But his attack plan was a simple one. Behind a massive artillery barrage, he’d put infantry across the Amur River in assault boats to deal with the Russian bunkers, simultaneously bringing up engineers to span the river with ribbon bridges in order to rush his mechanized forces across, up the hills on the far side, then farther north. He had helicopters, though not enough of the attack kind to suit his needs. He’d complained about this, but so had every other senior officer in the People’s Liberation Army. The only thing about the Russian Army that worried him were their Mi-24 attack helicopters. They were clumsy machines but dangerous in their capabilities, if wisely used.
His best intelligence came from reams of Humint from Chinese citizens living illegally but comfortably in Russia—shopkeepers and workers, a fair number of whom were officers or stringers for the Ministry for State Security. He would have preferred more photographs, but his country had only a single orbiting reconnaissance satellite, and the truth was that the imagery purchased from the French SPOT commercial satellite company was better, at one-meter resolution, than his own country could manage. It was also easier to acquire over the Internet, and for that his intelligence coordinator had a blank check. They showed the nearest Russian mechanized formation over a hundred kilometers away. That confirmed the human intelligence that had said only things within artillery range were garrison units assigned to the border defenses. It was interesting that the Russian high command had not surged forces forward, but they didn’t have many to surge, and defending a border, with its numerous crenellations and meanders, used up manpower as a sponge used up water—and they didn’t have that many troops to squander. He also possessed information that this General-Colonel Bondarenko was training his troops harder than his predecessor had, but that was not much cause for concern. The Chinese had been training hard for years, and Ivan would take time to catch up.
No, his only concern was distance. His army and its neighbors had a long way to go. Keeping them supplied would be a problem, because as Napoleon said that an army marched on its stomach, so tanks and tracked vehicles floated on a sea of diesel oil. His intelligence sources gave locations for large Russian stocks, but he couldn’t count on seizing them intact, desirable though that might be, and even though he had plans for helicopter assaults on every one he had charted.
Peng put out his sixtieth cigarette of the day and looked up at his operations officer. “Yes?”
“The final order has arrived. Jump off at 03:30 in three days.”
“Will you have everything in place by then?” Peng asked.
“Yes, Comrade General, with twenty-four hours to spare.”
“Good. Let’s make sure that all our men are well fed. It may be a long time between meals for the next few weeks.”
“That order has already been given, Comrade General,” the colonel told him.
“And total radio silence.”
“Of course, Comrade General.”
“Not a whisper,” the sergeant said. “Not even carrier waves.” The RC-135 Rivet Joint aircraft was the first USAF bird to deploy, flying out of Anderson Air Force base on the island of Guam. It had refueled over the Sea of Okhotsk and entered Russian airspace over the port city of Ayan, and now, two hours later, was just east of Skovorodino on the Russian side of the border. The Rivet Joint was an extensively modified windowless version of the old Boeing 707, crammed with radio-receiving equipment and crewed with experienced ferret personnel, one of only two USAF crews who spoke passable Chinese.
“Sergeant, what’s it mean when you have a lot of soldiers in the field and no radios?” the colonel in command of the mission asked. It was a rhetorical question, of course.
“Same thing it means when your two-year-old isn’t making any noise, sir. He’s crayoning the wall, or doing something else to get his bottom smacked.” The sergeant leaned back in the pilot-type seat, looking at the numerous visual scans tuned to known PLA frequencies. The screen was blank except for mild static. Maybe there’d been some chatter as the PLA had moved units into place, but now there was nothing but some commercial FM traffic, mainly music that was as alien to the American flight crew as Grand of Opry would have been in Beijing. Two crewmen listening to the civilian stations noted that the lyrics of the Chinese love ballads were as mindless as those of their Nashville counterparts, though the stations were leaning more heavily to patriotic songs at the moment.
The same was noted at Fort Meade, Maryland. The National Security Agency had a lot of ferret satellites up and circling the globe, including two monster Rhyolite-types in geosynchronous orbit over the equator, and all were tuned to Chinese military and government channels. The FM-radio chatter associated with military formations had trended down to zero in the last twelve hours, and to the uniformed and civilian analysts alike that meant just one thing: A quiet army is an army planning to do something.
The people at the National Reconnaissance Office had the main tasking in finishing up a Special National Intelligence Estimate, because people tended to believe photographs more than mere words. The imagery had been computer-matched with the radar-imaging satellites’ “take,” but surprisingly to no one, the assembly areas were mostly empty now. The tanks and other tracked vehicles had lingered only long enough to get reorganized after the train trip, and had moved out north, judging by the ruts they’d left in the mainly dirt roads of the region. They’d taken the time to spread their camouflage nets over the redeployed tanks, but that, too, had been a pro forma waste of time, because they could as little hide the track marks of hundreds of such vehicles as they could hide a mountain range. And scarcely any such effort had been taken with the hundreds of supply trucks, which, they saw, were still moving in tight little convoys, at about thirty kilometers per hour, heading for assembly areas just a few klicks south of where the shooters were. The imagery was printed up on six of the big laser printers custom-made for the NRO, and driven to the White House, where people were mainly sitting around in the Oval Office pulling a Presidential all-nighter, which was rather more special than those done by the deliveryman, an Army sergeant E-5 in this case. The civilian analyst who’d come with him stayed inside while the NCO walked back out to the government Ford sedan, having left behind a Newport hundred-millimeter cigarette for the President.
“Jack, you’re bad,” Jackson observed. “Bumming a smoke off that innocent young boy.”
“Stick it, Robby,” POTUS replied with a grin. The smoke made him cough, but it helped him stay awake as much as the premium coffee did. “You handle the stress your way, I’ll handle it my way. Okay, what do we have here?” the President asked the senior analyst.
“Sir, this is as many armored vehicles in one area as I have ever seen in China, plus all their equipment. They’re going north, and soon, in less than three days, I’d say.”
“What about air?” Jackson asked.
“Right here, sir.” The analysts finger traced over one of the photos. “Dedicated fighter base at Jinxi is a good example. Here’s a squadron of Russian-made Su-27s, plus a whole regiment of J-7s. The Sukhoi’s a pretty good fighter plane, similar in mission and capabilities to an early F-15. The -7’s a day-fighter knockoff of the old MiG-21, modified for ground attack as well as mixing up in the furball. You can count sixty-eight aircraft. Probably at least four were in the air when the satellite went overhead. Note the fueling trucks right on the ramp, and this aircraft has ground crew tinkering with it. We estimate that this base was stood-down for five days—”
“—getting everything ready?” Jackson asked. That’s how people did it.
“Yes, sir. You will also note missile noses peeking out under the wings of all these aircraft. They appear to be loaded for combat.”
“White ones on the rails,” Robby observed. “They’re planning to go do some work.”
“Unless our note gets them to calm down,” Ryan said, with a minor degree of hope in his voice. A very minor note, the others in the room thought. The President got one last puff off the purloined Newport and stubbed it out. “Might it help for me to make a direct personal call to Premier Xu?”
“Honest answer?” It was Professor Weaver, rather the worse for wear at four in the Washington morning.
“The other sort isn’t much use to me at the moment,” Ryan replied, not quite testily.
“It will look good in the papers and maybe the history books, but it is unlikely to affect their decision-making process.”
“It’s worth a try,” Ed Foley said in disagreement. “What do we have to lose?”