounted artillery, Hill Eight-nine.

Authenticate Sierra. Over!"

"White Knight Five, King Three, immediate suppression, grid Charlie Delta Three-five-niner-one-one-two, tracked vehicles…"

As the voice at the other end repeated back the message, Rivera marveled at the stupidity of modern politics. Time and time again, the U.S. Marines had come under vicious, slashing attack, not by a foreign enemy but by American politicians eager to cut military budgets, or to eliminate what they saw as Pentagon waste.

There'd been waste in the military, there was no denying that, though Rivera had always felt that the military all too often became a scapegoat for congressmen trying to divert attention from waste closer to Capitol Hill. In recent years, however, things had gotten out of hand. During some of the sillier periods of the Clinton Administration, attempts had been made to eliminate the Marines entirely, or at least to pare them back; one move still being debated called for eliminating Marine artillery, with the idea that artillery should be strictly the prerogative of the U.S. Army. By that way of thinking, letting the Marines field their own artillery, even for counterbattery fire, was a needless duplication of effort.

In the same spirit of efficiency, they'd blocked letting the Marines buy their own modern M-1A1 tanks, forcing them to continue relying on relic M60s.

Another target, one not yet successfully hit, had been Marine Air; after all, why should the Marines have their own combat aircraft when America had an Air Force?

Of course, those ideas had been fielded by the same folks who thought that the Navy should lose its strike aircraft. The blind, stupid REMFs who made such suggestions, Rivera decided bitterly, had never been in a foxhole with enemy artillery ranging in on their position.

The bombardment of the Marine position continued, gouts of mud and smoke thundering into the sky with each shrieking rattle of incoming fire. Moments later, though, a Marine sheltering nearby poked his head up and shouted, "Here come the A-6s!"

"Go Marines!" another voice echoed, but Rivera already had his binoculars pressed to his face, studying the gray, blunt-nosed planes howling down over the Kola Inlet from the north. "Those aren't Marines," he yelled, reading the block letters printed on each fuselage. "They're Navy!"

"Go Navy! Go Navy!" Traditional interservice rivalries were forgotten as the Intruders skimmed the hilltops above Polyamyy in a north-to-south run, coming in impossibly low. Bombs spilled from wing pylons, flashing in the sun as they tumbled end-for-end… and then the hill above Polyamyy vanished in a volcanic eruption of churning orange flame, fireballs boiling hundreds of feet into a smoke-splashed sky.

"Not bad, for squids," Larson said with a casual shrug. "Marines would've come in lower."

But it was better than "not bad," Rivera knew. Those A-6s had been dead on target, and the pounding of the 1/8 and 3/8 positions had instantly ceased.

Raising the radio receiver to his ear again, he began to pick out targets among the ships and subs clustered in the water below his position, calling them back to the battle-management people waiting offshore.

In the distance, as the hilltop continued to burn, the first Marine Super Stallions were already touching down outside of Polyamyy itself.

"I thought you said you would be ready!" Karelin thundered into the mouthpiece of the red telephone he held clenched in one hand. "You should have been at sea by now!"

"We are ready, Comrade Admiral," Chelyag's voice replied. "We have been ready for the past eight hours. But the Americans-"

"Audacious Flame cannot wait on the Americans, and it cannot wait on you!

If your vessel is ready to put to sea, then go! Immediately!"

"Sir, there are reports of American Marines landing on the heights above cavern Three. Our forces are scattered or in retreat. A Naval Infantry colonel told me five minutes ago that there is fighting inside Polyamyy now!

The skies above the Kola Inlet are commanded by their planes! It is twenty-five kilometers to the open sea. We would never make it all the way!"

Karelin paused, then took a deep breath, forcing himself to stay calm.

Chelyag could have no idea of what was at stake here. "Listen carefully to me, Comrade Captain. Your original orders called for you to reach a strategic bastion before surfacing and carrying out the final part of your orders. But at this point, the launch itself is of more importance than the continued threat of your vessel. You could launch immediately, as soon as you are clear of the cavern."

There was a long silence on the other end of the line. Karelin waited patiently, the phone to his ear. In the distance, outside the walls of his bunker, he could hear the dull thunder of a far-off bombing raid, the crump of antiaircraft guns, the distant wail of a siren. Things were going wrong, very wrong. Hours ago, Leonov's 5th Blue Guard had crossed the Volga at Simbersk.

Krasilnikov's senior strategists felt they were making an all-out drive on Novgorod, four hundred kilometers east of Moscow. Leonov's forces had to be stopped now, before they managed to isolate Moscow and the far north from loyal troops and supplies east of the Urals.

"You want me to launch as soon as I am clear of the cavern."

"Exactly, Comrade Captain. One missile, targeted on Chelyabinsk. After that, you will make your way up the inlet and into the Barents Sea."

"If possible." Chelyag sounded bitter.

"Yes, Chelyag. If possible."

"American air superiority-"

"Fuck American air superiority! I am giving orders now to the 23rd and 47th Frontal Aviation Regiments at Revda and Kirovsk to scramble immediately, to put everything they have into the skies over the Kola Inlet. The American air groups are tired and over-extended. They have already suffered heavy casualties. In one hour, you will see nothing but MiGs above Polyamyy. You have that long to get Leninskiy Nesokrushimyy Pravda under way."

There was another hesitation. "Very well, Admiral. It will be done."

"I am counting on you, Chelyag. Marshal Krasilnikov is counting on you."

"I am very sure my men will appreciate that. Sir."

Had that been sarcasm putting a bite to Chelyag's voice? As he hung up the phone, Karelin could not be sure.

Tombstone walked into the ready room changing area without knocking.

After all, most of the squadron's flyers were either in the air or up in Ops or the CIC. But Lieutenant Commander Joyce Flynn was already there, and Tombstone caught a glimpse of long legs and small, bare breasts before he hastily looked away. Carefully avoiding either looking at her or too obviously looking away, he began pulling off his own uniform.

"I heard you're going up, CAG," Flynn said behind him. He turned to answer, and blinked. Wearing nothing but a pair of plain, white panties, she was watching him with a frank lack of embarrassment or self-consciousness. In one hand she held one of the bulky, rubberized survival suits. "Whatcha say, sailor? Can I hitch a ride?"

He gave her a wry smile. Nightmare had been disgusted at having his aircraft downgrudged, but he'd accepted Tombstone's suggestion that he make himself useful in Ops without argument. That had left Tomboy, his RIO, with some unexpected downtime. As hard as everyone in the squadron had been driving, he'd not expected her to squawk about that.

"You know, Commander," he told her carefully, "that might not be a real smart career move."

"Hey, you need an RIO, right?" She ran her free hand through her red brush-cut hair and dramatically tossed her head. She had pale skin highlighted by densely scattered freckles that went clear down to her chest and shoulders, green eyes, and an impish grin, all of which contributed to her decidedly less-than-military look at the moment. "I'm your man!"

Damn, he would need a RIO. The F-14 could be flown solo, barely, but it wasn't a pleasant experience ― about like playing piano with one hand while typing a letter with the other ― and it was suicide in a dogfight. He'd not been thinking ahead. Hell, maybe he needed someone in the back seat just to watch over him.

Tombstone sighed, then shook his head. "Get your shit on, Commander.

And move your tail. We don't have much time."