The Bear and the Dragon

Chapter 59
Loss of Control
With the death of General Peng, command of 34th Shock Army devolved to Major General Ge Li, CG also of 302nd Armored. His first task was to get himself clear, and this he did, ordering his tank off the long gun-range slope while one of the surviving reconnaissance tracks recovered Peng’s body. All of those tracked vehicles also pulled back, as Ge figured his first task was to determine what had happened, rather than to avenge the death of his army commander. It took him twenty minutes to motor back to his own command section, where he had a command track identical to the one Peng had driven about in. He needed the radios, since he knew the field phones were down, for whatever reason he didn’t know.
“I need to talk to Marshal Luo,” he said over the command frequency, which was relayed back to Beijing via several repeater stations. It took another ten minutes because the Defense Minister, he was told, was in a Politburo meeting. Finally, the familiar voice came over the radio.
“This is Marshal Luo.”
“This is Major General Ge Li, commanding Three-Oh-Second Armored. General Peng Xi-Wang is dead,” he announced.
“What happened?”
“He went forward to join the reconnaissance section to see the front, and he was killed by a sniper bullet. The recon section ran into a small ambush, looked like a single Russian personnel carrier. I drove it off with my own tank,” Ge went on. It was fairly true, and it seemed like the sort of thing he was supposed to say.
“I see. What is the overall situation?” the Defense Minister asked.
“Thirty-fourth Shock Army is advancing—well, it was. I paused the advance to reorganize the command group. I request instructions, Comrade Minister.”
“You will advance and capture the Russian gold mine, secure it, and then continue north for the oil field.”
“Very well, Comrade Minister, but I must advise you that Twenty-ninth Army, right behind us, sustained a serious attack an hour ago, and was reportedly badly hit.”
“How badly?”
“I do not know. Reports are sketchy, but it doesn’t sound good.”
“What sort of attack was it?”
“An air attack, origin unknown. As I said, reports are very sketchy at this time. Twenty-ninth seems very disorganized at the moment,” Ge reported.
“Very well. You will continue the attack. Forty-third Army is behind Twenty-ninth and will support you. Watch your left flank—”
“I know of the reports of Russian units to my west,” Ge said. “I will orient a mechanized division to deal with that, but ...”
“But what?” Luo asked.
“But, Comrade Marshal, we have no reconnaissance information on what lies before us. I need such information in order to advance safely.”
“You will find your safety in advancing rapidly into enemy territory and destroying whatever formations you find,” Luo told him forcefully. “Continue your advance!”
“By your command, Comrade Minister.” There wasn’t much else he could say to that.
“Report back to me as necessary.”
“I will do that,” Ge promised.
“Very well. Out.” Static replaced the voice.
“You heard him,” Ge said to Colonel Wa Cheng-gong, whom he’d just inherited as army operations officer. “Now what, Colonel?”
“We continue the advance, Comrade General.”
Ge nodded to the logic of the situation. “Give the order.”
It took hold four minutes later, when the radio commands filtered down to battalion level and the units started moving.
They didn’t need reconnaissance information now, Colonel Wa reasoned. They knew that there had to be some light Russian units just beyond the ridgeline where Peng had met his foolish death. Didn’t I warn him? Wa raged to himself. Didn’t Ge warn him? For a general to die in battle was not unexpected. But to die from a single bullet fired by some lone rifleman was worse than foolish. Thirty years of training and experience wasted, lost to a single rifleman!


There they go again,” Major Tucker said, seeing the plume of diesel exhaust followed by the lurching of numerous armored vehicles. ”About six kilometers from your first line of tanks.”
“A pity we can’t get one of these terminals to Sinyavskiy,” Bondarenko said.
“Not that many of them, sir,” Tucker told him. “Sun Microsystems is still building them for us.”


That was General Ge Li,” Luo told the Politburo. ”We’ve had some bad luck. General Peng is dead, killed by a sniper bullet, I just learned.”
“How did that happen?” Premier Xu asked.
“Peng had gone forward, as a good general should, and there was a lucky Russian out there with a rifle,” the Defense Minister explained. Then one of his aides appeared and walked to the marshal’s seat, handing him a slip of paper. He scanned it. “This is confirmed?”
“Yes, Comrade Marshal. I requested and got confirmation myself. The ships are in sight of land even now.”
“What ships? What land?” Xu asked. It was unusual for him to take an active part in these meetings. Usually he let the others talk, listened passively, and then announced the consensus conclusions reached by the others.
“Comrade,” Luo answered. “It seems some American warships are bombarding our coast near Guangszhou.”
“Bombarding?” Xu asked. “You mean with guns?”
“That’s what the report says, yes.”
“Why would they do that?” the Premier asked, somewhat nonplussed by this bit of information.
“To destroy shore emplacements, and—”
“Isn’t that what one does prior to invading, a preparation to putting troops on the beach?” Foreign Minister Shen asked.
“Well, yes, it could be that, I suppose,” Luo replied, “but—”
“Invasion?” Xu asked. “A direct attack on our own soil?”
“Such a thing is most unlikely,” Luo told them. “They lack the ability to put troops ashore in sufficiently large numbers. America simply doesn’t have the troops to do such a—”
“What if they get assistance from Taiwan? How many troops do the bandits have?” Tong Jie asked.
“Well, they have some land forces,” Luo allowed. “But we have ample ability to—”
“You told us a week ago that we had all the forces required to defeat the Russians, even if they got some aid from America,” Qian observed, becoming agitated. “What fiction do you have for us now, Luo?”
“Fiction!” the marshal’s voice boomed. “I tell you the facts, but now you accuse me of that?”
“What have you not told us, Luo?” Qian asked harshly. “We are not peasants here to be told what to believe.”
“The Russians are making a stand. They have fought back. I told you that, and I told you this sort of thing is to be expected—and it is. We fight a war with the Russians. It’s not a burglary in an unoccupied house. This is an armed contest between two major powers—and we will win because we have more and better troops. They do not fight well. We swept aside their border defenses, and we’ve pursued their army north, and they didn’t have the manhood to stand and fight for their own land! We will smash them. Yes, they will fight back. We must expect that, but it won’t matter. We will smash them, I tell you!” he insisted.
“Is there any information which you have not told us to this point?” Interior Minister Tong asked, in a voice more reasonable than the question itself.
“I have appointed Major General Ge to assume command of the Thirty-fourth Shock Army. He reported to me that Twenty-ninth Army sustained a serious air attack earlier today. The effects of this attack are not clear, probably they managed to damage communications—and an air attack cannot seriously hurt a large mechanized land force. The tools of war do not permit such a thing.”
“Now what?” Premier Xu asked.
“I propose that we adjourn the meeting and allow Minister Luo to return to his task of managing our armed forces,” Zhang Han Sen proposed. “And that we reconvene, say, at sixteen hours.”
There were nods around the table. Everyone wanted the time to consider the things that they’d heard this morning—and perhaps to give the Defense Minister the chance to make good his words. Xu did a head count and stood.
“Very well. We adjourn until this afternoon.” The meeting broke up in an unusually subdued manner, without the usual pairing off and pleasantries between old comrades. Outside the conference room, Qian buttonholed Fang again.
“Something is going badly wrong. I can feel it.”
“How sure are you of that?”
“Fang, I don’t know what the Americans have done to my railroad bridges, but I assure you that to destroy them as I was informed earlier this morning is no small thing. Moreover, the destruction inflicted was deliberately systematic. The Americans—it must have been the Americans—deliberately crippled our ability to supply our field armies. You only do such a thing in preparation to smashing them. And now the commanding general of our advancing armies is suddenly killed—stray bullet, my ass! That tset ha tset ha Luo leads us to disaster, Fang.”
“We’ll know more this afternoon,” Fang suggested, leaving his colleague and going to his office. Arriving there, he dictated another segment for his daily journal. For the first time, he wondered if it might turn out to be his testament.
For her part, Ming was disturbed by her minister’s demeanor. An elderly man, he’d always nonetheless been a calm and optimistic one for the most part. His mannerisms were those of a grandfatherly gentleman even when taking her or one of the other office girls to his bed. It was an endearing quality, one of the reasons the office staff didn’t resist his advances more vigorously—and besides, he did take care of those who took care of his needs. This time she took her dictation quietly, while he leaned back in his chair, his eyes closed, and his voice a monotone. It took half an hour, and she went out to her desk to do the transcription. It was time for the midday meal by the time she was done, and she went out to lunch with her co-worker, Chai.
“What is the matter with him?” she asked Ming.
“The meeting this morning did not go well. Fang is concerned with the war.”
“But isn’t it going well? Isn’t that what they say on TV?”
“It seems there have been some setbacks. This morning they argued about how serious they were. Qian was especially exercised about it, because the American attacked our rail bridges in Harbin and Bei’an.”
“Ah.” Chai shoveled some rice into her mouth with her chopsticks. “How is Fang taking it?”
“He seems very tense. Perhaps he will need some comfort this evening.”
“Oh? Well, I can take care of him. I need a new office chair anyway,” she added with a giggle.
Lunch dragged on longer than usual. Clearly their minister didn’t need any of them for the moment, and Ming took the time to walk about on the street to gauge the mood of the people there. The feeling was strangely neutral. She was out just long enough to trigger her computer’s downtime activation, and though the screen was blank, in the auto-sleep mode, the hard drive started turning, and silently activated the onboard modem.


Mary Pat Foley was in her office, though it was past midnight, and she was logging onto her mail account every fifteen minutes, hoping for something new from SORGE.
“You’ve got mail!” the mechanical voice told her.
“Yes!” she said back to it, downloading the document at once. Then she lifted the phone. “Get Sears up here.”
With that done, Mrs. Foley looked at the time entry on the e-mail. It had gone out in the early afternoon in Beijing ... what might that mean? she wondered, afraid that any irregularity could spell the death of SONGBIRD, and the loss of the SORGE documents.
“Working late?” Sears asked on entering.
“Who isn’t?” MP responded. She held out the latest printout. “Read.”
“Politburo meeting, in the morning for a change,” Sears said, scanning the first page. “Looks a little raucous. This Qian guy is raising a little hell—oh, okay, he chatted with Fang after it and expressed serious concerns ... agreed to meet later in the day and—oh, shit!”
“What’s that?”
“They discussed increasing the readiness of their ICBM force ... let’s see ... nothing firm was decided for technical reasons, they weren’t sure how long they could keep the missiles fueled, but they were shook by our takeout of their missile submarine ...”
“Write that up. I’m going to hang a CRITIC on it,” the DDO announced.
CRITIC—shorthand for “critical”—is the highest priority in the United States government for message traffic. A CRITIC-FLAGGED document must be in the President’s hands no less than fifteen minutes after being generated. That meant that Joshua Sears had to get it drafted just as quickly as he could type in his keyboard, and that made for errors in translation.


Ryan had been asleep for maybe forty minutes when the phone next to his bed went off.
“Yeah?”
“Mr. President,” some faceless voice announced in the White House Office of Signals, “we have CRITIC traffic for you.”
“All right. Bring it up.” Jack swung his body across the bed and planted his feet on the rug. As a normal human being living in his home, he wasn’t a bathrobe person. Ordinarily he’d just pad around his house barefoot in his underwear, but that wasn’t allowed anymore, and he always kept a long blue robe handy now. It was a gift from long ago, when he’d taught history at the Naval Academy—a gift from the students there—and bore on the sleeves the one wide and four narrow stripes of a Fleet Admiral. So dressed, and wearing leather slippers that also came with the new job, he walked out into the upstairs corridor. The Secret Service night team was already up and moving. Joe Hilton came to him first.
“We heard, sir. It’s on the way up now.”
Ryan, who’d been existing on less than five hours of sleep per night for the past week, had an urgent need to lash out and rip the face off someone—anyone—but, of course, he couldn’t do that to men who were just doing their job, with miserable hours of their own.
Special Agent Charlie Malone was at the elevator. He took the folder from the messenger and trotted over to Ryan.
“Hmm.” Ryan rubbed his hand over his face as he flipped the folder open. The first three lines jumped into his consciousness. “Oh, shit.”
“Anything wrong?” Hilton asked.
“Phone,” Ryan said.
“This way, sir.” Hilton led him to the Secret Service upstairs cubbyhole office.
Ryan lifted the phone and said, “Mary Pat at Langley.” It didn’t take long. “MP, Jack here. What gives?”
“It’s just what you see. They’re talking about fueling their intercontinental missiles. At least two of them are aimed at Washington.”
“Great. Now what?”
“I just tasked a KH-11 to give their launch sites a close look. There’s two of them, Jack. The one we need to look at is Xuanhua. That’s at about forty degrees, thirty-eight minutes north, one hundred fifteen degrees, six minutes east. Twelve silos with CCC-4 missiles inside. This is one of the newer ones, and it replaced older sites that stored the missiles in caves or tunnels. Straight, vertical, in-the-ground silos. The entire missile field is about six miles by six miles. The silos are well separated so that a single nuclear impact can’t take out any two missiles,” MP explained, manifestly looking at overheads of the place as she spoke.
“How serious is this?”
A new voice came on the line. “Jack, it’s Ed. We have to take this one seriously. The naval bombardment on their coast might have set them off. The damned fools think we might be attempting a no-shit invasion.”
“What? What with?” the President demanded.
“They can be very insular thinkers, Jack, and they’re not always logical by our rules,” Ed Foley told him.
“Great. Okay. You two come on down here. Bring your best China guy with you.”
“On the way,” the DCI replied.
Ryan hung up and looked at Joe Hilton. “Wake everybody up. The Chinese may be going squirrelly on us.”


The drive up the Potomac River hadn’t been easy. Captain Blandy hadn’t wanted to wait for a river pilot to help guide him up the river—naval officers tend to be overly proud when it comes to navigating their ships—and that had made it quite tense for the bridge watch. Rarely was the channel more than a few hundred yards wide, and cruisers are deepwater ships, not riverboats. Once they came within a few yards of a mudbank, but the navigator got them clear of it with a timely rudder order. The ship’s radar was up and running—people were actually afraid to turn off the billboard system because it, like most mechanical contrivances, preferred operation to idleness, and switching it off might have broken something. As it was, the RF energy radiating from the four huge billboard transmitters on Gettysburg’s superstructure had played hell with numerous television sets on the way northwest, but that couldn’t be helped, and probably nobody noticed the cruiser in the river anyway, not at this time of night. Finally, Gettysburg glided to a halt within sight of the Woodrow Wilson bridge, and had to wait for traffic to be halted on the D.C. Beltway. This resulted in the usual road rage, but at this time of night there weren’t that many people to be outraged, though one or two did honk their horns when the ship passed through the open drawbridge span. Perhaps they were New Yorkers, Captain Blandy thought. From there it was another turn to starboard into the Anacostia River, through another drawbridge, this one named for John Philip Sousa—accompanied by more surprised looks from the few drivers out—and then a gentle docking alongside the pier that was also home to USS Barry, a retired destroyer relegated to museum status.
The line handlers on the pier, Captain Blandy saw, were mainly civilians. Wasn’t that a hell of a thing?
The “evolution”—that, Gregory had learned, was what the Navy called parking a boat—had been interesting but unremarkable to observe, though the skipper looked quite relieved to have it all behind him.
“Finished with engines,” the CO told the engine room, and let out a long breath, shared, Gregory could see, by the entire bridge crew.
“Captain?” the retired Army officer asked.
“Yes?”
“What is this all about, exactly?”
“Well, isn’t it kinda obvious?” Blandy responded. “We have a shooting war with the Chinese. They have ICBMs, and I suppose the SecDef wants to be able to shoot them down if they loft one at Washington. SACLANT is also sending an Aegis to New York, and I’d bet Pacific Fleet has some looking out for Los Angeles and San Francisco. Probably Seattle, too. There’s a lot of ships there anyway, and a good weapons locker. Do you have spare copies of your software?”
“Sure.”
“Well, we’ll have a phone line from the dock in a few minutes. We’ll see if there’s a way for you to upload it to other interested parties.”
“Oh,” Dr. Gregory observed quietly. He really should have thought that one all the way through.


This is RED WOLF FOUR. I have visual contact with the Chinese advance guard,” the regimental commander called on the radio. ”About ten kilometers south of us.”
“Very well,” Sinyavskiy replied. Just where Bondarenko and his American helpers said they were. Good. There were two other general officers in his command post, the CGs of 201st and 80th Motor Rifle divisions, and the commander of the 34th was supposed to be on his way as well, though 94th had turned and reoriented itself to attack east from a point about thirty kilometers to the south.
Sinyavskiy took the old, sodden cigar from his mouth and tossed it out into the grass, pulling another from his tunic pocket and lighting it. It was a Cuban cigar, and superb in its mildness. His artillery commander was on the other side of the map table—just a couple of planks on saw-horses, which was perfect for the moment. Close by were holes dug should the Chinese send some artillery fire their way, and most important of all, the wires which led to his communications station, set a full kilometer to the west—that was the first thing the Chinese would try to shoot at, because they’d expect him to be there. In fact the only humans present were four officers and seven sergeants, in armored personnel carriers dug into the ground for safety. It was their job to repair anything the Chinese might manage to break.
“So, Comrades, they come right into our parlor, eh?” he said for those around him. Sinyavskiy had been a soldier for twenty-six years. Oddly, he was not the son of a soldier. His father was an instructor in geology at Moscow State University, but ever since the first war movie he’d seen, this was the profession he’d craved to join. He’d done all the work, attended all the schools, studied history with the manic attention common in the Russian army, and the Red Army before it. This would be his Battle of the Kursk Bulge, remembering the battle where Vatutin and Rokossovskiy had smashed Hitler’s last attempt to retake the offensive in Russia—where his mother country had begun the long march that had ended at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. There, too, the Red Army had been the recipient of brilliant intelligence information, letting them know the time, place, and character of the German attack, and so allowing them to prepare so well that even the best of the German field commanders, Erich von Manstein, could do no more than break his teeth on the Russian steel.
And so it will be here, Sinyavskiy promised himself. The only unsatisfactory part was that he was stuck here in this camouflaged tent instead of in the line with his men, but, no, he wasn’t a captain anymore, and his place was here, to fight the battle on a goddamned printed map.
“RED WOLF, you will commence firing when the advance guard gets to within eight hundred meters.”
“Eight hundred meters, Comrade General,” the commander of his tank regiment acknowledged. “I can see them quite clearly now.”
“What exactly can you see?”
“It appears to be a battalion-strength formation, principally Type 90 tanks, some Type 98s but not too many of those, spread out as though they went to sub-unit commanders. Numerous tracked personnel carriers. I do not see any artillery-spotting vehicles, however. What do we know of their artillery?”
“It’s rolling, not set up for firing. We’re watching them,” Sinyavskiy assured him.
“Excellent. They are now two kilometers off by my range finder.”
“Stand by.”
“I will do that, Command.”
“I hate waiting,” Sinyavskiy commented to the officers around him. They all nodded, having the same prejudice. He hadn’t seen Afghanistan in his younger years, having served mainly in 1st and 2nd Guards Tank armies in Germany back then, preparing to fight against NATO, an event which blessedly had never taken place. This was his very first experience with real combat, and it hadn’t really started yet, and he was ready for it to start.
Okay, if they light those missiles up, what can we do about it?” Ryan asked.
“If they launch ’em, there’s not a goddamned thing but run for cover,” Secretary Bretano said.
“That’s good for us. We’ll all get away. What about the people who live in Washington, New York, and all the other supposed targets?” POTUS asked.
“I’ve ordered some Aegis cruisers to the likely targets that are near the water,” THUNDER went on. “I had one of my people from TRW look at the possibility of upgrading the missile systems to see if they might do an intercept. He’s done the theoretical work, and he says it looks good on the simulators, but that’s a ways from a practical test, of course. It’s better than nothing, though.”
“Okay, where are the ships?”
“There’s one here now,” Bretano answered.
“Oh? When did that happen?” Robby Jackson asked.
“Less than an hour ago. Gettysburg. There’s another one going to New York—and San Francisco and Los Angeles. Also Seattle, though that’s not really a target as far as we know. The software upgrade is going out to them to get their missiles reprogrammed.”
“Okay, that’s something. What about taking those missiles out, before they can launch?” Ryan asked next.
“The Chinese silos have recently been upgraded in protection, steel armor on the concrete covers—shaped like a Chinese coolie hat, it will probably deflect most bombs, but not the deep penetrators, the GBU-27s we used on the railroad bridges—”
“If they have any left over there. Better ask Gus Wallace,” the Vice President warned.
“What do you mean?” Bretano asked.
“I mean we never made all that many of them, and the Air Force must have dropped about forty last night.”
“I’ll check that,” SecDef promised.
“What if he doesn’t?” Jack asked.
“Then either we get some more in one big hurry, or we think up something else,” TOMCAT replied.
“Like what, Robby?”
“Hell, send in a special-operations team and blow them the f*ck up,” the former fighter pilot suggested.
“I wouldn’t much want to try that myself,” Mickey Moore observed.
“Beats the hell out of a five-megaton bomb going off on Capitol Hill, Mickey,” Jackson shot back. “Look, the preferred thing to do is find out if Gus Wallace has the right bombs. It’s a long stretch for the Black Jets, but you can tank them going and coming—and put fighters up to protect the tankers. It’s complicated, but we practice that sort of thing. If he doesn’t have the goddamned bombs, we fly them to him, assuming there are any. You know, weapons storage isn’t a cornucopia, guys. There’s a finite, discrete number for every item in the inventory.”
“General Moore,” Ryan said, “call General Wallace and find out, right now, if you would.”
“Yes, sir.” Moore stood and left the Situation Room.
“Look,” Ed Foley said, pointing to the TV. “It’s started.”


The wood line erupted in a sheet of flame two kilometers across. The sight caused the eyes of the Chinese tankers to flare, but most of the front rank of tank crews didn’t have time for much more than that. Of the thirty tanks in that line, only three escaped immediate destruction. It was little better for the personnel carriers interspersed with them.
“You may commence firing, Colonel,” Sinyavskiy told his artillery commander.
The command was relayed at once, and the ground shook beneath their feet.


It was spectacular to see on the computer terminal. The Chinese had walked straight into the ambush, and the effect of the Russian opening volley was ghastly to behold.
Major Tucker took in a deep breath as he saw several hundred men lose their lives.
“Back to their artillery,” Bondarenko ordered.
“Yes, sir.” Tucker complied at once, altering the focus of the high-altitude camera and finding the Chinese artillery. It was mainly of the towed sort, being pulled behind trucks and tractors. They were a little slow getting the word. The first Russian shells were falling around them before any effort was made to stop the trucks and lift the limbers off the towing hooks, and for all that the Chinese gunners worked rapidly.
But theirs was a race against Death, and Death had a head start. Tucker watched one gun crew struggle to manhandle their 122-mm gun into a firing position. The gunners were loading the weapon when three shells landed close enough to upset the weapon and kill more than half their number. Zooming in the camera, he could see one private writhing on the ground, and there was no one close by to offer him assistance.
“It is a miserable business, isn’t it?” Bondarenko observed quietly.
“Yeah,” Tucker agreed. When a tank blew up it was easy to tell yourself that a tank was just a thing. Even though you knew that three or four human beings were inside, you couldn’t see them. As a fighter pilot never killed a fellow pilot, but only shot down his aircraft, so Tucker adhered to the Air Force ethos that death was something that happened to objects rather than people. Well, that poor bastard with blood on his shirt wasn’t a thing, was he? He backed off the camera, taking a wider field that permitted godlike distancing from the up-close-and-personal aspects of the observation.
“Better that they should have remained in their own country, Major,” the Russian explained to him.


Jesus, what a mess,” Ryan said. He’d seen death up-close-and-personal himself in his time, having shot people who had at the time been quite willing to shoot him, but that didn’t make this imagery any the more palatable. Not by a long f*cking shot. The President turned.
“Is this going out, Ed?” he asked the DCI.
“Ought to be,” Foley replied.


And it was, on a URL—“Uniform Resource Locator” in ‘Netspeak-called http://www.darkstarfeed.cia.gov/siberiabattle/realtime.ram. It didn’t even have to be advertised. Some ’Net crawlers stumbled onto it in the first five minutes, and the “hits” from people looking at the “streaming video” site climbed up from 0 to 10 in a matter of three minutes. Then some of them must have ducked into chat rooms to spread the word. The monitoring program for the URL at CIA headquarters also kept track of the locations of the people logging into it. The first Asian country, not unexpectedly, was Japan, and the fascination of the people there in military operations guaranteed a rising number of hits. The video also included audio, the real-time comments of Air Force personnel giving some perverse color-commentary back to their comrades in uniform. It was sufficiently colorful that Ryan commented on it.
“It’s not meant for anyone much over the age of thirty to hear,” General Moore said, coming back into the room.
“What’s the story on the bombs?” Jackson asked at once.
“He’s only got two of them,” Moore replied. “The nearest others are at the factory, Lockheed-Martin, Sunnyvale. They’re just doing a production run right now.”
“Uh-oh,” Robby observed. “Back to Plan B.”
“It might have to be a special operation, then, unless, Mr. President, that is, you are willing to authorize a strike with cruise missiles.”
“What kind of cruise missiles?” Ryan asked, knowing the answer even so.
“Well, we have twenty-eight of them on Guam with W-80 warheads. They’re little ones, only about three hundred pounds. It has two settings, one-fifty or one-seventy kilotons.”
“Thermonuclear weapons, you mean?”
General Moore let out a breath before replying. “Yes, Mr. President.”
“That’s the only option we have for taking those missiles out?” He didn’t have to say that he would not voluntarily launch a nuclear strike.
“We could go in with conventional smart bombs—GBU- 10s and -15s. Gus has enough of those, but not deep penetrators, and the protection on the silos would have a fair chance at deflecting the weapon away from the target. Now, that might not matter. The CSS-4 missiles are delicate bastards, and the impact even of a miss could scramble their guidance systems ... but we couldn’t be sure.”
“I’d prefer that those things not fly.”
“Jack, nobody wants them to fly,” the Vice President said. “Mickey, put together a plan. We need something to take them out, and we need it in one big f*ckin’ hurry.”
“I’ll call SOCOM about it, but, hell, they’re down in Tampa.”
“Do the Russians have special-operations people?” Ryan asked.
“Sure, it’s called Spetsnaz.”
“And some of these missiles are targeted on Russia?”
“It certainly appears so, yes, sir,” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs confirmed.
“Then they owe us one, and they damned well owe it to themselves,” Jack said, reaching for a phone. “I need to talk to Sergey Golovko in Moscow,” he told the operator.


The American President,” his secretary said.
“Ivan Emmetovich!” Golovko said in hearty greeting. “The reports from Siberia are good.”
“I know, Sergey, I’m watching it live now myself. Want to do it yourself?”
“It is possible?”
“You have a computer with a modem?”
“One cannot exist without the damned things,” the Russian replied.
Ryan read off the URL identifier. “Just log onto that. We’re putting the feed from our Dark Star drones onto the Internet.”
“Why is that, Jack?” Golovko asked at once.
“Because as of two minutes ago, one thousand six hundred and fifty Chinese citizens are watching it, and the number is going up fast.”
“A political operation against them, yes? You wish to destabilize their government?”
“Well, it won’t hurt our purposes if their citizens find out what’s happening, will it?”
“The virtues of a free press. I must study this. Very clever, Ivan Emmetovich.”
“That’s not why I called.”
“Why is that, Tovarisch Prezidyent?” the SVR chairman asked, with sudden concern at the change in his tone. Ryan was not one to conceal his feelings well.
“Sergey, we have a very adverse indication from their Politburo. I’m faxing it to you now,” he heard. “I’ll stay on the line while you read it.”
Golovko wasn’t surprised to see the pages arrive on his personal fax machine. He had Ryan’s personal numbers, and the Americans had his. It was just one way for an intelligence service to demonstrate its prowess in a harmless way. The first sheets to come across were the English translation of the Chinese ideographs that came through immediately thereafter.


Sergey, I sent you our original feed in case your linguists or psychologists are better than ours,” the President said, with an apologetic glance at Dr. Sears. The CIA analyst waved it off. ”They have twelve CSS-4 missiles, half aimed at you, half at us. I think we need to do something about those things. They may not be entirely rational, the way things are going now.”
“And your shore bombardment might have pushed them to the edge, Mr. President,” the Russian said over the speakerphone. “I agree, this is a matter of some concern. Why don’t you bomb the things with your brilliant bombs from your magical invisible bombers.”
“Because we’re out of bombs, Sergey. They ran out of the sort they need.”
“Nichevo” was the reaction.
“You should see it from my side. My people are thinking about a commando-type operation.”
“I see. Let me consult with some of my people. Give me twenty minutes, Mr. President.”
“Okay, you know where to reach me.” Ryan punched the kill button on the phone and looked sourly at the tray of coffee things. “One more cup of this shit and I’m going to turn into an urn myself.”


The only reason he was alive now, he was sure, was that he’d withdrawn to the command section for 34th Army. His tank division was being roughly handled. One of his battalions had been immolated in the first minute of the battle. Another was now trying to maneuver east, trying to draw the Russians out into a running battle for which his men were trained. The division’s artillery had been halved at best by Russian massed fire, and 34th Army’s advance was now a thing of the past. His current task was to try and use his two mechanized divisions to establish a base of fire from which he could try to wrest back control of the battle. But every time he tried to move a unit, something happened to it, as though the Russians were reading his mind.
“Wa, pull what’s left of Three-Oh-Second back to the ten o’clock start-line, and do it now!” he ordered.
“But Marshal Luo won’t—”
“And if he wishes to relieve me, he can, but he isn’t here now, is he?” Ge snarled back. “Give the order!”
“Yes, Comrade General.”


With this toy in our hands, the Germans would not have made it as far as Minsk,” Bondarenko said.
“Yeah, it helps to know what the other guy’s doing, doesn’t it?”
“It’s like being a god on Mount Olympus. Who thought this thing up?”
“Oh, a couple of people at Northrop started the idea, with an airplane called Tacit Rainbow, looked like a cross between a snow shovel and a French baguette, but it was manned, and the endurance wasn’t so good.”
“Whoever it is, I would like to buy him a bottle of good vodka,” the Russian general said. “This is saving the lives of my soldiers.”
And beating the living shit out of the Chinese, Tucker didn’t add. But combat was that sort of game, wasn’t it?
“Do you have any other aircraft up?”
“Yes, sir. Grace Kelly’s back up to cover First Armored.”
“Show me.”
Tucker used his mouse to shrink one video window and then opened another. General Diggs had a second terminal up and running, and Tucker just stole its take. There were what looked like two brigades operating, moving north at a measured pace and wrecking every Chinese truck and track they could find. The battlefield, if you could call it that, was a mass of smoke columns from shot-up trucks, reminding Tucker of the vandalized Kuwaiti oil fields of 1991. He zoomed in to see that most of the work was being done by the Bradleys. What targets there were simply were not worthy of a main-gun round from the tanks. The Abrams just rode herd on the lighter infantry carriers, doing protective overwatch as they ground mercilessly forward. The major slaved one camera to his terminal and went scouting around for more action ...
“Who’s this?” Tucker asked.
“That must be BOYAR,” Bondarenko said.
It was what looked like twenty-five T-55 tanks advancing on line, and these tanks were using their main guns ... against trucks and some infantry carriers ...


Load HEAT,” Lieutenant Komanov ordered. ”Target track, one o’clock! Range two thousand.”
“I have him,” the gunner said a second later.
“Fire!”
“Firing,” the gunner said, squeezing the trigger. The old tank rocked backwards from the shot. Gunner and commander watched the tracer arcing out ...
“Over, damn it, too high. Load another HEAT.”
The loader slammed another round into the breech in a second: “Loaded!”
“I’ll get the bastard this time,” the gunner promised, adjusting his sights down a hair. The poor bastard out there didn’t even know he’d been shot at the first time ...
“Fire!”
“Firing ...”
Yet another recoil, and ...
“Hit! Good shooting Vanya!”
Three Company was doing well. The time spent in gunnery practice was paying off handsomely, Komanov thought. This was much better than sitting in a damned bunker and waiting for them to come to you ...


What is that?” Marshal Luo asked.
“Comrade Marshal, come here and see,” the young lieutenant colonel urged.
“What is this?” the Defense Minister asked with a trailing-off voice ... “Cao ni ma,” he breathed. Then he thundered: “What the hell is this?”
“Comrade Marshal, this is a web site, from the Internet. It purports to be a live television program from the battlefield in Siberia.” The young field-grade officer was almost breathless. “It shows the Russians fighting Thirty-fourth Shock Army ...”
“And?”
“And they’re slaughtering our men, according to this,” the lieutenant colonel went on.
“Wait a minute—what—how is this possible?” Luo demanded.
“Comrade, this heading here says darkstar. ‘Dark Star’ is the name of an American unmanned aerial vehicle, a reconnaissance drone, reported to be a stealth aircraft used to collect tactical intelligence. Thus, it appears that they are using this to feed information, and putting the information on the Internet as a propaganda tool.” He had to say it that way, and it was, in fact, the way he thought about it.
“Tell me more.”
The officer was an intelligence specialist. “This explains the success they’ve had against us, Comrade Marshal. They can see everything we do, almost before we do it. It’s as though they listen to our command circuit, or even listen into our staff and planning meetings. There is no defense against this,” the staff officer concluded.
“You young defeatist!” the marshal raged.
“Perhaps there is a way to overcome this advantage, but I do not know what it is. Systems like this can see in the dark as well as they can in the sunlight. Do you understand, Comrade Marshal? With this tool they can see everything we do, see it long before we approach their formations. It eliminates any possibility of surprise ... see here,” he said, pointing at the screen. “One of Thirty-fourth Army’s mechanized divisions is maneuvering east. They are here”—he pointed to a printer map on the table—“and the enemy is here. If our troops get to this point unseen, then perhaps they can hit the Russians on their left flank, but it will take two hours to get there. For the Russians to get one of their units to a blocking position will take but one hour. That is the advantage,” he concluded.
“The Americans do that to us?”
“Clearly, the feed on the Internet is from America, from their CIA.”
“This is how the Russians have countered us, then?”
“Clearly. They’ve outguessed us at every turn today. This must be how they do it.”
“Why do the Americans put this information out where everyone can see it?” Luo wondered. The obvious answer didn’t occur to him. Information given out to the public had to be carefully measured and flavored for the peasants and workers to draw the proper conclusions from it.
“Comrade, it will be difficult to say on state television that things are going well when this is available to anyone with a computer.”
“Ahh.” Less a sound of satisfaction than one of sudden dread. “Anyone can see this?”
“Anyone with a computer and a telephone line.” The young lieutenant colonel looked up, only to see Luo’s receding form.
“I’m surprised he didn’t shoot me,” the officer observed.
“He still might,” a full colonel told him. “But I think you frightened him.” He looked at the wall clock. It was sixteen hours, four in the afternoon.
“Well, it is a concern.”
“You young fool. Don’t you see? Now he can’t even conceal the truth from the Politburo.”


Hello, Yuri,” lark said. It was different to be in Moscow in time of war. The mood of the people on the street was unlike anything he’d ever seen. They were concerned and serious—you didn’t go to Russia to see the smiling people any more than you went to England for the coffee—but there was something else, too. Indignation. Anger ... determination? Television coverage of the war was not as strident and defiant as he’d expected. The new Russian news media were trying to be even-handed and professional. There was commentary to the effect that the army’s inability to stop the Chinese cold spoke ill of their country’s national cohesion. Others lamented the demise of the Soviet Union, whom China would not have dared to threaten, much less attack. More asked what the hell was the use of being in NATO if none of the other countries came to the aid of their supposed new ally.
“We told the television people that if they told anyone of the American division now in Siberia, we’d shoot them, and of course they believed us,” Lieutenant General Kirillin said with a smile. That was something new for Clark and Chavez to see. He hadn’t smiled much in the past week.
“Things looking up?” Chavez inquired.
“Bondarenko has stopped them at the gold mine. They will not even see that, if my information is correct. But there is something else,” he added seriously.
“What’s that, Yuriy?” Clark asked.
“We are concerned that they might launch their nuclear weapons.”
“Oh, shit,” Ding observed. “How serious is that?”
“It comes from your President. Golovko is speaking with President Grushavoy right now.”
“And? How do they plan to go about it? Smart bombs?” John asked.
“No, Washington has asked us to go in with a special-operations team,” Kirillin said.
“What the hell?” John gasped. He pulled his satellite phone out of his pocket and looked for the door. “Excuse me, General. E.T. phone home.”


You want to say that again, Ed?” Foley heard.
“You heard me. They’ve run out of the bombs they need. Evidently, it’s a pain in the ass to fly bombs to where the bombers are.”
“F*ck!” the CIA officer observed, out in the parking lot of this Russian army officers’ club. The encryption on his phone didn’t affect the emotion in his voice. “Don’t tell me, since RAINBOW is a NATO asset, and Russia’s part of NATO now, and since you’re going to be asking the f*cking Russians to front this operation, in the interest of North Atlantic solidarity, we’re going to get to go and play, too, right?”
“Unless you choose not to, John. I know you can’t go yourself. Combat’s a kid’s game, but you have some good kids working for you.”
“Ed, you expect me to send my people in on something like that and I stay home and f*cking knit socks?” Clark demanded heatedly.
“That’s your call to make. You’re the RAINBOW commander.”
“How is this supposed to work? You expect us to jump in?”
“Helicopters—”
“Russian helicopters. No thanks, buddy, I—”
“Our choppers, John. First Armored Division had enough and they’re the right kind ...”


They want me to do what?” Dick Boyle asked.
“You heard me.”
“What about fuel?”
“Your fueling point’s right about here,” Colonel Masterman said, holding the just-downloaded satellite photo. “Hilltop west of a place called Chicheng. Nobody lives there, and the numbers work out.”
“Yeah, except out flight path takes us within ten miles of this fighter base.”
“Eight F-117s are going to hit it while you’re on the way in. Ought to close down their runways for a good three days, they figure.”
“Dick,” Diggs said, “I don’t know what the problem is exactly, but Washington is really worried that Joe is going to launch his ICBMs at us at home, and Gus Wallace doesn’t have the right bombs to take them out reliably. That means a special-ops force, down and dirty. It’s a strategic mission, Dick. Can you do it?”
Colonel Boyle looked at the map, measuring distance in his mind ... “Yeah, we’ll have to mount the outrigger wings on the Blackhawks and load up to the max on gas, but, yeah, we got the range to get there. Have to refuel on the way back, though.”
“Okay, can you use your other birds to ferry the fuel out?”
Boyle nodded. “Barely.”
“If necessary, the Russians can land a Spetsnaz force anywhere through here with additional fuel, so they tell me. This part of China is essentially unoccupied, according to the maps.”
“What about opposition on the ground?”
“There is a security force in the area. We figure maybe a hundred people on duty, total, say a squad at each silo. Can you get some Apaches out there to run interference?”
“Yeah, they can get that far, if they travel light.” Just cannon rounds and 2.75-inch rockets, he thought.
“Then get me your mission requirements,” General Diggs said. It wasn’t quite an order. If he said it was impossible, then Diggs couldn’t make him do it. But Boyle couldn’t let his people go out and do something like this without being there to command them.


The MI-24s finished things off. The Russian doctrine for their attack helicopters wasn’t too different from how they used their tanks. Indeed, the MI-24—called the Hind by NATO, but strangely unnamed by the Russians themselves—was referred to as a flying tank. Using AT-6 Spiral missiles, they finished off a Chinese tank battalion in twenty minutes of jump and shoot, sustaining only two losses in the process. The sun was setting now, and what had been Thirty-fourth Shock Army was wreckage. What few vehicles had survived the day were pulling back, usually with wounded men clinging to their decks.
In his command post, General Sinyavskiy was all smiles. Vodka was snorted by all. His 265th Motor Rifle Division had halted and thrown back a force more than double its size, suffering fewer than three hundred dead in the process. The TV news crews were finally allowed out to where the soldiers were, and he delivered the briefing, paying frequent compliments to his theater commander, Gennady Iosefovich Bondarenko, for his cool head and faith in his subordinates. “He never lost his nerve,” Sinyavskiy said soberly. “And he allowed us to keep ours for when the time came. He is a Hero of Russia,” the division commander concluded. “And so are many of my men!”


Thank you for that, Yuriy Andreyevich, and, yes, for that you will get your next star,” the theater commander told the television screen. Then he turned to his staff. ”Andrey Petrovich, what do we do tomorrow?”
“I think we will let Two-Six-Five start moving south. We will be the hammer, and Diggs will be the anvil. They still have a Type-A Group army largely intact to the south, the Forty-third. We will smash it starting day after tomorrow, but first we will maneuver it into a place of our choosing.”
Bondarenko nodded. “Show me a plan, but first, I am going to sleep for a few hours.”
“Yes, Comrade General.”