General Peng Xi-Wang, commander of the Red Banner 34th Shock Army, only sixteen kilometers away, looked through powerful spotting glasses at the Russian frontier. Thirty-fourth Shock was a Type A Group Army, and comprised about eighty thousand men. He had an armored division, two mechanized ones, a motorized infantry division, and other attachments, such as an independent artillery brigade under his direct command. Fifty years of age, and a party member since his twenties, Peng was a long-term professional soldier who’d enjoyed the last ten years of his life. Since commanding his tank regiment as a senior colonel, he’d been able to train his troops incessantly on what had become his home country.
The Shenyang Military District comprised the north-easternmost part of the People’s Republic. It was composed of hilly, wooded land, and had warm summers and hitter winters. There was a touch of early ice on the Amur River below Peng now, but from a military point of view, the trees were the real obstacle. Tanks could knock individual trees down, but not every ten meters. No, you had to drive between and around them, and while there was room for that, it was hard on the drivers, and it ate up fuel almost as efficiently as tipping the fuel drum over on its side and just pouring it out. There were some roads and railroad rights-of-way, and if he ever went north, he’d be using them, though that made for good ambush opportunities, if the Russians had a good collection of antitank weapons. But the Russian doctrine, going back half a century, was that the best antitank weapon was a better tank. In their war with the fascists, the Soviet army had enjoyed possession of a superb tank in the T-34. They’d built a lot of the Rapier antitank guns, and duly copied NATO guided antitank weapons, but you dealt with those by blanketing an area with artillery fire, and Peng had lots of guns and mountains of shells to deal with the unprotected infantrymen who had to steer the missiles into their targets. He wished he had the Russian-designed Arena anti-missile system, which had been designed to protect their tanks from the swarm of NATO’s deadly insects, but he didn’t, and he heard it didn’t work all that well anyway.
The spotting glasses were Chinese copies of a German Zeiss model adopted for use by the Soviet Army of old. They zoomed from twenty to fifty-power, allowing him an intimate view of the other side of the river. Peng came up here once a month or so, which allowed him to inspect his own border troops, who stood what was really a defensive watch, and a light one at that. He had little concern about a Russian attack into his country. The People’s Liberation Army taught the same doctrine as every army back to the Assyrians of old: The best defense is a good offense. If a war began here, better to begin it yourself. And so Peng had cabinets full of plans to attack into Siberia, prepared by his operations and intelligence people, because that was what operations people did.
“Their defenses look ill-maintained,” Peng observed.
“That is so, Comrade,” the colonel commanding the border-defense regiment agreed. “We see little regular activity there.”
“They are too busy selling their weapons to civilians for vodka,” the army political officer observed. “Their morale is poor, and they do not train anything like we do.”
“They have a new theater commander,” the army’s intelligence chief countered. “A General-Colonel Bondarenko. He is well regarded in Moscow as an intellect and as a courageous battlefield commander from Afghanistan.”
“That means he survived contact once,” Political observed. “Probably with a Kabul whore.”
“It is dangerous to underestimate an adversary,” Intelligence warned.
“And foolish to overestimate one.”
Peng just looked through the glasses. He’d heard his intelligence and political officer spar before. Intelligence tended to be an old woman, but many intelligence officers were like that, and Political, like so many of his colleagues, was sufficiently aggressive to make Genghis Khan seem womanly. As in the theater, officers played the roles assigned to them. His role, of course, was to be the wise and confident commander of one of his country’s premier striking arms, and Peng played that role well enough that he was in the running for promotion to General First Class, and if he played his cards very carefully, in another eight years or so, maybe Marshal. With that rank came real political power and personal riches beyond counting, with whole factories working for his own enrichment. Some of those factories were managed by mere colonels, people with the best of political credentials who knew how to kowtow to their seniors, but Peng had never gone that route. He enjoyed soldering far more than he enjoyed pushing paper and screaming at worker-peasants. As a new second lieutenant, he’d fought the Russians, not very far from this very spot. It had been a mixed experience. His regiment had enjoyed initial success, then had been hammered by a storm of artillery. That had been back when the Red Army, the real Soviet Army of old, had fielded whole artillery divisions whose concentrated fire could shake the very earth and sky, and that border clash had incurred the wrath of the nation the Russians had once been. But no longer. Intelligence told him that the Russian troops on the far side of this cold river were not even a proper shadow of what had once been there. Four divisions, perhaps, and not all of them at full strength. So, however clever this Bondarenko fellow was, if a clash came, he’d have his hands very full indeed.
But that was a political question, wasn’t it? Of course. All the really important things were.
“How are the bridging engineers?” Peng asked, surveying the watery obstacle below.
“Their last exercise went very well, Comrade General,” Operations replied. Like every other army in the world, the PLA had copied the Russian “ribbon” bridge, designed by Soviet engineers in the 1960s to force crossings of all the streams of Western Germany in a NATO/Warsaw Pact war so long expected, but never realized. Except in fiction, mainly Western fiction that had had the NATO side win in every case. Of course. Would capitalists spend money on books that ended their culture? Peng chuckled to himself. Such people enjoyed their illusions . . .
… almost as much as his own country’s Politburo members. That’s the way it was all over the world, Peng figured. The rulers of every land held images in their heads, and tried to make the world conform to them. Some succeeded, and those were the ones who wrote the history books.
“So, what do we expect here?”
“From the Russians?” Intelligence asked. “Nothing that I have heard about. Their army is training a little more, but nothing to be concerned about. If they wanted to come south across that river, I hope they can swim in the cold.”
“The Russians like their comforts too much for that. They’ve grown soft with their new political regime,” Political proclaimed.
“And if we are ordered north?” Peng asked.
“If we give them one hard kick, the whole rotten mess will fall down,” Political answered. He didn’t know that he was exactly quoting another enemy of the Russians.
C H A P T E R – 43
Decisions
The colonel flying Air Force One executed an even better landing than usual. Jack and Cathy Ryan were already awake and showered to alertness, helped by a light breakfast heavy on fine coffee. The President looked out the window to his left and saw troops formed up in precise lines, as the aircraft taxied to its assigned place. “Welcome to Poland, babe. What do you have planned?” “I’m going to spend a few hours at their big teaching hospital. Their chief eye-cutter wants me to look at his operation.” It was always the same for FLOTUS, and she didn’t mind. It came from being an academic physician, treating patients, but also teaching young docs, and observing how her counterparts around the world did their version of her job. Every so often, you saw something new that was worth learning from, or even copying, because smart people happened everywhere, not just at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. It was the one part of the First Lady folderol that she actually enjoyed, because she could learn from it, instead of just being a somewhat flat-chested Barbie doll for the world to gawk at. To this end she was dressed in a beige business suit, whose jacket she would soon exchange for a doc’s proper white lab coat, which was always her favorite item of apparel. Jack was wearing one of his dark-blue white-pinstriped President-of-the-United-States suits, with a maroon striped tie because Cathy liked the color combination, and she really did decide what Jack wore, except for the shirt. SWORDSMAN wore only white cotton shirts with button-down collars, and despite Cathy’s lobbying for something different, on that issue he stood firm. This had caused Cathy to observe more than once that he’d wear the damned things with his tuxedos if convention didn’t demand otherwise.