by Tom Clancy
“Do we have nuke-tipped cruise missiles?”
“No, the President has to authorize that. The birds and the warheads are co-located at Whiteman Air Force Base along with the B-2s. It would take a day or so to mate them up. I’d recommend that the President authorize that if this Chinese situation goes any further,” Moore concluded.
And the best way to deliver nuclear-tipped cruise missiles—off Navy submarines or carrier-based strike aircraft—was impossible because the Navy had been completely stripped of its nuclear weapons inventory, and fixing that would not be especially easy, Jackson knew. The fallout of the nuclear explosion in Denver, which had brought the world to the brink of a full-scale nuclear exchange, had caused Russia and America to take a deep breath and then to eliminate all of their ballistic launchers. Both sides still had nuclear weapons, of course. For America they were mostly B-61 and -83 gravity bombs and W-80 thermonuclear warheads that could be affixed to cruise missiles. Both systems could be delivered with a high degree of confidence and accuracy, and stealth. The B-2A bomber was invisible to radar (and hard enough to spot visually unless you were right next to it) and the cruise missiles smoked in so low that they merged not merely with ground clutter but with highway traffic as well. But they lacked the speed of ballistic weapons. That was the trouble with the fearsome weapons, but that was also their advantage. Twenty-five minutes from turning the “enable-launch” key to impact—even less for the sea-launched sort, which usually flew shorter distances. But those were all gone, except for the ones kept for ABM tests, and those had been modified to make them difficult to fit with warheads.
“Well, we just try to keep this one conventional. How many nuclear weapons could we deliver if we had to?”
“First strike, with the B-2s?” Moore asked. “Oh, eighty or so. If you figure two per target, enough to turn every major city in the PRC into a parking lot. It would kill upwards of a hundred million people,” the Chairman added. He didn’t have to say that he had no particular desire to do that. Even the most bloodthirsty soldiers were repelled by the idea of killing civilians in such numbers, and those who made four-star rank got there by being thoughtful, not psychotic.
“Well, if we let them know that, they ought to think hard about pissing us off that big,” Jackson decided.
“They ought to be that rational, I suppose,” Mickey Moore agreed. “Who wants to be the ruler of a parking lot?” But the problem with that, he didn’t add, was that people who started wars of aggression were never completely rational.
How do we go about calling up reserves?” Bondarenko asked.
Theoretically, almost every Russian male citizen was liable to such a call-up, because most of them had served in their country’s military at one time or another. It was a tradition that dated back to the czars, when the Russian army had been likened to a steamroller because of its enormous mass.
The practical problem today, however, was that the state didn’t know where they all lived. The state required that the veterans of uniformed service tell the army when they moved from one residence to another, but the men in question, since until recently they’d needed the state’s permission to move anywhere, assumed that the state knew where they were and rarely bothered, and the country’s vast and cumbersome bureaucracy was too elephantine to follow up on such things. As a result, neither Russia, nor the Soviet Union before it, had done much to test its ability to call up trained soldiers who’d left their uniforms behind. There were whole reserve divisions that had the most modern of equipment, but it had never been moved after being rolled into their warehouses, and was attended only by cadres of active-duty mechanics who actually spent the time to maintain it, turning over the engines in accordance with written schedules which they followed as mindlessly as the orders that had been drafted and printed. And so, the general commanding the Far East Military Theater had access to thousands of tanks and guns for which he had no soldiers, along with mountains of shells and virtual lakes of diesel fuel.
The word “camouflage,” meaning a trick to be played or a ruse, is French in origin. It really ought to be Russian, however, because Russians were the world’s experts at this military art. The storage sites for the real tanks that formed the backbone of Bondarenko’s theoretical army were so skillfully hidden that only his own staff knew where they were. A good fraction of the sites had even evaded American spy satellites that had searched for years for the locations. Even the roads leading to the storage sites were painted with deceptive colors, or planted with false conifer trees. This was all one more lesson of World War II, when the Soviet Army had totally befuddled the Germans so often that one wondered why the Wehrmacht even bothered employing intelligence officers, they had been snookered so frequently.
“We’re getting orders out now,” Colonel Aliyev replied. “With luck, half of them ought to find people who’ve worn the uniform. We could do better if we made a public announcement.”
“No,” Bondarenko replied. “We can’t let them know we’re getting ready. What about the officer corps?”
“For the reserve formations? Well, we have an ample supply of lieutenants and captains, just no privates or NCOs for them to command. I suppose if we need to we can field a complete regiment or so of junior officers driving tanks,” Aliyev observed dryly.
“Well, such a regiment ought to be fairly proficient,” the general observed with what passed for light humor. “How fast to make the call-up happen?”
“The letters are already addressed and stamped. They should all be delivered in three days.”
“Mail them at once. See to it yourself, Andrey,” Bondarenko ordered.
“By your command, Comrade General.” Then he paused. “What do you make of this NATO business?”
“If it brings us help, then I am for it. I’d love to have American aircraft at my command. I remember what they did to Iraq. There are a lot of bridges I’d like to see dropped into the rivers they span.”
“And their land forces?”
“Do not underestimate them. I’ve seen how they train, and I’ve driven some of their equipment. It’s excellent, and their men know how to make use of it. One company of American tanks, competently led and supported, can hold off a whole regiment. Remember what they did to the army of the United Islamic Republic. Two active-duty regiments and a brigade of territorials crushed two heavy corps as if it were a sand-table exercise. That’s why I want to upgrade our training. Our men are as good as theirs, Andrey Petrovich, but their training is the best I have ever seen. Couple that to their equipment, and there you have their advantage.”
“And their commanders?”
“Good, but no better than ours. Shit, they copy our doctrine time and again. I’ve challenged them on this face-to-face, and they freely admit that they admire our operational thinking. But they make better use of our doctrine than we do—because they train their men better.”
“And they train better because they have more money to spend.”
“There you have it. They don’t have tank commanders painting rocks around the motor pool, as we do,” Bondarenko noted sourly. He’d just begun to change that, but just-begun was a long way from mission-accomplished. “Get the call-up letters out, and remember, we must keep this quiet. Go. I have to talk to Moscow.”
“Yes, Comrade General.” The G-3 made his departure.
Well, ain’t that something?” Major General Diggs commented after watching the TV show.
“Makes you wonder what NATO is for,” Colonel Masterman agreed.
“Duke, I grew up expecting to see T-72 tanks rolling through the Fulda Gap like cockroaches on a Bronx apartment floor. Hell, now they’re our friends?” He had to shake his head in disbelief. “I’ve met a few of their senior people, like that Bondarenko guy running the Far East Theater. He’s pretty smart, serious professional. Visited me at Fort Irwin. Caught on real fast, really hit it off with Al Hamm and the Blackhorse. Our kind of soldier.”
“Well, sir, I guess he really is
now, eh?”
That’s when the phone rang. Diggs lifted it. “General Diggs. Okay, put him through.... Morning, sir.... Just fine, thanks, and—yes? What’s that? ... This is serious, I presume.... Yes, sir. Yes, sir, we’re ready as hell. Very well, sir. Bye.” He set the phone back down. “Duke, good thing you’re sitting down.”
“What gives?”
“That was SACEUR. We got alert orders to be ready to entrain and move east.”
“East where?” the divisional operations officer asked, surprised. An unscheduled exercise in Eastern Germany, maybe?
“Maybe as far as Russia, the eastern part. Siberia, maybe,” Diggs added in a voice that didn’t entirely believe what it said.
“What the hell?”
“NCA is concerned about a possible dust-up between the Russians and the Chinese. If it happens, we may have to go east to support Ivan.”
“What the hell?” Masterman observed yet again.
“He’s sending his J-2 down to brief us in on what he’s got from Washington. Ought to be here in half an hour.”
“Who else? Is this a NATO tasking?”
“He didn’t say. Guess we’ll have to wait and see. For the moment just you and the staff, the ADC, and the brigade sixes are in on the brief.”
“Yes, sir,” Masterman said, there being little else he could say.
The Air Force sends a number of aircraft when the President travels. Among these were C-5B Galaxies. Known to the Navy as “the aluminum cloud” for its huge bulk, the transport is capable of carrying whole tanks in its cavernous interior. In this case, however, they carried VC- 60 helicopters, larger than a tank in dimensions, but far lighter in weight.
The VH-60 is a version of the Sikorsky Blackhawk troop-carrier, somewhat cleaned up and appointed for VIP passengers. The pilot was Colonel Dan Malloy, a Marine with over five thousand hours of stick time in rotary-ring aircraft, whose radio call-sign was “Bear.” Cathy Ryan knew him well. He usually flew her to Johns Hopkins in the morning in a twin to this aircraft. There was a co-pilot, a lieutenant who looked impossibly young to be a professional aviator, and a crew chief, a Marine staff sergeant E-6 who saw to it that everyone was properly strapped in, something that Cathy did better than Jack, who was not used to the different restraints in this aircraft.
Aside from that the Blackhawk flew superbly, not at all like the earthquake-while-sitting-on-a-chandelier sensation usually associated with such contrivances. The flight took almost an hour, with the President listening in on the headset/ear protectors. Overhead, all aerial traffic was closed down, even commercial flights in and out of every commercial airport to which they came close. The Polish government was concerned with his safety.
“There it is,” Malloy said over the intercom. “Eleven o’clock.”
The aircraft banked left to give everyone a good look out the polycarbonate windows. Ryan felt a sudden sense of enforced sobriety come over him. There was a rudimentary railroad station building with two tracks, and another spur that ran off through the arch in yet another building. There were a few other structures, but mainly just concrete pads to show where there had been a large number of others, and Ryan’s mind could see them from the black-and-white movies shot from aircraft, probably Russian ones, in World War II. They’d been oddly warehouse-like buildings, he remembered. But the wares stored in them had been human beings, though the people who’d built this place hadn’t seen it that way; they had regarded them as vermin, insects or rats, something to be eliminated as efficiently and coldly as possible.
That’s when the chill hit. It was not a warm morning, the temperature in the upper fifties or so, Jack thought, but his skin felt colder than that number indicated. The chopper landed softly, and the sergeant got the door open and the President stepped out onto the landing pad that had recently been laid for just this purpose. An official of the Polish government came up and shook his hand, introducing himself, but Ryan missed it all, suddenly a tourist in Hell itself, or so it felt. The official who would be serving as guide led them to a car for the short drive closer to the facility. Jack slid in beside his wife.
“Jack ...” she whispered.
“Yeah,” he acknowledged. “Yeah, babe, I know.” And he spoke not another word, not even hearing the well-prepared commentary the Pole was giving him.
“Arbeit Macht Frei” the wrought-iron arch read. Work makes free was the literal meaning, perhaps the most callously cynical motto ever crafted by the twisted minds of men calling themselves civilized. Finally, the car stopped, and they got out into the air again, and again the guide led them from place to place, telling them things they didn’t hear but rather felt, because the very air seemed heavy with evil. The grass was wonderfully green, almost like a golf course from the spring rain ... from the nutrients in the soil? Jack wondered. Lots of those. More than two million people had met death in this place. Two million. Maybe three. After a while, counting lost its meaning, and it became just a number, a figure on a ledger, written in by some accountant or other who’d long since stopped considering what the digits represented.
He could see it in his mind, the human shapes, the bodies, the heads, but thankfully not the faces of the dead. He presently found himself walking along what the German guards had called Himmel Straβe, the Road to Heaven. But why had they called it that? Was it pure cynicism, or did they really believe there was a God looking down on what they did, and if so, what had they thought He thought of this place and their activity? What kind of men could they have been? Women and children had been slaughtered immediately upon arrival here because they had little value as workers in the industrial facilities that I. G. Farben had built, so as to take the last measure of utility from the people sent here to die—to make a little profit from their last months. Not just Jews, of course; the Polish aristocracy and the Polish priesthood had been killed here. Gypsies. Homosexuals. Jehovah’s Witnesses. Others deemed undesirable by Hitler’s government. Just insects to be eliminated with Zyklon-B gas, a derivative of pesticide research by the German chemical industries.
Ryan had not expected this to be a pleasant side trip. What he’d anticipated was an educational experience, like visiting the battlefield at Antietam, for example.
But this hadn’t been a battlefield, and it didn’t feel at all like one.
What must it have been like for the men who’d liberated this place in 1945? Jack wondered. Even hardened soldiers, men who’d faced death every day for years, must have been taken aback by what they’d found here. For all its horrors, the battlefield remained a place of honor, where men tested men in the most fundamental way—it was cruel and final, of course, but there was the purity of fighting men contesting with other fighting men, using weapons, but—but that was rubbish, Jack thought. There was little nobility to be found in war ... and far less in this place. On a battlefield, for whatever purpose and with whatever means, men fought against men, not women and kids. There was some honor to be had in the former, but not ... this. This was crime on a vast scale, and as evil as war was, at the human level it stopped short of what men called crime, the deliberate infliction of harm upon the innocent. How could men do such a thing? Germany was today, as it had been then, a Christian country, the same nation that had brought forth Martin Luther, Beethoven, and Thomas Mann. Did it all come down to their leader? Adolf Hitler, a nebbish of a man, born to a middle-grade civil servant, a failure at everything he’d tried ... except demagoguery. He’d been a fucking genius at that ...
... But why had Hitler hated anyone so much as to harness the industrial might of his nation not for conquest, which was bad enough, but for the base purpose of cold-blooded extermination? That, Jack knew, was one of history’s most troublesome mysteries. Some said Hitler had hated the Jews because he’d seen one on the streets of Vienna and simply disliked him. Another expert in the field, a Jew himself, had posed the proposition that a Jewish prostitute had given the failed Austrian painter gonorrhea, but there was no documentary evidence upon w
hich to base that. Yet another school of thought was more cynical still, saying that Hitler hadn’t really cared about the Jews one way or another, but needed an enemy for people to hate so that he could become leader of Germany, and had merely seized upon the Jews as a target of opportunity, just something against which to mobilize his nation. Ryan found this alternative unlikely, but the most offensive of all. For whatever reason, he’d taken the power his country had given him and turned it to this purpose. In doing so, Hitler had cursed his name for all time to come, but that was no consolation to the people whose remains fertilized the grass. Ryan’s wife’s boss at Johns Hopkins was a Jewish doc named Bernie Katz, a friend of many years. How many such men had died here? How many potential Jonas Salks? Maybe an Einstein or two? Or poets, or actors, or just ordinary workers who would have raised ordinary kids ...
... and when Jack had sworn the oath of office mandated by the United States Constitution, he’d really sworn to protect such people as those, and maybe such people as these, too. As a man, as an American, and as President of the United States, did he not have a duty to prevent such things from ever happening again? He actually believed that the use of armed force could only be justified to protect American lives and vital American security interests. But was that all America was? What about the principles upon which his nation was founded? Did America only apply them to specific, limited places and goals? What about the rest of the world? Were these not the graves of real people?
John Patrick Ryan stood and looked around, his face as empty right now as his soul, trying to understand what had taken place here, and what he could—what he had to learn from this. He had immense power at his fingertips every day he lived in the White House. How to use it? How to apply it? What to fight against? More important, what to fight for?
“Jack,” Cathy said quietly, touching his hand.
