"-closed, Sergeant. The season is closed, and no, he is not a wolf that you can shoot for your own pleasure, and- down," Aleksandrov ordered. The gardener was looking their way with his field gla.s.ses. Their faces were painted, and they had branches tucked into their field clothing to break up their outlines, but he was taking no chances. "They'll be moving soon. Back to the track."

The hardest part of their drill was to avoid leaving tracks for the Chinese to spot. Aleksandrov had "discussed" this with his drivers, threatening to shoot anyone who left a trail. (He knew he couldn't do that, of course, but his men weren't quite sure.) Their vehicles even had upgraded m.u.f.flers to reduce their sound signature. Every so often, the men who designed and built Russian military equipment got things right, and this was such a case. Besides, they didn't crank their engines until they saw the Chinese doing the same. Aleksandrov looked up. Okay, the gardener was waving to those behind him, the wave that meant to bring their vehicles up. They were doing another leapfrog jump, with one section standing fast and providing over-watch cover for the next move, should something happen. He had no intention of making anything happen, but of course they couldn't know that. Aleksandrov was surprised that they were maintaining their careful drill into the second day. They weren't getting sloppy yet. He'd expected that, but it seemed that the Chinese were better drilled even than his expectations, and were a.s.siduously following their written doctrine. Well, so was he.

"Move now, Captain?" Buikov asked.

"No, let's sit still and watch. They ought to stop at that little ridge with the logging road. I want to see how predictable they are, Boris Yevgeniyevich." But he did trigger his portable radio. "Stand by, they're jumping again."

The other radio just clicked on and off, creating a whisper of static, rather than a spoken reply. Good, his men were adhering to their radio discipline. The second echelon of Chinese tracks moved forward carefully, at about tenkilometer speed, following this opening in the forest. Interesting, he thought, that they weren't venturing too far into the adjoining woods. No more than two or three hundred meters. Then he cringed. A helicopter chattered overhead. It was a Gazelle, a Chinese copy of the French military helicopter. But his track was back in the woods, and every time it stopped, the men ran outside to stretch the camo-net around it. His men, also, were well-drilled. And that, he told his men, was why they didn't dare leave a visible trail if they wanted to live. It wasn't much of a helicopter, but it did carry rockets-and their BRM was an armored personnel carrier, but it wasn't that armored.

"What's he doing?" Buikov asked.

"If he's looking, he's not being very careful about it."

The Chinese were driving up a pathway built ages ago for an unbuilt spur off the Trans-Siberian Railroad. It was wide, in some places five hundred meters, and fairly wellgraded. Someone in years past had thought about building this spur to exploit the unsurveyed riches of Siberia-enough to cut down a lot of trees, and they'd barely grown back in the harsh winters. Just saplings in this pathway now, easily ground into splinters by tracked vehicles. Farther north, the work was being continued by army engineers, making a path to the new gold find, and beyond that to the oil discoveries on the Arctic Coast. When they got that far, the Chinese would find a good road, ready-made for a mechanized force to exploit. But it was a narrow one, and the Chinese would have to learn about flank security if they kept this path up.

Aleksandrov remembered a Roman adventure into Germany, a soldier named Quintilius Varus, commanding three legions, who'd ignored his flanks, and lost his army in the process to a German named Armenius. Might the Chinese make a similar mistake? No, everyone knew of the Teutonenberg Forest disaster. It was a textbook lesson in every military academy in the known world. Quintilius Varus had been a political commander, given that command because he'd been beloved of his emperor, Caesar Augustus, obviously not because of his operational skill. It was a lesson probably better remembered by soldiers than by politicians. And the Chinese army was commanded by soldiers, wasn't it?

"That's the fox," Buikov said. This was the other officer in the Chinese unit, probably the subordinate of the gardener. Similar in size, but he had less interest in plants than he had in darting about. As they watched, he disappeared into the tree line to the east, and if he went by the form card, he'd be invisible for five to eight minutes.

"I could use a smoke," Sergeant Buikov observed.

"That will have to wait, Sergeant."

"Yes, Comrade Captain. May I have a sip of water, then?" he asked petulantly. It wasn't water he wanted, of course.

"Yes, I'd like a shot of vodka, too, but I neglected to bring any with me, as, I am sure, you did as well."

"Regrettably, yes, Comrade Captain. A good slug of vodka helps keep the chill away in these damp woods."

"And it also dulls the senses, and we need our senses, Boris Yevgeniyevich, unless you enjoy eating rice. a.s.suming the c.h.i.n.ks take prisoners, which I rather doubt. They do not like us, Sergeant, and they are not a civilized people. Remember that."

So, they don't go to the ballet. Neither do I, Sergeant Buikov didn't say aloud. His captain was a Muscovite, and spoke often of cultural matters. But like his captain, Buikov had no love for the Chinese, and even less now that he was looking at Chinese soldiers on the soil of his country. He only regretted not killing some, but killing was not his job. His job was watching them p.i.s.s on his country, which somehow only made him angrier.

"Captain, will we ever get to shoot them?" the sergeant asked.

"In due course, yes, it will be our job to eliminate their reconnaissance elements, and yes, Boris, I look forward to that as well." And, yes, I could use a smoke as well. And I'd love a gla.s.s of vodka right now. But he'd settle for some black bread and b.u.t.ter, which he did have in his track, three hundred meters to the north.

Six and a half minutes this time. The fox had at least looked into the woods to the east, probably listened for the sound of diesel engines, but heard nothing but the chirping of birds. Still, this c.h.i.n.k lieutenant was the more conscientious of the two, in Buikov's opinion. They should kill him first, when the time came, the sergeant thought. Aleksandrov tapped the sergeant on the shoulder. "Our turn to leapfrog, Boris Yevgeniyevich."

"By your command, Comrade Captain." And both men moved out, crouching for the first hundred meters, and taking care not to make too much noise, until they heard the Chinese tracks start their engines. In five more minutes, they were back in their BRM and heading north, slowly picking their way through the trees, Aleksandrov b.u.t.tered some bread and ate it, sipping water as he did so. When they'd traveled a thousand meters, their vehicle stopped, and the captain got on his big radio.

Who is Ingrid?" Tolkunov asked. "Ingrid Bergman," Major Tucker replied. "Actress, good-lookin' babe in her day. All the Dark Stars are named for movie stars, Colonel. The troops did it." There was a plastic strip on the monitor top to show which Dark Star was up and transmitting. Marilyn Monroe was back at Zhigansk for service, and Grace Kelly was the next one up, scheduled to go in fifteen hours. "Anyway"-he flipped a switch and then played a little with his mouse control-"there's the Chinese lead elements."

"Son of a b.i.t.c.h," Tolkunov said, demonstrating his knowledge of American slang.

Tucker grinned. "Pretty good, ain't it? Once I sent one over a nudist colony in California-that's like a private park where people walk around naked all the time. You can tell the difference between the flat-chested ones and the ones with nice t.i.ts. Tell the natural blondes from the peroxide ones, too. Anyway, you use this mouse to control the camera-well, somebody else is doing it now up at Zhigansk. Anything in particular that you're interested in?"

"The bridges on the Amur," Tolkunov said at once. Tucker picked up a radio microphone.

"This is Major Tucker. We have a tasking request. Slew Camera Three onto the big crossing point."

"Roger," the speaker next to the monitor said.

The picture changed immediately, seeming to race across the screen like a ribbon from ten o'clock down to four o'clock. Then it stabilized. The field of view must have been four kilometers across. It showed a total of what appeared to be eight bridges, each of them approached by what looked like a parade of insects.

"Give me control of Camera Three," Tucker said next.

"You got it, sir," the speaker acknowledged.

"Okay." Tucker played with the mouse more than the keyboard, and the picture zoomed in-"isolated"-on the third bridge from the west. There were three tanks on it at once, moving at about ten kilometers per hour south to north. The display showed a compa.s.s rose in case you got disoriented, and it was even in color. Tolkunov asked why.

"No more expensive than black-and-white cameras, and we put it on the system because it sometimes shows you things you don't get from gray. First time for overheads, even the satellites don't do color yet," Tucker explained. Then he frowned. "The angle's wrong, can't get the divisional markings on the tanks without moving the platform. Wait." He picked up the microphone again. "Sergeant, who's crossing the bridges now?"

"Appears to be their Three-Oh-Second armored division, sir, part of the Twenty-Ninth Group-A Army. The Thirty-Fourth Army is fully across now. We estimate one full regiment of the Three-Oh-Second is across and moving north at this time," the intel weenie reported, as though relating the baseball scores from yesterday.

"Thanks, Sarge."

"Roger that, Maj."

"And they can't see this drone?" Tolkunov asked.

"Well, on radar it's pretty stealthy, and there's another little trick we have on it. Goes back to World War II, called Project Yehudi back then, you put lights on the thing."

"What?" Tolkunov asked.

"Yeah, you spot airplanes because they're darker'n the sky, but if you put lightbulbs on 'em, they turn invisible. So, there are lights on the airframe, and a photo sensor dials the brightness automatically. They're d.a.m.ned near impossible to spot-they cruise at sixty thousand feet, way the h.e.l.l above contrail level, and they got no infrared signature at all, hardly-even if you know where to look, and they tell me you can't hardly make an air-to-air missile lock onto one. Pretty cool toy, eh?"

"How long have you had this?"

"I've been working on it, oh, about four years now."

"I've heard of Dark Star, but this capability is amazing."

Tucker nodded. "Yeah, it's pretty slick. Nice to know what the other guy's doing. First time we deployed it was over Yugoslavia, and once we learned how to use it, and how to coordinate it with the shooters, well, we learned to make their lives pretty miserable. Tough s.h.i.t, Joe."

"Joe?"

"Joe c.h.i.n.k." Tucker pointed at the screen. "That's what we mainly call him." The friendly nickname for Koreans had once been Luke the Gook. "Now, Ingrid doesn't have it yet, but Grace Kelly does, a laser designator, so you can use these things to clobber targets. The fighter just lofts the bomb in from, oh, maybe twenty miles away, and we guide it into the target. I've only done that at Red Flag, and we can't do it from here with this terminal, but they can up at Zhigansk."

"Guide bombs from six hundred kilometers away?"

"Yeah. h.e.l.l, you can do it from Washington if you want. It all goes over the satellite, y'now?"

"Yob tvoyu maht!"

"Soon we're going to make the fighter jocks obsolete, Colonel. Another year or so and we'll be doing terminal guidance on missiles launched from a coupla hundred miles away. Won't need fighter pilots then. Guess I'll have to buy me a scarf. So, Colonel, what else do you want to see?"

The II-86 landed at a rustic fighter base with only a few helicopters on it, Colonel Mitch Turner noted. As divisional intelligence officer, he was taking in a lot of what he saw in Russia, and what he saw wasn't all that encouraging. Like General Diggs, he'd entered the Army when the USSR had been the main enemy and princ.i.p.al worry for the United States Army, and now he was wondering how many of the intelligence estimates he'd help draft as a young spook officer had been pure fantasy. Either that or the mighty had fallen farther and faster than any nation in history. The Russian army wasn't even a shadow of what the Red Army had been. The "Rompin', Stompin'Russian Red a.s.s" so feared by NATO was as dead as the stegosaurus toys his son liked to play with, and right now that was not such a good thing. The Russian Federation looked like a rich family of old with no sons to defend it, and the girl kids were getting raped. Not a good thing. The Russians, like America, still had nuclear weapons-bombs, deliverable by bombers and tactical fighters. However, the Chinese had missiles to deliver theirs, and they were targeted at cities, and the Big Question was whether the Russians had the stones to trade a few cities and, say, forty million people for a gold mine and some oil fields. Probably not, Turner figured. Not something a smart man would do. Similarly, they could not afford a war of attrition against a country with nine times as many people and a healthier economy, even over this ground. No, if they were to defeat the Chinese, it had to be with maneuver and agility, but their military was in the s.h.i.tter, and neither trained nor equipped to play maneuver warfare.

This, Turner thought on reflection, was going to be an interesting war. It was not the sort he wanted to fight. Better to clobber a dumb little enemy than mix it up with a smart powerful one. It might not be glorious, but it was a h.e.l.l of a lot safer.

"Mitch," General Diggs said, as they stood to walk off the airplane. "Thoughts?"

"Well, sir, we might have picked a better place to fly to. Way things look, this is going to be a little exciting."

"Go on," the general ordered.

"The other side has better cards. More troops, bettertrained troops, more equipment. Their task, crossing a lot of nasty country, is not enviable, but neither is the Russian task, defending against it. To win they have to play maneuver warfare. But I don't see that they have the horsepower to pull it off."

"Their boss out here, Bondarenko. He's pretty good."

"So was Erwin Rommel, sir, but Montgomery whupped his a.s.s."

There were staff cars lined up to drive them into the Russian command post. The weather was clearer here, and they were close enough to the Chinese that a clear sky wasn't something to enjoy anymore.

CHAPTER 53.

Deep Concerns So, what's happening there?" Ryan asked. "The Chinese are seventy miles inside Russia. They have a total of eight divisions over the river, and they're pushing north," General Moore replied, moving a pencil across the map spread on the conference table. "They blew through the Russian border defenses pretty fast-it was essentially the Maginot Line from 1940. I wouldn't have expected it to hold very long, but our overheads showed them punching through fairly professionally with their leading infantry formations, supported by a lot of artillery. Now they have their tanks across-about eight hundred to this point, with another thousand or so to go."

Ryan whistled. "That many?"

"When you invade a major country, sir, you don't do it on the cheap. The only good news at this point is that we've really given their air force a b.l.o.o.d.y nose."

"AWACS and -15s?" Jackson asked.

"Right." The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs nodded. "One of our kids made ace in a single engagement. A Colonel Winters."

"Bronco Winters," Jackson said. "I've heard the name. Fighter jock. Okay, what else?"

"Our biggest problem on the air side is going to be getting bombs to our airmen. Flying bombs in is not real efficient. I mean, you can use up a whole C-5 just to deliver half the bombs for one squadron of F-15Es, and we've got a lot of other things for the C-5s to do. We're thinking about sending the bombs into Russia by train to Chita, say, and then flying them up to Suntar from there, but the Russian railroad is moving just tanks and vehicles for now, and that isn't going to change soon. We're trying to fight a war at the end of one railroad line. Sure, it's double-tracked, but it's still just one d.a.m.ned line. Our logistical people are already taking a lot of Maalox over this one."

"Russian airlift capacity?" Ryan asked.

"FedEx has more," General Moore replied. "In fact, FedEx has a lot more. We're going to ask you to authorize call-up of the civilian reserve air fleet, Mr. President."

"Approved," Ryan said at once.

"And a few other little things," Moore said. He closed his eyes. It was pushing midnight, and n.o.body had gotten much sleep lately. "VMH-1 is standing-to. We're in a shooting war with a country that has nuclear weapons on ballistic launchers. So, we have to think about the possibility-re-mote maybe, but still a possibility-that they could launch at us. So, VMH-1 and the Air Force's First Heli at Andrews are standing-to. We can get a chopper here to lift you and your family out in seven minutes. That concerns you, Mrs. O'ay," Moore said to Andrea.

The President's Princ.i.p.al Agent nodded. "We're dialed in. It's all in The Book," she said. That n.o.body had opened that particular book since 1962 was beside the point. It was written down. Mrs. Price-O'Day looked a little peaked.

"You okay?" Ryan asked.

"Stomach," she explained.

"Try some ginger?" Jack went on.

"Nothing much works for this, Dr. North tells me. Please excuse me, Mr. President." She was embarra.s.sed that he'd noticed her discomfort. She always wanted to be one of the boys. But the boys didn't get pregnant, did they?

"Why don't you drive home?"

"Sir, I-"

"Go," Ryan said. "That's an order. You're a woman, and you're pregnant. You can't be a cop all the time, okay? Get some relief here and go. Right now."

Special Agent Price-O'Day hesitated, but she did have an order, so she walked out the door. Another agent came in immediately.

"Machismo from a woman. What's the G.o.dd.a.m.ned world coming to?" Ryan asked the a.s.sembly.

"You're not real liberated, Jack," Jackson observed with a grin.

"It's called objective circ.u.mstances, I think. She's still a girl, even if she does carry a pistol. Cathy says she's doing fine. This nausea stuff doesn't last forever. Probably feels like it to her, though. Okay, General, what else?"

"Kneecap and Air Force One are on hot-pad alert 'round the clock. So, if we get a launch warning, in seven minutes or less, you and the Vice President are on choppers, five more minutes to Andrews, and three more after that you're doing the takeoff roll. The drill is, your family goes to Air Force One and you go to Kneecap," he concluded. Kneecap was actually the National Emergency Airborne Command Post (NEACP), but the official acronym was too hard to p.r.o.nounce. Like the VC-25A that served as Air Force One, Kneecap was a converted 747 that was really just a wrapper for a bunch of radios flying in very close formation.

"Gee, that's nice to know. What about my family?" PO-TUS asked.

"In these circ.u.mstances, we keep a chopper close to where your wife and kids are at all times, and then they'll fly in whatever direction seems the safest at the moment. If that's not Andrews, then they'll get picked up later by a fixed-wing aircraft and taken to whatever place seems best. It's all theoretical," Moore explained, "but something you might as well know about."

"Can the Russians stop the Chinese?" Ryan asked, turning his attention back to the map.

"Sir, that remains to be seen. They do have the nuclear option, but it's not a card I would expect them to play. The Chinese do have twelve CSS-4 ICBMs. It's essentially a duplicate of our old t.i.tan-II liquid fuels, with a warhead estimated to be between three and five megatons."

"City-buster?" Ryan asked.

"Correct. No counterforce capability, and there's nothing we have left to use against it in that role anyway. The CEP on the warhead is estimated to be plus or minus a thousand meters or so. So, it'd do a city pretty well, but that's about all."

"Any idea where they're targeted?" Jackson asked. Moore nodded at once.

"Yes. The missile is pretty primitive, and the silos are oriented on their targets because the missile doesn't have much in the way of cross-range maneuverability. Two are targeted on Washington. Others on LA, San Francisco, and Chicago. Plus Moscow, Kiev, St. Petersburg. They're all leftovers from the Bad Old Days, and they haven't been modified in any way."

"Any way to take them out?" Jackson asked.

"I suppose we could stage a mission with fighter or bomber aircraft and go after the silos with PGMs," Moore allowed. "But we'd have to fly the bombs to Suntar first, and even then it'll be rather a lengthy mission for the F-117s."

"What about B-2s out of Guam?" Jackson asked.

"I'm not sure they can carry the right weapons. I'll have to check that."

"Jack, this is something we need to think about, okay?"

"I hear you, Robby. General, have somebody look into this, okay?"