Arctic Front wi-4

by Ian Slater

  “What’s in it for me, General?” asked Miller cheekily.

  “A medal if you do,” replied Freeman unhesitatingly. “A kick in the ass if you don’t! Have you got what you need?” Freeman asked Miller.

  “Well, sir, Intelligence reports that Lake Baikal is surrounded by the most intense ABM and AA defenses we’ve ever seen. Denser than they were around Hanoi. Compared to what they’ve got around Baikal, Baghdad was just a bunch of firecrackers.”

  Norton could see Freeman was getting impatient, smacking the pointer against his right leg. He didn’t want to hear all the problems; he already knew them. But Norton knew that Miller was building his case, giving the air force some leeway.

  “How long?” asked Freeman, the levity of his earlier comments gone.

  “Three weeks, General. Two if you can secure the beachhead at Rudnaya Pristan so the engineers can lay enough matting for an airfield. And we’ll have to have airfield perimeter defense.”

  “Patriots.”

  There was a cheer, the Patriot still enjoying its legendary status from the Iraqi war. But not with Freeman. He’d pored over the reports and understood that it was the Israeli defense forces who, not sticking to standard firing procedures, had introduced shortcuts that were responsible for the Patriots over Israel taking out most of the Scuds. But not the warheads. You could end up technically “knocking out” a Scud but causing more carnage on the ground when an unexploded warhead came down with the rest of the scrap metal.

  Freeman had ordered in the armored-vehicle-mounted Oerlikon-Buhrie ADATs. The eight high-velocity ADAT missiles, equally effective against armor and aircraft, had only a commander/gunner crew and were air portable by chopper or C-130. With a twelve-mile radar scan, the ADATs had laser-beam ranging (up to five miles) and optical radar track with FLIR — forward-looking infrared — TV tracking. And ADATs could operate while the vehicle was on the move, the wingless missiles shooting out from the eight-container turret at two thousand miles per hour, target acquisition and aim taking less than one second.

  For further perimeter air defense, Freeman also preferred the ninety-pound British Rapier — eight tracked missiles on an enclosed two-man vehicle — because the Rapier’s warhead was made to explode internally, not outside the target. An internal explosion meant you didn’t simply knock the incoming enemy missile off trajectory but actually blew up the warhead in the air.

  Freeman sensed a current of opposition running through the American units who had been long used to the U.S. Patriot and Nike-Hercules and the West German Roland. Yet he understood that it wasn’t simply a matter of national pride. Hell, half the electronic components in the F-18s and Eagles were dependent on the Japanese electronics industry. No, what the Americans objected to was that they wouldn’t have time to retrain crews. But Freeman had thought of that, too, and had requested Canadian units from the joint Canadian/U.S. NORAD units. For once the Canadian Parliament did not debate the issue ad nauseam, and the Canadian ADATs team, along with a British-manned Rapier regiment, was already en route, taking the long flight from the U.S. west coast to Hawaii and then to Okinawa, skirting the still-unsecured sea lanes off the Kuril Islands.

  “Gentlemen, I want this operation ready to roll in seventy-two hours. The carrier force that will make the Vladivostok feint south of Rudnaya Pristan is already underway out of Yokohama. Now I want to reiterate, for those of you who haven’t already heard it, that the great Communist weakness is their overdependence on centralization. Overcentralization. It grows naturally from suspicious minds, gentlemen. No one trusts anyone else — haven’t done so since nineteen seventeen. Why the hell should they change now? That’s why it took them so long to shoot that KAL airliner down. MiG pilots had to keep checking with central command so Far Eastern TVD wouldn’t think the sons of bitches were defecting to Japan.”

  There was a ripple of laughter in the audience as they watched Freeman getting wound up. “Overcentralization doesn’t only play havoc with tactical decisions, gentlemen. It is death to any self-sustaining tooth-to-tail logistical system. You’ve got to understand that in a Communist system — and I don’t give a shit where it is or who’s running it — goddamn Stalinists, Marxists, Leninists, and Maoists are all the same when it comes to administration. Everybody’s so busy covering their ass, signing forms in quadruplicate, that nothing ever gets done fast enough. Course in war, things speed up, but the disease, gentlemen, is in the body politic. On occasion it administers some self-help medicine, but they can’t cure it. You’ve all heard the stories about the factory making ten thousand left shoes and no right ones just to fulfill the five-year plan quota. Well, it’s not much of an exaggeration, I can tell you. Now I don’t know whether you realize it or not — and every one of you above the rank of colonel should — but no one below a Soviet sergeant is allowed to carry a goddamn map. That should tell you something right there. These are the telling details, gentlemen…”

  Norton was watching the officers watching Freeman. It was the general at his best. He had what the troops called his “George C. Scott look.” He turned and thumped the map at Khabarovsk so hard that the entire Far Eastern TVD shook, several red pins marking the positions of Siberian divisions popping out, toppling over the Siberian/Chinese border into the vastness of Outer and Inner Mongolia and then to the floor. “The details, gentlemen. Such details are going to win the war for us — if we stay alert to them. But—” He hesitated. “That’s my job. Yours is to remember only one thing…”

  “L‘audace, I‘audace,” murmured a lieutenant colonel of artillery in the back row. “Toujours I’audace.”

  “Speed!” thundered Freeman. “I don’t want to get any SIT-REPS whining about anyone being ‘pinned down.’ You get yourselves unpinned — and fast — and get on the move again. And keep moving! Is that clear?”

  There was the silence of assent.

  “I’m not going to pump sunshine up your ass and tell you that there won’t be substantial opposition. There’ll be plenty of it. This is their land, their home, and they’ll fight for it as hard as you would. They’ve got the numbers — in equipment and men — but I know we have the quality in equipment and men to stop them!” He paused, hands on his hips, looking out at the divisional and corps commanders. “Any questions?”

  There were plenty, and Freeman knew it, but they were the kind that could be answered only in the coming battles.

  * * *

  “What do you think, Dick?” asked Freeman as the last of the officers shuffled out. Norton said it all depended on how many troops the Siberians could manage to move east to the coast.

  Freeman was searching for his glasses again, patting his battle dress pockets. “Damn it! I can never find those goddamn reading things. Only need one of ‘em anyway. Have one of the boys in med corps make the up a single lens.”

  “A pince-nez?” said Norton, surprised.

  “Jesus, no. Look like a goddamn fairy. No, just one lens with something to clip it onto so I don’t lose the damn thing.”

  “A monocle?” said Norton, amused by the idea.

  “Fine. Now look here, Dick. Only way we’re going to get the jokers on the run is to stay mobile. We’ve got to keep moving. Keep ‘em off balance. Don’t give ‘em a chance to stabilize anything, from their big guns and armor to their airfields. Bill Miller’s boys’ll pound anything that looks as if it’s big enough for a mosquito to take off from. That’ll keep their PVO — air force — occupied. Meanwhile we’ve got to keep their ground forces off balance. Do the unexpected. Go around them.”

  Freeman’s right hand made a sweeping movement west then south of the BAM — the northern Baikal-Amur mainline loop — to Irkutsk, just west of Baikal. “Get Airborne. SAS/Delta, air mobile artillery and armored units behind them. Light tanks, APCs, M-1s, multiple rocket launchers, and some concentrated rocket artillery barrages as well. Scatter them to hell, Dick-isolate them. If it’s too sticky in one area, then we’ll do a MacArthur island hop. Bypass the bastard
s, attack another unit. Keep them so damned occupied in their rear they’ll find themselves fighting on three fronts.” He pointed all the way west on the map four thousand miles to the north-south spine of the Urals. “British and American forces pressing east from Minsk. Our boys here heading west from Khabarovsk, and our special forces driving them crazy in the center.” The general, hands on his hips again, was nodding, satisfied with the plan. “You know about the fruit seller?”

  “No.”

  “Iraq,” explained Freeman. “Special forces. Our boys and the Brits. An Arab goes up to an Iraqi HQ with a basket of fresh fruit.” Freeman looked at Norton. “He’s a Brit in mufti — hadn’t washed for weeks. Son of a bitch argues, Dick, with the Iraqi commander over how many dinar for the fruit. I couldn’t do that. Hate goddamn haggling. Son of a bitch in Carmel tried to sell the a car like that once. It was beautiful. Forty-two Packard. Impeccable condition. Big hubcaps. Anyway, the Iraqi finally agrees on the price. While he’s in getting the money, this Brit pushes an infrared stick into the sand. Thirty minutes later, an F-18 attack. Thousand-pound Smart bomb. Not only got the commander but the whole goddamned HQ.”

  Freeman stood back from the map, a myriad of details running through his head. “Sow havoc behind the lines, Dick. That’s what we have to do here. Like those SPETS bastards did to us in the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket.” Whether or not it was the mention of the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket or the long day the general had put in, Norton noticed Freeman’s hands had moved from his hips to his lower back, massaging it, a grimace of pain in his face. Norton wondered if the injury the general had sustained when being thrown out of the Humvee during the breakout was flaring up again. But he knew better than to mention it.

  The general picked up the pointer stick, collapsed its telescoped sections to ballpoint-pen size, and clipped it in his battle dress pocket. “Be the biggest air drop in history, Dick. Bigger than Crete. Bigger than Arnhem, and we won’t make the mistake Montgomery did. There won’t be a bridge too far in this lot.” He turned to Norton. “Know why?”

  Every general’s aide understands that part of his role is to be a constant sounding board for his commanding officer’s ideas, but now and then it was nice to be able to outguess them.” You’re not going to try to capture all of them?” proffered Norton. “Just enough to screw up their supply line here and there.”

  The tone of Freeman’s voice changed. It was quiet, measured, as if his public persona had fled him and he was talking to his inner self, to his own memory, which he absolutely believed transcended his own lifetime, belonging to another time, to history. He turned away from the map, leaning against the edge of the Khabarovsk/Baikal model, gazing over the now-vacant seats. “Jung,” he told Norton, “tells the story of the Yucca moth. ‘Flowers of the Yucca plant open for one night only, and the moth takes pollen from one of the flowers, kneads it to a pellet, flies to another flower, slices open the pistil, lays eggs between the ovules, then stuffs the pellet into the funnelled opening of the pistil.’ “ He turned, his face barely a foot from Norton’s. “It does this, Dick, this complicated ritual. Then dies.”

  Norton looked back at the general, utterly bewildered.

  “How do you explain it, Dick? No learning involved. Yucca flower’s open for only one night. One night, Dick.” He looked back over the empty seats. “Can’t have been learned, you see. We call it intuition, by which we mean it is innate — already there, already known, in the brain of the moth. We have that same kind of pre-knowledge, Dick, but we don’t know what to call it exactly, so we take a stab at it and say it’s instinct.” He turned to Norton again. “You see what I’m saying. The moth has the image of the flower already in its brain. Before it’s even born. Remember what the poet said, Dick. ‘Trailing clouds of glory do we come from God who is our home.’ We’ve already been there. The moth already knows. We know. I know. It was in the dream — the map of Siberia. Something missing, Dick.” He eased himself away from the model, stretching, his hands again kneading the small of his back. “It came to the at breakfast. I was going over the dream — damn thing had kept the awake half the night, felt like I’d been on the rack.” He turned about to face the huge wall map. “Can you see it?”

  “This “Wheel of Fortune,’ General?”

  Freeman gave a rough smile, his right hand extended, moving from the Urals east across the west Siberian plain, the central plateau, and then the eastern mountains. “All their communications — all their topographical communications, Dick. Automobile enthusiast like myself should have spotted it right away. Different from any other map in the civilized world. No roads. No goddamn roads, Dick!” Freeman was visibly excited. “You see in the south, from Sverdlovsk in the Urals through Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, and on to Khabarovsk — no main roads. It’s all goddamn rivers, Dick. That’s the secret. The bridges. We forget about everything else but the bridges. We blow their bridges not to stop their road traffic but their river traffic. Their rivers are their roads — their lifelines — Dick. Frozen in the winter. Like Lake Lagoda.”

  For once Norton, too, felt victorious. “You mean the Russians resupplying Leningrad in World War Two. By road from Murmansk and then across the frozen lake.”

  “Goddamn it, Dick! You win the Toyota and the trip to Disneyland.”

  “Well, I’ll be—”

  “We collapse those bridges on them, Dick, and it’ll be like the Ventura Freeway at peak hour. Nothing’ll move.”

  Norton looked more closely at the maps. Freeman was right on the money. It was so simple once you saw it. Three hundred miles or so east of Chita, itself three hundred miles east of Baikal, there was absolutely no main road into the Far Eastern TVD. “What about the Trans-Siberian Railway?” he asked Freeman.

  “With our superiority we’ll cut it, too.”

  * * *

  That night both men went to sleep more easily than at any time during the previous two weeks. Freeman became somnolent recalling Churchill’s summons to Buckingham Palace after the Munich crisis of 1939. Finally called to be leader of the nation in its darkest hours, after having been out in his wilderness, Churchill had later said he had gone to bed peacefully that night, having no fears of the morrow and confident that “facts are better than dreams.”

  “I’ll take both, Winston,” said Freeman, switching off his bed lamp. “I’ll take both.”

  It had not occurred to the commander in chief of Operation Arctic Front that dreams are but often one step from nightmares and that the Siberians had dreams of their own and that these no less than those of the American commanders’ were rooted solidly in the recognition of certain indisputable facts— which they would soon give him ample evidence of.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Rudnaya Pristan

  The Yak vertical takeoff fighter bomber diving on the landing helicopter assault ship Winston Davis got off one Acrid radar homing missile before being taken out by saturation fire from the ship’s two “pope miters,” the high-domed, six-barrelled, twenty-millimeter Vulcan Phalanx Mark 15’s that fired one hundred rounds a second and enveloped the Siberian fighter in a dense hail of depleted uranium. The fireball that a moment ago had been the Yak now hit the LHD, the Yak’s starboard wing’s Koliesov/Rybinak vertical takeoff lift jets slamming into one of the forty-thousand-ton ship’s five antisurface guns, sending white-hot shrapnel whooshing through the air, killing the bridge’s port lookout, and raising fears among the two thousand marines below that if the twelve thousand tons of aviation fuel were hit they’d all be incinerated within a matter of minutes. As the shock of the impact continued to reverberate deafeningly through the jam-packed half-deck hangars below, a fully equipped battalion, gathered about its palletized supplies, which took up 150,000 cubic feet of the ship’s huge interior, waited anxiously for the landings that might or might not happen depending on the outcome of the great naval battle now swirling and crashing about them.

  What Admiral Burke feared most was the Siberian fleet’s two ultramodern g
uided-missile cruisers, now still over two hundred miles away but racing south at flank speed to intercept him on his right flank. His only hope was that the two old Iowa class battle wagons, the Missouri and the Wisconsin, would stop them. But it was seen by Burke’s commander as a forlorn hope. And indeed because of the two ships’ age, despite weapons modernization, most of the officers in Burke’s fleet had serious doubts about the behemoths of another age being of any use in the high-tech war.

  There were those, like Adm. John Brentwood, who, joined by others in the U.S. DOD — Department of Defense — and the British MOD — Ministry of Defence — were preoccupied by an unanswered question: Would the Tomahawk missiles aboard the Iowa class battleships be more than a match going up against the Kirov guided-missile cruisers’ SS-N-19, three-hundred-mile-range, four-thousand-pound missile? The latter, as well as being over a thousand pounds heavier than the Tomahawk, was more than three times as fast. The American cruise missile’s speed, at a subsonic 520 miles per hour, made it a slowpoke compared to the over-1700-miles per-hour Siberian missile. It was a difference that UK Liaison Officer Brigadier Soames at the White House referred to, with typical British understatement, as “a slight advantage for the Sibirs.”

  The undeniable advantage of the Siberian’s speed allowed the Kirov cruisers to wait until the Missouri and Wisconsin had fired two Tomahawks apiece, two for each of the Siberian cruisers; they had ample time, even in the split-second world of over-the-horizon electronic warfare, to respond. It was a luxurious five seconds in all after each Tomahawk, in a feral roar and with its peculiar “ass-dragging” motion, skidded out from one of the eight armored box launchers like a huge, vertical cigar moving sideways, the missile arcing high enough to afford Siberian radar a glimpse and to get a back-track vector, before the American missile dropped in altitude.