“That’s still a long way to move,” Masterman observed. He looked over at his boss.
“What are you planning, Gennady?”
“I want to take the four Russian divisions north to link up with the 265th, and stop them about here. Then, perhaps, we will use your forces to cross east through here and cut them off.”
Now it wasn’t the Chinese who were being ambitious, both Diggs and Masterman thought. Moving First Infantry Division (Mechanized) from Fort Riley, Kansas, to Fort Carson, Colorado, would have been about the same distance, but it would have been on flat ground and against no opposition. Here that task would involve a lot of hills and serious resistance. Those factors did make a difference, the American officers thought.
“No serious contact yet?”
Bondarenko shook his head. “No, I’m keeping my mechanized forces well away from them. The Chinese are advancing against no opposition.”
“You want ’em to fall asleep, get sloppy?” Masterman asked.
“Da, better that they should get overconfident.”
The American colonel nodded. That made good sense, and as always, war was as much a psychological game as a physical one. “If we jump off the trains at Chita, it’s still a long-approach march to where you want us, General.”
“What about fuel?” Colonel Douglas asked.
“That is the one thing we have plenty of,” answered Colonel Aliyev. “The blue spots on the map, fuel storage—it is the same as your Number Two Diesel.”
“How much?” Douglas asked.
“At each fuel depot, one billion two hundred fifty million liters.”
“Shit!” Douglas observed. “That much?”
Aliyev explained, “The fuel depots were established to support a large mobile force in a border conflict. They were built in the time of Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev. Huge concrete-and-steel storage tanks, all underground, well hidden.”
“They must be,” Mitch Turner observed. “I’ve never been briefed on them.”
“So, we evaded even your satellite photos, yes?” That pleased the Russian. “Each depot is manned by a force of twenty engineers, with ample electric pumps.”
“I like the locations,” Masterman said. “What’s this unit here?”
“That is BOYAR, a reserve mechanized force. The men have just been called up. Their weapons are from a hidden equipment-storage bunker. It’s a short division, old equipment—T-55s and such—but serviceable. We’re keeping that force hidden,” Aliyev said.
The American G-3 arched his eyebrows. Maybe they were out-manned, but they weren’t dumb. That BOYAR force was in a particularly interesting place… if Ivan could make proper use of it. Their overall operational concept looked good—theoretically. A lot of soldiers could come up with good ideas. The problem was executing them. Did the Russians have the ability to do that? Russia’s military theorists were as good as any the world had ever seen—good enough that the United States Army regularly stole their ideas. The problem was that the U.S. Army could apply those theories to a real battlefield, and the Russians could not.
“How are your people handling this?” Masterman asked.
“Our soldiers, you mean?” Aliyev asked. “The Russian soldier knows how to fight,” he assured his American counterpart.
“Hey, Colonel, I am not questioning their guts,” Duke assured his host. “How’s their spirit, for one thing?”
Bondarenko handled that one: “Yesterday I had to face one of my young officers, Komanov, from the border defenses. He was furious that we were unable to give him the support he needed to defeat the Chinese. And I was ashamed,” the general admitted to his guests. “My men have the spirit. Their training is lacking—I just got here a few months ago, and my changes have barely begun to take effect. But, you will see, the Russian soldier has always risen to the occasion, and he will today—if we here are worthy of him.”
Masterman didn’t share a look with his boss. Diggs had spoken well of this Russian general, and Diggs was both a good operational soldier and a good judge of men. But the Russian had just admitted that his men weren’t trained up as well as they ought to be. The good news was that on the battlefield, men learned the soldier’s trade rapidly. The bad news was that the battlefield was the most brutal Darwinian environment on the face of the planet. Some men would learn, but others would die in the process, and the Russians didn’t have all that many they could afford to lose. This wasn’t 1941, and they weren’t fighting with half their population base this time around.
“You’re going to want us to move out fast when the trains drop us off at Chita?” Tony Welch asked. He was the divisional chief of staff.
“Yes,” Aliyev confirmed.
“Okay, well, then I need to get down there and look over the facilities. What about fuel for our choppers?”
“Our air force bases have fuel storage similar to the diesel depots,” Aliyev told him. “Your word is infrastructure, yes? That is the one thing we have much of. When will they arrive?”
“The Air Force is still working that out. They’re going to fly our aviation brigade in. Apaches first. Dick Boyle’s chomping at the bit.”
“We will be very pleased to see your attack helicopters. We have all too few of our own, and our air force is also slow delivering them.”
“Duke,” Diggs said, “get on the horn to the Air Force. We need some choppers right the hell now, just so we can get around and see what we need to see.”
“Roger,” Masterman replied.
“Let me get a satellite radio set up,” Lieutenant Colonel Garvey said, heading for the door.
Ingrid Bergman was heading south now. General Wallace wanted a better idea for the Chinese logistical tail, and now he was getting it. The People’s Republic of China was in many ways like America had been at the turn of the previous century. Things moved mainly by rail. There were no major highways as Americans understood them, but a lot of railroads. Those were efficient for moving large quantities of anything over medium-to-long distances, but they were also inflexible, and hard to repair—especially the bridges—and most of all the tunnels, and so that was what he and his targeting people were looking at. The problem was that they had few bombs to drop. None of his attack assets—mainly F-15E Strike EAGLEs at the moment—had flown over with bombs on their wings, and he had barely enough air-to-mud munitions for an eight-ship strike mission. It was like going to a dance and finding no girls there. The music was fine, and so was the fruit punch, but there really wasn’t anything to do. Perversely, his -15E crews didn’t mind. They got to play fighter plane, and all such people prefer shooting other airplanes down to dropping bombs on mud soldiers. It just came with the territory. The one thing he had going now was that his scarf-and-goggles troops were playing hell with the PRC air force, with over seventy confirmed kills already for not a single air-to-air loss. The advantage of having E-3B AWACS aircraft was so decisive that the enemy might as well have been flying World War I Fokkers, and the Russians were learning rapidly how to make use of E-3B support. Their fighters were good aerodynamic platforms, just lacking in legs. The Russians had never built a fighter with fuel capacity for more than about one hour? flight time. Nor had they ever learned how to do midair refueling, as the Americans had. And so the Russian MiG and Sukhoi fighters could go up, take their instructions from the AWACS, and participate in one engagement, but then they had to return to base for gas. Half of the kills his EAGLE drivers had collected so far were of Chinese fighters that had broken off their fights to RTB for gas as well. It wasn’t fair, but Wallace, like all Air Force fighter types, could hardly have cared less about being fair in combat.
But Wallace was fighting a defensive war to this point. He was successfully defending Russian airspace. He was not taking out Chinese targets, not even attacking the Chinese troops on the ground in Siberia. So, though his fighters were having a fine, successful war, they just weren’t accomplishing anything important. To that end, he lifted his satellite link to America.
“We ain’t got no bombs, General,” he told Mickey Moore.
“Well, your fellow Air Scouts are maxed out on taskings, and Mary Diggs is screaming to get some trash haulers to get him his chopper brigade moved to where he needs it.”
“Sir, this is real simple. If you want us to kill some Chinese targets, we have to have bombs. I hope I’m not going too fast for you,” Wallace added.
“Go easy, Gus,” Moore warned.
“Well, sir, maybe it just looks a little different in Washington, but where I’m sitting right now, I have missions, but not the tools to carry those missions out. So, you D.C. people can either send me the tools or rescind the missions. Your call, sir.”