"We found a written order in one of the bunkers, authorizing them to leave when they thought things were untenable. That surprised me," Colonel Wa observed. "Historically, the Russians fight very hard on the defense, as the Germans found. But that was under Stalin. The Russians had discipline then. And courage. Not today, it would seem."

"Their evacuation was conducted with some skill," Peng thought out loud. "We ought to have taken more prisoners."

"They ran too fast, Comrade General," operations explained.

"He who fights and runs away," General Peng quoted, "lives to fight another day. Bear that in mind, Colonel."

"Yes, Comrade General, but he who runs away is not an immediate threat."

"Let's go," the general said, heading off to his command track. He wanted to see the front, such as it was.

So?" Bondarenko asked the lieutenant. The youngster Shad been through a bad day, and being required to stand and make a report to his theater commander made it no better. "Stand easy, boy. You're alive. It could have been worse."

"General, we could have held if we'd been given a little support," Komanov said, allowing his frustration to appear.

"There was none to give you. Go on." The general pointed at the map on the wall.

"They crossed here, and came through this saddle, and over this ridge to attack us. Leg infantry, no vehicles that we ever saw. They had man-portable anti-tank weapons, nothing special or unexpected, but they had ma.s.sive artillery support. There must have been an entire battery concentrated just on my one position. Heavy guns, fifteen-centimeter or more. And artillery rockets that wiped out our artillery support almost immediately."

"That's the one surprise they threw at us," Aliyev confirmed. "They must have a lot more of those fire-finder systems than we expected, and they're using their Type 83 rockets as dedicated counter-battery weapons, like the Americans did in Saudi. It's an effective tactic. We'll have to go after their counter-battery systems first of all, or use self-propelled guns to fire and move after only two or three shots. There's no way to spoof them that I know of, and jamming radars of that type is extremely difficult."

"So, we have to work on a way to kill them early on," Bondarenko said. "We have electronic-intelligence units. Let them seek out those c.h.i.n.k radars and eliminate them with rockets of our own." He turned. "Go, on. Lieutenant. Tell me about the Chinese infantry."

"They are not cowards, Comrade General. They take fire and act properly under it. They are well-drilled. My position and the one next to us took down at least two hundred, and they kept coming. Their battle drill is quite good, like a soccer team. If you do this, they do that, almost instantly. For certain, they call in artillery fire with great skill."

"They had the batteries already lined up, Lieutenant, lined up and waiting," Aliyev told the junior officer. "It helps if you are following a prepared script. Anything else?"

"We never saw a tank. They had us taken out before they finished their bridges. Their infantry looked well-prepared, well-trained, even eager to move forward. I did not see evidence of flexible thinking, but I did not see much of anything, and as you say, their part of the operation was preplanned, and thoroughly rehea.r.s.ed."

"Typically, the Chinese tell their men a good deal about their planned operations beforehand. They don't believe in secrecy the way we do," Aliyev said. "Perhaps it makes for comradely solidarity on the battlefield."

"But things are going their way, Andrey. The measure of an army is how it reacts when things go badly. We haven't seen that yet, however." And would they ever? Bondarenko wondered. He shook his head. He had to banish that sort of thinking from his mind. If he had no confidence, how could his men have it? "What about your men, Valeriy Mikhailovich? How did they fight?"

"We fought, Comrade General," Komanov a.s.sured the senior officer. "We killed two hundred, and we would have killed many more with a little artillery support."

"Will your men fight some more?" Aliyev asked.

"f.u.c.k, yes!" Komanov snarled back. "Those little b.a.s.t.a.r.ds are invading our country. Give us the right weapons, and we'll f.u.c.king kill them all!"

"Did you graduate tank school?"

Komanov bobbed his head like a cadet. "Yes, Comrade General, eighth in my cla.s.s."

"Give him a company with BOYAR," the general told his ops officer. "They're short of officers."

Major General Marion Diggs was in the third train out of Berlin; it wasn't his choosing, just the way things worked out. He was thirty minutes behind Angelo Giusti's cavalry squadron. The Russians were running their trains as closely together as safety allowed, and probably even shading that somewhat. What was working was that the Russian national train system was fully electrified, which meant that the engines accelerated well out of stations and out of the slow orders caused by track problems, which were numerous.

Diggs had grown up in Chicago. His father had been a Pullman porter with the Atcheson, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad, working the Super Chief between Chicago and Los Angeles until the pa.s.senger service had died in the early 1970s; then, remarkably enough, he'd changed unions to become an engineer. Marion remembered riding with him as a boy, and loving the feel of such a ma.s.sive piece of equipment under his hands-and so, when he'd gone to West Point, he'd decided to be a tanker, and better yet, a cavalryman. Now he owned a lot of heavy equipment.

It was his first time in Russia, a place he certainly hadn't expected to see when he'd been in the first half of his uniformed career, when the Russians he'd worried about seeing had been mainly from First Guards Tank and Third Shock armies, those ma.s.sive formations that had once sat in East Germany, always poised to take a nice little drive to Paris, or so NATO had feared.

But no more, now that Russia was part of NATO, an idea that was like something from a bad science-fiction movie. There was no denying it, however. Looking out the windows of the train car, he could see the onion-topped spires of Russian Orthodox churches, ones that Stalin had evidently failed to tear down. The railyards were pretty familiar. Never the most artistic examples of architecture or city planning, they looked the same as the dreary yards leading into Chicago or any other American city. No, only the train yards that you built under your Christmas tree every year were pretty. But they didn't have any Christmas trees in evidence here. The train rolled to a stop, probably waiting for a signal to proceed- -but no, this looked to be some sort of military terminal. Russian tanks were in evidence off to the right, and a lot of sloped concrete ramps-the Russians had probably built this place to ship their own tracked vehicles west, he judged.

"General?" a voice called.

"Yo!"

"Somebody here to see you, sir," the same voice announced.

Diggs stood and walked back to the sound. It was one of his junior staff officers, a new one fresh from Leavenworth, and behind him was a Russian general officer.

"You are Diggs?" the Russian asked in fair English.

"That's right."

"Come with me please." The Russian walked out onto the platform. The air was fresh, but they were under low, gray clouds this morning.

"You going to tell me how things are going out east?" Diggs asked.

"We wish to fly you and some of your staff to Chabarsovil so that you can see for yourself."

That made good sense, Diggs thought. "How many?"

"Six, plus you."

"Okay." The general nodded and reached for the captain who'd summoned him from his seat. "I want Colonels Masterman, Douglas, Welch, Turner, Major Hurst, and Lieutenant Colonel Garvey."

"Yes, sir." The boy disappeared.

"How soon?"

"The transport is waiting for you now."

One of theirs, Diggs thought. He'd never flown on a Russian aircraft before. How safe would it be? How safe would it be to fly into a war zone? Well, the Army didn't pay him to stay in safe places.

"Who are you?"

"Nosenko, Valentin Nosenko, general major, Stavka."

"How bad is it?"

"It is not good, General Diggs. Our main problem will be getting reinforcements to the theater of action. But they have rivers to cross. The difficulties, as you Americans say, should even out."

Diggs's main worry was supply. His tanks and Bradleys all had basic ammo loads already aboard, and two and a half additional such loads for each vehicle were on supply trucks sitting on other trains like this one. After that, things got a little worrisome, especially for artillery. But the biggest worry of all was diesel fuel. He had enough to move his division maybe three or four hundred miles. That was a good long way in a straight line, but wars never allowed troops to travel in straight lines. That translated to maybe two hundred miles of actual travel at best, and that was not an impressive number at all. Then there was the question of jet fuel for his organic aircraft. So, his head logistician, Colonel Ted Douglas, was the first guy he needed, after Masterman, his operations brain. The officers started showing up.

"What gives, sir?" Masterman asked.

"We're flying east to see what's going on."

"Okay, let me make sure we have some communications gear."Masterman disappeared again. He left the train car, along with two enlisted men humping satellite radio equipment.

"Good call, Duke," LTC Garvey observed. He was communications and electronic intelligence for First Tanks.

"Gentlemen, this is General Nosenko from Stavka. He's taking us east, I gather?"

"Correct, I am an intelligence officer for Stavka. This way, please." He led them off, to where four cars were waiting. The drive to a military airport took twenty minutes.

"How are your people taking this?" Diggs asked.

"The civilians, you mean? Too soon to tell. Much disbelief, but some anger. Anger is good," Nosenko said. "Anger gives courage and determination."

If the Russians were talking about anger and determination, the situation must be pretty bad, Diggs thought, looking out at the streets of the Moscow suburbs.

"What are you moving east ahead of us?"

"So far, four motor-rifle divisions," Nosenko answered. "Those are our best-prepared formations. We are a.s.sembling other forces."

"I've been out of touch. What else is NATO sending? Anything?" Diggs asked next.

"A British brigade is forming up now, the men based at Hohne. We hope to have them on the way here in two days."

"No way we'd go into action without at least the Brits to back us up," Diggs said. "Good, they're equipped about the same way we are." And better yet, they trained according to the same doctrine. Hohne, he thought, their 22nd Brigade from Haig Barracks, Brigadier Sam Turner. Drank whiskey like it was Perrier, but a good thinker and a superior tactician. And his brigade was all trained up from some fun and games down at Grafenwhr. "What about Germans?"

"That's a political question," Nosenko admitted.

"Tell your politicians that Hitler's dead, Valentin. The Germans are pretty good to have on your side. Trust me, buddy. We play with them all the time. They're down a little from ten years ago, but the German soldier ain't no dummy, and neither are his officers. Their reconnaissance units are particularly good."

"Yes, but that is a political question," Nosenko repeated. And that, Diggs knew, was that, at least for now.

The aircraft waiting was an II-86, known to NATO as the Camber, manifestly the Russian copy of Lockheed's C-141 Starlifter. This one had Aeroflot commercial markings, but retained the gun position in the tail that the Russians liked to keep on all their tactical aircraft. Diggs didn't object to it at the moment. They'd scarcely had the chance to sit down and strap in when the aircraft started rolling.

"In a hurry, Valentin?"

"Why wait, General Diggs? There's a war on," he reminded his guest.

"Okay, what do we know?"

Nosenko opened the map case he'd been carrying and laid out a large sheet on the floor as the aircraft lifted off. It was of the Chinese-Russian border on the Amur River, with markings already penciled on. The American officers all leaned over to look.

"They came in here, and drove across the river . . ."

How fast are they moving?" Bondarenko asked.

"I have a reconnaissance company ahead of them. They report in every fifteen minutes," Colonel Tolkunov replied. "They are moving in a deliberate manner. Their reconnaissance screen is composed of WZ-501 tracked APCs, heavy on radios, light on weapons. They are on the whole not very enterprising, however. As I said, deliberate. They move by leapfrogging half a kilometer at a bound, depending on terrain. We're monitoring their radios. They're not encrypted, though their spoken language is deceptive in terminology. We're working on that."

"Speed of advance?"

"Five kilometers in an hour is the fastest we've seen, usually slower than that. Their main body is still getting organized, and they haven't set up a logistics train yet. I'd expect them to attempt no more than thirty kilometers in a day on flat open ground, based on what I've seen so far."

"Interesting." Bondarenko looked back at his maps. They'd start going north-northwest because that's what the terrain compelled them to do. At this speed, they'd be at the gold strike in six or seven days.

Theoretically, he could move 265th Motor Rifle to a blocking position . . . here . . . in two days and make a stand, but by then they'd have at least three, maybe eight, mechanized divisions to attack his one full-strength unit, and he couldn't gamble on that so soon. The good news was that the Chinese were bypa.s.sing his command post-contemptuously? he wondered, or just because there was nothing there to threaten them, and so nothing to squander force on? No, they'd run as fast and hard as they could, bringing up foot infantry to wall off their line of advance. That was cla.s.sic tactics, and the reason was because it worked. Everyone did it that way, from Hannibal to Hitler.

So, their lead elements moved deliberately, and they were still forming up their army over the Amur bridgehead.

"What units have we identified?"

"The lead enemy formation is their 34th Red Banner Shock Army, Commanded by Peng Xi-w.a.n.g. He is politically reliable and well-regarded in Beijing, an experienced soldier. Expect him to be the operational army group commander. The 34th Army is mainly across the river now. Three more Group A mechanized armies are lined up to cross as well, the 31st, 29th, and 43rd. That's a total of sixteen mechanized divisions, plus a lot of other attachments. We think the 65th Group B Army will be next across. Four infantry divisions plus a tank brigade. Their job will be to hold the western flank, I would imagine." That made sense. There was no Russian force east of the breakthrough worthy of the name. A cla.s.sic operation would also wheel east to Vladivostok on the Pacific Coast, but that would only distract forces from the main objective. So, the turn east would wait for at least a week, probably two or three, with just light screening forces heading that way for the moment.

"What about our civilians?" Bondarenko asked.

"They're leaving the towns in the Chinese path as best they can, mainly cars and buses. We have MP units trying to keep them organized. So far nothing has happened to interfere with the evacuation," Tolkunov said. "See, from this it looks as if they're actually bypa.s.sing Belogorsk, just pa.s.sing east of it with their reconnaissance elements."

"That's the smart move, isn't it?" Bondarenko observed. "Their real objective is far to the north. Why slow down for anything? They don't want land. They don't want people. They want oil and gold. Capturing civilians will not make those objectives any easier to accomplish. If I were this Peng fellow, I would be worried about the extent of my drive north. Even unopposed, the natural obstacles are formidable, and defending his line of advance will be a beast of a problem." Gennady paused. Why have any sympathy for this barbarian? His mission was to kill him and all his men, after all. But how? If even marching that far north was a problem-and it was-then how much harder would it be to strike through the same terrain with less-prepared troops? The tactical problems on both sides were the kind men in his profession did not welcome.

"General Bondarenko?" a foreign voice asked.

"Yes?" He turned to see a man dressed in an American flight suit.

"Sir, my name is Major Dan Tucker. I just flew in with a downlink for our Dark Star UAVs. Where do you want us to set up, sir?"

"Colonel Tolkunov? Major, this is my chief of intelligence."

The American saluted sloppily, as air force people tended to do. "Howdy, Colonel."

"How long to set up?"

The American was pleased that this Tolkunov's English was better than his own Russian. "Less than an hour, sir."

"This way." The G-2 led him outside. "How good are your cameras?"

"Colonel, when a guy's out taking a p.i.s.s, you can see how big his d.i.c.k is."

Tolkunov figured that was typical American braggadocio, but it set him wondering.

Captain Feodor Il'ych Aleksandrov commanded the 265th Motor Rifle's divisional reconnaissance element-the division was supposed to have a full battalion for this task, but he was all they had-and for that task he had eight of the new BRM reconnaissance tracks. These were evolutionary developments of the standard BMP infantry combat vehicle, upgraded with better automotive gear-more reliable engine and transmission systems-plus the best radios his country made. He reported directly to his divisional commander, and also, it seemed, to the theater intelligence coordinator, some colonel named Tolkunov. That chap, he'd discovered, was very concerned with his personal safety, always urging him to stay close-but not too close-not to be spotted, and to avoid combat of any type. His job, Tolkunov had told him at least once every two hours for the last day and a half, was to stay alive and to keep his eye on the advancing Chinese. He wasn't supposed to so much as injure one little hair on their cute little c.h.i.n.k heads, just stay close enough that if they mumbled in their sleep, to copy down the names of the girlfriends they f.u.c.ked in their dreams.

Aleksandrov was a young captain, only twenty-eight, and rakishly handsome, an athlete who ran for personal pleasure-and running, he told his men, was the best form of exercise for a soldier, especially a reconnaissance specialist. He had a driver, gunner, and radio operator for each of his tracks, plus three infantrymen whom he'd personally trained to be invisible.

The drill was for them to spend about half their time out of their vehicles, usually a good kilometer or so ahead of their Chinese counterparts, either behind trees or on their bellies, reporting back with monosyllabic comments on their portable radios, which were of j.a.panese manufacture. The men moved light, carrying only their rifles and two spare magazines, because they weren't supposed to be seen or heard, and the truth was that Aleksandrov would have preferred to send them out unarmed, lest they be tempted to shoot someone out of patriotic anger. However, no soldier would ever stand for being sent out on a battlefield weaponless, and so he'd had to settle for ordering them out with bolts closed on empty chambers. The captain was usually out with his men, their BRM carriers hidden three hundred or so meters away in the trees.

In the past twenty-four hours, they'd become intimately familiar with their Chinese opponents. These were also trained and dedicated reconnaissance specialists, and they were pretty good at their jobs, or certainly appeared to be. They were also moving in tracked vehicles, and also spent a lot of their time on foot, ahead of their tracks, hiding behind trees and peering to the north, looking for Russian forces. The Russians had even started giving them names.

"It's the gardener," Sergeant Buikov said. That one liked touching trees and bushes, as though studying them for a college paper or something. The gardener was short and skinny, and looked like a twelve-year-old to the Russians. He seemed competent enough, carrying his rifle slung on his back, and using his binoculars often. He was a Chinese lieutenant, judging by his shoulderboards, probably commander of this platoon. He ordered his people around a lot, but didn't mind taking the lead. So, he was probably conscientious. He is, therefore, the one we should kill first, Aleksandrov thought. Their BRM reconnaissance track had a fine 30-mm cannon that could reach out and turn the gardener into fertilizer from a thousand meters or so, but Captain Aleksandrov had forbidden it, worse luck, Buikov thought. He was from this area, a woodsman of sorts who'd hunted in the forests many times with his father, a lumberjack. "We really ought to kill him."

"Boris Yevgeniyevich, do you wish to alert the enemy to our presence?" Aleksandrov asked his sergeant.

"I suppose not, my captain, but the hunting season is-"