Red Storm Rising

25. Treks

Once clear of the meadow, they were back in what the map called wasteland. It was level for the first kilometer, then the uphill effort began in earnest on the Glymsbrekkur, a seven-hundred-foot climb. So soon your legs forget, Edwards thought. The rain hadn't let up, and the deep twilight they had to guide them forced a slow pace. Many of the rocks they tried to walk on were loose. The footing was treacherous, and a misstep could easily be fatal. Their ankles were sore from the constant twists on the uneven ground, and their tightly laced boots didn't seem to help anymore.

After six days in the back country, Edwards and his Marines were beginning to understand what fatigue was. At each step their knees gave just an inch or so too much, making the next step that much more of an effort. Their pack straps cut cruelly into their shoulders. Their arms were tired from carrying their weapons and from constantly adjusting their gear. Necks sagged. It was an effort to look up and around, always having to be alert for a possible ambush.

Behind them the glow of the house fire disappeared behind a ridgeline, the first good thing that had happened. No helicopters yet, no vehicles investigating the fire. Good, but how long would that last? How soon would the patrol be missed? they all wondered.

All but Vigdis. Edwards walked a few yards in front of her, listening to her breathing, listening for sobs, wanting to say something to her, but not knowing what. Had he done the right thing? Was it murder? Was it expediency? Or was it justice? Did that matter? So many questions. He set them aside. They had to survive. That mattered.

"Take a break," he said. "Ten minutes."

Sergeant Smith checked to see where the others were, then sat down beside his officer.

"We done good, Lieutenant. I figure four, maybe five miles in the past two hours. I think we can ease up a little."

Edwards smiled wanly. "Why not just stop and build a house here?"

Smith chuckled in the darkness. "I hear you, skipper."

The lieutenant studied the map briefly, looking up to see how well it matched with what he could see. "What say we go left around this marsh? The map shows a waterfall here, the Skulafoss. Looks like a nice deep canyon. Maybe we'll get lucky and find a cave or something. If not, it's deep. No choppers'll come in there, and we'll have shadows to hide in. Five hours?"

"'Bout that," Smith agreed. "Roads to cross?"

"Nothing shows but foot trails."

"I like it." Smith turned to the girl, who watched them without a word as she sat with her back against a rock. "How do you feel, ma'am?" he inquired gently.

"Tired." Her voice said more than that, Edwards thought. There was no emotion there, none at all. He wondered if this was good or bad. What was the right thing to do for the victims of serious crime? Her parents murdered before her eyes, her own body brutally violated, what kind of thoughts were going through that head? Get her mind off it, he decided.

"How well do you know this area?" the lieutenant asked.

"My father fish here. I come with him many times." Her head leaned back into a shadow. Her voice cracked and dropped into quiet sobs.

Edwards wanted to wrap an arm around her, to tell her things were all right now, but he was afraid it might only make things worse. Besides, who would believe that things were all right now?

"How we fixed for food, Sarge?"

"I figure we got maybe four days' worth of canned stuff. I went through the house pretty good, sir," Smith whispered. "Got a pair of fishing rods and some lures. If we take our time, we ought to be able to feed ourselves. Lots of good fishin' creeks around here, maybe at this place we're goin'. Salmon and trout. Never could afford to do it myself, but I heard tell that the fishing's really something. You said your daddy's a fisherman, right?"

"Lobsterman-close enough. You said you couldn't afford-"

"Lieutenant, they charge you like two hundred bucks a day to fish up here," Smith explained. "Hard to afford on a sergeant's pay, you know? But if they charge that much, there must be a shitload of fish in the water, right?"

"Sounds reasonable," Edwards agreed. "Time to move. When we get to that mountain, we'll belly-up for a while and get everybody rested."

"I'll drink to that, skipper. Might make us late getting

"Screw it! Then were late. The rules just changed some. Ivan's liable to be looking for us. We take it slow from now on. If our friends on the other end of this radio don't like it, too damned bad. We'll get there late, but we'll get there."

"You got it, skipper. Garcia! Take the point. Rodgers, cover the back door. Five more hours, Marines, then we sleep."

The spray stung his face, and Morris loved it. The convoy of ballasted ships was steaming into the teeth of a forty-knot gale. The sea was an ugly, foam-whipped shade of green, droplets of seawater tearing off the whitecaps to fly horizontally through the air. His frigate climbed up the steep face of endless twenty-foot swells, then crashed down again in a succession that had lasted six hours. The ship's motion was brutal. Each time the bow nosed down it was as though the brakes had been slammed on a car. Men held on to stanchions and stood with their feet wide apart to compensate for the continuous motion. Those in the open like Morris wore life preservers and hooded jackets. A number of his young crewmen would be suffering from this, ordinarily-even professional sailormen wanted to avoid this sort of weather-but now mainly they slept. Pharris was back to normal Condition-3 steaming, and that allowed the men to catch up on their rest.

Weather like this made combat nearly impossible. Submarines were mainly a one-sensor platform. For the most part, they detected targets on sonar and the crashing sea noise tended to blanket the ship sounds submarines listened for. A really militant sub skipper could try running at Periscope depth to operate his search radar, but that meant running the risk of broaching and momentarily losing control of his boat, not some thing a nuclear submarine officer looked kindly upon. A submarine would practically have to ram a ship to detect it, and the odds against that were slim. Nor did they have to worry about air attacks for the present. The sea's crenelated surface would surely confuse the seeker head of a Russian missile.

For their own part, their bow-mounted sonar was useless, as it heaved up and down in a twenty-foot arc, sometimes rising completely clear of the water. Their towed-array sonar trailed in the placid waters a few hundred feet below the surface, and so could theoretically function fairly well, but in practice, a submarine had to be moving at high speed to stand out from the violent surface noise, and even then engaging a target under these conditions was no simple matter. His helicopter was grounded. Taking off might have been possible, but landing was a flat impossibility under these conditions. A submarine would have to be within ASROC torpedo range-five miles-to be in danger from the frigate, but even that was a slim possibility. They could always call in a P-3 Orion-two were operating with the convoy at present-but Morris did not envy their crews a bit, as they buffeted through the clouds at under a thousand feet.

For everyone a storm meant time off from battle, for both sides to rest up for the next round. The Russians would have it easier. Their long-range aircraft would be down for needed maintenance, and their submarines, cruising four hundred feet down, could keep their sonar watches in comfort.

"Coffee, skipper?" Chief Clarke came out of the pilothouse, a cup in his hand with a saucer on top to keep the saltwater out.

"Thanks." Morris took the cup and drained half of it. "How's the crew doing?"

"Too tired to barf, sir." Clarke laughed. "Sleeping like babies. How much longer this slop gonna last, Cap'n?"

"Twelve more hours, then it's supposed to clear off. High-pressure system right behind this." The long-range weather report had just come in from Norfolk. The storm track was moving farther north. Mostly clear weather for the next two weeks. Wonderful.

The chief leaned outboard to see how the forward deck fittings were taking the abuse. Every third or fourth wave, Pharris dug her nose in hard, occasionally taking green water over the bow. This water slammed into things, and the chief's job was to get them fixed. Like most of the 1052s assigned to the stormy Atlantic, Pharris had been given spray strakes and higher bow plating on her last overhaul, which reduced but did not entirely eliminate the problem known to sailors since men first went to sea: the ocean will try very hard to kill you if you lack the respect she demands. Clarke's trained eye took in a hundred details before he turned back.

"Looks like she's riding this one out okay."

"Hell, I'd settle for this all the way back," Morris said after finishing off his coffee. "After it's over, we'll have to round up a lot of merchies, though."

Clarke nodded agreement. Station-keeping was not especially easy in this kind of weather.

"So far, so good, Captain. Nothing big has come loose yet."

"How 'bout the tail?"

"No sweat, sir. I got a man keeping an eye on that. Should hold up nice, 'less we have to speed up." Both men knew they wouldn't speed up. They were making ten knots, and the frigate couldn't run much faster than that in these seas no matter what the cause. "Heading aft, sir."

"Okay. Heads up." Morris looked aloft to check that his lookouts were still alert. Probabilities or not, there was danger out there. All kinds.

"Andoya. They weren't heading for Bodo after all," Toland said as he pored over the satellite photographs of Norway.

"How many troops on the ground do you think?"

"At least a brigade, Group Captain. Maybe a short division. Lots of tracked vehicles here, lots of SAMs, too. They're already basing fighters at the airfield. Be bombers next-maybe there by now. These shots are three hours old." The Russian naval force was already headed back to the Kola Fjord. They could reinforce by air now. He wondered what had happened to the regiment of Norwegians supposed to be based there.

"Their Blinder light bombers can reach us from there. Bastards can dash in and out at high-mach numbers, be bloody difficult to intercept." The Soviets had launched a systematic attack on the RAF radar stations arrayed on the Scottish coast. Some attacks were by air-to-surface missiles, others by submarine-launched cruise missiles. One had even been by fighter-bombers with massive jamming support-but that one had been costly. RAF Tornados bad killed half of the raiders, mainly on the return leg. Twin-engine Blinder bombers could deliver their heavy bombloads after running in low and fast. Probably why Ivan wanted Andoya, Toland thought. Perfectly located for them. Easy to support from their own northern bases, and just a little too far for fighter-bombers in Scotland to counterattack without heavy tanker support.

"We can get there," the American said, "but it means getting half our attack birds loaded up with buddy stores."

"No chance. They'll never release them from the reserve force." The group captain shook his head.

"Then we have to start running a heavy patrol over the Faroes, and that keeps us from bothering Iceland too much." Toland looked around the table. "Don't you just love it when a plan comes together? How do we take the initiative away from these bastards? We're playing their game. We're reacting to their actions, not doing what we want to do. That's how you lose, people. Ivan's got his Backfires standing down because of this front moving across the central Atlantic. They'll be flying again tomorrow after a good day's rest, gunning for our convoys. If we can't hit Andoya, and we can't do much about Iceland, what the hell are we going to do, just sit here and worry about defending Scotland?"

"If we allow Ivan to establish air superiority over us-"

"If Ivan can kill the convoys, Group Captain, we lose the fucking war!" Toland pointed out.

"True. You're quite correct, Bob. The problem is, how do we hit the Backfires? They appear to be flying directly down over Iceland. Fine, we have a known area of transit, but it's protected by MiGs, laddy. We'd end up sending fighters to battle fighters."

"So we try something indirect. We gun for the tankers they're using."

The fighter pilots present, two squadron operations officers had silently been watching the intelligence types talk.

"How the hell are we going to find their tankers?" one asked now.

"You think they can refuel thirty or more bombers without some radio chatter?" Toland asked. "I've listened in on Russian tanker ops by satellite, and I know there's chatter. Let's say we can get a snooper up there, and he finds out where they're tanking. Why not then put some Toms astride their flightpath home?"

"Hit them after they tank the strike the fighter jock mused.

"It won't do diddly for the strike today, say, but it'll hurt the bastards tomorrow. If we succeed even once, then Ivan has to change his operational pattern, maybe send fighters out with them. If nothing else, we'll have them reacting to us for a change."

"And perhaps take the heat off us," the group captain went on. "Right, let's look at this."

The map didn't begin to show how hard it would be. The Skula River had carved a series of gorges over the centuries. The river was high, and the falls generated a cloud of spray from which a rainbow arched in the morning sun. It made Edwards angry. He'd always liked rainbows before, but this one meant the rocks they had to climb down were slick and wet. He figured it to be two hundred feet down to a floor of granite boulders. It looked a lot farther than that.

"You ever do any rock climbin', Lieutenant?" Smith asked.

"Nope, nothing like this. You?"

"Yeah, 'cept we mostly practice goin' up. This here oughta be easier. Don't worry too much about slipping. These boots hold pretty good. Just make sure you set your feet on something solid, okay? And you take it nice and slow. Let Garcia lead off. I already like this place, skipper. See that pool below the falls? There's fish in there, and I don't think anybody'll ever spot us down this hole.

"Okay, you watch the lady."

"Right. Garcia, lead off. Rodgers, cover the rear." Smith slung his rifle across his back as he walked to Vigdis.

"Ma'am, you think you can handle this?" Smith held out his hand.

"I have been here before." She almost smiled until she remembered who had brought her here, and how many times. She didn't take his hand.

"That's good, Miss Vigdis. Maybe you can teach us a thing or two. You be careful, now."

It would have been fairly easy except for their heavy packs. Each man carried a fifty-pound load. The added weight and their fatigue affected their balance, with the result that someone watching from a distance might have taken the Marines for old women crossing an icy street. It was a fifty-degree slope down, in some places almost vertical, with some paths worn into the slopes, perhaps by the wild deer that throve here. For the first time fatigue worked in their favor. Fresher, they might have tried to move more quickly; as it was, each man was near the end of his string, and feared his own weakness more than the rocks. It took over an hour, but they made it down with nothing worse than cuts on their hands and bruises somewhere else.

Garcia crossed the river to the east side, where the canyon wall was steeper, and they camped out on a rocky shelf ten feet above the water. Edwards checked his watch. They had been on the move continuously for more than two days. Fifty-six hours. Each found himself a place in the deep shadows.

First they ate. Edwards downed a can of something without troubling to see what it was. His burps tasted like fish. Smith let the two privates sleep first, and gave his own sleeping bag to Vigdis. The girl fell mercifully asleep almost as quickly as the Marines. The sergeant made a quick tour of the area while Edwards watched, amazed that he had any energy left at all.

"This is a good spot, skipper," the sergeant pronounced finally, collapsing down next to his officer. "Smoke?"

"I don't smoke. Thought you were out."

"I was. The lady's dad did, though, and I got a few packs." Smith lit an unfiltered cigarette with a Zippo lighter bearing the globe and anchor of the Marine Corps. He took a long pull. "Jesus, ain't this wonderful!"

"I figure we can spend a day here to rest up."

"Sounds good to me." Smith leaned back. "You held up pretty good, Lieutenant."

"I ran track at the Air Force Academy. Ten-thousand-meter stuff, some marathons, that sort of thing."

Smith gave him a baleful look. "You mean I've been trying to walk a damned runner into the ground?"

"You have walked a marathoner into the friggin' ground." Edwards massaged his shoulders. He wondered if the pain from his pack straps would ever go away. His legs felt as though someone had hammered on them with a baseball bat. He leaned back and commanded every muscle in his body to relax. The rocky ground didn't help, but he could not raise the energy even to look for a better spot. He remembered something. "Shouldn't somebody stand guard?"

"I thought about that," Smith said. He was lying back also, his helmet down over his eyes. "I think just this once we can forget it. Only way anybody'll spot us is if a chopper hovers right overhead. Nearest road's ten miles from here. Screw it. What d'you think, skipper?"

Edwards didn't hear the question.

"Ivan Mikhailovich, are your bags packed?" Alekseyev asked.

"Yes, Comrade General."

"Commander-in-Chief West is missing. He was en route from Third Shock Army to his forward headquarters and disappeared. It is thought he might have been killed by an air attack. We're taking over."

"Just like that?"

"Not at all," Alekseyev said angrily. "They took thirty-six hours to decide that he was probably dead! The maniac had just relieved Third Shock's commander, then disappeared, and his deputy couldn't decide what to do. A scheduled attack never began, and the fucking Germans counterattacked while our men were waiting for orders!'' Alekseyev shook his head to clear it and went on more calmly. "Well, now we will have soldiers running the campaign, not some politically reliable whoremonger."

Sergetov again noted his superior's puritanical streak. It was one of the few traits that agreed exactly with Party policy.

"Our mission?" the captain asked.

"While the General takes charge at the command post, you and I will tour the forward divisions to ascertain the situation at the front. Sorry, Ivan Mikhailovich, I'm afraid this is not the safe posting I promised your father."

"I speak good English in addition to Arabic," the younger man sniffed. Alekseyev had checked that out before writing up the transfer orders. Captain Sergetov had been a good company officer before being lured out of uniform by the promise of a comfortable life of Party work. "When do we leave?"

"We fly out in two hours."

"In daylight?" The captain was surprised at that.

"It would appear that air travel by day is safer. NATO claims to dominate the night sky. Our people say otherwise, but they are flying us out in daylight. Draw your own conclusions, Comrade Captain."

A C-5A transport aircraft sat outside its hangar, waiting. Within the cavernous structure a team of forty-half officers in naval dress, half civilians wearing General Dynamics coveralls-worked on Tomahawk missiles. While one group removed the massive antiship warheads and replaced them with something else, the other group's task was more difficult. They were replacing the missile guidance systems, the usual ship-hunting packages being removed in favor of terrain-matching systems that the men knew were used only for nuclear-tipped missiles intended for land targets. The guidance boxes were new, fresh from the factory. They had to be checked and calibrated. A delicate job. Though the systems had already been certified by the manufacturer, the usual peacetime routines were gone, replaced with an urgency that all of them felt but none of them knew the reason for. The mission was a complete secret.

Delicate electronic instruments fed pre-programmed information into the guidance packages, and other monitors examined the commands generated by the on-board computers. There were only enough men to check out three missiles at a time, and each check took just over an hour. Occasionally one would look up to see the massive Galaxy transport, still waiting, its crew pacing about between trips to the weather office. When each missile was certified, a grease pencil mark was made next to the "F' code letter on the warhead, and the torpedo-shaped weapon was carefully loaded into its launch canister. Nearly a third of the guidance packages were discarded and replaced. Several had failed completely, but the problems with most were quite minor, though serious enough to warrant replacement instead of adjustment. The technicians and engineers from General Dynamics wondered about that. What sort of target demanded this sort of precision? All in all, the job took twenty-seven hours, six more than expected. About half of the men boarded the aircraft, which lifted off the concrete twenty minutes later, bound for Europe. They slept in the rear-facing seats, too tired to care about the dangers that might await them at their destination, wherever that was.

Edwards was sitting up almost before he knew why. Smith and his Marines were even faster, already on their feet, weapons in their hands and racing to cover. Their eyes scanned the rocky rim of their small canyon as Vigdis continued to scream. Edwards left his rifle and went to her.

The automatic reaction of the Marines was to assume that she had seen some danger upon them. Instinctively, Edwards knew different. Her eyes looked blankly toward the bare rocks a few yards away, her hands gripped at the bedroll. By the time he reached her, she had stopped screaming. This time Edwards did not stop to think. He grabbed her around the shoulders and pulled her head toward his own.

"You're safe. Vigdis, you are safe."

"My family," she said, her chest heaving as she caught her breath. "They kill my family. Then-?'

"Yes, but you are alive."

'The soldiers, they-" The girl had evidently loosened her clothes to sleep more comfortably. Now she drew back from Edwards, pulling them tight around her. The lieutenant kept his hands away from her clothes and wrapped the sleeping bag around her.

"They will not hurt you again. Remember all of what happened. They will not hurt you again."

She looked into his face. He didn't know what to make of her expression. The pain and grief were evident, but there were other things there, and Edwards didn't know this girl well enough to read what she was thinking.

"The one who kill my family. You kill-killed him."

Edwards nodded. "They are all dead. They cannot hurt you."

"Yes." Vigdis looked down at the ground.

"You all right?" Smith asked.

"Yeah," Edwards answered. "The lady had a-a bad dream."

"They come back," she said. "They come back again."

"Ma'am, they ain't never coming back to hurt you." Smith grasped her arm through the sleeping bag. "We'll protect you. Nobody will hurt you while we are here. Okay?"

The girl nodded jerkily.

"Okay, Miss Vigdis, now why don't you try to get some sleep? Ain't nobody gonna hurt you while we're around. You need us, you can call us."

Smith walked away. Edwards started to rise, but the girl's hand came out of the bag and took his arm.

"Please, do not go away. I-fear, fear to be alone."

"Okay. I'll stay with you. You lie back and get some sleep."

Five minutes later her eyes were closed and her breathing was regular. Edwards tried not to look at her. Should she suddenly awake and see his eyes on her-what might she think? And she could be right, Edwards admitted to himself. Two weeks ago, had he encountered her at the Keflavik Officers Club… he was a young, unattached man, and she was evidently a young, unattached woman. His main thought after the second drink would have been to get her back to his quarters. A little soft music. How beautiful she would have looked there, slipping demurely from her fashionable clothes in the soft light coming through the shades. Instead he had met her stark naked, cuts and bruises on her exposed flesh. So strange it was now. Edwards knew without thinking that if another man tried to put hands on her, he'd kill him without hesitation, and he couldn't bring himself to think of what taking the girl himself might be like-his only likely thought if he had encountered her on the street. What if I hadn't decided to come to her house? he wondered. She'd be dead by now, along with her parents. Probably someone would have found them in a few days… like they'd discovered Sandy. And that, Edwards knew all along, was the reason he'd killed the Russian lieutenant and enjoyed the man's slow trip to hell. A pity no one had seen fit to do that

Smith waved to him. Edwards rose quietly and walked over.

"I got Garcia on guard. I think we better go back to being Marines after all. If that'd been for real, we'd all be cold meat by now, Lieutenant."

"We're all too tired to move out just yet."

"Yes, sir. The lady okay?"

"She's had a tough time. When she wakes up-hell, I don't know. I'm afraid she might just come apart on us."

"Maybe." Smith lit a cigarette. "She's young. She might bounce back if we give her a chance."

"Get her something to do?"

"Same as us, skipper. You're better off doin' than thinkin'."

Edwards checked his watch. He'd actually gotten six hours of sleep before all this had happened. Though his legs were stiff, otherwise he felt better than he would have imagined. It was an illusion, he knew. He needed at least another four hours, and a good meal, before he'd be ready to move.

"We won't move out until about eleven. I want everybody to get some more sleep and one decent meal before we head out of here."

"Makes sense. When you gonna radio in?"

"I should have done that a long time ago, I just don't want to climb those damned rocks."

"Lieutenant, I'm just a dumbass grunt, but insteada doing that, why don't you just walk downstream about half a mile? You oughta be able to track in on your satellite that way, right?"

Edwards turned to look north. Walking about that far would lower the angle to the satellite as well as climbing… why didn't I think of that? Because like any good Air Force Academy graduate, you thought in terms of up-and-down instead of sideways. The lieutenant shook his head angrily, noting the sergeant's sly grin before he lifted the radio pack and heading down the canyon's rocky floor.

"You're very late, Beagle," Doghouse said at once. "Repeat your status."

"Doghouse, things are just terrible. We had a run-in with a Russian patrol." Edwards explained for another two minutes.

"Beagle, are you out of your Goddamned mind? Your orders are to avoid, repeat avoid, contact with the enemy. How do you know that somebody doesn't know you're there? Over!"

"They're all dead. We rolled their vehicle over a cliff and set fire to it. We made it look like an accident, just like on TV. It's all over, Doghouse. No sense worrying about it now. We are now ten klicks from where it happened. I'm resting my men for the rest of the day. We will continue our march north tonight. This may take longer than you expect. The terrain is rugged as hell, but we'll do our best. Nothing more to report. We can't see much from where we are."

"Very well. Your orders are unchanged, and please don't play white knight again-acknowledge."

"Roger that. Out." Edwards smiled to himself as he repacked the radio. When he got back to the others, he saw that Vigdis was stirring in her sleep. He lay down beside her, careful to stay a few feet away.

"Bloody cowboy-John Wayne rescuing the settlers from the bloody red Indians!"

"We weren't there," said the man with the eye patch. He fingered it briefly. "It is a mistake to judge a man from a thousand miles away. He was there, he saw what was happening. The next thing is, what does this tell us about Ivan's troops?"

"The Sovs do not exactly have an exemplary record for dealing with civilians," the first man pointed out.

"The Soviet airborne troops are known for their stern discipline," the second replied. Formerly a major in the SAS, and invalided out, he was now a senior man with the Special Operations Executive, the SOE- "Conduct like this is not indicative of well-disciplined troops. That may be important later on. For the moment, as I told you earlier, this lad is turning out very nicely indeed." He said it without a trace of smugness.