Chapter 54
Probes and Pushes
Much of life in the military is mere adherence to Parkinson’s Law, the supposition that work invariably expands to fill the time allocated for it. In this case, Colonel Dick Boyle arrived on the very first C-5B Galaxy, which, immediately upon rolling to a stop, lifted its nose “visor” door to disgorge the first of three UH-60A Blackhawk helicopters, whose crewmen just as immediately rolled it to a vacant piece of ramp to unfold the rotor blades, assure they were locked in place, and ready the aircraft for flight after the usual safety checks. By that time, the C-5B had refueled and rolled off into the sky to make room for the next Galaxy, this one delivering AH-64 Apache attack helicopters—in this case complete with weapons and other accoutrements for flying real missions against a real armed enemy.
Colonel Boyle busied himself with watching everything, even though he knew that his troops were doing their jobs as well as they could be done, and would do those jobs whether he watched and fussed over them or not. Perversely, what Boyle wanted to do was to fly to where Diggs and his staff were located, but he resisted the temptation because he felt he should be supervising people whom he’d trained to do their jobs entirely without supervision. That lasted three hours until he finally saw the logic of the situation and decided to be a commander rather than a shop supervisor, and lifted off for Chabarsovil. The flying was easy enough, and he preferred the medium-low clouds, because there had to be fighters about, and not all of them would be friendly. The GPS navigation system guided him to the right location, and the right location, it turned out, was a concrete helipad with soldiers standing around it. They were wearing the “wrong” uniform, a state of mind that Boyle knew he’d have to work on. One of them escorted Boyle into a building that looked like the Russian idea of a headquarters, and sure enough, it was.
“Dick, come on over,” General Diggs called. The helicopter commander saluted as he approached.
“Welcome to Siberia, Dick,” Marion Diggs said in greeting.
“Thank you, sir. What’s the situation?”
“Interesting,” the general replied. “This is General Bondarenko. He’s the theater commander.” Boyle saluted again. “Gennady, this is Colonel Boyle, who commands my aviation brigade. He’s pretty good.”
“What’s the air situation, sir?” Boyle asked Diggs.
“The Air Force is doing a good job on their fighters so far.”
“What about Chinese helicopters?”
“They do not have many,” another Russian officer said. “I am Colonel Aliyev, Andrey Petrovich, theater operations. The Chinese do not have many helicopters. We’ve only seen a few, mainly scouts.”
“No troop carriers? No staff transport?”
“No,” Aliyev answered. “Their senior officers prefer to move around in tracked vehicles. They are not married to helicopters as you Americans are.”
“What do you want me to do, sir?” Boyle asked Diggs.
“Take Tony Turner to Chita. That’s the railhead we’re going to be using. We need to get set up there.”
“Drive the tracks in from there, eh?” Boyle looked at the map.
“That’s the plan. There are closer points, but Chita has the best facilities to off-load our vehicles, so our friends tell us.”
“What about gas?”
“The place you landed is supposed to have sizable underground fuel tanks.”
“More than you will need,” Aliyev confirmed. Boyle thought that was quite a promise.
“And ordnance?” Boyle asked. “We’ve got maybe two days’ worth on the C-5s so far. Six complete loads for my Apaches, figuring three missions per day.”
“Which version of the Apache?” Aliyev asked.
“Delta, Colonel. We’ve got the Longbow radar.”
“Everything works?” the Russian asked.
“Colonel, not much sense bringing them if they don’t,” Boyle replied, with a raised eyebrow. “What about secure quarters for my people?”
“At the base where you landed, there will be secure sleeping quarters for your aviators—bombproof shelters. Your maintenance people will be housed in barracks.”
Boyle nodded. It was the same everywhere. The weenies who built things acted as if pilots were more valuable than the people who maintained the aircraft. And so they were, until the aircraft needed repairs, at which point the pilot was as useful as a cavalryman without a horse.
“Okay, General. I’ll take Tony to this Chita place and then I’m going back to see to my people’s needs. I could sure use one of Chuck Garvey’s radios.”
“He’s outside. Grab one on your way.”
“Okay, sir. Tony, let’s get moving,” he said to the chief of staff.
“Sir, as soon as we get some infantry in, I want to put security on those fueling points,” Masterman said. “Those places need protecting.”
“I can give you what you need,” Aliyev offered.
“Fine by me,” Masterman responded. “How many of those secure radios did Garvey bring?”
“Eight, I think. Two are gone already,” General Diggs warned. “Well, there’ll be more on the train. Go tell Boyle to send two choppers here for our needs.”
“Right.” Masterman ran for the door.
The ministers all had offices and, as in every other such office in the world, the cleanup crews came in, in this case about ten every night. They picked up all sorts of trash, from candy wrappers to empty cigarette packs to papers, and the latter went into special burn-bags. The janitorial staff was not particularly smart, but they had had to pass background checks and go through security briefings that were heavy on intimidation. They were not allowed to discuss their jobs with anyone, not even a spouse, and not ever to reveal what they saw in the wastebaskets. In fact, they never thought much about it—they were less interested in the thoughts or ideas of the Politburo members than they were in the weather forecasts. They’d rarely even seen the ministers whose offices they cleaned, and none of the crew had ever so much as spoken a single word to any of them; they just tried to be invisible on those rare occasions when they saw one of the godlike men who ruled their nation. Maybe a submissive bow, which was not even acknowledged by so much as a look, because they were mere furniture, menials who did peasants’ work because, as peasants, that was all they were suited for. The peasants knew what computers were, but such machines were not for the use of such men as they were, and the janitorial staff knew it.
And so when one of the computers made a noise while a cleaner was in the office, he took no note of it. Well, it seemed odd that it should whir when the screen was dark, but why it did what it did was a mystery to him, and he’d never even been so bold as to touch the thing. He didn’t even dust the keyboard as he cleaned the desktop—no, he always avoided the keys.
And so, he heard the whir begin, continue for a few seconds, then stop, and he paid no mind to it.
Mary Pat Foley opened her eyes when the sun started casting shadows on her husband’s office wall, and rubbed her eyes reluctantly. She checked her watch. Seven-twenty. She was usually up long before this—but she usually didn’t go to bed after four in the morning. Three hours of sleep would probably have to do. She stood and headed into Ed’s private washroom. It had a shower, like hers. She’d make use of her own shortly, and for the moment settled for some water splashed on her face and a reluctant look in the mirror that resulted in a grimace at what the look revealed.
The Deputy Director (Operations) of the Central Intelligence Agency shook her head, and then her entire body to get the blood moving, and then put her blouse on. Finally, she shook her husband’s shoulder.
“Out of the hutch, honey-bunny, before the foxes get you.”
“We still at war?” the DCI asked from behind closed eyes.
“Probably. I haven’t checked yet.” She paused for a stretch and slipped her feet into her shoes. “I’m going to check my e-mail.”
“Okay, I’ll call downstairs for breakfast,” Ed told her.
“Oatmeal. No eggs. Your cholesterol is too high,” Mary Pat observed.
“Yeah, baby,” he grumbled in submissive reply.
“That’s a good honey-bunny.” She kissed him and headed out.
Ed Foley made his bathroom call, then sat at his desk and lifted the phone to call the executive cooking staff. “Coffee. Toast. Three-egg omelet, ham, and hash browns.” Cholesterol or not, he had to get his body working.
You’ve got mail,” the mechanical voice said.
“Great.” The DDO breathed. She downloaded it, going through the usual procedures to save and print, but rather more slowly this morning because she was groggy and therefore mistake-prone. That sort of thing made her slow down and be extra careful, something she’d learned to do as the mother of a newborn. And so in four minutes instead of the usual two, she had a printed hard copy of the latest SORGE feed from Agent SONGBIRD. Six pages of relatively small ideographs. Then she lifted the phone and punched the speed-dial button for Dr. Sears.
“Yes?”
“This is Mrs. Foley. We got one.”
“On the way, Director.” She had some coffee before he arrived, and the taste, if not the effect of the caffeine, helped her face the day.
“In early?” she asked.
“Actually I slept in last night. We need to improve the selection on the cable TV,” he told her, hoping to lighten the day a little. One look at her eyes told him how likely that was.
“Here.” She handed the sheets across. “Coffee?”
“Yes, thank you.” His eyes didn’t leave the page as his hand reached out for the cup. “This is good stuff today.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, it’s Fang’s account of a Politburo discussion of how the war’s going ... they’re trying to analyze our actions ... yeah, that’s about what I’d expect ...”
“Talk to me, Dr. Sears,” Mary Pat ordered.
“You’re going to want to get George Weaver in on this, too, but what he’s going to say is that they’re projecting their own political outlook onto us generally, and onto President Ryan in particular ... yeah, they’re saying that we are not hitting them hard for political reasons, that they think we don’t want to piss them off too much ...” Sears took a long sip of coffee. “This is really good stuff. It tells us what their political leadership is thinking, and what they’re thinking isn’t very accurate.” Sears looked up. “They misunderstand us worse than we misunderstand them, Director, even at this level. They see President Ryan’s motivation as a strictly political calculation. Zhang says that he’s laying back so that we can do business with them, after they consolidate their control over the Russian oil and goldfields.”
“What about their advance?”
“They say—that is, Marshal Luo says—that things are going according to plan, that they’re surprised at the lack of Russian opposition, and also surprised that we haven’t struck any targets within their borders.”
“That’s because we don’t have any bombs over there yet. Just found that out myself. We’re having to fly the bombs in so that we can drop them.”
“Really? Well, they don’t know that yet. They think it’s deliberate inaction on our part.”
“Okay, get me a translation. When will Weaver get in?”
“Usually about eight-thirty.”
“Go over this with him as soon as he arrives.”
“You bet.” Sears took his leave.
Bedding down for the night?” Aleksandrov asked.
“So it would seem, Comrade Captain,” Buikov answered. He had his binoculars on the Chinese. The two command-reconnaissance vehicles were together, which only seemed to happen when they secured for the night. It struck both men as odd that they confined their activities to daylight, but that wasn’t a bad thing for the Russian watchers, and even soldiers needed their sleep. More than most, in fact, both of the Russians would have said. The stress and strain of keeping track of the enemies of their country—and doing so within their own borders—were telling on both of them.
The Chinese drill was thorough, but predictable. The two command tracks were together. The others were spread out, mainly in front of them, but one three hundred meters behind to secure their rear. The crews of each track stayed together as a unit. Each broke out a small petrol stove for cooking their rice—probably rice, the Russians all thought. And they settled down to get four or five hours of sleep before waking, cooking breakfast, and moving out before dawn. Had they not been enemies, their adherence to so demanding a drill might have excited admiration. Instead, Buikov found himself wondering if he could get two or three of their BRMs to race up on the invaders and immolate them with the 30-mm rapid-fire cannons on their tracked carriers. But Aleksandrov would never allow it. You could always depend on officers to deny the sergeants what they wanted to do.
The captain and his sergeant walked back north to their track, leaving three other scouts to keep watch on their “guests,” as Aleksandrov had taken to calling them.
“So, Sergeant, how are you feeling?” the officer asked in a quiet voice.
“Some sleep will be good.” Buikov looked back. There was now a ridgeline in addition to the trees between him and the Chinks. He lit a cigarette and let out a long, relaxed breath. “This is harder duty than I expected it to be.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, Comrade Captain. I always thought we could kill our enemies. Baby-sitting them is very stressful.”
“That is so, Boris Yevgeniyevich, but remember that if we do our job properly, then Division will be able to kill more than just one or two. We are their eyes, not their teeth.”
“As you say, Comrade Captain, but it is like making a movie of the wolf instead of shooting him.”
“The people who make good wildlife movies win awards, Sergeant.”
The odd thing about the captain, Buikov thought, was that he was always trying to reason with you. It was actually rather endearing, as if he was trying to be a teacher rather than an officer.
“What’s for dinner?”
“Beef and black bread, Comrade Captain. Even some butter. But no vodka,” the sergeant added sourly.
“When this is over, I will allow you to get good and drunk, Boris Yevgeniyevich,” Aleksandrov promised.
“If we live that long, I will toast your health.” The track was where they’d left it, and the crew had spread out the camouflage netting. One thing about this officer, Buikov thought, he got the men to do their duty without much in the way of complaint. The same sort of good comradely solidarity my grandfather spoke about, as he told his endless tales of killing Germans on the way to Vienna, just like in all the movies, the sergeant thought.
The black bread was canned, but tasty, and the beef, cooked on their own small petrol heater, wasn’t so bad as to choke a dog. About the time they finished, Sergeant Grechko appeared. He was the commander of the unit’s #3 BRM, and he was carrying ...
“Is that what I think it is?” Buikov asked. “Yuriy Andreyevich, you are a comrade!”
It was a half-liter bottle of vodka, the cheapest “BOΔKA” brand, with a foil top that tore off and couldn’t be resealed.
“Whose idea is this?” the captain demanded.
“Comrade Captain, it is a cold night, and we are Russian soldiers, and we need something to help us relax,” Grechko said. “It’s the only bottle in the company, and one slug each will not harm us, I think,” the sergeant added reasonably.
“Oh, all right.” Aleksandrov extended his metal cup, and received perhaps sixty grams. He waited for the rest of his crew to get theirs, and saw that the bottle was empty. They all drank together, and sure enough, it tasted just fine to be Russian soldiers out in the woods, doing their duty for their Motherland.
“We’ll have to refuel tomorrow,” Grechko said.
“There will be a fuel truck waiting for us, forty kilometers north at the burned-down sawmill. We’ll go up there one at a time, and hope our Chinese guests do not get overly ambitious in their advance.”
That must be your Captain Aleksandrov,” Major Tucker said. ”Fourteen hundred meters from the nearest Chinese. That’s pretty close,” the American observed.
“He’s a good boy,” Aliyev said, “Just reported in. The Chinese follow their drill with remarkable exactitude. And the main body?”
“Twenty-five miles back—forty kilometers or so. They’re laagering in for the night, too, but they’re actually building campfires, like they want us to know where they are.” Tucker worked the mouse to show the encampments. The display was green-on-green now. The Chinese armored vehicles showed as bright spots, especially from the engines, which glowed from residual heat.
“This is amazing,” Aliyev said in frank admiration.
“We decided back around the end of the 1970s that we could play at night when everybody else can’t. It took a while to develop the technology, but it by-God works, Colonel. All we need now is some Smart Pigs.”
“What?”
“You’ll see, Colonel. You’ll see,” Tucker promised. Best of all, this “take” came from Grace Kelly, and she did have a laser designator plugged in to the fuselage, tooling along now at 62,000 feet and looking down with her thermal-imaging cameras. Under Tucker’s guidance, the UAV kept heading south, to continue the catalog of the Chinese units advancing into Siberia. There were sixteen ribbon bridges on the Amur River now, and a few north of there, but the really vulnerable points were around Harbin, well to the south, inside Chinese territory. Lots of railroad bridges between there and Bei’an, the terminus of the railroad lifeline to the People’s Liberation Army. Grace Kelly saw a lot of trains, mainly diesel engines, but even some old coal-burning steam engines that had come out of storage in order to keep the weapons and supplies coming north. Most interesting of all was the recently built traffic circle, where tank cars were unloading something, probably diesel fuel, into what appeared to be a pipeline that PLAA engineers were working very hard to extend north. That was something they’d copied from America. The U.S. and British armies had done the same thing from Normandy east to the front in late 1944, and that, Tucker knew, was a target worthy of note. Diesel fuel wasn’t just the food of a field army. It was the very air it breathed.
There were huge numbers of idle men about. Laborers, probably, there to repair damaged tracking, and the major bridging points had SAM and FLAK batteries in close attendance. So, Joe Chink knew that the bridges were important, and he was doing his best to guard them.
For what good that would do, Tucker thought. He got on the satellite radio to talk things over with the crew up at Zhigansk, where General Wallace’s target book was being put together. The crunchies on the ground were evidently worried about taking on the advancing People’s Liberation Army, but to Major Tucker, it all looked like a collection of targets. For point targets, he wanted J-DAMs, and for area targets, some smart pigs, the J-SOWs, and then Joe Chink was going to take one on the chin, and probably, like all field armies, this one had a glass jaw. If you could just hit it hard enough.
The Russians on the ground had no idea what FedEx was, and were more than a little surprised that any private, nongovernment corporation could actually own something as monstrous as a Boeing 747F freighter aircraft.
For their part, the flight crews, mainly trained by the Navy or Air Force, had never expected to see Siberia except maybe through the windows of a B-52H strategic bomber. The runways were unusually bumpy, worse than most American airports, but there was an army of people on the ground, and when the swinging door on the nose came up, the ground crews waved the forklifts in to start collecting the palletized cargo. The flight crews didn’t leave the aircraft. Fueling trucks came up and connected the four-inch hoses to the proper nozzle points and started refilling the capacious tanks so that the aircraft could leave as soon as possible, to clear the ramp space. Every 747F had a bunking area for the spare pilots who’d come along for the ride. They didn’t even get a drink, those who’d sleep for the return flight, and they had to eat the boxed lunches they’d been issued at Elmendorf on the outbound flight. In all, it took fifty-seven minutes to unload the hundred tons of bombs, which was scarcely enough for ten of the F-15Es parked at the far end of the ramp, but that was where the forklifts headed.
Is that a fact?” Ryan observed.
“Yes, Mr. President,” Dr. Weaver replied. “For all their sophistication, these people can be very insular in their thinking, and as a practical matter, we are all guilty of projecting our own ways of thinking onto other people.”
“But I have people like you to advise me. Who advises them?” Jack asked.
“They have some good ones. Problem is, their Politburo doesn’t always listen.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve seen that problem here, too. Is this good news or bad news, people?”
“Potentially it could be both, but let’s remember that we understand them now a lot better than they understand us,” Ed Foley told those present. “That gives us a major advantage, if we play our cards intelligently.”
Ryan leaned back and rubbed his eyes. Robby Jackson wasn’t in much better shape, though he’d slept about four hours in the Lincoln Bedroom (unlike President Lincoln— it was called that simply because a picture of the sixteenth President hung on the wall). The good Jamaican coffee helped everyone at least simulate consciousness.
“I’m surprised that their Defense Minister is so narrow,” Robby thought aloud, his eyes tracing over the SORGE dispatch. “You pay the senior operators to be big-picture thinkers. When operations go as well as the one they’re running, you get suspicious. I did, anyway.”
“Okay, Robby, you used to be God of Operations across the river. What do you recommend?” Jack asked.
“The idea in a major operation is always to play with the other guy’s head. To lead him down the path you want him to go, or to get inside his decision cycle, just prevent him from analyzing the data and making a decision. I think we can do that here.”
“How?” Arnie van Damm asked.
“The common factor of every successful military plan in history is this: You show the guy what he expects and hopes to see, and then when he thinks he’s got the world by the ass, you cut his legs off in one swipe.” Robby leaned back, holding court for once. “The smart move is to let them keep going for a few more days, make it just seem easier and easier for them while we build up our capabilities, and then when we hit them, we land on them like the San Francisco earthquake—no warning at all, just the end of the f*ckin’ world hits ’em. Mickey, what’s their most vulnerable point?”
General Moore had that answer: “It’s always logistics. They’re burning maybe nine hundred tons of diesel fuel a day to keep those tanks and tracks moving north. They have a full five thousand engineers working like beavers running a pipeline to keep up with their lead elements. We cut that, and they can make up some of the shortfall with fuel trucks, but not all of it—”
“And we use the Smart Pig to take care of those,” Vice President Jackson finished.
“That’s one way to handle it,” General Moore agreed.
“Smart Pig?” Ryan asked.
Robby explained, concluding: “We’ve been developing this and a few other tricks for the last eight years. I spent a month out at China Lake a few years ago with the prototype. It works, if we have enough of them.”
“Gus Wallace has that at the top of his Christmas list.”
“The other trick is the political side,” Jackson concluded.
“Funny, I have an idea for that. How is the PRC presenting this war to its people?”
It was Professor Weaver’s turn: “They’re saying that the Russians provoked a border incident—same thing Hitler did with Poland in 1939. The Big Lie technique. They’ve used it before. Every dictatorship has. It works if you control what your people see.”
“What’s the best weapon for fighting a lie?” Ryan asked.
“The truth, of course,” Arnie van Damm answered for the rest. “But they control their news distribution. How do we get the truth to their population?”
“Ed, how is the SORGE data coming out?”
“Over the ’Net, Jack. So?”
“How many Chinese citizens own computers?”
“Millions of them—the number’s really jumped in the past couple of years. That’s why they’re ripping that patent off Dell Computer that we made a stink about in the trade talks and—oh, yeah ...” Foley looked up with a smile. “I like it.”
“That could be dangerous,” Weaver warned.
“Dr. Weaver, there’s no safe way to fight a war,” Ryan said in reply. “This isn’t a negotiation between friends. General Moore?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Get the orders out.”
“Yes, sir.”
“The only question is, will it work?”
“Jack,” Robby Jackson said, “it’s like with baseball. You play the games to find out who the best is.”
The first reinforcing division to arrive at Chita was the 201st. The trains pulled into the built-for-the-purpose offloading sidings. The flatcars had been designed (and built in large numbers) to transport tracked military vehicles. To that end, flip-down bridging ramps were located at each end of every single car, and when those were tossed down in place, the tanks could drive straight off to the concrete ramps to where every train had backed up. It was a little demanding—the width of the cars was at best marginal for the tank tracks—but the drivers of each vehicle kept their path straight, breathing a small sigh of relief when they got to the concrete. Once on the ground, military police troops, acting as traffic cops, directed the armored vehicles to assembly areas. The 201st Motor Rifle Division’s commander and his staff were there already, of course, and the regimental officers got their marching orders, telling them what roads to take northeast to join Bondarenko’s Fifth Army, and by joining it, to make it a real field army rather than a theoretical expression on paper.
The 201st, like the follow-on divisions, the 80th, 34th, and 94th, were equipped with the newest Russian hardware, and were at their full TO&E. Their immediate mission was to race north and east to get in front of the advancing Chinese. It would be quite a race. There weren’t many roads in this part of Russia, and what roads there were here were unpaved gravel, which suited the tracked vehicles. The problem would be diesel fuel, because there were few gas stations for the trucks which ran the roads in peacetime pursuits, and so the 201st had requisitioned every tanker truck its officers could locate, and even that might not be enough, the logisticians all worried, not that they had much choice in the matter. If they could get their tanks there, then they’d fight them as pillboxes if it came to that.
About the only thing they had going for them was the network of telephone lines, which enabled them to communicate without using radios. The entire area was under the strictest possible orders for radio silence, to deny all conceivable knowledge to the enemy; and the air forces in the area, American and Russian, were tasked to eliminate all tactical reconnaissance aircraft that Chinese would be sending about. So far, they’d been successful. A total of seventeen J-6 and -7 aircraft, thought to be the reconnaissance variants of their classes, had been “splashed” short of Chita.
The Chinese problem with reconnaissance was confirmed in Paris, of all places. SPOT, the French corporation which operated commercial photosatellites, had received numerous requests for photos of Siberia, and while many of them came from seemingly legitimate western businesses, mainly news agencies, all had been summarily denied. Though not as good as American reconnaissance satellites, the SPOT birds were good enough to identify all the trains assembled at Chita.
And since the People’s Republic of China still had a functioning embassy in Moscow, the other concern was that their Ministry of State Security had Russian nationals acting as paid spies, feeding data to Russia’s new enemy. Those individuals about whom the Russian Federal Security Service had suspicions were picked up and questioned, and those in custody were interrogated vigorously.
This number included Klementi Ivanovich Suvorov.
“You were in the service of an enemy country,” Pavel Yefremov observed. “You killed for a foreign power, and you conspired to kill our country’s president. We know all this. We’ve had you under surveillance for some time now. We have this.” He held up a photocopy of the onetime pad recovered from the dead-drop on the park bench. “You may talk now, or you may be shot. It is your life at risk, not mine.”
In the movies, this was the part where the suspect was supposed to say defiantly, “You’re going to kill me anyway,” except that Suvorov had no more wish to die than anyone else. He loved life as much as any man, and he’d never expected to be caught any more than the most foolish of street criminals did. If anything, he’d expected arrest even less than one of those criminals, because he knew how intelligent and clever he was, though this feeling had understandably deflated over the last few days.
The outlook of Klementi Ivan’ch Suvorov was rather bleak at the moment. He was KGB-trained, and he knew what to expect—a bullet in the head—unless he could give his interrogators something sufficiently valuable for them to spare his life, and at the moment even life in a labor camp of strict regime was preferable to the alternative.
“Have you truly arrested Kong?”
“We told you that before, but, no, we have not. Why tip them off that we’ve penetrated their operation?” Yefremov said honestly.
“Then you can use me against them.”
“How might we do that?” the FSS officer asked.
“I can tell them that the operation they propose is going forward, but that the situation in Siberia wrecked my chance to execute it in a timely fashion.”
“And if Kong cannot leave their embassy—we have it guarded and isolated now, of course—how would you get that information to him?”
“By electronic mail. Yes, you can monitor their landlines, but to monitor their cellular phones is more difficult. There’s a backup method for me to communicate with him electronically.”
“And the fact that you haven’t made use of it so far will not alert them?”
“The explanation is simple. My Spetsnaz contact was frightened off by the outbreak of hostilities, and so was I.”
“But we’ve already checked your electronic accounts.”
“Do you think they are all written down?” He tapped the side of his head. “Do you think I am totally foolish?”
“Go on, make your proposal.”
“I will propose that I can go forward with the mission. I require them to authorize it by a signal—the way they set the shades in their windows, for example.”
“And for this?”
“And for this I will not be executed,” the traitor suggested.
“I see,” Yefremov said quietly. He would have been perfectly content to shoot the traitor right here and now, but it might be politically useful to go forward with his proposal. He’d kick that one upstairs.
The bad part about watching them was that you had to anticipate everything they did, and that meant that they got to have more sleep, about an hour’s worth, Aleksandrov figured, and no more than that only because they were predictable. He’d had his morning tea. Sergeant Buikov had enjoyed two morning cigarettes with his, and now they lay prone on wet dew-dampened ground, with their binoculars to their eyes. The Chinese had also had soldiers out of their tracks all night, set about a hundred meters away from them, so it seemed. They weren’t very adventurous, the captain thought. He would have spread his sentries much farther out, at least half a kilometer, in pairs with radios to go with their weapons. For that matter, he would have set up a mortar in the event that they spotted something dangerous. But the fox and the gardener seemed to be both conservative and confident, which was an odd combination of characteristics.
But their morning drill was precise. The petrol heaters came out for tea—probably tea, they all figured—and whatever it was that they had for breakfast. Then the camouflage nets came down. The outlying sentries came in and reported in person to their officers, and everyone mounted up. The first hop on their tracks was a short one, not even half a kilometer, and again the foot-scouts dismounted and moved forward, then quickly reported back for the second, much longer morning frog leap forward.
“Let’s move, Sergeant,” Aleksandrov ordered, and together they ran to their BRM for their first trek into the woods for their own third installment of frog leap backwards.
There they go again,” Major Tucker said, after getting three whole hours of sleep on a thin mattress four feet from the Dark Star terminal. It was Ingrid Bergman up again, positioned so that she could see both the reconnaissance element and main body of the Chinese army. ”You know, they really stick to the book, don’t they?”
“So it would seem,” Colonel Tolkunov agreed.
“So, going by that, tonight they’ll go to about here.” Tucker made a green mark on the acetate-covered map. “That puts them at the gold mine day after tomorrow. Where do you plan to make your stand?” the major asked.
“That depends on how quickly the Two Zero One can get forward.”
“Gas?” Tucker asked.
“Diesel fuel, but, yes, that is the main problem with moving so large a force.”
“Yeah, with us it’s bombs.”
“When will you begin to attack Chinese targets?” Tolkunov asked.
“Not my department, Colonel, but when it happens, you’ll see it here, live and in color.”
Ryan had gotten two hours of nap in the afternoon, while Arnie van Damm covered his appointments (the Chief of Staff needed his sleep, too, but like most people in the White House, he put the President’s needs before his own), and now he was watching TV, the feed from Ingrid Bergman.
“This is amazing,” he observed. “You could almost get on the phone and tell a guy where to go with his tank.”
“We try to avoid that, sir,” Mickey Moore said at once. In Vietnam it had been called the “squad leader in the sky” when battalion commanders had directed sergeants on their patrols, not always to the enlisted men’s benefit. The miracle of modern communications could also be a curse, with the expected effect that the people in harm’s way would ignore their radios or just turn the damned things off until they had something to say themselves.
Ryan nodded. He’d been a second lieutenant of Marines once, and though it hadn’t been for long, he remembered it as demanding work for a kid just out of college.
“Do the Chinese know we’re doing this?”
“Not as far as we can tell. If they did, they’d sure as hell try to take the Dark Star down, and we’d notice if they tried. That’s not easy, though. They’re damned near invisible on radar, and tough to spot visually, so the Air Force tells me.”
“Not too many fighters can reach sixty thousand feet, much less cruise up there,” Robby agreed. “It’s a stretch even for a Tomcat.” His eyes, too, were locked on the screen. No officer in the history of military operations had ever had a capability akin to this, not even two percent of it, Jackson was sure. Most of war-fighting involved finding the enemy so that you knew where to kill him. These new things made it like watching a Hollywood movie—and if the Chinese knew they were there, they’d freak. Considerable efforts had been designed into Dark Star to prevent that from happening. Their transmitters were directional, and locked onto satellites, instead of radiating outward in the manner of a normal radio. So, they might as well have been black holes up there, orbiting twelve miles over the battlefield.
“What’s the important thing here?” Jack asked General Moore.
“Logistics, sir, always logistics. Told you this morning, sir, they’re burning up a lot of diesel fuel, and replenishing that is a mother of a task. The Russians have the same problem. They’re trying to race a fresh division north of the Chinese spearhead, to made a stand around Aldan, close to where the gold strike is. It’s only even money they can make it, even over roads and without opposition. They have to move a lot of fuel, too, and the other problem for them is that it’ll wear out the tracks on their vehicles. They don’t have lowboy trailers like ours, and so their tanks have to do it all on their own. Tanks are a lot more delicate to operate than they look. Figure they’ll lose a quarter to a third of their strength just from the approach march.”
“Can they fight?” Jackson asked.
“They’re using the T-80U. It would have given the M60A3 a good fight, but no, not as good as our first-flight M1, much less the M1A2, but against the Chinese M-90, call it an even match, qualitatively. It’s just that the Chinese have a lot more of them. It comes down to training. The Russian divisions that they’re sending into the fight are their best-trained and -equipped. Question is, are they good enough? We’ll just have to see.”
“And our guys?”
“They start arriving at Chita tomorrow morning. The Russians want them to assemble and move east-southeast. The operational concept is for them to stop the Chinese cold, and then we chop them off from their supplies right near the Amur River. It makes sense theoretically,” Mickey Moore said neutrally, “and the Russians say they have all the fuel we’ll need in underground bunkers that have been there for damned near fifty years. We’ll see.”