The Chinese problem with reconnaissance was confirmed in Paris, of all places. SPOT, the French corporation which operated commercial photosatellites, had received numerous requests for photos of Siberia, and while many of them came from seemingly legitimate western businesses, mainly news agencies, all had been summarily denied. Though not as good as American reconnaissance satellites, the SPOT birds were good enough to identify all the trains assembled at Chita.
And since the People’s Republic of China still had a functioning embassy in Moscow, the other concern was that their Ministry of State Security had Russian nationals acting as paid spies, feeding data to Russia’s new enemy. Those individuals about whom the Russian Federal Security Service had suspicions were picked up and questioned, and those in custody were interrogated vigorously.
This number included Klementi Ivanovich Suvorov.
“You were in the service of an enemy country,” Pavel Yefremov observed. “You killed for a foreign power, and you conspired to kill our country’s president. We know all this. We’ve had you under surveillance for some time now. We have this.” He held up a photocopy of the onetime pad recovered from the dead-drop on the park bench. “You may talk now, or you may be shot. It is your life at risk, not mine.”
In the movies, this was the part where the suspect was supposed to say defiantly, “You’re going to kill me anyway,” except that Suvorov had no more wish to die than anyone else. He loved life as much as any man, and he’d never expected to be caught any more than the most foolish of street criminals did. If anything, he’d expected arrest even less than one of those criminals, because he knew how intelligent and clever he was, though this feeling had understandably deflated over the last few days.
The outlook of Klementi Ivan’ch Suvorov was rather bleak at the moment. He was KGB-trained, and he knew what to expect—a bullet in the head—unless he could give his interrogators something sufficiently valuable for them to spare his life, and at the moment even life in a labor camp of strict regime was preferable to the alternative.
“Have you truly arrested Kong?”
“We told you that before, but, no, we have not. Why tip them off that we’ve penetrated their operation?” Yefremov said honestly.
“Then you can use me against them.”
“How might we do that?” the FSS officer asked.
“I can tell them that the operation they propose is going forward, but that the situation in Siberia wrecked my chance to execute it in a timely fashion.”
“And if Kong cannot leave their embassy—we have it guarded and isolated now, of course—how would you get that information to him?”
“By electronic mail. Yes, you can monitor their landlines, but to monitor their cellular phones is more difficult. There’s a backup method for me to communicate with him electronically.”
“And the fact that you haven’t made use of it so far will not alert them?”
“The explanation is simple. My Spetsnaz contact was frightened off by the outbreak of hostilities, and so was I.”
“But we’ve already checked your electronic accounts.”
“Do you think they are all written down?” He tapped the side of his head. “Do you think I am totally foolish?”
“Go on, make your proposal.”
“I will propose that I can go forward with the mission. I require them to authorize it by a signal—the way they set the shades in their windows, for example.”
“And for this?”
“And for this I will not be executed,” the traitor suggested.
“I see,” Yefremov said quietly. He would have been perfectly content to shoot the traitor right here and now, but it might be politically useful to go forward with his proposal. He’d kick that one upstairs.
The bad part about watching them was that you had to anticipate everything they did, and that meant that they got to have more sleep, about an hour’s worth, Aleksandrov figured, and no more than that only because they were predictable. He’d had his morning tea. Sergeant Buikov had enjoyed two morning cigarettes with his, and now they lay prone on wet dew-dampened ground, with their binoculars to their eyes. The Chinese had also had soldiers out of their tracks all night, set about a hundred meters away from them, so it seemed. They weren’t very adventurous, the captain thought. He would have spread his sentries much farther out, at least half a kilometer, in pairs with radios to go with their weapons. For that matter, he would have set up a mortar in the event that they spotted something dangerous. But the fox and the gardener seemed to be both conservative and confident, which was an odd combination of characteristics.
But their morning drill was precise. The petrol heaters came out for tea—probably tea, they all figured—and whatever it was that they had for breakfast. Then the camouflage nets came down. The outlying sentries came in and reported in person to their officers, and everyone mounted up. The first hop on their tracks was a short one, not even half a kilometer, and again the foot-scouts dismounted and moved forward, then quickly reported back for the second, much longer morning frog leap forward.
“Let’s move, Sergeant,” Aleksandrov ordered, and together they ran to their BRM for their first trek into the woods for their own third installment of frog leap backwards.
“There they go again,” Major Tucker said, after getting three whole hours of sleep on a thin mattress four feet from the Dark Star terminal. It was Ingrid Bergman up again, positioned so that she could see both the reconnaissance element and main body of the Chinese army. “You know, they really stick to the book, don’t they?”
“So it would seem,” Colonel Tolkunov agreed.
“So, going by that, tonight they’ll go to about here.” Tucker made a green mark on the acetate-covered map. “That puts them at the gold mine day after tomorrow. Where do you plan to make your stand?” the major asked.
“That depends on how quickly the Two Zero One can get forward.”
“Gas?” Tucker asked.
“Diesel fuel, but, yes, that is the main problem with moving so large a force.”
“Yeah, with us it’s bombs.”
“When will you begin to attack Chinese targets?” Tolkunov asked.
“Not my department, Colonel, but when it happens, you’ll see it here, live and in color.”
Ryan had gotten two hours of nap in the afternoon, while Arnie van Damm covered his appointments (the Chief of Staff needed his sleep, too, but like most people in the White House, he put the President’s needs before his own), and now he was watching TV, the feed from Ingrid Bergman.
“This is amazing,” he observed. “You could almost get on the phone and tell a guy where to go with his tank.”
“We try to avoid that, sir,” Mickey Moore said at once. In Vietnam it had been called the “squad leader in the sky” when battalion commanders had directed sergeants on their patrols, not always to the enlisted men’s benefit. The miracle of modern communications could also be a curse, with the expected effect that the people in harm’s way would ignore their radios or just turn the damned things off until they had something to say themselves.
Ryan nodded. He’d been a second lieutenant of Marines once, and though it hadn’t been for long, he remembered it as demanding work for a kid just out of college.
“Do the Chinese know we’re doing this?”
“Not as far as we can tell. If they did, they’d sure as hell try to take the Dark Star down, and we’d notice if they tried. That’s not easy, though. They’re damned near invisible on radar, and tough to spot visually, so the Air Force tells me.”
“Not too many fighters can reach sixty thousand feet, much less cruise up there,” Robby agreed. “It’s a stretch even for a TOMCAT.” His eyes, too, were locked on the screen. No officer in the history of military operations had ever had a capability akin to this, not even two percent of it, Jackson was sure. Most of war-fighting involved finding the enemy so that you knew where to kill him. These new things made it like watching a Hollywood movie—and if the Chinese knew they were there, they’d freak. Considerable efforts had been designed into Dark Star to prevent that from happening. Their transmitters were directional, and locked onto satellites, instead of radiating outward in the manner of a normal radio. So, they might as well have been black holes up there, orbiting twelve miles over the battlefield.
“What’s the important thing here?” Jack asked General Moore.
“Logistics, sir, always logistics. Told you this morning, sir, they’re burning up a lot of diesel fuel, and replenishing that is a mother of a task. The Russians have the same problem. They’re trying to race a fresh division north of the Chinese spearhead, to made a stand around Aldan, close to where the gold strike is. It’s only even money they can make it, even over roads and without opposition. They have to move a lot of fuel, too, and the other problem for them is that it’ll wear out the tracks on their vehicles. They don’t have lowboy trailers like ours, and so their tanks have to do it all on their own. Tanks are a lot more delicate to operate than they look. Figure they’ll lose a quarter to a third of their strength just from the approach march.”