In East Berlin the loading of the two giant four-engined Russian Condors, the world’s largest military air transports, was delayed. Each plane, assigned to carry 345 members of the Communist freedom volunteer force from East Berlin to Pyongyang via Khabarovsk, was waiting for the Cubans to arrive. The East German commander was annoyed, but the members of his “shock troop” company, though in full battle packs, had no complaint. The shock troops, who had been waiting for more than an hour in the huge, overheated cavern of the Condors, had been told that some of the Cubans sent to help the Communist volunteer force aid North Korea were women. They had also been told by their political officer they must not call any of the women “senorita” or “senora”; this was something you heard only in the decadent American Western films so beloved by equally decadent West Germans. Nowadays, they were instructed, they must address the women as “Comrade”— “Compañera.”
But as they filed into the transports from the long flight from Havana to East Germany, the Cuban women, over twenty of them, aroused intense curiosity among the East German soldiers. For the East German troops, used to the hard, athletic beauty of their women, the Cuban women’s beautifully developed bodies were more supple in appearance. The compañeras’ swarthy Latin color, their golden faces beaded by sweat, their combat bras damp through their dark green T-shirts, were an intriguing and welcome sight. Several of them had to press up closely against the men in the tightly packed aircraft, but not one of the men complained. It would be a long flight.
“Sicherheitsgürtel anfassen!”—”Fasten seat belts for takeoff.”
Despite some eager helpers, not one compañera needed assistance, most of the 12 °Cubans wearing red A patches on their black berets, signifying they had served in the African campaigns of “fraternal assistance,” from Angola to the Sudan. As the pilots in the two Condors began the preflight checks, the seven hundred troops in the Condors were ordered to put in their earplugs as the engines went into their distinctive high-vibration scream. For a few token Bulgarian assault troops who had never been flown into action before, the noise in the huge military plane, devoid of the insulation normally accorded passenger aircraft, was frightening.
Despite the noise and the earplugs, Dieter Meir, a tall, blond East German, the cousin of Hans Meir at Outpost Alfa, managed to introduce himself to the Cuban woman next to him.
“Ich heisse Juanita “—”My name is Juanita,” she said, putting out her hand. Seeing his surprise at her knowing German, she explained, shouting close to him in competition with the engines, “We have many experts from Germany.”
Meir nodded rather than saying anything, as now conversation was impossible; the huge Condor’s engines were in takeoff pitch as its nose wheels traced the white floodlit semicircles about Schönefeld terminal, beginning its lumbering and surprisingly bumpy roll toward the main tarmac. The second Condor was taxiing three hundred yards behind as they moved to the runway best suited for takeoff in the “Berliner Luft,” the legendary and invigorating wind that blew down across the old Prussian plain across West Berlin’s Grunewald Forest and toward the East German farms beyond Kopenick’s Forest.
When Juanita had said “Germany” rather than “East Germany” to Dieter Meir, it struck a responsive chord, for he hoped that one day, in the heart, it truly would be Germany again— not just when the politicians declared it was, but united in spirit, in the same way that he and the Cuban, from thousands of miles away, had come together in their common ideology — to help unite another country. And yet he sometimes wondered if it would ever really happen in his own country, families, like his own, separated too long, still split asunder, the lingering legacy of having been apart for so many years beyond the 500-kilometer anti-Fascist barrier.
Inside the terminal the Bereitschaftspolizei, “police band,” played a stirring rendition of “Freiheit and Peace,” at once entertaining the waiting passengers for domestic flights and being recorded by Soviet and other Eastern bloc radio and television networks to mark the historical occasion on which the socialist world had, after so much inner turmoil, risen as one in defense of the North Korean workers’ democracy in their struggle against the American assault. How typically stupid the Americans had been, to assume that after the workers’ democratic movements had erupted in the Gorbachev years somehow everyone would suddenly throw away the good socialist things with the bad and declare themselves lovers of capitalism — to trade socialist evils for the evils of capitalism, as if there was nothing in between.
Aboard the Condors none of the more than seven hundred East German, Cuban, Bulgarian, and Romanian troops could hear the ceremonies or speeches, but there was excitement in the two huge transports. Most of the troops were under twenty-five and needed to prove themselves. On the other hand, Gen. Hans Demmler, commander in chief of the Communist volunteer force, could hear the pomp and circumstance over the earphones, plugged into the aircraft’s circuits, but he took no notice of it. His hands were full, hoping that as the different segments had not time to train together for the task at hand, they would fight well as self-contained units, not that he had any choice, for full integration would be impossible with the language barriers, despite liaison officers. Right now he was checking that each AK-74 was “tipped” to protect the barrel and front sight from any damage during the flight. Although the troops had been told the flight plan called for a landing at Khabarovsk, if possible they would refuel in the air, as Moscow deemed this would be an impressive logistical display for the Americans.
The engines screamed in protest as the flaps were tested, then the brakes released, as the first Condor began the long run, gathering speed on the south runway.
The shadowy figures of the two men on top of the eight-story Kreuzberg apartment block were all but invisible, one of them leaning against the northeastern comer of the water tank for support, head bowed, right hand as one with the gripstock of the Stinger. It was not the Stinger of Afghan guerrilla fame, which in fact had often refused to fire, but the much improved Stinger-POST, incorporating the passive optical scanning function so that the taxiing Condor completely filled the aiming circle, the edge a little fuzzy due to diffused heat waves at the plane’s extremities that were rising and falling in the Stinger’s sight like a mirage. The Condor was equipped with exhaust “baffles” or shields to minimize hot exhaust trail, but as the fully loaded plane rose and banked hard right, both port and starboard engine exhausts were clear to the naked eye, let alone the Stinger. The agent squeezed the grip, the Stinger’s back-blast illuminating the rooftop momentarily, scorching the agent’s arm. The Condor, in effect a climbing fuel tank with soldiers aboard, exploded like napalm, reminding Chin of the American Challenger explosion years before, one of the Condor’s engines, part of the wing still attached, cartwheeling, disintegrating in a fizzing halo of scarlet, ripping open the night. The main body of the Condor fell as if lead-weighted onto the tarmac like a zeppelin tight with hydrogen. As it burst into flame, the first fifty rows of tiny soldiers could be seen, heads black as burnt matches, then disappearing in the orange-white inferno that raced hundreds of meters down the runway.
Suddenly the second Condor, in the process of braking, tires sparking, exploded, its four nose wheels collapsing, fuselage sliding along the tarmac like the chin of some huge dinosaur on black ice, plowing into the inferno of the first plane. In the near daylight intensity of the scene, as fire engines screamed, the Koreans atop the building three-quarters of a mile away could plainly see some Communist volunteer troops in the second Condor sliding down open ramps, most of them afire, others coming down into a fuel slick that ignited seconds later, the ribbing of the fuselage now stretched against the skin of the aircraft in an X ray of the plane, the roar like a thousand Christmas trees going up. There were no screams, or at least none that could be heard over those of the sirens. A tongue of flame like a ceremonial dragon’s shot out and around the rear cargo door of the second Condor, incinerating the remainder of the fleeing troops. Then the Koreans could hear a rattling sound, becoming louder as searchlights streamed out into the night like wildly flung straws darting over the West German apartments across the bulldozed remnants of the Wall. The rattle was the sound of machine-gun fire.
“Let’s go!” said Chin.
There was shooting all the way from Treptow, East Berlin’s most southerly suburb around the East German airport, to Pankow, East Berlin’s most northwesterly suburb sixteen miles away. Most of the shooting, however, was concentrated in Kreuzberg, from where the missiles had been fired.
Outside the apartment the big crowds that had been racing down from the back-street Kneipen—pubs — toward the wire fence along the River Spree now started to retreat as rifle and machine-gun fire increased. In the flickering light of a flare, Chin saw an old man in pajamas and robe standing in the street below the apartment complex gazing skyward. A woman darted out from beneath the ginkgo trees, shouting and dragging him away toward an old section of dilapidated Wall. It wasn’t certain who had started the small-arms fire, and Chin suspected that some of it was probably the ammunition going off in the Condors. In any event, now both sides were at it.
“All here?” Chin asked in the darkness, the sky to the east glowing a soft pink.
Each man responded. They went down to the gray BMW. “All in?” Chin asked again.
“Yes.”
“Where are the cases?”
“The trunk.”
Chin told the agent driving to pull up on the first bridge over the Teltow Canal on their way back to the trade legation offices. But there were too many people about, mainly police cars, and so they went on to another bridge, where Chin got out and ditched the two missile launchers. “Switch off,” he told the driver. He listened for a moment, thinking he’d heard footsteps nearby, but now all he could hear was the cracking and pop of the small-arms fire. “Now, look,” Chin said, stamping his feet; it was damper and colder by the canal. “You’ve all done a first-rate job. I want you to know — well—” He paused, never having been one for sentimentality but wanting to convey to his men how satisfied he was with their performance. The four of them had volunteered even though they didn’t know all the details of the job. “Komawō”—”Thanks,” he said.
He shot the driver first, the man immediately behind the driver second, and then the third man, trying to scramble out the back door. The man in the center was begging for mercy, his hands up high. “Don’t, sir—”
Chin stood back a little and shot him, trying not to get anything on his coat.
In a chain reaction all along NATO’s line, phones were ringing off the hook. Fighting had broken out in Berlin, and reinforced alert had become “general alert.” At Outpost Alfa, two hundred miles southeast of Berlin, Hans Meir, who, with an American, was manning the observation tower, the scene of Hitler’s Nazis crossing the Rhine Bridge clear in his mind, knew what to do. He was no less than Samson at the pass, only instead of the jawbone of an ass with which to beat back any breach of the “trace,” he had a direct line to Fifth Army Corp’s 120-millimeter artillery batteries behind him, ready to pulverize the Soviet and East German echelons, groups of five tanks, if they dared try to punch their way through. So far it was a quiet country night, broken only by the sound of an owl. Then Meir heard at least half a dozen dull thumps some miles to the east of him.
“What was that?” asked his American partner. There was a faint pinkish glow, the size of a tennis ball from where they were. Hans Meir didn’t hesitate. Lifting the phone, he rang Alfa HQ. He couldn’t get through, the line sounding like frying eggs.
In the main Alfa hut, a mile behind in a pine wood, they were trying to contact the Alfa tower, but all they heard was static on the line. It wasn’t a line in the old-fashioned sense of radio cables but rather the elaborate fiber-optics links that were on the blink. The fiber-optic system was thought to be impregnable against an EMP, electromagnetic impulse, the kind of shock blasts given off from a nuclear explosion, scrambling all sensitive electronic equipment from televisions to defense computers.
At NATO’s headquarters in Brussels, calls were coming in from pay phones from as far south as Burghausen in Bavaria to Fehmarn in Schleswig-Holstein in the north. All computers and fiber-optic radio links between Bonn and NATO HQ, as well as all those between armor/infantry, artillery, and air forces, including ground tremor sensors, had simply gone mad, spewing out nonsense that was only adding to the general air of confusion.
In the rain-slashed darkness around Alfa One, Klaus Meir and his army buddy, Johnny Malvinsky, were watching the gap when the American, his Bronx accent markedly different from Meir’s college-taught English, said something to Meir, who thought it sounded like “ruf.”
“Ruf?” Meir said.
“A ruf,” Malvinsky seemed to say. “It’s moving.”
“Where?”
Malvinsky handed him the infrared binoculars. “Two o’clock. By the rise near the barn.”
The American was right, but it wasn’t a roof, at least not a full-sized one, more like that of a small toolshed moving, the infrared’s scope picking up spotty thermals.
“What magnification is this?” asked Meir. They were still trying to call Alfa HQ since the order had come, taking them from “military vigilance” to “general alert.”
“Usual setting,” said Malvinsky. “I didn’t change it.”
At Alfa HQ the infantry troops had come through the door of the metal hut as if there were a fire, the lift-up counter slamming back, held down by the sergeant as he kept intoning, “Let’s go! Let’s go!” The M-1s were coughing once, then there was a deep, throaty purr, surprisingly quiet to infantry used to the old M-60 Patterns. No one questioned whether it was a drill or not. They’d get their butts kicked if they didn’t do it within the required time, and suffer restricted furlough as well. Outside as they moved beneath the pines into the Bradley armored personnel carriers, thirteen men apiece, the column started off for the trace near the tower.
Facing the Fulda Gap from the east, Meir’s and Malvinsky’s opposites, members of a squad from the East German Fourth and Soviet Thirty-ninth motorized rifle divisions, saw something moving along the plain through their infrared.
“Looks like an outhouse moving,” the East German told his Russian liaison officer. The Russian agreed, but the thermal images were spotty because of the light rain that had now started. In any event, the shape of whatever they were watching was much smaller than that of a tank. Besides, in regular radio “line,” rather than fiber-optic, contact with their headquarters, they would have been informed of any unusual traffic.
The farmer driving the tractor, like many others all along the front between East and West Germany, was one of those who had agreed to work farmland in and around the DMZ provided they were given special Risikoentgeld— “danger subsidies.” But the subsidy, the East German farmer had long since told his wife, did not cover nuclear war, thank you very much. Working patiently and only at night, he had fitted the tractor with a rude protective shield of steel slabs either side and over the roof, his wife and two children sitting behind him now on seats he had expressly built, along with a huge white flag that would flap as he unfurled it at the Fulda Gap.
“And how,” his wife had asked him, “do we get across the strip?” She meant the mines, many of which had been left in place after the West and Gorby’s Moscow had ended. He told her he had mounted a roller plow on the front with loose chains to act as flails. Nothing new about the idea. Old as the hills.
“It’s crazy,” she told him.
“Woman,” he’d replied, “when the shooting starts, there will not be time to discuss what we might do. But where do you prefer to take your chances? In the East or the West?” His argument was sound enough as it went, and a rainy night was made to order. Still there were two things wrong. The first was a loose bearing on the tractor’s right wheel, making the squeak of the tractor even more pronounced than usual, and the white flag, which wouldn’t have made any difference to the East Germans anyway, was so sodden by the rain that it didn’t flap at all but merely hugged the pole like some thin, frightened ghost.
In the East German’s infrared scope, whatever was moving disappeared for a moment behind a wood but then came back into view as a frosty outline, nearing the fence. In Tower Alfa, Hans Meir tried to make his decision. This wasn’t the bridge leading to the Rhineland in ‘36 where Grandfather said you could see the Nazis clearly coming at you. But, of course, using camouflage is precisely what the Russians would do — trying to confuse Alfa just long enough.
“Den Mann halten!”— “Stop him!” ordered the Russian liaison officer. “It’s an American mine clearer.” The East German fired. Meir didn’t see the antitank missile streaking toward the trace, only a white streak across the infrared scope—
“Back-blast!” said Malvinsky. “Ten o’clock.”
“Got it in sight?” asked Meir.
“In sight,” answered Malvinsky, the AT launcher on his shoulder.
“Fire!” Malvinsky fired at the East German back-blast position, bits and pieces, probably signed pine branches, still visible like pricks of orange snow melting on the glass of his infrared scope. Nearer the trace was a rolling fireball followed by pieces of flaming debris from the tractor. There was no human noise, the tractor stopped.
The East German fired back at Alfa’s Tower, but by then Meir and Malvinsky were halfway down the staircase and into the jeep, pulling back to the next position in the pines on their side of the strip. The East German rocket missed the tower, crashing into the pines above them, setting the trees afire and throwing long shadows across their dugout. Meir fired three scarlet emergency flares. As they burst high above Alfa One HQ, the Soviet headquarters at Zossen-Wünsdorf, using the old-fashioned radio lines, ordered “Operation Home Rule” to begin.
Twenty Soviet-Warsaw Pact divisions, infantry and four thousand tanks, began to move, preceded by hundreds of strike aircraft, primarily SU-24/Fencers for ground support and MiG-29s with air-to-air Alamo and antiradiation, antiradar air-to-surface missiles, with Russian NR-30-millimeter tank-destroying cannon, all converging on the Fulda Gap. Most of the Soviet aircraft, while visible on U.S. and European satellite pictures, were not visible to the knocked-out fiber-optical radar systems on NATO’s central front, north and south of the Fulda Gap. Here the Soviets’ AFOMs, anti-fiber-optic measures, had been most effective. Nevertheless, in response to the firing in Berlin and the flares at Outpost Alfa, NATO, as part of its “forward defense, flexible response” strategy, sent hundreds of M-1s toward the gap while concealed 155-millimeter and 203-millimeter artillery guns behind Fulda began pounding the gap through which the T-80 echelons were expected to come pouring. Heavily camouflaged tanks of the U.S. Eleventh Armored, dug in behind preselected revetment areas in defilade positions, waited should the Soviet-Warsaw Pact tanks burst through the saturating fire of the artillery. In their deep, second forward observation hole, Hans Meir and Malvinsky hunkered down by the infrared periscope, ground shaking all about them, trees trembling as the deadly artillery rained down only a quarter mile from them.
“This is it, Fritz,” said Malvinsky.
“Ja.” Meir pulled a walkie-talkie from the OP’s alert kit.
They had been taught and they understood that for them there could be no retreat; their only job, the most important of all as NATO front line OPs, was to hold as long as they could, to give situation reports vital to the artillery and tanks. To buy time. As Malvinsky stayed glued to the periscope, seeing the earth erupting before him in jagged white plumes on the infrared, he could hear Meir cranking up the minefield charge box for their sector. “Are they coming through yet?” he asked Malvinsky.
“Jes-us!” replied the American. “Have a look at this!”
General Sutherland had told them the Soviet-Warsaw Pact would most likely come through in echelons of fives, two wing-men, one either side of the three center tanks, to protect the flank. But to see his infrared’s circle blocked solid with the thermal waves of so many, to actually see more tanks than he had ever seen in his life coming straight for him, was something that no amount of live ammunition training or anything else had prepared them for. “Settle down,” said Meir, as much to himself as to Malvinsky. “Are they in our sector yet?”
“Hundred meters to go,” said Malvinsky. “Hold it.”
The forest was erupting, trees splitting all about them, the scream of hot metal shards carving up the air. Malvinsky swung the infrared scope around, and for as far as the eye could see there were thick, billowing clouds of white and the steady pomp, pomp, pomp of smoke grenades spewing from the forward tanks, whose earsplitting frenzied sound was now joined by the NATO mines as they began detonating. Meir heard the distinctive screech of tracks coming off roller wheels and the heavy metallic thumps as the mine-disabled tanks were shoved aside by those behind them, who now continued converging on the gap.
Within minutes a squadron of NATO A-10s came in low over the trees, wings rocking in their tight subsonic turns, almost like a car too powerful for its driver. Despite the rain and darkness, the A-10s performed superbly as they flew below the Russian MiGs and Fencers, their telltale “bug-eyed” twin jets, well back, and the high lizard-patterned khaki-green camouflage visible in flare light. The A-10 Thunderbolts showed astonishing virtuosity, seeming almost to hover momentarily, their noses down, the forty-two-hundred-round-per-minute, 30-millimeter cannon spitting out long orange tracer. Wherever the cannon fire struck the Russian tanks’ reactive armor, the 30-millimeter bullets disintegrated the explosive-reactive armor, destroying the cannon’s bullets before they could even penetrate the tank metal proper. But wherever the rain of orange cannon fire found the thinner-skinned turrets, it was enough to stop the tank, the air inside the vehicle a whizzing cloud of white-hot razors, many of the tanks exploding as the A-10s’ fire not only passed through the turret but superheated the tank’s own supply of ammunition by the loader. As well, most of the big American 155- and 203-millimeter self-propelled guns behind Alfa One were able to change position before the answering Soviet-Warsaw Pact batteries got a fix on them and were now tearing into the more than five hundred T-72s and T-80s that were the first to reach the Fulda Gap.
The Russian tanks now within range, the dug-in M-1s and M-60s were waiting until the last minute for their best shots to stop the Russian tanks that had survived the deluge of artillery and the assault of the U.S.-Luftwaffe Tenth Tactical Fighter Wing. At times the NATO fighters managed to penetrate the thick Russian MiG cover, below which Soviet Fencers were providing ground support for their tanks, their wings no longer swept back but in the straight lateral position as they came in low, seeking out the American A-10s.
Meir and Malvinsky knew that sooner or later they’d be overrun, no place to hide, caught between the steamrollers of the two opposing armies. Through screaming bursts of shell fire, Malvinsky was reporting tanks coming through in battalion strength, fifty at a time now that gaps in the minefield had been “ribboned out,” Russian and East German infantry having quite literally laid out fluorescent tape to mark the safe entry points through the strip. If that happened, disaster would result, with the Soviet-Warsaw Pact echelons pouring through, then splitting off into arrow formations, one right, northward towards Kassel, the other left, south to Frankfurt-am-Main, driving deep wedges into NATO’s central front.
The crisis for NATO at the moment, as Meir knew first in his forward position, was that of the fiber-optical-guided missiles. Long lauded as much cheaper than the old standard missiles, which had to carry their own expensive independent control system, the fiber-optical missiles were guided by images relayed back to a central fire control. But the fiber-optical missiles had now been neutered by the fuel/air explosions, one of which Meir and Malvinsky had seen earlier that night as a pinkish glow to the east and which had sent out pressure waves twice as powerful as that emitted by a two-kiloton nuclear bomb, the waves ineffectual against the old-fashioned clunky Russian missiles.
A motorcycle messenger sent out from Fifth Army headquarters to Alfa One was told about the fiber-optics screw-up and, hitting 120 miles an hour on the Autobahn, had taken the message back to Fifth Army HQ, which had still not heard anything directly from NATO’s commander in chief of the thirteen-hundred-kilometeR-1ong central front. Nevertheless, despite the dire situation, Fifth Army’s General Willison was refusing to unleash his “stochastic” robot mines, designed to be set loose to roam for up to four days, attaching themselves to the magnetic field of a tank, exploding with fifteen kilograms of explosive. The trouble with this plan, Willison realized, was that if the NATO forces couldn’t stop the enemy tanks at Fulda Gap and NATO tanks had to go into the Gap, then the stochastic mines would be just as much a menace to his U.S. M-1s, German Leopards, and British Challenger tanks.
The Fulda Gap was now a caldron of flying steel and volcanic earth as the Russians’ spearhead column littered the ground, many of its tanks still burning, crews dead or dying aboard, hulls of others ripped apart, but still the Russians kept coming. With a six-to-one-man ratio over NATO, the gap might still be breached, MiGs and F-15s thundering overhead in the night, contesting the space above the potential breakthrough point.
All Meir and Malvinsky, eyes red with fatigue and fear, could do was to keep changing dugout positions as much as they could, trying not to expose themselves to either enemy or “friendly” fire as they watched tracer arcing out from the M-1s, machine guns finding the range, the M-1s’ lasers put out of action either by the tanks’ own reactive armor packs exploding or direct Russian fire, over a hundred of the M-1s destroyed by East German 125-millimeter armor-piercing discarding sabot rounds, capable of piercing the M-1s’ twenty-centimeter steel.
It was now twenty minutes after two on the morning of September 3 when, because of the massive blackout of communication along NATO’s line, NATO’s European commander in Brussels, General Koch, had no alternative but to formally release, by pay telephones (those not plugged into the fiber-optic system) and dispatch riders, all sector commanders to proceed on their own initiative. He emphasized the main tenet of NATO’s “forward defense, flexible response” strategy — that the enemy should be engaged as far forward as possible to buy the desperate one week needed for the American reserves to enter the war — the nuclear option being the strategy of last resort and only permissible under the express orders of the NATO council.
For Koch, there were only two decisions he could have made: one, to do as he had done, or secondly, to defer to the NATO council. But in the time it would have taken him to convene the council, he was ordering the recall of “dual-based” troops from the United States, that is, those troops who, on paper, were in Europe but were only at half strength, an economic measure left over from the habit of bleeding the United States’ European garrisons to put reserves into Vietnam. Koch knew the decision he made to recall the dual-based troops was in effect a decision that might force the U.S. president’s hand. Unlike his NATO brief, Koch did not have the authority to move any U.S. unit higher than a forty-thousand-man corps. His request for the dual-based troops, a request that he knew would be known as quickly by Moscow as Washington, would be one that in effect would widen the war, but if not made, would make it impossible for the United States to reinforce Europe in time. Besides, if he didn’t issue the order, the Russians would see this as a weakness, and what might have been an intention simply to gobble up territory along the near front would expand anyway, encouraging the S-WP forces to press on farther into Western Europe, knowing the farther they went, the less likely it was that NATO’s nuclear option would be invoked.
Koch fully understood what it would mean for President Mayne, but historians could argue about it — if there was anything left to write about, which there wouldn’t be if the Russians broke through. The president could refuse the request, of course, but this also would be seen by Moscow as a lack of resolve, another Munich sellout, and would only encourage Moscow to grab even more territory.
When Press Secretary Trainor got the request, he was at once shaken and relieved. He and the president had been holding a decidedly gloomy discussion in the Oval Office with the Joint Chiefs about the political necessity of ascertaining whether or not the missiles that hit the Blaine were fired by NKA patrol boats or had come in via low air attack, launched by a Russian aircraft out of Cam Rahn Bay or from the southbound Soviet Far Eastern Fleet. But now the request from SACEUR— Supreme Allied Commander Europe — endorsed by CINC south and CINC north, rendered the question about who fired the missiles academic.
“The North Koreans have tripped the whole goddamned thing off anyway,” said Trainor.
A call came in from Premier Suzlov. He was demanding that Mayne order NATO to cease its fighting and surrender all territory gained by the Soviet-Warsaw Pact countries.
“Mr. Premier,” answered the president, “I don’t want this. You don’t want this. Call off your people in Korea.”
“I have no people in Korea. You have people in Korea.”
“I mean call off Pyongyang.”
“We have no people in Pyongyang. It would be interference in the internal affairs—”
“Then,” said Mayne calmly, “call off the ‘fraternal assistance’ you are giving East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia—”
“We did not begin this, Mr. President. Your act of terrorist aggression in East Berlin—”
‘ “That might well have been terrorist, Mr. Premier, but it was not an act of any government in the NATO alliance. Of this I can assure you.”
“Assure me? You can assure me of nothing. However, if you contain your NATO armies, I will agree to—”
“Mr. Premier?”
The line went dead.
“What the hell—” began Mayne.
The NSA electronic experts overseeing the White House and situation room communications punched all the right buttons, including time-of-conversation-cessation tone for number coding into the computer. Most likely explanation, they informed the president, “connections purposely cut.”
The president looked up, astounded. “By whom?”
The Joint Chiefs of Staff knew and Trainor knew they knew, but coming from them, it could look almost self-serving. It was for a moment as if each of the Joint Chiefs, aware that history was being made, did not want to come out on the wrong side of it.
“Some of Suzlov’s generals see this as their chance,” Trainor proffered quietly, adding in an even quieter but more chilling tone, “As the British would say, ‘in for a penny, in for a pound.’ “
“What in hell does that mean?” snapped the president.
“Go for broke,” Trainor answered quietly. “The NATO forces might be reeling. They won’t get another chance like this for a hundred years.”
Harry Schuman, sitting next to Admiral Horton, was nodding in agreement. “Hardliners have been fretting ever since Gorbachev’s reductions. I think Mr. Trainor is correct in his assessment.”
Mayne was rubbing his forehead. “All right, General Gray. What’ll it take?”
“Rollover, sir.” He meant the NATO policy of “Atlantic necessity,” of the U.S., British, and other NATO navies, but primarily the U.S. and British, having to accept enormous losses, simply roll over them, to get the reinforcements of men, materiel, and food to reinforce Europe if they were to have any hope of pushing the Russians back.
“Mr. President,” said Admiral Horton, “in the first hundred and eighty days we’re looking at a minimum of six thousand cargo ships. Each ship making six round trips. Means a minimum of thirty-four cargo ships a day — excluding naval battle groups for escort and carrier air cover for the convoys.”
“Can we do it?”
“We do it or we lose Europe.”
“Do it,” said Mayne.
At that moment Trainor knew that from here on in the government of the United States would function from the bombproof shelter of the White House situation room and that Senator Leyland had just lost his bid for the presidency.
On Capitol Hill, the entire place under the heaviest security ever seen in Congress, President Mayne, for purposes of national as well as European morale, made his address from the House of Representatives, as Roosevelt had done, to show Europe that both Democrats and Republicans supported him. As he mounted the podium, the silence was palpable as the speaker invited the president to address the Congress.
“This day, as you know, war has broken out in Europe. Soviet and Warsaw Pact armies have attacked the NATO alliance through the very Iron Curtain that for years past has been the front line between the forces of freedom and those of oppression. And once again the United States has been called upon to stem the tide of tyranny, a tide given its force by those in Moscow who in their unshakable Communist determination wish to rule not only the Soviet Union but the rest of the world. I have asked Premier Suzlov several times this day through the offices of the Soviet Embassy to agree to a cease-fire by midnight tonight Washington time. Should I not receive the answer we want — that hostilities shall cease at that time, that both NATO and the Soviet-Warsaw Pact units will withdraw to the positions they occupied before hostilities began — then we must understand that a state of war exists between the United States and the Soviet Union and her allies.
“I ask you all to join with me, to pray for peace but to stand ready for war. We, like all our allies, hold our breath for all mankind, for all those on the edge of the abyss. But should it come to this, we are resolved to fight if we have to, with all the resources at our disposal. Let us be calm, but let us be firm, firm in the conviction of those Americans who have gone before us, for those Americans who went to do battle with the evils of Hitler and all those of his ilk who would make us slaves and extinguish the flame of freedom.
“Rest assured that the United States will do all in its power to bring the hostilities to a quick and peaceful end. But if our overtures of peace are rebuffed, then the fate of our children is at hand and will reside in our determination, as Americans, to stand up to a bully in the only way we know how: in the words of another American, ‘to give him a thrashing he’ll never forget.’ God bless you all.”
Trainor was stunned, as was a good part of the Congress, by born the brevity and starkness of the president’s oration. Suddenly the Congress erupted in applause as the president walked from the podium, surrounded by a standing ovation. The people, Trainor saw, had done what Americans had always done, rallied about the presidency in times of national peril.
The Secret Service contingent was unable to hold the members of Congress back as they crowded about to shake the president’s hand, but Mayne, his demeanor calm, his stride purposeful, walked up to Senator Leyland and extended his hand. For that moment in the nation’s history, following the speech, beamed all over America, time seemed to stand still and there were no Democrats or Republicans, blacks or whites, there were only Americans.
Trainor’s beaming smile was not simply that of a PR man’s victory but one of genuine affection for his boss; the Hemingway paraphrase about thrashing a bully was a master stroke, he thought — so long as no one pointed out that Hemingway had committed suicide.
By 4:17 a.m. the Fulda Gap was choked with armor, the destruction by the U.S. Fifth Army’s artillery so unabatedly concentrated that east of the Gap, the plain looked like some vast scrap-yard strewn with the steaming hulls of over a thousand Soviet-Warsaw Pact tanks, the majority of these being obsolete T-62s, of which the Russians alone had twenty-three thousand in reserve and which were unofficially known among the Moscow general staff as dryan— “fodder.” But the tanks had kept coming, and at times, with the air-ripping scream of wire-guided and fire-and-forget antitank missiles, blanket artillery fire and the cacophony of assorted small arms, barrels threatening to jam from unprecedented sustained action, U.S. and West German troops manning tank graders had to be called in to clear a way through as more and more NATO units arrived.
The A-10 Thunderbolts, or rather those who managed to penetrate the increasingly accurate Russian SAM screen, continued to buoy Meir’s spirit. Though his hearing had long gone in the deep fallback bunker at Alfa Two, he still managed to glimpse with awe the twin-engined jets screaming in just above tree level, their seven-barreled Avenger Gatling guns ripping into the oncoming S-WP armor, the stream of the thirty-millimeter cannon fire stuttering into the tanks at over seventy rounds a second, many of the tanks exploding, illuminating others nearby, which became the Thunderbolts’ next targets.
The antitank missiles were doing well, but it was the A-10s that, despite their losses, continued to be the best antitank weapon NATO had in the field, augmenting the fire of the hidden M-1s, whose 120-millimeters kept thumping away from the woods, although many of the American tanks, over 270, had been destroyed by the Soviet-Warsaw Pact onslaught.
As the carnage continued, the biggest surprise to the NATO generals was that the highly touted and sophisticated Swedish BILL antitank missile system, proven so effective at homing in above and destroying the thinner turret armor, was being foiled by the less-sophisticated Soviet T-72 tanks with reactive armor packs on the turret as well as around it and by foil-spewing ejectors that scrambled the incoming missiles’ homing radar. The BILL top-attack warheads, however, extracted a savage price in S-WP infantry — the Russian BMPs’, personnel carriers’, much thinner armor and tracks easily penetrated by the missiles. But still the Russians and East Germans kept coming, astonishing the forward infantry companies of U.S. Fifth Army by using infantry in several instances to clear a minefield before the tanks by running through it, an old Russian tactic from the days of Stalingrad.
Then at 5:00 a.m., 4:00 p.m. Washington time, Russia’s C in C of the western military theater, or TVD, Major General Agursky, received reports that brigades from West Germany’s First Armored and Second Mechanized Divisions were being diverted to reinforce the NATO semicircle of armor around Fulda Gap and that the British First Army, in position south of the Elbe, was moving farther south to shore up the areas depleted by the West Germans heading to Fulda. Agursky gave orders for the second phase of Operation Home Rule to begin.
The Soviet Ninth Armored Division, leading an attack of thirty Soviet-Warsaw Pact divisions, fifteen armored, fifteen mechanized infantry — over 450,000 troops in all — struck and broke through in the far northern sector of NATO’s front, twenty-four miles east of the Elbe, racing for Hamburg and Bremerhaven, the prime designated ports for U.S. resupply of NATO. NATO headquarters had never been sure of Denmark’s willingness to intervene against such a Russian-Warsaw Pact right hook south of Denmark’s border, and eventually NATO’s high command was proven correct, for while the West German Sixth Mechanized Division in Schleswig-Holstein attacked bravely and without hesitation, aided by elements of the eighty-four thousand First German Corps and northern elements of British First Army, the Danish Parliament debated the advisability of becoming involved. By the time they’d decided to send a stern note to Moscow, the Soviet-Warsaw Pact blitzkrieg, spearheaded by five thousand Soviet T-90s, was racing through the dawn toward the vital ports of Hamburg and Bremerhaven, the T-90s’ 135-millimeter laser-guided cannons blasting everything before them. The most strategic bridges over the Elbe were quickly in the hands of the Soviet 207th Airborne, who started a row at Soviet-WP HQ by taking all the glory for having secured the bridges when it was in fact SPETSNAZ, special force teams, already in place in the west, who had secured the bridge crossings by thwarting NATO demolition teams in the first place.
At Fulda Gap, one of the T-90 five-tank-platoon leaders was Lt. Sergei Marchenko, twenty-four, younger son of Kiril Marchenko and who, because fate had decreed that he be less than five feet six inches in height, had automatically been conscripted to the Soviet Tank Corps, the 2.10-meter-high T-90 being the lowest silhouette of any tank in the world. But what Sergei Marchenko had really wanted to do was fly. What his father wanted him to do was to obey orders so that in time, if he acquitted himself well as a tank commander, he might qualify for transfer. Right now, however, all that Marchenko was concerned about was staying alive — the inside of his T-90, devoid of the airconditioning of the American M-1s, extraordinarily hot due not only to the heat generated by the tank engine and the motors that moved the ten-ton turret but by the smoke and heat generated by the scores of other tanks in the 270-tank division moving toward the Gap. Many of the tanks were now more than fifty meters apart, violating the normal “twenty-five meter” rule of Russian armor. It was an on-the-spot decision by the corps commander to get his tanks as far from one another as possible in an effort to avoid the heavy punishment being meted out by the Thunderbolts and the legendary concentrated artillery fire of the Americans, many of whose guns, as in Fulda Gap, had long been pre-positioned to saturate grids within grids. Apart from the heat in the tank, Marchenko, after two hours of combat, found the noise of the turret grating and squeaking, the crash of the automatic loader, the high whine of electric motors, and above all the radio traffic, was so overwhelming in its disorientation, he removed his headset. It was a court-martial offense during full attack, but whoever wrote the rules in Moscow didn’t drive a tank.
Lowering his dust goggles, he stood up, one arm resting against the 12.70 machine gun, as he watched another wave of armor and armored personnel carriers barely visible forging through the dust and smoke, the whole division under orders that once they were through the Gap, they were to wheel south in an effort to engage American and German reinforcements on the Fulda front. What they needed now, thought Sergei, even more than air-conditioning, was for the Soviet MiGs to deal a death blow to the F-15s and F-16s and to clear the skies of damned American Apache helicopters that were so good at ducking down in gaps between the woods and ambushing two to three tanks at a time before they were blown out of the air. Unfortunately the Soviet Havoc helicopters at a distance could easily be mistaken for an American Apache, and some of these had reportedly been hit by mistake. Above the smoke and crash of the ground battle, over sixteen hundred NATO and Soviet-Warsaw Pact aircraft, from high-performance jets to subsonic ground-support aircraft, were engaged in a fierce battle, the NATO air force’s biggest problem being that, although they could launch over three sorties per plane in the first ten hours compared to the Russians’ two, their heat-seeking missiles had in fact taken out over thirty of their own aircraft in the high-tech confusion over Fulda Gap, where Murphy’s Law operated with even more devastating effect than in peacetime, when laser beams fixing on the wrong target simply resulted in an embarrassed pilot. In the skies over Fulda it meant the death of a pilot, and while the West could replace fighters at a faster rate than the Soviet-Warsaw Pact alliance, the Russians’ reserve of pilots had been carefully built up to a three-to-one superiority over NATO.
As Marchenko looked above him, glimpsing dogfights through the wafting smoke cover, he wondered who was getting the best of it. He wasn’t even sure what was happening in his sector, let alone what part he played in the master plan. All he knew was what any other commander, tank crewman, or infantryman knew. Their local action, no matter how small, was merely part of the master plan hatched by some genius out of the Frunze Military Academy after Gorbachev had so stupidly signed the INF, ridding NATO of all its medium-range missiles and so forcing NATO to face only two possibilities in Western Europe: either a modern conventional war now under way or all-out, long-range nuclear holocaust in which no one would be the winner.
Marchenko’s troop of five tanks had stopped for refueling when they got the message “German armor ahead.” Marchenko felt his stomach tighten — half fear, half excitement. If you beat the Germans, you’d done something. The Americans were tough, but this was German home soil. “What are they?” Marchenko asked. “M-1s or Pattons?”
“Leopards.”
“Ones or twos?”
His wingman signaled that they had finished refueling.
“What’s the difference?” asked the sergeant over the radio from the starboard tank. “A Leopard’s a Leopard.”
“Oh,” said Sergei with mocking nonchalance. “No difference. You clod. The Mark Two’s reach is an extra thousand meters. A slight advantage over the One, wouldn’t you agree?”
That was the major trouble, thought Sergei — never quite knowing what you were up against. His was only a small piece in a great puzzle of war. Now, if you were a fighter pilot — then at least you’d have more freedom of movement than in one of the nine hundred tanks now wheeling en masse to engage the West Germans, the biggest problem for the next few miles being a collision in the damn smoke.
Then news came that another lightning strike had been unleashed by Major General Agursky, this time a left hook around the Czechoslovakian-Austrian corner near the Bohemian Forest’ across the river in Inn — fanning out on the ancient Danube plain and streaming into Bavaria.
“Who told you that?” shouted Sergei.
“American armed forces network.”
Sergei smiled, despite the dust-thick air that was making it almost impossible to breathe. Why did the Americans tell everybody? He couldn’t understand it. They had to tell everyone everything. They were telling the world NATO was on the run, reeling two hundred miles to the north, the S-WP forces smashing through the Dutch 415th Armored and now two hundred miles south through the Austrian border, splitting the NATO defenses into three sectors. Clearly Agursky was set on the right course, seeking to divide the NATO pockets, then pulverize them into submission before America’s enormous production potential to resupply could come into play. And the farther the S-WP penetrated into West Germany, the less likely it became that the Americans could even consider the nuclear alternative. The radio crackled, informing Marchenko that the Leopard tanks were Mark Ones.
“God is good,” Sergei said, and got a belly laugh from the driver, who was so wound up that the thought of his T-90 having a thousand-meter advantage over the Leopard One seemed to him nothing less than a gift.
“I’d still rather be up north,” put in the driver, “if the American radio is right.”
“Why?” asked Sergei.
“I’d rather be fighting those Dutch hippies,” said the driver. “The Krauts are a different matter, Comrade.”
“Ah,” said Sergei, dismissing the odds, “we’ll shit all over—” The tank swerved violently to the left to avoid a forty-five-degree antitank slab. There was a tremendous thwack and Sergei saw a fine red mist, then his gunner’s head rolling by his feet, the man’s torso bubbling with blood.
In the south on the Donau, or Danube, plain, the weather over the Bohemian Forest was closing in, hampering NATO’s Fourth Allied Tactical Air Force, so that to its Luftwaffe commander, General Heiss, it seemed that even God was against NATO.
Before Congress had even heard of and ratified the president’s declaration of war, the British convoy, under British naval escort, was already under way, the U.S. Navy to take up escort duty twelve hundred miles north of Newfoundland, and in Manhattan, Lana La Roche, nee Brentwood, had carefully aligned the arrows on the child-proof safety top of her vial of sleeping pills and poured them down the toilet.
Earlier that day she had left her apartment on the Upper East Side and walked down to the Plaza — for some reason, which at first she couldn’t explain, she found Central Park to be a kind of magnet in her depression. She had scrupulously avoided watching television or reading a newspaper, for her own bad news about her marriage — Jay would still not agree to a divorce — was enough to cope with. And it was a long time before she realized why she had been going to Central Park, often at night. It was dangerous, a punishment for her failure in her marriage, at college, at living. Then, whether she liked it or not, the world came crashing in on her.
She had been standing by the park wall, across from the Plaza’s north entrance, barely noticing the traffic sliding by — a young man showing off, coming out of the hotel, crossing over to the horse-drawn cabriolets, bowing deeply before a bejeweled blonde, twice his years. Soon she would grow old and he’d still be young.
The whip struck the horse’s flank and it began the lover’s walk through the park. Raucous rock was booming from the band shell, and roller skaters with ghetto blasters weaved by. Why didn’t they get Walkmans or earphones or something and just blow off their own ears? she wondered. Then she saw someone nearby reading The Times, its banner headline telling the world that an American warship, the USS Blaine, had been hit in the East China Sea. She had felt her heart racing with the shock, yet simultaneously she felt a surge of exhilaration for the overwhelming fact was that for the first time in over a year of utter defeat, she knew exactly what to do. A few days in New York to get things set up and then to California.
David Brentwood hadn’t had the freedom that his sister, for all her troubles, had, and as one of the six-month reservists, his was a stark choice. Deferment, then go where the army sent you, or volunteer now for the marines. Stacy and Melissa, who had come over to the ROTC office, were watching him.
“Marines,” he said. The look on Stacy’s face was worth it— or so David thought until David got to Parris Island and quickly came to the conclusion that it had been the dumbest decision he’d ever made. He’d said “marines” to impress Melissa. That bastard Stacy had conned him.