by Tom Clancy
The train terminal was well-designed for their purposes, Colonel Welch thought. Russian engineers might have designed things clunky, but they’d also designed them to work, and the layout here was a lot more efficient than it looked on first inspection. The trains reversed direction on what American railroaders called a wye—Europeans called it a turning triangle—which allowed trains to back up to any one of ten off-loading ramps, and the Russians were doing it with skill and aplomb. The big VL80T electric locomotive eased backwards, with the conductors on the last car holding the air-release valve to activate the brakes when they reached the ramp. When the trains stopped, the soldiers jumped from their passenger coaches and ran back to their individual vehicles to start them up and drive them off. It didn’t take longer than thirty minutes to empty a train. That impressed Colonel Welch, who’d used the Auto Train to take his family to Disney World, and the off-loading procedure in Sanford, Florida, usually took an hour and a half or so. Then there was no further waiting. The big VL (Vladimir Lenin) engines immediately moved out for the return trip west to load up another ten thousand tons of train cars and cargo. It certainly appeared as though the Russians could make things happen when they had to.
“Colonel?” Welch turned to see a Russian major, who saluted crisply.
“Yes?”
“The first train with your personnel is due in four hours twenty minutes. We’ll take them to the southern assembly area. There is fuel there if they need it, and then we have guides to direct them east.”
“Very good.”
“Until then, if you wish to eat, there is a canteen inside the station building.”
“Thank you. We’re okay at the moment.” Welch walked over to where his satellite radio was set up, to get that information to General Diggs.
Colonel Bronco Winters now had seven red stars painted on the side panel of his F-15C, plus four of the now-defunct UIR flags. He could have painted on some marijuana or coca leaves as well, but that part of his life was long past, and those kills had been blacker than his uncle Ernie, who still lived in Harlem. So, he was a double-ace, and the Air Force hadn’t had many of those on active duty in a very long time. He took his flight to what they had taken to calling Bear Station, on the western edge of the Chinese advance.
It was an Eagle station. There were now over a hundred F-16 fighters in Siberia, but they were mainly air-to-mud rather than air-to-air, and so the fighting part of the fighter mission was his department, while the -16 jocks grumbled about being second-class citizens. Which they were, as far as Colonel Winters thought. Damned little single-engine pukes.
Except for the F-16CGs. They were useful because they were dedicated to taking out enemy radars and SAM sites. The Siberian Air Force (so they now deemed themselves) hadn’t done any air-to-mud yet. They had orders not to, which offended the guys whose idea of fun was killing crunchies on the ground instead of more manly pursuits. They didn’t have enough bombs for a proper bombing campaign yet, and so they were coming up just to ride guard on the E-3Bs in case Joe Chink decided to go after them—it was a hard mission, but marginally doable, and Bronco was surprised that they hadn’t made the attempt yet. It was a sure way to lose a lot of fighter planes, but they’d lost a bunch anyway, and why not lose them to a purpose ... ?
“Boar Lead, this is Eagle Two, over.”
“Boar Leader.”
“We show something happening, numerous bandits one-four-five your position, angels three-three, range two hundred fifty miles, coming north at six hundred knots—make that count thirty-plus bandits, looks like they’re coming right for us, Boar Lead,” the controller on the AWACS reported.
“Roger, copy that. Boar, Lead,” he told his flight of four. “Let’s get our ears perked up.”
“Two.” “Three.” “Four,” the rest of his flight chimed in.
“Boar Leader, this is Eagle Two. The bandits just went supersonic, and they are heading right for us. Looks like they’re not kidding. Vector right to course one-three-five and prepare to engage.”
“Roger, Eagle. Boar Lead, come right to one-three-five.”
“Two.” “Three.” “Four.”
Winters checked his fuel first of all. He had plenty. Then he looked at his radar display for the picture transmitted from the AWACS, and sure enough, there was a passel of bandits inbound, like a complete ChiComm regiment of fighters. The bastards had read his mind.
“Damn, Bronco, this looks like a knife fight coming.”
“Be cool, Ducky, we got better knives.”
“You say so, Bronco,” the other element leader answered.
“Let’s loosen it up, people,” Colonel Winters ordered. The flight of four F-15Cs separated into two pairs, and the pairs slipped apart as well so that each could cover the other, but a single missile could not engage both.
The display between his legs showed that the Chinese fighters were just over a hundred miles off now, and the velocity vectors indicated speeds of over eight hundred knots. Then the picture dirtied up some.
“Boar Lead, looks like they just dropped off tanks.”
“Roger that.” So, they’d burned off fuel to get altitude, and now they were committed to the battle with full internal fuel. That would give them better legs than usual, and they had closed to less than two hundred miles between them and the E-3B Sentry they clearly wanted to kill. There were thirty people on that converted 707, and Winters knew a lot of them. They’d worked together for years, mainly in exercises, and each controller on the Sentry had a specialty. Some were good at getting you to a tanker. Some were good at sending you out to hunt. Some were best at defending themselves against enemies. This third group would now take over. The Sentry crewmen would think this wasn’t cricket, that it wasn’t exactly fair to chase deliberately after a converted obsolete airliner ... just because it acted as bird-dog for those who were killing off their fighter-pilot comrades. Well, that’s life, Winters thought. But he wasn’t going to give any of these bandits a free shot at another USAF aircraft.
Eighty miles now. “Skippy, follow me up,” the colonel ordered.
“Roger, Lead.” The two clawed up to forty thousand feet, so that the cold ground behind the targets would give a better contrast for their infrared seekers. He checked the radar display again. There had to be a good thirty of them, and that was a lot. If the Chinese were smart, they’d have two teams, one to engage and distract the American fighters, and the other to blow through after their primary target. He’d try to concentrate on the latter, but if the former group’s pilots were competent, that might not be easy.
The warbling tone started in his headphones. The range was now sixty miles. Why not now? he asked himself. They were beyond visual range, but not beyond range of his AM-RAAM missiles. Time to shoot ’em in the lips.
“Going Slammer,” he called on the radio.
“Roger, Slammer,” Skippy replied from half a mile to his right.
“Fox-One!” Winters called, as the first one leapt off the rails. The first Slammer angled left, seeking its designated target, one of the enemy’s leading fighters. The closure speed between missile and target would be well over two thousand miles per hour. His eyes dropped to the radar display. His first missile appeared to hit—yes, the target blip expanded and started dropping. Number Eight. Time for another: “Fox-One!”
“Fox-One,” his wingman called. Seconds later: “Kill!” Lieutenant Acosta called.
Winters’s second missile somehow missed, but there wasn’t time for wondering why. He had six more AMRAAMs, and he pickled four of them off in the next minute. By that time, he could see the inbound fighters. They were Shenyang J-8IIs, and they had radars and missiles, too. Winters flipped on his jammer pod, wondering if it would work or not, and wondering if their infrared missiles had all-aspect targeting like his Sidewinders. He’d probably find out soon, but first he fired off two ’winders. “Breaking right, Skippy.”
“I’m with you, Bronco,” Acosta replied.
D
amn, Winters thought, there are still at least twenty of the fuckers. He headed down, speeding up as he went and calling for a vector.
“Boar Lead, Eagle, there’s twenty-three of them left and they’re still coming. Dividing into two elements. You have bandits at your seven o’clock and closing.”
Winters reversed his turn and racked his head against the g-forces to spot it. Yeah, a J-8 all right, the Chinese two-engine remake of the MiG-21, trying to get position to launch on him—no, two of the bastards. He reefed the turn in tight, pulling seven gees, and after ten endless seconds, getting his nose on the targets. His left hand selected Sidewinder and he triggered two off.
The bandits saw the smoke trails of the missiles and broke apart, in opposite directions. One would escape, but both the heat-seekers locked on the guy to the right, and both erased his aircraft from the sky. But where had the other one gone? Winters’ eyes swept a sky that was both crowded and empty at the same time. His threat receiver made its unwelcome screeching sound, and now he’d find out if the jammer pod worked or not. Somebody was trying to lock him up with a radar-guided missile. His eyes swept around looking for who that might be, but he couldn’t see anyone—
—Smoke trail! A missile, heading in his general direction, but then it veered and exploded with its target—friend or foe, Winters couldn’t tell.
“Boar Flight, Lead, check in!” he ordered.
“Two.” “Three.” A pause before: “Four!”
“Skippy, where are you?”
“Low and right, one mile, Leader. Heads up, there’s a bandit at your three and closing.”
“Oh, yeah?” Winters yanked his fighter to the right and was rewarded with an immediate warbling tone—but was it friend or foe? His wingman said the latter, but he couldn’t tell, until—
Whoever it was, it had launched at him, and so he triggered a Sidewinder in reply, then dove hard for the deck while punching off flares and chaff to distract it. It worked. The missile, a radar seeker, exploded harmlessly half a mile behind him, but his Sidewinder didn’t miss. He’d just gotten another kill, but he didn’t know how many today, and there wasn’t time to think things over.
“Skippy, form up on me, we’re going north.”
“Roger, Bronco.”
Winters had his radar on, and he saw at least eight enemy blips to the north. He went to afterburner to chase, checking his fuel state. Still okay. The Eagle accelerated rapidly, but just to be safe, he popped off a string of chaff and flares in case some unknown Chinese was shooting at him. The threat receiver was screeching continuously now, though not in the distinctive chirping tone that suggested lock-up. He checked his weapons board. Three AIM-9X Sidewinders left. Where the hell had this day gone to?
“Ducky is hit, Ducky is hit!” a voice called. “Aw, shit!”
“Ghost Man here, got the fucker for you, Ducky. Come right, let me give you a damage check.”
“One engine gone, other one’s running hot,” the second element leader reported, in a voice more angry than afraid. He didn’t have time for fear yet. Another thirty seconds or so and that would start to take hold, Winters was sure.
“Ducky, you’re trailing vapor of some sort, recommend you find a place to set it down.”
“Eagle Two, Bronco, what’s happening?”
“Bronco, we have six still inbound, putting Rodeo on it now. You have a bandit at your one o’clock at twenty miles, angels three-one, speed seven-five-zero.”
“Roger that, Eagle. I’m on him.” Winters came a little right and got another acquisition tone. “Fox-Two!” he called. The smoke trail ran straight for several miles, then corkscrewed to the left as it approached the little dot of gray-blue and ... yes!
“Rodeo Lead,” a new voice called. “Fox-One, Fox-One with two!”
“Conan, Fox-One!”
Now things were really getting nervous. Winters knew that he might be in the line of fire for those Slammers. He looked down to see that the light on his IFF was a friendly, constant green. The Identification Friend or Foe was supposed to tell American radars and missiles that he was on their side, but Winters didn’t entirely trust computer chips with his life, and so he squinted his eyes to look for smoke trails that weren’t going sideways. His radar could see the AWACS now, and it was moving west, taking the first part of evasive action, but its radar was still transmitting, even with Chinese fighters within ... twenty miles? Shit! But then two more blips disappeared, and the remaining ones all had friendly IFF markers.
Winters checked his weapons display. No missiles left. How had all that happened? He was the United States Air Force champ for situational awareness, but he’d just lost track of a combat action. He couldn’t remember firing all his missiles.
“Eagle Two, this is Boar Lead. I’m Winchester. Do you need any help?” “Winchester” meant out of weapons. That wasn’t entirely true. He still had a full magazine of 20-mm cannon shells, but suddenly all the gees and all the excitement were pulling on him. His arms felt leaden as he eased his Eagle back to level flight.
“Boar Lead, Eagle. Looks like we’re okay now, but that was kinda exciting, fella.”
“Roger that, Eagle. Same here. Anything left?”
“Negative, Boar. Rodeo Lead got the last two. I think we owe that major a couple of beers.”
“I’ll hold you to that, Eagle,” Rodeo Lead observed.
“Ducky, where are you?” Winters called next.
“Kinda busy, Bronco,” a strained voice replied. “I got a hole in my arm, too.”
“Bronco, Ghost Man. Ducky’s got some holes in the airframe. I’m going to shepherd him back to Suntar. Thirty minutes, about.”
“Skippy, where you be?”
“Right behind you, Leader. I think I got four, maybe five, in that furball.”
“Any weapons left?”
“Slammer and ’winder, one each. I’ll look after you, Colonel,” Lieutenant Acosta promised. “How’d you make out?”
“Two, maybe more, not sure,” the squadron commander answered. The final tally would come from the AWACS, plus a check of his own videotape. Mainly he wanted to get out of the aircraft and take a good stretch, and he now had time to worry about Major Don Boyd—Ducky—and his aircraft.
So, we want to mess with their heads, Mickey?” Admiral Dave Seaton asked.
“That’s the idea,” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs told the chief of naval operations.
“Makes sense. Where are their heads at?”
“According to what CIA says, they think we’re limiting the scope of operations for political reasons—to protect their sensibilities, like.”
“No foolin’?” Seaton asked with no small degree of incredulity.
Moore nodded. “Yep.”
“Well, then it’s like a guy holding aces and eights, isn’t it?” the CNO thought aloud, referring to the last poker hand held by James Butler—“Wild Bill”—Hickok in Deadwood, South Dakota. “We just pick the mission that’s sure to flip them out.”
“What are you thinking?” Moore asked.
“We can slam their navy pretty hard. Bart Mancuso’s a pretty good operator. What are they most afraid of ... ?” Seaton leaned back in his swivel chair. “First thing Bart wants to do is take out their missile submarine. It’s at sea now with Tucson in trail, about twenty thousand yards back.”
“That far?”
“It’s plenty close enough. It’s got an SSN in close proximity to protect it. So, Tucson takes ‘em both out—zap.” Moore didn’t get the terminology, but Seaton was referring to the Chinese ships as “it,” meaning an enemy, a target worthy only of destruction. “Beijing might not know it’s happened right away, unless they’ve got an ‘I’m Dead’ buoy on the sail. Their surface navy’s a lot easier. That’ll be mainly aircraft targets, some missiles to keep the surface community happy.”
“Submarine-launched missiles?”
“Mickey, you don’t sink ships by making holes that let air in. You sink ships by making holes
that let water in,” Seaton explained. “Okay, if this is supposed to be for psychological effect, we hit everything simultaneously. That’ll mean staging a lot of assets, and it runs the risk of being overly complicated, having the other guy catch a sniff of what’s happening before we do anything. It’s a risk. Do we really want to run it?”
“Ryan’s thinking ‘big picture.’ Robby’s helping him.”
“Robby’s a fighter pilot,” Seaton agreed. “He likes to think in terms of movie stuff. Hell, Tom Cruise is taller than he is,” Seaton joked.
“Good operational thinker. He was a pretty good J-3,” Moore reminded the senior sailor.
“Yeah, I know, it’s just that he likes to make dramatic plays. Okay, we can do it, only it complicates things.” Seaton looked out the window for a second. “You know what might really flip them out?”
“What’s that?” Moore asked. Seaton told him. “But it’s not possible for us to do, is it?”
“Maybe not, but we’re not dealing with professional military people, are we? They’re politicians, Mickey. They’re used to dealing with images instead of reality. So, we give them an image.”
“Do you have the pieces in place to do that?”
“Let me find out.”
“This is crazy, Dave.”
“And deploying First Armored to Russia isn’t?” the CNO demanded.
Lieutenant Colonel Angelo Giusti was now certain that he’d be fully content never to ride on another train as long as he lived. He didn’t know that all of the Russian State Railroad’s sleeper cars were being used to transport Russian army forces—they’d never sent any of the cars as far west as Berlin, not to slight the Americans, but because it had simply never occurred to anyone to do so. He took note of the fact that the train veered off to the north, off the main track, thumping over various switches and interlockings as it did so, and then the train came to a halt and started going backwards slowly. They seemed to be in the yard alone. They’d passed numerous westbound trains in the past two hours, all with engines dragging empty flatcars, and the conductor who appeared and disappeared regularly had told them that this was the approximate arrival time scheduled, but he hadn’t really believed it, on the premise that a railroad with such uncomfortable seats probably didn’t adhere to decent schedules either. But here they were, and the off-loading ramps were obvious for what they were.