“That is bad for us,” Gogol advised. “It alerts the game.”
“They have little noses,” Buikov replied.
“Yes, and the wind is in our favor,” the old hunter conceded.
“Lordy, Lordy,” Major Tucker observed. “They’ve bunched up some.” It was Grace Kelly again, looking down on the battlefield-to-be like Pallas Athena looking down on the plains of Troy. And about as pitilessly. The ground had opened up a little, and the corridor they moved across was a good three kilometers wide, enough for a battalion of tanks to travel line-abreast, a regiment in columns of battalions, three lines of thirty-five tanks each with tracked infantry carriers interspersed with them. Colonels Aliyev and Tolkunov stood behind him, speaking in Russian over their individual telephones to the 265th Motor Rifle’s command post. In the night, the entire 201st had finally arrived, plus Leading elements of the 80th and 44th. There were now nearly three divisions to meet the advancing Chinese, and included in that were three full divisional artillery sets, plus, Tucker saw for the first time, a shitload of attack helicopters sitting on the ground thirty kilometers back from the point of expected contact. Joe Chink was driving into a motherfucker of an ambush. Then a shadow crossed under Grace Kelly, out of focus, but something moving fast.
It was two squadrons of F-16C fighter-bombers, and they were armed with Smart Pigs.
That was the nickname for J-SOW, the Joint Stand-Off Weapon. The night before, other F-l6s, the CG version, the new and somewhat downsized version of the F-4G Wild Weasel, had gone into China and struck at the line of border radar transmitters, hitting them with HARM antiradar missiles and knocking most of them off the air. That denied the Chinese foreknowledge of the inbound strike. They had been guided by two E-3B Sentry aircraft, and protected by three squadrons of F-15C EAGLE air-superiority fighters in the event some Chinese fighters appeared again to die, but there had been little such fighter activity in the past thirty-six hours. The Chinese fighter regiments had paid a bloody price for their pride, and were staying close to home in what appeared to be a defense mode—on the principle that if you weren’t attacking, then you were defending. In fact they were doing little but flying standing patrols over their own bases—that’s how thoroughly they had been whipped by American and Russian fighters—and that left the air in American and Russian control, which was going to be bad news for the People’s Liberation Army.
The F-l6s were at thirty thousand feet, holding to the east. They were several minutes early for the mission, and circled while awaiting word to attack. Some concertmaster was stage-managing this, they all thought. They hoped he didn’t break his little baton-stick-thing.
“Getting closer,” Pasha observed with studied nonchalance. “Range?” Aleksandrov asked the men down below in the track. “Twenty-one hundred meters, within range,” Buikov reported from inside the gun turret. “The fox and the gardener approach, Comrade Captain.”
“Leave them be for the moment, Boris Yevgeniyevich.”
“As you say, Comrade Captain.” Buikov was comfortable with the no-shoot rule, for once.
“How much farther to the reconnaissance screen?” Peng asked. “Two more kilometers,” Ge replied over the radio. “But that might not be a good idea.”
“Ge, have you turned into an old woman?” Peng asked lightly. “Comrade, it is the job of lieutenants to find the enemy, not the job of senior generals,” the division commander replied in a reasonable voice.
“Is there any reason to believe the enemy is nearby?”
“We are in Russia, Peng. They’re here somewhere.”
“He is correct, Comrade General,” Colonel Wa Cheng-gong pointed out to his commander.
“Rubbish. Go forward. Tell the reconnaissance element to stop and await us,” Peng ordered. “A good commander LEADs from the front!” he announced over the radio.
“Oh, shit,” Ge observed in his tank. “Peng wants to show off his ji-ji. Move out,” he ordered his driver, a captain (his entire crew was made of officers). “Let’s LEAD the emperor to the recon screen.”
The brand-new T-98 tank surged forward, throwing up two rooster tails of dirt as it accelerated. General Ge was in the commander’s hatch, with a major acting as gunner, a duty he practiced diligently because it was his job to keep his general alive in the event of contact with the enemy. For the moment, it meant going ahead of the senior general with blood in his eye.
“Why did they stop?” Buikov asked. The PLA tracks had suddenly halted nine hundred meters off, all five of them, and now the crews dismounted, manifestly to take a stretch, and five of them lit up smokes.
“They must be waiting for something,” the captain thought aloud. Then he got on the radio. “GREEN WOLF here, the enemy has halted about a kilometer south of us. They’re just sitting still.”
“Have they seen you?”
“No, they’ve dismounted to take a piss, looks like, just standing there. We have them in range, but I don’t want to shoot until they’re closer,” Aleksandrov reported.
“Very well, take your time. There’s no hurry here. They’re walking into the parlor very nicely.”
“Understood. Out.” He set the mike down. “Is it time for morning break?”
“They haven’t been doing that the last four days, Comrade Captain,” Buikov reminded his boss.
“They appear relaxed enough.”
“I could kill any of them now,” Gogol said, “but they’re all privates, except for that one. . .”
“That’s the fox. He’s a lieutenant, likes to run around a lot. The other officer’s the gardener. He likes playing with plants,” Buikov told the old man.
“Killing a lieutenant’s not much better than killing a corporal,” Gogol observed. “There’s too many of them.”
“What’s this?” Buikov said from his gunner’s scat. “Tank, enemy tank coming around the left edge, range five thousand.”
“I see it!” Aleksandrov reported. “. . . Just one? Only one tank—oh, all right, there’s a carrier with it—”
“It’s a command track, look at all those antennas!” Buikov called.
The gunner’s sight was more powerful than Aleksandrov’s binoculars. The captain couldn’t confirm that for another minute or so. “Oh, yes, that’s a command track, all right. I wonder who’s in it…”
There they are,” the driver called back. “The reconnaissance section, two kilometers ahead, Comrade General.”
“Excellent,” Peng observed. Standing up to look out of the top of his command track with his binoculars, good Japanese ones from Nikon.
There was Ge in his command tank, thirty meters off to the right, protecting him as though he were a good dog outside the palace of some ancient nobleman. Peng couldn’t see anything to be concerned about. It was a clear day, with some puffy white clouds at three thousand meters or so. If there were American fighters up there, he wasn’t going to worry about them. Besides, they’d done no ground-attacking that he’d heard about, except to hit those bridges back at Harbin, and one might as well attack a mountain as those things, Peng was sure. He had to hold on to the sill of the hatch lest the pitching of the vehicle smash him against it—it was a track specially modified for senior officers, but no one had thought to make it safer to stand in, he thought sourly. He wasn’t some peasant-private who could smash his head with no consequence . . . Well, in any case, it was a good day to be a soldier, in the field Leading his men. A fair day, and no enemy in sight.
“Pull up alongside the reconnaissance track,” he ordered his driver.
“Who the hell is this?” Captain Aleksandrov wondered aloud. “Four big antennas, at least a division commander,” Buikov thought aloud. “My thirty will settle his hash.”
“No, no, let’s let Pasha have him if he gets out.”
Gogol had anticipated that. He was resting his arms on the steel top of the BRM, tucking the rifle in tight to his shoulder. The only thing in his way was the loose weave of the camouflage netting, and that wasn’t an obstacle to worry about, the old marksman was sure.
“Stopping to see the fox?” Buikov said next.
“Looks that way,” the captain agreed.
“Comrade General!” the young lieutenant called in surprise. “Where’s the enemy, Boy?” Peng asked loudly in return. “General, we haven’t seen much this morning. Some tracks in the ground, but not even any of that for the past two hours.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Not a thing,” the lieutenant replied.
“Well, I thought there’d be something around.” Peng put his foot in the leather stirrup and climbed to the top of his command vehicle.
“It’s a general, has to be, look at that clean uniform!” Buikov told the others as he slewed his turret around to center his sight on the man eight hundred meters away. It was the same in any army. Generals never got dirty.
“Pasha,” Aleksandrov asked, “ever kill an enemy general before?”
“No,” Gogol admitted, drawing the rifle in very tight and allowing for the range. . . .