by Ian Slater
The hundreds of SPETS and other underground cells that had infiltrated the West during the East German rush through the wire, or rather through the gaps in the wire that had been cut by the Hungarians in 1989, had already carried out highly successful sabotage raids on the railway marshaling yards throughout western Germany as well as hitting four of the huge “prepo” storage sites dotted about the central region, including two outside Gottingen and Fulda which had contained many of the central front’s 150,000 military vehicles and nuclear warheads for 105-millimeter and 203-millimeter artillery. But not all of NATO’s depots had been gutted in the early hours and weeks of the war, and the troops in the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket were drawing on the deep underground reserve dumps of ammunition from around Munster, situated more or less in the middle of the kidney-shaped 250-square-mile pocket.
Soviet and East German bombers could not penetrate the NATO air screen thrown up around avianosets Angliya— “carrier England”—where, though exhausted by sometimes more than seven sorties a day, pilots of the RAF, USAF, and German Luftwaffe forming NATO’s Second Allied Tactical Air Force continued to go up against the swarms of MiG-23-escorted “Backfire” and Badger-C bombers, the Soviet fighters carrying Kitchen and Kingfish air-to-surface missiles. Despite their pilots’ fatigue and a crash rate of 5.2 percent — which didn’t sound like much to the layman at home but which meant that after just ten sorties, you had only a fifty-fifty chance of coming back alive — the NATO air force commanders deep in the Börfink bunker before it was overrun had kept the Soviets at bay in the air. What the HQ of Second Tactical Air Force, now in the south at Ramstein, wanted — and what the U.K. Royal Air Force command in High Wycombe prayed for — was foul weather.
While this would complicate the already insufficient supply lines across the English Channel, including the floating oil pipeline, NATO preferred it because of the experience of the American pilots who had fought off Soviet interceptors in the night skies and bad weather during General Freeman’s raid on Pyongyang. The American pilots, including Frank Shirer, had confirmed a long-held NATO article of faith: When it came to instrument flying with all visuals ruled out, American, British, and German fighters could outstrip their Russian counterparts.
Even during the daytime dogfights over northwestern Germany and over the area still held by NATO in the south around Mannheim and Heidelberg, the NATO fighters, particularly British and German Tornadoes and American F-111s and Falcon-18s, were outclassing the opposition. The problem was that the opposition had more planes and more pilots: an advantage of three to one in aircraft, two to one in pilots. It was a situation worsened by the spectacular success of the Soviet divisions in southern Germany, which had so badly mauled the Fourth Allied Tactical Air Force, SPETS attacks having penetrated as far as Bitburg, where forty-seven of the seventy-two F-15s based there were destroyed on the ground by “activated” SPETS groups who had easily infiltrated the sea of refugees fleeing westward from the Soviet juggernaut.
In Hannover, northeast of the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket, the concern of the Soviet-Warsaw Pact was how to crush the pocket before NATO convoys could hope to replace what had been lost on the battlefields of Germany.
For the Soviet military accountants and logistical wizards in Berlin’s subterranean headquarters, the problem was never calculated in terms of pain, of lives lost, because already the human face had become obscured beneath the wrap of high technology. Modern technology, contrary to public opinion, had not made killing any less barbaric, the twisted metal of modern munitions wreaking as much hacking and butchering as any of the barbaric wars of old. One of the “advances” in technology was bullets so heavy, yet so small — made of depleted uranium — and of such velocity that upon impact, they could vaporize a man’s head in the way a piece of shell might have in the great artillery barrages of the First and Second World Wars.
For the HQ computer staffs, however, divisions were rectangles moved about on the computer screens, not a torso torn asunder, where arms and legs or stomachs simply disappeared and where carrion crows grew fat on the spilt innards of soldiers. Nor did the statisticians deal with the effect on morale of supersonic fighter attacks, or laser-guided antitank rockets, of the unimaginable nightmare of a cluster bomb bursting, bombs within bombs within bombs, releasing needle-sharp shrapnel. Nor did the statisticians deal with the overwhelming sweet stench of dead flesh that greased the treads of the tanks and APCs as men drove until they were exhausted or their fuel had been expended, many of them becoming nothing more than whimpering shadows of their former selves, their eyes bright with madness from high-tech stress levels beyond bearing.
In the Berlin bunkers, where the state had long held precedence over the individual, the Soviet military statisticians, many of them women, saw none of this — their job to coldly, dispassionately, estimate Allied losses and a timetable for Allied resupply. Bad weather to them was neutral; perhaps it would make the convoy safer, harder to find by visual means — on the other hand, the low mist and rolling fog banks of late fall could impede attack and aid defense on the land. For now, it was the matter of the convoys that Supreme Soviet Commander Marshal Leonid Kroptkin was concentrating upon. So long as the NATO fighter screen held over Western Europe, NATO supply lines through France and through Austria, if Vienna threw in its lot with the NATO forces, would sustain the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket. And if supplies kept coming, the pocket could expand into counterattack. And so the top priority for Moscow and Berlin was to stop the convoys now heading for the French ports, from Dunkirk to Calais in the north to as far southwest as Dieppe, Saint-Malo, and Cherbourg.
“As long as this situation holds,” the Soviet Western Theater of Operations C in C reported, “we have not won the war.” It was not only the Allied submarine-escorted convoys that the marshal worried about, but the Allied capacity to airdrop supplies into the pocket if the NATO convoys succeeded in bringing in enough men and materiel to the ports. What the Russian commander wanted was massive reinforcements from the East preceded by an awesome artillery barrage of a thousand guns of the kind that had finally destroyed the Wermacht and swallowed up Berlin over fifty years ago. His losses had been staggering, the Allies exacting a terrible price, over 130,000 Russians killed while punching the hole through the Fulda Gap, and almost 200,000 Soviet troops wounded.
“There is talk of reserves coming up from Yugoslavia, Marshal,” his aide, a colonel, reminded him, pointing on the wall to the alpine border between northern Yugoslavia and southern Austria. “Through the Ljubljana Gap and—”
“Yes, there is talk,” said the marshal. “There is always a lot of talk, Colonel. And what if Austria does not come over to us and permit the Yugoslavs to pass through?”
“I think they will.”
“Yes, now,” said the marshal. “If it looks as if we are winning.” He turned to the huge, three-dimensional contour table map, his hand sweeping down over southern Germany to Austria. “No, my friend — the Austrians are stuffing themselves full of pastries, eyes darting like parrots west to east, waiting. Their friends are whoever wins. No one can wait for the Austrians.”
“The Yugoslavs could simply push their way through. Whether Austria liked it or not,” proffered the aide.
The marshal was bending over the contour map, his finger tracing the long fold of the Danube valley eastward to the conjunction of Czechoslovakia and Austria. “I thought you went to officers’ school. You should know better than to indulge in such speculation. If the Yugoslavs come in, they will first have to get through the Ljubljana Gap if they are to be any use to us.”
A dispatch rider, goggles and uniform splattered in mud, came in, saluted, and handed the marshal a list of the latest positions of the retreating Dutch forces in Westphalia, north of the Ruhr. The marshal nodded and told the rider to give the report to his logistics aide. The colonel, though distracted for a moment by the sight of the dispatch rider in a room buzzing and crackling with state-of-the-art electronic communications
, returned to the subject of possible reinforcements confronting NATO’s southern flank. “Even if the Italians attacked on our southern flank, I doubt whether they could stop the Yugoslavs, Marshal,” the ambitious colonel pressed on.
“Perhaps not,” replied the marshal, his right hand alternately opening and closing to a fist, leaving a finger pointing at the Ljubljana pass. “But the Yugoslavs might stop themselves. With Serbs versus Croats. In any case, Colonel, by the time the Yugoslavs reach southern Germany, the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket could have expanded. No — what we need are more troops. And quickly — so that we can annihilate NATO.” His arms swept across the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket. “Before they can catch their breath. We need to destroy their convoys — and we need more men.”
“You’re thinking,” proffered the colonel, “of the Far East divisions.”
The marshall nodded. In the Far Eastern military theater, the Soviet Union, ever wary of the long-standing and often bitter border disputes with China’s one point four billion and India’s eight hundred million, maintained over fifty divisions, almost a million men, fifteen thousand tanks, sixteen thousand artillery and mortar pieces, and more than fifteen hundred tactical aircraft.
“I have already requested them,” said the marshal. “Whether I get them is another matter.”
“I’m sure you’ll get what you need, Marshal,” said the colonel optimistically.
“Why is it,” the marshal asked no one in particular, running thick, stubby hands through thinning white hair as he looked at the red-flagged bulge on the wall map that marked the disposition of the Soviet armies’ deep penetration of Germany, “that the young are so incurably optimistic?”
A soldier brought the marshal’s tea. “Is it,” continued the marshal, picking up the hard cube of sugar, “because they have no history? Or is it because they have not seen the defeats?” He raised the glass of tea, sucking the hot, steaming liquid through the cube of sugar until it disintegrated in a crunch of tobacco-stained teeth. “I think it is because they have not smelled war,” the marshal answered himself.
Until this moment the colonel had thought he had very much been in the war, but the marshal’s voice, utterly devoid of sentimentality, hard in its every estimate, conveyed to him the sudden truth that up till now, what he had thought was war had only been war behind the front lines, in the relative comfort of albeit makeshift headquarters in the ancient German capitals. Suddenly the colonel felt he needed the comfort of knowing that more men were coming. That thousands would come to aid them — so as to crush the British, American, and Germans in one decisive stroke. To bury all uncertainty.
“Marshal?”
“Yes?”
“Sir — this is meant as no criticism, but I was wondering if it might not be more efficient if we carried out all disposition-of-forces information by radio phone rather than by dispatch rider.”
“You’re worried about our gasoline supply for the armor, eh? Well, so am I. Our supply line is overextended, and I realized that every drop—”
“No, sir. I meant, wouldn’t it be faster — better — to rely on our electronics rather than—”
“Faster,” said the marshal, “of course. But better?” He grimaced, but there was also the hint of a smile. “I don’t think so.”
The colonel was flabbergasted. Had the marshal not attended officers’ school? But the colonel would later remember the incident as the turning point of his military career — the point at which the marshal had dragged him out of the twentieth century into the new age.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Four thousand miles away, it was late afternoon, a stiff easterly clearing New York of its pollution haze, the twin towers of the World Trade Center reflecting the turquoise sky like two enormous slabs of green ice towering above the skyline. But the high wisps of cirrus cloud and the vibrant color of the sky went unnoticed by Adm. John Brentwood. The only reason he noticed the high winds was because of their baleful howling by his New York Port Authority office on the seventieth floor. The retired admiral had resisted the move to the Trade Center as long as he could, citing, truthfully, that even the confusion of the short move from the Port Authority offices around Battery Park would cause delay in the crucial matter at hand: his office’s overseeing the loading and departure of the vital Atlantic convoys.
“No problem, Admiral,” his secretary had concluded. “Everything’s on disk. In the old days we’d need fifty trucks and a month of overtime. Now — we’ll have everything up here, three days maximum.”
“Three days we can well use here,” Brentwood had grumbled, his pen skimming over the latest cargo manifest — nearly all ammunition and aircraft parts.
They had tried flying several replacement squadrons of Thunderbolts and F-111s over the Atlantic with extra fuel in drop tanks and midair refueling. But the Russians could see them coming across the Atlantic, and though the weather was worsening over the mid-Atlantic ridge, the Russian pilots had managed to intercept. For a while the Americans and Canadians were losing more pilots at sea than over European soil. Pilots downed in Europe stood a reasonable chance of chopper pickup, providing they didn’t come down in enemy territory. But for those who were shot down over the Atlantic, the rescue rate was less than 5 percent, for even though the pilots’ radio beacons had a minuscule failure rate, the Atlantic was simply too vast to patrol for lost pilots, when every spare available aircraft was being used to help ferry materiel or conscripted for antisub patrols.
Because of the high losses of combat pilots over the Atlantic, sixty-eight in the first two months of the war, women pilots — whom the army air corps had used in peacetime to ferry the vitally needed planes to Europe — were now, albeit reluctantly, being considered as combat pilots. An editorial in The New York Times, a usually harsh critic of Army General Freeman’s “cowboy” tactics, now brought his name back to national prominence by praising him for having had the foresight to use women chopper pilots in the daring and successful raid in and out of Pyongyang, the editorial going on to severely criticize the Pentagon’s failure to have trained women as combat pilots.
The Times also criticized the slow rate of convoy departures, so that while John Brentwood was happy that Freeman, his youngest son’s commander and someone Brentwood Senior greatly admired, was being mentioned again, sending signals to Washington that “more aggressively innovative thinking” was needed, the retired admiral bridled at the implicit criticism of the Port Authority. And it didn’t help John Brentwood or any of his colleagues when the Nagata joke had reached the “Tonight Show,” the Port Authority becoming the butt of one of Leno’s comedy routines. Leno suggested that maybe “what the New York Port Authority should do is put a congressman on every ship. With that much hot air aboard — no way it would sink!”
Now, high in his new office, Brentwood, his office’s computer notwithstanding, was confronted by hills of files, piled upon and about his desk. No matter how many computers you had to punch in all the variables, from not stowing yeast, sugar, or rice cargos together to the myriad problems about where and how to get enough ships, in the final analysis the decisions often had to be made on an old sailor’s gut instinct. The major problem was that the deficiencies of the United States’ aging mercantile marine were now starkly evident, after having been virtually ignored by every administration since Reagan, despite persistent predictions by the Pentagon that the ten thousand merchant sailors in the United States were far short of the twenty-two thousand required in war.
For Brentwood, it meant requisitioning, cajoling, recommissioning anything that would float and help bolster the old fleet, most of which had been taken out of mothballs to be used for the dangerous three-thousand-mile journey from North America to the ports of France and Britain. But while many ships were called, and many willingly lent to the government for cash equity later on, only 30 percent of these craft were approved as seaworthy, the others, to the chagrin of many a proud yachtsman or sailor, not qualifying because they could not
maintain the required seventeen-knot convoy speed.
There had been the public hue and cry for the admiral and his staff to “get off their butts,” as the New York Post put it, and to use whatever was possible for the convoys. Many of his critics pointed out that some of the thousands of big yachts, for example, could do well in excess of seventeen knots. But Brentwood stood firm, pointing out in turn that it wasn’t the yachts’ speed that worried him so much as their ability to keep in convoy pattern while heading full into a force-ten gale amid radio silence. And sailing under strict convoy orders whereby neither naval escort nor other merchantmen could alter course to assist, thus giving a marauding sub a slow target. Even so, Brentwood insisted on considering all comers, the computer telling him in cold, hard numbers that not enough of the tonnage NATO so desperately needed was getting through. “Rollover” was railing, the deadly equations tipping decidedly in the Soviets’ favor.
Six cups of coffee since lunch, his diet having held firm against the creamer until the last cup, Brentwood was surprised when he looked up and saw it was dark, the old familiar Manhattan skyline now drastically altered due to wartime fuel and energy conservation, including a blackout on all nonessential illumination. It had been suggested at first that the city go into full blackout condition, as in England and Europe, but this was ruled out on the assumption that if the Russians were going to attack New York, it would be with ICBMs or sea- and air-launched cruise missiles. They would have no need to see where the city was, the coordinates for such an attack already having been programmed into the terrain contour-matching nose radar of the ICBMs aboard their “Boomers,” as the giant Soviet Typhoon SSBNs were called. Besides, as the major pointed out, and few challenged him, if the city was blacked out, the crime rate would soar.