Red Storm Rising (1986) (33 page)

“They report some fighting still at the air base, but it will soon be under control. The first team at the main quay reports no one there. That will be secure, my captain. You should rest a bit.”

Kherov shook his head like a drunken man. “That will come soon enough. Fifteen more kilometers. We race in too fast as it is. The Americans may yet have some aircraft heading for us. We must get to the dock and unload your equipment before noon. I have lost too many of my crewmen to fail.”

“We gotta report this,” Edwards said quietly. He shrugged out of his pack and opened it. He’d watched a man test the radio before, and saw that instructions were printed on the side of the radio set. The six pieces of the antenna fitted easily into the pistol grip. Next he plugged in his headset and switched the radio on.

He was supposed to point the flowerlike antenna at a satellite on the 30° meridian, but he didn’t have a compass to tell him where that was. Smith unfolded a map and selected a landmark in that general direction. Edwards pointed the antenna at it and waved it slowly across the sky until he heard the warbling carrier wave of the communications bird.

“Okay.” Edwards turned the frequency knob to a preselected channel and toggled the Transmit switch.

“Anyone on this net, this is Mike Edwards, first lieutenant, United States Air Force, transmitting from Iceland. Please acknowledge, over.” Nothing happened. Edwards reread the instructions to make sure he was doing the right thing, and rebroadcast the same message three more times.

“Sender on this net, please identify. Over.” A voice finally answered.

“Edwards, Michael D., first lieutenant, U.S. Air Force, serial number 328-61-4030. I’m the meteorological officer attached to the 57th Fighter Interceptor Squadron at Keflavik. Who is this? Over.”

“If you don’t know that, pal, you don’t belong on this net. Clear off, we need this for official traffic,” the voice answered coldly. Edwards stared at the radio in mute rage for several seconds before exploding.

“Listen up, asshole! The guy who knows how to work this damned radio is dead, and I’m all you got. The base at Keflavik was hit seven hours ago by a Russian air and ground attack. The place is crawling with bad guys, there’s a Russian ship coming into Hafnarfjördur harbor right now, and you’re playing fucking word games! Let’s get it together, mister. Over!”

“Copy that. Stand by. We have to verify who you are.” Not a trace of remorse.

“Dammit, this thing works on batteries. You want me to run them down while you open a file cabinet?”

A new voice came on the circuit. “Edwards, this is the senior communications watch officer. Get off the air. They might be able to monitor you. We’ll check you out and be back in three-zero minutes from now. You got that? Over.”

That was more like it. The lieutenant checked his watch. “Roger, understand. We’ll be back in three-zero minutes. Out.” Edwards flipped the power switch off. “Let’s get moving. I didn’t know they could track in on this.” The good news was that the radio broke down in under two minutes, and they were moving again.

“Sarge, let’s head for this Hill 152. We should be able to see pretty good from up there, and there’s water on the way.”

“It’s hot water, sir, full of sulfur. Just as soon not drink that shit, if you know what I mean.”

“Suit yourself.” Edwards moved off at a slow trot. Once as a boy he’d had to call in to report a fire. They’d believed him then. Why not now?

Kherov knew that he was finishing the work that the Americans had begun. Driving his ship into the harbor at eighteen knots was worse than reckless. The sea bottom here was rock, not mud, and a grounding could easily rip his bottom out. But he feared another air attack even more, and he was sure that a flight of American fighters was heading this way, laden with missiles and bombs that would rob him of success in the most important mission of his life.

“Midships!” he called.

“Rudder amidships,” the helmsman acknowledged.

He’d learned minutes before that his first officer was dead, from wounds sustained in the first strafing attack. His best helmsman had died screaming before his eyes, along with many of his skilled deck crewmen. He had only one man qualified to take the shore sightings necessary for a positive position fix. But the quay was in sight, and he’d depend on a seaman’s eye.

“Slow to half speed,” he ordered. The helmsman relayed the order on the engine room telegraph.

“Rudder right full.” He watched his ship’s head come slowly right. He stood on the centerline of the bridge, carefully lining his jackstaff up with the quay. There was no one trained to handle the mooring lines. He wondered if the soldiers could manage it.

The ship touched bottom. Kherov was thrown from his feet and cursed loudly with pain and rage. He’d misjudged his approach. The Fucik shuddered as she slid across the rocky bottom. There was no time to check his chart. When the tide turned, the harbor’s strong eddy currents would make his landing an impossible nightmare.

“Reverse your rudder.” A minute later the ship was fully afloat again. The captain ignored the flooding alarms that hooted behind him. The hull was penetrated, or maybe the damaged seams had sprung further. No matter. The dock was a mere thousand meters away. It was a massive quay made of rough stone. “Midships. All stop.”

The ship was moving far too fast to stop. The soldiers on the dock could already see that, and were slowly backing up, away from the edge, fearing that it would crumble when the ship struck. Kherov grunted with dark amusement. So much for the line handlers. Eight hundred meters.

“All back full.”

Six hundred meters. The ship’s whole mass shuddered as the engines fought to slow her. She headed into the berth at a thirty-degree angle, her speed now eight knots. Kherov walked to the engine room voice tube.

“On my order, shut down the engines, pull the manual sprinkler handle, and evacuate the engine spaces.”

“What are you doing?” the General asked.

“We cannot moor to the quay,” Kherov answered simply. “Your soldiers don’t know how to handle the lines, and many of my seamen are dead.” The berth Kherov had selected was precisely half a meter shallower than his ship’s draft. He went back to the voice tube.

“Now, Comrades!”

Below, the chief engineer gave the orders. His chief machinist cut off the diesel engines and ran to the escape ladder. The engineer yanked the emergency handle for the fire-suppression system and followed, after counting heads to make sure that all his men had gotten out.

“Rudder hard right!”

A minute later the bow of
Julius Fucik
rammed the quay at a speed of five knots. Her bow crumpled as though constructed of paper, and the whole ship pivoted to the right, her side slamming against the rocks in a shower of orange sparks. The impact ripped the ship’s bottom open at the turn of her starboard bilges. Instantly her lower decks flooded, and the ship settled rapidly to the bottom, only a few feet below her flat keel. The
Julius Fucik
would never sail again. But she had reached her objective.

Kherov waved to the General. “My men will deploy the two baby tugboats we have in the stem. Tell them to remove two barges and set them between the stem and the end of the quay. My men will show you how to secure the barges properly so they don’t drift off. Then use your bridging equipment to take your vehicles off the elevator onto the barges, then from the barges to the quay.”

“We can do this easily. Now, Comrade Captain, you will see my surgeon. I will brook no further argument.” The General waved to his orderly and both men assisted the captain below. There might still be time.

“You decide who I am yet?” Edwards asked testily. Another really annoying thing was the quarter-second delay caused by the signal’s travel time to and from the satellite.

“That’s affirmative. The problem is, how do we know it’s really you?” The officer had a telex in his hand confirming that one First Lieutenant Michael D. Edwards, USAF, had indeed been the met officer for the 57th FIS, information that could easily have been in Russian hands before the attack.

“Look, turkey, I’m sitting here on Hill 152, east of Hafnarfjördur, okay? There is a Russian helicopter flying around, and some godawful big ship just docked in the harbor. It’s too far to see a flag, but I don’t figure the son of a bitch came from New York, y’know? The Russians have invaded this rock. They pounded hell out of Keflavik, and they got troops all over the place.”

“Tell me about the ship.”

Edwards locked the binoculars to his eyes. “Black hull, white superstructure. Big block letters on the side. Can’t quite make it out. Something-Lines. The first word begins with an L. Some kind of barge-carrying ship. There’s a tugboat moving a barge around right now.”

“Have you seen any Russian troops?”

Edwards paused before answering. “No. I’ve just heard radio reports of the Marines at Keflavik. They were being overrun. They’ve been off the air ever since. I can see some people on the dock, but I can’t tell what they are.”

“Okay, we’ll be checking that out. For the moment I’d suggest that you find a good, safe place to belly-up, and stay off the air. If we have to contact you, we’ll broadcast on the hour, every even hour. If you want to talk to us, we’ll be here. Understood?”

“Roger, copy. Out.” Edwards switched off. “I don’t believe this.”

“Nobody knows what the hell’s going on, Lieutenant,” Smith observed. “Why should they? We sure as hell don’t.”

“Ain’t that the truth!” Edwards repacked his radio. “If those idiots would listen to me, we could have some fighter-bombers here to blast that ship inside two hours. God, but she’s a big one. How much equipment can you Marines load in something that big?”

“A lot,” Smith said quietly.

“You think they’ll be trying to land more troops?”

“It figures, sir. They couldn’t have hit Keflavik with all that many—figure a battalion, tops. This here’s a pretty big rock. I’d sure as hell want more troops to hold it than that. Course, I’m just a buck sergeant.”

The General could finally get to work. The first order of business was to board the single working helicopter, now operating off the dock, its pilots delighted to see the ship sunk alongside the quay. He left a rifle company to secure the harbor area, sent another to Reykjavik airport to reinforce that, and detailed his last to get the division’s equipment moving off the ship. Then he flew to Keflavik to survey the situation.

Most of the fires were still burning, he saw. The aircraft fuel dump nearest the base was ablaze, but the main storage tanks five kilometers away seemed intact, and, he could see, were already guarded by a BMD assault vehicle and some men. The assault regiment commander met him on one of the undamaged runways.

“Keflavik air base is secure, Comrade General!” he proclaimed.

“How did it go?”

“Hard. The Americans were uncoordinated—one of the missiles hit their command post—but they did not give up easily. We have nineteen dead and forty-three wounded. We have accounted for most of the Marines and other security troops, and we are still counting the other prisoners.”

“How many armed troops escaped?”

“None that we know of. Too early to tell, of course, but some undoubtedly died in the fires.” The colonel waved at the smashed base area to the east. “How is the ship? I heard he took a missile hit.”

“And we were strafed by American fighters. He’s tied to the dock, and the equipment is being unloaded now. Can we use this airfield? I—”

“Getting that report now.” The colonel’s radio operator handed his radiophone over. The colonel spoke for a minute or so. A five-man party of Air Force personnel had accompanied the second wave and was evaluating the base facilities.

“Comrade General, the base radar and radio systems are destroyed. The runways are littered with debris, and they tell me that they need some hours to sweep them clear. Also the fuel pipeline is broken in two places. Fortunately it did not burn. For the moment we’ll have to use the airport’s trucks to transfer fuel. All of them seem to be intact . . . they recommend that the airlift come into Reykjavik. Have we secured that?”

“Yes, and it is intact. Any hope of getting information from the American aircraft?”

“Unfortunately not, Comrade. The aircraft were badly damaged from incoming missiles. Those that did not burn of their own accord were burned by their crews. As I said, they fought hard.”

“Very well. I’ll send the remainder of your two battalions with your equipment as soon as we can get things organized. I’ll need the third at the dock for the moment. Set up your perimeter. Start the cleanup, we need this airfield operational as soon as possible. Get the prisoners together and ready to move. We’ll be flying them out tonight. They are to be treated correctly.” His orders on that score were very precise. Prisoners are assets.

“As you say, Comrade General. And please get me some engineers so that we can repair that fuel pipe.”

“Well done, Nikolay Gennadyevich!”

The General ran back to his helicopter. Only nineteen dead. He’d expected a higher number than that. Taking out the Marine command center had been a real stroke of luck. By the time his Hip returned to the dock, the equipment was already rolling off. The ship’s barges had been fitted with loading doors in their hulls, like miniature landing craft, which allowed vehicles to roll straight out. The units already were being organized on the dock and nearby lots. His staff officers were fully in charge of things, the General saw. To this point, Operation Polar Glory was a total success.

When the Hip landed, it refueled from a line draped down from the ship’s side. The General went to his operations officer.