by Tom Clancy
The line handlers on the pier, Captain Blandy saw, were mainly civilians. Wasn’t that a hell of a thing?
The “evolution”—that, Gregory had learned, was what the Navy called parking a boat—had been interesting but unremarkable to observe, though the skipper looked quite relieved to have it all behind him.
“Finished with engines,” the CO told the engine room, and let out a long breath, shared, Gregory could see, by the entire bridge crew.
“Captain?” the retired Army officer asked.
“Yes?”
“What is this all about, exactly?”
“Well, isn’t it kinda obvious?” Blandy responded. “We have a shooting war with the Chinese. They have ICBMs, and I suppose the SecDef wants to be able to shoot them down if they loft one at Washington. SACLANT is also sending an Aegis to New York, and I’d bet Pacific Fleet has some looking out for Los Angeles and San Francisco. Probably Seattle, too. There’s a lot of ships there anyway, and a good weapons locker. Do you have spare copies of your software?”
“Sure.”
“Well, we’ll have a phone line from the dock in a few minutes. We’ll see if there’s a way for you to upload it to other interested parties.”
“Oh,” Dr. Gregory observed quietly. He really should have thought that one all the way through.
This is RED WOLF FOUR. I have visual contact with the Chinese advance guard,” the regimental commander called on the radio. ”About ten kilometers south of us.”
“Very well,” Sinyavskiy replied. Just where Bondarenko and his American helpers said they were. Good. There were two other general officers in his command post, the CGs of 201st and 80th Motor Rifle divisions, and the commander of the 34th was supposed to be on his way as well, though 94th had turned and reoriented itself to attack east from a point about thirty kilometers to the south.
Sinyavskiy took the old, sodden cigar from his mouth and tossed it out into the grass, pulling another from his tunic pocket and lighting it. It was a Cuban cigar, and superb in its mildness. His artillery commander was on the other side of the map table—just a couple of planks on saw-horses, which was perfect for the moment. Close by were holes dug should the Chinese send some artillery fire their way, and most important of all, the wires which led to his communications station, set a full kilometer to the west—that was the first thing the Chinese would try to shoot at, because they’d expect him to be there. In fact the only humans present were four officers and seven sergeants, in armored personnel carriers dug into the ground for safety. It was their job to repair anything the Chinese might manage to break.
“So, Comrades, they come right into our parlor, eh?” he said for those around him. Sinyavskiy had been a soldier for twenty-six years. Oddly, he was not the son of a soldier. His father was an instructor in geology at Moscow State University, but ever since the first war movie he’d seen, this was the profession he’d craved to join. He’d done all the work, attended all the schools, studied history with the manic attention common in the Russian army, and the Red Army before it. This would be his Battle of the Kursk Bulge, remembering the battle where Vatutin and Rokossovskiy had smashed Hitler’s last attempt to retake the offensive in Russia—where his mother country had begun the long march that had ended at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. There, too, the Red Army had been the recipient of brilliant intelligence information, letting them know the time, place, and character of the German attack, and so allowing them to prepare so well that even the best of the German field commanders, Erich von Manstein, could do no more than break his teeth on the Russian steel.
And so it will be here, Sinyavskiy promised himself. The only unsatisfactory part was that he was stuck here in this camouflaged tent instead of in the line with his men, but, no, he wasn’t a captain anymore, and his place was here, to fight the battle on a goddamned printed map.
“RED WOLF, you will commence firing when the advance guard gets to within eight hundred meters.”
“Eight hundred meters, Comrade General,” the commander of his tank regiment acknowledged. “I can see them quite clearly now.”
“What exactly can you see?”
“It appears to be a battalion-strength formation, principally Type 90 tanks, some Type 98s but not too many of those, spread out as though they went to sub-unit commanders. Numerous tracked personnel carriers. I do not see any artillery-spotting vehicles, however. What do we know of their artillery?”
“It’s rolling, not set up for firing. We’re watching them,” Sinyavskiy assured him.
“Excellent. They are now two kilometers off by my range finder.”
“Stand by.”
“I will do that, Command.”
“I hate waiting,” Sinyavskiy commented to the officers around him. They all nodded, having the same prejudice. He hadn’t seen Afghanistan in his younger years, having served mainly in 1st and 2nd Guards Tank armies in Germany back then, preparing to fight against NATO, an event which blessedly had never taken place. This was his very first experience with real combat, and it hadn’t really started yet, and he was ready for it to start.
Okay, if they light those missiles up, what can we do about it?” Ryan asked.
“If they launch ’em, there’s not a goddamned thing but run for cover,” Secretary Bretano said.
“That’s good for us. We’ll all get away. What about the people who live in Washington, New York, and all the other supposed targets?” POTUS asked.
“I’ve ordered some Aegis cruisers to the likely targets that are near the water,” THUNDER went on. “I had one of my people from TRW look at the possibility of upgrading the missile systems to see if they might do an intercept. He’s done the theoretical work, and he says it looks good on the simulators, but that’s a ways from a practical test, of course. It’s better than nothing, though.”
“Okay, where are the ships?”
“There’s one here now,” Bretano answered.
“Oh? When did that happen?” Robby Jackson asked.
“Less than an hour ago. Gettysburg. There’s another one going to New York—and San Francisco and Los Angeles. Also Seattle, though that’s not really a target as far as we know. The software upgrade is going out to them to get their missiles reprogrammed.”
“Okay, that’s something. What about taking those missiles out, before they can launch?” Ryan asked next.
“The Chinese silos have recently been upgraded in protection, steel armor on the concrete covers—shaped like a Chinese coolie hat, it will probably deflect most bombs, but not the deep penetrators, the GBU-27s we used on the railroad bridges—”
“If they have any left over there. Better ask Gus Wallace,” the Vice President warned.
“What do you mean?” Bretano asked.
“I mean we never made all that many of them, and the Air Force must have dropped about forty last night.”
“I’ll check that,” SecDef promised.
“What if he doesn’t?” Jack asked.
“Then either we get some more in one big hurry, or we think up something else,” TOMCAT replied.
“Like what, Robby?”
“Hell, send in a special-operations team and blow them the fuck up,” the former fighter pilot suggested.
“I wouldn’t much want to try that myself,” Mickey Moore observed.
“Beats the hell out of a five-megaton bomb going off on Capitol Hill, Mickey,” Jackson shot back. “Look, the preferred thing to do is find out if Gus Wallace has the right bombs. It’s a long stretch for the Black Jets, but you can tank them going and coming—and put fighters up to protect the tankers. It’s complicated, but we practice that sort of thing. If he doesn’t have the goddamned bombs, we fly them to him, assuming there are any. You know, weapons storage isn’t a cornucopia, guys. There’s a finite, discrete number for every item in the inventory.”
“General Moore,” Ryan said, “call General Wallace and find out, right now, if you would.”
“Yes, sir.” Moore stood and l
eft the Situation Room.
“Look,” Ed Foley said, pointing to the TV. “It’s started.”
The wood line erupted in a sheet of flame two kilometers across. The sight caused the eyes of the Chinese tankers to flare, but most of the front rank of tank crews didn’t have time for much more than that. Of the thirty tanks in that line, only three escaped immediate destruction. It was little better for the personnel carriers interspersed with them.
“You may commence firing, Colonel,” Sinyavskiy told his artillery commander.
The command was relayed at once, and the ground shook beneath their feet.
It was spectacular to see on the computer terminal. The Chinese had walked straight into the ambush, and the effect of the Russian opening volley was ghastly to behold.
Major Tucker took in a deep breath as he saw several hundred men lose their lives.
“Back to their artillery,” Bondarenko ordered.
“Yes, sir.” Tucker complied at once, altering the focus of the high-altitude camera and finding the Chinese artillery. It was mainly of the towed sort, being pulled behind trucks and tractors. They were a little slow getting the word. The first Russian shells were falling around them before any effort was made to stop the trucks and lift the limbers off the towing hooks, and for all that the Chinese gunners worked rapidly.
But theirs was a race against Death, and Death had a head start. Tucker watched one gun crew struggle to manhandle their 122-mm gun into a firing position. The gunners were loading the weapon when three shells landed close enough to upset the weapon and kill more than half their number. Zooming in the camera, he could see one private writhing on the ground, and there was no one close by to offer him assistance.
“It is a miserable business, isn’t it?” Bondarenko observed quietly.
“Yeah,” Tucker agreed. When a tank blew up it was easy to tell yourself that a tank was just a thing. Even though you knew that three or four human beings were inside, you couldn’t see them. As a fighter pilot never killed a fellow pilot, but only shot down his aircraft, so Tucker adhered to the Air Force ethos that death was something that happened to objects rather than people. Well, that poor bastard with blood on his shirt wasn’t a thing, was he? He backed off the camera, taking a wider field that permitted godlike distancing from the up-close-and-personal aspects of the observation.
“Better that they should have remained in their own country, Major,” the Russian explained to him.
Jesus, what a mess,” Ryan said. He’d seen death up-close-and-personal himself in his time, having shot people who had at the time been quite willing to shoot him, but that didn’t make this imagery any the more palatable. Not by a long fucking shot. The President turned.
“Is this going out, Ed?” he asked the DCI.
“Ought to be,” Foley replied.
And it was, on a URL—“Uniform Resource Locator” in ‘Netspeak-called http://www.darkstarfeed.cia.gov/siberiabattle/realtime.ram. It didn’t even have to be advertised. Some ’Net crawlers stumbled onto it in the first five minutes, and the “hits” from people looking at the “streaming video” site climbed up from 0 to 10 in a matter of three minutes. Then some of them must have ducked into chat rooms to spread the word. The monitoring program for the URL at CIA headquarters also kept track of the locations of the people logging into it. The first Asian country, not unexpectedly, was Japan, and the fascination of the people there in military operations guaranteed a rising number of hits. The video also included audio, the real-time comments of Air Force personnel giving some perverse color-commentary back to their comrades in uniform. It was sufficiently colorful that Ryan commented on it.
“It’s not meant for anyone much over the age of thirty to hear,” General Moore said, coming back into the room.
“What’s the story on the bombs?” Jackson asked at once.
“He’s only got two of them,” Moore replied. “The nearest others are at the factory, Lockheed-Martin, Sunnyvale. They’re just doing a production run right now.”
“Uh-oh,” Robby observed. “Back to Plan B.”
“It might have to be a special operation, then, unless, Mr. President, that is, you are willing to authorize a strike with cruise missiles.”
“What kind of cruise missiles?” Ryan asked, knowing the answer even so.
“Well, we have twenty-eight of them on Guam with W-80 warheads. They’re little ones, only about three hundred pounds. It has two settings, one-fifty or one-seventy kilotons.”
“Thermonuclear weapons, you mean?”
General Moore let out a breath before replying. “Yes, Mr. President.”
“That’s the only option we have for taking those missiles out?” He didn’t have to say that he would not voluntarily launch a nuclear strike.
“We could go in with conventional smart bombs—GBU- 10s and -15s. Gus has enough of those, but not deep penetrators, and the protection on the silos would have a fair chance at deflecting the weapon away from the target. Now, that might not matter. The CSS-4 missiles are delicate bastards, and the impact even of a miss could scramble their guidance systems ... but we couldn’t be sure.”
“I’d prefer that those things not fly.”
“Jack, nobody wants them to fly,” the Vice President said. “Mickey, put together a plan. We need something to take them out, and we need it in one big fuckin’ hurry.”
“I’ll call SOCOM about it, but, hell, they’re down in Tampa.”
“Do the Russians have special-operations people?” Ryan asked.
“Sure, it’s called Spetsnaz.”
“And some of these missiles are targeted on Russia?”
“It certainly appears so, yes, sir,” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs confirmed.
“Then they owe us one, and they damned well owe it to themselves,” Jack said, reaching for a phone. “I need to talk to Sergey Golovko in Moscow,” he told the operator.
The American President,” his secretary said.
“Ivan Emmetovich!” Golovko said in hearty greeting. “The reports from Siberia are good.”
“I know, Sergey, I’m watching it live now myself. Want to do it yourself?”
“It is possible?”
“You have a computer with a modem?”
“One cannot exist without the damned things,” the Russian replied.
Ryan read off the URL identifier. “Just log onto that. We’re putting the feed from our Dark Star drones onto the Internet.”
“Why is that, Jack?” Golovko asked at once.
“Because as of two minutes ago, one thousand six hundred and fifty Chinese citizens are watching it, and the number is going up fast.”
“A political operation against them, yes? You wish to destabilize their government?”
“Well, it won’t hurt our purposes if their citizens find out what’s happening, will it?”
“The virtues of a free press. I must study this. Very clever, Ivan Emmetovich.”
“That’s not why I called.”
“Why is that, Tovarisch Prezidyent?” the SVR chairman asked, with sudden concern at the change in his tone. Ryan was not one to conceal his feelings well.
“Sergey, we have a very adverse indication from their Politburo. I’m faxing it to you now,” he heard. “I’ll stay on the line while you read it.”
Golovko wasn’t surprised to see the pages arrive on his personal fax machine. He had Ryan’s personal numbers, and the Americans had his. It was just one way for an intelligence service to demonstrate its prowess in a harmless way. The first sheets to come across were the English translation of the Chinese ideographs that came through immediately thereafter.
Sergey, I sent you our original feed in case your linguists or psychologists are better than ours,” the President said, with an apologetic glance at Dr. Sears. The CIA analyst waved it off. ”They have twelve CSS-4 missiles, half aimed at you, half at us. I think we need to do something about those things. They may not be entirely rational, the way things are goi
ng now.”
“And your shore bombardment might have pushed them to the edge, Mr. President,” the Russian said over the speakerphone. “I agree, this is a matter of some concern. Why don’t you bomb the things with your brilliant bombs from your magical invisible bombers.”
“Because we’re out of bombs, Sergey. They ran out of the sort they need.”
“Nichevo” was the reaction.
“You should see it from my side. My people are thinking about a commando-type operation.”
“I see. Let me consult with some of my people. Give me twenty minutes, Mr. President.”
“Okay, you know where to reach me.” Ryan punched the kill button on the phone and looked sourly at the tray of coffee things. “One more cup of this shit and I’m going to turn into an urn myself.”
