“Wait until eight, Jack,” van Damm thought. “We don’t want him to think we’ve been up all night. It’ll inflate his sense of self-worth.”
Ryan turned to look at the windows on his south wall. The drapes hadn’t been closed, and anyone passing by could have noted that the lights had been on all night. But, strangely, he didn’t know if the Secret Service ever turned them off at night.
“When do we start moving forces?” Jack asked next.
“The Air Attache will call from Moscow when his talks have been concluded. Ought to be any time.”
The President grunted. “Longer night than ours.”
“He’s younger than we are,” Mickey Moore observed. “Just a colonel.”
“If this goes, what are our plans like?” van Damm asked.
“Hyperwar,” Moore answered. “The world doesn’t know the new weapons we’ve been developing. It’ll make desert storm look like slow motion.”
C H A P T E R – 48
Opening Guns
While others were pulling all-nighters, Gennady Iosifbvich Bondarenko was forgetting what sleep was supposed to have been. His teleprinter was running hot with dispatches from Moscow, reading that occupied his time, and not always to his profit.
Russia had still not learned to leave people alone when they were doing their jobs, and as a result, his senior communications officer cringed when he came in with new “FLASH” traffic.
“Look,” the general said to his intelligence officer. “What I need is information on what equipment they have, where they are, and how they are postured to move north on us. Their politics and objectives are not as important to me as where they are right now!”
“I expect to have hard information from Moscow momentarily. It will be American satellite coverage, and—”
“God damn it! I remember when we had our own fucking satellites. What about aerial reconnaissance?”
“The proper aircraft are on their way to us now. We’ll have them flying by tomorrow noon, but do we dare send them over Chinese territory?” Colonel Tolkunov asked.
“Do we dare not to?” CINC-FAR EAST demanded in reply.
“General,” the G-2 said, “the concern is that we would be giving the Chinese a political excuse for the attack.”
“Who said that?”
“Stavka.”
Bondarenko’s head dropped over the map table. He took a breath and closed his eyes for three blissful seconds, but all that achieved was to make him wish for an hour—no, just thirty minutes of sleep. That’s all, he thought, just thirty minutes.
“A political excuse,” the general observed. “You know, Vladimir Konstantinovich, once upon a time, the Germans were sending highflying reconnaissance aircraft deep into Western Russia, scouting us out prior to their invasion. There was a special squadron of fighters able to reach their altitude, and their regimental commander asked for permission to intercept them. He was relieved of his command on the spot. I suppose he was lucky that he wasn’t shot. He ended up a major ace and a Hero of the Soviet Union before some German fighter got him. You see, Stalin was afraid of provoking Hitler, too!”
“Comrade Colonel?” Heads turned. It was a young sergeant with an armful of large-format photographs.
“Here, quickly!”
The sergeant laid them on the table, obscuring the topographical maps that had occupied the previous four hours. The quality wasn’t good. The imagery had been transmitted over a fax machine instead of a proper photographic printer, but it was good enough for their purposes. There were even inserts, small white boxes with legends typed in, in English, to tell the ignorant what was in the pretty little pictures. The intelligence officer was the first to make sense of it all.
“Here they come,” the colonel breathed. He checked the coordinates and the time indicated in the lower-right corner of the top photo. “That’s a complete tank division, and it’s right”—he turned back to the printed map—”right here, just as we expected. Their marshaling point is Harbin. Well, it had to be. All their rail lines converge there. Their first objective will be Belogorsk.”
“And right up the valley from there,” Bondarenko agreed. “Through this pass, then northwest.” One didn’t need to be a Nobel laureate to predict a line of advance. The terrain was the prime objective condition to which all ambitions and plans had to bend. Bondarenko could read the mind of the enemy commander well enough, because any trained soldier would see the contour lines on the map and analyze them the same way. Flat was better than sloped. Clear was better than wooded. Dry was better than wet. There was a lot of sloped terrain on the border, but it smoothed out, and there were too many valleys inviting speedy advance. With enough troops, he could have made every one of those valleys a deathtrap, but if he’d had enough troops, the Chinese wouldn’t be lined up on his border. They’d be sitting in their own prepared defenses, fearing him. But that was not the shape of the current world for Commander-in-chief Far East.
The 265th Motor Rifle was a hundred kilometers back from the border. The troops were undergoing frantic gunnery training now, because that would generate the most rapid return for investment. The battalion and regimental officers were in their command posts running map-table exercises, because Bondarenko needed them thinking, not shooting. He had sergeants for that. The good news for Bondarenko was that his soldiers enjoyed shooting live rounds, and their skill levels were improving rapidly. The bad news was that for every trained tank crew he had, the Chinese had over twenty.
“What an ambush we could lay, if we only had the men,” Tolkunov breathed.
“When I was in America, watching them train, I heard a good if-only joke. If only your aunt had balls, then she’d be your uncle, Vladimir Konstantinovich.”
“Quite so, Comrade General.” They both turned back to the maps and the photos.
So, they know what we’re doing,” Qian Kun observed. “This is not a good development.”
“You can know what a robber will do, but if he has a pistol and you don’t, what difference does it make?” Zhang Han San asked in return. “Comrade Marshal?”
“One cannot hide so large a movement of troops,” Marshal Luo said blandly. “Tactical surprise is always hard to achieve. But we do have strategic surprise.”
“That is true,” Tan Deshi told the Politburo. “The Russians have alerted some of their divisions for movement, but they are all in the west, and days away, and all will approach down this rail line, and our air force can close it, can’t you, Luo?”
“Easily,” the Defense Minister agreed.
“And what of the Americans?” Fang Gan asked. “In that note we just got, they have told us that they regard the Russians as allies. How many times have people underestimated the Americans, Zhang? Including yourself,” he added.
“There are objective conditions which apply even to the Americans, for all their MAGIC,” Luo assured the assembly.
“And in three years we will be selling them oil and gold,” Zhang assured them all in turn. “The Americans have no political memory. They always adapt to the changing shape of the world. In 1949, they drafted the NATO Treaty, which included their bitter enemies in Germany. Look at what they did with Japan, after dropping atomic bombs on them. The only thing we should consider: though few Americans will be deployed, and they will have to take their chances along with everyone else, perhaps we should avoid inflicting too many casualties. We would also do well to treat prisoners and captured civilians gently—the world does have sensibilities we must regard somewhat, I suppose.”
“Comrades,” Fang said, summoning up his courage for one last display of his inner feelings. “We still have the chance to stop this from happening, as Marshal Luo told us some days ago. We are not fully committed until shots are fired. Until then, we can say we were running a defense exercise, and the world will go along with that explanation, for the reasons my friend Zhang has just told us. But once hostilities are begun, the tiger is out of the cage. Men defend what is theirs with tenacity. You will recall that Hitler underestimated the Russians, to his ultimate sorrow. Iran underestimated the Americans just last year, causing disaster for them and the death of their leader. Are we sure that we can prevail in this adventure?” he asked. “Sure? We gamble with the life of our country here. We ought not to forget that.”
“Fang, my old comrade, you are wise and thoughtful as ever,” Zhang responded graciously. “And I know you speak on behalf of our nation and our people, but as we must not underestimate our enemies, so we ought not to underestimate ourselves. We fought the Americans once before, and we gave them the worst military defeat in their history, did we not?”
“Yes, we did surprise them, but in the end we lost a million men, including Mao’s own son. And why? Because we overestimated our own abilities.”