Jack and his swimmers would be in Russia only as unarmed instructors. They would be based at the Arkhara airfield and were under strict orders to neither participate in any Russian operations nor get anywhere near the Chinese border.
******
Everything was cooking right along at The Detachment with additional troops having been drafted in from the Metz garrison on temporary duty to help in the warehouses. The Detachment’s permanent staff were working around the clock with the new arrivals to load pallets and truck them to the Reims airport.
So far the pallets put together at The Detachment had been going out of Reims on regular C-130s. But, because of a combination of slow-arriving supplies and a shortage of tankers for aerial refueling, not enough pallets has yet reached the Russians to have much of an impact.
That was about to change. The supplies and equipment we hoped to send to the Russian east had finally begun pouring in to The Detachment. And, starting as early as tomorrow morning, we will begin using the planes of two newly assigned squadrons of our latest extended range C-130s and one squadron of C-17 Globemasters.
Some of the new C-130s were already en route to Reims with equipment and supplies for the pallets; others were flying direct from California and Alaska to the Russian Far East with food and payroll money for the Russian troops.
And although their crews don’t know it yet, six of our extended range C-130s will have their American markings painted out and turned over to Russian crews. Danovsky will use them to fly in reinforcements and materials from western Russia.
The American air crews delivering the planes will stay with them for a while as instructors to help the Russian air crews transition into them. But they will sure as hell be explicitly ordered to never fly with the Russians on actual missions once the war starts.
That we were actually doing something to support the Russians so they wouldn’t need to use their nukes was the good news. The bad news was that Ann was really pissed. I had just told her I would be going out myself as early as tomorrow afternoon.
I need to scope out how the situation is shaping up and the one thing I damn sure know from experience is that it can’t be done from thousands of miles away.
******
“Please wake up General. We’re about thirty minutes out of Khabarovsk.”
“Oh. Right. Thanks Bobby.”
“There are some messages for you, Sir. And Sandy’s got a hot breakfast you can eat while you read them. Everyone else has already eaten.”
According to the messages, both the American and Russian airlifts are gathering momentum and moving into high gear. The Russian planes are bringing in Spetsnaz, various handheld and vehicle-mounted missiles from what was left of Moscow’s inventory, and volunteers anxious to earn dollars to support their families; they are taking out Russian dependents as well as Russian civilians with sufficient foreign currency to bribe the gatekeepers and the Russian plane crews.
The American planes were bringing food supplies, particularly meat, fruit, and dairy products, into various Russian airfields. They were also bringing in money, green American twenty dollar bills, and American Special Forces troops to pass them out.
It's settled. Every Russian soldier in the east is to get an “eastern allowance” of an additional five hundred dollars per month in green dollars regardless of his rank, a huge increase in their pay. But it's the navy frogmen who go out as demolition swimmers who will really score—they will each get an additional four years pay, which is a gazillion of the new government's worthless rubles, and twenty thousand dollars for each successful mission. It is to be payable immediately upon their return from each mission.
It’s sort of like a combination of an incentive bonus and the extra pay our soldiers get if they are in a combat zone and the extra cost of living pay they get if they serve in Alaska. The big difference is that Alaska is prosperous, beautiful and relatively safe; the Russian East is poor, drab and dangerous.
Our planes were also carrying out Russian dependents. We were carrying them to the States on our return flights and putting them on civilian carriers to take them back to Russia. This was already turning into an unexpected problem. Some of the Russian military wives have been defecting, seeking asylum in the states rather than continuing on to Russia. I wonder how their husbands and Moscow will respond when that word gets out.
And, miracle of miracles, the Russian grunts and junior officers were beginning to actually get paid, even the sailors and naval infantry at the big naval base at Vladivostok; Hammond was sending the money, all in green twenties, with a number of two-man Special Forces teams assigned to each Russian division to guard it and pass it out. The payments had already started.
Bill Hammond made a smart decision when he assigned the Special Forces guys from the Group at Fort Bragg to handle the delivery of the food and money to the Russian troops. Many of them served in Afghanistan and Iraq and had experience paying and feeding foreign troops. Even more importantly, they totally understand the importance of not letting the Russian senior officers and government officials get their hands on the money.
One of the messages I leafed through as we prepared to land was about the money. It seems Moscow wants the money to pay the soldiers routed through Moscow and the Secretary Sanders thinks that doing so would be “an important gesture.”
My response to the inquiry from the President’s Chief of Staff was probably not well thought out: “Fuck the gesture. It’s more important that the troops be paid than meaningless politicians are bribed.”
Out of the corner of my eye I could see the air force sergeant encoding the message smile as he typed it into the coding machine.
******
Brigadiers Goldman of the Air Force and Woods of the Army, and the ever jovial Colonel Lindauer, were all waiting at the foot of the portable stairs as I walked down the steps from the plane with three of my aides, Colonel Peterson, Captain Shapiro and Sergeant Teniers.
Hurrying up as we walked down the stairs was one of Danovsky’s translators, Lieutenant Basilov. He looked anxious.
Basilof’s the slender young guy with short hair and bad teeth who had acted as Shokalov’s translator when I was here the first time. Basilov was now assigned to Woods and Goldman as their interpreter “in case your Colonel Lindauer is not available.” Basilof was apparently the one of the few officers at Danovsky’s headquarters who was fluent in English; he was also almost certainly some kind of an intelligence officer.
Come to think of it, I thought as I stepped off the stairs, I need to send a message to Safford and Hammond reminding them that any people we send out should be accompanied by Russian speaking translators whenever possible.
Basilof pushed his way forward in order to be the first to greet me.
“I think I secrets no betray, General Evans, when I say General Danovsky is anxious very much for talk. He has sent me and your generals in personal car to carry you to him directly.” Woods and Goldman nodded. Grimly I noted. Wonder what’s up.
On the drive in from the airfield Lindauer softly said, “something’s up. Anybody have any idea what it might be?”
*****
Danovsky's headquarters was a beehive of activity and we could hear him bellowing into a phone as we entered the outer area of his office where his aides and visitors sat while they waited to be summoned.
We were immediately ushered into his office. He nodded a welcome, and then a moment later put his hand over the phone and said something to Basilov, with an ordering motion of his chin towards me. Then he resumed talking loudly into the phone.
“There has been a contact report from a platoon of village reservists. This morning a large Chinese unit, maybe as many as an entire battalion according to the local platoon commander, crossed the border about two hundred kilometers south of here.”
Danovsky was continuing to shout into the phone. I can’t understand a word of what he is saying but it was obvious from the tone of his voice that he was giving very pointed
orders to someone.
A few moments later Danovsky put the phone down and welcomed me with a big Russian bear hug.
“It is good to see you, Richard Ivanovich. The Chinese are crossing the border and we have taken several prisoners. But we don’t know how many have crossed or their purpose or if more are coming. We are trying to find translators so we can question them.”
He needs translators who can speak Chinese? That’s surprising. I would have thought he would have lots of them. I’ll have to ask Bill Hammond to get more Chinese and Russian translators out here as soon as possible. Also, if it hasn’t been done already, maybe he can arrange for increased satellite surveillance of the border.
“I suspect the Chinese found out that we are moving our troops around and are trying to find out where they are going and how many are left on the border. On the other hand there may be a full scale infiltration going on just like the one you described in your book about General Roberts.”
“Uh…” I asked, “Yuri Andreovich, what exactly is the current situation?”
******
Danovsky’s description of what he was doing was quite interesting. He appeared to have taken my experience with choke points to heart. And he thanked me profusely for the food and monetary assistance that was beginning to pour in from the United States. “More than we’ve been getting from Moscow.”
There is nothing like good hot food, green dollars, and officers giving decisive orders to restore the morale of the troops. I just hope the Special Forces guys are actually getting the food and money to the Russian troops and their families. Got to check that with the Special Forces colonel Bill put in charge of the program out here. His name is Bowie. I haven’t met him yet.
The bottom line was that Danovsky has been pulling some of his troops and engineers away from their units and using them to build three strong choke points—two, a primary and a secondary, where the railroad goes through a couple of particularly mountainous areas that would be hard to bypass, and a third on the Russian side of the relatively short Trans-Siberian branch line running south to the Amur River border and then over the river on a bridge to the Chinese city of Heihe.
At least, in the past the railroad ran over the bridge to Heihe. The Chinese closed the border during the Second Usurri River War in 2003 and never reopened it. And Danovsky certainly didn’t want them to start now—the bridge was high on the list of the bridges that needed to be knocked out as soon as the war started.
Danovsky’s troops and their equipment were mostly moving to the choke points by train. Also moving by train were the troops assigned to guard the Trans-Siberian's key bridges. The trains that don’t stop at the choke points and key bridges keep going until they reach the rail junction at Podovsk, about six hundred and fifty miles to the east. That’s where the branch line of the Trans-Siberian cuts away towards Heihe. There was a good airfield and a lot of fuel reserves in storage just beyond the Podovsk junction.
Many civilian refugees were also moving westward to Podovsk to escape the coming fighting and to avoid the fighting and being trapped inside China if the Chinese win. What they didn’t know was that, when the Chinese actually invade, Shokalov plans to declare the cities and villages he can’t defend to be open cities and not even try to defend them; most of the refugees would probably be safer if they remained at home.
Shokalov’s plan was simple. Try to hold the Chinese at the border. If that fails, which he and everyone else including me expects, he’d try to hold them at Khabarovsk and at the choke points in the mountains along the railroad right of way. And if the main body of invading Chinese was able to push westward and reach the choke points, he planned to cut them off from their supplies and reinforcements by using “left behind” partisan units to attack the Chinese rear areas.
He also intended to cut up their rear with armor raids. “Just the way they tell me you did to us a couple of months ago.”
But how and where will the Chinese attack and does Danovsky have enough time to get ready, and will he have enough men and equipment to drive the Chinese out of Russia without using his nukes? There were a lot of unanswered questions. There always are.
******
Total chaos was the best way to describe the situation we saw when we visited the bedraggle and rundown train station at Khabarovsk. Around the clock all the available trains, including those normally based further inland and at Vladivostok, were constantly loading military and construction equipment and supplies and pulling out for the choke points under construction and to the rail junction with the branchline that used to run down to the Chinese city of Heihe.
The trains coming in from Vladivostok and going out from Khabarovsk were an impressive sight to see with the troops packed around their tanks, armored vehicles, and construction equipment. Some of the troops were even riding on the roofs of the passenger and freight cars. Civilian passengers were allowed to take any remaining space with whatever household items they can carry aboard. At least that was supposed to be the plan. In reality the troops and civilians were riding everywhere they could squeeze in including on the train roofs and the equipment-carrying flat cars.
As we drove away from the station I noticed an old coal burning switch engine that had been pressed into service. It was puffing little black smoke rings into the air as it moved down the line pulling a handful of flat cars loaded with bulldozers and troops.
Military trucks, military dependents, and civilian vehicles were not going out on the trains. The dependents were being sent out in the planes that brought in supplies; the military trucks and civilian vehicles were required to drive on the two lane east-west dirt highway that doubled as the service road along the Trans-Siberian Railroad’s tracks in this part of Russia.
Both lanes of the service road had been converted to one-way traffic for most of the day. And civilian vehicles weren’t allowed past the checkpoint at the edge of the city unless they could show that they were carrying enough fuel to make the entire six hundred and fifty mile trip to Podovsk. Many were being turned back. I was not at all sure that was better than running out of fuel in the middle of nowhere and having to start walking.
For some strange reason the railroad service road known as the Trans-Siberian Highway was complete with separate road bridges from Lake Baikal to Khabarovsk and Vladivostok. It was in the middle of Russia, to the west of Lake Baikal where the road bridges were never built and roads were not cut into the hillsides.
In the past, the cars and trucks driving on the service road had been loaded on railroad flat cars and carried around the missing sections to where the road began again. That "fix" eliminated the need to build road bridges and difficult stretches of road. It also eliminated any chance of reinforcements and supplies reaching Danovsky's men by road.
We used to do the same thing in Alaska to get cars and trucks from Anchorage to the Port of Whittier and it worked pretty well. Danovsky’s problem, of course, was that the railroad could not be used to fill the gaps in the road system because so many of the railroad’s key bridges were destroyed.
Things were also problematic about three hundred miles west of Kharbarovsk at Arkhara, according to Brigadier Woods. He flew out with General Turpin for a visit yesterday. Arkhara was important because it had an air force base and would be Danovsky’s supply base and rally point if he was forced out of Kharbarovsk. At the moment its two relatively small sidings were jammed with unloading trains and construction crews were working around the clock to expand them and build a third.
Arkhara was either a very small city or a very large village depending on how you measure such things. Military dependents that somehow ended up in Arkhara by train were being bussed by road to the military air field. From there they were being evacuated by air on a space available basis.
Civilians arriving in Arkhara by the trains, on the other hand, were being trucked or forced to walk to a haphazard tent camp a few miles beyond the village. They were being held there until space could be found for them
on the American and Russian planes that were periodically bringing supplies into Arkhara. So far very few civilians have gotten out unless they had enough money to bribe their way on board one of the departing planes.
Jack Peterson had gone out to Arkhara for a look while I was in the States. He described the civilian tent camp as a barely livable open sewer with more people arriving every day than American and Russian supply flights could possibly carry out; I can only wonder what the camp will be like in the Siberian winter. If we stick with the Russians we’ll probably end up having to run a humanitarian relief project until the refugees can get out on empty supply planes, or perhaps even a refugee airlift.
******
Television coverage of the unexpected arrival in the United States of forlorn and destitute Russian refugees coming in on the returning American supply planes finally awakened Americans to the possibility that the Secretary of State’s treaty has gotten us enmeshed in another war. Some of the politicians and media were beginning to blame her for involving us while others, mostly the knee jerk media supporters of her party, were defending her “for doing the right thing.” Whatever the hell that is.
Whatever the pros and cons of the treaty, the Secretary’s position as a potential candidate for the Presidency seemed to have suffered a serious setback. And, as you might imagine, Khabarovsk and Podovsk were suddenly flooded with American and other television crews sending back stories of the "Russian retreat” and trying to find people who speak English to interview—which, in the best tradition of today's American news tradition, tended to interviewing other newly arrived and equally uninformed members of the media.
Fortunately, their search for English speakers who might have some idea what was happening had not been very successful; there are very few English-speakers on the ground in Siberia other than our Special Forces guys at the off-limits Podovsk air base, and they’re hard to spot because they were all wearing Russian fatigues and caps, even me. Our Special Forces troops make really good Russians with their beards, camouflaged Russian fatigues, and their inability to speak English when questioned by reporters.
Our Next Great War Page 8
