The Yak vertical takeoff fighter bomber diving on the landing helicopter assault ship Winston Davis got off one Acrid radar homing missile before being taken out by saturation fire from the ship’s two “pope miters,” the high-domed, six-barrelled, twenty-millimeter Vulcan Phalanx Mark 15’s that fired one hundred rounds a second and enveloped the Siberian fighter in a dense hail of depleted uranium. The fireball that a moment ago had been the Yak now hit the LHD, the Yak’s starboard wing’s Koliesov/Rybinak vertical takeoff lift jets slamming into one of the forty-thousand-ton ship’s five antisurface guns, sending white-hot shrapnel whooshing through the air, killing the bridge’s port lookout, and raising fears among the two thousand marines below that if the twelve thousand tons of aviation fuel were hit they’d all be incinerated within a matter of minutes. As the shock of the impact continued to reverberate deafeningly through the jam-packed half-deck hangars below, a fully equipped battalion, gathered about its palletized supplies, which took up 150,000 cubic feet of the ship’s huge interior, waited anxiously for the landings that might or might not happen depending on the outcome of the great naval battle now swirling and crashing about them.
What Admiral Burke feared most was the Siberian fleet’s two ultramodern guided-missile cruisers, now still over two hundred miles away but racing south at flank speed to intercept him on his right flank. His only hope was that the two old Iowa class battle wagons, the Missouri and the Wisconsin, would stop them. But it was seen by Burke’s commander as a forlorn hope. And indeed because of the two ships’ age, despite weapons modernization, most of the officers in Burke’s fleet had serious doubts about the behemoths of another age being of any use in the high-tech war.
There were those, like Adm. John Brentwood, who, joined by others in the U.S. DOD — Department of Defense — and the British MOD — Ministry of Defence — were preoccupied by an unanswered question: Would the Tomahawk missiles aboard the Iowa class battleships be more than a match going up against the Kirov guided-missile cruisers’ SS-N-19, three-hundred-mile-range, four-thousand-pound missile? The latter, as well as being over a thousand pounds heavier than the Tomahawk, was more than three times as fast. The American cruise missile’s speed, at a subsonic 520 miles per hour, made it a slowpoke compared to the over-1700-miles per-hour Siberian missile. It was a difference that UK Liaison Officer Brigadier Soames at the White House referred to, with typical British understatement, as “a slight advantage for the Sibirs.”
The undeniable advantage of the Siberian’s speed allowed the Kirov cruisers to wait until the Missouri and Wisconsin had fired two Tomahawks apiece, two for each of the Siberian cruisers; they had ample time, even in the split-second world of over-the-horizon electronic warfare, to respond. It was a luxurious five seconds in all after each Tomahawk, in a feral roar and with its peculiar “ass-dragging” motion, skidded out from one of the eight armored box launchers like a huge, vertical cigar moving sideways, the missile arcing high enough to afford Siberian radar a glimpse and to get a back-track vector, before the American missile dropped in altitude.
At wave-skimming height, the Tomahawk’s cigar-tube shape began its metamorphosis, its tail unfolding, stubby wings extending and air intake popping up to gulp air, allowing the missile’s own engine to take over as the rocket booster finished. Looking now more like the V-l buzz bomb from which it had been derived, the missile’s 1,000-pound conventional warhead, replacing a 450-pound nuclear tip, followed its preprogrammed terrain-matching contour guide which afforded the Tomahawk a CEP — circular error of probability — of only 250 feet. This was normally not critical for most large land targets, but for a moving target at sea it raised the odds considerably.
The captain of the nuclear-powered Frunze IV had personally picked up on the Tomahawks’ firing, receiving details of the Tomahawk’s trajectory from a Bear recon aircraft out of the Kommandorsky Islands to the north. In response the Frunze IV and the other Siberian cruiser had each launched five SS-19 missiles from hatches forward of the cruiser’s Gatling gun turret and from both port and starboard stations.
In all, ten missiles were now streaking toward the starye amerikanskie sufi—”old American bitches”—as the Missouri and Wisconsin were contemptuously referred to. The sinking of either one — or hopefully both — would only add to the impression in Novosibirsk of an overwhelming American naval defeat, the Americans still withdrawing south, one of the battle group’s foam-filled minesweepers already sunk. While her weight and nonmetallic fiberglass hull had not set off any pressure or magnetic mines, the sound of her props had triggered acoustic mines that had literally blown her clear of the water, her spine snapped, her foam-filled interior giving off a thick, oily, and highly toxic smoke, the two halves of the sweeper taking longer to go down than they would have without the foam that kept them floating about like some ancient fire ships sent among an enemy fleet to sow confusion and break up its order of battle.
By now the Missouri’s two Tomahawk cruise missiles were locked onto by the Frunze IV’s “Top Pair” three-dimensional, long-range radar scanner. They were intercepted eleven miles out by a cluster of type 4,6, and 9 missiles fired by the Frunze. It was impossible to say what type had downed one of the two American missiles, so many target and antitarget vectors were converging in the general area; so many Siberian missiles, in fact, that it was likely, given their inferior guidance system, that it had been a case of “fratricide”—debris and shock waves from one missile altering another’s course, preventing it from making a direct hit. Either way, one of the Tomahawks was down.
The second Tomahawk hit the Frunze IV starboard midships, the explosion shattering all glass on the bridge, decapitating two officers on watch, while a great hole, over ten feet in diameter, now gaped at the waterline. The dark, inky sea turned to a frothing cauldron as it churned into the cruiser, the enormous intake of water causing the ship to roll sharply starboard and capsize — sinking in less than eleven minutes, all 794 hands lost. Most drowned in the first five minutes or so; others swam through the ice-cold sea of oil and flotsam to a few inflatable rafts where they hauled themselves aboard only to the shortly of pneumonia, coughing unceasingly, lungs coated in oil — in effect, drowning in their own fuel.
Of the ten surface-to-surface SS-19s that the cruisers had fired at the Missouri and Wisconsin, two struck Missouri and three the Wisconsin. Three of the others were shot down by American Harpoon and Vulcan AA fire; the remaining two exploded in the sea, sending enormous spumes of white into the tracer-streaked night. And now the argument that had raged for years over the advisability of keeping the old battle wagons was answered.
Both had seen active service, particularly the Missouri in the Iraqi war, but not ship-to-ship confrontations, and the moment the two battleships were struck, there was in the Pentagon an almost unseemly rush to hear what had happened. What happened was that of the two missiles that hit the Missouri, one exploded starboard side against the bridge, the other made a wide-angle hit on the stern deck that took out two of the battleship’s four SH60-Lamps helos; the other two helicopters were aloft on antisub watch.
When the first missile hit the bridge it killed two men in number two turret from sheer concussion, its fireball so intense that the explosion took out four of the five-inch guns on that side, killing twenty-six men while engulfing one of the stern-facing five-inch guns, sending a sheet of dense, curdling fire rushing along the starboard side as if some enormous flamethrower had belched, the smoke and flame spilling over the stern’s triple sixteen-inch turret.
It did not destroy it but, because of the heat, made the turret, even with its air conditioning, uninhabitable for the next half hour as fire hoses crisscrossed in dense smoke to get the deck fire under control. But the main concern was the missile that had hit the starboard side of the bridge, nearer the ship’s combat control center. It was known that no air-to-surface missile, such as the Exocet, which could smash through any of the lighter-armored modern ships, could penetrate the battleship’s armor belt, but now the surface-to-surface Siberian missile, striking the seventeen and a half inches of thick class A steel that girded the bridge, failed to penetrate.
Inside the bridge two officers would lose their hearing forever from the impact, and several others would also be repatriated, suffering permanent inner-ear damage. But no one in combat control was killed, and while the navigation electronics were knocked out, the “stand-alone” fire control for the two forward turrets, with three guns apiece, and the fire control for the three guns in the lone stern turret were unaffected, despite the fact that the latter was still not visible because of the thick, choking, white smoke that had replaced the black as the fires were being doused; the urgent thump, thump, thump, of the pumps was audible to the Wisconsin several miles off the Missouri’s starboard quarter.
The Wisconsin sustained damage to two of her four shafts from the missile that had hit the stern’s solid 12.5-inch-thick steel armor belt, causing spider fractures. But here, as aboard the Missouri, bulkheads had held. The “old” battle wagons, once so disparaged by the “bottom line” accounting experts as outmoded “floating nostalgia,” had more than once proved their resilience to enemy missiles, their armor belts far thicker than the thinly skinned, higher-tech cruisers and destroyers of more recent years.
As if this weren’t enough, they were now about to do what no other ship in the fleet could. In addition to its array of Tomahawk missiles, Vulcan twenty-millimeter Gatling guns, and five-inch, dual-purpose guns, the old lathes’ nine sixteen-inch guns administered the coup de grace to the USAF’s bombing assault out of Attu against the Kommandorsky Islands. Each of the eighteen 16-inch guns of the two battleships hurled a 2,700-pound shell, the equivalent of throwing a Volkswagen Beetle twenty-three miles. And they did it thirty-six times a minute. The crews of the twenty-four smaller five-inch guns had to wait until the battle wagons got closer to the islands. The five-inch guns were only able to throw seventy-pound shells fourteen miles, by which time Missouri’s Harpoon missiles had dealt with three of the hydrofoils sent out from the Kommandorskys; the Wisconsin took out six.
The Siberians’ mistake in having concentrated all their available air power from Kamchatka south against the American battle carrier group and losing the fight for air superiority was now compounded by the terrible punishment the two American battleships were meting out to the Kommandorsky airfields, killing any hope in Novosibirsk of using the Kommandorsky Islands as an advance carrier for the MiG-29s, the inferior V/STOL Forgers in Baku’s fleet unable to stop Burke’s task force from protecting Freeman’s landing.
Worse still for the Siberian TVD, Far Eastern Military District HQ in Khabarovsk, was the dilemma now confronting them. Should they concentrate their forces south nearer the Sea of Japan — Japan being the Americans’ carrier in the far east, particularly the island of Hokkaido; or should they move those forces already in the south north to reinforce the Kuril garrisons? But this would be in vain if Freeman decided, in light of the terrible air offensive now underway against Sakhalin, to bypass the Kurils and Sakhalin and actually invade the mainland.
Splitting their forces violated fundamental military doctrine, and particularly Soviet military doctrine, of concentrating all your forces, of amassing overwhelming strength before attacking. Even now, Novosibirsk was receiving information from the four Kuril Island Strait monitoring stations that the enemy-most likely the American navy’s Seals — was probing the straits, possibly readying to detonate the mines in one or all of the vital gateway channels between the Pacific and the Sea of Okhotsk.
But in Novosibirsk, Marshal Yesov knew that if the Americans’ activity around the straits was a feint and they kept moving south, the Siberian garrisons on the Kurils and Sakhalin might simply be bypassed. Yet if the garrisons weren’t maintained, the Americans might decide to land there as a springboard for an attack on the mainland.
General Dya Stavkin, C in C Fifth Army’s shock artillery division on the Pacific border, which included regiments of tactical missiles, self-propelled artillery, and massed Katyusha— mobile barrage rockets — approved of Yesov’s strategy, favoring “scorched earth” from the coast inland as far as it took to make what the Americans called their LOTS — logistics over the shore — supply problems as critical as possible. It had worked against Napoleon and the Wermacht — why not against Freeman? Better to obmanut amerikantsev— “suck the Americans in”—and give them what their whole national psyche was worst prepared for: not a quick campaign but a long, drawn-out one. Soviets could wait. The usually somber Yesov told his staff a joke to illustrate the point. “You won’t be able to get your new car for ten years,” the Moscow salesman tells a buyer.
“When will it be delivered?” asks the buyer. “Morning or afternoon?”
“Are you crazy?” says the salesman. “You have to wait ten years for your car and you want to know whether it will be delivered in the morning or afternoon? What’s the difference?”
“Well, the plumber’s coming in the morning.”
The Americans couldn’t wait for anything, Yesov told them; they like “drive-in, drive-out” wars. No, the strategy was, let their bombers out of Japan and the Seventh Fleet level the docks and sub pens of Vladivostok. Let their troops land where they wanted now that Baku had failed to stop them. Besides, Novosibirsk didn’t know where they were headed and so couldn’t do much about it. Suck them in and let the Russian winter and Chernko’s surprise do their job. And harass them all the time as Giap did in Vietnam. The Siberian army had many more soldiers and much better equipment that Giap ever had. And he won.
It was during this conference of Yesov’s that the Siberian Fifth’s Stavkin, a man not easily excited, was first told of Chernko’s secret.
“Bozhe May!”— “My God!” Stavkin said, leaning toward his colleague, a general who commanded the Chinghan Sixth Guards Tank Army. “The Arctic Foxes’ll be well fed this winter.” He meant fat with American dead.
“Da!” agreed the Chinghan commander, whose titanium-capped teeth looked as tough as his T-90s. “This Chernko business will finish them.”
Stavkin listened to Yesov outline his plans for the withdrawal in detail, stressing the importance to Khabarovsk and Chita HQ — further west of Khabarovsk — of coordinating the tactical withdrawals. But Stavkin had difficulty concentrating on the details, his excitement at being one of those who would defeat the legendary Freeman, the Freeman of Minsk and Ratmanov fame, making it difficult for him to sit still. Yesov, a thickset, bullish-looking man, his face, as the saying went, always the color of the party, was now pounding it into them that the Americans had an obsession with high ground. “If the Americans do not gain the high ground,” he said, “they immediately become depressed and need tranquilizers!”
This was cause for great laughter throughout the Siberian officer corps.
“Unopposed?”
“Unopposed, sir,” reported Norton, his face flushed with the effort of having run up the stairs to the LHA’s bridge to confirm what the marines had been reporting from the LCTs as they went into Rudnaya Pristan. Norton’s face was slack from the sense of relief.
“No fire at all?” pressed Freeman.
“Oh, a little,” Norton conceded, “but small arms, General. Looks like Buryat militia. Local units. And our UAV (unmanned air reconnaissance vehicle) has spotted only six 122-millimeter howitzers. They’re in firing position — high on their swivel trailer mounts but no trucks anywhere. And they’re not self-propelled. Firing’s sporadic, too.”
“By God!” said Freeman, his mood suddenly the opposite of all those around him on the LHA’s bridge, his eyes narrowing as he took off his helmet, running his hand through the gray shock of hair. “I smell a big fat Commie rat here, Dick. What’s Yesov up to?” He turned around to the LHA’s captain and the marine commander.”Yesov’s a crafty son of a bitch. Saw some of his work in western Europe before he joined Siberian command.”
“General,” said Dick Norton, “has it occurred to you that after Ratmanov and the beating they’ve taken trying to stop Burke’s task force that they might be having second thoughts?”
Freeman glowered at him, as a coach might a player who’d opined that the other team looked like they’d had enough.
“What the hell’s the matter with you, Dick? Some of those goddamned Aphids hitting us softened your brain? If this is a retreat, it’s tactical.” Freeman took up his field glasses, scanning the shoreline. “The one thing I want to make damn sure of is that there are no more mines around here. We wasted enough time on that bullshit already. Talking to some of those Seals who went in off of a Sea Wolf sub when we thought we might try the Kuril Straits. They told me the Siberians had every mine down there you could think of — magnetic, pressure, acoustic. One of the guys told the he figures the sons of bitches have probably got hamburger-sniffing mines.”
“They got any general sniffers down there, sir?”
It was an inappropriate remark, and Norton knew it the moment he’d said it; but it was too late — out before he could stop himself, so buoyant was his mood at the news of the landings being virtually unopposed.
“So what’s a general sniffer?” asked Freeman, still scanning the shoreline with his binoculars.
There was an awkward silence, the marine battalion commander winking at his second in command to ease the tension. Everyone was relieved; it was the kind of reverie that overtakes men who one minute are convinced they’re feeing death and the next find out they are not, or at least that it has been postponed.
“Well?” pressed Freeman, turning the binoculars further down the beachhead. “How do you sniff a general?”
“Ah — hot air, sir,” Norton replied sheepishly.
Barely lowering the binoculars, Freeman glanced down at the map. “Yesov could have mined the road leading inland.”
“Pretty deserted beach out here, General. Unless they knew your exact plans they wouldn’t have time for that. First they’d have to get the mines down here. Your point about centralization and…”
“Yes, yes,” said Freeman impatiently, still unnerved by the lack of opposition. “Subs?” he said suddenly.
“Still outside, sir. That’s one thing we’re sure of. MAD overflights from the P-3s have shown they’re still outside. No way they want to get trapped up in here with us commanding the Kuril entrances and our air force ready to hit them if they try to run through the Japanese Strait. No, sir, they’re outside — waiting to hit our supply lines, especially the Alaska-California oil runs.”
“What are our POL reserves in Nippon, Dick?”
Norton, fortunately, had the petrol, oil, and lubricant figures in his head. “Three months, with severe rationing in Japan and depending on our rate of advance.”
“Well, the Japs’ve done a good job of burying their oil reserves. Less, o’ course, the Siberians have another Sorge who knows where they are.”
Norton was alarmed. Richard Sorge had been the German Communist agent who, posing as a Nazi newspaper man in Tokyo during the Second World War, had thrown flamboyant parties for the Japanese VIP’s on his yacht in Tokyo Bay while down below he was sending messages to Moscow, the most important one being that he had discovered that the Japanese weren’t going to attack Siberia’s flank after all but were heading south to take Hong Kong, Malaya, and on to Australia. This single piece of information allowed the Siberian reserves, a million fresh troops, to be withdrawn from Siberia and sent into Stalingrad where they turned the tide against Von Paulus’s Sixth Army. Even so, it wasn’t the mention of Sorge that worried Norton but the general’s lackadaisical use of “Japs” instead of “Japanese.” Lord, if the Japanese press got hold of that, outrage would rain down on the Americans like flechettes.
“Japanese, sir,” Norton reminded him.
“What? Oh, right. Well, let’s hope their depot sites are secret.”
Unfortunately the hopes of a general do not carry any more weight than those of the humblest private. Every single depot, from the two within thirty miles of Tokyo’s sacred bridge across to the emperor’s palace to the four depots on the west coast, had been known to Chernko’s agents for years. If the Siberian air force could not penetrate the Eagles and Falcons of the U.S. in Japan then SPETS-recruited Communist agents from the Japanese underground “Red Army” could and did penetrate the POL dumps’ defenses. Within the next seventy-six hours, as Freeman’s troops poured ashore virtually unopposed at Rudnaya Pristan, already stretching their supply line, four of the six Japanese POL depots were hit. Only two of the attacks succeeded due to a vigorous, some said fanatical, defense by the Japanese defense force, which paid the price with twenty-nine dead and another sixteen wounded. Even so, the SPETS attacks reduced Freeman’s POL supply to six weeks.
In New York oil prices set an all-time high, with a ten-dollar increase per barrel. Also, fears that the Siberians might use chemical weapons as a last resort drove up the price of Fuller’s earth, used in decontamination field hospitals, while shares in Mediclean 2000 water-spray-vacuum decontamination MASH units and in activated charcoal dressings rose dramatically, many of the companies owned by Jay La Roche Pharmaceuticals. ABC’s “Nightline” charged that the rumors of impending use of CBW — chemical biological warfare — by the Siberians were false, planted by unscrupulous war profiteers to drive up their shares, not only in America but abroad.
The allegations were false, however, and because of this, subsequent rumors that nerve-gas-resistant bromide pills had been laced with cyanide by KGB sleepers were vigorously denied. They were proven true, however — Freeman’s first casualties on the beachhead at Rudnaya Pristan being a marine platoon who, mistaking colored tear gas fired by the Yakut militia as a possible CBW attack, swallowed the bromide pills and died agonizing deaths as their central nervous systems went into spasm, their ordeal ends with defecation and suffocation. Bromide company shares collapsed, but for Jay La Roche it was like a shark sniffing blood. Through conduits on the Shanghai Free Trading Area stock exchange, he bought all available shares of Chinese companies licensed by the Chinese government— seventeen in all — concentrating only on those who made cherry food coloring, used for everything from cherry candy to cherry-flavored fruit pies for export. The cherry flavoring also contained an essential ingredient for the making of lethal BZ gas, which the Soviets had already used to kill many of the rioters in dissident republics.
The news report in the morning was followed by an FBI announcement that “invoking the president’s suspension of civil rights, a full counterintelligence investigation was being made of the bromide scandal.” By breakfast time the following morning, now 9:00 p.m. in eastern Siberia, the bromide pill incident had been overshadowed by the shock that a General Dynamics factory in California, manufacturing the F-16, had been attacked. No guards were killed, but in the sheds on which the mortars had landed, eleven damaged F-16s were write-offs. The cost of testing even marginally damaged planes and the intricate microchip circuitry of the war planes was considered to be both ethically and financially unacceptable.
Meanwhile the La Roche tabloids had hit the streets, screaming, BROMIDE BARRAGE KILLS OUR BOYS!
Jay La Roche loved the headline. Circulation of his tabloids would skyrocket in every supermarket in the country, and he was making a killing on the stock market, both from toxic chemicals used in the war and their antidotes.
Freeman had been badly shaken by the poisoned-pill disaster and although pressing on, leading the marine column in his Humvee along the road from Rudnaya Pristan, he was waiting for the Siberian tiger to bite. But so far Second Army’s spearhead column of thirty M-1 A-1 sixty-ton battle tanks rolled unmolested.
Then, approaching Dalnegorsk, twenty miles inland and northwest of the beachhead, the men in Able Company, Second Battalion of the seventeen-thousand-man MEF First Division heard five or six muffled explosions on the mountains on either side of the Rudnaya River road, the steepest mountain on their left. Then they saw the mountainsides begin to move as thousands of tons of snow avalanched down, smashing into and covering the middle of the column, burying over fifty marines.
Freeman immediately ordered air strikes in from the carriers standing off in the Sea of Japan, but the pilots could not bomb for fear of setting off more avalanches — one of the first lessons of the Siberian campaign. Besides which there were no targets. If there had been any Siberian sappers around, left behind to detonate the avalanches, they were now gone.
It took four hours to dig all the men out, Marine Corps tradition demanding that they try, as far as humanly possible, to bring out their own dead. But not all could be recovered, and Freeman ordered the column on to Dalnegorsk, which the pilots found easy to locate, using the thousand-foot smokestacks as a reference point. By now engineering corps officers had radioed Freeman that there had apparently been no enemy units on the mountainsides, the charges having been set off by pressure-triggered circuits when the M-1 tanks rolled over them. By the time Dalnegorsk and the road to Krasnorechensk and Zavetnoye, on the way to Bikin and Khabarovsk, had been secured, it was discovered by the advance marine patrols, covered by low-flying Falcons and tank-killing A-10s, that the towns had been abandoned. Not a living soul was left, all livestock had been butchered and the towns set afire in the last few hours. Freeman looked at Norton worriedly. “In Normandy, twenty miles in six hours would have been a miracle. Here, with these distances, it’s nothing. It’s worse than nothing, Dick. It’s disastrous!”
Norton remained silent.
“This isn’t a Siberian feint,” declared Freeman, pulling his collar up against the bitter cold, steam rising from the lead tank behind his Humvee.”This is our fuckup. A monumental, Grade A, mega-sized fuckup! And damn it!” Freeman was standing up in the back of the Humvee, left hand resting on the.50 caliber machine gun, right hand crunching and flinging ice disgustedly away. “It’s my damn fault!”
The cold was so intense that it made Norton’s throat sore just to try to speak, but in all fairness he felt he should point out that much of it, the weather, for example, was beyond any general’s control. Behind the Humvee the stationary M-1 was idling, keeping up the revs, the gas turbine’s purring remarkably low for such a powerful engine. Even so it was eerily unsettling in the great white valley, the high ground far above them, Norton unable to shake the conviction that the mountains were waiting, biding their time to fall in on them once more.
“At this rate,” said Freeman, “we’ll be old as Canadians in Florida before we get to Bikin, goddamn it! Dick, We’ve got to get out of this hole. We’re not on first base yet, and we’re huffing and puffing like—” It was then that the Apache strike choppers appeared, over thirty of them, swarming up the valley like angry gnats, going on ahead to secure the road as far as possible while engineers sent a remote-controlled “sniffer” vehicle ahead.
The sniffer slowed the advance further but was safer. And then Freeman got his surprise. It came from a marine intelligence officer in the advance patrol who was bright enough to note the sight of hastily left meals and some livestock not slaughtered but peering out dolefully from the elaborately carved white window shutters of their barns, which looked better than most of the ramshackle houses nearby. What this told the marine, and thus Freeman, was that the Siberian withdrawal had been so rushed that even the traditional Siberian scorched-earth policy had been abandoned in their flight, a few militia men probably being the only ones who had had time to rig up a set of avalanche charges. Even so Freeman sent demolition teams ahead, suspecting that the hurried evacuation itself might be a Siberian bluff, though he also had a hunch that the marine lieutenant’s observation, given that they’d landed in such a sparsely populated area, was correct.
There were no more demolition charges found for several hours, and as suddenly as they’d been halted earlier, the marine tank column and mobile infantry leading Second Army picked up the pace. Freeman, the bit between his teeth, ordered full speed, the armored personnel carriers and supply trucks finding themselves on hard, tank-packed snow, the M-1s cruising at thirty-five miles per hour, Freeman holding them back from their maximum of fifty miles per hour only in order to get maximum mileage for minimum fuel spent. When demolition charges were sniffed out, the engineers quickly laid pipe charges, and the column had only to stop for a matter of minutes before speeding on again.
Within four days, while he had not equalled the rapid advance attained by McCaffrey’s Twenty-fourth Mechanized Infantry Division in Iraq or got anywhere near equaling Rommel’s armored run in France of two hundred miles in one day, he was in Bikin, pausing only to refuel, a blizzard swirling about him making for an anxious time but giving the U.S. pilots, with their more sophisticated electronics, the edge in instrument flying. Though if the Siberians’ night-fighting equipment wasn’t as good as the Americans’ there was nothing lacking in their courage. While the refueling was in process, the armored column could hear a distant thunder high overhead, massive B-52 raids out of Okinawa, the planes still within Khabarovsk’s AA missile envelope but protected by Eagles and Falcons as they pounded the city with more ordnance, including Smart bombs from lower-flying F-111s preceding them and dumb bombs, than was dropped on Baghdad in the opening hours of the Iraqi war.
“However,” warned Freeman in his first press conference since the landing, “Khabarovsk could be a major battle.”
When he got to Khabarovsk there was no major battle: the military was gone; only the population, confused and worried, left behind for the Americans to feed. Only some of them, mostly Jews, were happy to see the Americans. The regular army had vanished, and only the militia remained. They were no match for the American marines. The civilians, who hid in terror for the first few hours, were now venturing out, soon forming a sea around the tank columns. The tanks were warm, and all heat and electricity to the city and the sparsely populated coast had been cut off by the retreating regulars. The American pilots commented on how it reminded them of flying over Alaska and the Canadian north: utter darkness, not even lights of outlying settlements visible.
Norton was already looking exhausted; they’d been on the road for almost twenty-four hours without a break. “Sir, far as we can make out, no civilians were allowed to leave. Shops were stripped bare by the army, the crowds left for us to feed.”
“Yes,” confirmed the marine commander. “Only civilians to get out were prisoners. Apparently they were taken out by the KGB on the Trans-Siberian.”
Within twenty minutes of the Americans having entered Khabarovsk there was a series of enormous explosions in a rough semicircle east of the city center as far out as seventeen miles. Soon there was the glow of fires everywhere over the frozen salt marsh as fuel depots blew along with ammunition dumps. Anything the Siberians could not take with them they had destroyed, including the city’s four airfields. The brutish smokestacks, most of them in the northern sector of the city, stood in the flickering light, visible only to the four-hundred-foot level. They came in and out of view amid the choking, soot-colored smoke that rained black on the snow.
“Where’s the battle, General?” asked a CBN reporter.
Freeman grumpily ignored him, turning to Norton instead. “How about the Trans-Siberian?”
“G-2 says it’s ripped up from here to Birobidzhan.”
“Blown up?” asked Freeman irritably. “Or ripped up?”
Norton didn’t know.
“Goddamn it!” shouted Freeman. “Find out!”
“Yes, sir.”
From Khabarovsk west over the hundred miles of frozen salt marshes to Birobidzhan, then three hundred miles to Belogorsk, all the while following the Trans-Siberian Railway around the big, 250-mile-wide, right-to-left horseshoe bend in the Amur River — at times less than twenty miles from the Manchurian border, the U.S. Air Force having taken out Zavitinsk airfield fourteen hours before — the tooth of Freeman’s Second Army, its M-1 A-1s gulping, even at cruise speed, three gallons per mile, was fast outrunning the tail of its supply line.
The quarter-mile-wide ribbon of ice of the south-north Zeya River took on the look of burnished gold at Svobodnyy before more snow began falling and was, Freeman predicted, the perfect place for the Siberians to have blown the bridges. A few miles on and he found he was right. The enormous twisted steel of the railroad span was caught in the ice, a crippled skeleton of steel, the bridge’s pylons left standing naked, the fresh snow pillows atop them affording the pylons a symmetry and beauty amid the collapsed spans. But the Siberians’ scorched-earth policy, at least here, was of little account, holding Freeman up only for as long as it took his M-1 A-1s with plough blades and the engineers’ rocket-propelled pipeline charges to clear the ice of mines. Most mine positions were immediately obvious from the frozen mounds of scraped ice that stood out like pimples of broken glass amid the new snow that was not yet deep enough to obscure the detritus. Self-propelled howitzers could be seen here and there in the forest, intact, their crews blue and bloated if they could be picked out at all from the shattered timber and decapitated trees that marked where infrared Smart bomb attacks by the U.S. air force had been made from the captured airfields.
Where tarmacs had been blown up, the U.S. engineers simply hosed in hot water under pressure from the water trucks, the water-filled craters instantly freezing, after which the graders topped them off as one would level off a filled-in posthole, and the Marsden matting was laid. U.S. planes were using the fields within an hour of their completion.
The railway was another story. The Siberians, having sacrificed much of their heavy fighter cover — mainly MiG-29s — to protect sacrificial MiG-27 Flogger-D ground attack aircraft, had dropped each Flogger’s 6,600-pound ordnance on the multiple track west of the Zeya River between Shimanovsk and Mukhino. This meant that the pea-colored Rossiya, or “Train Number One,” which ran from Vladivostok to Moscow, was unable to proceed because of the downed transmission lines. The Siberians, however, quickly hitched the carriages carrying evacuees from Khabarovsk to three steam engines, drawn into service from the dozens of such locomotives which had previously been disbanded beside the line with the coming of the electric engines.
Moving slowly through the dense, fogged-in and snow-draped taiga of larch, pine, and fir, the train approached the top of the horseshoe hump of the Amur. Instead of the usual caboose, the train dragged an enormous hook-shaped, stump-jump plough behind it, ripping up the ties like matchsticks, the splayed rail now pushed uselessly to the side on this eastern section of the forty-eight-hundred-mile railway. The guards at each tunnel entrance and bridge gratefully hopped aboard the last passenger carriage, the carriages alternating with AA quads mounted on flatbeds, every fourth flatbed in the car train sprouting SA-6 AA missiles. The “Mukhino Express,” as it had been wryly described by the American pilots who had come down through the heavy cloud layer only to have their infrared signature detectors thwarted for a time by the thick bone-chilling fog, was finally stopped in a river of high explosives before it could reach the station at Mukhino. The pale blue station disintegrated in a spectacular explosion that sent ancient pine planks, black earth, and fire-streaked snow, together with iron heating-stove plates and the woodpile, whirling in a mini-tornado a quarter mile high before it came down in a crashing hail.
Meanwhile Freeman and his commanders welcomed the pause necessitated by having to clear the minefields across the Zeya, for it gave the vitally needed tank and POL resupply trucks time to catch up. Freeman was asked by his chief of logistics, Gen. Malcolm Wain, whether they should go to blivets. Wain had been impressed by the way in which the blivets, or flexi-plastic bags containing thousands of gallons of fuel, had proved so useful in the Iraqi desert to store gas. But here he didn’t have in mind the huge, depot-sized bags that could be buried out of sight of aerial reconnaissance by the roadside but rather the tank-sized bags which, providing a tank was not in action but in transit, could be carried piggyback, an extra jerry can, as it were, one which could be jettisoned before getting the call to go into action or at the first sign of Second Army’s spearhead being attacked.
Freeman spread out the map, slipping in the single-lens monocle that had caused the name “Von Freeman” to stick among those who bore him ill will for his decision to use the fuel air explosive bombs to break the Ratmanov deadlock. The monocle was impatiently tapping sector twenty-one, northwest of Mukhino, and beyond twenty-one to sectors thirty-three and thirty-seven where the Amur reached the apogee of the hump. “I like it,” he told Wain. “Our rate of progress — soon be doing better than Erwin.”
Wain looked across at Norton without the general seeing. Whenever Freeman was making good time, the heroes of his military pantheon were referred to by their first names. If he got held up, it would quickly be that “bastard Rommel.”
“But,” Freeman sighed, “I don’t like it. Scorched-earth policy is one thing. I understand that. But this is — this is a turkey shoot. After Ratmanov I expected a fight.”
Wain disagreed. “I don’t see it that way, General. After Ratmanov they’re going to avoid a close-in fight if they can. Especially with our air superiority.”
“Maybe,” said Freeman, unconvinced. “But they’re not going to give up the whole damn country. They’ve got to stop — stand and fight somewhere. They’ve got to counterattack.” Freeman folded the map case and slipped it into the Humvee’s back seat, smacking his gloves together. “God, it’s cold!” He looked about unhappily at the column stopped for refueling.
It was against everything in Freeman’s book to halt. He’d built a career on movement. Movement! Movement! Movement! as against the Siberians’ obsession with refusing to attack until they had overwhelming numbers in men and materiel. If Freeman stopped, Norton knew, it would make everyone down the line happy — give them a chance to catch their breath and allow the supply tail to thicken. But, Freeman was asking himself as well as Norton and Wain, what was that crafty son of a bitch Yesov up to? Freeman was nodding to himself, concluding that Yesov would be gambling on his, Freeman’s, lifelong commitment to movement, the Siberians sucking him in deeper and deeper, the American supply line becoming ever more overextended.
“Mal.”
“Sir?”
“We’ll pause here. Twenty-four hours. Dick, give the order to establish defensive perimeter. Air task order — saturation fighter cover and attack gunships ready to go.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We’re in ‘overreach’ with our fighters. I realize that. We’re already heavily committed to in-air refueling.” It was as if he was trying to justify his uncharacteristic decision to stop. “But we need to consolidate here. Get another airstrip going. Must remember the aim, gentlemen — to capture Irkutsk. From there our fighter-bomber radius can hit the industrial underbelly. We’re now at a critical stage, however. We can’t pause for too long for resupply. I’ll bet that’s what Yesov’s counting on — hoping his scorched-earth policy’ll force us to drag our ass. But, gentlemen, his scorched-earth policy is outmoded. Takes no account of the American genius for resupply. He obviously hasn’t learned anything from Iraq. Well, let him withdraw. By the time he’s got his big battalions ready on the ramparts, we’ll be knocking the ramparts out from under him.”
Freeman held up his hand to silence any protest that his stopping was perhaps unwise for the same reasons that he was criticizing his Siberian counterpart, for stopping created a stationary target, and it was a maxim of Freeman’s military strategy that a stationary target in modern warfare has no chance. But neither Norton nor Wain had been about to protest, and Freeman holding up his hand seemed to them more a gesture of doubt than confidence, something they’d not seen in him before. Perhaps the terrible casualty rate on Ratmanov had affected the general more than they thought. At odd moments Norton had seen Freeman, when he thought no one was looking, leaning back, his hands massaging his lower back, still in pain. But for Norton there was no doubt — Freeman had made a sound military decision, right from the textbook. To go on without having consolidated your supply line was always a risky proposition.