“Comrade Colonel, our country is at war,” Post Five six Alfa reported to command. “I can’t see enemy troop movement yet, but they’re coming.”
“Do you have any targets?” regiment asked.
“No, none at this time.” He looked down into the bunker. His various positions could just give a direction to a target, and when another confirmed it and called in its own vector, they’d have a pre-plotted artillery target for the batteries in the rear—
—but those were being hit already. The Chinese rockets were targeted well behind him, and that’s what their targets had to be. He turned his head to see the flashes and hear the booms from ten kilometers back.
A moment later, there was a fountaining explosion skyward. One of the first flight of Chinese rockets had gotten lucky and hit one of the artillery positions in the rear. Bad news for that gun crew, Komanov thought. The first casualties in this war. There would be many more … perhaps including himself. Surprisingly, that thought was a distant one. Someone was attacking his country. It wasn’t a supposition or a possibility anymore. He could see it, and feel it. This was his country they were attacking. He’d grown up in this land. His parents lived here. His grandfather had fought the Germans here. His grandfather’s two brothers had, too, and both had died for their country, one west of Kiev and the other at Stalingrad. And now these Chink bastards were attacking his country, too? More than that, they were attacking him, Senior Lieutenant Valeriy Mikhailovich Komanov. These foreigners were trying to kill him, his men, and trying to steal part of his country.
Well, fuck that! he thought.
“Load HE!” he told his loader.
“Loaded!” the private announced. They all heard the breech clang shut.
“No target, Comrade Lieutenant,” the gunner observed.
“There will be, soon enough.”
“Post Five Nine, this is Five six Alfa. What can you see?”
“We just spotted a boat, a rubber boat, coming out of the trees on the south bank… more, more, more, many of them, maybe a hundred, maybe more.”
“Regiment, this is Fifty-six Alfa, fire mission!” Komanov called over the phone.
The gunners ten kilometers back were at their guns, despite the falling Chinese shells and rockets that had already claimed three of the fifteen gun crews. The fire mission was called in, and the preset concentration dialed in from range books so old they might as well have been engraved in marble. In each case, the high-explosive projectile was rammed into the breech, followed by the propellant charge, and the gun cranked up and trained to the proper elevation and azimuth, and the lanyards pulled, and the first Russian counterstrokes in the war just begun were fired.
Unknown to them, fifteen kilometers away a fire-finder radar was trained on their positions. The millimeter-wave radar tracked the shells in flight and a computer plotted their launch points. The Chinese knew that the Russians had guns covering the border, and knew roughly where they would be—the performance of the guns told that tale—but not exactly where, because of the skillful Russian efforts at camouflage. In this case, those efforts didn’t matter too greatly. The calculated position of six Russian howitzers was instantly radioed to rocket launchers that were dedicated counter-battery weapons. One Type-83 launcher was detailed to each target, and each of them held four monster 273-mm rockets, each with a payload of 150 kilograms of submunitions, in this case eighty hand grenade-sized bomblets. The first rocket launched three minutes after the first Russian counter-fire salvo, and required less than two minutes of flight time from its firing point ten kilometers inside Chinese territory. Of the first six fired, five destroyed their targets, and then others, and the Russian gunfire died in less than five minutes.
“Why did it stop?” Komanov asked. He’d seen a few rounds hit among the Chinese infantry just getting out of their boats on the Russian side of the river. But the shriek of shells overhead passing south had just stopped after a few minutes. “Regiment, this is Five six Alfa, why has our fire stopped?”
“Our guns were taking counter-battery fire from the Chinese. They’re trying to get set back up now,” was the encouraging reply. “What is your situation?”
“Position Five-Zero has taken a little fire, but not much. Mainly they’re hitting the reverse slope of the southern ridge.” That was where the fake bunkers were, and the concrete lures were fulfilling their passive mission. This line of defenses had been set up contrary to published Russian doctrine, because whoever had set them up had known that all manner of people can read books. Komanov’s own position covered a small saddle-pass through two hills, fit for advancing tanks. If the Chinese came north in force, if this was not just some sort of probe aimed at expanding their borders—they’d done that back in the late 1960s— this was a prime invasion route. The maps and the terrain decided that.
“That is good, Lieutenant. Now listen: Do not expose your positions unnecessarily. Let them in close before you open up. Very close.” That, Komanov knew, meant a hundred meters or so. He had two heavy machine guns for that eventuality. But he wanted to kill tanks. That was what his main gun had been designed to do.
“Can we expect more artillery support?” he asked his commander.
“I’ll let you know. Keep giving us target information.”
“Yes, Comrade Colonel.”
For the fighter planes, the war began when the first PLAAF crossed over the Amur. There were four Russian fighter-interceptors up, and these, just like the invaders, were Sukhoi-27. Those on both sides had been made in the same factories, but the Chinese pilots had triple the recent flight time of the defending Russians, who were outnumbered eight to one.
Countering that, however was the fact that the Russian aircraft had support from the USAF E-3B Sentry AWACS aircraft, which was guiding them to the intercept. Both sets of fighters were flying with their target-acquisition radars in standby mode. The Chinese didn’t know what was out there. The Russians did. That was a difference.
“Black Falcon Ten, this is EAGLE Seven. Recommend you come right to new course two-seven-zero. I’m going to try an’ bring you up on the Chinese from their seven o’clock.” It would also keep them out of Chinese radar coverage.
“Understood, EAGLE. Coming right to two-seven-zero.” The Russian flight leader spread his formation out and settled down as much as he could, with his eyes tending to look off to his left.
“Okay, Black Falcon Ten, that’s good. Your targets are now at your nine o’clock, distance thirty kilometers. Come left now to one-eight-zero.
“Coming left,” the Russian major acknowledged. “We will try to start the attack Fox-Two,” he advised. He knew American terminology. That meant launching infrared seekers, which did not require the use of radar, and so did not warn anyone that he was in harm’s way. The Marquis of Queensberry had never been a fighter pilot.
“Roger that, Falcon. This boy’s smart,” the controller commented to his supervisor.
“That’s how you stay alive in this business,” the lieutenant colonel told the young lieutenant at the Nintendo screen.
“Okay, Falcon Ten, recommend you come left again. Targets are now fifteen kilometers … make that seventeen kilometers to your north. You should have tone shortly.”
“Da. I have tone,” the Russian pilot reported, when he heard the warble in his headset. “Flight, prepare to fire . . . Fox-Two!” Three of the four aircraft loosed a single missile each. The fourth pilot was having trouble with his IR scanner. In all cases, the blazing rocket motors wrecked their night vision, but none of the pilots looked away, as they’d been trained to do, and instead watched their missiles streak after fellow airmen who did not yet know they were under attack. It took twenty seconds, and as it turned out, two missiles were targeted on the same Chinese aircraft. That one took two hits and exploded. The second died from its single impact, and then things really got confusing. The Chinese fighters scattered on command from their commander, doing so in a preplanned and well-rehearsed maneuver, first into two groups, then into four, each of which had a piece of sky to defend. Everyone’s radar came on, and in another twenty seconds, a total of forty missiles were flying, and with this began a deadly game of chicken. The radar-homing missiles needed a radar signal to guide them, and that meant that the firing fighter could not switch off or turn away, only hope that his bird would kill its target and switch off his radar before his missile got close.
“Damn,” the lieutenant observed, in his comfortable controller’s seat in the E-3B. Two more Chinese fighters blinked into larger bogies on his screen and then started to fade, then another, but there were just too many of the Chinese air-to-air missiles, and not all of the Chinese illumination radars went down. One Russian fighter took three impacts and disintegrated. Another one limped away with severe damage, and as quickly as it had begun, this air encounter ended. Statistically, it was a Russian win, four kills for one loss, but the Chinese would claim more.