Chapter 50
Thunder and Lightning
They got him,” Murray told Ryan. ”Our friend Clark was there to watch. Damned ecumenical of the Russkies.”
“Just want to be an ally back to us, I suppose, and RAINBOW is a NATO asset. You suppose he’ll sing?”
“Like a canary, probably,” the FBI Director predicted. “The Miranda Rule never made it to Russia, Jack, and their interrogation techniques are a little more—uh, enthusiastic than ours are. Anyway, it’s something to put on TV, something to get their public seriously riled up. So, boss, this war going to stop or go?”
“We’re trying to stop it, Dan, but—”
“Yeah, I understand,” Murray said. “Sometimes big shots act just like street hoods. Just with bigger guns.”
This bunch has H-bombs, Jack didn’t say. It wasn’t something you wanted to talk about right after breakfast. Murray hung up and Ryan checked his watch. It was time. He punched the intercom button on his phone.
“Ellen, could you come in, please?”
It took the usual five seconds. “Yes, Mr. President.”
“I need one, and it’s time to call Beijing.”
“Yes, sir.” She handed Ryan a Virginia Slim and went back to the anteroom.
Ryan saw one of the phone lights go on and waited, lighting his smoke. He had his speech to Premier Xu pretty well canned, knowing that the Chinese leader would have a good interpreter nearby. He also knew that Xu would still be in the office. He’d been working pretty late over the past few days—it wasn’t hard to figure out why. Starting a potential world war had to be a time-consuming business. So, it would be less than thirty seconds to make the guy’s phone ring, then Ellen Sumter would talk to the operator on the far end—the Chinese had full-time switchboard operators rather than secretary-receptionists as in the White House—and the call would be put through. So, figure another thirty seconds, and then Jack would get to make his case to Xu: Let’s reconsider this one, buddy, or something bad will happen. Bad for our country. Bad for yours. Probably worse for yours. Mickey Moore had promised something called Hyperwar, and that would be seriously bad news for someone unprepared for it. The phone light stayed on, but Ellen wasn’t beeping him to get on the line ... why? Xu was still in his office. The embassy in Beijing was supposed to be keeping an eye on the guy. Ryan didn’t know how, but he was pretty sure they knew their job. It might have been as easy as having an embassy employee—probably an Agency guy—stand on the street with a cell phone and watch a lit-up office window, then report to the embassy, which would have an open line to Foggy Bottom, which had many open lines to the White House. But then the light on the phone blinked out, and the intercom started:
“Mr. President, they say he’s out of the office,” Mrs. Sumter said.
“Oh?” Ryan took a long puff. “Tell State to confirm his location.”
“Yes, Mr. President.” Then forty seconds of silence. “Mr. President, the embassy says he’s in his office, as far as they can tell.”
“And his people said ... ?”
“They said he’s out, sir.”
“When will he be back?”
“I asked. They said they didn’t know.”
“Shit,” Ryan breathed. “Please get me Secretary Adler.”
“Yeah, Jack,” SecState said a few seconds later.
“He’s dodging my call, Scott.”
“Xu?”
“Yeah.”
“Not surprising. They—the Chinese Politburo—don’t trust him to talk on his own without a script.”
Like Arnie and me, Ryan thought with a mixture of anger and humor. “Okay, what’s it mean, Scott?”
“Nothing good, Jack,” Adler replied. “Nothing good.”
“So, what do we do now?”
“Diplomatically, there’s not much we can do. We’ve sent them a stiff note, and they haven’t answered. Your position vis-à-vis them and the Russian situation is as clear as we can make it. They know what we’re thinking. If they don’t want to talk to us, it means they don’t care anymore.”
“Shit.”
“That’s right,” the Secretary of State agreed.
“You’re telling me we can’t stop it?”
“Correct.” Adler’s tone was matter-of-fact.
“Okay, what else?”
“We tell our civilians to get the hell out of China. We’re set up to do that here.”
“Okay, do it,” Ryan ordered, with a sudden flip of his stomach.
“Right.”
“I’ll get back to you.” Ryan switched lines and punched the button for the Secretary of Defense.
“Yeah,” Tony Bretano answered.
“It looks like it’s going to happen,” Ryan told him.
“Okay, I’ll alert all the CINCs.”
In a matter of minutes, FLASH traffic was dispatched to each of the commanders-in-chief of independent commands. There were many of them, but at the moment the most important was CINCPAC, Admiral Bart Mancuso in Pearl Harbor. It was just after three in the morning when the STU next to his bed started chirping.
“This is Admiral Mancuso,” he said, more than half asleep.
“Sir, this is the watch officer. We have a war warning from Washington. China. ‘Expect the commencement of hostilities between the PRC and the Russian Federation to commence within the next twenty-four hours. You are directed to take all measures consistent with the safety of your command.’ Signed Bretano, SecDef, sir,” the lieutenant commander told him.
Mancuso already had both feet on the floor of the bedroom. “Okay, get my staff together. I’ll be in the office in ten minutes.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
The chief petty officer assigned to drive him was already outside the front door, and Mancuso noted the presence of four armed Marines in plain sight. The senior of them saluted while the others studiously looked outward at a threat that probably wasn’t there ... but might be. Minutes later, he walked into his hilltop headquarters overlooking the naval base. Brigadier General Lahr was there, waiting for him.
“How’d you get in so fast?” CINCPAC asked him.
“Just happened to be in the neighborhood, Admiral,” the J-2 told him. He followed Mancuso into the inner office.
“What’s happening?”
“The President tried to phone Premier Xu, but he didn’t take the call. Not a good sign from our Chinese brethren,” the theater intelligence officer observed.
“Okay, what’s John Chinaman doing?” Mancuso asked, as a steward’s mate brought in coffee.
“Not much in our area of direct interest, but he’s got a hell of a lot of combat power deployed in the Shenyang Military District, most of it right up on the Amur River.” Lahr set up a map stand and started moving his hand on the acetate overlay, which had a lot of red markings on it. For the first time in his memory, Mancuso saw Russian units drawn in blue, which was the “friendly” color. It was too surprising to comment on.
“What are we doing?”
“We’re moving a lot of air assets into Siberia. The shooters are here at Suntar. Reconnaissance assets back here at Zhigansk. The Dark Stars ought to be up and flying soon. It’ll be the first time we’ve deployed ’em in a real shooting war, and the Air Force has high hopes for them. We have some satellite overheads that show where the Chinese are. They’ve camouflaged their heavy gear, but the Lacrosse imagery sees right through the nets.”
“And?”
“And it’s over half a million men, five Group-A mechanized armies. That’s one armored division, two mechanized infantry, and one motorized infantry each, plus attachments that belong directly to the army commander. The forces deployed are heavy in tanks and APCs, fair in artillery, but light in helicopters. The air assets belong to somebody else. Their command structure for coordinating air and ground isn’t as streamlined as it ought to be, and their air forces aren’t very good by our standards, but their numbers are better than the Russians’. Manpower-wise, the Chinese have a huge advantage on the ground. The Russians have space to play with, but if it comes down to a slugging match, bet your money on the People’s Liberation Army.”
“And at sea?”
“Their navy doesn’t have much out of port at the moment, but overheads show they’re lighting up their boilers alongside. I would expect them to surge some ships out. Expect them to stay close in, defensive posture, deployment just to keep their coast clear.”
Mancuso didn’t have to ask what he had out. Seventh Fleet was pretty much out to sea after the warnings from previous weeks. His carriers were heading west. He had a total of six submarines camped out on the Chinese coast, and his surface forces were spun up. If the People’s Liberation Army Navy wanted to play, they’d regret it.
“Orders?”
“Self-defense only at this point,” Lahr said.
“Okay, we’ll close to within two hundred fifty miles of their coast minimum for surface ships. Keep the carriers an additional hundred back for now. The submarines can close in and shadow any PLAN forces at will, but no shooting unless attacked, and I don’t want anyone counter-detected. The Chinese have that one reconsat up. I don’t want it to see anything painted gray.” Dodging a single reconnaissance satellite wasn’t all that difficult, since it was entirely predictable in course and speed. You could even keep out of the way of two. When the number got to three, things became difficult.
In the Navy, the day never starts because the day never ends, but that wasn’t true for a ship sitting in wooden blocks. Then things changed, if not to an eight-hour day, then at least to a semi-civilian job where most of the crew lived at home and drove in every morning (for the most part) to do their jobs. That was principally preventive maintenance, which is one of the U.S. Navy’s religions. It was the same for Al Gregory; in his case, he drove his rented car in from the Norfolk motel and blew a kiss at the rent-a-cop at the guard shack, who waved everyone in. Once there had been armed Marines at the gates, but they’d gone away when the Navy had been stripped of its tactical nuclear weapons. There were still some nukes at the Yorktown ordnance station, because the Trident warheads hadn’t yet all been disassembled out at Pantex in Texas, and some still occupied their mainly empty bunkers up on the York River, awaiting shipment west for final disposal. But not at Norfolk, and the ships that had guards mainly depended on sailors carrying Beretta M9 pistols which they might, or might not, know how to use properly. That was the case on USS Gettysburg, whose sailors recognized Gregory by sight and waved him aboard with a smile and a greeting.
“Hey, Doc,” Senior Chief Leek said, when the civilian came into CIC. He pointed to the coffee urn. The Navy’s real fuel was coffee, not distillate fuel, at least as far as the chiefs were concerned.
“So, anything good happening?”
“Well, they’re going to put a new wheel on today.”
“Wheel?”
“Propeller,” Leek explained. “Controllable pitch, reversible screw, made of high-grade manganese-bronze. They’re made up in Philadelphia, I think. It’s interesting to watch how they do it, long as they don’t drop the son of a bitch.”
“What about your toy shop?”
“Fully functional, Doc. The last replacement board went in twenty minutes ago, didn’t it, Mr. Olson?” The senior chief addressed his assistant CIC officer, who came wandering out of the darkness and into view. “Mr. Olson, this here’s Dr. Gregory from TRW.”
“Hello,” the young officer said, stretching his hand out. Gregory took it.
“Dartmouth, right?”
“Yep, physics and mathematics. You?”
“West Point and Stony Brook, math,” Gregory said.
“Hudson High?” Chief Leek asked. “You never told me that.”
“Hell, I even did Ranger School between second- and first-class years,” he told the surprised sailors. People looked at him and often thought “p-ssy.” He enjoyed surprising them. “Jump School, too. Did nineteen jumps, back when I was young and foolish.”
“Then you went into SDI, I gather,” Olson observed, getting himself some CIC coffee. The black-gang coffee, from the ship’s engineers, was traditionally the best on any ship, but this wasn’t bad.
“Yeah, spent a lot of years in that, but it all kinda fizzled out, and TRW hired me away before I made bird. When you were at Dartmouth, Bob Jastrow ran the department?”
“Yeah, he was involved in SDI, too, wasn’t he?”
Gregory nodded. “Yeah, Bob’s pretty smart.” In his lexicon, pretty smart meant doing the calculus in your head.
“What do you do at TRW?”
“I’m heading up the SAM project at the moment, from my SDI work, but they lend me out a lot to other stuff. I mainly do software and the theoretical engineering.”
“And you’re playing with our SM-2s now?”
“Yeah, I’ve got a software fix for one of the problems. Works on the ’puter, anyway, and the next job’s reprogramming the seeker heads on the Block IVs.”
“How you going to do that?”
“Come on over and I’ll show you,” Gregory said. He and Olson wandered to a desk, with the chief in tow. “The trick is fixing the way the laser nutates. Here’s how the software works ...” This started an hour’s worth of discussion, and Senior Chief Leek got to watch a professional software geek explaining his craft to a gifted amateur. Next they’d have to sell all this to the Combat Systems Officer—“Weps”—before they could run the first computer simulations, but it looked to Leek as though Olson was pretty well sold already. Then they’d have to get the ship back in the water to see if all this bullshit actually worked.
The sleep had worked, Bondarenko told himself. Thirteen hours, and he hadn’t even awakened to relieve his bladder—so, he must have really needed it. Then and there he decided that Colonel Aliyev would screen successfully for general’s stars.
He walked into his evening staff meeting feeling pretty good, until he saw the looks on their faces.
“Well?” he asked, taking his seat.
“Nothing new to report,” Colonel Tolkunov reported for the intelligence staff. “Our aerial photos show little, but we know they’re there, and they’re still not using their radios at all. Presumably they have a lot of phone lines laid. There are scattered reports of people with binoculars on the southern hilltops. That’s all. But they’re ready, and it could start at any time—oh, yes, just got this from Moscow,” the G-2 said. “The Federal Security Service arrested one K. I. Suvorov on suspicion of conspiring to assassinate President Grushavoy.”
“What?” Aliyev asked.
“Just a one-line dispatch with no elaboration. It could mean many things, none of them good,” the intelligence officer told them. “But nothing definite either.”
“An attempt to unsettle our political leadership? That’s an act of war,” Bondarenko said. He decided he had to call Sergey Golovko himself about that one!
“Operations?” he asked next.
“The 265th Motor Rifle is standing-to. Our air-defense radars are all up and operating. We have interceptor aircraft flying combat air patrol within twenty kilometers of the border. The border defenses are on full alert, and the reserve formation—”
“Have a name for it yet?” the commanding general asked.
“BOYAR,” Colonel Aliyev answered. “We have three companies of motorized infantry deployed to evacuate the border troops if necessary, the rest are out of their depot and working up north of Never. They’ve done gunnery all day.”
“And?”
“And for reservists they did acceptably,” Aliyev answered. Bondarenko didn’t ask what that meant, partly because he was afraid to.
“Anything else we can do? I want ideas, comrades,” General Bondarenko said. But all he saw were headshakes. “Very well. I’m going to get some dinner. If anything happens, I want to know about it. Anything at all, comrades.” This generated nods, and he walked back to his quarters. There he got on the phone.
“Greetings, General,” Golovko said. It was still afternoon in Moscow. “How are things at your end?”
“Tense, Comrade Chairman. What can you tell me of this attempt on the president?”
“We arrested a chap named Suvorov earlier today. We’re interrogating him and one other right now. We believe that he was an agent of the Chinese Ministry of State Security, and we believe also that he was conspiring to kill Eduard Petrovich.”
“So, in addition to preparing an invasion, they also wish to cripple our political leadership?”
“So it would seem,” Golovko agreed gravely.
“Why weren’t we given fuller information?” Far East demanded.
“You weren’t?” The chairman sounded surprised.
“No!” Bondarenko nearly shouted.
“That was an error. I am sorry, Gennady losifovich. Now, you tell me: Are you ready?”
“All of our forces are at maximum alert, but the correlation of forces is adverse in the extreme.”
“Can you stop them?”
“If you give me more forces, probably yes. If you do not, probably no. What help can I expect?”
“We have three motor-rifle divisions on trains at this moment crossing the Urals. We have additional air power heading to you, and the Americans are beginning to arrive. What is your plan?”
“I will not try to stop them at the border. That would merely cost me all of my troops to little gain. I will let the Chinese in and let them march north. I will harass them as much as possible, and then when they are well within our borders, I will kill the body of the snake and watch the head die. If, that is, you give me the support I need.”
“We are working on it. The Americans are being very helpful. One of their tank divisions is now approaching Poland on trains. We’ll send them right through to where you are.”
“What units?”
“Their First Tank division, commanded by a Negro chap named Diggs.”
“Marion Diggs? I know him.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, he commanded their National Training Center and also commanded the force they deployed to the Saudi kingdom last year. He’s excellent. When will he arrive?”
“Five days, I should imagine. You’ll have three Russian divisions well before then. Will that be enough, Gennady?”
“I do not know,” Bondarenko replied. “We have not yet taken the measure of the Chinese. Their air power worries me most of all. If they attack our railhead at Chita, deploying our reinforcements could be very difficult.” Bondarenko paused. “We are well set up to move forces laterally, west to east, but to stop them we need to move them northeast from their drop-off points. It will be largely a race to see who can go north faster. The Chinese will also be using infantry to wall off the western flank of their advance. I’ve been training my men hard. They’re getting better, but I need more time and more men. Is there any way to slow them down politically?”
“All political approaches have been ignored. They pretend nothing untoward is happening. The Americans have approached them as well, in hope of discouraging them, but to no avail.”
“So, it comes to a test of arms?”
“Probably,” Golovko agreed. “You’re our best man, Gennady Iosifovich. We believe in you, and you will have all the support we can muster.”
“Very well,” the general replied, wondering if it would be enough. “I will let you know of any developments here.”
General Bondarenko knew that a proper general—the sort they had in movies, that is—would now eat the combat rations his men were having, but no, he’d eat the best food available because he needed his strength, and false modesty would not impress his men at all. He did refrain from alcohol, which was probably more than his sergeants and privates were doing. The Russian soldier loves his vodka, and the reservists had probably all brought their own bottles to ease the chill of the nights—such would be the spoken excuse. He could have issued an order forbidding it, but there was little sense in drafting an order that his men would ignore. It only undermined discipline, and discipline was something he needed. That would have to come from within his men. The great unknown, as Bondarenko thought of it. When Hitler had struck Russia in 1941—well, it was part of Russian mythology, how the ordinary men of the land had risen up with ferocious determination. From the first day of the war, the courage of the Russian soldier had given the Germans pause. Their battlefield skills might have been lacking, but never their courage. For Bondarenko, both were needed; a skillful man need not be all that brave, because skill would defeat what bravery would only defy. Training. It was always training. He yearned to train the Russian soldier as the Americans trained their men. Above all, to train them to think—to encourage them to think. A thinking German soldier had nearly destroyed the Soviet Union—how close it had been was something the movies never admitted, and it was hard enough to learn about it at the General Staff academies, but three times it had been devilishly close, and for some reason the gods of war had sided with Mother Russia on all three occasions.
What would those gods do now? That was the question. Would his men be up to the task? Would he be up to the task? It was his name that would be remembered, for good or ill, not those of the private soldiers carrying the AK-47 rifles and driving the tanks and infantry carriers. Gennady Iosifovich Bondarenko, general-colonel of the Russian Army, commander-in-chief Far East, hero or fool? Which would it be? Would future military students study his actions and cluck their tongues at his stupidity or shake their heads in admiration of his brilliant maneuvers?
It would have been better to be a colonel again, close to the men of his regiment, even carrying a rifle of his own as he’d done at Dushanbe all those years before, to take a personal part in the battle, and take direct fire at enemies he could see with his own eyes. That was what came back to him now, the battle against the Afghans, defending that missited apartment block in the snow and the darkness. He’d earned his medals that day, but medals were always things of the past. People respected him for them, even his fellow soldiers, the pretty ribbons and metal stars and medallions that hung from them, but what did they mean, really? Would he find the courage he needed to be a commander? He was sure here and now that that sort of courage was harder to find than the sort that came from mere survival instinct, the kind that was generated in the face of armed men who wished to steal your life away.
It was so easy to look into the indeterminate future with confidence, to know what had to be done, to suggest and insist in a peaceful conference room. But today he was in his quarters, in command of a largely paper army that happened to be facing a real army composed of men and steel, and if he failed to deal with it, his name would be cursed for all time. Historians would examine his character and his record and say, well, yes, he was a brave colonel, and even an adequate theoretician, but when it came to a real fight, he was unequal to the task. And if he failed, men would die, and the nation he’d sworn to defend thirty years before would suffer, if not by his hand, then by his responsibility.
And so General Bondarenko looked at his plate of food and didn’t eat, just pushed the food about with his fork, and wished for the tumbler of vodka that his character denied him.
General Peng Xi-Wang was finishing up what he expected to be his last proper meal for some weeks. He’d miss the long-grain rice that was not part of combat rations—he didn’t know why that was so: The general who ran the industrial empire that prepared rations for the front-line soldiers had never explained it to him, though Peng was sure that he never ate those horrid packaged foods himself. He had a staff to taste-test, after all. Peng lit an after-dinner smoke and enjoyed a small sip of rice wine. It would be the last of those for a while, too. His last pre-combat meal completed, Peng rose and donned his tunic. The gilt shoulderboards showed his rank as three stars and a wreath.
Outside his command trailer, his subordinates waited. When he came out, they snapped to attention and saluted as one man, and Peng saluted back. Foremost was Colonel Wa Cheng-Gong, his operations officer. Wa was aptly named. Cheng-Gong, his given name, meant “success.”
“So, Wa, are we ready?”
“Entirely ready, Comrade General.”
“Then let us go and see.” Peng led them off to his personal Type 90 command-post vehicle. Cramped inside, even for people of small size, it was further crowded by banks of FM radios, which fed the ten-meter-tall radio masts at the vehicle’s four corners. There was scarcely room for the folding map table, but his battle staff of six could work in there, even when on the move. The driver and gunner were both junior officers, not enlisted men.
The turbocharged diesel caught at once, and the vehicle lurched toward the front. Inside, the map table was already down, and the operations officer showed their position and their course to men who already knew it. The large roof hatch was opened to vent the smoke. Every man aboard was smoking a cigarette now.
Hear that?” Senior Lieutenant Valeriy Mikhailovich Komanov had his head outside the top hatch of the tank turret that composed the business end of his bunker. It was the turret of an old—ancient—JS-3 tank. Once the most fearsome part of the world’s heaviest main-battle tank, this turret had never gone anywhere except to turn around, its already thick armor upgraded by an additional twenty centimeters of applique steel. As part of a bunker, it was only marginally slower than the original tank, which had been underpowered at best, but the monster 122-mm gun still worked, and worked even better here, because underneath it was not the cramped confines of a tank hull, but rather a spacious concrete structure which gave the crewmen room to move and turn around. That arrangement cut the reloading speed of the gun by more than half, and didn’t hurt accuracy either, because this turret had better optics. Lieutenant Komanov was, notionally, a tanker, and his platoon here was twelve tanks instead of the normal three, because these didn’t move. Ordinarily, it was not demanding duty, commanding twelve six-man crews, who didn’t go anywhere except to the privy, and they even got to practice their gunnery at a duplicate of this emplacement at a range located twenty kilometers away. They’d been doing that lately, in fact, at the orders of their new commanding general, and neither Komanov nor his men minded, because for every soldier in the world, shooting is fun, and the bigger the gun, the greater the enjoyment. Their 122-mms had a relatively slow muzzle velocity, but the shell was large enough to compensate for it. Lately, they’d gotten to shoot at worn-out old T-55s and blown the turret off each one with a single hit, though getting the single hit had taken the crews, on the average, 2.7 shots fired.
They were on alert now, a fact which their eager young lieutenant was taking seriously. He’d even had his men out running every morning for the last two weeks, not the most pleasant of activities for soldiers detailed to sit inside concrete emplacements for their two years of conscripted service. It wasn’t easy to keep their edge. One naturally felt secure in underground concrete structures capped with thick steel and surrounded with bushes which made their bunker invisible from fifty meters away. Theirs was the rearmost of the platoons, sitting on the south slope of Hill 432—its summit was 432 meters high—facing the north side of the first rank of hills over the Amur Valley. Those hills were a lot shorter than the one they were on, and also had bunkers on them, but those bunkers were fakes—not that you could tell without going inside, because they’d also been made of old tank turrets—in their case from truly ancient KV-2s that had fought the Germans before rusting in retirement—set in concrete boxes. The additional height of their hill meant that they could see into China, whose territory started less than four kilometers away. And that was close enough to hear things on a calm night.
Especially if the thing they heard was a few hundred diesel engines starting up at once.
“Engines,” agreed Komanov’s sergeant. “A f*cking lot of them.”
The lieutenant hopped down from his perch inside the turret and walked the three steps to the phone switchboard. He lifted the receiver and punched the button to the regimental command post, ten kilometers north.
“This is Post Five Six Alfa. We can hear engines to our south. It sounds like tank engines, a lot of them.”
“Can you see anything?” the regimental commander asked.
“No, Comrade Colonel. But the sound is unmistakable.”
“Very well. Keep me informed.”
“Yes, comrade. Out.” Komanov set the phone back in its place. His most-forward bunker was Post Five Nine, on the south slope of the first rank of hills. He punched that button.
“This is Lieutenant Komanov. Can you see or hear anything?”
“We see nothing,” the corporal there answered. “But we hear tank engines.”
“You see nothing?” “Nothing, Comrade Lieutenant,” Corporal Vladimirov responded positively.
“Are you ready?”
“We are fully ready,” Vladimirov assured him. “We are watching the south.”
“Keep me informed,” Komanov ordered, unnecessarily. His men were alert and standing-to. He looked around. He had a total of two hundred rounds for his main gun, all in racks within easy reach of the turret. His loader and gunner were at their posts, the former scanning the terrain with optical sights better than his own officer’s binoculars. His reserve crewmen were just sitting in their chairs, waiting for someone to die. The door to the escape tunnel was open. A hundred meters through that was a BTR-60 eight-wheeled armored personnel carrier ready to get them the hell away, though his men didn’t expect to make use of it. Their post was impregnable, wasn’t it? They had the best part of a meter of steel on the gun turret, and three meters of reinforced concrete, with a meter of dirt atop it—and besides, they were hidden in a bush. You couldn’t hit what you couldn’t see, could you? And the Chinks had slitty little eyes and couldn’t see very well, could they? Like all the men in this crew, Komanov was a European Russian, though there were Asians under his command. This part of his country was a mishmash of nationalities and languages, though all had learned Russian, if not at home, then in school.
“Movement,” the gunner said. “Movement on Rice Ridge.” That was what they called the first ridge line in Chinese territory. “Infantrymen.”
“You’re sure they’re soldiers?” Komanov asked.
“I suppose they might be shepherds, but I don’t see any sheep, Comrade Lieutenant.” The gunner had a wry sense of humor.
“Move,” the lieutenant told the crewman who’d taken his place in the command hatch. He reclaimed the tank commander’s seat. “Get me the headset,” he ordered next. Now he’d be connected to the phone system with a simple push-button microphone. With that, he could talk to his other eleven crews or to regiment. But Komanov didn’t don the earphones just yet. He wanted his ears clear. The night was still, the winds calm, just a few gentle breezes. They were a good distance from any real settlement, and so there were no sounds of traffic to interfere. Then he leveled his binoculars on the far ridge. Yes, there was the ghostly suggestion of movement there, almost like seeing someone’s hair blowing in the wind. But it wasn’t hair. It could only be people. And as his gunner had observed, they would not be shepherds.
For ten years, the officers in the border bunkers had cried out for low-light goggles like those issued to the Spetsnaz and other elite formations, but, no, they were too expensive for low-priority posts, and so such things were only seen here when some special inspection force came through, just long enough for the regular troops to drool over them. No, they were supposed to let their eyes adapt to the darkness ... as though they think we’re cats, Komanov thought. But all the interior battle lights in the bunkers were red, and that helped. He’d forbidden the use of white lights inside the post for the past week.
Brothers of this tank turret had first been produced in late 1944—the JS-3 had stayed in production for many years, as though no one had summoned the courage to stop producing something with the name Iosif Stalin on it, he thought. Some of them had rolled into Germany, invulnerable to anything the Fritzes had deployed. And the same tanks had given serious headaches to the Israelis, with their American- and English-built tanks, as well.
“This is Post Fifty. We have a lot of movement, looks like infantry, on the north slope of Rice Ridge. Estimate regimental strength,” his earphones crackled.
“How many high-explosive shells do we have?” Komanov asked.
“Thirty-five,” the loader answered.
And that was a goodly amount. And there were fifteen heavy guns within range of Rice Ridge, all of them old ML- 20 152-mm howitzers, all sitting on concrete pads next to massive ammo bunkers. Komanov checked his watch. Almost three-thirty. Ninety minutes to first light. The sky was cloudless. He could look up and see stars such as they didn’t have in Moscow, with all its atmospheric pollution. No, the Siberian sky was clear and clean, and above his head was an ocean of light made brighter still by a full moon still high in the western sky. He focused his eyes through his binoculars again. Yes, there was movement on Rice Ridge.
So?” Peng asked.
“At your command,” Wa replied.
Peng and his staff were forward of their guns, the better to see the effect of their fire.
But seventy thousand feet over General Peng’s head was Marilyn Monroe. Each of the Dark Star drones had a name attached to it, and given the official name of the platform, the crews had chosen the names of movie stars, all of them, of course, of the female persuasion. This one even had a copy of the movie star’s Playboy centerfold from 1953 skillfully painted on the nose, but the eyes looking down from the stealthy UAV were electronic and multi-spectrum rather than china blue. Inside the fiberglass nosecone, a directional antenna cross-linked the “take” to a satellite, which then distributed it to many places. The nearest was Zhigansk. The farthest was Fort Belvoir, Virginia, within spitting distance of Washington, D.C., and that one sent its feed via fiberoptic cable to any number of classified locations. Unlike most spy systems, this one showed real-time movie-type imagery.
“Looks like they’re getting ready, sir,” an Army staff sergeant observed to his immediate boss, a captain. And sure enough, you could see soldiers ramming shells into the breeches of their field pieces, followed by the smaller cloth bags that contained the propellant. Then the breeches were slammed shut, and the guns elevated. The 30-30-class blank cartridges were inserted into the firing ports of the breech-blocks, and the guns were fully ready. The last step was called “pulling the string,” and was fairly accurate. You just jerked the lanyard rope to fire the blank cartridge and that ignited the powder bags, and then the shell went north at high speed.
“How many guns total, Sergeant?” the captain asked.
“A whole goddamned pisspot full, sir.”
“I can see that. What about a number?” the officer asked.
“North of six hundred, and that’s just in this here sector, Cap’n. Plus four hundred mobile rocket launchers.”
“We spotted air assets yet?”
“No, sir. The Chinese aren’t nighttime flyers yet, least not for bombing.”
Eagle Seven to Zebra, over,” the AWACS senior controller radioed back to Zhigansk.
“Zebra to Seven, reading you five-by-five,” the major running the ground base replied.
“We got bogies, call it thirty-two coming north out of Siping, estimate they’re Sierra-Uniform Two-Sevens.”
“Makes sense,” the major on the ground told his wing commander. “Siping’s their 667th Regiment. That’s their best in terms of aircraft, and stick-time. That’s their varsity, Colonel.”
“Who do we have to meet them?”
“Our Russian friends out of Nelkan. Nearest American birds are well north and—”
“—and we haven’t got orders to engage anybody yet,” the colonel agreed. “Okay, let’s get the Russians alerted.”
“Eagle Seven to Black Falcon Ten, we have Chinese fighters three hundred kilometers bearing one-nine-six your position, angels thirty, speed five hundred knots. They’re still over Chinese territory, but not for much longer.”
“Understood,” the Russian captain responded. “Give me a vector.”
“Recommend intercept vector two-zero-zero,” the American controller said. His spoken Russian was pretty good. “Maintain current speed and altitude.”
“Roger.”
On the E-3B’s radar displays, the Russian Su-27s turned to head for the Chinese Su-27s. The Russians would have radar contact in about nine minutes.
Sir, this don’t look real nice,” another major in Zhigansk said to his general.
“Then it’s time to get a warning out,” the USAF two-star agreed. He lifted a phone that went to the Russian regional command post. There hadn’t as yet been time to get a proper downlink to them.
General, a call from the American technical mission at Zhigansk,” Tolkunov said.
“This is General Bondarenko.”
“Hello, this is Major General Gus Wallace. I just set up the reconnaissance shop here. We just put up a stealthy recon-drone over the Russian Chinese border at ...” He read off the coordinates. “We show people getting ready to fire some artillery at you, General.”
“How much?” Bondarenko asked.
“Most I’ve ever seen, upwards of a thousand guns total. I hope your people are hunkered down, buddy. The whole damned world’s about to land on ’em.”
“What can you do to help us?” Bondarenko asked.
“My orders are not to take action until they start shooting,” the American replied. “When that happens, I can start putting fighters up, but not much in the way of bombs. We hardly have any to drop,” Wallace reported. “I have an AWACS up now, supporting your fighters in the Chulman area, but that’s all for now. We have a C-130 ferrying you a downlink tomorrow so that we can get you some intelligence directly. Anyway, be warned, General, it looks here as though the Chinese are going to launch their attack momentarily.”
“Thank you, General Wallace.” Bondarenko hung up and looked at his staff. “He says it’s going to start at any moment.”
And so it did. Lieutenant Komanov saw it first. The line of hills his men called Rice Ridge was suddenly backlit by yellow flame that could only be the muzzle flashes of numerous field guns. Then came the upward-flying meteor shapes of artillery rockets.
“Here it comes,” he told his men. Unsurprisingly, he kept his head up so that he could see. His head, he reasoned, was a small target. Before the shells landed, he felt the impact of their firing; the rumble came through the ground like a distant earthquake, causing his loader to mutter, “Oh, shit,” probably the universal observation of men in their situation.
“Get me regiment,” Komanov ordered.
“Yes, Lieutenant,” the voice answered.
“We are under attack, Comrade Colonel, massive artillery fire to the south. Guns and rockets are coming our—”
Then the first impacts came, mainly near the river, well to his south. The exploding shells were not bright, but like little sparks of light that fountained dirt upward, followed by the noise. That did sound like an earthquake. Komanov had heard artillery fire before, and seen what the shells do at the far end, but this was as different from that as an exploding oil tank was from a cigarette lighter.
“Comrade Colonel, our country is at war,” Post Five Six Alfa reported to command. “I can’t see enemy troop movement yet, but they’re coming.”
“Do you have any targets?” regiment asked.
“No, none at this time.” He looked down into the bunker. His various positions could just give a direction to a target, and when another confirmed it and called in its own vector, they’d have a pre-plotted artillery target for the batteries in the rear—
—but those were being hit already. The Chinese rockets were targeted well behind him, and that’s what their targets had to be. He turned his head to see the flashes and hear the booms from ten kilometers back. A moment later, there was a fountaining explosion skyward. One of the first flight of Chinese rockets had gotten lucky and hit one of the artillery positions in the rear. Bad news for that gun crew, Komanov thought. The first casualties in this war. There would be many more ... perhaps including himself. Surprisingly, that thought was a distant one. Someone was attacking his country. It wasn’t a supposition or a possibility anymore. He could see it, and feel it. This was his country they were attacking. He’d grown up in this land. His parents lived here. His grandfather had fought the Germans here. His grandfather’s two brothers had, too, and both had died for their country, one west of Kiev and the other at Stalingrad. And now these Chink bastards were attacking his country, too? More than that, they were attacking him, Senior Lieutenant Valeriy Mikhailovich Komanov. These foreigners were trying to kill him, his men, and trying to steal part of his country.
Well, f*ck that! he thought.
“Load HE!” he told his loader.
“Loaded!” the private announced. They all heard the breech clang shut.
“No target, Comrade Lieutenant,” the gunner observed.
“There will be, soon enough.”
“Post Five Nine, this is Five Six Alfa. What can you see?”
“We just spotted a boat, a rubber boat, coming out of the trees on the south bank ... more, more, more, many of them, maybe a hundred, maybe more.”
“Regiment, this is Fifty-six Alfa, fire mission!” Komanov called over the phone.
The gunners ten kilometers back were at their guns, despite the falling Chinese shells and rockets that had already claimed three of the fifteen gun crews. The fire mission was called in, and the preset concentration dialed in from range books so old they might as well have been engraved in marble. In each case, the high-explosive projectile was rammed into the breech, followed by the propellant charge, and the gun cranked up and trained to the proper elevation and azimuth, and the lanyards pulled, and the first Russian counterstrokes in the war just begun were fired.
Unknown to them, fifteen kilometers away a fire-finder radar was trained on their positions. The millimeter-wave radar tracked the shells in flight and a computer plotted their launch points. The Chinese knew that the Russians had guns covering the border, and knew roughly where they would be—the performance of the guns told that tale—but not exactly where, because of the skillful Russian efforts at camouflage. In this case, those efforts didn’t matter too greatly. The calculated position of six Russian howitzers was instantly radioed to rocket launchers that were dedicated counter-battery weapons. One Type-83 launcher was detailed to each target, and each of them held four monster 273-mm rockets, each with a payload of 150 kilograms of submunitions, in this case eighty hand grenade—sized bomblets. The first rocket launched three minutes after the first Russian counter-fire salvo, and required less than two minutes of flight time from its firing point ten kilometers inside Chinese territory. Of the first six fired, five destroyed their targets, and then others, and the Russian gunfire died in less than five minutes.
Why did it stop?” Komanov asked. He’d seen a few rounds hit among the Chinese infantry just getting out of their boats on the Russian side of the river. But the shriek of shells overhead passing south had just stopped after a few minutes. ”Regiment, this is Five Six Alfa, why has our fire stopped?”
“Our guns were taking counter-battery fire from the Chinese. They’re trying to get set back up now,” was the encouraging reply. “What is your situation?”
“Position Five-Zero has taken a little fire, but not much. Mainly they’re hitting the reverse slope of the southern ridge.” That was where the fake bunkers were, and the concrete lures were fulfilling their passive mission. This line of defenses had been set up contrary to published Russian doctrine, because whoever had set them up had known that all manner of people can read books. Komanov’s own position covered a small saddle-pass through two hills, fit for advancing tanks. If the Chinese came north in force, if this was not just some sort of probe aimed at expanding their borders—they’d done that back in the late 1960s—this was a prime invasion route. The maps and the terrain decided that.
“That is good, Lieutenant. Now listen: Do not expose your positions unnecessarily. Let them in close before you open up. Very close.” That, Komanov knew, meant a hundred meters or so. He had two heavy machine guns for that eventuality. But he wanted to kill tanks. That was what his main gun had been designed to do.
“Can we expect more artillery support?” he asked his commander.
“I’ll let you know. Keep giving us target information.”
“Yes, Comrade Colonel.”
For the fighter planes, the war began when the first PLAAF crossed over the Amur. There were four Russian fighter-interceptors up, and these, just like the invaders, were Sukhoi-27. Those on both sides had been made in the same factories, but the Chinese pilots had triple the recent flight time of the defending Russians, who were outnumbered eight to one.
Countering that, however was the fact that the Russian aircraft had support from the USAF E-3B Sentry AWACS aircraft, which was guiding them to the intercept. Both sets of fighters were flying with their target-acquisition radars in standby mode. The Chinese didn’t know what was out there. The Russians did. That was a difference.
“Black Falcon Ten, this is Eagle Seven. Recommend you come right to new course two-seven-zero. I’m going to try an’ bring you up on the Chinese from their seven o’clock.” It would also keep them out of Chinese radar coverage.
“Understood, Eagle. Coming right to two-seven-zero.” The Russian flight leader spread his formation out and settled down as much as he could, with his eyes tending to look off to his left.
“Okay, Black Falcon Ten, that’s good. Your targets are now at your nine o’clock, distance thirty kilometers. Come left now to one-eight-zero.”
“Coming left,” the Russian major acknowledged. “We will try to start the attack Fox-Two,” he advised. He knew American terminology. That meant launching infrared seekers, which did not require the use of radar, and so did not warn anyone that he was in harm’s way. The Marquis of Queensberry had never been a fighter pilot.
“Roger that, Falcon. This boy’s smart,” the controller commented to his supervisor.
“That’s how you stay alive in this business,” the lieutenant colonel told the young lieutenant at the Nintendo screen.
“Okay, Falcon Ten, recommend you come left again. Targets are now fifteen kilometers ... make that seventeen kilometers to your north. You should have tone shortly.”
“Da. I have tone,” the Russian pilot reported, when he heard the warble in his headset. “Flight, prepare to fire ... Fox-Two!” Three of the four aircraft loosed a single missile each. The fourth pilot was having trouble with his IR scanner. In all cases, the blazing rocket motors wrecked their night vision, but none of the pilots looked away, as they’d been trained to do, and instead watched their missiles streak after fellow airmen who did not yet know they were under attack. It took twenty seconds, and as it turned out, two missiles were targeted on the same Chinese aircraft. That one took two hits and exploded. The second died from its single impact, and then things really got confusing. The Chinese fighters scattered on command from their commander, doing so in a preplanned and well-rehearsed maneuver, first into two groups, then into four, each of which had a piece of sky to defend. Everyone’s radar came on, and in another twenty seconds, a total of forty missiles were flying, and with this began a deadly game of chicken. The radar-homing missiles needed a radar signal to guide them, and that meant that the firing fighter could not switch off or turn away, only hope that his bird would kill its target and switch off his radar before his missile got close.
“Damn,” the lieutenant observed, in his comfortable controller’s seat in the E-3B. Two more Chinese fighters blinked into larger bogies on his screen and then started to fade, then another, but there were just too many of the Chinese air-to-air missiles, and not all of the Chinese illumination radars went down. One Russian fighter took three impacts and disintegrated. Another one limped away with severe damage, and as quickly as it had begun, this air encounter ended. Statistically, it was a Russian win, four kills for one loss, but the Chinese would claim more.
“Any chutes?” the senior controller asked over the intercom. The E-3 radar could track those, too.
“Three, maybe four ejected. Not sure who, though, not till we play the tape back. Damn, that was a quick one.”
The Russians didn’t have enough planes up to do a proper battle. Maybe next time, the colonel thought. The full capabilities of a fighter/AWACS team had never been properly demonstrated in combat, but this war held the promise to change that, and when it happened, some eyes would be opened.