Chapter 53
Deep Concerns
So, what’s happening there?” Ryan asked.
“The Chinese are seventy miles inside Russia. They have a total of eight divisions over the river, and they’re pushing north,” General Moore replied, moving a pencil across the map spread on the conference table. “They blew through the Russian border defenses pretty fast—it was essentially the Maginot Line from 1940. I wouldn’t have expected it to hold very long, but our overheads showed them punching through fairly professionally with their leading infantry formations, supported by a lot of artillery. Now they have their tanks across—about eight hundred to this point, with another thousand or so to go.”
Ryan whistled. “That many?”
“When you invade a major country, sir, you don’t do it on the cheap. The only good news at this point is that we’ve really given their air force a bloody nose.”
“AWACS and -15s?” Jackson asked.
“Right.” The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs nodded. “One of our kids made ace in a single engagement. A Colonel Winters.”
“Bronco Winters,” Jackson said. “I’ve heard the name. Fighter jock. Okay, what else?”
“Our biggest problem on the air side is going to be getting bombs to our airmen. Flying bombs in is not real efficient. I mean, you can use up a whole C-5 just to deliver half the bombs for one squadron of F-15Es, and we’ve got a lot of other things for the C-5s to do. We’re thinking about sending the bombs into Russia by train to Chita, say, and then flying them up to Suntar from there, but the Russian railroad is moving just tanks and vehicles for now, and that isn’t going to change soon. We’re trying to fight a war at the end of one railroad line. Sure, it’s double-tracked, but it’s still just one damned line. Our logistical people are already taking a lot of Maalox over this one.”
“Russian airlift capacity?” Ryan asked.
“FedEx has more,” General Moore replied. “In fact, FedEx has a lot more. We’re going to ask you to authorize call-up of the civilian reserve air fleet, Mr. President.”
“Approved,” Ryan said at once.
“And a few other little things,” Moore said. He closed his eyes. It was pushing midnight, and nobody had gotten much sleep lately. “VMH-1 is standing-to. We’re in a shooting war with a country that has nuclear weapons on ballistic launchers. So, we have to think about the possibility—remote maybe, but still a possibility—that they could launch at us. So, VMH-1 and the Air Force’s First Heli at Andrews are standing-to. We can get a chopper here to lift you and your family out in seven minutes. That concerns you, Mrs. O’Day,” Moore said to Andrea.
The President’s Principal Agent nodded. “We’re dialed in. It’s all in The Book,” she said. That nobody had opened that particular book since 1962 was beside the point. It was written down. Mrs. Price-O’Day looked a little peaked.
“You okay?” Ryan asked.
“Stomach,” she explained.
“Try some ginger?” Jack went on.
“Nothing much works for this, Dr. North tells me. Please excuse me, Mr. President.” She was embarrassed that he’d noticed her discomfort. She always wanted to be one of the boys. But the boys didn’t get pregnant, did they?
“Why don’t you drive home?”
“Sir, I—”
“Go,” Ryan said. “That’s an order. You’re a woman, and you’re pregnant. You can’t be a cop all the time, okay? Get some relief here and go. Right now.”
Special Agent Price-O’Day hesitated, but she did have an order, so she walked out the door. Another agent came in immediately.
“Machismo from a woman. What’s the goddamned world coming to?” Ryan asked the assembly.
“You’re not real liberated, Jack,” Jackson observed with a grin.
“It’s called objective circumstances, I think. She’s still a girl, even if she does carry a pistol. Cathy says she’s doing fine. This nausea stuff doesn’t last forever. Probably feels like it to her, though. Okay, General, what else?”
“Kneecap and Air Force One are on hot-pad alert ’round the clock. So, if we get a launch warning, in seven minutes or less, you and the Vice President are on choppers, five more minutes to Andrews, and three more after that you’re doing the takeoff roll. The drill is, your family goes to Air Force One and you go to Kneecap,” he concluded. Kneecap was actually the National Emergency Airborne Command Post (NEACP), but the official acronym was too hard to pronounce. Like the VC-25A that served as Air Force One, Kneecap was a converted 747 that was really just a wrapper for a bunch of radios flying in very close formation.
“Gee, that’s nice to know. What about my family?” POTUS asked.
“In these circumstances, we keep a chopper close to where your wife and kids are at all times, and then they’ll fly in whatever direction seems the safest at the moment. If that’s not Andrews, then they’ll get picked up later by a fixed-wing aircraft and taken to whatever place seems best. It’s all theoretical,” Moore explained, “but something you might as well know about.”
“Can the Russians stop the Chinese?” Ryan asked, turning his attention back to the map.
“Sir, that remains to be seen. They do have the nuclear option, but it’s not a card I would expect them to play. The Chinese do have twelve CSS-4 ICBMs. It’s essentially a duplicate of our old Titan-II liquid fuels, with a warhead estimated to be between three and five megatons.”
“City-buster?” Ryan asked.
“Correct. No counterforce capability, and there’s nothing we have left to use against it in that role anyway. The CEP on the warhead is estimated to be plus or minus a thousand meters or so. So, it’d do a city pretty well, but that’s about all.”
“Any idea where they’re targeted?” Jackson asked. Moore nodded at once.
“Yes. The missile is pretty primitive, and the silos are oriented on their targets because the missile doesn’t have much in the way of cross-range maneuverability. Two are targeted on Washington. Others on LA, San Francisco, and Chicago. Plus Moscow, Kiev, St. Petersburg. They’re all leftovers from the Bad Old Days, and they haven’t been modified in any way.”
“Any way to take them out?” Jackson asked.
“I suppose we could stage a mission with fighter or bomber aircraft and go after the silos with PGMs,” Moore allowed. “But we’d have to fly the bombs to Suntar first, and even then it’ll be rather a lengthy mission for the F- 117s.”
“What about B-2s out of Guam?” Jackson asked.
“I’m not sure they can carry the right weapons. I’ll have to check that.”
“Jack, this is something we need to think about, okay?”
“I hear you, Robby. General, have somebody look into this, okay?”
“Yes, sir.”
Gennady Iosifovich!” General Diggs called on entering the map room.
“Marion Ivanovich!” The Russian came over to take his hand, followed by a hug. He even kissed his guest, in the Russian fashion, and Diggs flinched from this, in the American fashion. “In!”
And Diggs waited for ten seconds: “Out!” Both men shared the laugh of an insider’s joke.
“The turtle bordello is still there?”
“It was the last time I looked, Gennady.” Then Diggs had to explain to the others. “Out at Fort Irwin—we collected all the desert tortoises and put them in a safe place so the tanks wouldn’t squish ’em and piss off the tree-huggers. I suppose they’re still in there making little turtles, but the damned things screw so slow they must fall asleep doing it.”
“I have told that story many times, Marion.” Then the Russian turned serious. “I am glad to see you. I will be more glad to see your division.”
“How bad is it?”
“It is not good. Come.” They walked over to the big wall map. “These are their positions as of thirty minutes ago.”
“How are you keeping track of them?”
“We now have your Dark Star invisible drones, and I have a smart young captain on the ground watching them as well.”
“That far ...” Diggs said. Colonel Masterman was right beside him now. “Duke?” Then he looked at his Russian host. “This is Colonel Masterman, my G-3. His last job was as a squadron commander in the Tenth Cav.”
“Buffalo Soldier, yes?”
“Yes, sir,” Masterman confirmed with a nod, but his eyes didn’t leave the map. “Ambitious bastards, aren’t they?”
“Their first objective will be here,” Colonel Aliyev said, using a pointer. “This is the Gogol Gold Strike.”
“Well, hell, if you’re gonna steal something, might as well be a gold mine, right?” Duke asked rhetorically. “What do you have to stop them with?”
“Two-Six-Five Motor Rifle is here.” Aliyev pointed.
“Full strength?”
“Not quite, but we’ve been training them up. We have four more motor-rifle divisions en route. The first arrives at Chita tomorrow noon.” Aliyev’s voice was a little too optimistic for the situation. He didn’t want to show weakness to Americans.
“That’s still a long way to move,” Masterman observed. He looked over at his boss.
“What are you planning, Gennady?”
“I want to take the four Russian divisions north to link up with the 265th, and stop them about here. Then, perhaps, we will use your forces to cross east through here and cut them off.”
Now it wasn’t the Chinese who were being ambitious, both Diggs and Masterman thought. Moving First Infantry Division (Mechanized) from Fort Riley, Kansas, to Fort Carson, Colorado, would have been about the same distance, but it would have been on flat ground and against no opposition. Here that task would involve a lot of hills and serious resistance. Those factors did make a difference, the American officers thought.
“No serious contact yet?”
Bondarenko shook his head. “No, I’m keeping my mechanized forces well away from them. The Chinese are advancing against no opposition.”
“You want ’em to fall asleep, get sloppy?” Masterman asked.
“Da, better that they should get overconfident.”
The American colonel nodded. That made good sense, and as always, war was as much a psychological game as a physical one. “If we jump off the trains at Chita, it’s still a long-approach march to where you want us, General.”
“What about fuel?” Colonel Douglas asked.
“That is the one thing we have plenty of,” answered Colonel Aliyev. “The blue spots on the map, fuel storage—it is the same as your Number Two Diesel.”
“How much?” Douglas asked.
“At each fuel depot, one billion two hundred fifty million liters.”
“Shit!” Douglas observed. “That much?”
Aliyev explained, “The fuel depots were established to support a large mobile force in a border conflict. They were built in the time of Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev. Huge concrete-and-steel storage tanks, all underground, well hidden.”
“They must be,” Mitch Turner observed. “I’ve never been briefed on them.”
“So, we evaded even your satellite photos, yes?” That pleased the Russian. “Each depot is manned by a force of twenty engineers, with ample electric pumps.”
“I like the locations,” Masterman said. “What’s this unit here?”
“That is BOYAR, a reserve mechanized force. The men have just been called up. Their weapons are from a hidden equipment-storage bunker. It’s a short division, old equipment—T- 55s and such—but serviceable. We’re keeping that force hidden,” Aliyev said.
The American G-3 arched his eyebrows. Maybe they were outmanned, but they weren’t dumb. That BOYAR force was in a particularly interesting place ... if Ivan could make proper use of it. Their overall operational concept looked good—theoretically. A lot of soldiers could come up with good ideas. The problem was executing them. Did the Russians have the ability to do that? Russia’s military theorists were as good as any the world had ever seen—good enough that the United States Army regularly stole their ideas. The problem was that the U.S. Army could apply those theories to a real battlefield, and the Russians could not.
“How are your people handling this?” Masterman asked.
“Our soldiers, you mean?” Aliyev asked. “The Russian soldier knows how to fight,” he assured his American counterpart.
“Hey, Colonel, I am not questioning their guts,” Duke assured his host. “How’s their spirit, for one thing?”
Bondarenko handled that one: “Yesterday I had to face one of my young officers, Komanov, from the border defenses. He was furious that we were unable to give him the support he needed to defeat the Chinese. And I was ashamed,” the general admitted to his guests. “My men have the spirit. Their training is lacking—I just got here a few months ago, and my changes have barely begun to take effect. But, you will see, the Russian soldier has always risen to the occasion, and he will today—if we here are worthy of him.”
Masterman didn’t share a look with his boss. Diggs had spoken well of this Russian general, and Diggs was both a good operational soldier and a good judge of men. But the Russian had just admitted that his men weren’t trained up as well as they ought to be. The good news was that on the battlefield, men learned the soldier’s trade rapidly. The bad news was that the battlefield was the most brutal Darwinian environment on the face of the planet. Some men would learn, but others would die in the process, and the Russians didn’t have all that many they could afford to lose. This wasn’t 1941, and they weren’t fighting with half their population base this time around.
“You’re going to want us to move out fast when the trains drop us off at Chita?” Tony Welch asked. He was the divisional chief of staff.
“Yes,” Aliyev confirmed.
“Okay, well, then I need to get down there and look over the facilities. What about fuel for our choppers?”
“Our air force bases have fuel storage similar to the diesel depots,” Aliyev told him. “Your word is infrastructure, yes? That is the one thing we have much of. When will they arrive?”
“The Air Force is still working that out. They’re going to fly our aviation brigade in. Apaches first. Dick Boyle’s chomping at the bit.”
“We will be very pleased to see your attack helicopters. We have all too few of our own, and our air force is also slow delivering them.”
“Duke,” Diggs said, “get on the horn to the Air Force. We need some choppers right the hell now, just so we can get around and see what we need to see.”
“Roger,” Masterman replied.
“Let me get a satellite radio set up,” Lieutenant Colonel Garvey said, heading for the door.
Ingrid Bergman was heading south now. General Wallace wanted a better idea for the Chinese logistical tail, and now he was getting it. The People’s Republic of China was in many ways like America had been at the turn of the previous century. Things moved mainly by rail. There were no major highways as Americans understood them, but a lot of railroads. Those were efficient for moving large quantities of anything over medium-to-long distances, but they were also inflexible, and hard to repair—especially the bridges—and most of all the tunnels, and so that was what he and his targeting people were looking at. The problem was that they had few bombs to drop. None of his attack assets—mainty F-15E Strike Eagles at the moment—had flown over with bombs on their wings, and he had barely enough air-to-mud munitions for an eight-ship strike mission. It was like going to a dance and finding no girls there. The music was fine, and so was the fruit punch, but there really wasn’t anything to do. Perversely, his -15E crews didn’t mind. They got to play fighter plane, and all such people prefer shooting other airplanes down to dropping bombs on mud soldiers. It just came with the territory. The one thing he had going now was that his scarf-and-goggles troops were playing hell with the PRC air force, with over seventy confirmed kills already for not a single air-to-air loss. The advantage of having E-3B AWACS aircraft was so decisive that the enemy might as well have been flying World War I Fokkers, and the Russians were learning rapidly how to make use of E-3B support. Their fighters were good aerodynamic platforms, just lacking in legs. The Russians had never built a fighter with fuel capacity for more than about one hour’s flight time. Nor had they ever learned how to do midair refueling, as the Americans had. And so the Russian MiG and Sukhoi fighters could go up, take their instructions from the AWACS, and participate in one engagement, but then they had to return to base for gas. Half of the kills his Eagle drivers had collected so far were of Chinese fighters that had broken off their fights to RTB for gas as well. It wasn’t fair, but Wallace, like all Air Force fighter types, could hardly have cared less about being fair in combat.
But Wallace was fighting a defensive war to this point. He was successfully defending Russian airspace. He was not taking out Chinese targets, not even attacking the Chinese troops on the ground in Siberia. So, though his fighters were having a fine, successful war, they just weren’t accomplishing anything important. To that end, he lifted his satellite link to America.
“We ain’t got no bombs, General,” he told Mickey Moore.
“Well, your fellow Air Scouts are maxed out on taskings, and Mary Diggs is screaming to get some trash haulers to get him his chopper brigade moved to where he needs it.”
“Sir, this is real simple. If you want us to kill some Chinese targets, we have to have bombs. I hope I’m not going too fast for you,” Wallace added.
“Go easy, Gus,” Moore warned.
“Well, sir, maybe it just looks a little different in Washington, but where I’m sitting right now, I have missions, but not the tools to carry those missions out. So, you D.C. people can either send me the tools or rescind the missions. Your call, sir.”
“We’re working on it,” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs assured him.
Do I have any orders?” Mancuso asked the Secretary of Defense.
“Not at this time,” Bretano sold CINCPAC.
“Sir, may I ask why? The TV says we’re in a shooting war with China. Am I supposed to play or not?”
“We are considering the political ramifications,” THUNDER explained.
“Excuse me, sir?”
“You heard me.”
“Mr. Secretary, all I know about politics is voting every couple of years, but I have a lot of gray ships under my command, and they’re technically known as warships, and my country is at war.” The frustration in Mancuso’s voice was plain.
“Admiral, when the President decides what to do, you will find out. Until then, ready your command for action. It’s going to happen. I’m just not sure when.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” Mancuso hung up and looked at his subordinates. “Political ramifications,” he said. “I didn’t think Ryan was like that.”
“Sir,” Mike Lahr soothed. “Forget ‘political’ and think ‘psychological,’ okay? Maybe Secretary Bretano just used the wrong word. Maybe the idea is to hit them when it’ll do the most good—because we’re messing with their heads, sir, remember?”
“You think so?”
“Remember who the Vice President is? He’s one of us, Admiral. And President Ryan isn’t a p-ssy, is he?”
“Well ... no, not that I recall,” CINCPAC said, remembering the first time he’d met the guy, and the shoot-out he’d had aboard Red October. No, Jack Ryan wasn’t a p-ssy. “So, what do you suppose he’s thinking?”
“The Chinese have a land war going on—air and land, anyway. Nothing’s happening at sea. They may not expect anything to happen at sea. But they are surging some ships out, just to establish a defense line for the mainland. If we get orders to hit those ships, the purpose will be to make a psychological impact. So, let’s plan along those lines, shall we? Meanwhile, we keep getting more assets in place.”
“Right.” Mancuso nodded and turned to face the wall. Pacific Fleet was nearly all west of the dateline now, and the Chinese had probably no clue where his ships were, but he knew about them. USS Tucson was camped out on 406, the single PRC ballistic-missile submarine. It was known to the west as a “Xia” class SSBN, and his intelligence people disagreed on the sub’s actual name, but “406” was the number painted on its sail, and that was how he thought of it. None of that mattered to Mancuso. The first shoot order he planned to issue would go to Tucson—to put that missile-armed sub at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. He remembered that the PRC had nuclear-tipped missiles, and those in his area of responsibility would disappear as soon as he had authorization to deal with them. USS Tucson was armed with Mark 48 ADCAP fish, and they’d do the job on that target, assuming that he was right and President Ryan wasn’t a p-ssy after all.
And so, Marshal Luo?” Zhang Han San asked.
“Things go well,” he replied at once. “We crossed the Amur River with trivial losses, captured the Russian positions in a few hours, and are now driving north.”
“Enemy opposition?”
“Light. Very light, in fact. We’re starting to wonder if the Russians have any forces deployed in sector at all. Our intelligence suggests the presence of two mechanized divisions, but if they’re there, they haven’t advanced to establish contact with us. Our forces are racing forward, making better than thirty kilometers per day. I expect to see the gold mine in seven days.”
“Is anything going badly?” Qian asked.
“Only in the air. The Americans have deployed fighters to Siberia, and as we all know, the Americans are very clever with their machines, especially the ones that fly. They have inflicted some losses on our fighter aircraft,” the Defense Minister admitted.
“How large are the losses?”
“Total, over one hundred. We’ve gotten twenty-five or so of theirs in return, but the Americans are masters of aerial combat. Fortunately, their aircraft can do little to hinder the advance of our tanks, and, as you have doubtless noted, they have not attacked into our territory at all.”
“Why is that, Marshal?” Fang asked.
“We are not certain,” Luo answered, turning to the MSS chief. “Tan?”
“Our sources are not certain, either. The most likely explanation is that the Americans have made a political decision not to attack us directly, but merely to defend their Russian ‘ally’ in a pro forma way. I suppose there is also the consideration that they do not wish to take losses from our air defenses, but the main reason for their restraint is undoubtedly political.”
Heads nodded around the table. It was indeed the most likely explanation for the American lack of action, and all of these men understood political considerations.
“Does this mean that they are measuring their action against us in such a way as to cause us minimal injury?” Tong Jie asked. It was so much the better for him, of course, since the Interior Ministry would have to deal with the internal dislocations that systematic attacks might cause.
“Remember what I said before,” Zhang pointed out. “They will do business with us once we’ve secured our new territory. So, they already anticipate this. It seems plain that they will support their Russian friends, but only so much. What else are the Americans but mercenaries? This President Ryan, what was he?”
“He was a CIA spy, and by all accounts an effective one,” Tan Deshi reminded them.
“No,” Zhang disagreed. “He was a trader in stocks before he joined CIA, and then he was a stock trader again after he left—and whom does he bring into his cabinet? Winston, another hugely rich capitalist, a trader in stocks and securities, a typical American rich man. I tell you, money is the key to understanding these people. They do business. They have no political ideology, except to fatten their purses. To do that, you try not to make blood enemies, and now, here, with us, they do not try to anger us too greatly. I tell you, I understand these people.”
“Perhaps,” Qian said. “But what if there are objective circumstances which prevent more aggressive action?”
“Then why is their navy not taking action? Their navy is most formidable, but it does nothing, correct, Luo?”
“Not to this point, but we are wary of them,” the marshal warned. He was a soldier, not a sailor, even though the PLAN did come under his command. “We have patrol aircraft looking for them, but so far we have not spotted anything. We know they are not in harbor, but that is all.”
“They do nothing with their navy. They do nothing with their land forces. They sting us slightly with their air forces, but what is that? The buzzing of insects.” Zhang dismissed the issue.
“How many have underestimated America, and this Ryan fellow, and done so to their misfortune?” Qian demanded. “Comrades, I tell you, this is a dangerous situation we are in. Perhaps we can succeed, all well and good if that comes to pass, but overconfidence can be any man’s undoing.”
“And overestimating one’s enemy ensures that you will never do anything,” Zhang Han San countered. “Did we get to where we are, did our country get to where we are, by timidity? The Long March was not made by cowards.” He looked around the table, and no one summoned the character to argue with him.
“So, things go well in Russia?” Xu asked the Defense Minister.
“Better than the plan,” Luo assured them all.
“Then we proceed,” the Premier decided for them all, once others had made the real decisions. The meeting soon adjourned, and the ministers went their separate ways.
“Fang?”
The junior Minister-Without-Portfolio turned to see Qian Kun coming after him in the corridor. “Yes, my friend?”
“The reason the Americans have not taken firmer action is that they act at the end of a single railroad to move them and their supplies. This takes time. They have not dropped bombs on us, probably, because they don’t have any. And where does Zhang get this rubbish about American ideology?”
“He is wise in the ways of international affairs,” Fang replied.
“Is he? Is he really? Is he not the one who tricked the Japanese into commencing a war with America? And why—so that we and they could seize Siberia. And then did he not quietly support Iran and their attempt to seize the Saudi kingdom? And why? So that we could then use the Muslims as a hammer to beat Russia into submission—so that we could seize Siberia. Fang, all he thinks about is Siberia. He wishes to see it under our flag before he dies. Perhaps he wishes to have his ashes buried in a golden urn, like the emperors,” Qian hissed. “He’s an adventurer, and those men come to bad ends.”
“Except those who succeed,” Fang suggested.
“How many of them succeed, and how many die before a stone wall?” Qian shot back. “I say the Americans will strike us, and strike us hard once their forces are assembled. Zhang follows his own political vision, not facts, not reality. He may lead our country to its doom.”
“Are the Americans so formidable as that?”
“If they are not, Fang, why does Tan spend so much of his time trying to steal their inventions? Don’t you remember what America did to Japan and Iran? They are like the wizards of legend. Luo tells us that they’ve savaged our air force. How often has he told us how formidable our fighters are? All the money we spent on those wonderful aircraft, and the Americans slaughter them like hogs fattened for market! Luo claims we’ve gotten twenty-five of theirs. He claims only twenty-five. More likely we’ve gotten one or two! Against over a hundred losses, but Zhang tells us the Americans don’t want to challenge us. Oh, really? What held them back from smashing Japan’s military, and then annihilating Iran’s?” Qian paused for breath. “I fear this, Fang. I fear what Zhang and Luo have gotten us into.”
“Even if you are right, what can we do to stop it?” the minister asked.
“Nothing,” Qian admitted. “But someone must speak the truth. Someone must warn of the danger that lies before us, if we are to have a country left at the end of this misbegotten adventurism.”
“Perhaps so. Qian, you are as ever a voice of reason and prudence. We will speak more,” Fang promised, wondering how much of the man’s words was alarmism, and how much was good sense. He’d been a brilliant administrator of the state railroads, and therefore was a man with a firm grasp on reality.
Fang had known Zhang for most of his adult life. He was a highly skilled player on the political stage, and a brilliantly gifted manipulator of people. But Qian was asking if those talents translated into a correct perception of reality, and did he really understand America and Americans—and most of all, this Ryan fellow? Or was he just forcing oddly shaped pegs into the slots he’d engraved in his own mind? Fang admitted that he didn’t know, and more to the point, didn’t know the answers to the implicit questions. He did not know himself whether Zhang was right or not. And he really should. But who might? Tan of the Ministry of State Security? Shen of the Foreign Ministry? Who else? Certainly not Premier Xu. All he did was to confirm the consensus achieved by others, or to repeat the words spoken into his ear by Zhang.
Fang walked to his office thinking about all these things, trying to organize his thoughts. Fortunately, he had a system for achieving that.
It started in Memphis, the headquarters of Federal Express. Faxes and telexes arrived simultaneously, telling the company that its wide-body cargo jets were being taken into federal service under the terms of a Phase I call-up of the Civilian Reserve Air Fleet. That meant that all freight-capable aircraft that the federal government had helped to finance (that was nearly all of them, because no commercial bank could compete with Washington when it came to financing things) were now being taken, along with their crews, under the control of the Air Mobility Command. The notice wasn’t welcome, but neither was it much of a surprise. Ten minutes later came follow-up messages telling the aircraft where to go, and soon thereafter they started rolling. The flight crews, the majority of them military-trained, wondered where their ultimate destinations were, sure that they’d be surprising ones. The pilots would not be disappointed in this.
FedEx would have to make do with its older narrow-body aircraft, like the venerable Boeing 727s with which the company had gotten started two decades earlier. That, the dispatchers knew, would be a stretch, but they had assistance agreements with the airlines, which they would now activate in order to try to keep up with the continuing shipment of legal documents and live lobsters all over America.
Just how inefficient is it?” Ryan asked.
“Well, we can deliver one day’s worth of bombs in three days’ worth of flying—maybe two if we stretch things a little, but that’s as good as it’s going to get,” Moore told him. “Bombs are heavy things, and getting them around uses up a lot of jet fuel. General Wallace has a nice list of targets to service, but to do that he needs bombs.”
“Where are the bombs going to come from?”
“Andersen Air Force Base on Guam has a nice pile,” Moore said. “Ditto Elmendorf in Alaska, and Mountain Home in Idaho. Various other places. It’s not so much a question of time and distance as of weight. Hell, the Russian base he’s using at Suntar is plenty big for his purposes. We just have to get the bombs to him, and I’ve just shunted a lot of Air Force lifters to Germany to start loading First Armored’s aviation assets to where Diggs is. That’s going to take four days of nonstop flying.”
“What about crew rest?” Jackson asked.
“What?” Ryan looked up.
“It’s a Navy thing, Jack. The Air Force has union rules on how much they can fly. Never had those rules out on the boats,” Robby explained. “The C-5 has a bunk area for people to sleep. I was just being facetious.” He didn’t apologize. It was late—actually “early” was the correct adjective—and nobody in the White House was getting much sleep.
For his part, Ryan wanted a cigarette to help him deal with the stress, but Ellen Sumter was home and in bed, and no one on night duty in the White House smoked, to the best of his knowledge. But that was the wimp part of his character speaking, and he knew it. The President rubbed his face with his hands and looked over at the clock. He had to get some sleep.
It’s late, honey-bunny,” Mary Pat said to her husband.
“I never would have guessed. Is that why my eyes keep wanting to close?”
There was, really, no reason for them to be here. CIA had little in the way of assets in the PRC. SORGE was the only one of value. The rest of the intelligence community, DIA and NSA, each of them larger than the Central Intelligence Agency in terms of manpower, didn’t have any directly valuable human sources either, though NSA was doing its utmost to tap in on Chinese communications. They were even listening in on cell phones through their constellation of geosynchronous ferret satellites, downloading all of the “take” through the Echelon system and then forwarding the “hits” to human linguists for full translation and evaluation. They were getting some material, but not all that much. SORGE was the gemstone of the collection, and both Edward and Mary Patricia Foley were really staying up late to await the newest installment in Minister Fang’s personal diary. The Chinese Politburo was meeting every day, and Fang was a dedicated diarist, not to mention a man who enjoyed the physical attractions of his female staff. They were even reading significance into the less regular writings of WARBLER, who mainly committed to her computer his sexual skills, occasionally enough to make Mary Pat blush. Being an intelligence officer was often little different from being a paid voyeur, and the staff psychiatrist translated all of the prurient stuff into what was probably a very accurate personality profile, but to them it just meant that Fang was a dirty old man who happened to exercise a lot of political power.
“It’s going to be another three hours at best,” the DCI said.
“Yeah,” his wife agreed.
“Tell you what ...” Ed Foley rose off the couch, tossed away the cushions, and reached in to pull out the foldaway bed. It was marginally big enough for two.
“When the staff sees this, they’ll wonder if we got laid tonight.”
“Baby, I have a headache,” the DCI reported.