Men of War k-4

by John A. Schettler

  “Now then, I’m afraid my research leaves me very little time for stories and movies, but I do spend a good deal of time in books like that one.” He pointed at the Naval Chronology. “Imagine my chagrin one day when I pick up this volume and look up a reference I was very certain about to check on some detail—and find that the passage no longer exists! There it was in my head, clear as a bell. I had read it just that same afternoon. Then I go back to check on a minor detail and it is nowhere to be found. So I check other reference books, and to my great surprise, none of them mentions this incident. Well now you might begin to think yourself a crazy man indeed,” he sighed.

  “Gerasim… It is one thing to find notes in a song out of order, or even to be surprised that a character in a book you were so sure of was simply not in that favorite story of yours. But when your history books start to misbehave in this manner, then you take real notice. Yes? Then you sit up late at night with that dusty old volume on your nightstand and you read, and read, and go to sleep hoping it will all still be as you remembered it when you wake up the next morning. One day you find something has changed again, and your curiosity increases, your determination redoubles. You become a man on a mission to discover just what may have happened to cause this impossible thing that you swear has happened. You become a very determined man, in fact.”

  Kapustin had been listening, though he began to sense a nonsensical edge to what his friend was telling him. He nonetheless continued nodding, without objection, adopting the time honored forms of vranyo, the polite listening of one man as another spins out a little lie, or a boastful exaggeration. Only when the story was complete would it be proper to make any objection. Kamenski finished, looking at his friend to see how he was reacting to all this.

  “You are telling me you think the history recounted in this book has changed? What is in your tea tonight, Pavel?”

  “Ah, yes,” said Kamenski. “That is the first thing you consider. People change their minds all the time, but a book cannot re-write itself. It is a fixed and certain thing—unless it gets deliberately edited and re-issued. We do that sort of thing often enough, but then we get two books, yes? Side by side. One has the old text, and one has the new. Yet this is not what I am speaking of. I am talking about opening to a passage or incident in the history you know as well as your own last name and finding it different, subtly changed—or worse than that—finding it missing… and then sitting there wondering why you are the only one who can remember it.”

  “History is a story that men write, Pavel. You know that as well as I do. I’m sorry if you forget your books and think they have changed, but I am talking about something more than this now—a nuclear warhead missing. Men missing. Thirty six men listed as killed in action that this world never seems to have heard of.”

  “Nor would you have ever heard about them if this Doctor had not prepared that list. Have you considered that, Gerasim?”

  “Well… I suppose not.”

  “The Doctor made a mistake, but I cannot really blame him. How would he know that there would be no record of any of these men? How could he check on something like this in a few hours time with Volkov gnawing at his ankle. So he gave you the list. But you, my friend, you are a careful man. You checked with Moscow, and these dead men are truly dead—so dead that they were never even born.”

  “You mean there was a black operation, yes? This was all part of a cover up?”

  “No, Gerasim. I mean they were never born. And as for the nuclear warhead, I know exactly what happened to it, and it had nothing to do with the Orel, nor is it on its way to the airport tonight. That was just another suggestion to throw Volkov off the scent.”

  Pavel Kamenski was not simply a curious old man living in a quiet suburb of Vladivostok with his daughter, grandson, cat and walnut trees. He was an old navy man, moving from active service into the Naval Intelligence arm as well. But his long career did not end there. He was, in fact, the recently retired Deputy Director of the KGB, and he knew quite a bit more about Kirov than the his friend the Inspector General would ever know.

  He looked at Kapustin, thinking that what he was now about to say might change his friend’s life forever. Yet there was nothing else to do at this point. Volkov he could manage easily enough. But Kapustin was his friend of many years, and he knew him well. He was going to keep digging in this back yard until he dug up another bone, so he had been prepping him for this revelation for some time, slowly sharing small pieces of the puzzle to gauge his reaction. It was time to bring some focus to the picture. The man was Inspector General of the Russian Navy, a lofty enough post to make allowance. Yet what will he do when I finally pull the wax out of his ears and he, too, hears the Siren song? Will he go mad, as other men have? We shall see. He reached for the samovar.

  “Here, Gerasim, let me warm your tea.”

  Part XII

  STANDOFF

  “Very few veterans can return to the battlefield and summon the moral courage to confront what they did as armed combatants… they are often incapable of facing the human suffering and death they inflicted… they see only their own ghosts.”

  ~ Chris Hedges

  Chapter 34

  The news whirred on, 24 hours every day, moving from story to story in staccato tempo. The top of the hour replayed the grim warning from the Chinese general at the UN while Fox News rattled verbal sabers in reprisal and an aging Bill O’Reilly pronounced judgment on the story, rallying the right-leaning audience frequenting that channel. On CNN the more liberal talking heads chatted and speculated and trotted out ex-Army and Navy “experts” to explain what had happened in the East China Sea, and what might be coming next… after this brief commercial break.

  In a strange juxtaposition of the profoundly serious with the insanity of the irrelevant, the news was quickly followed by a raft of “other news,” celebrity showcasing, and mindless ‘entertainment.’

  Wall Street hated the war news. It was not long before the market lost a cool 1200 points, and fell another 350 points the following morning. Commentator Art Hogan nabbed the quote of the day to explain the carnage: “This market is going down like free beer. I would say if there had been a day when we’re trying to price in a worst-case scenario, this might be it.” Money looked for safe havens in bonds, then fled to gold and other precious metals as it always did in times of crisis.

  When they weren’t watching TV, Americans hit the malls and supermarkets in a spate of quiet panic buying. Prices began to spike and shortages of many things on the “hundred items to disappear first” list became reality. People felt the shadow of impending war at the gas pump more than ever, then at the super market and the cost of everything from their phone calls to their Blue Rays. Milk was selling at over $4.50 per half gallon. Gasoline was now well over $6.50 per gallon and still cheap compared to prices in Europe and the UK. While millions sat with their after dinner coffee and browsed on ‘The Huffington Post,’ the war but had already escalated in the pulsing, restless energy of the Internet.

  Half a world and eight time zones away, Unit 61398 was also very busy that morning in Shanghai. Operating from a plain high rise like any of a thousand others around it in the sprawling mega-city, a select cadre of Chinese military IT and computer specialists were now working overtime to penetrate and exploit any weakness they could find in US defense and infrastructure networks. They attacked the power grids, hydroelectric projects, refineries, satellite and GPS communications networks, telecommunications and cell phone systems, air traffic control, financial institutions, and also made pointed attacks on key defense sites. Cyberspace and outer space were to become the first arena of confrontation between East and West.

  That list of strategic targets was surely frightening, but most Americans first felt the attacks when Unit 61398 did the unthinkable in a clever and yet highly symbolic act of defiance. They took down prime time TV on a major network. The feature movie that night was a rerun of the science fiction classic Independence Day. A mas
sive shadow had just passed over the site of the Apollo Moon landing, and an thrumming vibration shook the landmark footprints of Neil Armstrong in the ominous opening scene that promised “you ain’t seen nothing yet.” The next scene showed a cyberpunk scientist scooting about on his lab chair in the SETI listening post, somewhere in the Arizona desert. He had hold of an odd signal that had interrupted the rock song blaring in the background: “It’s the end of the world as you know it…”

  There was nothing like a little widescreen mayhem and total destruction to make the home audience forget their troubles. The ex- summer blockbuster was to be followed by something even more spectacular: 2012, the mother of all disaster movies by this same director. Soon the massive alien ships of Independence Day entered the atmosphere and made their way to designated rendezvous points over major world cities. Jeff Goldblum was fussing over misplaced aluminum cans in his role as the genius cable repair guy. He would soon figure the whole thing out, and then rush off to the White House with his Apple PowerBook to warn the president of the impending attack.

  The first half was a fabulous mix of awesome special effects as the alien ships appeared and then fired their death rays to begin the extermination of the human race. Scenes of chaos and destruction would abound, then the Air Force would launch a feeble counterattack. The alien force fields were impervious to all our weapons, even nuclear bombs. But the creatures in the ships had not reckoned on Jeff Goldblum and his Macintosh. The hero would write a computer virus and use a Roswell UFO to deliver it to the alien mother ship.

  Meanwhile, the President himself would lead the next attack, aided by a drunken ex-crop duster as his wingman. The computer virus would foil the alien force fields, allowing the crop duster to get through to deliver the attack on one of the alien ships—payback for all the molestation he endured as an abductee earlier in life. The clear message: Americans never lose, not even when they’re up against aliens in UFOs. Americans have guys like Jeff Goldblum and drunk crop dusters always lurking in the background and ready to save the world at a moment’s notice.

  So while the ships and subs of seven nations slipped quietly from their berths in the Pacific, Americans turned their attention to the 50-inch plasma on the walls above their fireplaces, oblivious. The first segment was over and they were sitting through another commercial break learning more than they ever wanted to know about fashion crazes, facial cream, Cialis, and the impending baseball playoffs.

  In spite of the crisis, it was amazing how little real information ever came over the mass media. Besides, the aliens were blowing New York and Washington DC all to hell just after the commercial break, so the thought of $6 or $7 for gas and a little more on the heating bill this winter wouldn’t really matter as they watched the President of the United States ask the alien in the Roswell facility what they wanted us to do. When the movie resumed the captured alien mouthed the reply, spoken through the hapless character actor Brent Spiner, aka “Data” from the popular Star Trek series. It was one simple word, spoken in a long, rasping reprisal: “Die…” and a hell of a way to open negotiations. It was fortunate the nation had Jeff Goldblum on the job this time.

  Then the movie feed itself was interrupted, with a rarely seen message frozen on the screen.

  “We are experiencing technical difficulties—Please Stand By”

  ~ ~ ~

  That same morning the thin cord of sanity that stretched between Seoul and Pyongyang for long decades of uneasy peace was suddenly terminated when the daily test of the ‘Red Cross Hotline’ failed. Colonel Sun Yun Kim stood holding the receiver to his ear listening to the line ring and ring, with no answer, until it eventually dissolved into the long heartless buzz of an empty dial tone. He reset the receiver and keyed the system to try again, only this time the line was completely dead.

  The last time this had happened had been the early morning hours of March 11, 2012 when North Korea used the incident to protest military maneuver in the south and UN sanctions aimed at inhibiting its nuclear program. The two countries had no formal diplomatic relations since the tentative truce was signed in the 1950s and technically existed in a suspended state of war. It was no wonder, given the situation in the Pacific, that the border “truce village” of Panmunjom was more than edgy that morning.

  Pyongyang had responded to the rising tension in typical fashion by setting its military on high alert. The tiny starving enclave of repressive hegemony in the north fielded the world’s fourth largest standing army, with over a million men under arms on active duty at any given time and another eight million in reserve. With 1000 ballistic missiles, including a handful that could reach the west coast of the US, 5400, tanks, 2600 AFVs, 1600 SPGs and MLRS systems, its ground forces were a snarling dog on a thin leash that stretched all the way back to Beijing.

  The “incident” was another grim reminder to the US that if it wished to rush to honor two existing mutual defense treaties with Japan and Taiwan, it would soon find the ante upped and have South Korea to worry about as well. The ravenous North was only too happy to oblige, with its massive armed forces all dressed up and with only one place to go. It was going to be a very long day in the situation room of the White House deep underground bunker.

  ~ ~ ~

  The long line of warships sailed east, past the submarine base where SSN Kazan had slipped away hours earlier, then northeast into the Sea of Okhotsk. Karpov was taking the fleet north of Hokkaido Island, to the one Russian controlled channel there south of Aniva Bay, Sakhalin Island. It would be a long day’s sailing at 25 knots, and they timed the transit to occur at midnight the following day. There the Japanese watch post at Wakkanai at the northern tip of Hokkaido would surely spot the ships, and relay the count to JDF Headquarters in Tokyo.

  A Kawasaki P-1 Maritime Patrol aircraft was already up from Misawa airfield, Japan’s new replacement for the aging US P-3s. It was a sophisticated new surveillance plane, with advanced signals processing capability and new Artificial Intelligence to advise the Tactical Coordinator (TACCO) on best intercept course plots for its alternate role as an ASW strike aircraft. Ten such planes had been procured, giving the Japanese good coverage along the long archipelago of islands that they now controlled. With range just shy of 5000 miles the planes had excellent endurance for the surveillance role it was tasked with that night. It could sit over Hokkaido Island safe in Japanese airspace and use its excellent AESA radar to watch the ominous procession of warships to the north.

  The fleet continued due east in the Sea Of Okhotsk for yet another day, making for the wide channel south of Urup Island in the Kurile chain. By day the skies above the flotilla were patrolled by pairs of MIG-29s off airfields in the Kuriles. By night the ships would deploy their own helicopters in wide arcs around the main formation to keep a wary eye out for submarines. Nothing was seen or heard, and no challenge was mounted from Japanese naval or air forces. They had enough on their hands with the angry dragon they had roused from its long slumber, and were content to watch from a respectful distance as Karpov led the fleet out towards the deep blue of the Pacific. It was soon clear to them that this flotilla of formidable warships was hastening to join the Russian Admiral Kuznetsov carrier group already operating in the waters off the southern tip of Kamchatka. That force was now heading southwest towards the Kuriles to effect a rendezvous.

  South of the Japanese mainland, the wayward brother ship of Kuznetsov, sold off and adopted by the Chinese years ago, had already deployed from Dalian naval base and was poised to enter the Yellow Sea. The tickling alarm clock had run the course of the forty-eight hour ultimatum set by the People’s Republic of China, and there had not been such a breathless, agonizing wait since the countdown to the launching of the first Gulf war over 30 years ago in August of 1990.

  In that war and the Second Gulf War against Saddam that followed it ten years later after 9/11, the absolute superiority of Western air and ground forces had been brutally established. Only the long asymmetric guerilla war fought by t
he radicalized Islamics had proved again that the modern world was not an age of conquest and occupation. American forces left Iraq and Afghanistan with little to show for the billions in dollars and the thousands of dead and wounded soldiers who fought there. It was not like WWII, where the United States had decisively joined the Allies to defeat two major world powers and liberate over ten nations that had been overrun by the enemy, and did so in only four years. No, in the early 21st century America fought for nearly 15 years in Afghanistan, and then left it much as they had found it. Two years after the last troops pulled out the Taliban were back to business as usual.

  This time it was not American troops deploying from their homeland to a far distant and hostile shore. This time it was forces of a coalition that now spanned half the land mass of the world, the SinoPac alliance between China and Russia that had been signed in the year 2020. The Dragon and the Bear had settled their differences, agreed on mutual economic development of the vast untapped resources of Siberia, where China’s hungry manufacturing economy was to be fed by the oil, timber, and metals there, and Russia would be flooded with the finances it so desperately needed to get back to the glory days when it had been a dominant player on the world stage.

  The fear of imminent war was circling the globe, and when Taiwan issued a joint resolution by both the executive and legislative Yuans formally declaring independence a quiet hush settled over the region. Mainland China had their answer. Washington grimaced at the announcement, failing to prevent it by diplomatic arm twisting that had gone on for the last 24 hours. Taiwan was calling the Dragon’s bluff, and whistling for the hounds to come to its aid, invoking its longstanding mutual defense treaty with the US.

  Washington had walked a careful tightrope stretched between the island and the Chinese mainland since 1955. On the one hand they pledged to defend Taiwan from outside aggression, while on the other they threw a bone to the People’s Republic by inserting careful language into the treaty upon its ratification: “It is the understanding of the Senate that nothing in the treaty shall be construed as affecting or modifying the legal status or sovereignty of the territories to which it applies.”