by Ian Slater
The allegations were false, however, and because of this, subsequent rumors that nerve-gas-resistant bromide pills had been laced with cyanide by KGB sleepers were vigorously denied. They were proven true, however — Freeman’s first casualties on the beachhead at Rudnaya Pristan being a marine platoon who, mistaking colored tear gas fired by the Yakut militia as a possible CBW attack, swallowed the bromide pills and died agonizing deaths as their central nervous systems went into spasm, their ordeal ends with defecation and suffocation. Bromide company shares collapsed, but for Jay La Roche it was like a shark sniffing blood. Through conduits on the Shanghai Free Trading Area stock exchange, he bought all available shares of Chinese companies licensed by the Chinese government— seventeen in all — concentrating only on those who made cherry food coloring, used for everything from cherry candy to cherry-flavored fruit pies for export. The cherry flavoring also contained an essential ingredient for the making of lethal BZ gas, which the Soviets had already used to kill many of the rioters in dissident republics.
The news report in the morning was followed by an FBI announcement that “invoking the president’s suspension of civil rights, a full counterintelligence investigation was being made of the bromide scandal.” By breakfast time the following morning, now 9:00 p.m. in eastern Siberia, the bromide pill incident had been overshadowed by the shock that a General Dynamics factory in California, manufacturing the F-16, had been attacked. No guards were killed, but in the sheds on which the mortars had landed, eleven damaged F-16s were write-offs. The cost of testing even marginally damaged planes and the intricate microchip circuitry of the war planes was considered to be both ethically and financially unacceptable.
Meanwhile the La Roche tabloids had hit the streets, screaming, BROMIDE BARRAGE KILLS OUR BOYS!
Jay La Roche loved the headline. Circulation of his tabloids would skyrocket in every supermarket in the country, and he was making a killing on the stock market, both from toxic chemicals used in the war and their antidotes.
* * *
Freeman had been badly shaken by the poisoned-pill disaster and although pressing on, leading the marine column in his Humvee along the road from Rudnaya Pristan, he was waiting for the Siberian tiger to bite. But so far Second Army’s spearhead column of thirty M-1 A-1 sixty-ton battle tanks rolled unmolested.
Then, approaching Dalnegorsk, twenty miles inland and northwest of the beachhead, the men in Able Company, Second Battalion of the seventeen-thousand-man MEF First Division heard five or six muffled explosions on the mountains on either side of the Rudnaya River road, the steepest mountain on their left. Then they saw the mountainsides begin to move as thousands of tons of snow avalanched down, smashing into and covering the middle of the column, burying over fifty marines.
Freeman immediately ordered air strikes in from the carriers standing off in the Sea of Japan, but the pilots could not bomb for fear of setting off more avalanches — one of the first lessons of the Siberian campaign. Besides which there were no targets. If there had been any Siberian sappers around, left behind to detonate the avalanches, they were now gone.
It took four hours to dig all the men out, Marine Corps tradition demanding that they try, as far as humanly possible, to bring out their own dead. But not all could be recovered, and Freeman ordered the column on to Dalnegorsk, which the pilots found easy to locate, using the thousand-foot smokestacks as a reference point. By now engineering corps officers had radioed Freeman that there had apparently been no enemy units on the mountainsides, the charges having been set off by pressure-triggered circuits when the M-1 tanks rolled over them. By the time Dalnegorsk and the road to Krasnorechensk and Zavetnoye, on the way to Bikin and Khabarovsk, had been secured, it was discovered by the advance marine patrols, covered by low-flying Falcons and tank-killing A-10s, that the towns had been abandoned. Not a living soul was left, all livestock had been butchered and the towns set afire in the last few hours. Freeman looked at Norton worriedly. “In Normandy, twenty miles in six hours would have been a miracle. Here, with these distances, it’s nothing. It’s worse than nothing, Dick. It’s disastrous!”
Norton remained silent.
“This isn’t a Siberian feint,” declared Freeman, pulling his collar up against the bitter cold, steam rising from the lead tank behind his Humvee.”This is our fuckup. A monumental, Grade A, mega-sized fuckup! And damn it!” Freeman was standing up in the back of the Humvee, left hand resting on the.50 caliber machine gun, right hand crunching and flinging ice disgustedly away. “It’s my damn fault!”
The cold was so intense that it made Norton’s throat sore just to try to speak, but in all fairness he felt he should point out that much of it, the weather, for example, was beyond any general’s control. Behind the Humvee the stationary M-1 was idling, keeping up the revs, the gas turbine’s purring remarkably low for such a powerful engine. Even so it was eerily unsettling in the great white valley, the high ground far above them, Norton unable to shake the conviction that the mountains were waiting, biding their time to fall in on them once more.
“At this rate,” said Freeman, “we’ll be old as Canadians in Florida before we get to Bikin, goddamn it! Dick, We’ve got to get out of this hole. We’re not on first base yet, and we’re huffing and puffing like—” It was then that the Apache strike choppers appeared, over thirty of them, swarming up the valley like angry gnats, going on ahead to secure the road as far as possible while engineers sent a remote-controlled “sniffer” vehicle ahead.
The sniffer slowed the advance further but was safer. And then Freeman got his surprise. It came from a marine intelligence officer in the advance patrol who was bright enough to note the sight of hastily left meals and some livestock not slaughtered but peering out dolefully from the elaborately carved white window shutters of their barns, which looked better than most of the ramshackle houses nearby. What this told the marine, and thus Freeman, was that the Siberian withdrawal had been so rushed that even the traditional Siberian scorched-earth policy had been abandoned in their flight, a few militia men probably being the only ones who had had time to rig up a set of avalanche charges. Even so Freeman sent demolition teams ahead, suspecting that the hurried evacuation itself might be a Siberian bluff, though he also had a hunch that the marine lieutenant’s observation, given that they’d landed in such a sparsely populated area, was correct.
There were no more demolition charges found for several hours, and as suddenly as they’d been halted earlier, the marine tank column and mobile infantry leading Second Army picked up the pace. Freeman, the bit between his teeth, ordered full speed, the armored personnel carriers and supply trucks finding themselves on hard, tank-packed snow, the M-1s cruising at thirty-five miles per hour, Freeman holding them back from their maximum of fifty miles per hour only in order to get maximum mileage for minimum fuel spent. When demolition charges were sniffed out, the engineers quickly laid pipe charges, and the column had only to stop for a matter of minutes before speeding on again.
Within four days, while he had not equalled the rapid advance attained by McCaffrey’s Twenty-fourth Mechanized Infantry Division in Iraq or got anywhere near equaling Rommel’s armored run in France of two hundred miles in one day, he was in Bikin, pausing only to refuel, a blizzard swirling about him making for an anxious time but giving the U.S. pilots, with their more sophisticated electronics, the edge in instrument flying. Though if the Siberians’ night-fighting equipment wasn’t as good as the Americans’ there was nothing lacking in their courage. While the refueling was in process, the armored column could hear a distant thunder high overhead, massive B-52 raids out of Okinawa, the planes still within Khabarovsk’s AA missile envelope but protected by Eagles and Falcons as they pounded the city with more ordnance, including Smart bombs from lower-flying F-111s preceding them and dumb bombs, than was dropped on Baghdad in the opening hours of the Iraqi war.
“However,” warned Freeman in his first press conference since the landing, “Khabarovsk could be a
major battle.”
When he got to Khabarovsk there was no major battle: the military was gone; only the population, confused and worried, left behind for the Americans to feed. Only some of them, mostly Jews, were happy to see the Americans. The regular army had vanished, and only the militia remained. They were no match for the American marines. The civilians, who hid in terror for the first few hours, were now venturing out, soon forming a sea around the tank columns. The tanks were warm, and all heat and electricity to the city and the sparsely populated coast had been cut off by the retreating regulars. The American pilots commented on how it reminded them of flying over Alaska and the Canadian north: utter darkness, not even lights of outlying settlements visible.
Norton was already looking exhausted; they’d been on the road for almost twenty-four hours without a break. “Sir, far as we can make out, no civilians were allowed to leave. Shops were stripped bare by the army, the crowds left for us to feed.”
“Yes,” confirmed the marine commander. “Only civilians to get out were prisoners. Apparently they were taken out by the KGB on the Trans-Siberian.”
Within twenty minutes of the Americans having entered Khabarovsk there was a series of enormous explosions in a rough semicircle east of the city center as far out as seventeen miles. Soon there was the glow of fires everywhere over the frozen salt marsh as fuel depots blew along with ammunition dumps. Anything the Siberians could not take with them they had destroyed, including the city’s four airfields. The brutish smokestacks, most of them in the northern sector of the city, stood in the flickering light, visible only to the four-hundred-foot level. They came in and out of view amid the choking, soot-colored smoke that rained black on the snow.
“Where’s the battle, General?” asked a CBN reporter.
Freeman grumpily ignored him, turning to Norton instead. “How about the Trans-Siberian?”
“G-2 says it’s ripped up from here to Birobidzhan.”
“Blown up?” asked Freeman irritably. “Or ripped up?”
Norton didn’t know.
“Goddamn it!” shouted Freeman. “Find out!”
“Yes, sir.”
* * *
From Khabarovsk west over the hundred miles of frozen salt marshes to Birobidzhan, then three hundred miles to Belogorsk, all the while following the Trans-Siberian Railway around the big, 250-mile-wide, right-to-left horseshoe bend in the Amur River — at times less than twenty miles from the Manchurian border, the U.S. Air Force having taken out Zavitinsk airfield fourteen hours before — the tooth of Freeman’s Second Army, its M-1 A-1s gulping, even at cruise speed, three gallons per mile, was fast outrunning the tail of its supply line.
The quarter-mile-wide ribbon of ice of the south-north Zeya River took on the look of burnished gold at Svobodnyy before more snow began falling and was, Freeman predicted, the perfect place for the Siberians to have blown the bridges. A few miles on and he found he was right. The enormous twisted steel of the railroad span was caught in the ice, a crippled skeleton of steel, the bridge’s pylons left standing naked, the fresh snow pillows atop them affording the pylons a symmetry and beauty amid the collapsed spans. But the Siberians’ scorched-earth policy, at least here, was of little account, holding Freeman up only for as long as it took his M-1 A-1s with plough blades and the engineers’ rocket-propelled pipeline charges to clear the ice of mines. Most mine positions were immediately obvious from the frozen mounds of scraped ice that stood out like pimples of broken glass amid the new snow that was not yet deep enough to obscure the detritus. Self-propelled howitzers could be seen here and there in the forest, intact, their crews blue and bloated if they could be picked out at all from the shattered timber and decapitated trees that marked where infrared Smart bomb attacks by the U.S. air force had been made from the captured airfields.
Where tarmacs had been blown up, the U.S. engineers simply hosed in hot water under pressure from the water trucks, the water-filled craters instantly freezing, after which the graders topped them off as one would level off a filled-in posthole, and the Marsden matting was laid. U.S. planes were using the fields within an hour of their completion.
The railway was another story. The Siberians, having sacrificed much of their heavy fighter cover — mainly MiG-29s — to protect sacrificial MiG-27 Flogger-D ground attack aircraft, had dropped each Flogger’s 6,600-pound ordnance on the multiple track west of the Zeya River between Shimanovsk and Mukhino. This meant that the pea-colored Rossiya, or “Train Number One,” which ran from Vladivostok to Moscow, was unable to proceed because of the downed transmission lines. The Siberians, however, quickly hitched the carriages carrying evacuees from Khabarovsk to three steam engines, drawn into service from the dozens of such locomotives which had previously been disbanded beside the line with the coming of the electric engines.
Moving slowly through the dense, fogged-in and snow-draped taiga of larch, pine, and fir, the train approached the top of the horseshoe hump of the Amur. Instead of the usual caboose, the train dragged an enormous hook-shaped, stump-jump plough behind it, ripping up the ties like matchsticks, the splayed rail now pushed uselessly to the side on this eastern section of the forty-eight-hundred-mile railway. The guards at each tunnel entrance and bridge gratefully hopped aboard the last passenger carriage, the carriages alternating with AA quads mounted on flatbeds, every fourth flatbed in the car train sprouting SA-6 AA missiles. The “Mukhino Express,” as it had been wryly described by the American pilots who had come down through the heavy cloud layer only to have their infrared signature detectors thwarted for a time by the thick bone-chilling fog, was finally stopped in a river of high explosives before it could reach the station at Mukhino. The pale blue station disintegrated in a spectacular explosion that sent ancient pine planks, black earth, and fire-streaked snow, together with iron heating-stove plates and the woodpile, whirling in a mini-tornado a quarter mile high before it came down in a crashing hail.
Meanwhile Freeman and his commanders welcomed the pause necessitated by having to clear the minefields across the Zeya, for it gave the vitally needed tank and POL resupply trucks time to catch up. Freeman was asked by his chief of logistics, Gen. Malcolm Wain, whether they should go to blivets. Wain had been impressed by the way in which the blivets, or flexi-plastic bags containing thousands of gallons of fuel, had proved so useful in the Iraqi desert to store gas. But here he didn’t have in mind the huge, depot-sized bags that could be buried out of sight of aerial reconnaissance by the roadside but rather the tank-sized bags which, providing a tank was not in action but in transit, could be carried piggyback, an extra jerry can, as it were, one which could be jettisoned before getting the call to go into action or at the first sign of Second Army’s spearhead being attacked.
Freeman spread out the map, slipping in the single-lens monocle that had caused the name “Von Freeman” to stick among those who bore him ill will for his decision to use the fuel air explosive bombs to break the Ratmanov deadlock. The monocle was impatiently tapping sector twenty-one, northwest of Mukhino, and beyond twenty-one to sectors thirty-three and thirty-seven where the Amur reached the apogee of the hump. “I like it,” he told Wain. “Our rate of progress — soon be doing better than Erwin.”
Wain looked across at Norton without the general seeing. Whenever Freeman was making good time, the heroes of his military pantheon were referred to by their first names. If he got held up, it would quickly be that “bastard Rommel.”
“But,” Freeman sighed, “I don’t like it. Scorched-earth policy is one thing. I understand that. But this is — this is a turkey shoot. After Ratmanov I expected a fight.”
Wain disagreed. “I don’t see it that way, General. After Ratmanov they’re going to avoid a close-in fight if they can. Especially with our air superiority.”
“Maybe,” said Freeman, unconvinced. “But they’re not going to give up the whole damn country. They’ve got to stop — stand and fight somewhere. They’ve got to counterattack.” Freeman folded the map
case and slipped it into the Humvee’s back seat, smacking his gloves together. “God, it’s cold!” He looked about unhappily at the column stopped for refueling.
It was against everything in Freeman’s book to halt. He’d built a career on movement. Movement! Movement! Movement! as against the Siberians’ obsession with refusing to attack until they had overwhelming numbers in men and materiel. If Freeman stopped, Norton knew, it would make everyone down the line happy — give them a chance to catch their breath and allow the supply tail to thicken. But, Freeman was asking himself as well as Norton and Wain, what was that crafty son of a bitch Yesov up to? Freeman was nodding to himself, concluding that Yesov would be gambling on his, Freeman’s, lifelong commitment to movement, the Siberians sucking him in deeper and deeper, the American supply line becoming ever more overextended.
“Mal.”
“Sir?”
“We’ll pause here. Twenty-four hours. Dick, give the order to establish defensive perimeter. Air task order — saturation fighter cover and attack gunships ready to go.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We’re in ‘overreach’ with our fighters. I realize that. We’re already heavily committed to in-air refueling.” It was as if he was trying to justify his uncharacteristic decision to stop. “But we need to consolidate here. Get another airstrip going. Must remember the aim, gentlemen — to capture Irkutsk. From there our fighter-bomber radius can hit the industrial underbelly. We’re now at a critical stage, however. We can’t pause for too long for resupply. I’ll bet that’s what Yesov’s counting on — hoping his scorched-earth policy’ll force us to drag our ass. But, gentlemen, his scorched-earth policy is outmoded. Takes no account of the American genius for resupply. He obviously hasn’t learned anything from Iraq. Well, let him withdraw. By the time he’s got his big battalions ready on the ramparts, we’ll be knocking the ramparts out from under him.”
