by Tom Clancy
“Aye aye, sir.” He saluted as Captain Blandy hustled back forward. “What’s that all about?”
“Beats me, Chief.”
“What do I do? Getting under way?” Gregory asked.
“Got your toothbrush? If not, you can buy one in the ship’s store. Excuse me, Doc, I have to do a quick muster.” Leek tossed his cigarette over the side and went the same way that the captain had.
And there was precisely nothing for Gregory to do. There was no way for him to leave the ship, except to jump down into the flooding floating dry dock, and that didn’t look like a viable option. So, he headed back into the superstructure and found the ship’s store open. There he bought a toothbrush.
Bondarenko spent the next three hours with Major General Sinyavskiy, going over approach routes and fire plans.
“They have fire-finder radar, Yuriy, and their counter-battery rockets have a long reach.”
“Can we expect any help from the Americans?”
“I’m working on that. We have superb reconnaissance information from their movie-star drones.”
“I need the location of their artillery. If we can take that away from them, it makes my job much easier.”
“Tolkunov!” the theater commander yelled. It was loud enough that his intelligence coordinator came running.
“Yes, Comrade General!”
“Vladimir Konstantinovich, we’ll be making our stand here,” Bondarenko said, pointing to a red line on the map. “I want minute-to-minute information of the approaching Chinese formations—especially their artillery.”
“I can do that. Give me ten minutes.” And the G-2 disappeared back out to where the Dark Star terminal was. Then his boss thought about it.
“Come on, Yuriy, you have to see this.”
“General,” Major Tucker said by way of greeting. Then he saw a second one. “General,” he said again.
“This is General Sinyavskiy. He commands Two-Six-Five. Would you please show him the advancing Chinese?” It wasn’t a question or a request, just phrased politely because Tucker was a foreigner.
“Okay, it’s right here, sir, we’ve got it all on videotape. Their leading reconnaissance elements are ... here, and their leading main-force units are right here.”
“Fuck,” Sinyavskiy observed in Russian. “Is this magic?”
“No, this is—” Bondarenko switched languages. “Which unit is this, Major?”
“Grace Kelly again, sir. To Catch a Thief with Cary Grant, Hitchcock movie that one was. The sun’ll be down in another hour or so and we’ll be getting it all on the thermal-imaging systems. Anyway, here’s their leading battalion, all look like their Type-90 tanks. They’re keeping good formation discipline, and they just refueled about an hour ago, so, figure they’re good for another two hundred or so kilometers before they stop again.”
“Their artillery?”
“Lagging behind, sir, except for this tracked unit here.” Tucker played with the mouse some and brought up another picture.
“Gennady Iosifovich, how can we fail with such information?” the division commander asked.
“Yuriy, remember when we thought about attacking the Americans?”
“Madness. The Chinks can’t see this drone?” Sinyavskiy asked, somewhat incredulously.
“It’s stealthy, as they call it, invisible on radar.”
“Nichevo.”
“Sir, I have a direct line to our headquarters at Zhigansk. If you guys are going to make a stand, what do you want from us?’ Tucker asked. ”I can forward your request to General Wallace.”
“I have thirty Su-25 attack bombers and also fifty Su-24 fighter bombers standing by, plus two hundred Mi-24 helicopters.” Getting the last in theater had been agonizingly slow, but finally they were here, and they were the Ace of Diamonds Bondarenko had facedown on the card table. He hadn’t let so much as one approach the area of operations yet, but they were two hundred kilometers away, fueled and armed, their flight crews flying to practice their airmanship and shooting live weapons as rehearsal—for some, the first live weapons they’d ever shot.
“That’s going to be a surprise for good old Joe,” Tucker observed with a whistle. “Where’d you hide them, sir? Hell, General, I didn’t know they were around.”
“There are a few secure places. We want to give our guests a proper greeting when the time is right,” Gennady Iosifovich told the young American officer.
“So, what do you want us to do, sir?”
“Take down their logistics. Show me this Smart Pig you’ve been talking to Colonel Tolkunov about.”
“That we can probably do, sir,” Tucker said. “Let me get on the phone to General Wallace.”
So, they’re turning me loose?” Wallace asked.
“As soon as contact is imminent between Russian and Chinese ground forces.” Mickey Moore then gave him his targets. “It’s most of the things you wanted to hit, Gus.”
“I suppose,” the Air Force commander allowed, somewhat grudgingly. “And if the Russians ask for help?”
“Give it to them, within reason.”
“Right.”
LTC Giusti, SABRE SIX, got off the helicopter at the Number Two fueling point and walked toward General Diggs.
“They weren’t kidding,” Colonel Masterman was saying. “This is a fuckin’ lake.” One and a quarter billion liters translated to more than three hundred million gallons, or nearly a million tons of fuel, about the carrying capacity of four supertankers, all of Number Two Diesel, or close enough that the fuel injectors on his tanks and Bradleys wouldn’t notice the difference. The manager of the site, a civilian, had said that the fuel had been there for nearly forty years, since Khrushchev had had a falling-out with Chairman Mao, and the possibility of war with the other communist country had turned from an impossibility into a perceived likelihood. Either it was remarkable prescience or paranoid wish fulfillment, but in either case it worked to the benefit of First Armored Division.
The off-loading facilities could have been better, but the Soviets evidently hadn’t had much experience with building gas stations. It was more efficient to pump the fuel into the division’s fuel bowsers, which then motored off to fill the tanks and tracks four or six at a time.
“Okay, Mitch, what do we have on the enemy?” General Diggs asked his intelligence officer.
“Sir, we’ve got a Dark Star tasked directly to us now, and she’ll be up for another nine hours. We’re up against a leg-infantry division. They’re forty kilometers that way, mainly sitting along this line of hills. There’s a regiment of ChiComm tanks supporting them.”
“Artillery?”
“Some light and medium, all of it towed, setting up now, with fire-finder radars we need to worry about,” Colonel Turner warned. “I’ve asked General Wallace to task some F-16s with HARMs to us. They can tune the seekers on those to the millimeter-band the fire-finders use.”
“Make that happen,” Diggs ordered.
“Yes, sir.”
“Duke, how long to contact?” the general asked his operations officer.
“If we move on schedule, we’ll be in their neighborhood about zero-two-hundred.”
“Okay, let’s get the brigade commanders briefed in. We party just after midnight,” Diggs told his staff, not even regretting his choice of words. He was a soldier about to go into combat, and with that came a different and not entirely pleasant way of thinking.
CHAPTER 57
Hyperwar
It had been rather a tedious couple of days for USS Tucson. She’d been camped out on 406 for sixteen days, and was holding station seventeen thousand yards—eight and a half nautical miles—astern of the Chinese boomer, with a nuclear-powered fast-attack camped out just to the south of it at the moment. The SSN, at least, supposedly had a name, Hai Long, the intelligence weenies said it was. But to Tucson’s sonarman, 406 was Sierra-Eleven, and Hai Long was Sierra-Twelve, and so they were known to the fire-control tracking party.
Tra
cking both targets was not demanding. Though both had nuclear power plants, the reactor systems were noisy, especially the feed pumps that ran cooling water through the nuclear pile. That, plus the sixty-hertz generators, made for two pairs of bright lines on the waterfall sonar display, and tracking both was about as difficult as watching two blind men in an empty shopping mall parking lot at high noon on a cloudless day. But it was more interesting than tracking whales in the North Pacific, which some of PACFLT’s boats had been tasked to do of late, to keep the tree-huggers happy.
Things had gotten a little more interesting lately. Tucson ran to periscope/antenna depth twice a day, and the crew had learned, much to everyone’s surprise, that Chinese and American armed forces were trading shots in Siberia, and that meant, the crew figured, that 406 might have to be made to disappear, and that was a mission, and while it might not exactly be fun, it was what they were paid to do, which made it a worthwhile activity.
406 had submarine-launched ballistic missiles aboard, twelve Ju Lang-1 CSS-N-3s, each with a single megaton-range warhead. The name meant “Great Wave,” so the intelligence book said. It also said they had a range of less than three thousand kilometers, which was less than half the range needed to strike California, though it could hit Guam, which was American territory. That didn’t really matter. What did matter was that 406 and Hai Long were ships of war belonging to a nation with which the United States was now trading shots.
The VLF radio fed off an antenna trailed off the after corner of Tucson’s sail, and it received transmissions from a monstrous, mainly underground transmitter located in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The tree-huggers complained that the energy emanating from this radio confused migrating geese in the fall, but no hunters had yet complained about smaller bags of waterfowl, and so the radio remained in service. Built to send messages to American missile submarines, it still transmitted to the fast-attacks that remained in active service. When a transmission was received, a bell went off in the submarine’s communications room, located aft of the attack center, on the starboard side.
The bell dinged. The sailor on watch called his officer, a lieutenant, j.g., who in turn called the captain, who took the submarine back up to antenna depth. Once there, he elevated the communications laser to track in on the Navy’s own communications satellite, known as SSIX, the Submarine Satellite Information Exchange, telling it that he was ready for a transmission. The reply action message came over a directional S-band radio for the higher bandwidth. The signal was cross-loaded into the submarine’s crypto machines, decoded, and printed up.
TO: USS TUCSON (SSN-770)
FROM: CINCPAC
1. UPON RECEIVING “XQT SPEC OP” SIGNAL FROM VLS YOU WILL ENGAGE AND DESTROY PRC SSBN AND ANY PRC SHIPS IN CONTACT.
2. REPORT RESULTS OF ATTACK VIA SSIX.
3. SUBSEQUENT TO THIS OPERATION, CONDUCT UNRESTRICTED OPERATIONS AGAINST PRC NAVAL UNITS.
4. YOU WILL NOT RPT NOT ENGAGE COMMERCIAL TRAFFIC OF ANY KIND.
CINCPAC SENDS
END MESSAGE
“Well, it’s about goddamned time,” the CO observed to his executive officer.
“Doesn’t say when to expect it,” the XO observed.
“Call it two hours,” the captain said. “Let’s close to ten thousand yards. Get the troops perked up. Spin up the weapons.”
“Aye.”
“Anything else close?”
“There’s a Chinese frigate off to the north, about thirty miles.”
“Okay, after we do the subs, we’ll Harpoon that one, then we’ll close to finish it off, if necessary.”
“Right.” The XO went forward to the attack center. He checked his watch. It was dark topside. It didn’t really matter to anyone aboard the submarine, but darkness made everybody feel a little more secure for some reason or other, even the XO.
It was tenser now. Giusti’s reconnaissance troopers were now within twenty miles of the expected Chinese positions. That put them inside artillery range, and that made the job serious.
The mission was to advance to contact, and to find a hole in the Chinese positions for the division to exploit. The secondary objective was to shoot through the gap and break into the Chinese logistical area, just over the river from where they’d made their breakthrough. There they would rape and pillage, as LTC Giusti thought of it, probably turning north to roll up the Chinese rear with one or two brigades, and probably leaving the third to remain in place astride the Chinese line of communications as a blocking force.
His troopers had all put on their “makeup,” as some called it, their camouflage paint, darkening the natural light spots of the face and lightening the dark ones. It had the overall effect of making them look like green and black space aliens. The advance would be mounted, for the most part, with the cavalry scouts mostly staying in their Bradleys and depending on the thermal-imaging viewers used by the driver and gunner to spot enemies. They’d be jumping out occasionally, though, and so everyone checked his PVS-11 personal night-vision system. Every trooper had three sets of fresh AA batteries that were as important as the magazines for their M16A2 rifles. Most of the men gobbled down an MRE ration and chased it with water, and often some aspirin or Tylenol to ward off minor aches and pains that might come from bumps or sprains. They all traded looks and jokes to lighten the stress of the night, plus the usual brave words meant as much for themselves as for others. Sergeants and junior officers reminded the men of their training, and told them to be confident in their abilities.
Then, on radioed command, the Bradleys started off, leading the heavier main-battle tanks off to the enemy, moving initially at about ten miles per hour.
The squadron’s helicopters were up, all sixteen of them, moving very cautiously because armor on a helicopter is about as valuable as a sheet of newspaper, and because someone on the ground only needed a thermal-imaging viewer to see them, and a heat-seeking missile would snuff them out of the sky. The enemy had light flak, too, and that was just as deadly.
The OH-58D Kiowa Warriors had good night-vision systems, and in training the flight crews had learned to be confident of them, but people didn’t often die in training. Knowing that there were people out there with live weapons and the orders to make use of them made everyone discount some of the lessons they’d learned. Getting shot down in one of those exercises meant being told over the radio to land, and maybe getting a tongue-lashing from the company commander for screwing up, which usually ended with a reminder that in real combat operations, he’d be dead, his wife a widow, and his children orphans. But they weren’t, really, and so those words were never taken as seriously as they were now. Now it could be real, and all of the flight crews had wives or sweethearts, and most of them had children as well.
And so they moved forward, using their own night-vision equipment to sweep the ground ahead, their hands a little more tingly than usual on the controls.
Division Headquarters had its own Dark Star terminal set up, with an Air Force captain running it. Diggs didn’t much like being so far in the rear with his men going out in harm’s way, but command wasn’t the same thing as leadership. He’d been told that years before at Fort Leavenworth’s Command and General Staff School, and he’d experienced it in Saudi Arabia only the previous year, but even so, he felt the need to be out forward, close to his men, so that he could share the danger with them. But the best way for him to mitigate the danger to them was to stay back here and establish effective control over operations, along with Colonel Masterman.
“Cookstoves?” Masterman asked.
“Yep,” the USAF captain—his name was Frank Williams—agreed. “And these bright ones are campfires. Cool night. Ground temperature’s about forty-three degrees, air temperature is forty-one. Good contrast for the thermal viewing systems. They seem to use the kind of stoves we had in the Boy Scouts. Damn, there’s a bunch of ’em. Like hundreds.”
“Got a hole in their lines?”
“Looks thin right here, ’tween the
se two hills. They have a company on this hilltop, and another company here—I bet they’re in different battalions,” Williams said. “Always seems to work that way. The gap between them looks like a little more ’n a kilometer, but there’s a little stream at the bottom.”
“Bradleys don’t mind getting a little wet,” Diggs told the junior officer. “Duke?”
“Best bet for a blow-through I’ve seen so far. Aim Angelo for it?”
Diggs thought about that. It meant committing his cavalry screen, and that also meant committing at least one of his brigades, but such decisions were what generals were for. “What else is around?”
“I’d say their regimental headquarters is right about here, judging by the tents and trucks. You’re going to want to hit it with artillery, I expect.”
“Right about the time QUARTER HORSE gets there. No sense alerting them too soon,” Masterman suggested. General Diggs thought it over one more time and made his first important decision of the night:
“Agreed. Duke, tell Giusti to head for that gap.”
“Yes, sir.” Colonel Masterman moved off toward the radios. They were doing this on the fly, which wasn’t exactly the way they preferred, but that was often the world of real-time combat operations.
“Roger,” Diggs called.
Colonel Roger Ardan was his divisional artillery commander—GUNFIGHTER Six on the divisional radio net—a tall thin man, rather like a not-tall-enough basketball player.
“Yes, sir.”
“Here’s your first fire mission. We’re going to shoot Angelo Giusti through this gap. Company of infantry here and here, and what appears to be a regimental command post here.”
“Enemy artillery?”
“Some one-twenty-twos here, and what looks like two-oh-threes, eight inch, right here.”