by Tom Clancy
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 thou
ght, 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 S
an Francisco earthquake—no warning at all, just the end of the fuckin’ 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?”