by Ian Slater
An American cruise missile was passing over them, just above the top of the hills that spread north of the Amur, its white speckle camouflage making it difficult to spot but its stubby, squarish wings cutting the cold, Arctic air and making a sound like cars whipping past one another, the subdued growl of its motor coming to them only after it had passed overhead. Then there was another, and another.
“Holy cow,” said Valdez. “Ain’t that somethin’!” The effect on morale of finally striking back, now that the Siberian trajectories had been back-tracked, was electric, sending a surge of badly needed confidence through the forward units of Second Army.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Apache and Cobra gunships flying NOE — nap of the earth — missions following the contours of the taiga ahead of Freeman’s armored column were so close to the treetops, it was regarded as inevitable that some would be lost to wind sheer. The gunships skimmed the up and down of air currents over the white, rolling sea of forest. A sudden unexpected drop of a few feet, and the trees would reach up and take you down. But none were lost — at least not on the way in, the pilots long used to such tactics in western Europe, the steady stream of information needed to assist in NOE fed back from the twenty-five-inch-diameter combination thermal imaging sensor, laser, TV, and boresight system through a.1-inch-diameter tube to video displays in the cockpit. Each pilot, in symbiotic relationship with the cyclic control column, was ready to touch-alter forward, backward blade, pitch, and yaw controls in response to the main computer display.
The cockpit of the lead chopper of the thirty sharp-nosed, 140-mile-per-hour AH-1S Cobras was suddenly invaded by a loud buzzing noise and flashing red light. The rate of climb had fallen precipitously in a downdraft; the craft’s pod load of eight TOW, or tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-guided, antitank missiles, and two pods of nineteen 2.75-inch rockets for softer targets — should infantry be sighted — were abnormally buffeted. In addition there was the weight of the universal-swivel, turret-mounted, thirty-millimeter machine gun and its ammunition belt under the nose with which to contend. The pilot instantly altered the pitch, the rotors responding quickly in the colder Siberian air, giving more lift than in the warmer climes of western Europe and Southeast Asia.
Still, it was hair-raising flying, heartbeat and blade beat alarmingly out of synch at times, the first tanks in sight either T-72s or 80s; it was difficult to tell because of the camouflage netting. Adding to his anxiety, the pilot was already depressed after having received the news that morning that his brother in the navy had been killed, sucked overboard by the enormous vacuum created when the Missouri had fired one of its salvoes against the Kommandorsky Islands.
But in the split second of sighting the target a half mile away and racing toward him, the pilot forgot all the questions he wanted answered about his brother’s death — such as why the hell he was out on deck when the guns were fired? He felt the adrenaline taking over as he shot off a TOW missile equipped with the latest warhead, upgraded to penetrate — he hoped — the layered reactive armor of the Siberian tanks, the armor that could explode an incoming round, diffusing its impact.
The Cobras, now joined by Apaches, made a force of sixty choppers in all. They swarmed over the taiga that erupted beneath them with streaks of orange light, pale against the snow but thunderous in their explosions. Shrapnel screamed as camouflaged “cold”—therefore not infrared-detectable — antiaircraft quads of rapid machine-gun fire opened up. For all their sophistication and versatility in the air — an aspect constantly celebrated by Hollywood — the truth, as every chopper pilot knew, was that his craft, flying at plus or minus 150 miles per hour, was a slow combatant in the modern world of high-subsonic and supersonic warfare, and low to the trees they were terribly vulnerable.
The Siberian quads continued to unleash a terrible and concentrated fire by means of the single most important an-antihelicopter defense of modern warfare: the Soviet-developed high-velocity AIRDEM, or air defense mines. The weapon was really misnamed as it was not, strictly speaking, an antiaircraft mine at all, having no effect on faster, fixed-wing aircraft. Rather it was specifically an antihelicopter weapon. But misnamed or not, the Siberian radar-and-heat-sensor-equipped mines exploded in V-shaped cones of shrapnel four hundred feet high and over a hundred yards in diameter.
The mine, triggered either by the approaching rotor slap or engine heat, proved devastating to the U.S. helicopter strike force, knocking out fifteen of the sixty choppers, three of these lost in midair collisions as a direct result of confusion and equipment gone awry in an air whistling with fuselage-smashing metal bits.
At first the younger reporters assigned to Second Army’s media pool back in Khabarovsk had difficulty understanding the seriousness of what had happened. To their inexperienced eyes, while fifteen downed out of sixty was bad news, it still left forty-five choppers fully operational. But older hands pointed out that if Freeman had lost 25 percent of all his choppers in one action, very soon he’d have none left. And as serious as the loss of 180 million dollars of sophisticated technology was, the loss of thirty pilots was far more serious.
The remaining forty-five U.S. choppers did not flinch, despite the losses. Most of their pilots were veterans of NOE flying in Europe and Iraq, and they exhibited all the deftness that was required in hugging rolling terrain at treetop level.
The instant a target was spotted, the chopper would dip down in the nearest fold, hovering, its mast sight extended high above the rotors, the sight’s small TV, invisible to the enemy, providing a clear video of the enemy tank or gun position. Then, with the target fix gained within seconds, the chopper would pop up, fire, pop down, wait for the explosion, and move on. The Apaches had an advantage over the Cobras as the latter, because of logistical priorities, had been assigned TOW missiles whose 447-pound electronic firing control box was much heavier man the Hellfire antitank control box used aboard the Apaches. The difference in control-box weight allowed the heavier Apaches to carry much more ordnance than the smaller, ten-thousand-pound Cobras.
It was not only the Siberian AIRDEMs that plagued the Apache/Cobra strike force but the mobile remote-controlled ZSU-23 sixty-five-round-per-minute AA quads that had already gained a reputation in the air defense of Ratmanov Island.
At Chichatka it wasn’t Freeman in the lead M-1 A-1 who realized what had happened but one of the model-airplane-sized Pioneer UAVs — unmanned aerial reconnaissance vehicles-launched from the column’s midsection.
Heading into the cacophony of fire, snow-laden trees shattering and splitting on either side of it, snow, fire, and dirt sweeping across the road from the AIRDEMs’ explosions, Freeman’s tank in the first four-tank platoon was a thousand yards from the summit of the hill before Chichatka Station. Sitting higher, behind the gunner, who was encased by solid steel beneath the base of the 120-millimeter cannon, Freeman moved his right thumb and depressed the M-1 A-1 cupola’s traverse and laying control, his eyes flicking over the nine observation periscopes he had available to him, ready in an instant to go to “override” control should he glimpse the hull or any other part of an enemy tank or its camouflage net.
On either side of the road, fire breaks ran through the taiga, but as yet he saw neither tank tracks, though these would have been covered by the recent snowfall, nor any other sign of troop concentrations. Though he could see nothing of the enemy, Freeman, like the loader on his left and the gunner and driver in front of him, was sweating with concentration, the sour odor filling the tank. And despite the fact that the Abrams’ superb torsion-bar suspension made it the smoothest tank ride in the world, allowing the gun to traverse and remain stabilized regardless of the degree of buck and yaw even at full speed over rough ground, the fact was that a tank was still a tank, not a convertible.
The sheer volume of noise within the tank — an echo chamber for the fifteen-hundred-horsepower gas turbine, the nerve-rasping whine of the turret moving, and the heavy thumping of tread-compressed clumps of sn
ow thrown up against the tank’s belly, all combined together with the four men’s intercom phone — added to the tension made worse by the knowledge that snow seeping back was reducing the infrared and laser-ranging sight capability.
Like every other tank commander, Freeman knew he would have only a split second to get a bead through the sighting scope. The “watch” was split between Freeman, taking the front 180-degree traverse, the loader, responsible for left flank to rear, and the gunner, right flank to rear. All the while Freeman was ready to plug into the intertank Bradley infantry fighting vehicle and armored personnel carrier radio network in the event that any of the tank crews spotted infantry that, he suspected, even now could be moving through the trees on either flank, waiting until enough tanks had passed before launching antitank rockets against the American armor.
A rock hit the glacis, the front-sloped armor, and Freeman saw the loader start. Mindful of the beating he’d taken on the Never-Skovorodino Road, Freeman wondered for a second whether it might have been better to wait for the self-propelled, eleven-mile-range, 155-millimeter howitzers and seventeen-mile-range M-110 A-2 artillery. But everything was a judgment call, and by the time the Never-Skovorodino road behind him would be cleared of the burned-out hulks caused by the Siberian cruise missile attack, and so clear enough for the howitzers to pass through, the Siberian armor would have time to position itself.
“Dolly Patton, three o’clock!” shouted the gunner, and in the half second it took Freeman to spot the outline of the busty armor of what looked to be a four-hundred-millimeter-thick T-72 turret, the gunner, having seen the target hidden down a firebreak on the right flank, had already got off a HESH — high-explosive squash head — round, the cold, clean air in the tank immediately replaced by a gush of hot, acrid-smelling smoke, the rush of the air conditioners’ antigas overpressure system automatically cutting in. Freeman immediately spotted another angular shape, its hull down but just visible above a snow berm about a thousand meters down the road. Going to override he got the fix and, hearing the roar of a gunship overhead, squeezed the trigger, sending off another HESH round at over a thousand meters a second to the target, and saw another M-1 tank right aft of him firing. He fired again; the muffled “crump” he heard, octane exploding. The first target already burned fiercely, nothing visible but a wall of orange flame licking into the white-green forest on either side of the firebreak, snow from previously heavily laden branches sliding to the ground like sugar.
In 2.3 minutes Freeman’s M-1 A-1 fired ten rounds. At this rate he knew they’d be out of ammunition in just under ten minutes. It was well within the M-1 ‘s rate of fire, the midbarrel fume extractor capable of handling the rapid passage of the fifty-six-pound HEAT round down the smooth bore, but it also meant the logistics of resupply quickly loomed as a major consideration.
So far no M-1s had been hit, to Freeman’s knowledge, though in the confusion of battle, including the noise of choppers overhead, no one would really know what had happened until after. His M-1 still advancing, the low hum of the computers making constant adjustments for barrel bend, wind drift, and outside temperature audible between the heavy thumps of other M-1s firing, Freeman broke into the intertank radio circuit, ordering any tank with more than thirty of its fifty rounds expended to withdraw for rearming. Tanks further back were told to go to battle speed and to close the gap wherever the more open ground around Chichatka Station would allow. Freeman hated ordering any kind of withdrawal of tanks who still had ten rounds, but he was suspicious now because of the apparent absence of infantry.
The forests beyond the clear area were ideal for infantry antitank positions; he didn’t want to be the man who led his armor into a trap. But he already had.
For the gunships it had been an unmitigated disaster, and Freeman’s realization that, albeit unwittingly, he’d delivered his air cavalry into the snare of quads and AIRDEM mines set by Yesov came via a radio message from his G-2. It was short and blunt and immediately explained to the gunner in Freeman’s tank and in many other M-1s how it was that Freeman’s armor had been so successful so far, the only casualty being a bad eject of a spent shell that seriously burned a loader. The message sent in plain language from Freeman’s G-2, its conclusion verified by the unmanned reconnaissance aircraft, was: “Enemy tanks fake.”
Worse was to come. With his choppers withdrawing, his tank crews knowing they’d been had, even if the helicopters had taken out some of the remote control quads in the forest, Freeman, the recon pics now rushed to him by dispatch rider, stood there in the cupola looking at the blowups. The caption over them bore the euphemistic title: “Simulated armored vehicles. French made.” The hastily typed G-2 report added the French manufacturer’s name, Lancelin-Barracuda, misspelled with a single “r.”
The fake tanks that had deceived the aerial reconnaissance were of fiberglass/plywood construction, their hollow interior containing a ten-gallon drum of gasoline, a four-cubic-foot box of junk metal — ample supplies of this available from the many disbanded old steam engines along the Trans-Siberian — and a clear-burning, Japanese-made kerosene lamp. The lamp produced the heat source for IF sensors aboard either the UAV reconnaissance craft or helicopters, such as those that had been flown by the thirty American helicopter pilots who were now dead. G-2 also informed Freeman that a Pentagon file matchup just received indicated that the cost to the Siberians of just one T-80 equalled the purchase price of at least sixty fake tanks. To add insult to injury, it was less subtly pointed out that C in C Second Army should also “be advised” that Allied intelligence “has known for some time that ZSU-23 quads could be tripped by the pulse of approaching aircraft engines,” which would “clearly explain the lack of troops.”
* * *
HEAVY CASUALTIES IN SECOND ARMY was the headline of The New York Times. The La Roche paper, in funereal tones that belied its brutally flippant headline, FREEMAN FOILED AGAIN, suggested it was time “to ask serious questions about General Freeman’s leadership.” This time there was not even a reference to the Pyongyang raid or the breakout of the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket and only an ambivalent reference to the “heavily won” victory on Ratmanov. Dick Norton and everyone else in Second Army now knew that Freeman had not swept a double header; what he had instead was a double humiliation. How Yesov must be laughing in Novosibirsk.
No one but Norton had the courage, when Freeman returned through the pall,of still-burning helicopters, to tell Freeman the news of his wife’s death. And at this moment, on the worst day of his life, General Douglas Freeman was also informed by the E-3A Sentry advance warning reconnaissance that another Siberian cruise missile offensive was on its way from Baikal. Freeman wanted to be alone with his grief for the one person who had shared his innermost ambitions and fears and all the joys and disappointments of their life together. And so did many others who had seen their closest friends literally torn asunder. But mourning was a luxury no war indulged, and the stars he wore on his collar dictated unequivocally that he give all his attention to, and husband whatever energy he had for, the welfare of his men in Second Army’s most perilous hours.
Though Second Army moved forward through Chichatka, its pace was sullen, the air of defeat heavy as skunk cabbage. On one level the problem was as simple as it was critical; the U.S. Tomahawk cruise missiles had reached Baikal and taken out their designated targets, but more Siberian cruise missiles kept coming. Of course the launch sites had to be fake — only convincing enough, like the fake T-80s, in heat emission, size, and shape, to sucker the Americans into wasting precious cruise missiles of their own in the same way Freeman had lost fifteen of his prime antitank weapons in the downed Apaches and Cobras. It was evident now, G-2 had told him, that the Siberians must be using mobile sites, somehow covering their tracks, which the satellites weren’t picking up.
“Maybe they’re dragging a bush behind them,” said a junior officer jokingly. But no one was laughing, especially not the commander of the marine expeditionary fo
rce, who had lost another fifty-six men and forty-three wounded to the latest Siberian cruise attack.
Freeman, Norton, and the G-2 colonel were poring over the latest satellite reconnaissance pictures of the Baikal area, the colonel having circled the four Ushkanyi Islands jutting up like pimples in the photograph. Next to the satellite pics he put four tatty amateur photographs of the islands, slightly out of focus, the islands looking like tiny white stones encrusted by the ice. “What are these splotches?” asked Freeman in as desultory a tone as Norton had ever heard. The general was putting on his long white camouflage winter coat, preparing to go for one of his walks, and Norton couldn’t blame him. It was bad enough to lose a game without having to suffer replays in the dugout.
“Splotches?” said the colonel. “Well, most of it, I think, is overexposure — especially on these amateur shots we were sent. Some of it, of course, is varying thicknesses in the ice.” He tapped the amateur photographs, brought to them by one of the Buryat underground who’d nearly got shot by a jittery marine and who “claimed,” the colonel said suspiciously, that he’d gotten them from some Jewish underground.
Freeman grunted, picked up his helmet, and, as he always did before he went out, checked that his belt revolver was fully loaded, ready to go.
“Want the to come along, General?” asked Norton.
“No. Thanks all the same, Dick.” He forced a grin, trying to belie his mood to the others. “Have to nut a few things out,” he said, and was gone, flurries of snow bursting in unceremoniously just before the door closed. Outside the wind was moaning through the taiga.
“Some congressmen,” said one of the G-2 officers, “are pressing for his recall.”