“Christ, they can’t drop much closer than that.”
“They can’t drop any closer than that,” Nichols said, wiping blood from his face.
They could still hear rifle fire from within the dust. The wind blew it way, and at least five Russians were still up and moving toward them. The Navy Corsairs made another run in but broke off, unable to drop so close to friendly troops. They curved back in seconds, firing their cannon. The shells scattered wildly, with some exploding ten yards from Edwards’s face.
“Where’d they go?”
“The left, I think,” Nichols answered. “You can’t talk directly to the fighters?”
Edwards shook his head. “Not that kind of radio, Sarge.”
The A-7s circled overhead while their pilots watched the ground for movement. Edwards tried to wave at them, but couldn’t tell if they recognized the gesture or not. One of them dove to his left and fired a cannon burst into the rocks. Edwards heard a scream, but saw nothing.
“Stalemate.” Edwards turned to look at his satellite radio. The last set of mortar rounds had sent a fragment through the backpack.
“Down!” Nichols grabbed the lieutenant as a grenade arced through the air. It exploded a few feet away. “Here they come again.”
Edwards turned and put a fresh magazine in his rifle. He saw two Russians fifty feet away and fired a long burst. One went down on his face. The other returned fire and dodged left. He felt a weight on his legs and saw Nichols down on his back with a trio of red holes in his shoulder. Edwards put the last magazine in his rifle and moved awkwardly across the hill to the left, unable to put much weight on his right leg.
“Michael . . .”
“Go the other way,” Edwards replied. “Look out!”
He saw a face and a rifle-and a flash. Edwards dove right, too late to keep from being hit in the chest. Only shock kept the pain from becoming unbearable. He fired a few rounds into the air to keep the man’s head down as he backpedaled his feet to get away. Where was everyone? There was rifle fire to his right. Why wasn’t anybody helping him? He heard the roar of jet engines as the A-7s continued to circle, unable to do anything but watch in frustration. He cursed them as he bled. His wounded leg revolted at being used this way, and his left arm was useless. Edwards held the rifle like an oversized handgun as he waited for the Russian to appear. He felt hands under his arms dragging him backwards.
“Drop me, Vigdis, for Christ’s sake, drop me and run.”
She said nothing. Her breathing was heavy as she struggled, stumbling, to pull him over the rocks. He was losing consciousness from the blood loss, and looked up to see the A-7s drawing off. There was another sound that didn’t seem to make much sense. Dust rose around him with a sudden wind and there was another long burst of machine-gun fire as a huge green-black shape appeared overhead. Men jumped out, and it was all over. He closed his eyes. The Russian commander had gotten through to Keflavik. Here was the Mi-24 to reinforce the outpost . . . Edwards was too drained to react. He’d run a good race and lost. There was more chattering rifle fire, then silence as the helicopter moved off. How did the Russians treat prisoners who’d killed helpless men?
“Your name Beagle?”
It required the greatest effort of his life to open his eyes. He saw a black man standing over him.
“Who’re you?”
“Sam Potter. I’m a lieutenant with Second Force Recon. You’re Beagle, right?” He turned. “We need a corpsman over here!”
“My people are all hurt.”
“We’re working on it. We’ll have you outa here in five minutes. Hang in there, Beagle. I gotta go do some work. Okay, people,” he called loudly. “Let’s get those Russians checked out. If we got any live ones, we wanna move them the hell off this rock right now!”
“Michael?” Edwards was still confused. Her face was right above his when he lost consciousness.
“Just who the hell is this guy?” Lieutenant Potter asked five minutes later.
“Wing-wiper. He done good,” Smith said, wincing with his own injuries.
“How’d you get here?” Potter waved for his radio operator.
“We fucking walked all the way from Keflavik, sir.”
“Quite a trip, Sarge.” Potter was impressed. He gave a short radio order. “Chopper’s on the way in now. I guess the lady goes out too.”
“Yes, sir. Welcome to Iceland, sir. We been waiting for you.”
“Take a look, Sarge.” Potter’s arm swept to the west. A series of gray bumps on the horizon headed east toward Stykkisholmur.
USS CHICAGO
They were still out there, McCafferty was sure-but where? After killing the last Tango, contact had never been reestablished with the other two Russian submarines. Eight hours of relative peace rewarded his evasive maneuvering. The Russian ASW aircraft were still overhead, still dropping sonobuoys, but something had gone wrong for them. They weren’t coming very close now. He’d had to maneuver clear only four times. That would have been a lot in peacetime, but after the past few days it seemed like a vacation.
The captain had taken the chance to rest himself and his crew. Though they would all have gratefully accepted a month in bed, the four or six hours of sleep they’d all had were like a cup of water for a man in the desert, enough to get them a little farther. And there was only a little farther to go: exactly one hundred miles to the jagged edge of the arctic ice. Sixteen hours or so.
Chicago was about five miles ahead of her sisters. Every hour, McCafferty would maneuver his sub to an easterly course and allow his towed array sonar to get a precise fix on them. That was hard enough: Boston and Providence were difficult to pick up even at this distance.
He wondered what the Russians were thinking. The mobbing tactics of the Krivak-Grisha teams had failed. They’d learned that it was one thing to use those ships for barrier operations against the Keypunch team, but something very different to rush after a submarine with long-range weapons and computerized fire-control. Their dependence on active sonobuoys had reduced the effectiveness of their ASW patrol aircraft, and the one thing that had nearly worked-placing a diesel sub between two sonobuoy lines, then spooking their target into moving with a randomly dropped torpedo-had failed also. Thank God they didn’t know how close they came with that, McCafferty thought to himself. Their Tango-class subs were formidable opponents, quiet and hard to locate, but the Russians were still paying for their unsophisticated sonars. All in all, McCafferty was more confident now than he’d been in weeks.
“Well?” he asked his plotting officer.
“Looks like they’re steaming as before, sir, about ten thousand yards behind us. I think this one’s Boston. She’s maneuvering a lot more. Providence here is plodding along pretty straight. We got a good fix on her.”
“Left ten degrees rudder, come to new course three-five-five,” McCafferty ordered.
“Left ten degrees rudder, aye, coming to new course three-five-five. Sir, my rudder is left ten degrees.”
“Very well.” The captain sipped at a cup of hot cocoa. It made a nice change of pace from coffee. Chicago turned slowly north. In the engine spaces aft, the submarine’s engineer crew kept watch on their instruments as the reactor plant turned out an even 10-percent power.
About the only bad news was the storm on the surface. For some reason a series of squalls was parading around the top of the world, and this one was a real growler. The sonar crew estimated fifteen-foot waves and forty-knot winds, unusual for the arctic summer. It knocked 10 to 20 percent off their sonar performance, but would make for ideal conditions as they approached the icepack. The sea conditions would be grinding acre-sized ice floes into ice chips, and that much noise would make the American subs very hard to detect in the ice. Sixteen hours, McCafferty told himself. Sixteen hours and we’re out of here.
“Conn, sonar, we have a contact bearing three-four-zero. Not enough data to classify at this time.”
McCafferty went forward to sonar.
“Show me.”
“Right here, skipper.” The chief tapped the display. “I can’t give you a bladecount yet, too sketchy for anything, Well, it smells like a nuclear boat,” the chief allowed.
“Put up your model.”
The chief pushed a button and a secondary screen displayed the predicted sonar range, generated by computer from known local water conditions. Their direct-path sonar range was just over thirty thousand yards. The water was not deep enough yet for convergence zones, and they were beginning to get low-frequency background noise from the icepack. It would impede their ability to discriminate sonar contacts in the same way bright sunlight lessens the apparent intensity of an electric light.