by Tom Clancy
“Over the ’Net, Jack. So?”
“How many Chinese citizens own computers?”
“Millions of them—the number’s really jumped in the past couple of years. That’s why they’re ripping that patent off Dell Computer that we made a stink about in the trade talks and—oh, yeah ...” Foley looked up with a smile. “I like it.”
“That could be dangerous,” Weaver warned.
“Dr. Weaver, there’s no safe way to fight a war,” Ryan said in reply. “This isn’t a negotiation between friends. General Moore?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Get the orders out.”
“Yes, sir.”
“The only question is, will it work?”
“Jack,” Robby Jackson said, “it’s like with baseball. You play the games to find out who the best is.”
The first reinforcing division to arrive at Chita was the 201st. The trains pulled into the built-for-the-purpose offloading sidings. The flatcars had been designed (and built in large numbers) to transport tracked military vehicles. To that end, flip-down bridging ramps were located at each end of every single car, and when those were tossed down in place, the tanks could drive straight off to the concrete ramps to where every train had backed up. It was a little demanding—the width of the cars was at best marginal for the tank tracks—but the drivers of each vehicle kept their path straight, breathing a small sigh of relief when they got to the concrete. Once on the ground, military police troops, acting as traffic cops, directed the armored vehicles to assembly areas. The 201st Motor Rifle Division’s commander and his staff were there already, of course, and the regimental officers got their marching orders, telling them what roads to take northeast to join Bondarenko’s Fifth Army, and by joining it, to make it a real field army rather than a theoretical expression on paper.
The 201st, like the follow-on divisions, the 80th, 34th, and 94th, were equipped with the newest Russian hardware, and were at their full TO&E. Their immediate mission was to race north and east to get in front of the advancing Chinese. It would be quite a race. There weren’t many roads in this part of Russia, and what roads there were here were unpaved gravel, which suited the tracked vehicles. The problem would be diesel fuel, because there were few gas stations for the trucks which ran the roads in peacetime pursuits, and so the 201st had requisitioned every tanker truck its officers could locate, and even that might not be enough, the logisticians all worried, not that they had much choice in the matter. If they could get their tanks there, then they’d fight them as pillboxes if it came to that.
About the only thing they had going for them was the network of telephone lines, which enabled them to communicate without using radios. The entire area was under the strictest possible orders for radio silence, to deny all conceivable knowledge to the enemy; and the air forces in the area, American and Russian, were tasked to eliminate all tactical reconnaissance aircraft that Chinese would be sending about. So far, they’d been successful. A total of seventeen J-6 and -7 aircraft, thought to be the reconnaissance variants of their classes, had been “splashed” short of Chita.
The Chinese problem with reconnaissance was confirmed in Paris, of all places. SPOT, the French corporation which operated commercial photosatellites, had received numerous requests for photos of Siberia, and while many of them came from seemingly legitimate western businesses, mainly news agencies, all had been summarily denied. Though not as good as American reconnaissance satellites, the SPOT birds were good enough to identify all the trains assembled at Chita.
And since the People’s Republic of China still had a functioning embassy in Moscow, the other concern was that their Ministry of State Security had Russian nationals acting as paid spies, feeding data to Russia’s new enemy. Those individuals about whom the Russian Federal Security Service had suspicions were picked up and questioned, and those in custody were interrogated vigorously.
This number included Klementi Ivanovich Suvorov.
“You were in the service of an enemy country,” Pavel Yefremov observed. “You killed for a foreign power, and you conspired to kill our country’s president. We know all this. We’ve had you under surveillance for some time now. We have this.” He held up a photocopy of the onetime pad recovered from the dead-drop on the park bench. “You may talk now, or you may be shot. It is your life at risk, not mine.”
In the movies, this was the part where the suspect was supposed to say defiantly, “You’re going to kill me anyway,” except that Suvorov had no more wish to die than anyone else. He loved life as much as any man, and he’d never expected to be caught any more than the most foolish of street criminals did. If anything, he’d expected arrest even less than one of those criminals, because he knew how intelligent and clever he was, though this feeling had understandably deflated over the last few days.
The outlook of Klementi Ivan’ch Suvorov was rather bleak at the moment. He was KGB-trained, and he knew what to expect—a bullet in the head—unless he could give his interrogators something sufficiently valuable for them to spare his life, and at the moment even life in a labor camp of strict regime was preferable to the alternative.
“Have you truly arrested Kong?”
“We told you that before, but, no, we have not. Why tip them off that we’ve penetrated their operation?” Yefremov said honestly.
“Then you can use me against them.”
“How might we do that?” the FSS officer asked.
“I can tell them that the operation they propose is going forward, but that the situation in Siberia wrecked my chance to execute it in a timely fashion.”
“And if Kong cannot leave their embassy—we have it guarded and isolated now, of course—how would you get that information to him?”
“By electronic mail. Yes, you can monitor their landlines, but to monitor their cellular phones is more difficult. There’s a backup method for me to communicate with him electronically.”
“And the fact that you haven’t made use of it so far will not alert them?”
“The explanation is simple. My Spetsnaz contact was frightened off by the outbreak of hostilities, and so was I.”
“But we’ve already checked your electronic accounts.”
“Do you think they are all written down?” He tapped the side of his head. “Do you think I am totally foolish?”
“Go on, make your proposal.”
“I will propose that I can go forward with the mission. I require them to authorize it by a signal—the way they set the shades in their windows, for example.”
“And for this?”
“And for this I will not be executed,” the traitor suggested.
“I see,” Yefremov said quietly. He would have been perfectly content to shoot the traitor right here and now, but it might be politically useful to go forward with his proposal. He’d kick that one upstairs.
The bad part about watching them was that you had to anticipate everything they did, and that meant that they got to have more sleep, about an hour’s worth, Aleksandrov figured, and no more than that only because they were predictable. He’d had his morning tea. Sergeant Buikov had enjoyed two morning cigarettes with his, and now they lay prone on wet dew-dampened ground, with their binoculars to their eyes. The Chinese had also had soldiers out of their tracks all night, set about a hundred meters away from them, so it seemed. They weren’t very adventurous, the captain thought. He would have spread his sentries much farther out, at least half a kilometer, in pairs with radios to go with their weapons. For that matter, he would have set up a mortar in the event that they spotted something dangerous. But the fox and the gardener seemed to be both conservative and confident, which was an odd combination of characteristics.
But their morning drill was precise. The petrol heaters came out for tea—probably tea, they all figured—and whatever it was that they had for breakfast. Then the camouflage nets came down. The outlying sentries came in and reported in person to their officers, and everyone mounted up. The first hop
on their tracks was a short one, not even half a kilometer, and again the foot-scouts dismounted and moved forward, then quickly reported back for the second, much longer morning frog leap forward.
“Let’s move, Sergeant,” Aleksandrov ordered, and together they ran to their BRM for their first trek into the woods for their own third installment of frog leap backwards.
There they go again,” Major Tucker said, after getting three whole hours of sleep on a thin mattress four feet from the Dark Star terminal. It was Ingrid Bergman up again, positioned so that she could see both the reconnaissance element and main body of the Chinese army. ”You know, they really stick to the book, don’t they?”
“So it would seem,” Colonel Tolkunov agreed.
“So, going by that, tonight they’ll go to about here.” Tucker made a green mark on the acetate-covered map. “That puts them at the gold mine day after tomorrow. Where do you plan to make your stand?” the major asked.
“That depends on how quickly the Two Zero One can get forward.”
“Gas?” Tucker asked.
“Diesel fuel, but, yes, that is the main problem with moving so large a force.”
“Yeah, with us it’s bombs.”
“When will you begin to attack Chinese targets?” Tolkunov asked.
“Not my department, Colonel, but when it happens, you’ll see it here, live and in color.”
Ryan had gotten two hours of nap in the afternoon, while Arnie van Damm covered his appointments (the Chief of Staff needed his sleep, too, but like most people in the White House, he put the President’s needs before his own), and now he was watching TV, the feed from Ingrid Bergman.
“This is amazing,” he observed. “You could almost get on the phone and tell a guy where to go with his tank.”
“We try to avoid that, sir,” Mickey Moore said at once. In Vietnam it had been called the “squad leader in the sky” when battalion commanders had directed sergeants on their patrols, not always to the enlisted men’s benefit. The miracle of modern communications could also be a curse, with the expected effect that the people in harm’s way would ignore their radios or just turn the damned things off until they had something to say themselves.
Ryan nodded. He’d been a second lieutenant of Marines once, and though it hadn’t been for long, he remembered it as demanding work for a kid just out of college.
“Do the Chinese know we’re doing this?”
“Not as far as we can tell. If they did, they’d sure as hell try to take the Dark Star down, and we’d notice if they tried. That’s not easy, though. They’re damned near invisible on radar, and tough to spot visually, so the Air Force tells me.”
“Not too many fighters can reach sixty thousand feet, much less cruise up there,” Robby agreed. “It’s a stretch even for a Tomcat.” His eyes, too, were locked on the screen. No officer in the history of military operations had ever had a capability akin to this, not even two percent of it, Jackson was sure. Most of war-fighting involved finding the enemy so that you knew where to kill him. These new things made it like watching a Hollywood movie—and if the Chinese knew they were there, they’d freak. Considerable efforts had been designed into Dark Star to prevent that from happening. Their transmitters were directional, and locked onto satellites, instead of radiating outward in the manner of a normal radio. So, they might as well have been black holes up there, orbiting twelve miles over the battlefield.
“What’s the important thing here?” Jack asked General Moore.
“Logistics, sir, always logistics. Told you this morning, sir, they’re burning up a lot of diesel fuel, and replenishing that is a mother of a task. The Russians have the same problem. They’re trying to race a fresh division north of the Chinese spearhead, to made a stand around Aldan, close to where the gold strike is. It’s only even money they can make it, even over roads and without opposition. They have to move a lot of fuel, too, and the other problem for them is that it’ll wear out the tracks on their vehicles. They don’t have lowboy trailers like ours, and so their tanks have to do it all on their own. Tanks are a lot more delicate to operate than they look. Figure they’ll lose a quarter to a third of their strength just from the approach march.”
“Can they fight?” Jackson asked.
“They’re using the T-80U. It would have given the M60A3 a good fight, but no, not as good as our first-flight M1, much less the M1A2, but against the Chinese M-90, call it an even match, qualitatively. It’s just that the Chinese have a lot more of them. It comes down to training. The Russian divisions that they’re sending into the fight are their best-trained and -equipped. Question is, are they good enough? We’ll just have to see.”
“And our guys?”
“They start arriving at Chita tomorrow morning. The Russians want them to assemble and move east-southeast. The operational concept is for them to stop the Chinese cold, and then we chop them off from their supplies right near the Amur River. It makes sense theoretically,” Mickey Moore said neutrally, “and the Russians say they have all the fuel we’ll need in underground bunkers that have been there for damned near fifty years. We’ll see.”
CHAPTER 55
Looks and Hurts
General Peng was all the way forward now, with the leading elements of his lead armored division, the 302nd. Things were going well for him—sufficiently well, in fact, that he was becoming nervous about it. No opposition at all? he asked himself. Not so much as a single rifle round, much less a barrage of artillery. Were the Russians totally asleep, totally devoid of troops in this sector? They had a full army group command section at Chabarsovil, commanded by that Bondarenko fellow, who was reported to be a competent, even a courageous, officer. But where the hell were his troops? Intelligence said that a complete Russian motor-rifle division was here, the 265th, and a Russian motor-rifle division was a superbly designed mechanized formation, with enough tanks to punch a hole in most things, and manned with enough infantry to hold any position for a long time. Theoretically. But where the hell was it? And where were the reinforcements the Russians had to be sending? Peng had asked for information, and the air force had supposedly sent photo-reconnaissance aircraft to look for his enemies, but with no result. He had expected to be mainly on his own for this campaign, but not entirely on his own. Fifty kilometers in advance of the 302nd Armored was a reconnaissance screen that had reported nothing but some tracks in the ground that might or might not have been fresh. The few helicopter flights that had gone out had reported nothing. They should have spotted something, but no, only some civilians, who for the most part got the hell out of the way and stayed there.
Meanwhile, his troops had crewed up this ancient railroad right-of-way, but it wasn’t much worse than traveling along a wide gravel road. His only potential operational concern was fuel, but two hundred 10,000-liter fuel trucks were delivering an adequate amount from the pipeline the engineers were extending at a rate of forty kilometers per day from the end of the railhead on the far bank of the Amur. In fact, that was the most impressive feat of the war so far. Well behind him, engineer regiments were laying the pipe, then covering it under a meter of earth for proper concealment. The only things they couldn’t conceal were the pumping stations, but they had the spare parts to build plenty more should they be destroyed.
No, Peng’s only real concern was the location of the Russian Army. The dilemma was that either his intelligence was faulty, and there were no Russian formations in his area of interest, or it was accurate and the Russians were just running away and denying him the chance to engage and destroy them. But since when did Russians not fight for their land? Chinese soldiers surely would. And it just didn’t fit with Bondarenko’s reputation. None of this situation made sense. Peng sighed. But battlefields were often that way, he told himself. For the moment, he was on—actually slightly ahead of—schedule, and his first strategic objective, the gold mine, was three days away from his leading reconnaissance element. He’d never seen a gold mine before.
; I’ll be damned!” Pavel Petrovich said. ”This is my land. No Chink’s going to chase me off of it!”
“They are only three or four days away, Pasha.”
“So? I have lived here for over fifty years. I’m not going to leave now.” The old man was well to the left of defiant. The chief of the mining company had come personally to drive him out, and expected him to come willingly. But he’d misread the old man’s character.
“Pasha, we can’t leave you here in their way. This is their objective, the thing they invaded us to steal—”
“Then I shall fight for it!” he retorted. “I killed Germans, I’ve killed bears, I’ve killed wolves. Now, I will kill Chinese. I’m an old man, not an old woman, comrade!”
“Will you fight against enemy soldiers?”
“And why not?” Gogol asked. “This is my land. I know all its places. I know where to hide, and I know how to shoot. I’ve killed soldiers before.” He pointed to his wall. The old service rifle was there, and the mining chief could easily see the notches he’d cut on the stock with a knife, one for every German. “I can hunt wolves and bear. I can hunt men, too.”
“You’re too old to be a soldier. That’s a young man’s job.”
“I need not be an athlete to squeeze a trigger, comrade, and I know these woods.” To emphasize his words, Gogol stood and took down his old sniper rifle from the Great Patriotic War, leaving the new Austrian rifle. The meaning was clear. He’d fought with this arm before, and he was quite willing to do so again. Hanging on his wall still were a number of the gilded wolf skins, most of which had single holes in the head. He touched one, then looked back at his visitors. “I am a Russian. I will fight for my land.”
The mining chief figured he’d buck this information up to the military. Maybe they could take him out. For himself, he had no particular desire to entertain the Chinese army, and so he took his leave. Behind him, Pavel Petrovich Gogol opened a bottle of vodka and enjoyed a snort. Then he cleaned his rifle and thought of old times.