Winters checked his weapons display. No missiles left. How had all that happened? He was the United States Air Force champ for situational awareness, but he’d just lost track of a combat action. He couldn’t remember firing all his missiles.
“EAGLE Two, this is Boar Lead. I’m Winchester. Do you need any help?” “Winchester” meant out of weapons. That wasn’t entirely true. He still had a full magazine of 20-mm cannon shells, but suddenly all the gees and all the excitement were pulling on him. His arms felt leaden as he eased his EAGLE back to level flight.
“Boar Lead, EAGLE. Looks like we’re okay now, but that was kinda exciting, fella.”
“Roger that, EAGLE. Same here. Anything left?”
“Negative, Boar. Rodeo Lead got the last two. I think we owe that major a couple of beers.”
“I’ll hold you to that, EAGLE,” Rodeo Lead observed.
“Ducky, where are you?” Winters called next.
“Kinda busy, Bronco,” a strained voice replied. “I got a hole in my arm, too.”
“Bronco, Ghost Man. Ducky’s got some holes in the airframe. I’m going to shepherd him back to Suntan Thirty minutes, about.”
“Skippy, where you be?”
“Right behind you, Leader. I think I got four, maybe five, in that furball.”
“Any weapons left?”
“Slammer and ‘winder, one each. I’ll look after you, Colonel,” Lieutenant Acosta promised. “How’d you make out?”
“Two, maybe more, not sure,” the squadron commander answered. The final tally would come from the AWACS, plus a check of his own videotape. Mainly he wanted to get out of the aircraft and take a good stretch, and he now had time to worry about Major Don Boyd— Ducky—and his aircraft.
So, we want to mess with their heads, Mickey?” Admiral Dave Seaton asked.
“That’s the idea,” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs told the chief of naval operations.
“Makes sense. Where are their heads at?”
“According to what CIA says, they think we’re limiting the scope of operations for political reasons—to protect their sensibilities, like.”
“No foolin’?” Seaton asked with no small degree of incredulity.
Moore nodded. “Yep.”
“Well, then it’s like a guy holding aces and eights, isn’t it?” the CNO thought aloud, referring to the last poker hand held by James Butler—”Wild Bill”—Hickok in Deadwood, South Dakota. “We just pick the mission that’s sure to flip them out.”
“What are you thinking?” Moore asked.
“We can slam their navy pretty hard. Bart Mancuso’s a pretty good operator. What are they most afraid of…?” Seaton leaned back in his swivel chair. “First thing Bart wants to do is take out their missile submarine. It’s at sea now with Tucson in trail, about twenty thousand yards back.”
“That far?”
“It’s plenty close enough. It’s got an SSN in close proximity to protect it. So, Tucson takes ’em both out—zap.” Moore didn’t get the terminology, but Seaton was referring to the Chinese ships as “it,” meaning an enemy, a target worthy only of destruction. “Beijing might not know it’s happened right away, unless they’ve got an ‘I’m Dead’ buoy on the sail. Their surface navy’s a lot easier. That’ll be mainly aircraft targets, some missiles to keep the surface community happy.”
“Submarine-launched missiles?”
“Mickey, you don’t sink ships by making holes that let air in. You sink ships by making holes that let water in,” Seaton explained. “Okay, if this is supposed to be for psychological effect, we hit everything simultaneously. That’ll mean staging a lot of assets, and it runs the risk of being overly complicated, having the other guy catch a sniff of what’s happening before we do anything. It’s a risk. Do we really want to run it?”
“Ryan’s thinking ‘big picture.’ Robby’s helping him.”
“Robby’s a fighter pilot,” Seaton agreed. “He likes to think in terms of movie stuff. Hell, Tom Cruise is taller than he is,” Seaton joked.
“Good operational thinker. He was a pretty good J-3,” Moore reminded the senior sailor.
“Yeah, I know, it’s just that he likes to make dramatic plays. Okay, we can do it, only it complicates things.” Seaton looked out the window for a second. “You know what might really flip them out?”
“What’s that?” Moore asked. Seaton told him. “But it’s not possible for us to do, is it?”
“Maybe not, but we’re not dealing with professional military people, are we? They’re politicians, Mickey. They’re used to dealing with images instead of reality. So, we give them an image.”
“Do you have the pieces in place to do that?”
“Let me find out.”
“This is crazy, Dave.”
“And deploying First Armored to Russia isn’t?” the CNO demanded.
Lieutenant Colonel Angelo Giusti was now certain that he’d be fully content never to ride on another train as long as he lived. He didn’t know that all of the Russian State Railroad’s sleeper cars were being used to transport Russian army forces—they’d never sent any of the cars as far west as Berlin, not to slight the Americans, but because it had simply never occurred to anyone to do so. He took note of the fact that the train veered off to the north, off the main track, thumping over various switches and interlockings as it did so, and then the train came to a halt and started going backwards slowly. They seemed to be in the yard alone. They’d passed numerous westbound trains in the past two hours, all with engines dragging empty flatcars, and the conductor who appeared and disappeared regularly had told them that this was the approximate arrival time scheduled, but he hadn’t really believed it, on the premise that a railroad with such uncomfortable seats probably didn’t adhere to decent schedules either. But here they were, and the offloading ramps were obvious for what they were.
“People, I think we’re here,” the commander of the Quarter Horse told his staff.
“Praise Jesus,” one of them observed. A few seconds later, the train jolted to a stop, and they were able to walk out onto the concrete platform, which, they saw, stretched a good thousand meters to the east. Inside of five minutes, the soldiers of Headquarters Troop were out and walking to their vehicles, stretching and grousing along the way.
“Hey, Angie,” called a familiar voice.
Giusti looked to see Colonel Welch and walked up to him with a salute.
“What’s happening?” Giusti asked.
“It’s a mess out east of here, but there is good news.”
“What might that be?”
“There’s plenty of fuel stashed for us. I’ve been flying security detachments out, and Ivan says he’s got fuel depots that’re the size of fuckin’ supertankers. So, we’re not going to run out of gas.”
“That’s good to know. What about my choppers?” Welch just pointed. There was an OH-58D Kiowa Warrior sitting not three hundred yards away. “Thank God for that. What’s the bad news?”
“The PLA has four complete Group-A armies in Siberia and heading north. There hasn’t been any heavy contact yet because Ivan’s refusing combat at the moment, until they can get something big enough to meet them with. They have one motor-rifle division in theater and four more heading up there. The last of ’em just cleared this railyard an hour and a half ago.”
“That’s, what? Sixteen heavy divisions in the invasion force?”
Welch nodded. “Thereabouts.”
“What’s my mission?”
“Assemble your squadron and head southeast. The idea is First Armored will cut off the bottom of the break-in and interrupt their supply line. Russian blocking force will then try to stop them about two hundred miles northeast of here.”
“Can they do it?” Four Russian divisions against sixteen Chinese didn’t seem especially favorable odds.
“Not sure,” Welch admitted. “Your job is to get out and establish lead security for the division. Advance to and secure the first big fuel depot. We’ll play it from there.”
“Support?”
“At the moment, the Air Force is mainly doing fighter work. No deep strikes yet because they don’t have enough bombs to sustain any kind of campaign.”
“What about resupply?”
“We have two basic loads for all the tracks. That’ll have to do for a while. At least we have four units of fire for the artillery.” That meant four days’ worth of shells—based on what the Army computed that a day of combat required. The supply weenies who did those calculations weren’t stingy on shells to shoot at the other guy. And in the entire Persian Gulf war, not a single tank had completely shot out its first basic load of shells, they both knew. But that was a different war. No two were ever the same, and they only got worse.
Giusti turned when he heard the first engine start up. It was an M3A2 Bradley Scout track, and the sergeant in the commander’s hatch looked happy to be moving. A Russian officer took over as traffic cop, waving the Brad forward, then right toward the assembly area. The next train backed up to the next ramp over. That would be “A” or Avenger Troop, with the first of Quarter Horse’s really heavy equipment, nine of the M1A2 main battle tanks.