Alerted by their coast watchers and unable to move their lucrative weapons complex, ABC was waiting. And ready. For the hundreds of men of the ad hoc Russian Regiment, everything was at stake, survival and money in amounts that the three disgruntled ex-Soviet generals had never dreamed they would be within striking distance of. The markup on Igla, Vanguard, and pirated Stinger-design MANPADs alone was 218 percent. Production costs had fallen drastically, with Lake Khanka providing a guaranteed supply of water for coolant. Productivity was also spurred on by bonuses for the fast loading of ABC’s ship-container-sized cargoes of twenty missiles per RORO — Roll-On, Roll-Off — load. Mideast sales tripled in the first six months of operation, bonuses for overtime so coveted that the soldiers from Abramov’s tank company, Beria’s infantry, and Chekashin’s air defense ground crews assembling the delicate guidance heads and 8 percent sulfur solid propellant were breaking all civilian productivity rates set in the go-slow environment of the old Soviet regime. And now they had in their possession the U.S.’s super-cavitating technology. More bonuses. As bonuses increased, so did expectations, the men wanting even more overtime. Indeed, a strict duty roster had to be enforced as some soldiers, particularly from Beria’s infantry battalions, had been skipping regular perimeter security duty so as to put in overtime on the assembly lines. When General Beria first heard from Big and Little in Moscow that an attack by the American ATFOR — American Anti-terrorism Force — was a possibility, he immediately tightened up all “perimeter skipping” by instituting the death penalty for any Russian absentee on the grounds that shirking this duty was desertion. It had a salutary effect, as those who wanted to make more money selling more missiles to Hamas and others were only too willing to inform on comrades whose executions created a vacancy and hence more lucrative overtime on the already lucrative assembly line.
“You won’t have to worry about the Americans,” Abramov assured Beria and Cherkashin. “My T-90s’ll take the bastards out before they get a chance to get out of their helicopter seats.”
“Bullshit!” announced Beria. “My infantry’ll be the force that’ll settle the matter. You’ll see.” He slapped Cherkashin on the shoulder. “Your air defense missiles and tank rounds can’t take out every individual, Sergei. I tell you, my lads’ll be onto whoever survives their drop.”
“Drop?” said Abramov brusquely. “They’re not crazy enough to try parachuting their force in. Besides, bad weather is coming. It will be like duck shooting for our men. No, General, the Americans’ll be ferrying them in by helicopter.” Abramov then turned to Cherkashin. “Your missile batteries should find them easily.”
“Not a problem, Comrade. We’ll blow them out of the sky. It’ll be raining Americans. Dead Americans.”
They all laughed. While none of the three believed it would be a cakewalk, it was obvious that the American MEU force of two-thousand-plus marines had no chance of surprising ABC when it had to move in from the Sea of Japan before unleashing any attack. Even so, the three rebel Russian generals were determined not to burden themselves with any time-wasting formalities that would slow down ABC’s production lines. Accordingly, the triumvirate phoned each of the company’s commanders, pointing out to them that insofar as everyone’s financial future, from general to private, was on the line, there’d be no time to implement what they called the “restraints” of the Geneva Convention. There would be no American prisoners taken.
“Should we issue a written directive?” posited Beria.
“Why?” said Abramov, shrugging at the infantry general’s question. “Then it’s on paper. You’re not in the party anymore, Viktor.” He paused, then added, “Remember what happened at the Wannsee Conference?”
Viktor and Sergei Cherkashin nodded. It had been the meeting convened by Reinhard Heydrich at Wannsee in Berlin where the final solution of the so-called Jewish Question was settled, of which no copies were to be kept, but one copy was, and because of this copy Adolph Eichmann and others paid the price. At the beginning of ABC’s formation they had rationalized their willingness to sell their souls to a terrorist clientele as a decision that was really based on an intention to rebuild and reassert Soviet might. But Putin and others hadn’t been able to get a handle on the Chechen terrorists, and so ABC had adopted the oldest rationale for corruption in mankind’s history: If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. And when they realized the enormous profits to be made selling hitherto stockpiled Soviet weaponry to terrorists, the crisp sound of newly printed currency soon drowned the conscience of any lingering party loyalist. Besides, there was no turning back. The dream of making a bundle, retiring to a dacha on the Black Sea, held them in its thrall. There would be swimming pools, caviar by the bowlful, your own private security as you lay in the hot Caspian sun. And flunkie lawyers arranging for you to go legitimate by investing in the big American pipeline being built through the Stans, the seven countries that before Gorbachev had been Soviet republics, kept in line by the kind of iron discipline the three generals had used to establish and maintain order at the Lake Khanka complex.
“Any sight of them yet?” Cherkashin, the most impatient of the three, asked his duty officer, who was monitoring the big screen of the air defense radar.
“No, sir. But we’ll know the second they take off from that helo carrier, the Yorktown.”
“You sure?” pressed Abramov.
“Yes, General. We have people on the coast.”
Abramov was now looking down to the right of the radar console at the situation table of the kind used by Royal Air Force controllers during the crucial Battle of Britain, contemplating the cutout silhouettes of the twelve American vessels. His old-fashioned reliance on the blackboard amused the younger computer-age duty officer. But all three of the Russian generals had seen what had happened to Saddam Hussein’s air force when the Americans had taken out the Iraqis’ early warning radar with Stealths. The Iraqis, with their sophisticated radar knocked out and without a “situation table” of the kind Abramov was now studying, were literally working in the dark and rapidly losing control of their dire situation.
“Question is,” pressed Abramov, “whether the Americans will launch fighters from the McCain.”
“No,” said Cherkashin confidently. “Moscow might turn a blind eye to a quick insertion of U.S. troops on our soil. After all, we accepted Allied intervention in 1917 in Archangel, but Moscow’s pride’ll draw the line at permitting foreign fighters in Russian airspace.”
“What I don’t understand,” said Abramov, is how American intelligence found its way to us.”
“Luck,” proffered Beria. “Pure, stupid American luck.”
“Whatever it was,” put in Cherkashin, “we should make damn sure we get this Freeman. He’s a cunning bastard. He’s like that Patton. And this’ll be the second time he’s been here. We don’t want to have to deal with him again.”
On this there was unanimous agreement.
“Well,” said Beria, “last I heard, our Arab friends were working with someone in Hamas.” He paused. “Or perhaps it was the Abu Haf’s al-Masri Martyr Brigades. Some youngster who has lived in America, studied there.”
“A bomber, you mean?” said Cherkashin.
“Perhaps,” said Beria.
“I don’t know,” said Cherkashin. “If the Americans see anyone coming near them they’ll shoot first and ask questions later. They’ve learned in Iraq what we learned in Afghanistan. Arabs have used kids as bombers.”
“Do we have such people?” inquired Beria.
“No,” answered Abramov. “But Beria has a point. Last time I was in Palestine, closing the deal for what will be our first batch of the super-cavitating MANPADs, I also came across one of Hamas’s leaders, an Iranian officer with the Abu Haf’s al-Masri Martyr Brigades who had been given the job of mentoring a young boy with jet-black hair and blue eyes. He was about eleven, maybe twelve years old. Orphaned as a baby in the Iraq War. A true little Muslim fanatic who, the officer told me, had been schooled for a time in America — immersed in the enemy’s culture.”
“So?” said Cherkashin who, despite his brilliance as an air defense commander, lacked the kind of forward-looking imagination Abramov possessed.
“Ah, too young,” said Beria dismissively.
“Exactly!” said Abramov, warming to his own logic. “That’s precisely my point.”
Beria nodded approvingly, eager to show that he was as quick as Abramov, and certainly quicker than Cherkashin in seeing where the tank general was going. “Yes, a blue-eyed kid. Clever.” He paused, his forehead creased in concentration as he sought to extrapolate from Abramov’s, or rather, the terrorists’, idea. “The boy could appear injured, perhaps caught between us and the Americans.”
Cherkashin was mulling it over. “But they’d search him for weapons.”
“Yes,” said Abramov. “But that wouldn’t be our problem. All that’s necessary is to have him found by the Americans — wandering, dazed, frightened. The Americans are suckers for a lost kid.”
“But,” Cherkashin cautioned, “all this presupposes Freeman will be here, that he won’t be directing operations aboard York City.”
“Yorktown,” Abramov corrected him, adding, “I hope your knowledge of our air defense ring, Sergei, is better than your knowledge of General Freeman. Like Patton, he’s always with his men. He’ll come, believe me. He’ll lead them in.”
“The kid you saw,” pressed Beria. “This blue-eyed American-hater. You say he’s been to America?”
“Yes, yes,” said Abramov. “Of course. Probably sent him in with illegals. Across the Canadian border. For how long, I don’t know, but he’s now back in Pakistan, at one of their “holy-war” madrassa schools. I saw him briefly in Islamabad when I did the last arms sale.”
“You think it might be possible,” asked Beria, “for Hamas to get him here in, say, the next twenty-four hours?”
“Of course,” said Abramov sharply. “If we offer to help them kill an American legend, the Arabs will send him on a flying carpet. Don’t worry, we’ll get him. One way or the other. Which reminds me, have all platoon commanders been shown that photo of him on the Net?”
“Every infantryman has the photo,” Beria assured the tank commander. “And I’ve personally put a bonus of ten thousand dollars on his head.”
Abramov, pleasantly surprised, gave one of his rare smiles. “And your men, Commander?” he asked Cherkashin.
“My men have also been promised high bonuses.” He thought of his brother, grimacing with the memory of the day he was killed in combat against the U.S.-led U.N. peacekeeping action in Sibir. A 120 mm Sabot round from one of Freeman’s Abrams tanks had hit the T-80. Cherkashin looked as if he could see straight through the thick cement walls of the subterranean bunker. There had been nothing left. His brother had been vaporized.
“If my men capture him,” Beria told Cherkashin, “I’ll make sure they hand him over to you.”
“And my men,” Abramov assured him, “will do the same.”
It was near dusk, and before it got too dark, Abramov wanted to inspect the Sixth’s tank commanders and make sure everyone was maintaining high alert. And with Cherkashin’s mention of tank ammunition, he wanted to quiz the gunners to make certain that in addition to HE rounds, they would have enough armor-piercing Sabot rounds with which to repel the Americans who, because of ABC’s first-rate camouflage, would be coming in blind, if they’d be coming at all. Many at ABC’s Lake Khanka complex believed that after all the huffing and puffing in Washington was over, there would be no attack, that the Americans were all talk. As Abramov walked outside, as expected he couldn’t see any tanks, and the marshland waters were turning golden in the fading sun.