World War III

“Return fire! Return fire! Second company, flank that gun to the east!” He ran for the protection of one of the pipeline’s support structures. A burst of machine gun fire twanged off the steel beams. A soldier running beside him was hit in the neck and dropped without a scream. The entire column was taking fire from three positions with nowhere to hide. Whole platoons were slaughtered before they could get to their feet to advance. Men wallowed in the snow not knowing which direction to fire, while others ran or crawled for the protection of the vehicles.

“This way!” Vorashin screamed at a squad leader. He pointed with his pistol at the machine gun in the treeline to the west. “This way! Follow me! Follow me!” Vorashin moved parallel to but away from the machine gun, diving, rolling, running and yelling every step of the way — making himself and the men who followed as active and visible as possible. The one cardinal rule a gunner was taught was to concentrate on the main attack. Do not be distracted by flanking maneuvers; that was the job of the machine gunner’s support, the riflemen and snipers. A machine gun was too slow and too heavy a weapon to use like a rifle. Its main purpose was to create havoc and inflict the most damage against targets of opportunity. This gunner, Vorashin realized, hadn’t been taught properly. He was too nervous or too stupid to know that by redirecting his aim at Vorashin’s six or seven men he was allowing a hundred others to coordinate a massive barrage of firepower.

The gunner learned his mistake too late. The volume of fire and grenades that finally silenced the gun were as if an invisible scythe had chopped through the trees around it — almost nothing taller than ten inches remained standing. Vorashin found the machine gun position shrouded in shattered and splintered trees. Then he understood why they had fired at his little group. There were only two men.

When he turned back to the column he barely could believe his own eyes. Rising above the oil station’s complex of buildings was a battered helicopter with Alaskan National Guard markings, the sound of its whipping rotor blades just reaching him. It was the same helicopter he’d seen limping away from the battlefield yesterday morning. The same helicopter Saamaretz so proudly claimed to have destroyed last night. But it wasn’t destroyed. It was hurtling down the breaker, firing at his rocket carrier, blasting great holes in the snow with grenades. But that wasn’t what caught the breath in his throat. The sight that widened his eyes” was what he saw at the oil station’s pump house.

A river of oil blackened the snow as it spewed out of a two-foot pipe from the pipeline’s emergency bleed-off valve. The pressure was so powerful that the oil shot thirty feet before it touched the ground.

Hundreds of gallons a second, Vorashin thought. It only took him a second to realize and then he was running, yelling for the men to run, for the tracks to move.

The oil slid down the south incline like a tide of black ink.

“Get out!” Vorashin screamed. He ran at an angle almost parallel to the treeline. “Get those vehicles out! Everyone, gel out of the way!”

Three companies had already dug into place against the shooting from two isolated positions beside the pump station. The machine guns that had so devastated the column in the first minutes had both been quieted, and the only resistance besides the circling helicopter came from the clearing inside the pump station. They were pouring heavy machine-gun fire laced with tracer bullets and launching grenades into the compound, collapsing walls of buildings, blasting craters into the permafrosted ground. They fired oblivious to the danger sliding ever faster toward them.

But Vorashin knew.

He ran until he tripped over the body of one of his men. He suddenly knew that the American commander hadn’t died yesterday in the crashed helicopter. Saamaretz hadn’t done the job he was sent to do. He knew because no one else would have come this far against such odds for this final, suicidal showdown. He knew because the bastard was in that pump house. And he hadn’t been beaten yet.

Vorashin also knew what three company commanders obviously didn’t know. Unrefined oil was more than slick, sticky, gritty goo. It was still petroleum. And crude oil, even in these temperatures, burned very, very well.

“Able, Baker? Come in. Come in!” Caffey growled into the talkie. He dropped to the slab floor behind the cast-iron protection of the pump regulator. The pump house echoed with the pings of ricochets. A fragment had glanced off the side of his head at the corner of his right eyebrow and his sleeve was bloody where he’d