The train ride was fairly jerky. Lieutenant Colonel Giusti squirmed in his upright coach seat, trying to get a little bit comfortable, but the Russian-made coach in which he and his staff were riding hadn’t been designed with creature comforts in mind, and there was no sense grumbling about it. It was dark outside, the early morning that children sensibly take to be nighttime, and there wasn’t much in the way of lights out there. They were in Eastern Poland now, farm country, probably, as Poland was evolving into the Iowa of Europe, lots of pig farms to make the ham for which this part of the world was famous. Vodka, too, probably, and Colonel Giusti wouldn’t have minded a snort of that at the moment. He stood and walked down the aisle of the car. Nearly everyone aboard was asleep or trying to be. Two sensible NCOs were stretched out on the floor instead of curled up on the seats. The dirty floor wouldn’t do their uniforms much good, but they were heading to combat operations, where neatness didn’t really count all that much. Personal weapons were invariably stowed in the overhead racks, in the open for easy access, because they were all soldiers, and they didn’t feel very comfortable without a usable weapon close by. He continued aft. The next coach had more troopers from Headquarters Company. His squadron sergeant major was in the back of that one, reading a paperback.
“Hey, Colonel,” the sergeant major said in greeting. “Long ride, ain’t it?”
“At least three more days to go, maybe four.”
“Super,” the senior non-com observed. “This is worse’n flying.”
“Yeah, well, at least we got our tracks with us.”
“Yes, sir.”
“How’s the food situation?”
“Well, sir, we all got our MREs, and I got me a big box of Snickers bars stashed. Any word what’s happening in the world?”
“Just that it’s started in Siberia. The Chinese are across the border and Ivan’s trying to stop ’em. No details. We ought to get an update when we go through Moscow, after lunchtime, I expect.”
“Fair ’nuff.”
“How are the troopers taking things?”
“No problems, bored with the train ride, want to get back in their tracks, the usual.”
“How’s their attitude?”
“They’re ready, Colonel,” the sergeant-major assured him.
“Good.” With that, Giusti turned and headed back to his seat, hoping he’d get a few hours anyway, and there wasn’t much of Poland to see anyway. The annoying part was being so cut off. He had satellite radios in his vehicles, somewhere on the flatcars aft of this coach, but he couldn’t get to them, and without them he didn’t know what was happening up forward. A war was on. He knew that. But it wasn’t the same as knowing the details, knowing where the train would stop, where and when he’d get to offload his equipment, get the Quarter Horse organized, and get back on the road, where they belonged.
The train part was working well. The Russian train service seemingly had a million flatcars designed expressly to transport tracked vehicles, undoubtedly intended to take their battle tanks west, into Germany for a war against NATO. Little had the builders ever suspected that the cars would be used to bring American tanks east to help defend Russia against an invader. Well, nobody could predict the future more than a few weeks. At the moment, he would have settled for five days or so.
The rest of First Armored was stretched back hundreds of miles on the east-west rail line. Colonel Don Lisle’s Second Brigade was just finishing up boarding in Berlin, and would be tail-end Charlie for the division. They’d cross Poland in daylight, for what that was worth.
The Quarter Horse was in the lead, where it belonged. Wherever the drop-off point was, they’d set up perimeter security, and then lead the march farther east, in a maneuver called Advance to Contact, which was where the “fun” started. And he needed to be well-rested for that, Colonel Giusti reminded himself. So he settled back in his seat and closed his eyes, surrendering his body to the jerks and sways of the train car.
Dawn patrol was what fighter pilots all thought about. The title for the duty went back to a 1930s Errol Flynn movie, and the term had probably originated with a real mission name, meaning to be the first up on a new day, to see the sun rise, and to seek out the enemy right after breakfast.
Bronco Winters didn’t look much like Errol Flynn, but that was okay. You couldn’t tell a warrior by the look of his face, though you could by the look on his face. He was a fighter pilot. As a youngster in New York, he’d ride the subway to La Guardia Airport, just to stand at the fence and watch the airplanes take off and land, knowing even then that he wanted to fly. He’d also known that fighters would be more fun than airliners, and known finally that to fly fighters he had to enter a service academy, and to do that he’d have to study. And so he’d worked hard all through school, especially in math and science, because airplanes were mechanical things, and that meant that science determined how they worked. So, he was something of a math whiz—that had been his college major at Colorado Springs—but his interest in it had ended the day he’d walked into Columbus Air Force Base in Mississippi, because once he got his hands on the controls of an aircraft, the “study” part of his mission was accomplished, and the “learning” part really began. He’d been the number-one student in his class at Columbus, quickly and easily mastering the Cessna Tweety Bird trainer, and then moving on to fighters, and since he’d been number one in his class, he’d gotten his choice—and that choice, of course, had been the F-15 EAGLE fighter, the strong and handsome grandson of the F-4 Phantom. An easy plane to fly, it was a harder one to fight, since the controls for the combat systems are located on the stick and the throttles, all in buttons of different shapes so that you could manage all the systems by feel, and keep your eyes up and out of the aircraft instead of having to look down at instruments. It was something like playing two pianos at the same time, and it had taken Winters a disappointing six months to master. But now those controls came as naturally as twirling the wax into his Bismarck mustache, his one non-standard affectation, which he’d modeled on Robin Olds, a legend in the American fighter community, an instinctive pilot and a thinking—and therefore a very dangerous— tactician. An ace in World War II, an ace in Korea, and also an ace over North Vietnam, Olds was one of the best who’d ever strapped a fighter plane to his back, and one whose mustache had made Otto von Bismarck himself look like a pussy.
Colonel Winters wasn’t thinking about that now. The thoughts were there even so, as much a part of his character as his situational awareness, the part of his brain that kept constant track of the three-dimensional reality around him at all times. Flying came as naturally to him as it did to the gyrfalcon mascot at the Air Force Academy. And so did hunting, and now he was hunting. His aircraft had instrumentation that downloaded the take from the AWACS aircraft a hundred fifty miles to his rear, and he divided his eye time equally between the sky around him and the display three feet from his 20-10 brown eyes . . .
… there … two hundred miles, bearing one-seven-two, four BANDITs heading north. Then four more, and another flight of four. Joe Chink was coming up to play, and the pigs were hungry.
“Boar Lead, this is EAGLE Two.” They were using encrypted burst-transmission radios that were very difficult to detect, and impossible to listen in on.
“Boar Lead.” But he kept his transmission short anyway. Why spoil the surprise?
“Boar Lead, we have sixteen BANDITs, one-seven-zero your position at angels thirty, corning due north at five hundred knots.”
“Got ’em.”
“They’re still south of the border, but not for long,” the young controller on the E-3B advised. “Boar, you are weapons-free at this time.”
“Copy weapons-free,” Colonel Winters acknowledged, and his left hand flipped a button to activate his systems. A quick look down to his weapons-status display showed that everything was ready to fire. He didn’t have his tracking/targeting radar on, though it was in standby mode. The F-15 had essentially been designed as an appendage to the monstrous radar in its nose—a design consideration that had defined the size of the fighter from the first sketch on paper—but over the years the pilots had gradually stopped using it, because it could warn an enemy with the right sort of threat receiver, telling him that there was an EAGLE in the neighborhood with open eyes and sharp claws. Instead he could now cross-load the radar information from the AWACS, whose radar signals were unwelcome, but nothing an enemy could do anything about, and not directly threatening. The Chinese would be directed and controlled by ground radar, and the Boars were just at the fuzzy edge of that, maybe spotted, maybe not. Somewhere to his rear, a Rivet Joint EC-135 was monitoring both the radar and the radios used by the Chinese ground controllers, and would cross-load any warnings to the AWACS. But so far none of that. So, Joe Chink was coming north.