“Better to go to that ridgeline, but our orders were to stop at once,” the lieutenant told the general.
“That’s right,” Peng agreed. He took out his Nikon binoculars and trained them on the ridge, perhaps eight hundred meters off. Nothing to see except for that one bush . . . Then there was a flash—
“Yes!” Gogol said the moment the trigger broke. Two seconds, about, for the bullet to—
They’d never hear the report of the shot over the sound of their diesel engines, but Colonel Wa heard the strange, wet thud, and his head turned to see General Peng’s face twist into surprise rather than pain, and Peng grunted from the sharp blow to the center of his chest, and then his hands started coming down, pulled by the additional weight of the binoculars—and then his body started down, falling off the top of the command track through the hatch into the radio-filled interior.
“That got him,” Gogol said positively. “He’s dead.” He almost added that it might be fun to skin him and lay his hide in the river for a final swim and a gold coating, but, no, you only did that to wolves, not people—not even Chinese.
“Buikov, take those tracks!”
“Gladly, Comrade Captain,” and the sergeant squeezed the trigger, and the big machine gun spoke.
They hadn’t seen or heard the shot that had killed Peng, but there was no mistaking the machine cannon that fired now. Two of the reconnaissance tracks exploded at once, but then everything started moving, and fire was returned.
“Major!” General Ge called.
“Loading HEAT!” The gunner punched the right button, but the autoloader, never as fast as a person, took its time to ram the projective and then the propellant case into the breech.
“Back us up!” Aleksandrov ordered loudly. The diesel engine was already running, and the BRM’s transmission set in reverse. The corporal in the driver’s seat floored the pedal and the carrier jerked backward. The suddenness of it nearly lost Gogol over the side, but Aleksandrov grabbed his arm and dragged him down inside, tearing his skin in the process. “Go north!” the captain ordered next.
“I got three of the bastards!” Buikov said. Then the sky was rent by a crash overhead. Something had gone by too fast to see, but not too fast to hear.
“That tank gunner knows his business,” Aleksandrov observed. “Corporal, get us out of here!”
“Working on it, Comrade Captain.”
“GREEN WOLF to command!” the captain said next into the radio.
“Yes, GREEN WOLF, report.”
“We just killed three enemy tracks, and I think we got a senior officer. Pasha, Sergeant Gogol, that is, killed a Chinese general officer, or so it appeared.”
“He was a general, all right,” Buikov agreed. “The shoulder boards were pure gold, and that was a command track with four big radio antennas.”
“Understood. What are you doing now, GREEN WOLF?”
“We’re getting the fuck away. I think we’ll be seeing more Chinks soon.”
“Agreed, GREEN WOLF. Proceed to divisional CR Out.”
“Yuriy Andreyevich, you will have heavy contact in a few minutes. What is your plan?”
“I want to volley-fire my tanks before firing my artillery. Why spoil the surprise, Gennady?” Sinyavskiy asked cruelly. “We are ready for them here.”
“Understood. Good luck, Yuriy.”
“And what of the other missions?”
“BOYAR is moving now, and the Americans are about to deploy their MAGICal pigs. If you can handle the Leading Chinese elements, those behind ought to be roughly handled.”
“You can rape their daughters for all I care, Gennady.”
“That is nekulturniy, Yuriy. Perhaps their wives,” he suggested, adding, “We are watching you on the television now.”
“Then I will smile for the cameras,” Sinyavskiy promised.
The orbiting F-16 fighters were under the tactical command of Major General Gus Wallace, but he, at the moment, was under the command—or at least operating under the direction—of a Russian, General-Colonel Gennady Bondarenko, who was in turn guided by the action of this skinny young Major Tucker and Grace Kelly, a soulless drone hovering over the battlefield.
“There they go, General,” Tucker said, as the Leading Chinese echelons resumed their drive north.
“I think it is time, then.” He looked to Colonel Aliyev, who nodded agreement.
Bondarenko lifted the satellite phone. “General Wallace?”
“I’m here.”
“Please release your aircraft.”
“Roger that. Out.” And Wallace shifted phone receivers. “EAGLE one, this is roughrider. Execute, execute, execute. Acknowledge.”
“Roger that, sir, copy your order to execute. Executing now. Out.” And the colonel on the LEAD AWACS shifted to a different frequency: “CADILLAC LEAD, this is EAGLE one. Execute your attack. Over.”
“Roger that,” the colonel heard. “Going down now. Out.”
The F-l6s had been circling above the isolated clouds. Their threat receivers chirped a little bit, reporting the emissions of SAM radars somewhere down there, but the types indicated couldn’t reach this high, and their jammer pods were all on anyway. On command, the sleek fighters changed course for the battlefield far below and to their west. Their GPS locators told them exactly where they were, and they also knew where their targets were, and the mission became a strictly technical exercise.
Under the wings of each aircraft were the Smart Pigs, four to the fighter, and with forty-eight fighters, that came to 192 J-SOWs. Each of these was a canister thirteen feet long and not quite two feet wide, filled with BLU-108 submunitions, twenty per container. The fighter pilots punched the release triggers, dropped their bombs, and then angled for home, letting the robots do the rest of the work. The Dark Star tapes would later tell them how they’d done.
The Smart Pigs separated from the fighters, extended their own little wings to guide themselves the rest of the way to the target area. They knew this information, having been programmed by the fighters and were now able to follow guidance from their own GPS receivers. This they did, acting in accordance with their own onboard mini-computers, until each reached a spot five thousand feet over their designated segment of the battlefield. They didn’t know that this was directly over the real estate occupied by the Chinese 29th Type A Group Army and its three heavy divisions, which included nearly seven hundred main-battle tanks, three hundred armored personnel carriers, and a hundred mobile guns. That made a total of roughly a thousand targets for the nearly four thousand descending submunitions. But the falling bomblets were guided, too, and each had a seeker looking for heat of the sort radiated by an operating tank, personnel carrier, self-propelled gun, or truck. There were a lot of them to look for.
No one saw them coming. They were small, no larger, really, than a common crow, and falling rapidly; they were also painted white, which helped them blend in to the morning sky. Each had a rudimentary steering mechanism, and at an altitude of two thousand feet they started looking for and homing in on targets. Their downward speed was such that a minor deflection of their control vanes was sufficient to get them close, and close meant straight down.
They exploded in bunches, almost in the same instant. Each contained a pound and a half of high-explosive, the heat from which melted the metal casing, which then turned into a projectile—the process was called “self-forging”—which blazed downward at a speed of ten thousand feet per second. The armor on the top of a tank is always the thinnest, and five times the thickness would have made no difference. Of the 921 tanks on the field, 762 took hits, and the least of these destroyed the vehicles’ diesel engine. Those less fortunate took hits through the turret, which killed the crews at once and/or ignited the ammunition storage, converting each armored vehicle into a small man-fabricated volcano. Just that quickly, three mechanized divisions were changed into one badly shaken and disorganized brigade. The infantry carriers fared no better, and it was worst of all for the trucks, most of them carrying ammunition or other flammable supplies.
All in all, it took less than ninety seconds to turn 29th Type A Group Army into a thinly spread junkyard and funeral pyre.
“Holy God,” Ryan said. “Is this for-real?” “Seeing is believing. Jack, when they came to me with the idea for J-SOW, I thought it had to be something from a science-fiction book. Then they demo’d the submunitions out at China Lake, and I thought, Jesus, we don’t need the Army or the Marines anymore. Just send over some F-18s and then a brigade of trucks full of body bags and some ministers to pray over them. Eh, Mickey?”
“It’s some capability,” General Moore agreed. He shook his head. “Damn, just like the tests.”
“Okay, what’s happening next?”
“Next” was just off the coast near Guangszhou. Two Aegis cruisers, Mobile Bay and Princeton, plus the destroyers Fletcher, Fife, and John Young, steamed in line-ahead formation out of the morning fog and turned broadside to the shore. There was actually a decent beach at this spot. There was nothing much behind it, just a coastal-defense missile battery that the fighter-bombers had immolated a few hours before. To finish that job, the ships trained their guns to port and let loose a barrage of five-inch shells. The crack and THUNDER of the gunfire could be heard on shore, as was the shriek of the shells passing overhead, and the explosions of the detonations. That included one missile that the bombs of the previous night had missed, plus the crew getting it ready for launch. People living nearby saw the gray silhouettes against the morning sky, and many of them got on the telephone to report what they saw, but being civilians, they reported the wrong thing, of course.