“Visuals?”
“In a few minutes Galveston will come up off our port beam, sir. Won’t see much of it at sixty meters altitude, of course. Then we cross Galveston Bay with Texas City off our portside, northwest of Galveston. Open water until our check-in position over Smith Point. According to the briefing, Texas air defense will have been alerted by then, and we can expect light to medium flak as we approach Baytown on the north side of Jacinto Bay, where Galveston narrows into the Houston Ship Channel maze.”
“Pick it up,” Semenev said to his copilot.
“Yes, sir,” said the copilot. “Galveston Bay is pinched in by Baytown on the north and La Porte on the south. From there to downtown Houston, a distance of some forty kilometers, the channel dodges peninsulas and islands all the-”
“Good enough. References, Navigator-and don’t use the map.”
“Yes, sir.” The navigator looked up from the chart table. “Hog Island first, then Spilman Island, then Black Duck peninsula to the right and Jennings Island to the left, around Alexander Island and Peggy Lake, skirting Crystal Lake peninsula to the starboard side, and the U.S.S. Texas basin. Then we make a ninety-degree turn to port, enter the narrower portion of the navigation channel, which snakes into the old city past La Porte and Galena Park. Near the-”
Captain Semenev yawned. “Okay. I guess between the three of us we’ll find it somehow. And speaking of Peggy Lake, did you ever hear the one about
A lovely young dancer named Peggy,
Whose performances were always quite leggy,
Could spread her-”
“We’re expected,” said the copilot, nodding toward the puff of black smoke up ahead, over Smith Point.
A moment later an antiaircraft shell burst ahead of them, too far off-target to do any damage.
Captain Semenev unhurriedly reached to one side and pulled the red handle that armed the helicopter’s machine guns and rockets. He pressed the mike button on the control column.
“All units: fifty-five-degree descent. Fan formation. Take evasive action.”
In his earphones he heard the crackle of acknowledgment in quick succession from the seven other gun-ships in his wing. Meanwhile, his helicopter slid down through the sky until he was flat-hatting across the water at five meters. He inched the throttle forward. His air-speed now registered 311 kilometers per hour. Compensating for air pressure, temperature, and an eighteen-kph tailwind, they were clipping the waves at 340 kilometers per hour.
As they made landfall, the flak seemed to become a solid curtain. The Texans were shooting at them with everything they had, but without coordination or significant effect. Intelligence reports from agents among the defenders had assured the Soviet fleet commander that, while the Texans expected helicopter reconnaissance and would do their best to down the choppers, the defenders were certain that the main assault would come from the fleet’s shipboard weapons as it attempted to shoot its way up the channel. Therefore, though tactical surprise had been denied the Soviets, they achieved strategic surprise, for relatively little Texan fire-power was deployed against low-flying aircraft. Even the Texans’ dual-purpose “Chicago organs,” firing 52-mm shells from eight barrels at a rate of 550 per minute, were aimed in flat trajectory, and were not brought to bear effectively until the first wave of Russian aircraft had already passed overhead.
Captain Semenev glanced down the line of helicopters to his port and starboard. The ten wings, eighty aircraft, were largely intact and almost perfectly aligned. Once the coastline was crossed, the formation would separate into two columns. The lead helicopter would speed up, while each one behind took up position in echelon. The two columns, starting at a point five kilometers from the banks of the channel on each side, were to come together like the blades of a shears, one at twenty meters altitude, the other at fifty meters. Instead of successive targets, the defenders would have only a single helicopter to shoot at before the whole flight passed over. The starboard flight would then crisscross below the port flight, and each wing would make a pass at the opposite channel bank before reforming and repeating the maneuver farther upstream. The tracks of the flights were like two sine waves canceling each other out, except that today it was the Texan enemy that was to be erased.
In the brief moments they overflew their confused adversaries on the ground, the Russians unleashed a furious barrage of Gatling-gun fire, rocket-propelled explosives, nerve gas, and napalm. The wake of each Russian gunship was a broad band of desolation. The answering fire was brief: before the antiaircraft batteries could swing around to follow an attacker disappearing over the channel, another would come in low from the opposite direction, its guns belching fire and streaming a deadly fog of poisonous gas. Like twin shuttles on a loom, the Russian columns stitched together the two sides of the channel in devastation as complete and terrifying in its magnitude as a thousand Stalingrads. For while the World War II Battle of Stalingrad claimed the lives of 175,000 Germans in ninety days, the Battle of the Black Channel, as it would become known to history, witnessed the slaughter of double that number in half as many minutes.
The Russians were not invulnerable. Despite heavy armor on the underside of their aircraft, the sustained Texan barrage, which became more concentrated and effective as the battle raged nearer the city proper, brought Russian gunships smoking down in growing numbers. Those who survived the crash were hauled out of smashed cockpits by eager hands. Some died quickly.
Of the 498 Russian helicopters that participated in the Battle of the Black Channel that July sixth, fewer than three hundred returned to their cryptotanker. Though the surviving air crews didn’t share in the general jubilation of the senior officers, who had viewed the battle as televised from airborne and satellite cameras, there was no question that the day had been a huge success for the Russians. Compared with World War II battles against the Germans, the costs in men and materiel had been trifling. More important was the Russian political victory.
So long as Russia’s military and naval might had not been demonstrated, there would always remain some residual doubt as to its efficacy after so many years of disuse-at least in the minds of Americans. President Wynn’s hands-off policy had given the Soviet Union a treasure that the signing of the Washington Protocols later in the year would merely formalize: proof of the futility of defying Russia’s awesome power.
The icing on the cake was the extraordinary propaganda value of the battle. Within hours, Russian reports were being picked up by American newspapers and television from intercepts of Russian communications traffic to Moscow. Sent in the clear after suitable laundering to conceal the extent of Russian losses, the news was heard and seen in American homes even while the battle still raged. The contrast between American and Russian casualties was appalling: an estimated 450,000 to 500,000 Texans dead-mostly by gas-and uncountable wounded, as against a reported Russian loss of thirty-seven helicopters and their crews, scarcely more than a hundred men in all- an unprecedented kill ratio of five-thousand-to-one. Russian reconnaissance planes had been scanning the battlefield from low and high altitudes since the moment the last helicopter wheeled and headed for the Omsk. The vision of hell their cameras relayed to American television networks was etched forever in the minds of those who saw it.
Close-ups showed mangled, incinerated bodies huddled around their pathetic World War II weapons, no match for the enemy’s sophisticated machines of destruction. Buildings were splashed and spattered with human remains, as if a city of slaughterhouses had been simultaneously detonated. Here a child’s arm lay in the middle of the road, the leg half a block away, the rest of the body God knew where. From the rubble came whimpers of the half-dead, mangled, and blinded in the darkness of fallen structures, struggling for breath that would, when it came, bring the peace of the grave, for the air was still layered with the haze of masonry dust mixed with poison gas. The horror of the carnage up close was compounded by the view of the battleground from high altitudes. For a stretch of nearly twenty kilometers, from Galveston Bay almost to the San Jacinto Monument, where it makes its looping swing to the west and south, the ship channel was a huge, angry black scar. The channel waters between the ravaged banks glistened with oil from ruptured tanks. Charred flotsam-the bodies of the dead and carcasses of ships that had been in the path of the raiders-clogged the shallows of the wide waterway. By midafternoon, not a living thing save for the indomitable Houston cockroach was stirring in an area of some one hundred square kilometers.
The American people saw it all, and pondered its implications.
The holocaust had been wrought by the helicopter complement of a single Russian ship, which had, moreover, survived unscathed. One Russian ship. And it was a mere auxiliary to the main battle fleet, untouched, not having deigned to risk smudging its paintwork by engaging the ragtag Texans. In a sense, the Russians were merciful, for the tens of thousands of entrenched Texans around the channel bend, close in to the downtown district, had been spared. The Russians announced over helicopter-borne loudspeakers, however, that anyone showing further resistance would share his countrymen’s fate.