by Tom Clancy
No one saw them coming. They were small, no larger, really, than a common crow, and falling rapidly; they were also painted white, which helped them blend in to the morning sky. Each had a rudimentary steering mechanism, and at an altitude of two thousand feet they started looking for and homing in on targets. Their downward speed was such that a minor deflection of their control vanes was sufficient to get them close, and close meant straight down.
They exploded in bunches, almost in the same instant. Each contained a pound and a half of high-explosive, the heat from which melted the metal casing, which then turned into a projectile—the process was called “self-forging”—which blazed downward at a speed of ten thousand feet per second. The armor on the top of a tank is always the thinnest, and five times the thickness would have made no difference. Of the 921 tanks on the field, 762 took hits, and the least of these destroyed the vehicles’ diesel engine. Those less fortunate took hits through the turret, which killed the crews at once and/or ignited the ammunition storage, converting each armored vehicle into a small man-fabricated volcano. Just that quickly, three mechanized divisions were changed into one badly shaken and disorganized brigade. The infantry carriers fared no better, and it was worse for the trucks, most of them carrying ammunition or other flammable supplies.
All in all, it took less than ninety seconds to turn 29th Type A Group Army into a thinly spread junkyard and funeral pyre.
Holy God,” Ryan said. ”Is this for real?”
“Seeing is believing. Jack, when they came to me with the idea for J-SOW, I thought it had to be something from a science-fiction book. Then they demo’d the submunitions out at China Lake, and I thought, Jesus, we don’t need the Army or the Marines anymore. Just send over some F-18s and then a brigade of trucks full of body bags and some ministers to pray over them. Eh, Mickey?”
“It’s some capability,” General Moore agreed. He shook his head. “Damn, just like the tests.”
“Okay, what’s happening next?”
Next” was just off the coast near Guangszhou. Two Aegis cruisers, Mobile Bay and Princeton, plus the destroyers Fletcher, Fife, and John Young, steamed in line-ahead formation out of the morning fog and turned broadside to the shore. There was actually a decent beach at this spot. There was nothing much behind it, just a coastal-defense missile battery that the fighter-bombers had immolated a few hours before. To finish that job, the ships trained their guns to port and let loose a barrage of five-inch shells. The crack and thunder of the gunfire could be heard on shore, as was the shriek of the shells passing overhead, and the explosions of the detonations. That included one missile that the bombs of the previous night had missed, plus the crew getting it ready for launch. People living nearby saw the gray silhouettes against the morning sky, and many of them got on the telephone to report what they saw, but being civilians, they reported the wrong thing, of course.
It was just after nine in the morning in Beijing when the Politburo began its emergency session. Some of those present had enjoyed a restful night’s sleep, and then been disturbed by the news that came over the phone at breakfast. Those better informed had hardly slept at all past three in the morning and, though more awake than their colleagues, were not in a happier mood.
“Well, Luo, what is happening?” Interior Minister Tong Jie asked.
“Our enemies counterattacked last night. This sort of thing we must expect, of course,” he admitted in as low-key a voice as circumstances permitted.
“How serious were these counterattacks?” Tong asked.
“The most serious involved some damage to railroad bridges in Harbin and Bei’an, but repairs are underway.”
“I hope so. The repair effort will require some months,” Qian Kun interjected.
“Who said that!” Luo demanded harshly.
“Marshal, I supervised the construction of two of those bridges. This morning I called the division superintendent for our state railroad in Harbin. All six of them have been destroyed—the piers on both sides of the river are totally wrecked; it will take over a month just to clear the debris. I admit this surprised me. Those bridges were very sturdily built, but the division superintendent tells me they are quite beyond repair.”
“And who is this defeatist?” Luo demanded.
“He is a loyal party member of long standing and a very competent engineer whom you will not threaten in my presence!” Qian shot back. “There is room in this building for many things, but there is not room here for a lie!”
“Come now, Qian,” Zhang Han Sen soothed. “We need not have that sort of language here. Now, Luo, how bad is it really?”
“I have army engineers heading there now to make a full assessment of the damage and to commence repairs. I am confident that we can restore service shortly. We have skilled bridging engineers, you know.”
“Luo,” Qian said, “your magic army bridges can support a tank or a truck, yes, but not a locomotive that weighs two hundred tons pulling a train weighing four thousand. Now, what else has gone wrong with your Siberian adventure?”
“It is foolish to think that the other side will simply lie down and die. Of course they fight back. But we have superior forces in theater, and we will smash them. We will have that new gold mine in our pocket before this meeting is over,” the Defense Minister promised. But the pledge seemed hollow to some of those around the table.
“What else?” Qian persisted.
“The American naval air forces attacked last night and succeeded in sinking some of our South Sea Fleet units.”
“Which units?”
“Well, we have no word from our missile submarine, and—”
“They sank our only missile submarine?” Premier Xu asked. “How is this possible? Was it sitting in harbor?”
“No,” Luo admitted. “It was at sea, in company with another nuclear submarine, and that one is also possibly lost.”
“Marvelous!” Tong Jie observed. “Now the Americans strike at our strategic assets! That’s half our nuclear deterrent gone, and that was the safe half of it. What goes on, Luo? What is happening now?”
At his seat, Fang Gan took note of the fact that Zhang was strangely subdued. Ordinarily he would have leaped to Luo’s defense, but except for the one conciliatory comment, he was leaving the Defense Minister to flap in the wind. What might that mean?
“What do we tell the people?” Fang asked, trying to center the meeting on something important.
“The people will believe what they are told,” Luo said.
And everyone nodded nervous agreement on that one. They did control the media. The American CNN news service had been turned off all over the People’s Republic, along with all Western news services, even in Hong Kong, which usually enjoyed much looser reins than the rest of the country. But the thing no one addressed, but everyone knew to worry about, was that every soldier had a mother and a father who’d notice when the mail home stopped coming. Even in a nation as tightly controlled as the PRC, you couldn’t stop the Truth from getting out—or rumors, which, though false, could be even worse than an adverse Truth. People would believe things other than those they were told to believe, if those other things made more sense than the Official Truth proclaimed by their government in Beijing.
Truth was something so often feared in this room, Fang realized, and for the first time in his life he wondered why that had to be. If the Truth was something to fear, might that mean they were doing something wrong in here? But, no, that couldn’t be true, could it? Didn’t they have a perfect political model for reality? Wasn’t that Mao’s bequest to their country?
But if that were true, why did they fear having the people find out what was really happening?
Could it be that they, the Politburo members, could handle the Truth and the peasantry could not?
But then, if they feared having the peasantry get hold of the Truth, didn’t that have to mean that the Truth was harmful to the people sitting in this room? And if the Truth was a danger to the p
easants and workers, then didn’t they have to be wrong?
Fang suddenly realized how dangerous was the thought that had just entered his mind.
“Luo, what does it mean to us strategically,” the Interior Minister asked, “if the Americans remove half of our strategic weapons? Was that done deliberately? If so, for what cause?”
“Tong, you do not sink a ship by accident, and so, yes, the attack on our missile submarine must have been a deliberate act,” Luo answered.
“So, the Americans deliberately removed from the table one of our only methods for attacking them directly? Why? Was that not a political act, not just a military one?”
The Defense Minister nodded. “Yes, you could see it that way.”
“Can we expect the Americans to strike at us directly? To this date they have struck some bridges, but what about our government and vital industries? Might they strike directly at us?” Tong went on.
“That would be unwise. We have missiles targeted at their principal cities. They know this. Since they disarmed themselves of nuclear missiles some years ago—well, they still have nuclear bombs that can be delivered by bombers and tactical aircraft, of course, but not the ability to strike at us in the way that we could strike at them—and the Russians, of course.”
“How sure are we that they are disarmed?” Tong persisted.
“If they have ballistic arms, they’ve concealed it from everyone,” Tan Deshi told them all. Then he shook his head decisively. “No, they have no more.”
“And that gives us an advantage, doesn’t it?” Zhong asked, with a ghoulish smile.
USS Gettysburg was alongside the floating pier in the York River. Once the warheads for Trident missiles had been stored here, and there must still have been some awaiting dismantlement, because there were Marines to be seen, and only Marines were entrusted to guard the Navy’s nuclear weapons. But none of those were on the pier. No, the trucks that rolled out from the weapons depot were carrying long, square cross-sectioned boxes that contained SM-2 ER Block-IVD surface-to-air missiles. When the trucks got to the cruiser, a traveling crane lifted them up to the foredeck of the ship, where, with the assistance of some strong-backed sailors, the boxes were rapidly lowered into the vertical launch cells of the forward missile launcher. It took about four minutes per box, Gregory saw, with the captain pacing his wheelhouse all the while. Gregory knew why. He had an order to take his cruiser right to Washington, D.C., and the order had the word “expedite” on it. Evidently, “expedite” was a word with special meaning for the United States Navy, like having your wife call for you from the baby’s room at two in the morning. The tenth box was duly lowered, and the crane swung clear of the ship.
“Mr. Richardson,” Captain Blandy said to the Officer of the Deck.
“Yes, sir,” the lieutenant answered.
“Let’s get under way.”
Gregory walked out on the bridge wing to watch. The Special Sea Detail cast off the six-inch hawsers, and scarcely had they fallen clear of the cleats on the main deck when the cruiser’s auxiliary power unit started pushing the ten thousand tons of gray steel away from the floating pier. And the ship was for sure in a hurry. She was not fifteen feet away when the main engines started turning, and less than a minute after that, Gregory heard the WHOOSH of the four jet-turbines taking a big gulp of air, and he could feel the ship accelerate for the Chesapeake Bay, almost like being on a city transit bus.
“Dr. Gregory?” Captain Blandy had stuck his head out the pilothouse door.
“Yeah, Captain?”
“You want to get below and do your software magic on our birds?”
“You bet.” He knew the way, and in three minutes was at the computer terminal which handled that task.
“Hey, Doc,” Senior Chief Leek said, sitting down next to him. “All ready? I’m supposed to help.”
“Okay, you can watch, I suppose.” The only problem was that it was a clunky system, about as user-friendly as a chain saw, but as Leek had told him a week before, this was the flower of 1975 technology, back when an Apple-II with 64K of RAM was the cat’s own ass. Now he had more computing power in his wristwatch. Each missile had to be upgraded separately, and each was a seven-step process.
“Hey, wait a minute,” Gregory objected. The screen wasn’t right.
“Doc, we loaded six Block-IVD. The other two are stock SM-2 ER Block IIIC radar-homers. What can I tell you, Cap’n Blandy’s conservative.”
“So I only do the upgrade on holes one through six?”
“No, do ’em all. It’ll just ignore the changes you made to the infrared homing code. The chips on the birds can handle the extra code, no sweat, right, Mr. Olson?”
“Correct, Senior Chief,” Lieutenant Olson confirmed. “The missiles are current technology even if the computer system isn’t. It probably costs more to make missile seeker-heads with current technology that can talk to this old kludge than it would to buy a new Gateway to upgrade the whole system, not to mention having a more reliable system overall, but you’ll have to talk to NAVSEA about that.”
“Who?” Gregory asked.
“Naval Sea Systems Command. They’re the technical geniuses who won’t put stabilizers on these cruisers. They think it’s good for us to puke in a seaway.”
“Feathermerchants,” Leek explained. “Navy’s full of ’em—on land, anyway.” The ship heeled strongly to starboard.
“Cap’n’s in a hurry, ain’t he?” Gregory observed. Gettysburg was making a full-speed right-angle turn to port.
“Well, SACLANT said it’s the SecDef’s idea. I guess that makes it important,” Mr. Olson told their guest.
I think this is imprudent,” Fang told them all.
“Why is that?” Luo asked.
“Is fueling the missiles necessary? Is there not a danger of provocation?”
“I suppose this is a technical matter,” Qian said. “As I recall, once you fuel them, you cannot keep them fueled for more than—what? Twelve hours?”
The technocrat caught the Defense Minister off guard with that question. He didn’t know the answer. “I will have to consult with Second Artillery for that,” he admitted.
“So, then, you will not prepare them for launch until we have a chance to consider the matter?” Qian asked.
“Why—of course not,” Luo promised.
“And so the real problem is, how do we tell the people what has transpired in Siberia?”
“The people will believe what we tell them to believe!” Luo said yet again.
“Comrades,” Qian said, struggling to keep his voice reasonable, “we cannot conceal the rising of the sun. Neither can we conceal the loss of our rail-transport system. Nor can we conceal the large-scale loss of life. Every soldier has parents, and when enough of them realize their son is lost, they will speak of it, and the word will get out. We must face facts here. It is better, I think, to tell the people that there is a major battle going on, and there has been loss of life. To proclaim that we are winning when we may not be is dangerous for all of us.”
“You say the people will rise up?” Tong Jie asked.
“No, but I say there could be dissatisfaction and unrest, and it is in our collective interest to avoid that, is it not?” Qian asked the assembly.
“How will adverse information get out?” Luo asked.
“It frequently does,” Qian told them. “We can prepare for it, and mitigate the effect of adverse information, or we can try to withstand it. The former offers mild embarrassment to us. The latter, if it fails, could be more serious.”
“The TV will show what we wish them to show, and the people will see nothing else. Besides, General Peng and his army group are advancing even as we speak.”
What do they call it?”
“This one’s Grace Kelly. The other two are Marilyn Monroe and—can’t remember,” General Moore said. “Anyway, they named ’em for movie stars.”
“And how do they transmit?”
“The Dark S
tar uploads directly to a communications satellite, encrypted, of course, and we distribute it out of Fort Belvoir.”
“So, we can send it out any way we want?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay, Ed, the Chinese are telling their people what?”
“They started off by saying the Russians committed a border intrusion and they counterattacked. They’re also saying that they’re kicking Ivan’s ass.”
“Well, that’s not true, and it’ll be especially untrue when they reach the Russian stop-line. That Bondarenko guy’s really played his cards beautifully. They’re pretty strung out. We’ve chopped their supply line for fair, and they’re heading into a real motherfucker of an ambush,” the DCI told them. “How about it, General?”
“The Chinese just don’t know what’s ahead of them. You know, out at the NTC we keep teaching people that he who wins the reconnaissance battle wins the war. The Russians know what’s happening. The Chinese do not. My God, this Dark Star has really exceeded our expectations.”
“It’s some shiny new toy, Mickey,” Jackson agreed. “Like going to a Vegas casino when you’re able to read the cards halfway through the deck. You just can’t hardly lose this way.”
The President leaned forward. “You know, one of the reasons we took it on the chin with Vietnam is how the people got to see the war every night on Huntley-Brinkley. How will it affect the Chinese if their people see the war the same way, but live this time?”
