by Ian Slater
“No, sir. We’ve still got a big low that’s come down from the Kara Sea. We’ll have to wait until it clears a bit before—” Freeman was pulling out the map. “Before we can use the K-14,” Norton continued, referring to the intelligence satellite. “But it has to be in the right orbit when they take pics.”
“My God, Dick, if there is a next time, we’re going to be ready. Where the hell are those Starstreaks?”
Starstreak was the state-of-the-art, three-dart-headed successor to Stinger, an intercept missile that could, if necessary, be mounted on the back of a Humvee and which provided Mach six “blanket target” protection against air tactical missiles.
“In transit, sir. Siberian Backfire bomber out of Sakhalin— before we took out its airfield — got lucky over one of the convoys from Japan.”
“You sure more are coming?” Freeman asked, his face flushed despite the cold.
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, that’s something. Meantime I want ADATs up ahead, Patriots — have the box launchers down here stick the pole radars high.”
“I’m doing that now, sir.”
“Good.” The general looked up at the cloud-shrouded summits, visible for a moment then gone. To others in the column, the deployment of what AA batteries had not been taken out by the missiles would afford a measure of security, a circling of the AA wagons, as it were, until the road was cleared for the column to move — anywhere but where they were. But Norton knew how bad it was for the general. Freeman had never exulted over the Patriot as others had after the Iraqi war. It bothered him that a Patriot had missed the Scud that killed the marines in Riyadh during the Iraqi war and that if the body of an incoming missile was hit, but not the actual warhead, the missile could end up wreaking the same kind of damage as occurred in Riyadh.
Dick Norton was making a quick call to Malcolm Wain to order in as many batteries of Starstreaks from Japan — from anywhere — as they could lay their hands on.
“How many are coming across now?” asked Wain.
“None,” said Norton. “Just get ‘em on choppers — C-5s, anything, but get them here. Any way you can.”
“By Christ!” said Freeman, coming up behind him. “I ‘d like to find the son of a bitch who engineered this.”
To do this, however, as he would soon discover for himself, would be impossible unless he was prepared to visit an Italian graveyard. But if he was not to meet the genius behind the Siberian missile assault, he soon experienced another assault — a cruise bombardment. Patriots, ADATs, and finally some Star-streaks were able to thin it out; nevertheless, it continued to pound Second Army so that Freeman was trapped. At the top of the Amur hump, unable to go either forward or back for fear of risking the disassembling of his AA defensive ring, he remained hemmed in by the high, snow-covered ridges, as he waited for clear weather so that the trajectories of the Siberian missiles could be more accurately traced. Casualties after the second attack were over two and a half thousand killed, sixteen hundred wounded.
To the public back home the mess from the Siberian front was bad enough, but they sought solace in the fact that the U.S. navy, thanks to the effectiveness of battle-wise skippers such as Robert Brentwood, commander of the nuclear sub USS Reagan, had been punishing the Siberian navy at an ever-increasing rate, protecting the vital sea lift resupply route from the American west coast to Japan.
* * *
Freeman prayed for good weather with all the energy his belief could muster. The bad weather didn’t clear; only a few gaps opened up as a new front howled malevolently down from the Laptev Sea over the tundra into the taiga, as if determined to take up where the previous front left off and continue making life as miserable as possible for Second Army. Meanwhile, news had come in via Japan that the British/American force approaching the Urals in much calmer conditions had come under fierce Siberian armored attack and was reeling southwest of Sverdlovsk. There were rumors of the Siberians having used sarin, a nerve gas whose “persistence” rating in cold, calm weather was high.
When Norton suggested to the general that he should carry his atropine injector — a self-contained hypodermic whose jab would penetrate a CBW suit — Freeman pretended not to hear him. He didn’t believe in doctors or any other medical assistance — until he was hurt. The general was more preoccupied with the report received moments before that yet another Siberian cruise missile attack was underway. This time SATINT and SIGINT would hopefully get much better trajectories. Freeman’s AA defenses opened fire, the roar of Patriots and the high scream of Starstreaks filling the hills about Never-Skovorodino, causing minor avalanches, one of these burying a scissor-folding mobile bridge span. The general was receiving SATINT from a fighter-protected E-3A Sentry early warning radar and control rotodome aircraft that the enemy cruise trajectories were definitely originating from around the Lake Baikal area.
“What in hell do they mean?” pressed Freeman, pulling out the Hershey bar from the MRE — meal ready to eat — tray, ignoring the rest. “From Lake Baikal?”
“Frozen lakes make as good a launch area as any other, I suppose,” said Norton. “Sure as heck not many trees around.”
“Yes, well,” said Freeman, chomping on the Hershey bar as if it were a cigar, “they’re about to get an education. Get out an ATO and tell them we want as many aircraft as possible flying against the Siberian cruise missile launch positions around or on Lake Baikal. They won’t be able to hide under cloud cover now.”
He was correct about the cloud cover, but there weren’t any launch sites on the ice. Instead, SATINT was suggesting that trajectories indicated mobile sites in the heavily forested areas around the northwestern edge of the 390-mile-long lake.
The F-15 and F-18 pilots, after passing through the heaviest antiaircraft gun and missile fire any of them had seen since the war began, including Ratmanov Island, lost fifteen American planes. Only six pilots bailed out. The remaining American fighters mixed it with a swarm of Fulcrums coming out of the superhardened concrete shelters hidden in the taiga, the bases circling the lake from Ulan-Ude in the southeast, barely a hundred miles north of the Mongolian border, to Kalakan northeast of the lake, back down through the Zima pipeline and rail junction on the Trans-Siberian west of the lake to Irkutsk on the Angara River, the lake’s only outflowing river.
For the next two days the Americans, despite increasing air losses, dropped more bombs on the infrared-spotted, cruciform-shaped cruise missile launch site clearings, while A-10 Thunderbolts covered Freeman’s column with their deadly thirty-millimeter antitank cannon as Second Army, refueled and resupplied, got on the move again through the taiga to Urusha and Yerofey Pavlovich, two towns over a hundred miles west. With the Thunderbolts looking for targets of opportunity and finding them, the lead air controller broke radio silence only once to give the grid reference of “massed armor” twenty-five miles west of Yerofey Pavlovich. The tanks, he reported, were in camouflaged revetments but detectable because the snow-weighted netting created unusual shadow patterns.
More up-gunned T-90s were reported lying in wait to ambush Second Army’s spearhead around Chichatka Station just a little further west, the tanks detectable through ID signature, heat given off by motors kept idling in the cold. Their exhaust was piped through flexihoses into snow berms — antitank ditches whose walls of ice were ten feet thick — but still heat patches showed up on infrared. The resulting air bombardment, a combination of A-10s, Eagles, Falcons, and F-111Fs, refueled midair from the coast, was as formidable an air strike as Freeman had ever seen, unloading more ordnance on the enemy’s newfound positions than was dropped on Hussein’s Republican Guard units in the first six days of that war.
Even so, Freeman, while exhorting his men, nevertheless cautioned them not to be “damned foolhardy,” adding, “when you attack, you are to assume that not one, I repeat, not one, of the enemy’s T-90s — or any other of his tanks — has been destroyed by the aerial bombardment. And I don’t give a damn about what reports
we get from Air Command. They’re doing a great job — absolutely superb — but they’re not on the ground. We are. I don’t want you taking your tank platoons in there thinking that all We’ve got to do is mop up. The Russians taught the Iraqis how to revet their armor, remember — dug ‘em in so deep even our bombers couldn’t get at them until they decided to come out and make a run for it. Well, I can tell you one thing — those Siberian sons of bitches aren’t working for Hussein. They’re working for themselves. When they come out — if they’re not coming at us already — they’re not going to run away. That you can bank on.
“Another thing — you can’t expect our air superiority to help much once we engage. You’ve seen it enough at Fort Hood, and the fact that this is snow, not sand, doesn’t make one whit of difference. Once the fighting starts, it’ll all be weasel shit and pebbles flying — identification friend or foe hard enough for us, let alone for our boys in the air. They’ll have enough work cut out looking after themselves. But remember, each of your tanks has infrared-visible ID marks. Last thing—” Freeman paused, taking off his battlefield Kevlar infantry helmet, putting it squarely on the briefing table, pulling a tank commander’s helmet to him. “Remember a la the Israelites?” He expected an answer, for it wasn’t a Biblical injunction but one passed down by the Israeli tank commanders in the Arab wars. The men roared in unison. “Keep moving!”
“Didn’t hear you.”
“Keep moving!”
“Right. Now, remember your buddies you left back there on that never-never road. Cream these jokers!” With that Freeman put on the new helmet, adjusting the throat mike and slicking his hair down under the rim. The interior of an Abrams M-1 A-1 was a high-tech marvel, but it was so cramped that a strand of hair loose over a laser sight could cost you the battle.
Norton told Freeman straight: if the general insisted on leading one of the front two command tanks of the twenty-two-tank battalion spearhead, then the colonel was going to make his protest official. Bravery was fine, but “damn foolhardiness,” to use Freeman’s own words, was something else. What would happen if Freeman was—
“General Wain’d take over,” responded Freeman. He turned, the front of the wide firing-control helmet almost touching Norton’s, his voice lowered. “Goddamn it, Dick, I appreciate your position. Respect it. But after that—” His thumb jerked back to the bloodied road whence they’d come, or rather inched over, in the last few hours. Several marine companies had been decimated, other Americans were dead, their bodies vanished, vaporized in the horror of modern explosives, the only memorial to them now bloodstained snow and a small white cross hammered into the hard Siberian soil. “I couldn’t live with myself after that if I didn’t lead,” he told Norton. “My God, Dick, ‘Skovorodino.’ “ He was looking into the distance — not into Siberia or any other place he’d known but to his field of glory. “Skovorodino! God, what a beautiful name. Even sounds victorious.” His mood suddenly darkened. “It should have been our victory.” He turned and climbed aboard the first of the two command M-1 tanks of the twenty-two-tank echelon that would lead the two-hundred-tank spearhead.
“No secret to the strategy, Dick. If anything happens to me, just keep pressing west — whichever way’ll get you to the east bank of Baikal and Irkutsk. Then we’d be far enough in to bomb the shit out of anything we like — far as the Kara Sea if we have to. Remember, the carriers can’t do it. Despite what the public thought, the flat tops accounted for less than five percent of all sorties flown in Iraq. We have to have land bases in deep.”
“Yes, General.”
“Don’t look so worried, Colonel,” said Freeman, grinning down at him. “We’re going to make ground round of ‘em!”
“Can I quote you, General?” It was the CBN reporter, hopping out of a Humvee, its driver looking apologetically nonplussed at Freeman.
“Sure!” said Freeman and, still standing up in the cupola, rapped on the tank. “Radio silence. Let’s go!”
Norton turned to the CBN newsman. “I thought it was made clear to you people that we’re running this by media pool and that none of you were allowed forward of Skovorodino.”
The reporter was shooting off the end of a roll of four hundred ASA at the general, snow flying up in clumps from the M-1’s tracks, the tank’s aerial leaning back as the war machine, for all of its sixty tons, shot forward from zero to twenty-five miles an hour in less than seven seconds, still nowhere near its forty-five-miles-per-hour cruising speed. It looked great. Freeman brought up his binoculars.
“Marvelous!” said the reporter. “He should be in the movies.”
“Listen!” insisted Norton. “I asked you what the hell are you doing up—”
“Got urgent news for the general,” said the reporter without even turning around. “His wife died.” The reporter was switching to another camera, Voightlander Vito B — older, simpler but with a good lens. “Didn’t think I should let him know before he goes into battle.”
Norton jerked the reporter around by the Voightlander’s strap. “You quote him, you set him up before this thing’s settled, and I’ll shoot you, you son of a bitch! You’ll be out of the pool, Dan! ‘Friendly fire.’ Got it?”
“Hey, hey. What the—”
“Shut up! Listen, big shot. While you’re beaming your videos back home he’s carrying over a thousand dead on his conscience. Nothing he could do about it then, but now he can. So don’t you report anything until the thing’s done. You get it? We don’t want any Baghdad Pete shit from you swinging your goddamned camera around so any Commie intelligence asshole can-”
“Hey. Easy, man.”
“You got it?” Norton was still holding him by the collar; an MP moved in to lend a hand.
“Wait until we’re done!” repeated Norton. The MP had never seen the colonel so mad.
The reporter put up his hands and backed away toward the Humvee, the cameras bashing against one another. The clouds were parting now, the sun turning the snow and endless taiga blindingly white, surface snow turning to ice. “Till you win, huh?” said the reporter sneeringly. “Christ, I’ll be an old man.”
Norton was moving menacingly toward the Humvee. “Get him out of here!” he yelled at the driver. The Humvee spun around in its own axis, splattering Norton head to foot with freezing, oil-stained slush.
* * *
Freeman’s tanks, though their gas turbines were the quietest of any main battle tank in the world, were still emitting a deep rumble through the taiga as arrowhead formations of A-10s came up to support high-flying B-52s. Navy carriers and cruisers in the Sea of Japan had already fired Tomahawk cruise missiles, programmed to hit the launch sites reported to be in the taiga around Lake Baikal far to the west.
“The boss runs over that Siberian armor up ahead and our cruise missiles flatten those launch sites, Colonel,” said Wain, “the general’ll sweep a double header.”
Dick Norton looked at his watch. He figured they wouldn’t have long to wait.
He was half right. The U.S. cruise-missile strike against SATINT-identified launch sites would take one hour and fifty-two minutes to reach the targets in the Baikal area, the U.S. cruises traveling at a ground-hugging five hundred miles per hour. Freeman’s armor should engage the enemy around Chichatka Station at about the same time.
It would be a decisive battle, Norton believed, because while there were thousands of Siberian main battle tanks and over fifty divisions within the Far Eastern TVD, Freeman’s master stroke had been in landing, like MacArthur had at Inchon, where no one thought he should or ought to land — on a remote part of the Southern TVD coastline. But like most master strokes it would be recognized as such only if Freeman won.
Despite the heavy armor reported to be concentrating around Chichatka, which Freeman was about to engage, U.S. air superiority meant that it was taking time for the Siberians to bring up troops and more tanks from the flatlands of the Siberian plain. The Siberians had few roads to do it, relying on relatively few ra
il lines together with the multiple track of the Trans-Siberian, If Freeman could inflict a decisive defeat here at Chichatka and move forward quickly, he might be able to take Irkutsk before the full weight of the Siberian divisions could be brought to bear on Second Army.
Back further in the marine expeditionary unit, Jesus Valdez was getting the news, passed up from the coast quicker than a blizzard, that back home the pounding they had taken on the Never-Skovorodino Road was being reported by the La Roche tabloid chain as the “Second Army Stuck in Neverland.” The more respectable media, it was said, had begun its reporting of the effect of the Siberian missile attacks in a more dignified manner, but once the La Roche papers had taken the low road, “market forces,” as they were saying on “Washington Week in Review,” had moved even the more “responsible” papers to follow La Roche’s sensationalism. The cruel truth for Freeman’s troops was that Second Army was becoming something of a joke; already there were not-so-subtle suggestions in Congress that Freeman ought to be replaced. Valdez was flicking the safety catch of his squad automatic weapon back and forth until Private First Class Joe Kim told him to knock it off.
“I was just thinkin’,” said Valdez, “that if I saw that CBN son of a bitch, I ‘d blow his friggin’ head off.”
“Easy, Juan,” cautioned Kim, who in the past had been the butt himself of jokes about his surname, it being the same as General Kim of the North Korean army, whom Freeman had defeated decisively in the raid on Pyongyang. “Don’t get all het up about it, man. Save it for the Thirty-first.”
“Yeah,” said Valdez. “Where the hell are they?”
“Don’ worry,” said Pirelli, who hailed from Brooklyn. “They’ll get here, I guarantee.”
“Not if Freeman takes out those wagons up ahead,” said another marine. “His M-1s’ll own the road.”
“That’s right, man,” said Kim, who as a boy — before his family emigrated to the United States — had fed himself on movies from the sixties and still put “man” at the end of everything he said, believing it made him as American as baseball. “Hey, hey,” he said excitedly, looking overhead. “You see that, man?”
