“So, comrades, they come right into our parlor, eh?” he said for those around him. Sinyavskiy had been a soldier for twenty-six years. Oddly, he was not the son of a soldier. His father was an instructor in geology at Moscow State University, but ever since the first war movie he’d seen, this was the profession he’d craved to join. He’d done all the work, attended all the schools, studied history with the manic attention common in the Russian army, and the Red Army before it. This would be his Battle of the Kursk Bulge, remembering the battle where Vatutin and Rokossovskiy had smashed Hitler’s last attempt to retake the offensive in Russia—where his mother country had begun the long march that had ended at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. There, too, the Red Army had been the recipient of brilliant intelligence information, letting them know the time, place, and character of the German attack, and so allowing them to prepare so well that even the best of the German field commanders, Erich von Manstein, could do no more than break his teeth on the Russian steel.
And so it will be here, Sinyavskiy promised himself. The only unsatisfactory part was that he was stuck here in this camouflaged tent instead of in the line with his men, but, no, he wasn’t a captain anymore, and his place was here, to fight the battle on a goddamned printed map.
“RED WOLF, you will commence firing when the advance guard gets to within eight hundred meters.”
“Eight hundred meters, Comrade General,” the commander of his tank regiment acknowledged. “I can see them quite clearly now.”
“What exactly can you see?”
“It appears to be a battalion-strength formation, principally Type 90 tanks, some Type 98s but not too many of those, spread out as though they went to sub-unit commanders. Numerous tracked personnel carriers. I do not see any artillery-spotting vehicles, however. What do we know of their artillery?”
“It’s rolling, not set up for firing. We’re watching them,” Sinyavskiy assured him.
“Excellent. They are now two kilometers off by my range finder.”
“Stand by.”
“I will do that, Command.”
“I hate waiting,” Sinyavskiy commented to the officers around him. They all nodded, having the same prejudice. He hadn’t seen Afghanistan in his younger years, having served mainly in 1st and 2nd Guards lank armies in Germany back then, preparing to fight against NATO, an event which blessedly had never taken place. This was his very first experience with real combat, and it hadn’t really started yet, and he was ready for it to start.
“Okay, if they light those missiles up, what can we do about it?” Ryan asked.
“If they launch ’em, there’s not a goddamned thing but run for cover,” Secretary Bretano said.
“That’s good for us. We’ll all get away. What about the people who live in Washington, New York, and all the other supposed targets?” POTUS asked.
“I’ve ordered some Aegis cruisers to the likely targets that are near the water,” thunder went on. “I had one of my people from TRW look at the possibility of upgrading the missile systems to see if they might do an intercept. He’s done the theoretical work, and he says it looks good on the simulators, but that’s a ways from a practical test, of course. It’s better than nothing, though.”
“Okay, where are the ships?”
“There’s one here now,” Bretano answered.
“Oh? When did that happen?” Robby Jackson asked.
“Less than an hour ago. Gettysburg. There’s another one going to New York—and San Francisco and Los Angeles. Also Seattle, though that’s not really a target as far as we know. The software upgrade is going out to them to get their missiles reprogrammed.”
“Okay, that’s something. What about taking those missiles out, before they can launch?” Ryan asked next.
“The Chinese silos have recently been upgraded in protection, steel armor on the concrete covers—shaped like a Chinese coolie hat, it will probably deflect most bombs, but not the deep penetrators, the GBU-27s we used on the railroad bridges—”
“If they have any left over there. Better ask Gus Wallace,” the Vice President warned.
“What do you mean?” Bretano asked.
“I mean we never made all that many of them, and the Air Force must have dropped about forty last night.”
“I’ll check that,” SecDef promised.
“What if he doesn’t?” Jack asked.
“Then either we get some more in one big hurry, or we think up something else,” TOMCAT replied.
“Like what, Robby?”
“Hell, send in a special-operations team and blow them the fuck up,” the former fighter pilot suggested.
“I wouldn’t much want to try that myself,” Mickey Moore observed.
“Beats the hell out of a five-megaton bomb going off on Capitol Hill, Mickey,” Jackson shot back. “Look, the preferred thing to do is find out if Gus Wallace has the right bombs. It’s a long stretch for the Black Jets, but you can tank them going and coming—and put fighters up to protect the tankers. It’s complicated, but we practice that sort of thing. If he doesn’t have the goddamned bombs, we fly them to him, assuming there are any. You know, weapons storage isn’t a cornucopia, guys. There’s a finite, discrete number for every item in the inventory.”
“General Moore,” Ryan said, “call General Wallace and find out, right now, if you would.”
“Yes, sir.” Moore stood and left the Situation Room.
“Look,” Ed Foley said, pointing to the TV. “It’s started.”
The wood line erupted in a sheet of flame two kilometers across. The sight caused the eyes of the Chinese tankers to flare, but most of the front rank of tank crews didn’t have time for much more than that. Of the thirty tanks in that line, only three escaped immediate destruction. It was little better for the personnel carriers interspersed with them.
“You may commence firing, Colonel,” Sinyavskiy told his artillery commander.
The command was relayed at once, and the ground shook beneath their feet.
It was spectacular to see on the computer terminal. The Chinese had walked straight into the ambush, and the effect of the Russian opening volley was ghastly to behold.
Major Tucker took in a deep breath as he saw several hundred men lose their lives.
“Back to their artillery,” Bondarenko ordered.
“Yes, sir.” Tucker complied at once, altering the focus of the high-altitude camera and finding the Chinese artillery. It was mainly of the towed sort, being pulled behind trucks and tractors. They were a little slow getting the word. The first Russian shells were falling around them before any effort was made to stop the trucks and lift the limbers off the towing hooks, and for all that the Chinese gunners worked rapidly.
But theirs was a race against Death, and Death had a head start. Tucker watched one gun crew struggle to manhandle their 122-mm gun into a firing position. The gunners were loading the weapon when three shells landed close enough to upset the weapon and kill more than half their number. Zooming in the camera, he could see one private writhing on the ground, and there was no one close by to offer him assistance.
“It is a miserable business, isn’t it?” Bondarenko observed quietly.
“Yeah,” Tucker agreed. When a tank blew up it was easy to tell yourself that a tank was just a thing. Even though you knew that three or four human beings were inside, you couldn’t see them. As a fighter pilot never killed a fellow pilot, but only shot down his aircraft, so Tucker adhered to the Air Force ethos that death was something that happened to objects rather than people. Well, that poor bastard with blood on his shirt wasn’t a thing, was he? He backed off the camera, taking a wider field that permitted godlike distancing from the up-close-and-personal aspects of the observation.
“Better that they should have remained in their own country, Major,” the Russian explained to him.
“Jesus, what a mess,” Ryan said. He’d seen death up-close-and-personal himself in his time, having shot people who had at the time been quite willing to shoot him, but that didn’t make this imagery any the more palatable. Not by a long fucking shot. The President turned. “Is this going out, Ed?” he asked the DCI. “Ought to be,” Foley replied.
And it was, on a URL—”Uniform Resource Locator” in ‘Netspeak— called http://www.darkstarfeed.cia.gov/siberiabattle/realtime.ram. It didn’t even have to be advertised. Some ‘Net crawlers stumbled onto it in the first five minutes, and the “hits” from people looking at the “streaming video” site climbed up from 0 to 10 in a matter of three minutes. Then some of them must have ducked into chat rooms to spread the word. The monitoring program for the URL at CIA headquarters also kept track of the locations of the people logging into it. The first Asian country, not unexpectedly, was Japan, and the fascination of the people there in military operations guaranteed a rising number of hits. The video also included audio, the real-time comments of Air Force personnel giving some perverse color-commentary back to their comrades in uniform. It was sufficiently colorful that Ryan commented on it.