by Ian Slater
Freeman held up his hand to silence any protest that his stopping was perhaps unwise for the same reasons that he was criticizing his Siberian counterpart, for stopping created a stationary target, and it was a maxim of Freeman’s military strategy that a stationary target in modern warfare has no chance. But neither Norton nor Wain had been about to protest, and Freeman holding up his hand seemed to them more a gesture of doubt than confidence, something they’d not seen in him before. Perhaps the terrible casualty rate on Ratmanov had affected the general more than they thought. At odd moments Norton had seen Freeman, when he thought no one was looking, leaning back, his hands massaging his lower back, still in pain. But for Norton there was no doubt — Freeman had made a sound military decision, right from the textbook. To go on without having consolidated your supply line was always a risky proposition.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Marshal Yesov’s aide was in a hurry, his chauffeur-driven Zil swishing past the great, snow-crowned dome of Novosibirsk’s opera and ballet theater. The statue of Lenin, his noble vision fixed on the future, was even more impressive in the strange, pinkish-brown light of the pollution-colored dusk. The soldier, sailor, and airman on Lenin’s right flanked him proudly; the heroic worker and torchbearer to his left were dusted by snow but looked equally heroic. It added to the aide’s excitement when, arriving at the Akademgorodok or “Science City” apartment block, he ran up the six flights — the elevator wasn’t working — to the apartment of Professor Leonid Grigorenko, the head of the KMK project. But when the door opened it was to Marshal Yesov that the aide blurted out, “On ostanovilsya!”— “He’s stopped! The American has stopped!”
Yesov showed no emotion, his blunt facial features unmoved as he walked back to the apartment’s window looking out on the frozen expanse that was the Ob Sea, where the River Ob had been dammed, and which in summer provided excellent sailing for the privileged ones in Akademgorodok and the party elite. He saw two guards in greatcoats and fur caps trudging as smartly as the snow would allow them along the ice-sheathed concrete slabs that inclined down to the frozen Ob, which in summer, by which time he would beat the American, would serve as a beach for those sunbathing to watch the colorful sailboat races.
He was not so worried about the Allied armies to the west-tired and busy administering Moscow and its environs, they had not yet breached the Urals. He turned from the window, and now that the lights in the city were coming on, pulled the blackout curtains shut, though there was little danger of air raids. To the east Freeman’s forces were further away than those in the west, over fifteen hundred miles from Novosibirsk. Still, it was Freeman’s forces that Marshal Yesov was most concerned about, for while the English Channel, across which the Allies in the west had been resupplied, had effectively been closed by Siberian submarines in the Arctic, Freeman’s supply line from Japan was uninterrupted, Freeman’s troops fresher, and Freeman himself more daring than the more conservative threat faced to the west. “On upryamy”—“He is a tractor,” said Yesov, looking out toward where the Trans-Siberian crossed the frozen expanse of the Ob. “He keeps on. This pause of his will not last long.”
“We will stop him,” said Grigorenko, calmly smoking his thin cigar as he went over the final plans of Chernko’s KMK project. “I hope there have been no more security leaks, however.”
“None,” Yesov assured him, explaining that even the man from engine shop three who had been shot knew only part of the project. Yesov was as confident as Grigorenko that Chernko’s plan would work. But he, Yesov, had had more experience than the scientist who had overseen the design and manufacturing process, and said nothing. Scientists could afford to say what they wanted. They were important to the state, particularly in a modern war, but the general had to be more circumspect, and when the Americans were defeated, Yesov had aspirations to be the president of the United Siberian Soviet Republics. Grigorenko, however, mistook Yesov’s silence for undue concern. “You mustn’t worry, General. Everything is in place, I assure you. The Americans will be demolished — utterly!” As he said this, Grigorenko sat back, stroking his goatee, his piercing gray eyes looking first at the general then his aide. “You know, of course, the supreme irony of the situation.”
The aide guessed it was the Iraqis who had been training in Poland before the Iraqi war for just such a project as Chernko’s— but he wasn’t going to do anything to steal the Akademician’s thunder.
“The Iraqis!” proclaimed Grigorenko, pleased with himself, leaning back and taking a bottle of Smirnoff vodka — the best, something that the average Russian hadn’t seen for months, the aide thought. Everything from nylon stockings to toy production had been conscripted for war materials.
“Yes,” Grigorenko said, pouring the three vodkas, a little extra for himself, the aide noticed. “It will add insult to injury for the Americans, comrades, that half of the attacking force will be Iraqi.”
The aide was trying to look surprised, a difficult thing to do when he knew by heart the story of how Hussein had sent Iraqis to the eastern bloc to train for just such a project in the Gulf war but how, because of Gorbachev’s stupid bungling, and against the advice of his military, the Iraqis were not permitted to carry out such an attack in the Iraqi war. Unable to get back home because of the UN boycott and U.S. intelligence on the lookout for them, the Iraqis, all members of Hussein’s dreaded Mukhabarat—his secret police — were still in Siberia and as expert as their Russian, instructors. Grigorenko passed around the glasses and proposed a toast: “Za porazhenie amerikantsev!”— ‘To the American defeat!”
Yesov rifted the shot glass and allowed a thin smile to crease his otherwise bullish face. “Za unizhenie amerikantsev!”—”To the Americans’ humiliation!”
“Na mnogo luchshe!”—”Much better!” added Grigorenko. The aide was not a believer in psychic phenomena or anything else he called “mind rubbish,” but he could not deny the fact that within seconds of the general having proposed the toast, the call came in from Kultuk, 850 miles east of them at the southwestern end of Lake Baikal and only 76 miles from the Mongolian border, that everything for Chernko’s KMK project was gotov—”ready to go.”
Grigorenko looked across at the commander in chief of all United Siberian Soviet Republic forces like an expectant father, waiting for the general to give the word. The American, Freeman, had stopped at Mukhino, and though it was almost a thousand miles further east of Kultuk, well away from Novosibirsk, the scientist’s expression of pained expectation said it all, that every day Yesov waited — every hour — the Americans got closer to reaching Lake Baikal and Irkutsk. And from Irkutsk their aircraft could strike Novosibirsk. But Yesov refused to be hurried, holding his glass out for another drink. Using it as a pointer, he moved it east to Baikal to the hump of the Amur that formed the Siberian-Chinese border. “Let him reach the very top of the hump, comrades. Then we’re in the clear.”
The aide nodded and glanced knowingly at the general, his look clearly saying that while Grigorenko might be one of the world’s greatest scientists and engineers, his political urn— “savvy”—was about as sophisticated as a yak’s. Chita HQ, halfway in the crescent of mountains and forest between Baikal and the top of the hump, had repeatedly advised Novosibirsk, Yesov specifically, not to act too close to the Chinese border, particularly not anywhere along the Amur where there had been border clashes since time immemorial between the two countries.
“No,” said Yesov, in answer to Grigorenko’s silent plea. “Not yet. The Chinese don’t like the Americans any more than we do, Doctor, but they are very touchy about their border. No, we cannot fire across the hump for fear we may drop short into Chinese territory.” He meant inside the hump. “No, we’ll wait until he is at the top.” Yesov used the rim of the oily vodka glass to indicate the area where he would spring his trap. “Here, between Never and—” The general required his reading glasses. “—Skovorodino.” The seven-and-a-half-mile road between the two towns was 170 miles west of w
here Freeman had stopped.
“He’ll be reassured, resupplied,” said Yesov. “Tanks topped up.”
“Da,” said Grigorenko approvingly, “all the better. His humiliation will be all the worse.”
* * *
The cruise missiles came in so low that neither Freeman in his advance command Humvee nor the radars of the helicopters flying cover saw them, the eight 672-pound missiles visible only five miles from target along the Never-Skovorodino Road. The first thing that the fifty M-1 tanks and six M-3 Bradley fighting vehicles and six mobile heavy mortars that formed the spearhead of Second Army’s II Corps lead tank battalion saw was the sudden appearance of the low-flying lead missile making a tight, right-hand turn before roaring overhead and exploding further down the line.
At the angle they saw it from it appeared to have detonated over the trees, but the CBN reporter with a tripod and zoom lens saw that it was exploding right over the midsection of the four-mile-long spearhead even as Second Army advance reconnaissance units looked back disbelievingly at the missile as it veered through the clear blue sky over the tip of the spearhead toward the center of the column. The CBN cameraman, too, was in awe, transfixed by the abrupt turn that another of the subsonic missiles made to avoid power lines. Rising no more than ten feet above them before descending again, its belly opening even as AA fire stuttered toward it, the missile exuded a hail of smaller missiles that buzzed in the air — antipersonnel flechettes and antitank bomblets. American tanks, the best in the world, were disintegrating, most of them still moving as if driven by ghosts, the screams of their dying crews soon lost amid the technicolor phantasm of light as the tanks spewed fountains of red and white rain as if being welded from the inside, a rain of sparks and flame oozing from the penetrated seals over the sloping glacis plate.
HEAT rounds exploded through the cupolas with a jetlike roar, and several tanks slewed broadside, ramming others, which were in turn struck by tanks coming from behind. The series of explosions from the fuel bladders sent sheets of orange-black flame billowing over the armored personnel carriers behind the tanks. The APCs’ crews and the twelve troopers inside each died agonizingly, the APCs becoming nothing more than ovens.
Those who made a run for it from the APCs’ rear doors were cut down by the buzzing bees of the flechettes, the darts not killing all but inflicting such terrible wounds that the medics and, as the CBN reporter would soon see, the MASH units to the rear were overwhelmed.
Chopper accidents added to the chaos as two air-sea rescue Blackhawks collided with four Cobra and Apache gunships in the thick battlefield smoke. One chopper, a Bell OH-58C Scout, slammed into one of the last incoming missiles. Chips of the heavy 350-millimeter, blocklike Chobham armor packs from the tanks whistled through the air, still intact, their resin-sandwiched steel, ceramic, and aluminum layers impenetrated but blown in toto away from the tanks when the M-1s’ fifty APFDS — armor-piercing fin-stabilized discarding Sabot rounds — reached their flash points and exploded internally, ripping the tank cupolas apart. The mechanized battalion’s tanks and the APCs of Freeman’s H Corps were further victims of the “bolt from the blue” Siberian attack against Freeman’s seven-corps, 379,000-man Second Army.
* * *
In addition to the sixty-six tanks destroyed, the Siberian cruise missiles had laid waste to and/or incapacitated over forty twelve-ton M-113 armored personnel carriers and twenty-three Marine Corps expeditionary force AAV-7A1 armed amphibious troop carriers and seventeen fourteen-ton light armored assault vehicles of the marines’ second expeditionary brigade, the vehicles now either gutted completely or burning.
In all 493 men were killed, over 600 wounded. Freeman’s Second Army spearhead was not much more than a smoking ruin. As suddenly as it had begun, the Siberian attack ceased, but not the suffering, as men, tearing open their CFA — combat first aid — kits sprinkled spore-contaminated antiseptic powder on wounds, which immediately turned the blood septic. In fact, only a few of the hundreds of the CFA kits were so contaminated, but the fear instigated by the certain knowledge that some had been tampered with meant that hundreds of men were loathe to use the packs. Consequently dozens more died, despite the exemplary efforts of medics and Medevac choppers.
The CBN reporter had not seen anything like it since the American A-10 Thunderbolts had come in with their cannon and chopped up the retreating Iraqi columns in the Gulf war. Though not immediately evident, it soon became clear, at least to Freeman’s G-2, that the Siberian cruise missiles’ TERCOM— terrain contour mapping — computers had been finely tuned and programmed not only to hit the tanks in the Second Army spearhead but to avoid the most forward, and hence far more lightly armed, Humvee scout cars.
Freeman was shattered, his hopes of a home run dashed, but he had no time to feel sorry for himself even if he had felt disposed to it, for now the ADATs and quickly deployed Patriot batteries were in position, or at least in the best position they could manage, given that some could not get out of the rubble of gutted vehicles, burning bodies and equipment. The antimissile Patriots’ box launchers were left where they were, their crews sent out to put the pole radar on higher ground. Now Freeman was receiving reports that there were massive troop movements heading east from Baikal toward Chita to the east, the troops identified as the Thirty-first “Stalingrad” Motorized Division. It was the army of Stalingrad fame.
“Son of a bitch!” said Jesus Valdez, called “Juan” by the other marines in his ten-man squad. “That’s all we need, man. Fucking Thirty-first.”
Another marine, hunkered down in the foxhole of ice, made so by the snow having been instantly melted in the heat of the missile attack after which the melt had refrozen, looked disbelievingly at the junkyard of burning tires, drooping guns, shattered armor, smoldering hulks of APCs, and the high, thick, black smoke churning from burning tires, red flames licking softly in the eerie blue twilight. Some of the marines gathered around the flames, warming themselves, until a marine lieutenant told them to douse the fires.
“Yeah,” said Jesus Valdez, “they might see where we are!” He’d lost three buddies in the missile onslaught and hadn’t found a trace of them. It was so terrible it didn’t seem real. The attack had lasted less than seven minutes — hardly a shot fired back, the Patriot launcher support units not then deployed, with the column being on the move. The marine lieutenant didn’t chew out Valdez for his sarcasm; the lieutenant, too, was still reeling inside at the carnage. He, too, had lost friends, and it took all his willpower to deploy the remaining seventeen of what only minutes before had been his thirty-man platoon to defensive positions off the road to take the radar aerials to the summit of the two-thousand-foot-high hills that ringed the death road between Never and Skovorodino.
Freeman’s first order after the attack was to keep out of the townships, attractive to tired, cold troops but a perfect setup, he believed, for another cruise attack. A townsite was perfect for terrain contour imaging, sticking out, in his words, “like a nun in a whorehouse.” Forward patrols reported that the railway had been ripped up from Never on and the pipeline running parallel to the Trans-Siberian shut down.
“How far away is their Thirty-first?” Freeman asked Dick Norton, momentarily too ashamed to look his aide in the face, a thing he normally detested in a man. Instead he was gazing at the wreckage, the acrid stench of defeat burning his nostrils. Mixed in with the oily reek of destroyed equipment and vehicles there came the sweet, sickly smell of burnt bodies.
“They’re coming from Chita,” said Norton. “Now as the crow flies it’s about—”
“Never mind the goddamn crow! How long till they can attack?”
Stunned by the general’s outburst, Norton stepped back. “Ah — they’re motorized. Five — four days. If they travel at night, maybe three.”
“Forty-eight hours,” declared Freeman, his left hand pulling so hard on the cuff of his right glove that Norton could see the general’s fingers straining against the white Gore-Tex
. “Toughest outfit in their army — except for the SPETS. They’ll attack in forty-eight hours.” He was staring at the clump of smoking debris and a bloody, bone-pierced stump that had once been a man’s head. Freeman’s voice was tremulous. He coughed, swore, his tone steadier now but heavy with anger. “Can you tell me,” he turned to Norton, “can anyone in this godforsaken place tell the why I lost so many fine young men? Why those satellite intelligence outfits can tell me the Siberian Thirty-first— a whole goddamn army — is on the move and yet they can’t give us any warning of a multiple cruise launch? Even if radar contact missed ‘em because the bastards were coming in so low, how was it that our satellites didn’t see launch plumes? Or are their infrared spotters on goddamn holiday?”
A major, his head in a blood-splattered bandage, handed Freeman the updated casualty report. Those killed now numbered over five hundred, several of the most recent having died of flechette wounds either on the way to the MASH unit at Mukhino or after arriving.
Norton relayed the general’s question, keeping his voice low from force of habit, the speaker close to his ear.
“General,” he told Freeman, “marine G-2 says the Siberians started a whole bunch of fires in the forests around the suspected launch area. SATINT can’t distinguish between natural hot spots and exhaust plumes. Both give off heat signatures.” Freeman was walking away from the ruins of his advanced armored column. “So they lit fires to confuse satellite IR pickups, but they must have spotted trajectories?”
