by Ian Slater
Attending to his maps, Yesov said nothing. He was an old Soviet strategist of the Frunze Military Academy, a believer in the big battalions school of warfare dominated by artillery, the Bog voyny—“God of War”—and zarnitsa, or lightning war, behind the enemy’s lines; not only behind the battlefield, but wherever possible within the enemy’s supply base — in this case the United States itself. Having been a young soldier once himself, he well understood the impatience of Minsky’s generation, but he had risen to be a marshal because he had never lost, and as much as the young men now scoffed at Lenin, one Leninist dictum had guided and would continue to guide all Yesov’s actions: “It is a crime to undertake war with a better prepared opponent.”
Minsky, however, highly decorated in the Afghanistan War, was undeterred by Yesov’s Frunze Academy caution. He thought Yesov an old fogy. In turn, Yesov thought that dealing with Minsky was like staring down the laser sights of one of the new T-80’s 135mm, the biggest MBT — main battle tank gun — in the world. One frontal shot against the tank’s glacis armor plate wouldn’t be enough to stop it. Sometimes, Yesov knew, it was more prudent to withdraw to defilade position — to sit and wait.
“The Americans are dug in,” Minsky pressed. “Freezing their asses off. Snow — why, it’s mother’s milk to us. But not to the Americans. I say hit them before the ice starts to crack and close our roads.” There being precious few roads at all in Siberia, the frozen rivers were the only trustworthy supply lines along which the logistics “tail” could keep up with the head. “Besides,” added Minsky, indicating the map of eastern Siberia around Lake Baikal and south into Outer Mongolia, “we have the Trans-Siberian. In ‘forty-five it only took us two months to move four armies across from the west. And during the cease-fire, we’ve been moving supplies across the taiga constantly. Why doesn’t Novosibirsk attack?”
None of his colleagues answered. They were loyal to Minsky, but they knew his reference to Novosibirsk was really a dig at Yesov, who would have the final military say on whether to hold the cease-fire or not after Novosibirsk’s political decision.
“Well, what are we going to do?” said Minsky.
“I don’t know what you’re going to do, General,” said Yesov, putting on his greatcoat, his peaked, crimson-banded gray cap, and his gloves against the bitter winter cold. “But I’m going to dinner.”
But Minsky was not easily put off. Inside the officers’ mess he wondered aloud about the special vulnerability of Americans when they were so far from home. “I tell you, the Americans are crybabies. Three months away and they start to blubber for Mama.”
“General Minsky,” said Yesov quietly, his massive jaws demolishing thick, black bread, “perhaps the Americans will move against us.”
The other officers, nonplussed, glanced at one another, but for Minsky there was no doubt.
“They won’t,” he said confidently. “Washington wouldn’t permit Freeman to violate the cease-fire.”
The marshal took out his cigarette case and lit a Sobraine, holding it meditatively between thumb and forefinger, both of which were stained a dark yellow with nicotine. “Perhaps, comrades. We’ll see. But this Freeman — he has a flair for the unorthodox.”
Just how unorthodox, Yesov could have had no idea.
CHAPTER FIVE
Khabarovsk
Freeman’s insistence that a team of navy SEAL — sea, air, and land — commandos be trained by deaf mutes, and that “Wolf dung! Lots of it!” be collected and brought to his HQ at Khabarovsk were two of the strangest orders issued by the commander of all American and Allied forces in eastern Siberia.
The victor of his daring nighttime commando raid on Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital, early in the war, and of his equally audacious airborne attack on Ratmanov Island, in the Bering Strait, only twenty-five miles from Alaska, Freeman had never approved of the cease-fire agreed to by the White House. “If we don’t finish it now,” Freeman warned Washington, “we’ll have to do it later at a higher cost.” But, as Schwarzkopf was told not to pursue the Republican Guard in Iraq any farther, so Washington had similarly ordered Freeman not to press his rout of the Siberian Fifth Army, spearheaded by the once-famed but now badly mauled Thirty-first Stalingrad Division.
The general’s order for wolf dung during the cease-fire Washington and Novosibirsk had pressed upon him, perplexed his aide, Dick Norton. But Freeman, as if his words were explanation enough, merely pointed out that “Intelligence reports all wolves have been taken from the Beijing Zoo and sent to the northern boundaries of the Beijing Military Region.”
In his Khabarovsk Quonset hut HQ, Freeman was studying the huge twelve-by-six-foot map of eastern Siberia, its green, mountainous terrain to the south contrasting with the treeless humps and plains of Mongolia to the south and west. His eyes followed the outline of a huge rectangle, the western edge formed by Lake Baikal, the annexed Mongolian People’s Republic to his south, the Yakutsk region of Siberia to his north, and behind him the Sea of Japan. There were many fancy military euphemisms for it, but every private in Freeman’s Second Army knew what it meant if the cease-fire didn’t hold. They’d be boxed in.
“Why can’t the damn fools see it?” demanded Freeman. “Novosibirsk is playing Washington for a sucker — again. I don’t trust those vodka-swilling sons of bitches as far as I can kick ‘em.” He turned from the map to face Norton and the other officers of his Khabarovsk HQ, some of them new boys flown in from Dutch Harbor, Alaska, on rotation. “You know what the new republics’ military were doing when Bush and Gorby were shaking hands, gentlemen?”
Norton knew — it was a rite of passage for any newcomer to his staff as far as Freeman was concerned.
“Well,” said Freeman, “there was a little mystery NATO couldn’t figure out. You all remember NATO?”
“North American Trust Organization?” proffered a cocky if ill-advised young captain — obviously not a career soldier.
Freeman ignored the smartass remark, but he’d already noted the man’s name: Tyler, M., a junior officer, liaison between Freeman’s G-2, intelligence section, and his first armored division. Cheeky bastard like Tyler would be a good man to put in the lead tank, Freeman thought. With that kind of chutzpa, he’d keep going where others would stop. Secret of an armored thrust was that you must never stop; your mobility was the best chance of securing victory and survival.
“Well,” continued Freeman, “our Russian friends in July, 1990—Soviet high command, to be exact — reported they had forty-one thousand tanks in Europe. Forty-one thousand, five hundred and eighty to be precise, gentlemen. Under the COFIE — conventional forces in Europe — treaty, a significant number of those tanks were to be destroyed, and so four months later the Soviets told us there were now only twenty thousand Soviet tanks in Europe. The question, however, gentlemen, was — I should say is—where did the other twenty thousand go? Scrap heap?” Freeman shook his head. “No, sir—none of them were junked. Not a one! We found out that many of the remainder were moved east of the Urals — out of Europe — just before the treaty document about ‘tanks in Europe’ was signed, and some were sent to the new central Asian republics. Now there were still eight thousand tanks missing, gentlemen, and if you’re puzzled about them, I can tell you that it was revealed in Sovetskaya Rossiya—a Russian paper — that the missing eight thousand tanks had been put in ‘storage bases’ in western Siberia and central Asia. Tanks, gentlemen — T-72s with laser sighting, thermal imaging, and appliqué armor — all of which could be used against us at any time. So my standing order is to keep your powder dry and make damn sure none of your forward OPS doze off—’specially during blizzards when our air cover from here west to Baikal will effectively be reduced to zero, even with our infrared capability. Any observer falls asleep at his post, I’ll have him flayed alive plus a hundred dollar fine for each man in the squad. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And the officer in charge busted to private.”
&
nbsp; No one answered. Freeman was as frustrated as Norton had seen him. He had tried to warn the American people and the Congress of the danger a few days before, during his press conference in Khabarovsk, but for this he’d been attacked. Now, holding up one of the La Roche papers, he let the new members of his staff see the screaming four-inch headline: WARMONGER!
“What do you think?” he asked his staff. “Am I a warmonger? Anybody here think these jokers’ll rest with American troops on Siberian soil? When they’ve got us surrounded north to Yakutsk, west beyond Lake Baikal, south to Mongolia?”
No one cared to answer him.
“Warmonger!” he said, throwing the La Roche paper down. “Well, they’re right—when I see war coming. Like Churchill. My God, this is Saddam Insane all over again. Should have gone after that son of a bitch right into Baghdad. I’d have personally shot the mad bastard. Know how many Kurds we would have saved? Men, women, and children? Never mind Iraqis.” Freeman snatched up his cap and the thick beech stick he’d honed to a pointer, his tone changing — as if suddenly, uncharacteristically, resigned to the foibles of Washington and the State Department doyennes of Foggy Bottom. “Meanwhile,” he continued in a world-weary voice, “all those armchair fairies in State and the Pentagon are pumping the president full of—restraint.” He said it as if it were a dirty word, the beech stick smacking hard against the massed divisions west of Baikal. “Only restraint this crowd’ll understand will come from the barrel of an M-1 tank. Which is why, gentlemen, if I’m any judge, I expect to be ‘recalled for consultation’ any day.”
If some of the officers were surprised, Dick Norton wasn’t. He’d got the first fax copy of the New York Times that morning, and if, unlike the La Roche tabloids, the mainstream papers weren’t exactly calling Freeman a warmonger — their more genteel prose amounted to the same thing. The Times had written:
General Douglas Freeman has proved to have been not only a loyal implementor of U.S. national policy, but a prescient and brilliant soldier. The raid he led on Pyongyang, the brilliant strategy that allowed the Allies to break out of the infamous Soviet-ringed Dortmund/Bielefeld pocket on the north German plain earlier in this conflict, and his dashing seizure of the initiative once the Siberian military threat in Lake Baikal had been realized, have made his name synonymous in the history of American arms with “daring” and “brilliant,” if at times “eccentric,” leadership.
This having been said, however, we believe that the time has come for Douglas Freeman to be recalled, as he was once the European threat was quashed. He is a fighting general, and not, as is increasingly being pointed out in the Congress, a peace general. He has done his job extraordinarily well, and the nation, as it did upon his return from Europe, should shower its honors upon him for his outstanding leadership of operation “Arctic Front,” which made it possible for the present cease-fire to be instigated. But now it is time for someone else to take his place in Siberia. He is, as he was in Europe — and there is no easy way to say this — too “volatile” for the peace. He is a soldier’s soldier, and one who has much to teach in the staff colleges of the nation. With the battlefield now thankfully silent, and with spring imminent, it is fitting that with a change in season there be a change in command, a transition from the time of war to a season of hope.
“By God!” Freeman had commented upon seeing the editorial, whipping off his reading glasses, conveying the impression he didn’t really need “visual assist,” when he plainly did. He was certain The New York Times and other papers were merely parroting administration policy, which he believed had been deliberately leaked to signal his end. “Where do those Pentagon fairies get that horse manure from, Dick? ‘Season of hope’! Good God, don’t they understand the Siberians outnumber us more than five to one?”
Dick Norton thought it inadvisable to remind the general that before the cease-fire, one of the Pentagon fairies he’d referred to had won the Silver Star in the vicious fighting on the road east of Skovordino, and that in his view Washington might be right. Norton looked down at the editorial. “Sounds like James Knutson to me — Yale, not the Pentagon.”
“Well,” grumped Freeman, his hands cupping a mug of coffee as he overlooked the frozen Amur River from his Khabarovsk HQ, the tall, war-scarred smokestacks reaching into the ice-cold blue, “it’s an Ivy League fairy, then. Worst kind. Don’t realize their freedom to pontificate upon national policy has been paid for in blood from Iwo Jima to this…” He paused, searching for the right word to describe the confluence of vast mountain ranges and endless taiga of fir, beech, larch, silver pine, and the steppe beyond Baikal. It was so vast, whole armies had been swallowed by and could hide in it without a trace. “Soon be spring,” he said. But there was none of the optimism with which most others on his staff had been anticipating the coming of the season. “Ice’ll start to melt. There’ll be floods. Our tanks could be in a quagmire. Immobile.” He took a sip of coffee, its steam condensing.
The HQ door banged open, a G-2 lieutenant stamping his feet, shucking off the snow. “ ‘Cept for the permafrost,” Freeman went on. “That’s rock-hard. But that won’t help us when the rivers start to crack.” Norton could see that even as the general was speaking, his conversation about the cold was evidence of a much deeper concern about whether the cease-fire would hold. He wanted it to, but to be caught napping at any of the hundreds of weak points along the vast “box” was a heavier load than anyone else was carrying, here or back in the Pentagon. “What do you think, Dick?” Freeman asked. “Don’t dress it up. You think they’ll attack in winter?”
“No, sir — I think the cease-fire’ll hold. Summer’s the time for war in this country. They sure as hell won’t try to move while Lake Baikal is frozen. We could reinforce our M-1 battalions on the western shore in a matter of hours— just scoot across that lake with close air support A-10 Thunderbolts riding shotgun. They’d soon sort out the T-72s. Look what they did on the road to Basra.” Norton was talking about the massacre the Thunderbolts had wrought in the Iraqi desert with their Volkswagen-sized gun mount forward of the plane’s titanium “bath” seat — the Thunderbolts’ thirty-millimeter cannon chopping up Hussein’s fleeing armored columns, sending them careening in panic. “Besides, General, Baikal won’t even begin to melt till late spring — four, six weeks away at least.”
“Maybe, Dick, but I don’t trust ‘em. I want to know the moment that son of a bitch starts to crack.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Under the rules,” Freeman said contemptuously, putting down his cap, the beech stick’s knobby end smacking the four-hundred-mile-long lake, “we can move anything but food supply trucks across the lake. Washington says anything else would give the wrong signal to Novosibirsk.”
“Yes, sir. I know.”
Freeman pulled his gloves on, deciding to leave after all, stretching the fur-lined leather into a fist. Dick Norton opened the door for him and immediately turned his face from the icy blast. “You tell me, Dick, the moment that ice starts to melt — first goddamn crack. You hear?”
“Yes, sir, but I honestly don’t think you’ve anything to worry about.”
As Freeman stepped out into swirling fresh snow, someone cried, “Look out, General!” Almost too late, the general stepped back, barely missed by two hooded skiers.
“God damn it!” exploded Freeman as they swooshed by.
“You okay, General?” asked Norton.
“Yes, yes,” said Freeman brusquely, pulling up his collar. “Women drivers — what d’you expect? Man’s not safe in his own camp.”
Norton laughed with him. It was a comment that’d get him killed in the media, but Norton knew he held no prejudice against women — had used them as his lead pilots in the attack on Pyongyang. On the other hand, he’d vehemently opposed the idea of women in tanks — had said, quite rightly, there was no place “to piss in private.”
CHAPTER SIX
In the headquarters of Beijing MR, the most important of the seven m
ilitary regions in China, the imperturbable General Cheng was perturbed. In one fell swoop, with Siberia’s annexation of Outer Mongolia — to which Cheng had no doubt Ulan Bator had willingly agreed, given the Mongolians’ ancient hatred of the Chinese — the traditional buffer zone between north China, Inner Mongolia, and Siberia had been removed. It wasn’t just the stationing there of the Siberian Thirty-ninth Army with its “category one”—top readiness, armored and motor-rifle divisions — that concerned Cheng. They had always been posted on the Mongolian-Chinese border and had always been a thorn in China’s side. But now several more divisions were stationed closer along the Mongolian-Chinese border around Saynshand in the Gobi Desert. The annexation meant that not even the formalities of Siberian-Mongolian discussions were necessary before the Siberians could move their troops at will in and about Outer Mongolia, threatening China’s enormous province of Inner Mongolia,
Cheng’s concerns ranged from the grand strategic implications of Siberia’s annexation of Mongolia to the myriad details that had to be attended to in running the world’s largest army, which, though not as modernized as the Siberians’ or the Americans’, was nevertheless four million strong. Many of the reservist cadres were battle hardened and wise after unofficially fighting to help defeat the Americans in the Vietnam War, older cadres having fought the Americans to a standstill in Korea in the 1950s.
But always it had been difficult for the PLA to keep within budget. In 1989, the time of Tiananmen, it had cost only thirteen U.S. cents a bullet to shoot Goddess of Democracy protesters; but now, with rampant inflation, the cost of ammunition had skyrocketed to twenty-five cents. Cheng knew this might not be a serious consideration for smaller armies, but for an army of four million, it was a headache. But Cheng was as resourceful as he was known to be cautious, and his connection with the American industrialist and newspaper magnate Jay La Roche was used to good effect, enabling him to buy U.S. supplies in the illegal arms trade through Brussels.
