Red Storm Rising

by Tom Clancy

  “General, I’m Commander Bob Toland. Until a few hours ago, I was on the threat team with Strike Fleet Atlantic—”

  “How’s it going on Iceland?”

  “The air attack on the fleet was chewed up, sir. There’s still the submarine problem to deal with, but the Marines are moving. I think we’ll win this one, General.”

  “Well, the more subs they send after the carriers, the fewer go after my convoys.”

  That’s one way to look at it, Toland thought. “Admiral, we captured a Russian fighter pilot. He comes from an important family. I interrogated him; here’s the tape. I think we know why the war started.”

  “Joachim, did you check his data?”

  “No, sir. He has already briefed COMEASTLANT, and Admiral Beattie wanted the data to come directly to you.”

  SACEUR’s eyes narrowed. “Let’s hear it, son.”

  “Oil.”

  41

  Targets of Opportunity

  BRUSSELS, BELGIUM

  Three copies were made of the tape. One went to one of SACEUR’s intelligence staff for a separate translation to be checked against Toland’s. Another was taken to French intelligence for electronic analysis. The third was analyzed by a Belgian psychiatrist who was fluent in Russian. While that was going on, half of the intelligence officers at NATO headquarters updated all their information about Soviet fuel consumption to date. CIA and other national intelligence services began a frantic investigation into Soviet oil production and utilization. Toland predicted the outcome hours before it came in: insufficient data. The range of possible conclusions predicted that the Russians had enough fuel for several months—or had already run out!

  SACEUR took his time before accepting the data at face value. Prisoner interrogations had given his intelligence people a wealth of information—most of it patently false or contradictory. Since supply officers naturally lagged behind the fighting troops, few of them had been captured. It was the Air Force that bought the story first. They knew that enemy fuel-supply dumps were smaller than expected. Instead of the One Big Facility so prevalent throughout Russian society (and after the big dump at Wittenburg had been blown up), the Russians had gone to small ones, accepting the price of increased air-defense and security requirements. NATO’s deep-strike air missions had been concentrating on airfields, munitions dumps, transport junctions, and the tank columns approaching the front... more lucrative targets than the smaller-than-expected fuel depots, which were also harder to spot. The traffic signatures associated with the large fuel-posts usually showed hundreds of trucks cycling in and out. The small ones, with fewer trucks involved, were harder for the look-down radar aircraft to locate. All these factors militated to a different targeting priority.

  After fifteen minutes’ discussion with his Air Chief, SACEUR changed all that.

  STENDAL, GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC

  “I can’t do both things,” Alekseyev whispered to himself. He’d spent the last twelve hours trying to find a way, but it wasn’t there. It was a marvel what it meant finally to be in command himself, no longer the aggressive subordinate. He was now responsible for success or failure. A mistake was his mistake. A failure was his failure. It had been much more comfortable the other way. Like his predecessor, Alekseyev had to mark his orders, even though his orders were impossible. He had to maintain the salient and continue the advance. He had the resources to do one or the other, but not both. You will advance northwest from the Weser, cutting off the forces on the right flank of the advancing troops and preparing the way for a decisive attack into the Ruhr Valley. Whoever issued the orders either didn’t know or didn’t care that this was impossible.

  But NATO knew. Their air power had smashed convoys on every road between Rühle and Alfeld. The two B tank divisions guarding Beregovoy’s northern flank had been caught off-balance and routed. Battalion-sized blocking forces occupied the major crossroads while the NATO commanders reinforced the regiment at Alfeld. Probably two full tank divisions lurked in the forests north of Rühle, but for the present they had not attacked Beregovoy. Instead their inaction both dared him to cross and invited him to counterattack north.

  Alekseyev remembered an important lesson from the Frunze Academy: the Kharkov Offensive of 1942. The Germans had allowed the advancing Red Army forces to penetrate deep—then cut them off and chewed them up. High Command [meaning Stalin] ignored the objective realities of the situation (hence violating the Second Law of Armed Combat), concentrating instead on subjective perceptions of apparent progress that unfortunately proved false, the lesson concluded. The General wondered if this battle would be an object lesson for some future class of captains and majors who would then write their test answers and essays in bluebooks, pointing out what an ass General Colonel Pavel Leonidovich Alekseyev was!

  Or he could pull them back . . . and admit defeat, and perhaps be shot, and then be remembered, if at all, as a traitor to the Motherland. It was so fitting. After sending so many thousands of boys into fire, now he faced death as well, though from an unexpected direction.

  “Major Sergetov, I want you to go back to Moscow to tell them in person what I am up to. I am going to detach one division from Beregovoy and drive it east to open the way at Alfeld again. The attack on Alfeld will be from two directions, and after it succeeds, we will be able to continue the Weser crossing without fear of having our spearhead cut off.”

  “A skillful compromise,” the major said hopefully.

  That’s just the thing I need to hear!

  BITBURG, FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY

  Twelve Frisbees were left. Twice they’d been pulled out of action briefly to determine what new tactics would lessen the hazards—with some success, Colonel Ellington told himself. A few of the Soviet systems had proved to have unsuspected capabilities, but half of his losses were unexplained. Were they the kind of accidents that accompanied flying heavily loaded aircraft at minimum altitude or simply the laws of probability catching up with everyone? A pilot might think a 1-percent chance of being shot down on a given mission acceptable, then realize that fifty such missions made it a 40-percent chance.

  His flight crews were unnaturally quiet. The elite Frisbee squadron was a tight family of men, a third of whom were gone. The professionalism that allowed them to shut this out and do their weeping in private had its limits. That limit had been passed. Mission performance was down. But combat requirements were not, and Ellington knew that sentiment’s place in the great military scheme of things fell below the need to hit targets.

  He rotated the aircraft off the pavement and headed east alone. Tonight he carried no weapons save Sidewinders and antiradar missiles for self-defense. His F-19A was burdened with fuel tanks instead of bombs. He settled to an initial flight altitude of three thousand feet and checked his instruments, making a slight adjustment in the aircraft’s trim before starting a slow descent to five hundred feet. That was his altitude on crossing the Weser.

  “Got some activity on the ground, Duke,” Eisly reported. “Looks like a column of tanks and troop carriers heading northeast on Highway 64.”

  “Report it in.” In this sector, everything that moved was a target. A minute later, they crossed the Leine north of Alfeld. They could see the distant flashes of artillery, and Ellington banked left to keep clear. A six-inch shell in its ballistic arc didn’t care if the Frisbee was invisible or not.

  This ought to be safer than a strike mission, Ellington told himself. They flew east, two miles from a secondary road that Eisly kept under surveillance with their nose-mounted television camera. The threat-warning receiver was lit up from SAM radars sweeping the sky for intruders.

  “Tanks,” he said quietly. “Lots of ’em.”

  “Moving?”

  “Don’t think so. Looks like they’re sitting alongside the road near the treeline. Wait—missile—launch warning! SAM three o’clock!”

  Ellington pushed the stick down and to the left. In a matter of seconds he had to dive his air
craft one way, turn his head the other to see the incoming missile, then turn back to make sure he didn’t plow a furrow in the dirt with his fifty-million-dollar aircraft. All he saw of the SAM was a yellow-white gout of flame, and it was heading for him. As soon as he leveled out, he wrenched the Frisbee into a hard right turn. In the back Eisly had his eyes on the missile.

  “Veering off, Duke—yeah!” The missile leveled out at the treetops behind the F-19, then dipped and exploded in the woods. “The instruments say that was a SA-6. The search radar is one o’clock and very close.”

  “Okay,” Ellington said. He activated a single Sidearm antiradar missile and fired it at the transmitter from a range of four miles. The Russians were slow to detect it. Ellington saw the detonation. Take that, Darth Vader!

  “I think you’re right on how they’re getting us, Duke.”

  “Yeah.” The Frisbee was designed to defeat overhead radars. Something looking up had a much better chance of detecting them. They could defeat that by flying very low, but then they couldn’t see as well as they wanted to see. He turned for another look at the tanks. “How many you think, Don?”

  “Lots, over a hundred.”

  “Tell ’em.” Ellington turned back north while Major Eisly made his report. In minutes some German Phantom jets would visit the tank assembly point. That many tanks sitting still probably meant a fueling point, he thought. Either the fuel trucks were already there or they were en route. Fuel trucks were now his primary targets, a surprising change after weeks of going for supply dumps and moving columns . . . Whats that?

  “Trucks dead ahead!” The Duke watched the enhanced view on his Head-Up Display. A long line of . . . fuel trucks, traveling in a tight column, blacked out and moving fast. The curved metal tops made the identification easy. He turned the fighter again to circle two miles from the road. Eisly’s infrared picture showed the glow of engines and exhaust piping, hotter than the cool night air. It was like a procession of ghosts down the tree-lined road.

  “I count fifty or so, Duke, and they’re heading for that tank park.”

  Five thousand gallons per truck, Ellington thought. Two hundred fifty thousand gallons of diesel fuel . . . enough to fill every tank in two Soviet divisions. Eisly called that one in also.

  “Shade Three,” the AWACS controller radioed back. “We have eight birds en route, ETA four minutes. Orbit and evaluate.”

  Ellington did not acknowledge. He put his aircraft right down on the treetops for several minutes, wondering how many trees had Russian soldiers standing nearby with their SA-7 hand-held missiles.

  A long time since he’d flown over Vietnam, a long time since he’d first realized that random chance could reach up into the sky and end his life despite all his skill. His years of peacetime flying had allowed him to forget that—Ellington never thought an accident could kill him. But one man with an SA-7 could, and there was no way to know when he was flying over one . . . Stop thinking about that, Duke.

  The Royal Air Force Tornados swept in from the east. The lead aircraft dropped his cluster bombs in front of the column. The rest swept over the road at a shallow angle, raining the bomblets on the convoy. Trucks exploded, sending burning fuel high into the air. Ellington saw the silhouettes of two fighter-bombers against the orange flames as they headed west for home. The fuel spread out on both sides of the road, and he watched the undamaged trucks stop and turn, desperately trying to escape the conflagration. Some were abandoned by their drivers. Others steered clear of the fire and tried to continue south. A few succeeded. Most bogged down, too heavily loaded to move on the soft earth.

  “Tell em they got about half. Not bad at all.”

  A minute later, the Frisbee was ordered northeast again.

  In Brussels the radar signals downlinked from the ground-search radar aircraft plotted the fuel convoy’s path. A computer was now programmed to perform the function of the videotape recorder, and it traced the convoy’s movements back to its point of origin. Eight more attack aircraft headed toward this patch of woods. The Frisbee got there first.

  “I show SAM radars, Duke,” Eisly said. “I’ll call it one battery of SA-6 and another of SA-11. They must think this place is important.”

  “And a hundred little bastards with hand-held SAMs,” Ellington added. “ETA on the strike?”

  “Four minutes.”

  Two batteries of SAMs would be very bad news for the strike aircraft. “Let’s cut those odds down some.”

  Eisly singled out the SA-11 search/acquisition radar. Ellington headed toward it at four hundred knots, using a road to travel below the trees until he was two miles away. Another Sidearm dropped off the airframe and rocketed toward the radar transmitter. At the same moment, two missiles came their way. The Duke applied maximum power and turned hard to the east, dropping chaff and flares as he did so. One missile went for the chaff and exploded harmlessly. The other locked onto the fuzzy radar signal reflected from the Frisbee and wouldn’t let go. Ellington jinked up hard, then pulled the aircraft into a maximum-g turn in hope of outmaneuvering the missile. But the SA-11 was too fast. It exploded a hundred feet behind the Frisbee. The two crewmen ejected from the distintegrating aircraft a moment later, their parachutes opening a scarce four hundred feet off the ground.

  Ellington landed at the edge of a small clearing. He quickly detached himself from the chute and activated his rescue radio before drawing his revolver. He caught a glimpse of Eisly’s chute dropping into the trees and ran in that direction.

  “Fuckin’ trees!” Eisly said. His feet were dangling off the ground. Ellington climbed up and cut him down. The major’s face was bleeding.

  Explosions thundered to the north.

  “They got it!” Ellington said.

  “Yeah, but who’s got us?” Eisly said. “I hurt my back.”

  “Can you move, Don?”

  “Hell, yes!”

  STENDAL, GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC

  The dispersal of fuel reserves into small depots had reduced NATO attacks on them nearly to zero. The resulting sense of security had lasted nearly a month. The attacks on tank columns and munitions stores were serious, but there were plenty of replacements for both. Fuel was a different story.

  “Comrade General, NATO has changed its pattern of air attacks.”

  Alekseyev turned from the map display to listen to his air-intelligence officer. Five minutes later, his supply chief came in.

  “How bad is it?”

  “Overall, perhaps as much as ten percent of our forward supplies. In the Alfeld sector, over thirty percent.”

  The phone rang next. It was the general whose divisions were to attack Alfeld in five hours.

  “My fuel is gone! The convoy was attacked and destroyed twenty kilometers from here.”

  “Can you attack with what you have?” Alekseyev asked.

  “I can, but I won’t be able to maneuver my units worth a damn!”

  “You must attack with what you have.”

  “But—”

  “There are four divisions of Soviet soldiers who will die if you do not relieve them. The attack will go as scheduled!” Alekseyev set the phone down. Beregovoy was also short on fuel. A tank could have enough fuel to drive three hundred kilometers in a straight line, but they almost never traveled in a straight line, and despite orders, the crews invariably left the engines running when sitting still. The time needed to start their diesels could mean death if a sudden air attack fell on them. Beregovoy had been forced to give all of his reserve fuel to his eastbound tanks so that they could hit Alfeld in conjunction with the westbound C divisions. The two divisions on the left bank of the Weser were essentially immobilized. Alekseyev was gambling the offensive on his ability to reestablish his supply routes. He told his supply chief to get more fuel. If his attack succeeded he’d need more still.

  MOSCOW, R.S.F.S.R.

  The transition was ridiculous—less than two hours from Stendal to Moscow by jet, from war to peace, from danger to
safety. His father’s chauffeur, Vitaly, met him at the military airport and drove at once to the Minister’s official dacha in the birch forests outside the capital. He entered the front room to see a stranger with his father.

  “So this is the famous Ivan Mikhailovich Sergetov, Major of the Soviet Army.”

  “Excuse me, Comrade, but I do not think we have met before.”

  “Vanya, this is Boris Kosov.”

  The young officer’s face betrayed just a fraction of his emotions on being introduced to the Director of the KGB. He leaned back into the easy chair and observed the man who had ordered the bombing of the Kremlin—after arranging for children to be there. It was two in the morning. KGB troops loyal—thought to be loyal, Minister Sergetov corrected himself—to Kosov patrolled outside to keep this meeting a secret.

  “Ivan Mikhailovich,” Kosov said genially, “what is your assessment of the situation at the front?”

  The young officer suppressed a desire to look to his father for guidance. “The success or failure of the operation hangs in the balance—remember that I am a junior officer and I lack the expertise for a reliable evaluation. But as I see things, the campaign could now go either way. NATO is short on manpower but they’ve had a sudden infusion of supplies.”

  “About two weeks’ worth.”

  “Probably less,” Sergetov said. “One thing we’ve learned at the front is that supplies get used up much faster than expected. Fuel, ordnance, everything seems almost to evaporate. So our friends in the Navy must keep hitting the convoys.”

  “Our ability to do this is seriously reduced,” Kosov said. “I would not expect—the truth is that the Navy has been defeated. Iceland will soon be back in NATO hands.”

  “But Bukharin didn’t say that!” the elder Sergetov objected.