Marshal Yesov’s aide was in a hurry, his chauffeur-driven Zil swishing past the great, snow-crowned dome of Novosibirsk’s opera and ballet theater. The statue of Lenin, his noble vision fixed on the future, was even more impressive in the strange, pinkish-brown light of the pollution-colored dusk. The soldier, sailor, and airman on Lenin’s right flanked him proudly; the heroic worker and torchbearer to his left were dusted by snow but looked equally heroic. It added to the aide’s excitement when, arriving at the Akademgorodok or “Science City” apartment block, he ran up the six flights — the elevator wasn’t working — to the apartment of Professor Leonid Grigorenko, the head of the KMK project. But when the door opened it was to Marshal Yesov that the aide blurted out, “On ostanovilsya!”— “He’s stopped! The American has stopped!”
Yesov showed no emotion, his blunt facial features unmoved as he walked back to the apartment’s window looking out on the frozen expanse that was the Ob Sea, where the River Ob had been dammed, and which in summer provided excellent sailing for the privileged ones in Akademgorodok and the party elite. He saw two guards in greatcoats and fur caps trudging as smartly as the snow would allow them along the ice-sheathed concrete slabs that inclined down to the frozen Ob, which in summer, by which time he would beat the American, would serve as a beach for those sunbathing to watch the colorful sailboat races.
He was not so worried about the Allied armies to the west-tired and busy administering Moscow and its environs, they had not yet breached the Urals. He turned from the window, and now that the lights in the city were coming on, pulled the blackout curtains shut, though there was little danger of air raids. To the east Freeman’s forces were further away than those in the west, over fifteen hundred miles from Novosibirsk. Still, it was Freeman’s forces that Marshal Yesov was most concerned about, for while the English Channel, across which the Allies in the west had been resupplied, had effectively been closed by Siberian submarines in the Arctic, Freeman’s supply line from Japan was uninterrupted, Freeman’s troops fresher, and Freeman himself more daring than the more conservative threat faced to the west. “On upryamy”—“He is a tractor,” said Yesov, looking out toward where the Trans-Siberian crossed the frozen expanse of the Ob. “He keeps on. This pause of his will not last long.”
“We will stop him,” said Grigorenko, calmly smoking his thin cigar as he went over the final plans of Chernko’s KMK project. “I hope there have been no more security leaks, however.”
“None,” Yesov assured him, explaining that even the man from engine shop three who had been shot knew only part of the project. Yesov was as confident as Grigorenko that Chernko’s plan would work. But he, Yesov, had had more experience than the scientist who had overseen the design and manufacturing process, and said nothing. Scientists could afford to say what they wanted. They were important to the state, particularly in a modern war, but the general had to be more circumspect, and when the Americans were defeated, Yesov had aspirations to be the president of the United Siberian Soviet Republics. Grigorenko, however, mistook Yesov’s silence for undue concern. “You mustn’t worry, General. Everything is in place, I assure you. The Americans will be demolished — utterly!” As he said this, Grigorenko sat back, stroking his goatee, his piercing gray eyes looking first at the general then his aide. “You know, of course, the supreme irony of the situation.”
The aide guessed it was the Iraqis who had been training in Poland before the Iraqi war for just such a project as Chernko’s— but he wasn’t going to do anything to steal the Akademician’s thunder.
“The Iraqis!” proclaimed Grigorenko, pleased with himself, leaning back and taking a bottle of Smirnoff vodka — the best, something that the average Russian hadn’t seen for months, the aide thought. Everything from nylon stockings to toy production had been conscripted for war materials.
“Yes,” Grigorenko said, pouring the three vodkas, a little extra for himself, the aide noticed. “It will add insult to injury for the Americans, comrades, that half of the attacking force will be Iraqi.”
The aide was trying to look surprised, a difficult thing to do when he knew by heart the story of how Hussein had sent Iraqis to the eastern bloc to train for just such a project in the Gulf war but how, because of Gorbachev’s stupid bungling, and against the advice of his military, the Iraqis were not permitted to carry out such an attack in the Iraqi war. Unable to get back home because of the UN boycott and U.S. intelligence on the lookout for them, the Iraqis, all members of Hussein’s dreaded Mukhabarat—his secret police — were still in Siberia and as expert as their Russian, instructors. Grigorenko passed around the glasses and proposed a toast: “Za porazhenie amerikantsev!”— ‘To the American defeat!”
Yesov rifted the shot glass and allowed a thin smile to crease his otherwise bullish face. “Za unizhenie amerikantsev!”—”To the Americans’ humiliation!”
“Na mnogo luchshe!”—”Much better!” added Grigorenko. The aide was not a believer in psychic phenomena or anything else he called “mind rubbish,” but he could not deny the fact that within seconds of the general having proposed the toast, the call came in from Kultuk, 850 miles east of them at the southwestern end of Lake Baikal and only 76 miles from the Mongolian border, that everything for Chernko’s KMK project was gotov—”ready to go.”
Grigorenko looked across at the commander in chief of all United Siberian Soviet Republic forces like an expectant father, waiting for the general to give the word. The American, Freeman, had stopped at Mukhino, and though it was almost a thousand miles further east of Kultuk, well away from Novosibirsk, the scientist’s expression of pained expectation said it all, that every day Yesov waited — every hour — the Americans got closer to reaching Lake Baikal and Irkutsk. And from Irkutsk their aircraft could strike Novosibirsk. But Yesov refused to be hurried, holding his glass out for another drink. Using it as a pointer, he moved it east to Baikal to the hump of the Amur that formed the Siberian-Chinese border. “Let him reach the very top of the hump, comrades. Then we’re in the clear.”
The aide nodded and glanced knowingly at the general, his look clearly saying that while Grigorenko might be one of the world’s greatest scientists and engineers, his political urn— “savvy”—was about as sophisticated as a yak’s. Chita HQ, halfway in the crescent of mountains and forest between Baikal and the top of the hump, had repeatedly advised Novosibirsk, Yesov specifically, not to act too close to the Chinese border, particularly not anywhere along the Amur where there had been border clashes since time immemorial between the two countries.
“No,” said Yesov, in answer to Grigorenko’s silent plea. “Not yet. The Chinese don’t like the Americans any more than we do, Doctor, but they are very touchy about their border. No, we cannot fire across the hump for fear we may drop short into Chinese territory.” He meant inside the hump. “No, we’ll wait until he is at the top.” Yesov used the rim of the oily vodka glass to indicate the area where he would spring his trap. “Here, between Never and—” The general required his reading glasses. “—Skovorodino.” The seven-and-a-half-mile road between the two towns was 170 miles west of where Freeman had stopped.
“He’ll be reassured, resupplied,” said Yesov. “Tanks topped up.”
“Da,” said Grigorenko approvingly, “all the better. His humiliation will be all the worse.”
The cruise missiles came in so low that neither Freeman in his advance command Humvee nor the radars of the helicopters flying cover saw them, the eight 672-pound missiles visible only five miles from target along the Never-Skovorodino Road. The first thing that the fifty M-1 tanks and six M-3 Bradley fighting vehicles and six mobile heavy mortars that formed the spearhead of Second Army’s II Corps lead tank battalion saw was the sudden appearance of the low-flying lead missile making a tight, right-hand turn before roaring overhead and exploding further down the line.
At the angle they saw it from it appeared to have detonated over the trees, but the CBN reporter with a tripod and zoom lens saw that it was exploding right over the midsection of the four-mile-long spearhead even as Second Army advance reconnaissance units looked back disbelievingly at the missile as it veered through the clear blue sky over the tip of the spearhead toward the center of the column. The CBN cameraman, too, was in awe, transfixed by the abrupt turn that another of the subsonic missiles made to avoid power lines. Rising no more than ten feet above them before descending again, its belly opening even as AA fire stuttered toward it, the missile exuded a hail of smaller missiles that buzzed in the air — antipersonnel flechettes and antitank bomblets. American tanks, the best in the world, were disintegrating, most of them still moving as if driven by ghosts, the screams of their dying crews soon lost amid the technicolor phantasm of light as the tanks spewed fountains of red and white rain as if being welded from the inside, a rain of sparks and flame oozing from the penetrated seals over the sloping glacis plate.
HEAT rounds exploded through the cupolas with a jetlike roar, and several tanks slewed broadside, ramming others, which were in turn struck by tanks coming from behind. The series of explosions from the fuel bladders sent sheets of orange-black flame billowing over the armored personnel carriers behind the tanks. The APCs’ crews and the twelve troopers inside each died agonizingly, the APCs becoming nothing more than ovens.
Those who made a run for it from the APCs’ rear doors were cut down by the buzzing bees of the flechettes, the darts not killing all but inflicting such terrible wounds that the medics and, as the CBN reporter would soon see, the MASH units to the rear were overwhelmed.
Chopper accidents added to the chaos as two air-sea rescue Blackhawks collided with four Cobra and Apache gunships in the thick battlefield smoke. One chopper, a Bell OH-58C Scout, slammed into one of the last incoming missiles. Chips of the heavy 350-millimeter, blocklike Chobham armor packs from the tanks whistled through the air, still intact, their resin-sandwiched steel, ceramic, and aluminum layers impenetrated but blown in toto away from the tanks when the M-1s’ fifty APFDS — armor-piercing fin-stabilized discarding Sabot rounds — reached their flash points and exploded internally, ripping the tank cupolas apart. The mechanized battalion’s tanks and the APCs of Freeman’s H Corps were further victims of the “bolt from the blue” Siberian attack against Freeman’s seven-corps, 379,000-man Second Army.
In addition to the sixty-six tanks destroyed, the Siberian cruise missiles had laid waste to and/or incapacitated over forty twelve-ton M-113 armored personnel carriers and twenty-three Marine Corps expeditionary force AAV-7A1 armed amphibious troop carriers and seventeen fourteen-ton light armored assault vehicles of the marines’ second expeditionary brigade, the vehicles now either gutted completely or burning.
In all 493 men were killed, over 600 wounded. Freeman’s Second Army spearhead was not much more than a smoking ruin. As suddenly as it had begun, the Siberian attack ceased, but not the suffering, as men, tearing open their CFA — combat first aid — kits sprinkled spore-contaminated antiseptic powder on wounds, which immediately turned the blood septic. In fact, only a few of the hundreds of the CFA kits were so contaminated, but the fear instigated by the certain knowledge that some had been tampered with meant that hundreds of men were loathe to use the packs. Consequently dozens more died, despite the exemplary efforts of medics and Medevac choppers.
The CBN reporter had not seen anything like it since the American A-10 Thunderbolts had come in with their cannon and chopped up the retreating Iraqi columns in the Gulf war. Though not immediately evident, it soon became clear, at least to Freeman’s G-2, that the Siberian cruise missiles’ TERCOM— terrain contour mapping — computers had been finely tuned and programmed not only to hit the tanks in the Second Army spearhead but to avoid the most forward, and hence far more lightly armed, Humvee scout cars.
Freeman was shattered, his hopes of a home run dashed, but he had no time to feel sorry for himself even if he had felt disposed to it, for now the ADATs and quickly deployed Patriot batteries were in position, or at least in the best position they could manage, given that some could not get out of the rubble of gutted vehicles, burning bodies and equipment. The antimissile Patriots’ box launchers were left where they were, their crews sent out to put the pole radar on higher ground. Now Freeman was receiving reports that there were massive troop movements heading east from Baikal toward Chita to the east, the troops identified as the Thirty-first “Stalingrad” Motorized Division. It was the army of Stalingrad fame.
“Son of a bitch!” said Jesus Valdez, called “Juan” by the other marines in his ten-man squad. “That’s all we need, man. Fucking Thirty-first.”
Another marine, hunkered down in the foxhole of ice, made so by the snow having been instantly melted in the heat of the missile attack after which the melt had refrozen, looked disbelievingly at the junkyard of burning tires, drooping guns, shattered armor, smoldering hulks of APCs, and the high, thick, black smoke churning from burning tires, red flames licking softly in the eerie blue twilight. Some of the marines gathered around the flames, warming themselves, until a marine lieutenant told them to douse the fires.
“Yeah,” said Jesus Valdez, “they might see where we are!” He’d lost three buddies in the missile onslaught and hadn’t found a trace of them. It was so terrible it didn’t seem real. The attack had lasted less than seven minutes — hardly a shot fired back, the Patriot launcher support units not then deployed, with the column being on the move. The marine lieutenant didn’t chew out Valdez for his sarcasm; the lieutenant, too, was still reeling inside at the carnage. He, too, had lost friends, and it took all his willpower to deploy the remaining seventeen of what only minutes before had been his thirty-man platoon to defensive positions off the road to take the radar aerials to the summit of the two-thousand-foot-high hills that ringed the death road between Never and Skovorodino.
Freeman’s first order after the attack was to keep out of the townships, attractive to tired, cold troops but a perfect setup, he believed, for another cruise attack. A townsite was perfect for terrain contour imaging, sticking out, in his words, “like a nun in a whorehouse.” Forward patrols reported that the railway had been ripped up from Never on and the pipeline running parallel to the Trans-Siberian shut down.
“How far away is their Thirty-first?” Freeman asked Dick Norton, momentarily too ashamed to look his aide in the face, a thing he normally detested in a man. Instead he was gazing at the wreckage, the acrid stench of defeat burning his nostrils. Mixed in with the oily reek of destroyed equipment and vehicles there came the sweet, sickly smell of burnt bodies.
“They’re coming from Chita,” said Norton. “Now as the crow flies it’s about—”
“Never mind the goddamn crow! How long till they can attack?”
Stunned by the general’s outburst, Norton stepped back. “Ah — they’re motorized. Five — four days. If they travel at night, maybe three.”
“Forty-eight hours,” declared Freeman, his left hand pulling so hard on the cuff of his right glove that Norton could see the general’s fingers straining against the white Gore-Tex. “Toughest outfit in their army — except for the SPETS. They’ll attack in forty-eight hours.” He was staring at the clump of smoking debris and a bloody, bone-pierced stump that had once been a man’s head. Freeman’s voice was tremulous. He coughed, swore, his tone steadier now but heavy with anger. “Can you tell me,” he turned to Norton, “can anyone in this godforsaken place tell the why I lost so many fine young men? Why those satellite intelligence outfits can tell me the Siberian Thirty-first— a whole goddamn army — is on the move and yet they can’t give us any warning of a multiple cruise launch? Even if radar contact missed ‘em because the bastards were coming in so low, how was it that our satellites didn’t see launch plumes? Or are their infrared spotters on goddamn holiday?”
A major, his head in a blood-splattered bandage, handed Freeman the updated casualty report. Those killed now numbered over five hundred, several of the most recent having died of flechette wounds either on the way to the MASH unit at Mukhino or after arriving.
Norton relayed the general’s question, keeping his voice low from force of habit, the speaker close to his ear.
“General,” he told Freeman, “marine G-2 says the Siberians started a whole bunch of fires in the forests around the suspected launch area. SATINT can’t distinguish between natural hot spots and exhaust plumes. Both give off heat signatures.” Freeman was walking away from the ruins of his advanced armored column. “So they lit fires to confuse satellite IR pickups, but they must have spotted trajectories?”
“No, sir. We’ve still got a big low that’s come down from the Kara Sea. We’ll have to wait until it clears a bit before—” Freeman was pulling out the map. “Before we can use the K-14,” Norton continued, referring to the intelligence satellite. “But it has to be in the right orbit when they take pics.”
“My God, Dick, if there is a next time, we’re going to be ready. Where the hell are those Starstreaks?”
Starstreak was the state-of-the-art, three-dart-headed successor to Stinger, an intercept missile that could, if necessary, be mounted on the back of a Humvee and which provided Mach six “blanket target” protection against air tactical missiles.
“In transit, sir. Siberian Backfire bomber out of Sakhalin— before we took out its airfield — got lucky over one of the convoys from Japan.”
“You sure more are coming?” Freeman asked, his face flushed despite the cold.
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, that’s something. Meantime I want ADATs up ahead, Patriots — have the box launchers down here stick the pole radars high.”
“I’m doing that now, sir.”
“Good.” The general looked up at the cloud-shrouded summits, visible for a moment then gone. To others in the column, the deployment of what AA batteries had not been taken out by the missiles would afford a measure of security, a circling of the AA wagons, as it were, until the road was cleared for the column to move — anywhere but where they were. But Norton knew how bad it was for the general. Freeman had never exulted over the Patriot as others had after the Iraqi war. It bothered him that a Patriot had missed the Scud that killed the marines in Riyadh during the Iraqi war and that if the body of an incoming missile was hit, but not the actual warhead, the missile could end up wreaking the same kind of damage as occurred in Riyadh.
Dick Norton was making a quick call to Malcolm Wain to order in as many batteries of Starstreaks from Japan — from anywhere — as they could lay their hands on.
“How many are coming across now?” asked Wain.
“None,” said Norton. “Just get ‘em on choppers — C-5s, anything, but get them here. Any way you can.”
“By Christ!” said Freeman, coming up behind him. “I ‘d like to find the son of a bitch who engineered this.”
To do this, however, as he would soon discover for himself, would be impossible unless he was prepared to visit an Italian graveyard. But if he was not to meet the genius behind the Siberian missile assault, he soon experienced another assault — a cruise bombardment. Patriots, ADATs, and finally some Star-streaks were able to thin it out; nevertheless, it continued to pound Second Army so that Freeman was trapped. At the top of the Amur hump, unable to go either forward or back for fear of risking the disassembling of his AA defensive ring, he remained hemmed in by the high, snow-covered ridges, as he waited for clear weather so that the trajectories of the Siberian missiles could be more accurately traced. Casualties after the second attack were over two and a half thousand killed, sixteen hundred wounded.
To the public back home the mess from the Siberian front was bad enough, but they sought solace in the fact that the U.S. navy, thanks to the effectiveness of battle-wise skippers such as Robert Brentwood, commander of the nuclear sub USS Reagan, had been punishing the Siberian navy at an ever-increasing rate, protecting the vital sea lift resupply route from the American west coast to Japan.
Freeman prayed for good weather with all the energy his belief could muster. The bad weather didn’t clear; only a few gaps opened up as a new front howled malevolently down from the Laptev Sea over the tundra into the taiga, as if determined to take up where the previous front left off and continue making life as miserable as possible for Second Army. Meanwhile, news had come in via Japan that the British/American force approaching the Urals in much calmer conditions had come under fierce Siberian armored attack and was reeling southwest of Sverdlovsk. There were rumors of the Siberians having used sarin, a nerve gas whose “persistence” rating in cold, calm weather was high.
When Norton suggested to the general that he should carry his atropine injector — a self-contained hypodermic whose jab would penetrate a CBW suit — Freeman pretended not to hear him. He didn’t believe in doctors or any other medical assistance — until he was hurt. The general was more preoccupied with the report received moments before that yet another Siberian cruise missile attack was underway. This time SATINT and SIGINT would hopefully get much better trajectories. Freeman’s AA defenses opened fire, the roar of Patriots and the high scream of Starstreaks filling the hills about Never-Skovorodino, causing minor avalanches, one of these burying a scissor-folding mobile bridge span. The general was receiving SATINT from a fighter-protected E-3A Sentry early warning radar and control rotodome aircraft that the enemy cruise trajectories were definitely originating from around the Lake Baikal area.
“What in hell do they mean?” pressed Freeman, pulling out the Hershey bar from the MRE — meal ready to eat — tray, ignoring the rest. “From Lake Baikal?”
“Frozen lakes make as good a launch area as any other, I suppose,” said Norton. “Sure as heck not many trees around.”
“Yes, well,” said Freeman, chomping on the Hershey bar as if it were a cigar, “they’re about to get an education. Get out an ATO and tell them we want as many aircraft as possible flying against the Siberian cruise missile launch positions around or on Lake Baikal. They won’t be able to hide under cloud cover now.”
He was correct about the cloud cover, but there weren’t any launch sites on the ice. Instead, SATINT was suggesting that trajectories indicated mobile sites in the heavily forested areas around the northwestern edge of the 390-mile-long lake.
The F-15 and F-18 pilots, after passing through the heaviest antiaircraft gun and missile fire any of them had seen since the war began, including Ratmanov Island, lost fifteen American planes. Only six pilots bailed out. The remaining American fighters mixed it with a swarm of Fulcrums coming out of the superhardened concrete shelters hidden in the taiga, the bases circling the lake from Ulan-Ude in the southeast, barely a hundred miles north of the Mongolian border, to Kalakan northeast of the lake, back down through the Zima pipeline and rail junction on the Trans-Siberian west of the lake to Irkutsk on the Angara River, the lake’s only outflowing river.
For the next two days the Americans, despite increasing air losses, dropped more bombs on the infrared-spotted, cruciform-shaped cruise missile launch site clearings, while A-10 Thunderbolts covered Freeman’s column with their deadly thirty-millimeter antitank cannon as Second Army, refueled and resupplied, got on the move again through the taiga to Urusha and Yerofey Pavlovich, two towns over a hundred miles west. With the Thunderbolts looking for targets of opportunity and finding them, the lead air controller broke radio silence only once to give the grid reference of “massed armor” twenty-five miles west of Yerofey Pavlovich. The tanks, he reported, were in camouflaged revetments but detectable because the snow-weighted netting created unusual shadow patterns.
More up-gunned T-90s were reported lying in wait to ambush Second Army’s spearhead around Chichatka Station just a little further west, the tanks detectable through ID signature, heat given off by motors kept idling in the cold. Their exhaust was piped through flexihoses into snow berms — antitank ditches whose walls of ice were ten feet thick — but still heat patches showed up on infrared. The resulting air bombardment, a combination of A-10s, Eagles, Falcons, and F-111Fs, refueled midair from the coast, was as formidable an air strike as Freeman had ever seen, unloading more ordnance on the enemy’s newfound positions than was dropped on Hussein’s Republican Guard units in the first six days of that war.
Even so, Freeman, while exhorting his men, nevertheless cautioned them not to be “damned foolhardy,” adding, “when you attack, you are to assume that not one, I repeat, not one, of the enemy’s T-90s — or any other of his tanks — has been destroyed by the aerial bombardment. And I don’t give a damn about what reports we get from Air Command. They’re doing a great job — absolutely superb — but they’re not on the ground. We are. I don’t want you taking your tank platoons in there thinking that all We’ve got to do is mop up. The Russians taught the Iraqis how to revet their armor, remember — dug ‘em in so deep even our bombers couldn’t get at them until they decided to come out and make a run for it. Well, I can tell you one thing — those Siberian sons of bitches aren’t working for Hussein. They’re working for themselves. When they come out — if they’re not coming at us already — they’re not going to run away. That you can bank on.
“Another thing — you can’t expect our air superiority to help much once we engage. You’ve seen it enough at Fort Hood, and the fact that this is snow, not sand, doesn’t make one whit of difference. Once the fighting starts, it’ll all be weasel shit and pebbles flying — identification friend or foe hard enough for us, let alone for our boys in the air. They’ll have enough work cut out looking after themselves. But remember, each of your tanks has infrared-visible ID marks. Last thing—” Freeman paused, taking off his battlefield Kevlar infantry helmet, putting it squarely on the briefing table, pulling a tank commander’s helmet to him. “Remember a la the Israelites?” He expected an answer, for it wasn’t a Biblical injunction but one passed down by the Israeli tank commanders in the Arab wars. The men roared in unison. “Keep moving!”
“Didn’t hear you.”
“Keep moving!”
“Right. Now, remember your buddies you left back there on that never-never road. Cream these jokers!” With that Freeman put on the new helmet, adjusting the throat mike and slicking his hair down under the rim. The interior of an Abrams M-1 A-1 was a high-tech marvel, but it was so cramped that a strand of hair loose over a laser sight could cost you the battle.
Norton told Freeman straight: if the general insisted on leading one of the front two command tanks of the twenty-two-tank battalion spearhead, then the colonel was going to make his protest official. Bravery was fine, but “damn foolhardiness,” to use Freeman’s own words, was something else. What would happen if Freeman was—
“General Wain’d take over,” responded Freeman. He turned, the front of the wide firing-control helmet almost touching Norton’s, his voice lowered. “Goddamn it, Dick, I appreciate your position. Respect it. But after that—” His thumb jerked back to the bloodied road whence they’d come, or rather inched over, in the last few hours. Several marine companies had been decimated, other Americans were dead, their bodies vanished, vaporized in the horror of modern explosives, the only memorial to them now bloodstained snow and a small white cross hammered into the hard Siberian soil. “I couldn’t live with myself after that if I didn’t lead,” he told Norton. “My God, Dick, ‘Skovorodino.’ “ He was looking into the distance — not into Siberia or any other place he’d known but to his field of glory. “Skovorodino! God, what a beautiful name. Even sounds victorious.” His mood suddenly darkened. “It should have been our victory.” He turned and climbed aboard the first of the two command M-1 tanks of the twenty-two-tank echelon that would lead the two-hundred-tank spearhead.
“No secret to the strategy, Dick. If anything happens to me, just keep pressing west — whichever way’ll get you to the east bank of Baikal and Irkutsk. Then we’d be far enough in to bomb the shit out of anything we like — far as the Kara Sea if we have to. Remember, the carriers can’t do it. Despite what the public thought, the flat tops accounted for less than five percent of all sorties flown in Iraq. We have to have land bases in deep.”
“Yes, General.”
“Don’t look so worried, Colonel,” said Freeman, grinning down at him. “We’re going to make ground round of ‘em!”
“Can I quote you, General?” It was the CBN reporter, hopping out of a Humvee, its driver looking apologetically nonplussed at Freeman.
“Sure!” said Freeman and, still standing up in the cupola, rapped on the tank. “Radio silence. Let’s go!”
Norton turned to the CBN newsman. “I thought it was made clear to you people that we’re running this by media pool and that none of you were allowed forward of Skovorodino.”
The reporter was shooting off the end of a roll of four hundred ASA at the general, snow flying up in clumps from the M-1’s tracks, the tank’s aerial leaning back as the war machine, for all of its sixty tons, shot forward from zero to twenty-five miles an hour in less than seven seconds, still nowhere near its forty-five-miles-per-hour cruising speed. It looked great. Freeman brought up his binoculars.
“Marvelous!” said the reporter. “He should be in the movies.”
“Listen!” insisted Norton. “I asked you what the hell are you doing up—”
“Got urgent news for the general,” said the reporter without even turning around. “His wife died.” The reporter was switching to another camera, Voightlander Vito B — older, simpler but with a good lens. “Didn’t think I should let him know before he goes into battle.”
Norton jerked the reporter around by the Voightlander’s strap. “You quote him, you set him up before this thing’s settled, and I’ll shoot you, you son of a bitch! You’ll be out of the pool, Dan! ‘Friendly fire.’ Got it?”
“Hey, hey. What the—”
“Shut up! Listen, big shot. While you’re beaming your videos back home he’s carrying over a thousand dead on his conscience. Nothing he could do about it then, but now he can. So don’t you report anything until the thing’s done. You get it? We don’t want any Baghdad Pete shit from you swinging your goddamned camera around so any Commie intelligence asshole can-”
“Hey. Easy, man.”
“You got it?” Norton was still holding him by the collar; an MP moved in to lend a hand.
“Wait until we’re done!” repeated Norton. The MP had never seen the colonel so mad.
The reporter put up his hands and backed away toward the Humvee, the cameras bashing against one another. The clouds were parting now, the sun turning the snow and endless taiga blindingly white, surface snow turning to ice. “Till you win, huh?” said the reporter sneeringly. “Christ, I’ll be an old man.”
Norton was moving menacingly toward the Humvee. “Get him out of here!” he yelled at the driver. The Humvee spun around in its own axis, splattering Norton head to foot with freezing, oil-stained slush.
Freeman’s tanks, though their gas turbines were the quietest of any main battle tank in the world, were still emitting a deep rumble through the taiga as arrowhead formations of A-10s came up to support high-flying B-52s. Navy carriers and cruisers in the Sea of Japan had already fired Tomahawk cruise missiles, programmed to hit the launch sites reported to be in the taiga around Lake Baikal far to the west.
“The boss runs over that Siberian armor up ahead and our cruise missiles flatten those launch sites, Colonel,” said Wain, “the general’ll sweep a double header.”
Dick Norton looked at his watch. He figured they wouldn’t have long to wait.
He was half right. The U.S. cruise-missile strike against SATINT-identified launch sites would take one hour and fifty-two minutes to reach the targets in the Baikal area, the U.S. cruises traveling at a ground-hugging five hundred miles per hour. Freeman’s armor should engage the enemy around Chichatka Station at about the same time.
It would be a decisive battle, Norton believed, because while there were thousands of Siberian main battle tanks and over fifty divisions within the Far Eastern TVD, Freeman’s master stroke had been in landing, like MacArthur had at Inchon, where no one thought he should or ought to land — on a remote part of the Southern TVD coastline. But like most master strokes it would be recognized as such only if Freeman won.
Despite the heavy armor reported to be concentrating around Chichatka, which Freeman was about to engage, U.S. air superiority meant that it was taking time for the Siberians to bring up troops and more tanks from the flatlands of the Siberian plain. The Siberians had few roads to do it, relying on relatively few rail lines together with the multiple track of the Trans-Siberian, If Freeman could inflict a decisive defeat here at Chichatka and move forward quickly, he might be able to take Irkutsk before the full weight of the Siberian divisions could be brought to bear on Second Army.
Back further in the marine expeditionary unit, Jesus Valdez was getting the news, passed up from the coast quicker than a blizzard, that back home the pounding they had taken on the Never-Skovorodino Road was being reported by the La Roche tabloid chain as the “Second Army Stuck in Neverland.” The more respectable media, it was said, had begun its reporting of the effect of the Siberian missile attacks in a more dignified manner, but once the La Roche papers had taken the low road, “market forces,” as they were saying on “Washington Week in Review,” had moved even the more “responsible” papers to follow La Roche’s sensationalism. The cruel truth for Freeman’s troops was that Second Army was becoming something of a joke; already there were not-so-subtle suggestions in Congress that Freeman ought to be replaced. Valdez was flicking the safety catch of his squad automatic weapon back and forth until Private First Class Joe Kim told him to knock it off.
“I was just thinkin’,” said Valdez, “that if I saw that CBN son of a bitch, I ‘d blow his friggin’ head off.”
“Easy, Juan,” cautioned Kim, who in the past had been the butt himself of jokes about his surname, it being the same as General Kim of the North Korean army, whom Freeman had defeated decisively in the raid on Pyongyang. “Don’t get all het up about it, man. Save it for the Thirty-first.”
“Yeah,” said Valdez. “Where the hell are they?”
“Don’ worry,” said Pirelli, who hailed from Brooklyn. “They’ll get here, I guarantee.”
“Not if Freeman takes out those wagons up ahead,” said another marine. “His M-1s’ll own the road.”
“That’s right, man,” said Kim, who as a boy — before his family emigrated to the United States — had fed himself on movies from the sixties and still put “man” at the end of everything he said, believing it made him as American as baseball. “Hey, hey,” he said excitedly, looking overhead. “You see that, man?”
An American cruise missile was passing over them, just above the top of the hills that spread north of the Amur, its white speckle camouflage making it difficult to spot but its stubby, squarish wings cutting the cold, Arctic air and making a sound like cars whipping past one another, the subdued growl of its motor coming to them only after it had passed overhead. Then there was another, and another.
“Holy cow,” said Valdez. “Ain’t that somethin’!” The effect on morale of finally striking back, now that the Siberian trajectories had been back-tracked, was electric, sending a surge of badly needed confidence through the forward units of Second Army.