“Nice thing about being a CINC, Mike. You’re allowed to think on your own a little.”
“What a fucking mess,” General-Colonel Bondarenko observed to his drink. He wasn’t talking about the news of the day, but about his command, even though the officers’ club in Chabarsovil was comfortable. Russian general officers have always liked their comforts, and the building dated back to the czars. It had been built during the Russo-Japanese war at the beginning of the previous century and expanded several times. You could see the border between pre-revolution and post-revolution workmanship. Evidently, German POWs hadn’t been trained this far cast—they’d built most of the dachas for the party elite of the old days. But the vodka was fine, and the fellowship wasn’t too bad, either.
“Things could be better, Comrade General,” Bondarenko’s operations officer agreed. “But there is much that can be done the right way, and little bad to undo.”
That was a gentle way of saying that the Far East Military District was less of a military command than it was a theoretical exercise. Of the five motor-rifle divisions nominally under his command, only one, the 265th, was at eighty-percent strength. The rest were at best regimental-size formations, or mere cadres. He also had theoretical command of a tank division—about a regiment and a half—plus thirteen reserve divisions that existed not so much on paper as in some staff officer’s dreams. The one thing he did have was huge equipment stores, but a lot of that equipment dated back to the 1960s, or even earlier. The best troops in his area of command responsibility were not actually his to command. These were the Border Guards, battalion-sized formations once part of the KGB, now a semi-independent armed service under the command of the Russian president.
There was also a defense line of sorts, which dated back to the 1930s and showed it. For this line, numerous tanks—some of them actually German in origin—were buried as bunkers. In fact, more than anything else the line was reminiscent of the French Maginot Line, also a thing of the 1930s. It had been built to protect the Soviet Union against an attack by the Japanese, and then upgraded halfheartedly over the years to protect against the People’s Republic of China—a defense never forgotten, but never fully remembered either. Bondarenko had toured parts of it the previous day. As far back as the czars, the engineering officers of the Russian Army had never been fools. Some of the bunkers were sited with shrewd, even brilliant appreciation for the land, but the problem with bunkers was explained by a recent American aphorism: If you can see it, you can hit it, and if you can hit it, you can kill it. The line had been conceived and built when artillery fire had been a chancy thing, and an aircraft bomb was fortunate to hit the right county. Now you could use a fifteen-centimeter gun as accurately as a sniper rifle, and an aircraft could select which windowpane to put the bomb through on a specific building.
“Andrey Petrovich, I am pleased to hear your optimism. What is your first recommendation?”
“It will be simple to improve the camouflage on the border bunkers. That’s been badly neglected over the years,” Colonel Aliyev told his commander-in-chief. “That will reduce their vulnerability considerably.”
“Allowing them to survive a serious attack for … sixty minutes, Andrushka?”
“Maybe even ninety, Comrade General. It’s better than five minutes, is it not?” He paused for a sip of vodka. Both had been drinking for half an hour. “For the 265th, we must begin a serious training program at once. Honestly, the division commander did not impress me greatly, but I suppose we must give him a chance.”
Bondarenko: “He’s been out here so long, maybe he likes the idea of Chinese food.”
“General, I was out here as a lieutenant,” Aliyev said. “I remember the political officers telling us that the Chinese had increased the length of the bayonets on their AK-47s to get through the extra fat layer we’d grown after discarding true Marxism-Leninism and eating too much.”
“Really?” Bondarenko asked.
“That is the truth, Gennady Iosifovich.”
“So, what do we know of the PLA?”
“There are a lot of them, and they’ve been training seriously for about four years now, much harder than we’ve been doing.”
“They can afford to,” Bondarenko observed sourly. The other thing he’d learned on arriving was how thin the cupboard was for funds and training equipment. But it wasn’t totally bleak. He had stores of consumable supplies that had been stocked and piled for three generations. There was a virtual mountain of shells for the 100-mm guns on his many—and long-since obsolete—T-54/55 tanks, for example, and a sea of diesel fuel hidden away in underground tanks too numerous to count. The one thing he had in the Far East Military District was infrastructure, built up by the Soviet Union over generations of institutional paranoia. But that wasn’t the same as an army to command.
“What about aviation?”
“Mainly grounded,” Aliyev answered glumly. “Parts problems. We used up so much in Chechnya that there isn’t enough to go around, and the Western District still has first call.”
“Oh? Our political leadership expects the Poles to invade us?”
“That’s the direction Germany is in,” the G-3 pointed out.
“I’ve been fighting that out with the High Command for three years,” Bondarenko growled, thinking of his time as chief of operations for the entire Russian army. “People would rather listen to themselves than to others with the voice of reason.” He looked up at Aliyev. “And if the Chinese come?”
The theater operations officer shrugged. “Then we have a problem.”
Bondarenko remembered the maps. It wasn’t all that far to the new gold strike . . . and the ever-industrious army engineers were building the damned roads to it…
“Tomorrow, Andrey Petrovich. Tomorrow we start drawing up a training regimen for the whole command,” CINC-FAR EAST told his own G-3.
C H A P T E R – 27
Transportation
Diggs didn’t entirely like what he saw, but it wasn’t all that unexpected. A battalion of Colonel Lisle’s 2nd Brigade was out there, maneuvering through the exercise area—clumsily, Diggs thought. He had to amend his thoughts, of course. This wasn’t the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, and Lisle’s 2nd Brigade wasn’t the 11th ACR, whose troopers were out there training practically every day, and as a result knew soldiering about as well as a SURGEON knew cutting. No, 1st Armored Division had turned into a garrison force since the demise of the Soviet Union, and all that wasted time in what was left of Yugoslavia, trying to be “peacekeepers,” hadn’t sharpened their war-fighting skills. That was a term Diggs hated. Peacekeepers be damned, the general thought, they were supposed to be soldiers, not policemen in battle dress uniform. The opposing force here was a German brigade, and by the looks of it, a pretty good one, with their Leopard-11 tanks. Well, the Germans had soldiering in their genetic code somewhere, but they weren’t any better trained than Americans, and training was the difference between some ignorant damned civilian and a soldier. Training meant knowing where to look and what to do when you saw something there. Training meant knowing what the tank to your left was going to do without having to look. Training meant knowing how to fix your tank or Bradley when something broke. Training eventually meant pride, because with training came confidence, the sure knowledge that you were the baddest motherfucker in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and you didn’t have to fear no evil at all.
Colonel Boyle was flying the UH-60A in which Diggs was riding.
Diggs was in the jump scat immediately aft and between the pilots’ seats. They were cruising about five hundred feet over the ground.
“Oops, that platoon down there just walked into something,” Boyle reported, pointing. Sure enough the lead tank’s blinking yellow light started flashing the I’m dead signal.
“Let’s see how the platoon sergeant recovers,” General Diggs said.
They watched, and sure enough, the sergeant pulled the remaining three tanks back while the crew bailed out of the platoon leader’s M1A2 main battle tank. As a practical matter, both it and its crew would probably have survived whatever administrative “hit” it had taken from the Germans. Nobody had yet come up with a weapon to punch reliably through the Chobham armor, but someone might someday, and so the tank crews were not encouraged to think themselves immortal and their tanks invulnerable.
“Okay, that sergeant knows his job,” Diggs observed, as the helicopter moved to another venue. The general saw that Colonel Masterman was making notes aplenty on his pad. “What do you think, Duke?”
“I think they’re at about seventy-five percent efficiency, sir,” the G-3 operations officer replied. “Maybe a little better. We need to put everybody on the SIMNET, to shake ’em all up a little.” That was one of the Army’s better investments. simnet, the simulator network, comprised a warehouse full of Ml and Bradley simulators, linked by supercomputer and satellite with two additional such warehouses, so that highly complex and realistic battles could be fought out electronically. It had been hugely expensive, and while it could never fully simulate training in the field, it was nevertheless a training aid without parallel.