by Ian Slater
The damage — over 192 killed, several hundred wounded, was not of particular concern to the marshal even though it abruptly ended the cocktail party. Whatever his faults might be, Yesov had been the first in that room, or in Novosibirsk’s Central Committee, to realize that the Americans had suddenly and dramatically demonstrated that they had the ability to reach deep into Sibir. It could only mean that the Americans must now have established forward air bases, despite the Thirty-first’s advance, from which to fire off their air-launch cruise missiles which, skimming at tree level across the taiga and steppe, had hit both the political heart and a vital industrial organ of Siberia. It was clearly a warning of the terrible danger that the vital Siberian oil fields at Mirnyy, in the very center of Siberia and without which she could not continue the war, were at immediate risk. The same would then be true of Siberia’s vital defense industries all the way from Mirnyy, believed to be invulnerable to all U.S. tactical missiles, to the oil field, barely two hundred miles north of Novosibirsk, at Belyy Yar. Everything was now within Freeman’s reach.
“You know what this means?” Professor Grigorenko demanded, rather than informing Yesov. But the marshal already knew. He might be slow afoot, but his brain was in excellent condition. Still the professor, shakily pouring himself a large vodka and ignoring the general’s glass, went on, “It’s brutally simple, Marshal. If they want to they can turn this into another Kuwait. On fire!”
“Do you really believe they’d do that?” asked an aide.
“Are you senile?” growled Yesov. “They’re not playing baseball, Comrade!”
“No, sir.”
* * *
In fact, Sonarman First Class Johnson aboard the GST was thinking in precisely those terms. They had stolen first base (the KMK works at Novokuznetsk), the second (Akademgorodok near Novosibirsk), and the third — he looked at his watch. Right about now.
Five hundred miles east of them the six one-thousand-pound cruise warheads came “shuffling” through the air over train tracks and a pipeline only yards apart in quadrant 56 just west of Sbega. When he heard them coming in, a praporschika — a warrant officer — in the Siberian Thirty-first knew as well as anyone else in the Stalingrad division that if the explosions of the incoming subsonic missiles — loaded with armor-piercing bomblets — blew out the pipe or rail tracks, 90 percent of the Thirty-first’s supplies would be cut off, only 10 percent able to make it on the poor road system. They simply did not have the kind of airlift capacity of the Americans.
The first missile took out a copse of snow-laden birch trees and did no harm to speak of. The second missile, however, tore up more than thirty feet of track; the remaining four missiles tore up even more, and their rain of armor-piercing bomblets sliced through the Thirty-first Stalingrad Division trucks in showers of white-hot steel, hitting over fifty fully loaded troop trucks in the 2,300-vehicle convoy, most of the casualties — over nine hundred — caused not only from the detonation but from the hornetlike swarms of flechettes.
Far more serious was the severing of the pipeline by the thousands of bomblets from missiles four and five. The oil line running adjacent to the road erupted in flame, the fire speeding along the ruptured pipe like a quick fuse.
The oil, already under pressure, jetted out like water from a long, punctured hose along a snaking, forty-mile section that, like the rest of the line, ran close to the road. The long, spurting tongues of fire set trucks, armor, troops, and self-propelled 120-millimeter howitzer haulers ablaze, and consumed another hundred vehicles, including BMDs — armored personnel carriers — in the most devastating single loss — over four thousand killed or injured — suffered by Russian arms in the past year.
The fire alone attracted American fighters in the overcast. Although they paid heavily, losing over twenty-three to the Fulcrums, they had such overwhelming numerical and instrument-flying superiority, they delivered what the Thirty-first commanders and those few still alive in the column were calling a “Kuwaiti highway” massacre. A-10 Thunderbolts were coming in, their seven-barrelled, thirty-millimeter Avenger cannons blazing, picking off the Siberians’ T-80 tanks at will.
Streams of tracer poured down so fast that they created the illusion that the tanks were actually sucking the fire from the planes, the tanks exploding, providing more target identification for the American air force. They created such a massive traffic jam on the second-rate road, hemmed in by the taiga and snow banks, that Freeman, seeing his chance, issued orders that the carnage continue unabated and that he would personally court-martial anyone who let up attacking in the next twenty-four hours for any other reason than to refuel and rearm.
The Thirty-first Stalingrad was taking a terrible pummelling, its morale as savaged by the belief that it was now surrounded as by the actual punishment it was taking. So savage was the American counterattack that, despite the thick white overlay of cumulonimbus, the battle became visible as a pulsating, red vein to satellite reconnaissance.
As suddenly as it had seemed an overwhelming threat, the Thirty-first was now in full retreat. Freeman, the Baikal threat against him now removed, ordered his armored divisions into the “fishhook” configuration he’d been waiting for. One column of over a thousand tanks with close air support arced left, southward, heading for Irkutsk on any side roads and rivers they could find. Some roads had been literally bombed and napalmed out of the taiga by U.S. engineers. The right curve of the fishhook turned northward, heading for Yakutsk. Freeman’s Shermanlike breakout around the flanks of the smashed-Thirty-first became a rout, the Siberian division finally pocketed, unable to move, its GST backup, as Freeman announced in a message to the president, “no longer in service.” The greatest strain on the American supply line was surrendering Siberians, most of them wounded. U.S. Medevac facilities were stretched to the limit.
* * *
For the crews aboard the two GSTs in quadrant 65 there was no warning, no gradual foreboding of ice growl or increase in subsurface turbidity. There was only the world coming to an end, the explosions of the two cruise missiles hitting them, so cataclysmic as to shock each man’s nervous system into instant, irreparable crisis, as surely as the subs’ hatches were buckled, preventing escape. The two GSTs, squashed like molten bottles, plummeted to over five thousand feet below into the primeval silt of the boreal forest.
* * *
“What can we do?” asked civilian members of the Novosibirsk Central Committee in panic. Yesov looked at each one of them in turn, then at all of them contemptuously. “Arrange a cease-fire, you fools!” He was a soldier first, he told them, but also a realist.
The American public, led by La Roche’s tabloids, were overwhelmingly in favor.
Freeman was appalled, Dick Norton handing him a faxed copy of the New York Times editorial which, like the La Roche papers, joined in heartily for an immediate cease-fire as offered by the Siberians, warning only that a cease-fire should not “extract unreasonable demands and sacrifices” from the Siberian people, “as did the Treaty of Versailles of the German nation, thereby assuring continued bitterness in the rebuilding that would have to be done.”
Outside his victorious forward headquarters at Sbega, west of the Chinese/Siberian hump, Freeman strode up a snow-dazzling embankment, the sky the bluest he’d ever seen. Smacking the New York Times headline, he thrust the newspaper back at Norton. “By God, this is, this is treachery, Norton.”
Norton looked stunned.
“They talk about the Treaty of Versailles,” thundered Freeman, frightening a bird from a nearby perch, the bird startling Norton, who reached for his sidearm. “Remember what Churchill said about the Treaty of Versailles?” said Freeman. “It was an armistice, he said, for twenty years. It’s the same here, goddamn it! Dick, if we don’t run with the bit while we have it between our teeth, we’ll have to fight these jokers again. Didn’t we learn anything from that bastard Hussein?” Freeman was beside himself, right glove smashing into his left. “Why don’t they let the do i
t, Dick? What the hell’s the matter with them back there at the White House?”
“President’s under an awful lot of pressure, General, for this cease-fire. Nobody wants any more fighting.”
“Neither do I, damn it! But can’t you see? Can’t anybody see that if we don’t finish it now, we’ll have to finish it somewhere else — forced into a rematch at a time and place of their choosing?”
Norton, quite frankly, didn’t have the courage to show the general the copies of the other newspapers’ headlines. “BRING OUR BOYS HOME!” the La Roche papers cried. “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!”
“They’re praising you a lot, General. Saying if it hadn’t been for your brilliance, your planning—”
Freeman wasn’t listening. “They must be made to understand, Dick. I want you to send a message to the president. Immediate. ‘Strongly suggest we finish the job. Do not trust Siberian offer, which I see as merely an opportunity to regroup — especially given their strong position on the western front. Please let my views be known to the Joint Chiefs. Sincerely, General Douglas Freeman.’ “
It was of no avail. President Mayne agreed with the American public: it was time to bring the boys home.
“YOU ARE ORDERED,” President Mayne’s reply message read, “TO CEASE ALL MILITARY OPERATIONS AT A MUTUALLY AGREED-UPON TIME WITHIN THE NEXT TWENTY-FOUR HOURS. REPEAT TWENTY-FOUR HOURS. THE NATION IS GRATEFUL FOR YOUR BRILLIANT LEADERSHIP. NOW IS THE TIME TO LEAD THE PEACE.”
Norton received the response from the White House and immediately went out to give it to the general. Freeman read it, crumpled it, and thrust it deep into his greatcoat pocket. He looked down the snow bank on the gaggle of press types trying to negotiate the slope in their frantic eagerness to interview “Dogged Doug,” a sobriquet he abhorred as much as he disliked the unwillingness of the press pool to go back to Khabarovsk now and interview some of the individuals — everyone from supply officers to grunts — who had made it possible. No, now they all wanted to be up at the front, now that it was all quiet.
“Look at ‘em!” Freeman told Norton. “By God, I’d like to bulldoze all of them into Baikal! You see, Dick? That’s how short a step it is from hosanna to hoot.”
“General, if you don’t feel up to it, perhaps we can arrange another— “
“Don’t fret, Dick. I won’t disgrace Second Army. Let the bastards come up and take their pretty pictures. Look good against the skyline, don’t I?”
“Yes, sir. It’s terrific.”
“All right then. Send ‘em up.”
The first of the press corps to make it was a woman reporter from Detroit who, barely able to get her breath, asked the general, “It’s said, General, you wanted to drive on once you’d turned the battle. Is that true?”
“I did.”
Norton looked skyward in exasperation.
“However,” continued Freeman, looking as happy as a father who’s been told his daughter has just become engaged to a parolee, “the U.S. Second Army is an instrument of national policy. I do what I am told. That is all.”
“But General—” Freeman walked through the rapturous acclaim back into his headquarters, urgent messages already coming through from the Joint Chiefs that he was, as soon as it could be arranged after the cease-fire, to make himself “available” to return to Washington for consultation.
“Ah,” he told Norton disgustedly.”Clear as the nose on my face. Far as the White House is concerned, the war is over. By God, they think it’s finished, Dick.”
* * *
At the signing of the cease-fire at Irkutsk, a dour Freeman shook hands with a dour Yesov, both flashing a smile for the cameras, Norton careful to keep Freeman out of mike range, which was just as well. “I tell you, Norton, there’s not one of them,” he said, smiling icily across the table at the Siberians, “you can stand near. Breath stinks like a goddamn—”
“General.”
Yesov was smiling again, this time for the French press.
“I don’t trust those Frogs either,” said Freeman. “They let us down when we wanted to overfly France — get that son of a bitch Khaddafy.”
“They helped us in the Iraqi war, General,” Norton whispered.
“At the last goddamn minute. Not like the Brits.”
“It’s over, General. In a few days we’ll be flying back to Khabarovsk and—” He was interrupted by applause as Yesov was acclaimed by the Siberian press — the marshal’s grin at the camera so transparently insincere, Norton thought, that it would need drastic touching up if the Siberian propaganda ministry was going to use it.
* * *
“It’s over,” Lana told Frank Shirer.
“I know,” he said, holding her, trying to feel good again. “You know that young cockney guy — all the facial burns and-”
“Yes,” she said, trying to hold her impatience, wanting to put any talk of wounds and hospitals — her work — behind her. It was time to celebrate.
“He says,” continued Shirer, stroking her hair but his mind clearly elsewhere, “that I should try for a transplant.”
She knew he could. One grisly fact about the war and the abilities of the Americans to get their wounded back more quickly than anyone else was that organ donor banks — and most servicemen were donors — were full of spare parts.
“Well, tell him you don’t want to — not now. Your fighting days are over, mister. Everyone’s fighting days are over, thank God,” she said, her hand holding his, guiding it to where she wanted it. It was the only magic that could overcome his depression at the prospect of no longer being a pilot.
“God, I love you,” he said.
“You, too.”
“Problem is, not everyone’s compatible.” For an instant she thought he was talking about them, but then realized his preoccupation about losing the eye — and a transplant — was still with him.
“All depends,” she said, “on whether you’re a candidate in the first place. Priorities.” She hesitated, then thought she might as well say it. “Some people can’t even see, honey.” But for all Shirer’s maturity, it was about as effective as telling a child to eat his broccoli because thousands were starving in Ethiopia. But for the moment, with the help of her professional knowledge of anatomy, the admonition was working, and soon she felt the hardness growing. “Nothing wrong with this,” she said, looking up, giving him the sweet, full smile that had first attracted him to her.
“No,” he said. “It’s ready for takeoff.”
“Looking for somewhere to land?” she asked, snuggling in closer.
“Have to do some maneuvering first,” he answered with a grin, and she knew that for the time being the horror of what they had done to him would abate.
“God, I love you,” he told her.
“You, too. Oh now, sweetie, we can have time for each other instead of this damn war.”
“Yes,” he said. It was almost disappointment.
“Hold me,” she said. He took her in his arms.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
It was the sixth day. Salvini was on point, David left of him in the diamond, Choir and Aussie, right flank, when Salvini gave them the “freeze” signal. To have gone down would have kicked up the powder snow and made too much noise. The patrol coming toward them through the trees, about ten men, hadn’t seen them yet but soon would. It was up to Salvini; he could see the most. The other three had all gone off “safety.” Simultaneously Salvini waved the diamond down and took a chance. “American!”
There was a roar of submachine gun fire and men shouting. Then a white flag — an overlay held aloft, its bearer growing as he rose unsteadily to his feet, advancing now, waving the white overlay side to side. All the others, nine of them, were walking forward now, hands raised. They were Siberian regulars — hungry, tired, wearing the patch showing a bear with a lightning rod in his paws, the insignia of the Siberian Thirty-first Stalingrad Division. As the clatter of their surrendered weapons seemed to fill the forest with sound, Aussie noticed
one of their weapons was an American-issue.45.
“Where’d you get that, Ivan?”
The Siberian affected ignorance, signifying he didn’t speak English. Aussie flipped open the Siberian’s holster flap and saw the “US Navy” stamp — Lieutenant R.C. Simpson.
“One of the Stallion crew,” said Salvini.
“You sure?” asked David.
“I’m sure. Helped him load the Arrows.”
Aussie drew his boot knife.”Where are they?” he asked the Siberian coldly.
“Easy, Aussie,” cautioned David.
“Where the fuck are they?” repeated Aussie, the blade under the Siberian’s chin.
A captain, hands still up, marched forward. “I speak little English.”
“Yeah?” said Aussie, without taking his eyes off the man in front of him. “Where are the helicopter soldiers?”
The captain shrugged. “We find on way to front, yes?” he said, indicating the.45. “All kaput in helicopters. Everyone dead.” He imitated a machine gun so well that Choir swung about and almost blew his head off.
“Sorry,” said the Siberian quickly. “Sorry, but everyone kaput.” He made a slashing motion across his throat. “SPETSNAZ. You understand. Ah—”
“We understand,” said David.
“I don’t believe the bastard,” said Aussie.
“I do,” said David.
“Then how come they’re heading back this way if they’re on their way to the fucking front?”
“Excuse me, please,” said the Siberian captain. “War is all finished.”
“Bullshit!” said Aussie. “I oughta—”
“Knock it off, Lewis,” warned David. “Back off. And that’s an order.”
Aussie sheathed the knife reluctantly without taking his eye off the Siberian. “If I find you’re lying, Ivan, I’ll hang you out to dry.”
