As Freeman walked toward his house, the wind, cold for Monterey, carried with it the invigorating tang of sea air mixed with the oppressive smell of a high-sulfur-content oil, the lower grade of crude still being rationed for civilian use, while consumer and antipollution groups pressed hard for the less sulfurous grades previously reserved for the military to be released for the domestic market now that the war was over. Freeman saw that the man spread-eagled in the sand and dune grass was dead, his T-shirt dark cherry red, a Beethoven motif faintly visible in the clinging stain of blood. Freeman heard the sound of sirens in the distance; seemed to be one coming, one going. His battle-trained hearing was acute; he did not make the mistake of confusing the echo for its origin — a mistake that had proved fatal for those troops during the war who had come up against the five-truck platoons of forty multiple-layered BM-21 Katyushas — truck-mounted rockets — for the first time.
“General Freeman?”
“Yes?”
It was a young female police officer, — short-cropped blond hair, sky-blue eyes, her khaki uniform smart, creases crisply ironed, green side piping without a wrinkle, the Smith and Wesson.38 high on her left side, he noticed. “My wife?” he said, the smile he’d had for the welcome-home crowd now gone. He could have been back at Minsk asking for SITREPS on unit deployment, his tone concerned, his control born in part from having witnessed what the Russians had called the boynya— “abattoir”—in Germany’s Fulda Gap. There the Russian armored echelons had poured through in right and left hooks before being stopped in the south by the American and Bundeswehr divisions, and in the north by the British Army of the Rhine — the choking dust literally dampened by blood as motorized infantry of both sides were torn apart in the shrapnel-filled air.
“Is she all right?” asked the general, a cheek muscle taut, his gloved right hand now a fist.
“Critical, sir, I’m afraid. She’s en route to Peninsula Hospital.”
“What happened?” A young boy, smiling, grasping a tiny stars and stripes, started beneath the ribbon toward the general. One of the MPs gently cut him off.
“We’re not exactly sure, General,” the female officer told him.”We got a 459 in progress — breaking and entering — about eighteen minutes ago. When we got here—” The officer turned, Freeman’s gaze following her outstretched hand, her notebook obscuring the man’s legs for a moment. “We found the front gate open. Back door was closed but not locked. Apparently he entered that way — round the back. We found some blood on the back pathway. It looks as if your wife fired two shots, but he made it to the sidewalk before he collapsed.” She paused. “He’s dead.”
Freeman turned back toward the army car, its khaki/black/green wave camouflage paint dulled even further by moody stratus threatening the coast as far up as Santa Cruz. His driver was pale, waiting anxiously, the situation obviously beyond her experience.
“General, sir—” said the policewoman. “I know it’s inconvenient, but could you identify the weapon your wife fired?”
“What?”
“The weapon your wife fired, sir. The man who broke in — well, he — he used a knife, General. We assume that Mrs. Freeman was the one who—”
Freeman seemed to be looking through the crowd, through the house, his right fist balling in his left. “Walther,” he said. “Nine millimeter.”
“This it, sir?” asked another police officer, holding up a Ziplock plastic bag containing a nine-millimeter automatic.
“Looks like it,” said Freeman, glancing at the gun. “Serial number’s in safety deposit.” He was looking out to sea, eyes squinting in the metallic glare that was still present though the sun was covered with cloud. “First Savings and Loan,” he told them. “Duplicate license at the base. Fort Ord.”
“Registered in your name, General?”
“Yes. Look, I’d like to get to the hospital. If there are any more questions you can—”
A flashbulb popped. He froze — first rule for any combat soldier caught in a flare. Natural instinct was to dive, but movement was what the enemy was looking for. If you could steel yourself to stand perfectly still, chances were they either wouldn’t see you or would mistake you for something else. It was only a second, but to the crowd outside his house it looked as if the general were momentarily transfixed with fright. Freeman sensed it and glowered furiously at the photographer.
Before Freeman arrived at the emergency ward at Peninsula Hospital there was a story on all the networks that the wife of General Douglas Freeman had been the victim of an attempted burglary gone wrong, was critically wounded, and that the general was — as the still photo accompanying the sound bite seemed to indicate—”visibly shaken.” The photo was also picked up by Reuters and UPI, and the implicit suggestion, made explicitly in the tabloids of the La Roche chain, was that the reason Freeman had been recalled in such haste after the Moscow surrender was due to the “hard-to-disguise fact” that the general’s nerves were already shot.
When Trainor handed the president the green file, a crimson diagonal stripe on its cover, containing the eight-by-ten blowups, he bent the gooseneck lamp down closer in the semidarkness of the working study with double steel reinforced walls in the south wing. Not far from the Oval Office, the smaller office was favored by the president not simply because it was more protected but because it had an older, comforting smell, reminiscent of his childhood — an air of old leather lounge chairs, of security, of how things used to be, of how he wished they could be again in the rapidly changing world. Also, here he could better work in the subdued light — a necessity, not a choice, when he was afflicted with the migraines that had plagued him ever since his Congressional days and which were as much a secret between Trainor, the president, and his secretary as were the codes for nuclear war in the possession of the air force officer who even now was sitting outside the study with the briefcase, or “football,” containing the daily “Go” codes. The headaches didn’t slow Mayne down; on the contrary, he held to Nietzsche’s adage that that which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and believed the will required to surmount the pain served him better than those whose faculties were not tried by any such ordeal. It was a constant reminder to him of what could be done, despite the obstacles, if you set your mind to it. He examined the photographs before him more closely, but the mountain range continued to puzzle him. Nebraska and Montana were as flat as a pancake — unless these MX sites he was looking at were smack up against the Big Horn Mountains or the Rockies of the Continental Divide that rose so dramatically from the prairie.”What was the name of that old Jimmy Stewart movie?” he mused aloud to Trainor. ‘ “The Far Country?”
“That’s not the western states,” answered Trainor, moving around to look over the president’s shoulder. “It’s supposed to be Kamchatka. Yeah — it is.”
“No wonder I was—” began Mayne, feeling foolish, only now realizing what he was looking at — that the half-dozen black doughnuts, a white dot in the middle of each the size of a pin-head, were the Siberian ICBM sites set in the deep, V-shaped defiles of towering, glacier-hung granite. These were open missile silos in Kamchatka Peninsula. The next photo was of the ICBM complex at Petropavlovsk which, though difficult to get at with U.S. missiles because of the acute south-north turning angles required to hit a target in deep east-west axis defiles, could nevertheless very easily take out the U.S. Trident and Sea Wolf bases as far away as Washington State and San Diego.
“It’s their answer, Mr. President,” said Trainor solemnly. “They haven’t blinked. You go nuclear. They go nuclear. Nobody wins.”
Mayne, shoulders rounded, head bent like an accountant confronted by the overwhelming power of the IRS ranged against his client, reluctantly flipped over the other photographs. More black donuts in the Siberian snows. “Then it has to be all-out conventional,” he said glumly to Trainor.
“Yes, Mr. President. But, as the Joint Chiefs point out, we’ll have to neutralize the ICBM silos on Kamchatka sooner or later— can’t afford to leave them there so they can pummel us anytime they like.” Trainor pulled over a CIA report.”Siberian conventional ammunition reserves are sixty days. After that we’d risk them going nuclear.”
Again Mayne was struck by the terrible irony of the nuclear age. You invented nuclear weapons, which supposedly made conventional arms obsolete but in order to make sure nuclear arms would never be used you had to fight modern wars with conventional forces and yet if supplies for the conventional weapons of one side ran out it might revert to nuclear anyway. So this meant you needed even more conventional weapons in the first place to take out the launch sites — to take out the nuclear possibility. It was an equation that the “Massachusetters,” which was Mayne’s term for all the doves, never understood, from George McGovern on down. But it was something with which every president, Democrat and Republican, had to contend once he sat in the Oval Office.
“Then,” said Mayne, “looks like we’re back in the war room.”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“Damn!” With that Mayne got up and asked Trainor for a Tylenol 3 and an aspirin 222. Only the “double whammy” stood any chance of dulling the tightening steel band of pain around his head and the thick pain that had waylaid his trapezius and neck muscles so that they felt as hard as bridge cables. Trainor saw him wince on the way down, but once in the corridor leading to the room there was no sign that the president was in pain, and anyone noticing his drawn features, the bags beneath bis eyes from lack of sleep, and the worry lines etched deep into his forehead saw these as the inevitable signs of the enormous responsibility shouldered by the commander in chief. And Trainor knew it was the truth, the strain taking its toll: more gray hair about the president’s temples and a set about his jaw that came from him being a nighttime “grinder,” the nightmare of a new war continuing to sabotage his already war-torn sleep.
It was not a very long meeting for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chief of naval operations, and the president’s special national security adviser Harry Schuman. They were of one accord. As well as ordering the offensive on the western front reactivated, pushing from Moscow toward the Urals, U.S. forces, with Canadian air cover as an assist, would have to engage in an airland battle to attack Siberia’s eastern flank and so establish a beachhead for Allied land operations against the United Siberian Soviet Republics.
“Cross Bering Strait?” proffered Mayne, seeking unanimous agreement.
“Yes, sir,” replied the CNO. “But first the navy and air force planes’ll have to knock out Big Diomede’s early warning and AA as well as antiship missile batteries. No chance with a land force. Two Diomedes Islands’ll be surrounded by a sea of jumbled drift ice.” The CNO produced a photograph of the jagged expanse of pressure ridges created by wind and sea action, many of the ridges up to sixty feet in height and six feet thick. “Carrier-launched planes’ll hit it from the south. Air force from the Alaskan peninsula.”
“How about the Russian subs attacking our carrier?” put in Mayne.
“Our battle groups’ll have usual guided missile destroyer and cruiser screen as well as helos and air cover — including fighter cover from the carrier itself and helos. Also we have several batteries of heavy guns on Little Diomede. Range to Big Diomede is less than three miles. Or five — depending on angle of fire.”
“Can our batteries do much against granite?”
“Some. All depends how deep the Russians are dug in. But our big ordnance bombs should do the job.” His right hand massaging his temple, Mayne said nothing, his mood of deep concentration inviting no comment. When he finally did speak, his tone was subdued. The confidence exuded by “big ordnance” men in the air force wasn’t shared by him. They had never really learned the lesson of Vietnam or Iraq. In Vietnam they’d dropped more bombs on the network collectively known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail than they had in all of World War II, and they still hadn’t beaten the North Vietnamese. In Iraq they’d hit Hussein’s troops with over three thousand sorties within the first week, but at the end of the day the coalition had still needed the ground war to win. And Hussein’s troops, though inferior to the Siberians, were dug in in sand, not granite. Also, the Siberians’ morale was rock solid compared to the Iraqis’. No, Mayne wanted backup — just in case. “Freeman.” It was more a question than a decision. After saying it he looked up at Trainor, the CNO, and the Joint Chiefs in turn as well as soliciting the wisdom of his special adviser Harry Schuman. Trainor heard the breath go out of General Grey, chief of the army.
The president shifted his gaze to the general. “What is it, Jimmy?”
“Sir. Douglas Freeman’s a good man, but in his present condition, I don’t think it’d be fair — either to the troops or to him.”
Mayne was nonplussed.”You think he’s too tired? Hell, General, we’re all tired.”
General Grey shot a glance of surprise in Trainor’s direction then back at the president. “I thought you knew, sir. CIA report came in about an hour ago.”
Trainor made no apologies. Reports were coming in all the time. There was a river of reports; you got buried in reports.
“What, about Freeman?”
“No, sir — his wife. In critical condition in Peninsula Hospital. Multiple stab wounds, they say.”
Mayne tried to remember whether he’d ever met Mrs. Freeman — some reception or other for the Desert Storm veterans back from Iraq. A tall, good-looking woman, unpretentious, but the exact features of her face were lost amid a blur of official receptions.
“When did this happen?” asked Mayne, emotionally reassured by his own concern, that after a war that had claimed the lives of countless thousands he could still feel compassion for an individual. What was it Stalin had said? One death is a tragedy, and more is a statistic. It’s something you had to guard against, particularly as president.
“Last night apparently,” answered Trainor.”FBI was called in by the MPs at Fort Ord, Freeman’s new HQ — because it had been called in on the police radio as a break and entry, possible burglary. But army intelligence figure it might be one of Chernko’s boys.”
“A SPETS attack?” asked Mayne, surprised. After all, Freeman was no longer a threat to the Russians.
The SPETS, short for SPETSNAZ or Voiska Spetsialnogo Naznacheniya, Special-Purpose Forces, were the highest trained, foreign-speaking, Russian commando elite who, among other things, had spread havoc when, dressed in American and British uniforms, they’d been dropped behind the Allied lines in the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket. Under the command of GRU’s, or Military Intelligence’s, Second Chief Directorate, the twenty-five-thousand-man force was the most brutal and best trained of the Russian special forces. But an attack on General Freeman’s wife? After all, hitting a commander’s wife didn’t stop a commander, and besides, Freeman was being recalled.
“It’s to show, I suspect,” put in the British brigadier, Soames, “that they can reach whomever they wish. A caution perhaps against us using Freeman. May not be Chernko of course — he’s pledged his full assistance to us. It could be whoever is taking over his agents.”
“It’s Chernko’s style all right,” Trainor concurred. “He’s been known to have his sleepers — agents already in place-target our nuclear sub captains while they’re off base here as well as abroad. Two of them got it while they were on leave around Faslane in Scotland — near our Holy Lock sub pens. But the FBI doesn’t figure he’d try that now, not after the surrender. Besides, our forward units are already in Moscow. What’s in it for him?”
“Quite,” said Soames.
‘‘Problem is, gentlemen,” Mayne reminded them, “that KGB or not, General Freeman’s going to be too preoccupied with his wife’s condition. We can’t have him leading any mop-up operation after the bombardment on Big Diomede now.” Mayne saw Trainor about to speak but carried on, “I know he’s thoroughly professional, that he’d do it if we asked him, but the fact is he’ll be too preoccupied with her condition. It’s rotten luck. All other things considered he seemed the perfect man for a mop-up. But I don’t want the life of one American — not one — endangered because of some minor detail overlooked by a man too overwrought by family concerns back home. Once our naval battle group and air force take out Big Diomede I want it secured, and tightly, with no chance of them taking it back and cutting off our logistical supply between Alaska and Siberia. That’d be fatal. In any event, let’s not worry about Freeman now. Hell, if your boys do a good enough job, Admiral—” He was looking at Horton and then Air Force General Allet, “—there won’t be any garrison left to mop up.”
Mayne’s confidence was bolstered by the plans of the naval battle group Admiral Horton was assembling out of San Diego, San Francisco, and Bangor, Washington. Even now orders were being issued for extra munitions to be rushed up to Little Diomede, for while its few guns on its more exposed western side couldn’t hope to do any significant damage to the eastern cliffs of the Siberian island three miles from them, Little Diomede’s gun emplacements would, along with the infamously changeable and hostile weather of the Bering Strait, run interference for the main naval battle group attack approaching from the Aleutians to the south and led in its center by the carrier USS Salt Lake City. Big Diomede was about to be subjected to a storm of firepower. While the island might withstand it, it was almost certain to destroy the will of the Siberian garrison so that Marines could be sent in and merely take it over. But all this wouldn’t be necessary if Novosibirsk and all the space program brains of Akademgorodok failed to get the approval of the Soviet Pacific Fleet to go along with the Siberian decision. In any event, preparations were underway to reactivate an element of the joint American-British SAS — Special Air Service commandos — the Allied equivalent of the SPETS, based in Wales, whose main squadrons, of seventy-two men each, were in the process of being demobilized.
Mayne doubted they’d be used, but both he and the Joint Chiefs believed that the preparations would be another clear signal to the Siberians. If there was no Soviet naval attack in the next twenty-four hours, this would confirm quite clearly that the Soviet Navy, traditionally the most conservative of the Russian forces, were not in concert with Novosibirsk. The White House knew that if Novosibirsk lost its vital sea arm, it could not hope to prosecute any war for very long — let alone win one — and neither Freeman nor any other general would be needed.