Red Metal

by Mark Greaney

  Sabaneyev said, “We will not fail you or the motherland, Mr. President.”

  “I know you will not. We will strike with speed and complete surprise, and we will be victorious.”

  And seconds later Rivkin was gone.

  Sabaneyev and Lazar looked at each other in silence for a moment; then the younger, blond-haired man said, “I suppose that means you and I are off to war.”

  Lazar said, “‘Surprise’? Did he say ‘surprise’? Is he unaware of the impossibility of strategic surprise?” Lazar knew, as did Sabaneyev, that Russian military planners had determined that any conventional attack on Europe would take at least two years of preparations—preparations that could not be hidden from Western satellites, spies, and signals intelligence collection. NATO knew this fact, too, and a key part of NATO’s defense was close monitoring of military production, training, force mobilization schedules, and the like.

  Lazar could think of no way he and his army could surprise anyone in the West.

  Sabaneyev said, “He didn’t say the target was Europe. It’s Africa—I’m sure of it. A small armored force to retake the mine that was stolen from us.”

  Lazar shrugged. “Africa by what route? Have you taught your tanks to swim, Eduard? As of yet, mine cannot.”

  Before Sabaneyev could reply, a colonel entered the room via the same double doors Rivkin had used and he placed briefing packets on the table next to where the generals stood.

  Both men were clearly confused. Sabaneyev said, “I’ve never been handed field orders at the Kremlin. Why aren’t we at the Ministry of Defense for this?”

  The colonel replied, “Security reasons.”

  Lazar chuckled at what he saw as the absurdity of this. “We are being given orders, but we can’t let anyone at MoD know? Can we tell our armies, or will we be driving our tanks ourselves? Firing them, too?”

  Sabaneyev laughed, but the colonel remained professionally cool. “At this early stage, Colonel General, President Rivkin and Colonel Borbikov thought it should be done this way.”

  Sabaneyev started to speak, but Lazar cut him off. “Colonel who?”

  “May I ask you to please read the orders? I believe your packets will have more answers than I am able to provide. Colonel Borbikov very much looks forward to meeting you and receiving your feedback as soon as you are finished.”

  The colonel left the room.

  “Who the fuck is Borbikov?” Lazar asked.

  Sabaneyev shrugged, and the two generals sat several seats apart at the conference table and opened the packets left for them. Each leather-bound folio was sixty pages of typewritten orders, clarifications, and charts, with a second sheaf of printed maps.

  On the title page of the booklet, three words were written.

  Operacyia Krasnyi Metal. Operation Red Metal.

  Below that was a date: 24 December 2020. Less than four months away.

  Sixty-four-year-old Colonel General Boris Lazar put on his eyeglasses and hunched over his papers, and fifty-two-year-old Colonel General Eduard Sabaneyev lifted his pages, leaned back, and crossed a booted leg over a knee. The men did not speak to each other; instead they just read.

  Five minutes into the reading, Sabaneyev let out a loud gasp but said nothing.

  Lazar caught up to the other general a minute later and he spoke under his breath: “You’ve got to be joking.”

  * * *

  • • •

  After Russia vacated the Mrima Hill rare-earth metal mine, they took their case to the International Criminal Court, where a hearing on the issue was blocked by Western powers.

  But the Kremlin never gave up on their goal of returning to the mine.

  Russian president Anatoly Rivkin had suffered a devastating hit to his domestic support after his promises to his people about the windfalls they would reap from Africa failed to materialize, and although there was some benefit to demonizing the West, claiming the Russian people had once again been humiliated by America, Western Europe, and Canada, he realized his choke hold on power was weakening by the day.

  Additionally, he and his partners had lost billions of dollars. Not only were his political fortunes on the brink of ruin; his own personal fortune was in jeopardy.

  The REMs meant the survival of Rivkin’s regime, of Rivkin himself, and he quickly determined he had to use the full force of the Russian military to regain control of them.

  It was no tough sell to get the military behind him. He had the support of his nation’s generals and admirals, because if Rivkin needed REMs to survive, his military needed them to remain strong. Every aircraft, communications network, missile, computer, and guidance system utilized these resources, and with the West taking over two-thirds of the known world supplies, and China owning most of the rest, Russia would be at the mercy of China and the West to exist as a military power.

  And this would not do.

  Rivkin’s Kremlin and the Ministry of Defense moved in secret but in lockstep, and they determined they needed a plan to retake the mines by force.

  It didn’t take long to produce one, because the plan had already been written.

  Yuri Vladimirovich Borbikov, the commander of the Spetsnaz forces at the mine during the standoff, had written a proposal at the Russian Federation Armed Forces Combined Arms Academy that was immediately classified at the highest levels of secrecy in the Russian military. The proposal was a plan to retake the Russian strategic resources under the soil in Kenya using an incredibly bold strategy.

  Borbikov had worked on his operation for two years, meeting unofficially with hundreds of military, intelligence, and political experts all over Russia. Using his own money and time, he had traveled to several different countries to look at the lay of the land in person.

  The proposal was so audacious, Borbikov was written off by many at the Ministry of Defense as a crackpot, and the document seemed destined to cripple his meteoric ascendency in the Russian army.

  Until that day Anatoly Rivkin demanded a bold strategy from his generals, damn the costs and the consequences.

  Some in the Ministry of Defense wanted to suppress the paper, worrying that a desperate Kremlin might actually entertain the far-fetched plan as somehow feasible. But others saw Borbikov and his blueprint to take the mines by force as exactly what Russia needed in this desperate time, and they leaked to government officials the existence of the Borbikov proposal. As it was, it was just the right tactic at just the right political moment.

  The president of Russia himself contacted the defense minister and demanded that the proposal be presented to him by the architect himself, and three days later Yuri Borbikov entered the Kremlin in his crisp uniform, ready to defend his plan to save Russia from ruin.

  Nine months after Borbikov and Rivkin first met, and days after the assassination in Taiwan and the release of the compromising video that dealt a blow to American military leadership in the Pacific, Russia’s two most iconic generals sat in silence at a conference table in the Kremlin and read Borbikov’s detailed operation. An operation that had been fully approved by the president of Russia.

  CHAPTER 7

  It took Sabaneyev just over an hour to digest it all, but when he had done so, he waited patiently on the older Lazar. General Lazar needed an additional twenty-five minutes before he closed his packet, looked up, and then stared out the window in silence.

  Lazar finally said, “One hundred and twenty days from now. Not much time at all.”

  Sabaneyev agreed, partially. “Not much, but enough.”

  Lazar turned to him. “This Borbikov. I’ve never heard of him.”

  “I remember him now,” Sabaneyev said. “Spetsnaz.”

  “I gathered as much from the battle plan. It’s certainly heavy on the special operations.”

  Sabaneyev said, “If I knew he was capable of coming up with something like this, I wo
uld have fished him out of Spetsnaz and brought him up in armor.”

  “He’s got quite an imagination,” Lazar said. The comment could have been taken a number of different ways, but the younger general correctly interpreted it.

  Sabaneyev leaned back in his chair in surprise. “You are actually saying you aren’t impressed with the operation? Really, Boris? A raid into Europe to destroy America’s Africa Command in Stuttgart and a simultaneous mission to Kenya to retake the mines? You aren’t so old that you can’t appreciate creative thought, are you?”

  “The creative thought I appreciate involves coming up with a way to fix an idler wheel arm on a frozen T-80 in the field without the proper tools. It isn’t coming up with a way to send virtually all Russia’s Western and Southern Military District’s armor into battle abroad at the same time, leaving the motherland exposed and vulnerable to conventional attack.”

  Sabaneyev shrugged. “At a time the threat from the West is nonexistent, and for only a short period.”

  Lazar continued looking out the window. “Funny thing about war, Sabaneyev. One side’s timeline isn’t always respected by the other side.”

  “Ah, here cometh the lecture.”

  “No lecture. You are no longer my student. You and I are equal in rank if not in experience.”

  “And you wear those extra miles on you as a cloak of invincibility, don’t you?”

  Lazar looked over the younger man now. “Invincibility? On the contrary. I am painfully aware of how vulnerable we all are, and will be.”

  Sabaneyev waved away the comment and picked up the papers in front of him. He waved them in the air. “On the face of it, this looks like a mission for two officers more junior than you and I, but Borbikov’s genius here is that he doesn’t micromanage. You and I have the freedom to organize, prioritize, and improvise. We have objectives clearly laid out, but we are left to shape our campaigns as we see fit. And you have all the advantages, Boris Petrovitch. You have the larger force and you will be attacking Africa to reacquire the rare-earth mines. These orders have me up against the most powerful armies of NATO”—Sabaneyev grinned—“while you will be fighting the Ethiopians and the Kenyans.”

  Lazar replied, “You read the same briefing I did, Eduard. These are spearheads that should be led by one-star generals. Not us. And, more importantly, can you really say you aren’t bothered by what you are tasked to do when you arrive at your objective?”

  Sabaneyev did not miss a beat. “I am the right officer for the mission, and I will fulfill my orders.”

  “Not what I asked.” Lazar lifted the booklet.

  Sabaneyev shrugged. “It is simply combat. Lawful combat.”

  “Only if you get away with it,” said Lazar, looking intently into his protégé’s eyes.

  “I will get away with it. And so will you.” Sabaneyev added, “What would you say to a friendly wager? A steak dinner for the man who achieves his objectives closest to his timeline.”

  Lazar looked out the window again at the warm day. A light rain had begun to fall. “The goal for both of us should be to return with the fewest dead boys. Anything else is folly and an utter waste of our focus.”

  Sabaneyev’s smile disappeared. “Don’t feign a higher purpose. You didn’t become the great Boris Lazar without leaving thousands of those boys you claim to love in massive lime-sprinkled pits in Afghanistan, Dagestan, Chechnya, Georgia, Ingushetia, and Ukraine. If you’ve lost your stomach for the fight, then that’s a new development, and a lot of mothers across the Russian Federation would be disappointed to hear that out of you now, long after their children’s corpses have rotted away to dirt.”

  Lazar spoke solemnly. “I lost many men who followed my orders while I followed orders myself. That will happen again in one hundred and twenty days, I am certain. Nothing changes.”

  “Everything will change when you take those mines. The map of the world will be different. Russia will be at the center for the first time in a generation. I can see that, and you should see that, too.”

  Lazar replied, “The Americans and Europeans will just find new sources somewhere else. They’ll develop their own mines if we take these back. Our economy won’t get the boost the politicians promise.”

  Sabaneyev cocked his head. “You’re an economist now, Boris? Something you picked up studying the microeconomics of goatherds on the steppes?”

  The older general did not miss a beat. “It’s common sense, Eduard. Something they don’t hand out like breast medals, apparently. And experience. That’s something earned by living with a head up and ears open.”

  The younger general nodded as if a chess opponent had made a clever move; then he said, “We’re here at the Kremlin right now. What a great opportunity you have to tell the president of your concerns.”

  Lazar stiffened a little. “No. But I suppose you might just tell Rivkin I have reservations about the wisdom of this escapade.”

  The statement hung in the air for several seconds. Finally Sabaneyev said, “Of course not. I want you in this all the way. You are the second-best general in the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation; that is undisputed.”

  “High praise,” Lazar said, a stab at Sabaneyev’s hubris.

  “The question is . . . do you want in on this fight, Boris?”

  Lazar heaved his broad chest and hesitated before responding. Finally he said, “Better I lead the southern spear than someone less trained. Someone with less interest in saving every life possible.”

  “Spoken like a wise man,” Sabaneyev said. “Perhaps not a warrior . . . but a wise man nonetheless.”

  The older general did not respond.

  * * *

  • • •

  Twenty minutes later Eduard Sabaneyev sat in the back of his staff car on the way to the Ministry of Defense for his one p.m. meeting with Colonel Yuri Borbikov.

  He’d spent the last five minutes giving his deputy, Colonel Feliks Smirnov, an abbreviated version of Red Metal, and he could tell the colonel was as floored by it all as Sabaneyev himself had been when he read the briefing papers.

  Smirnov said, “The Kremlin was wise to give you the premier operation, sir. Their European campaign will be higher profile and more technically difficult. For twenty-five years Boris Lazar was their star, but now they finally realize you are the true warrior general.”

  These were the words of a sycophant, Sabaneyev knew, but he also believed them to be true. He gazed out the window, a feeling of melancholy washing over him suddenly. “Ten years ago this would have made me beam with pride, Feliks. Even five, if I’m honest. But now? Lazar has lost his mettle. He gave me a sermon back there about how he cares only about his soldiers and insinuated the entire endeavor would be a waste of lives.”

  The general added, “Besting Boris Lazar now is no great feat.” He turned and winked at Smirnov. “You could almost do it yourself.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Boris Lazar rode in his own staff car back to the Ministry of Defense. His chief of staff was with him. Colonel Dmitry Kir would be anxious to learn what had happened inside the conference room, but Lazar hadn’t yet said a word about the battle plan. There’d be time enough for that later, days of meetings in secret with Borbikov and intelligence chiefs and others before he could get out of Moscow and back to his troops, but for now he wanted only to sit and reflect in silence.

  The fires of Lazar’s ambition had faded, and this was obvious to him by the way he felt about this opportunity before him. He still believed in the flag for which he fought, the people he protected, and he thought it likely that if this entire affair had been over territory in the near abroad—a threat from NATO against a Russian ally, or a recalcitrant satellite government attempting to break away from the federation—he would have been as heavily invested psychologically as ever.

  But not now.

&nbs
p; Eduard Sabaneyev was a different animal altogether. Lazar had no doubt that the younger man was sufficiently intelligent, charismatic, and skilled at developing the political and personal alliances necessary to make him a successful general. But Sabaneyev’s drive to fight for the sake of fighting, to acquire appointments proving his power and abilities, was something Lazar had no interest in personally.

  Not anymore.

  Lazar wondered if it was just his advancing age cooling his ambition, or if it was simply that he had absolutely no desire to fight for fucking African rocks.

  He looked out at the summer rain on the Moscow streets, then shut his eyes briefly in an attempt to wipe away any doubt or lack of resolve.

  He opened them and cleared his throat, then spoke up to his colonel, who was surely near tearing his hair out to learn what today’s trip to the Kremlin had been all about.

  Lazar spoke matter-of-factly. “It seems you and I will be spending Christmas together in Africa, Dmitry.”

  CHAPTER 8

  MINISTRY OF DEFENSE

  MOSCOW, RUSSIA

  26 AUGUST

  Colonel Yuri Borbikov stood in a conference room on the ninth floor of the Ministry of Defense, looked out the window and down to the Moskva River and Gorky Park beyond it, and steeled his nerves for his meeting to come.

  This was the biggest moment of his career, even bigger than when he met privately with Rivkin at the Kremlin months earlier.

  Today was more auspicious, because today he would meet his idol, Colonel General Boris Lazar, and he would have the honor of briefing him on the operation Borbikov himself had created.

  Since the day he left the Kenyan mine three years earlier, Borbikov had thought of nothing other than his return. He’d worked sixteen-hour days crafting his operation, and now he would brief the two ground commanders.