“Correct.” They might be enlisted men, Gregory thought, but that didn’t make them dumb.
“Software fix in the seeker head, right?”
“Also correct. I’ve rewritten the code. Pretty easy job, really. I reprogrammed the way the laser mutates. Ought to work okay if the infrared homing system works as advertised. At least it did in the computer simulations up in Washington.”
“It worked just fine on Shiloh, Doc. We got the videotape aboard somewhere,” Leek assured him. “Wanna see it?” “You bet,” Dr. Gregory said with enthusiasm. “Okay.” Senior Chief Leek checked his watch. “I’m free now. Let me head aft for a smoke, and then we’ll roll the videotape,” he said, sounding like Warner Wolf on WCBS New York.
“You can’t smoke in here?” Leek grunted annoyance. “It’s the New Navy, Doc. The cap’n’s a health Nazi. You gotta go aft to light up. Not even in chief’s quarters,”
Leek groused.
“I quit,” Matson said. “Not a pussy like Tim here.”
“My ass,” Leek responded. “There’s a few real men left aboard.”
“How come you sit sideways here?” Gregory asked, rising to his feet to follow them aft. “The important displays go to the right side of the ship instead of fore and aft. How come?”
” ‘Cuz it helps you puke if you’re in a seaway.” Matson laughed.
“Whoever designed these ships didn’t like sailors much, but at least the air conditioning works.” It rarely got above sixty degrees in the CIC, causing most of the men who worked there to wear sweaters. Aegis cruisers were decidedly not known for their comforts.
This is serious?” Colonel Aliyev asked. It was a stupid question, and he knew it. But it just had to come out anyway, and his commander knew that.
“We have orders to treat it that way, Colonel,” Bondarenko replied crossly. “What do we have to stop them?”
“The 265th Motor-Rifle Division is at roughly fifty percent combat efficiency,” the theater operations officer replied. “Beyond that, two tank regiments at forty percent or so. Our reserve formations are mostly theoretical,” Aliyev concluded. “Our air assets—one regiment of fighter-interceptors ready for operations, another three who don’t have even half their aircraft fit to fly.”
Bondarenko nodded at the news. It was better than it had been upon his arrival in theater, and he’d done well to bring things that far, but that wouldn’t impress the Chinese very much.
“Opposition?” he asked next. Far East’s intelligence officer was another colonel, Vladimir Konstantinovich Tolkunov.
“Our Chinese neighbors are in good military shape, Comrade General. The nearest enemy formation is Thirty-fourth Shock Army, a Type-A Group Army commanded by General Peng Xi-Wang,” he began, showing off what he knew. “That one formation has triple or more our mechanized assets, and is well trained. Chinese aircraft—well, their tactical aircraft number over two thousand, and we must assume they will commit everything to this operation. Comrades, we do not have anything like the assets we need to stop them.”
“So, we will use space to our advantage,” the general proposed. “Of that we have much. We will fight a holding action and await reinforcements from the west. I’ll be talking with Stavka later today. Let’s draw up what we’ll need to stop these barbarians.”
“All down one line of railroad,” Aliyev observed. “And our fucking engineers have been busily clearing a route for the Chinks to take to the oil fields. General, first of all, we need to get our engineers working on minefields. We have millions of mines, and the route the Chinese will take is easily predicted.”
The overall problem was that the Chinese had strategic, if not tactical, surprise. The former was a political exercise, and like Hitler in 1941, the Chinese had pulled it off. At least Bondarenko would have tactical warning, which was more than Stalin had allowed his Red Army. He also expected to have freedom of maneuver, because also unlike Stalin, his President Grushavoy would be thinking with his brain instead of his balls. With freedom of maneuver Bondarenko would have the room to play a mobile war with his enemy, denying the Chinese a chance at decisive engagement, allowing hard contact only when it served his advantage. Then he’d be able to wait for reinforcements to give him a chance to fight a set-piece battle on his own terms, at a place and time of his choosing.
“How good are the Chinese, really, Pavel?”
“The People’s Liberation Army has not engaged in large-scale combat operations for over fifty years, since the Korean War with the Americans, unless you cite the border clashes we had with them in the late ’60s and early ’70s. In that case, the Red Army dealt with them well, but to do that we had massive firepower, and the Chinese were only fighting for limited objectives. They are trained largely on our old model. Their soldiers will not have the ability to think for themselves. Their discipline is worse than draconian. The smallest infraction can result in summary execution, and that makes for obedience. At the operational level, their general officers are well-trained in theoretical terms. Qualitatively, their weapons are roughly the equal of ours. With their greater funding, their training levels mean that their soldiers are intimately familiar with their weapons and rudimentary tactics,” Zhdanov told the assembled staff. “But they are probably not our equal in operational-maneuver thinking. Unfortunately, they do have numbers going for them, and quantity has a quality all its own, as the NATO armies used to say of us. What they will want to do, and what I fear they will, is try to roll over us quickly—just crush us and move on to their political and economic objectives as quickly as possible.”
Bondarenko nodded as he sipped his tea. This was mad, and the maddest part of all was that he was playing the role of a NATO commander from 1975—maybe a German one, which was truly insane— faced with adverse numbers, but blessed, as the Germans had not been, with space to play with, and Russians had always used space to their advantage. He leaned forward:
“Very well. Comrades, we will deny them the opportunity for decisive engagement. If they cross the border, we will fight a maneuver war. We will sting and move. We will hurt them and withdraw before they can counterattack. We will give them land, but we will not give them blood. The life of every single one of our soldiers is precious to us. The Chinese have a long way to go to their objectives. We will let them go a lot of that way, and we will bide our time and husband our men and equipment. We will make them pay for what they take, but we will not—we must not—give them the chance to catch our forces in decisive battle. Are we understood on that?” he asked his staff. “When in doubt, we will run away and deny the enemy what he wants. When we have what we need to strike back, we will make him wish he never heard of Russia, but until then, let him chase his butterflies.”
“What of the border guards?” Aliyev asked.
“They will hurt the Chinese, and then they will pull out. Comrades, I cannot emphasize this enough: the life of every single private soldier is important to us. Our men will fight harder if they know we care about them, and more than that, they deserve our care and solicitude. If we ask them to risk their lives for their country, their country must be loyal to them in return. If we achieve that, they will fight like tigers. The Russian soldier knows how to fight. We must all be worthy of him. You are all skilled professionals. This will be the most important test of our lives. We must all be equal to our task. Our nation depends on us. Andrey Petrovich, draw up some plans for me. We are authorized to call up reserves. Let us start doing that. We have hectares of equipment for them to use. Unlock the gates and let them start drawing gear, and God permit the officers assigned to those cadres are worthy of their men. Dismissed.” Bondarenko stood and walked out, hoping his declamation had been enough for the task.
But wars were not won by speeches.
C H A P T E R – 45
Ghosts of Horrors Past
President Grushavoy arrived in Warsaw with the usual pomp and circumstance. A good actor, Ryan saw, watching the arrival on TV. You never would have guessed from his face that his country was looking at a major war. Grushavoy passed the same receiving line, doubtless composed of the same troops Ryan had eyeballed on his arrival, made a brief but flowery arrival speech citing the long and friendly history shared by Poland and Russia (conveniently leaving out the equally long and less-than-friendly parts), then got into a car for the city, accompanied, Ryan was glad to see, by Sergey Nikolay’ch Golovko. In the President’s hand was a fax from Washington outlining what the Chinese had in the way of war assets to turn loose on their northern neighbors, along with an estimate from the Defense Intelligence Agency on what they called the “correlation of forces,” which, Jack remembered, was a term of art used by the Soviet army of old. Its estimate of the situation was not especially favorable. Almost as bad, America didn’t have much with which to help the Russians. The world’s foremost navy was of little direct use in a land war. The United States Army had a division and a half of heavy troops in Europe, but that was thousands of miles from the expected scene of action. The Air Force had all the mobility it needed to project force anywhere on the globe, and that could give anyone a serious headache, but airplanes could not by themselves defeat an army. No, this would be largely a Russian show, and the Russian army, the fax said, was in terrible shape. The DIA had some good things to say about the senior Russian commander in theater, but a smart guy with a .22 against a dumb one with a machine gun was still at a disadvantage. So, he hoped the Chinese would be taken aback by this days news, but CIA and States estimate of that possibility was decidedly iffy.