by Ian Slater
Charles Riser, despite his prodigious knowledge of Oriental culture, did not know what tancho meant, and asked Bill Heinz, the embassy’s military attaché.
“Japanese crane,” replied Bill. “You’ve probably seen lots of ’em on postcards, Japanese watercolors. They’re a big deal in Japan.”
Now that Riser knew what tancho meant, his China hand’s knowledge came into play. “Well, one of the biggest sanctuaries would be Lake Khanka, the one up beyond Harbin. I think it straddles the Sino-Russian border.”
Riser e-mailed a coffee-quaffing Douglas Freeman about Lake Khanka. It was a huge four-thousand-square-kilometer body of water and marshland, ninety kilometers long and in places seventy kilometers wide, that constitutes one of the largest bird sanctuaries in the world. The wetlands and lake are fed by the upper course of the Ussuri River in a large depression where terrible forest fires over thousands of years had apparently rendered an area which should have been thick, boreal forest now only sparsely treed, leaving meadows and some copses of Mongolian oak. It was also reputed to be the last great refuge of the endangered far eastern leopard and Siberian tiger, and a vital refuge for hundreds of thousands of migrating birds, including the tancho. He also added, courtesy of Bill Heinz’s files, that there had been repeated complaints by Chinese “enviro nuts” about some kind of armament testing in the area adjacent to the lake.
In their computer-cum-music room Freeman forced himself to contain his excitement as, having quickly scanned Charlie Riser’s e-mail, he called up his meticulously cross-referenced military-industrial files, which he was confident were better than the Pentagon’s intel. “Lake Khanka” had rung a distant bell in his memory about Sino-Soviet border disputes, and its significance fairly jumped out at him from the monitor: Lake Khanka, at latitude 44 degrees, five minutes north, longitude 132 degrees east, on the far eastern Russia-China border, was less than fifty kilometers north of the Deng Jiang sulfur mine, sulfur being essential for any armaments, including the newer Man Portable Air Defense rockets of the kind that had downed his SpecOps Chinook at Priest Lake. Calling Margaret over, he pointed to the area map he had called up, zooming in on the area, highlighting a place southwest of the lake called Gayvoron, noting that it must be the railhead.
“Oh no,” said Margaret as she saw him snatch a light Windbreaker from the hallway. “Surely you can call from home.”
“Not this one, sweetie,” the general replied, grabbing his cap, giving her a peck on the cheek. “Sweetheart, Murphy is always hanging around. Get sloppy on security just once and it’s like leaving your car unlocked.”
From the repaired phone booth down by the 7-Eleven, Freeman dialed the White House and this time was immediately put through to Eleanor Prenty.
She got right to it. “You’ve read the summary, Douglas?”
“Yes. And I’ve deduced that everything points to those scumbags’ camp definitely being situated around a place called Lake Khanka. It’s situated in—”
“Yes, we know,” Eleanor cut in impatiently.
“What?” He was stunned. “You know it’s Lake Khanka?”
He heard a sigh that conveyed to him a sense of patient resignation on the other end. “Douglas, I think you’re one of the most brilliant military commanders this country’s ever had, your failure to catch these terrorists notwithstanding. But you—” She was sighing again, really pissing him off. “Like us all, I guess, you have some surprising blind spots.”
“Such as?” he asked grumpily. “My failure to catch these terrorists notwithstanding.”
“Don’t be childish, General. I haven’t got the time. None of us have. Remember, you and all other senior officers, active and retired, supported the Patriot Act.”
Now, as Aussie Lewis might have said, the penny dropped in Freeman’s brain. “Son of a — you’ve been tracking my Internet inquiries.”
“I have not. NSA has. Surely you must know that their computers are surfing the Net 24/7. As soon as certain phrases or terms pop up, the computers automatically tag and record them. Hell, Douglas, they do the same with me. You might not realize it, but some terrorist cells have staged random break-and-enters so they can use a citizen’s computer. That way any backtracking of the terrorists’ METAs to that ordinary citizen’s line is futile.”
“METAs?”
“Messages to activate,” explained Eleanor. “It’s an NSA acronym.”
Freeman’s brain was racing, despite his acute fatigue. “So you knew? I mean, NSA put the forensic analysis together with my computer files on Lake Khanka and Gayvoron?”
“It was your sulfur mine around which all the forensic stuff jelled,” Eleanor told him.
“Then it’s a matter for our air force,” said Douglas. “I expect Moscow’ll be as pleased as we are to take out a terrorist camp.” He was thinking of how the CIA and KGB had joined forces and worked so well together to prevent a planeload of Russian nuclear scientists from leaving Russia for Iran.
“It’s not as easy as that,” cautioned Eleanor. “The president’s been in contact with the Russian premier. There’s no way Moscow will allow a bombing mission on Russian soil. Besides, even if they did, we’d need much more precise targets than Lake Khanka and environs. Do you know how big that place is?”
“Of course, you’re right,” commented Freeman, embarrassed by not having seen such an obvious problem. He sure as hell needed some sleep.
“Plus,” continued Eleanor, “once it gets out that we want to go after them by bombing, there’ll be an outcry from every environmental group in the world. Can you imagine it, Douglas? Americans bombing a hallowed bird sanctuary? We’re hated enough already around the world, without every bird lover and Audubon Society on earth screaming bloody murder!”
“So what’s the best they’ll allow us?” pressed Freeman. “What kind of force can we mobilize?”
“Moscow’ll allow an MEU to be ferried in by air and for us to hit the terrorists’ camp. But we’ve only got twenty-four hours, max.”
The general was rapidly estimating how much time it would take for a SOC MEU, a special-operations-capable Marine Expeditionary Unit, of two thousand men to be dispatched, fight a winter battle, win, and withdraw. “That’s hardly enough time to—”
“Well, that’s all the time they’ve given us, Douglas. It’s nonnegotiable. Moscow wants to clean up its backyard terrorists as much as we do ours. But even with all the goodwill we’ve engendered between us since the end of the Cold War, they’re still very prickly about the whole thing. It’s a political minefield for the guys in the Kremlin. We’re damned lucky they’ll let us in. Thank God for the KGB-CIA joint venture against the nuclear scientists trying to hightail it to Iran. At least that’s set a precedent.”
“Well, do we have any HUMINT on the area?”
“We have several agents out of Harbin. Taiwanese sleepers. CIA has asked them to send out burst intel transmits to the Seventh Fleet in the Taiwanese straits. Our MEU attached to the fleet will be going in from the Yorktown.”
“Well, that’s the best news I’ve heard so far.” Freeman’s last SpecOp, into North Korea, had gone in from Yorktown. It was a 45,000-ton Wasp-class LHD-26B landing-helicopter-dock ship, part of the U.S. Marines’ “Gator Navy,” so-called because of the potent amphibian force the marines had proved to be in the victorious but bloody landings from Guadalcanal to Saipan. It was complete with forty-five assorted choppers, several of the hybrid Ospreys, two V/STOL–Vertical or Short Takeoff or Landing planes — Joint Strike Fighters, and three LCACs, which were hovercraft landing craft.
“We have another piece of information,” Eleanor told him. “Our military attaché in Berlin has received HUMINT from Germany that nanotech high-precision lathes are on the move east. Anyway, the president wanted me to seek your counsel.”
“I don’t know,” mused Freeman. “It’ll be a very tricky operation, any which way you look at it.”
“That’s why,” said Eleanor, “the president wants you
to lead it. Will you?”
The moment he hung up, Margaret knew. “Surely you didn’t accept it?” she asked. Freeman said nothing. “Oh, Douglas! I’m no politician, but can’t you see what this is?”
“An honor.”
“Honor? It’s — oh, Douglas—”
“I wish you’d stop saying, ‘Oh, Douglas.’ Anybody’d think I’d robbed a goddamn bank!”
But she wouldn’t be deterred. “I’m no military expert, Lord knows, but I can see a trap when it’s staring me in the face. I haven’t spent all my time going to bridal showers with Linda Rushmein.”
“Margaret!” he said sharply. “It’s obvious why I was chosen. I’m the only goddamned general who’s—”
“Don’t use that language, please!”
“I’m the only general,” he said, looking for all the world like Patton uncaged, “who’s had firsthand experience in the taiga, in the U.N. mission I led. I mean, my whole team has firsthand experience of the terrain, and—”
“Douglas, Douglas, do you honestly believe that you were the first choice?”
He said nothing, but the tension could have been cut with a knife.
“It’s a trap, dear, a political trap. Even I can see that. No one who cares about his career would dare volunteer. Can’t you see they’re using you? What do they care? They’re appealing to your ego, Douglas.”
He gave her a long, hard look and turned sharply about, snatching up the TV remote. “It’s a matter of honor. The president asked. The president of the United States of America has asked me to finish the job that I started. He’s obviously got more confidence in me than—” He strode off into the living room to get the latest update.
Margaret sat, or rather slumped, down in her lounge chair. After a long silence, she asked, very carefully, “Does the president have any idea of how many terrorists are in this wretched camp near—”
“Lake Khanka,” he said quietly. “No, no one knows. It could be a small outfit or a big complex. We’ll have to wait for a recon report from HUMINT.”
“From what?”
“People on the ground. In the area. Spies,” he said irritably. “Informers.”
She had her arms folded tightly below her breasts, the normally soft features of her face hardened in her fear for him. She remembered how Catherine used to pray for him every night he was away. “You could be killed.”
“If their base, if those people, get a chance to tool up for hypersonic weaponry, Margaret, a lot of people, including a lot of Americans, are going to get killed.”
To make matters even worse for Margaret, CNN’s Marte Price, in an exclusive from Washington, D.C., was confirming that the die had been cast. As she spoke a retaliatory U.S. force was being readied for an attack on the terrorists’ camp at some as yet undisclosed location overseas. CNN’s Pentagon correspondent reported that the force would most likely be deployed from one of the United States’ carrier battle groups. Such a group would most likely consist of a carrier, two frigates, two guided-missile Aegis cruisers, four destroyers, a replenishment vessel, and two nuclear attack submarines, all in the service of protecting a Wasp-class helo carrier transport carrying 2,100 combat troops of a Marine Expeditionary Unit under the command of a “full-bird” colonel. It was not known, she told her viewers, who would lead the assault, but it was rumored by confidential sources within the administration and the Pentagon that several of the armed services’ highest-ranking field commanders had strenuously objected to any precipitous action, citing the unmitigated disaster that was President Carter’s attempt in 1980 to rescue American hostages in Iran in a similar “in-out” lightning strike. It seemed that no one who valued their career prospects wanted anything to do with what Marte Price was characterizing as a “high-risk undertaking.”
“Did you hear that?” Margaret asked her husband.
He pretended not to hear. Closing his eyes, he recalled the last known positions of the U.S. Navy’s carrier battle groups, and deduced that unless there had been a radical shift in their combat patrol areas, it would be Admiral Crowley’s Seventh Fleet CBG which would be closest to Lake Khanka. If this were the case, the MEU he was to lead would be that of Colonel Jack Tibbet aboard the Yorktown, one of Admiral Crowley’s twelve-vessels. Scuttlebutt had it that because the navy, as were the other branches of the American armed forces, was dangerously overextended, it might well be that Crowley, who used to be captain of the carrier McCain as well as overall admiral of the fleet, would have to serve as captain of Yorktown as well as admiral of the fleet for the duration of this mission.
“I mean, Douglas,” Margaret pressed him, “aren’t you getting too old for…” It was the worst possible thing she could have said.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
For domestic consumption, the Russian president, in his distinctive baritone, vociferously objected to any “interventionist plan” against Russia by the United States or any other country. The truth, however, was that the Russian president’s dire warning, wildly greeted by crowds from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok, was strictly pro forma. For the fact was that within the Kremlin from which Putin and his successors had tried to govern following the collapse of the Soviet Union after the Cold War, there was growing alarm at the rash of rebel commanders who, having been suborned by bagmen into becoming rapacious capitalist arms dealers, viewed Moscow as nothing more than an impediment to their rapidly growing fortunes. In this test of wills, there were those in the Kremlin who harbored a hope that the Americans could be used to help redress the imbalance of power in Russia, wresting control away from Moscow and transferring it to powerful regional rebel groups.
Such a group was the triumvirate in Russia’s far east dubbed by Big and Little, two veteran English-speaking rebel officers of the old KGB’s Thirteenth Directorate, as the “ABC,” a cabal of three generals, Mikhail Abramov of the Siberian Sixth Armored Division, Viktor Beria of the Siberian Third Infantry Division, and Sergei Cherkashin of the Siberian Air Defense Arm. FSB, the Russian security service, the new KGB, knew that ABC, jointly financed by Muscovite gangsters and fundamentalist Arab groups in the Middle East in open defiance of Moscow, had concentrated and arrayed their forces around Lake Khanka and were considered to be amongst the best dug in of any of the breakaway rebel units. ABC had been careful to funnel the initial money provided by their backers into securing the best frontline troops available to defend the Lake Khanka perimeter and the railhead in the town of Gayvoron, from which armaments by the ton were being delivered to the port of Vladivostok 150 miles to the southeast. FSB reported that ABC had in effect built a private military economic zone in the far east wherein they could manufacture and export armaments well beyond Moscow’s reach.
The idea of trying to oust the ABC risked a civil war in the area, and the very suggestion of yet another civil war in Russia and yet another breakaway territory like Chechnya was as unpalatable to Moscow’s ruling elite as it was to the civilian population at large. And so, in one of those strange, upside-down ironies that violated all the tenets of the Cold War, the Kremlin, while vigorously objecting to the U.S. plan in public, simultaneously saw it as the best chance of ridding Moscow of the ABC, whose so-called business practices, Pravda declared, were “even worse than Enron’s.”
Yet Moscow knew that the risk the Americans would be taking was enormous. Lake Khanka was 120 miles inland from Vladivostok. Moscow knew the Americans, led by this so-called American legend, General Freeman, would have to not only contend with a vicious ring of sophisticated anti-aircraft weaponry, including MANPADs and emplacements of four SAMs of the type that had downed the American Scott Brady’s fighter over Bosnia, but also fight against paid-off rebellious elements of the Russian navy.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Alerted by their coast watchers and unable to move their lucrative weapons complex, ABC was waiting. And ready. For the hundreds of men of the ad hoc Russian Regiment, everything was at stake, survival and money in amounts that the three disgruntled ex-Soviet ge
nerals had never dreamed they would be within striking distance of. The markup on Igla, Vanguard, and pirated Stinger-design MANPADs alone was 218 percent. Production costs had fallen drastically, with Lake Khanka providing a guaranteed supply of water for coolant. Productivity was also spurred on by bonuses for the fast loading of ABC’s ship-container-sized cargoes of twenty missiles per RORO — Roll-On, Roll-Off — load. Mideast sales tripled in the first six months of operation, bonuses for overtime so coveted that the soldiers from Abramov’s tank company, Beria’s infantry, and Chekashin’s air defense ground crews assembling the delicate guidance heads and 8 percent sulfur solid propellant were breaking all civilian productivity rates set in the go-slow environment of the old Soviet regime. And now they had in their possession the U.S.’s super-cavitating technology. More bonuses. As bonuses increased, so did expectations, the men wanting even more overtime. Indeed, a strict duty roster had to be enforced as some soldiers, particularly from Beria’s infantry battalions, had been skipping regular perimeter security duty so as to put in overtime on the assembly lines. When General Beria first heard from Big and Little in Moscow that an attack by the American ATFOR — American Anti-terrorism Force — was a possibility, he immediately tightened up all “perimeter skipping” by instituting the death penalty for any Russian absentee on the grounds that shirking this duty was desertion. It had a salutary effect, as those who wanted to make more money selling more missiles to Hamas and others were only too willing to inform on comrades whose executions created a vacancy and hence more lucrative overtime on the already lucrative assembly line.
“You won’t have to worry about the Americans,” Abramov assured Beria and Cherkashin. “My T-90s’ll take the bastards out before they get a chance to get out of their helicopter seats.”
