Red Metal

by Mark Greaney

  The president knew what was being asked of him. He needed to choose which city would live and which would die.

  He thought it over, but not for long. He had spent the last two days steeling himself to lead his nation in war. He had forced out his old mind-set, removed compassion and care for anything other than battle.

  His calculation was made dispassionately but with a slight nod to potential civilian casualties.

  “Kraków is the second largest city in Poland. Wrocław is the fourth. If we fight in a city . . . we fight in Wrocław.”

  A quick call was made and an orderly brought a detailed map of the city, which was unfurled, and after another hour of discussion, the outline of the colonel’s plan was set.

  The Polish Land Forces would move elements of the 12th Mechanized Division, the 18th Reconnaissance Regiment, and the 10th Armored Cavalry Brigade into Sabaneyev’s assumed route along the A8 Motorway that ringed the city of Wrocław to the north. This would be a force of roughly 5,000 troops, and steps would be taken to mask the movements of these men and their equipment. These steps would fail, of course; the Russians would identify the rushed buildup.

  To Sabaneyev, it would appear as if the Poles were planning a massive ambush.

  If the Poles did, in fact, fight in the fields along the motorway, they would lose in a rout. But the Russians would trust the intelligence reports, and they would expect a day’s delay, and sizable losses of their own.

  But the colonel’s plan was not to put the Polish Land Forces north of Wrocław so that they could fight the Russians. No, it was to put the Polish Land Force north of Wrocław to force the Russians to take another route—to take them out of tank country, the open fields of Poland, and into infantry country, special forces country.

  The city.

  So far everything Sabaneyev had done had been to avoid a pitched fight with frontline Polish, American, and German army troops, to use speed and maneuverability to bypass his enemies’ strengths and to look for weaknesses. To search for gaps and move—fast.

  The Poles would use this tendency against him.

  The officers in the Ministry of National Defense building agreed with the Wojska Specjalne colonel when he postulated this would continue on the column’s inevitable eastern return. A large enough Polish force arrayed in front of Sabaneyev might get the Russian colonel general to seek an alternate route.

  He could turn north, but this would push him into the interior of the nation, not the open, flat south, and it would force him to pass close to the bulk of the Polish military, which was still arrayed near Warsaw awaiting what they assumed would be the main invasion force from Belarus. It would send him near several Polish air force bases, which would decrease the time his column and his air support would have to respond to any threats from the air.

  Heading north would both slow him down and expose him to more danger. He wouldn’t do that.

  But there was another maneuver Sabaneyev could make to avoid the direct encounter with the Polish Land Forces. He could bypass the 5,000 soldiers dug in in front of him along the motorway, peel off into the streets of Wrocław, and drive right through the city itself. In this way he would be delayed no more than four to six hours, not twelve to twenty-four; he could re-form his column on the A8 Motorway on the other side of the dug-in Polish positions; and he could once again race across poorly defended southern Poland and make his way into Belarus.

  If there was nothing but Polish civilian militia defending Wrocław, he would see the way as clear and would be drawn by the opportunity to strike a quick blow against a token force.

  Sabaneyev would not take the decision to move through Wrocław lightly. No military force, mechanized or otherwise, wants to get bogged down in a major city with tight streets, civilian traffic, and high buildings on all sides, but if the way through the city looked easier and more assured than the way around the city, the Polish special forces colonel suggested that the brash and confident General Eduard Sabaneyev would choose this route.

  Sabaneyev would surely send reconnaissance to look for evidence of traps in Wrocław; to check the bridges over the Oder River, which ran through the city, to ensure they had not been wired with explosives; and to gauge the citizenry for evidence the civilians had been moved out or warned.

  But if he found no evidence of major conventional forces positions, he’d almost assuredly take the risk.

  And if Sabaneyev could be steered into moving his armor directly through Wrocław, they would trap him in the spot that armor and in fact all conventional forces in the modern age detested and dreaded: fighting street to street, house to house. They would litter his route with a relatively small force of Wojska Specjalne, perhaps four hundred strong, augmented by a few thousand militiamen and -women in civilian clothes. They would make Sabaneyev pay for every block with an armored personnel carrier, every street with a tank, every kilometer with a company of dead Russian soldiers.

  The Russian drones wouldn’t pick up a few hundred men and women moving in small groups into Poland’s fourth-largest city over the next twelve hours, and if anyone was tracking the militias, the fact that a couple thousand of their personnel moved along with their old, outdated equipment into the city would just look like a repositioning, moving the B team out of the way of the egressing Russian army, so the PLF could execute their ambush.

  When the plan was put forward, there was arguing on all sides, especially when it became clear there would be no way to both preserve the element of surprise and evacuate the city. The historic old town, one of Europe’s most beautiful, would be ground zero for some of the most intense fighting on the Continent since the Second World War.

  The Polish people of Wrocław were clearly going to suffer.

  But President Zielinski had urged the military men to give him something that would work, damn the costs, and it looked like they had.

  The key to the attack would be the simultaneous destruction of the five bridges over the Oder River in the center of town. They would need to be dropped to force the Russians along a path of the Poles’ choosing.

  And this would have to happen without the Poles mining the bridges and therefore revealing the ambush to Russian forward reconnaissance troops.

  An air force general solved this equation. After conferring with junior officers, he said a dozen of the nation’s thirty-four remaining F-16 aircraft could take off and deliver bombs directly onto the bridges, and even though the inbound aircraft would be detected by the Russians, if the fighters took off from the 32nd Tactical Air Base at nearby Łask, the Russians would have little time to knock them out of the sky before they dropped their payloads and turned away.

  The F-16s could then, with luck, retreat back out of the Russian column’s air defense cone, up into the north of the nation, rearm with more bombs, and return for more action—not in the city itself, but on any targets of opportunity at the rear of the column that managed to escape the trap.

  The Polish president knew hundreds—no . . . thousands—of his citizens would die in the carnage and confusion of city fighting, and he would forever be the one who had condemned them to this fate. But ultimately he decided his very nation would not long stand if the Russians believed they could invade Poland without consequences.

  He was the one who would stick out his political neck and be sacked if not hanged by his own countrymen when it was all done. But as far as the president was concerned, it was NATO that had condemned the city of Wrocław to destruction by forcing his hand.

  The president signed off on the plan, signed away his political career and legacy, signed the death certificates of an unknown number of his citizens and military.

  He himself had friends and family in the city, but he did not pick up the phone to tell them to get out. He instead returned to the Presidential Palace, the seat of the brief Polish breakaway from Russia in 1918, itself a symbol of Polish pride and i
ndependence in their first attempts at democracy before once more falling under the boots of Russia and Germany. He picked up a hot coffee from the blissfully ignorant secretary in his outer office. He entered and sat down in the old, heavy leather chair.

  The December morning sun glared through the huge floor-to-ceiling glass windows of the old palace. Out front he could see the tall, prominent statue of Prince Józef Antoni Poniatowski mounted on his horse, his saber drawn, frozen in bronze in a perpetual cavalry charge. Outside were the lush gardens, green in summer, their joy diminished by the winter’s harsh cold and brown colors.

  Beyond the statue he could make out the top of the tomb of the unknown soldier, with earth from every Polish battlefield in large stone urns, and the barely visible gates to the eternal flame.

  He realized for the first time that the tomb was placed there to remind all Polish presidents past and future of their precise duties in times like these.

  A great dread washed over him.

  He thought of the men and women down south, the soldiers and civilians who were about to die, and he thought about the beautiful city he had doomed so that Poland itself might survive.

  He quietly put his head down on the huge wooden desk and wept uncontrollably.

  CHAPTER 46

  USS JOHN WARNER (SSN-785)

  GULF OF ADEN

  27 DECEMBER

  United States Navy commander Diana DelVecchio peered at the monitors in front of her with a rare look of surprise, given her experience.

  She called out, “XO, come take a look at this.”

  Lieutenant Commander Tad Jenkins, the ship’s executive officer, pivoted away from the navigator’s depth and right-of-way charts on the plotting board. He turned to the periscope displays on the conning tower and worked the zoom controls in and out as he did so.

  “That’s a fleet, Captain,” he said, looking at the large cluster of unmarked dark shapes in the rainy gray gloom of the Gulf of Aden.

  On an older boat, with an older-style periscope, submariners called the funny back-and-forth movement the officers made while looking through the periscope “dancing with the one-eyed lady.” The John Warner had a new state-of-the-art digital periscope system, technically called a UMM, or universal modular mast, which provided constant video feeds, was visible to everyone on the multiple screens, and had enhancements far beyond its fragile glass-and-mirrors predecessor.

  Jenkins flicked a switch engaging the enhanced night vision, then tried thermal to see if they could pick up any heat from the ships. Commander DelVecchio always wanted the scope low in the water to avoid detection, so Jenkins had to pause between waves as they crashed over the specially coated digital lenses.

  “That’s a fleet with a purpose,” he added, squinting through the scope. “Civilian ships in there, but that’s a military convoy. I see escorts, and they are arrayed in a battle plan.”

  He turned the UMM to the right, looking thoroughly over the convoy, pausing briefly on each distant gray ship. Then he zoomed all the way out and turned the scope slowly left, trying to better appreciate the full size and composition of the fleet.

  “XO, send it in,” DelVecchio ordered.

  “Down scope,” said Jenkins, retracting the photonic mast. “Radio, get an SSIXS transmission ready. I want to send Fleet Headquarters images and audio. Wait for Sonar to send you waveforms. We should have gotten enough video panoramic, both night and IR.”

  “Aye, sir,” replied the officer of the deck.

  The XO turned to the OOD. “The scope is yours if you need it, but maintain the captain’s preferred interrupted search and get pictures and laser ranges in the meantime. Get that transmission ready, then one last-up mast for a sat burst.”

  The USS John Warner was a Virginia-class submarine with Block-III upgrades. This meant her passive sonar included some of the latest tech, like the new large-aperture bow (LAB) sonar array and an enhanced active array of “chin-” and “sail-mounted” high-frequency sonar to hunt the enemy.

  And hunting the enemy in the most guileful fashion, using all the boat’s technological advances, was what Commander Diana DelVecchio did best.

  Her larger-than-life approach to leadership was such that she seemed a lot taller than her actual four-foot-eleven height.

  She had been born as a first-generation Italian American, and sometimes a slight Italian accent was audible, but only when she was angry or felt like her back was against the wall during fleet meetings. She also flared up when her crew or their performance was questioned, and this caused her accent to reveal itself.

  The crew loved her and treated her with a deep but almost friendly respect, which she allowed. She knew every single crew member’s full name, as well as the names of their wives and kids. Most of the crew worked hard for ways to get a word of praise from her, such was their respect for her naval professional skills, care for the crew, and fair treatment of them in a pinch.

  In minutes they would extend the UMM again, this time to zap their new intelligence up to the sky and all the way back to Fifth Fleet headquarters. The intelligence experts at Fifth Fleet would then go to work and dissect each ship in the convoy with known and recorded sonar data and images. If things went according to plan, they’d share the data with the rest of the fleet and also transmit some analysis to the John Warner.

  DelVecchio stared at the bulkhead a few seconds, thinking, then turned around and walked off toward the operations center. There she watched the video of the convoy and tried, with the help of audio and her sonarmen’s practiced ears, to discern who was who in this odd assortment of ships.

  * * *

  • • •

  Colonel Borbikov paced the tiny bridge of the Iranian frigate Sabalan, watching the downpour outside. This time of year was called the “short rains” by local fishermen for the brief but frequent squalls here in the Gulf of Aden. The season was tapering off, but tonight the intermittent spots of light rain reduced visibility. It did have the benefit of cooling things considerably from the daily highs of ninety degrees Fahrenheit, a fact not lost on the troops in the sweltering heat belowdecks.

  Borbikov peered through the glass as the bridge porthole wipers wicked away the rain. Two more infantrymen had wandered up on deck to refresh themselves in the squall. They climbed out of a hatch in the bow and faced skyward, relishing the fresh air and gentle rain.

  Even though Borbikov had threatened their superiors with court-martial, a few soldiers still appeared on deck about every half hour to escape the heat and stench common to troopships belowdecks. His own Spetsnaz soldiers generally maintained good discipline, but these were General Lazar’s troops aboard Sabalan, and the regular army guys always tested his boundaries. It didn’t help that Lazar himself and most of his other senior officers were aboard other vessels in the convoy, leaving Borbikov as the most senior Russian officer aboard Sabalan.

  He had taken to using the bridge’s bullhorn to scare Russian infantrymen back down to their cramped quarters.

  The Iranian frigates and cargo vessels loaned to the Russians came with several obligations. One was a requirement that no Russians be visible outside the skin of their ships until they made landfall. Another was that Iran would benefit from the last phase of the overall Russian campaign with a percentage of the income generated at the REM mine. It was a gain that might take several years to realize, but Iran was nothing if not patient when it came to profit.

  It had been clear to Borbikov from the beginning that the Americans would understand Russia’s true objective by this point in Red Metal. There was no way 5,000 Russian soldiers and their armor could be loaded into ships on the Iranian coast and then put to sea without it being noticed, and it wouldn’t take too much deductive reasoning to then determine that the aim of the military movement was the disputed rare-earth-metal mine in southern Kenya.

  But Borbikov had another feint to pull. He det
ermined that all the other obligations of the U.S. military at present would slow their detection, analysis, and reaction times, and then when they did determine Russia was after the mine, they would reasonably assume the ships would be landing in Mombasa, less than fifty kilometers from Mrima Hill. Transit time from Chabahar Port in Iran to Mombasa Port meant the West would have two full days to execute a naval or aerial military response before the Russians landed and off-loaded.

  Of course, the United States and NATO would want to engage Russians at sea. The destruction of AFRICOM in Germany meant America would have a difficult time organizing and mounting an in extremis attack in Africa, but American bombs and missiles fired at the Iranian ships could end the Russian invasion of Kenya before it even began. Once on land, the Russians would have all their ground-to-air assets up and running, not in storage several decks below the surface.

  But the West would not have two days to mount a defense. Borbikov’s plan instead sent his flotilla out of the Arabian Sea and up the Gulf of Aden, where they would go ashore at Djibouti City. This would necessitate Lazar making an arduous 1,300-kilometer armor movement through Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Kenya, but it would also mean shaving by half their vulnerable crossing over water.

  Sure, Borbikov allowed, if there were U.S. ships or subs in the Gulf of Aden, the Iranian and Russian escort ships and submarines lurking below the surface would have to deal with them, but this was a far better match than the premeditated and coordinated ambush they would receive if they tried sailing all the way to Mombasa.

  Colonel Borbikov lifted the bullhorn, barged out onto the bridge wing, and stood in the afternoon rain. “Get your fat, lazy fucking asses back down that hatch, soldiers!”