"Okay, get me a translation. When will Weaver get in?"

"Usually about eight-thirty."

"Go over this with him as soon as he arrives."

"You bet." Sears took his leave.

Bedding down for the night?" Aleksandrov asked.

"So it would seem, Comrade Captain," Buikov answered. He had his binoculars on the Chinese. The two command-reconnaissance vehicles were together, which only seemed to happen when they secured for the night. It struck both men as odd that they confined their activities to daylight, but that wasn't a bad thing for the Russian watchers, and even soldiers needed their sleep. More than most, in fact, both of the Russians would have said. The stress and strain of keeping track of the enemies of their country-and doing so within their own borders-were telling on both of them.

The Chinese drill was thorough, but predictable. The two command tracks were together. The others were spread out, mainly in front of them, but one three hundred meters behind to secure their rear. The crews of each track stayed together as a unit. Each broke out a small petrol stove for cooking their rice-probably rice, the Russians all thought. And they settled down to get four or five hours of sleep before waking, cooking breakfast, and moving out before dawn. Had they not been enemies, their adherence to so demanding a drill might have excited admiration. Instead, Buikov found himself wondering if he could get two or three of their BRMs to race up on the invaders and immolate them with the 30-mm rapid-fire cannons on their tracked carriers. But Aleksandrov would never allow it. You could always depend on officers to deny the sergeants what they wanted to do.

The captain and his sergeant walked back north to their track, leaving three other scouts to keep watch on their "guests," as Aleksandrov had taken to calling them.

"So, Sergeant, how are you feeling?" the officer asked in a quiet voice.

"Some sleep will be good." Buikov looked back. There was now a ridgeline in addition to the trees between him and the c.h.i.n.ks. He lit a cigarette and let out a long, relaxed breath. "This is harder duty than I expected it to be."

"Oh?"

"Yes, Comrade Captain. I always thought we could kill our enemies. Baby-sitting them is very stressful."

"That is so, Boris Yevgeniyevich, but remember that if we do our job properly, then Division will be able to kill more than just one or two. We are their eyes, not their teeth."

"As you say, Comrade Captain, but it is like making a movie of the wolf instead of shooting him."

"The people who make good wildlife movies win awards, Sergeant."

The odd thing about the captain, Buikov thought, was that he was always trying to reason with you. It was actually rather endearing, as if he was trying to be a teacher rather than an officer.

"What's for dinner?"

"Beef and black bread, Comrade Captain. Even some b.u.t.ter. But no vodka," the sergeant added sourly.

"When this is over, I will allow you to get good and drunk, Boris Yevgeniyevich," Aleksandrov promised.

"If we live that long, I will toast your health." The track was where they'd left it, and the crew had spread out the camouflage netting. One thing about this officer, Buikov thought, he got the men to do their duty without much in the way of complaint. The same sort of good comradely solidarity my grandfather spoke about, as he told his endless tales of killing Germans on the way to Vienna, just like in all the movies, the sergeant thought.

The black bread was canned, but tasty, and the beef, cooked on their own small petrol heater, wasn't so bad as to choke a dog. About the time they finished, Sergeant Grechko appeared. He was the commander of the unit's #3 BRM, and he was carrying . . .

"Is that what I think it is?" Buikov asked. "Yuriy Andreyevich, you are a comrade!"

It was a half-liter bottle of vodka, the cheapest "BOKA" brand, with a foil top that tore off and couldn't be resealed.

"Whose idea is this?" the captain demanded.

"Comrade Captain, it is a cold night, and we are Russian soldiers, and we need something to help us relax," Grechko said. "It's the only bottle in the company, and one slug each will not harm us, I think," the sergeant added reasonably.

"Oh, all right." Aleksandrov extended his metal cup, and received perhaps sixty grams. He waited for the rest of his crew to get theirs, and saw that the bottle was empty. They all drank together, and sure enough, it tasted just fine to be Russian soldiers out in the woods, doing their duty for their Motherland.

"We'll have to refuel tomorrow," Grechko said.

"There will be a fuel truck waiting for us, forty kilometers north at the burned-down sawmill. We'll go up there one at a time, and hope our Chinese guests do not get overly ambitious in their advance."

That must be your Captain Aleksandrov," Major Tucker said. "Fourteen hundred meters from the nearest Chinese. That's pretty close," the American observed.

"He's a good boy," Aliyev said, "Just reported in. The Chinese follow their drill with remarkable exact.i.tude. And the main body?"

"Twenty-five miles back-forty kilometers or so. They're laagering in for the night, too, but they're actually building campfires, like they want us to know where they are." Tucker worked the mouse to show the encampments. The display was green-on-green now. The Chinese armored vehicles showed as bright spots, especially from the engines, which glowed from residual heat.

"This is amazing," Aliyev said in frank admiration.

"We decided back around the end of the 1970s that we could play at night when everybody else can't. It took a while to develop the technology, but it by-G.o.d works, Colonel. All we need now is some Smart Pigs."

"What?"

"You'll see, Colonel. You'll see," Tucker promised. Best of all, this "take" came from Grace Kelly, and she did have a laser designator plugged in to the fuselage, tooling along now at 62,000 feet and looking down with her thermal-imaging cameras. Under Tucker's guidance, the UAV kept heading south, to continue the catalog of the Chinese units advancing into Siberia. There were sixteen ribbon bridges on the Amur River now, and a few north of there, but the really vulnerable points were around Harbin, well to the south, inside Chinese territory. Lots of railroad bridges between there and Bei'an, the terminus of the railroad lifeline to the People's Liberation Army. Grace Kelly saw a lot of trains, mainly diesel engines, but even some old coalburning steam engines that had come out of storage in order to keep the weapons and supplies coming north. Most interesting of all was the recently built traffic circle, where tank cars were unloading something, probably diesel fuel, into what appeared to be a pipeline that PLAA engineers were working very hard to extend north. That was something they'd copied from America. The U.S. and British armies had done the same thing from Normandy east to the front in late 1944, and that, Tucker knew, was a target worthy of note. Diesel fuel wasn't just the food of a field army. It was the very air it breathed.

There were huge numbers of idle men about. Laborers, probably, there to repair damaged tracking, and the major bridging points had SAM and FLAK batteries in close attendance. So, Joe c.h.i.n.k knew that the bridges were important, and he was doing his best to guard them.

For what good that would do, Tucker thought. He got on the satellite radio to talk things over with the crew up at Zhigansk, where General Wallace's target book was being put together. The crunchies on the ground were evidently worried about taking on the advancing People's Liberation Army, but to Major Tucker, it all looked like a collection of targets. For point targets, he wanted J-DAMs, and for area targets, some smart pigs, the J-SOWs, and then Joe c.h.i.n.k was going to take one on the chin, and probably, like all field armies, this one had a gla.s.s jaw. If you could just hit it hard enough.

The Russians on the ground had no idea what FedEx was, and were more than a little surprised that any private, nongovernment corporation could actually own something as monstrous as a Boeing 747F freighter aircraft.

For their part, the flight crews, mainly trained by the Navy or Air Force, had never expected to see Siberia except maybe through the windows of a B-52H strategic bomber. The runways were unusually b.u.mpy, worse than most American airports, but there was an army of people on the ground, and when the swinging door on the nose came up, the ground crews waved the forklifts in to start collecting the palletized cargo. The flight crews didn't leave the aircraft. Fueling trucks came up and connected the four-inch hoses to the proper nozzle points and started refilling the capacious tanks so that the aircraft could leave as soon as possible, to clear the ramp s.p.a.ce. Every 747F had a bunking area for the spare pilots who'd come along for the ride. They didn't even get a drink, those who'd sleep for the return flight, and they had to eat the boxed lunches they'd been issued at Elmendorf on the outbound flight. In all, it took fifty-seven minutes to unload the hundred tons of bombs, which was scarcely enough for ten of the F-15Es parked at the far end of the ramp, but that was where the forklifts headed.

Is that a fact?" Ryan observed.

"Yes, Mr. President," Dr. Weaver replied. "For all their sophistication, these people can be very insular in their thinking, and as a practical matter, we are all guilty of projecting our own ways of thinking onto other people."

"But I have people like you to advise me. Who advises them?" Jack asked.

"They have some good ones. Problem is, their Politburo doesn't always listen."

"Yeah, well, I've seen that problem here, too. Is this good news or bad news, people?"

"Potentially it could be both, but let's remember that we understand them now a lot better than they understand us," Ed Foley told those present. "That gives us a major advantage, if we play our cards intelligently."

Ryan leaned back and rubbed his eyes. Robby Jackson wasn't in much better shape, though he'd slept about four hours in the Lincoln Bedroom (unlike President Lincoln- it was called that simply because a picture of the sixteenth President hung on the wall). The good Jamaican coffee helped everyone at least simulate consciousness.

"I'm surprised that their Defense Minister is so narrow," Robby thought aloud, his eyes tracing over the SORGE dispatch. "You pay the senior operators to be big-picture thinkers. When operations go as well as the one they're running, you get suspicious. I did, anyway."

"Okay, Robby, you used to be G.o.d of Operations across the river. What do you recommend?" Jack asked.

"The idea in a major operation is always to play with the other guy's head. To lead him down the path you want him to go, or to get inside his decision cycle, just prevent him from a.n.a.lyzing the data and making a decision. I think we can do that here."

"How?" Arnie van Damm asked.

"The common factor of every successful military plan in history is this: You show the guy what he expects and hopes to see, and then when he thinks he's got the world by the a.s.s, you cut his legs off in one swipe." Robby leaned back, holding court for once. "The smart move is to let them keep going for a few more days, make it just seem easier and easier for them while we build up our capabilities, and then when we hit them, we land on them like the San Francisco earthquake-no warning at all, just the end of the f.u.c.kin' world hits 'em. Mickey, what's their most vulnerable point?"

General Moore had that answer: "It's always logistics. They're burning maybe nine hundred tons of diesel fuel a day to keep those tanks and tracks moving north. They have a full five thousand engineers working like beavers running a pipeline to keep up with their lead elements. We cut that, and they can make up some of the shortfall with fuel trucks, but not all of it-"

"And we use the Smart Pig to take care of those," Vice President Jackson finished.

"That's one way to handle it," General Moore agreed.

"Smart Pig?" Ryan asked.

Robby explained, concluding: "We've been developing this and a few other tricks for the last eight years. I spent a month out at China Lake a few years ago with the prototype. It works, if we have enough of them."

"Gus Wallace has that at the top of his Christmas list."

"The other trick is the political side," Jackson concluded.

"Funny, I have an idea for that. How is the PRC presenting this war to its people?"

It was Professor Weaver's turn: "They're saying that the Russians provoked a border incident-same thing Hitler did with Poland in 1939. The Big Lie technique. They've used it before. Every dictatorship has. It works if you control what your people see."

"What's the best weapon for fighting a lie?" Ryan asked.

"The truth, of course," Arnie van Damm answered for the rest. "But they control their news distribution. How do we get the truth to their population?"

"Ed, how is the SORGE data coming out?"

"Over the 'Net, Jack. So?"

"How many Chinese citizens own computers?"

"Millions of them-the number's really jumped in the past couple of years. That's why they're ripping that patent off Dell Computer that we made a stink about in the trade talks and-oh, yeah . . ." Foley looked up with a smile. "I like it."

"That could be dangerous," Weaver warned.

"Dr. Weaver, there's no safe way to fight a war," Ryan said in reply. "This isn't a negotiation between friends. General Moore?"

"Yes, sir."

"Get the orders out."

"Yes, sir."

"The only question is, will it work?"

"Jack," Robby Jackson said, "it's like with baseball. You play the games to find out who the best is."

The first reinforcing division to arrive at Chita was the 201st. The trains pulled into the built-for-the-purpose offloading sidings. The flatcars had been designed (and built in large numbers) to transport tracked military vehicles. To that end, flip-down bridging ramps were located at each end of every single car, and when those were tossed down in place, the tanks could drive straight off to the concrete ramps to where every train had backed up. It was a little demanding-the width of the cars was at best marginal for the tank tracks-but the drivers of each vehicle kept their path straight, breathing a small sigh of relief when they got to the concrete. Once on the ground, military police troops, acting as traffic cops, directed the armored vehicles to a.s.sembly areas. The 201st Motor Rifle Division's commander and his staff were there already, of course, and the regimental officers got their marching orders, telling them what roads to take northeast to join Bondarenko's Fifth Army, and by joining it, to make it a real field army rather than a theoretical expression on paper.

The 201st, like the follow-on divisions, the 80th, 34th, and 94th, were equipped with the newest Russian hardware, and were at their full TO&E. Their immediate mission was to race north and east to get in front of the advancing Chinese. It would be quite a race. There weren't many roads in this part of Russia, and what roads there were here were unpaved gravel, which suited the tracked vehicles. The problem would be diesel fuel, because there were few gas stations for the trucks which ran the roads in peacetime pursuits, and so the 201st had requisitioned every tanker truck its officers could locate, and even that might not be enough, the logisticians all worried, not that they had much choice in the matter. If they could get their tanks there, then they'd fight them as pillboxes if it came to that.

About the only thing they had going for them was the network of telephone lines, which enabled them to communicate without using radios. The entire area was under the strictest possible orders for radio silence, to deny all conceivable knowledge to the enemy; and the air forces in the area, American and Russian, were tasked to eliminate all tactical reconnaissance aircraft that Chinese would be sending about. So far, they'd been successful. A total of seventeen J-6 and -7 aircraft, thought to be the reconnaissance variants of their cla.s.ses, had been "splashed" short of Chita.

The Chinese problem with reconnaissance was confirmed in Paris, of all places. SPOT, the French corporation which operated commercial photosatellites, had received numerous requests for photos of Siberia, and while many of them came from seemingly legitimate western businesses, mainly news agencies, all had been summarily denied. Though not as good as American reconnaissance satellites, the SPOT birds were good enough to identify all the trains a.s.sembled at Chita.

And since the People's Republic of China still had a functioning emba.s.sy in Moscow, the other concern was that their Ministry of State Security had Russian nationals acting as paid spies, feeding data to Russia's new enemy. Those individuals about whom the Russian Federal Security Service had suspicions were picked up and questioned, and those in custody were interrogated vigorously.

This number included Klementi Ivanovich Suvorov.

"You were in the service of an enemy country," Pavel Yefremov observed. "You killed for a foreign power, and you conspired to kill our country's president. We know all this. We've had you under surveillance for some time now. We have this." He held up a photocopy of the onetime pad recovered from the dead-drop on the park bench. "You may talk now, or you may be shot. It is your life at risk, not mine."

In the movies, this was the part where the suspect was supposed to say defiantly, "You're going to kill me anyway," except that Suvorov had no more wish to die than anyone else. He loved life as much as any man, and he'd never expected to be caught any more than the most foolish of street criminals did. If anything, he'd expected arrest even less than one of those criminals, because he knew how intelligent and clever he was, though this feeling had understandably deflated over the last few days.

The outlook of Klementi Ivan'ch Suvorov was rather bleak at the moment. He was KGB-trained, and he knew what to expect-a bullet in the head-unless he could give his interrogators something sufficiently valuable for them to spare his life, and at the moment even life in a labor camp of strict regime was preferable to the alternative.

"Have you truly arrested Kong?"

"We told you that before, but, no, we have not. Why tip them off that we've penetrated their operation?" Yefremov said honestly.

"Then you can use me against them."

"How might we do that?" the FSS officer asked.

"I can tell them that the operation they propose is going forward, but that the situation in Siberia wrecked my chance to execute it in a timely fashion."

"And if Kong cannot leave their emba.s.sy-we have it guarded and isolated now, of course-how would you get that information to him?"

"By electronic mail. Yes, you can monitor their landlines, but to monitor their cellular phones is more difficult. There's a backup method for me to communicate with him electronically."

"And the fact that you haven't made use of it so far will not alert them?"

"The explanation is simple. My Spetsnaz contact was frightened off by the outbreak of hostilities, and so was I."

"But we've already checked your electronic accounts."

"Do you think they are all written down?" He tapped the side of his head. "Do you think I am totally foolish?"

"Go on, make your proposal."

"I will propose that I can go forward with the mission. I require them to authorize it by a signal-the way they set the shades in their windows, for example."

"And for this?"

"And for this I will not be executed," the traitor suggested.

"I see," Yefremov said quietly. He would have been perfectly content to shoot the traitor right here and now, but it might be politically useful to go forward with his proposal. He'd kick that one upstairs.

The bad part about watching them was that you had to antic.i.p.ate everything they did, and that meant that they got to have more sleep, about an hour's worth, Aleksandrov figured, and no more than that only because they were predictable. He'd had his morning tea. Sergeant Buikov had enjoyed two morning cigarettes with his, and now they lay p.r.o.ne on wet dew-dampened ground, with their binoculars to their eyes. The Chinese had also had soldiers out of their tracks all night, set about a hundred meters away from them, so it seemed. They weren't very adventurous, the captain thought. He would have spread his sentries much farther out, at least half a kilometer, in pairs with radios to go with their weapons. For that matter, he would have set up a mortar in the event that they spotted something dangerous. But the fox and the gardener seemed to be both conservative and confident, which was an odd combination of characteristics.

But their morning drill was precise. The petrol heaters came out for tea-probably tea, they all figured-and whatever it was that they had for breakfast. Then the camouflage nets came down. The outlying sentries came in and reported in person to their officers, and everyone mounted up. The first hop on their tracks was a short one, not even half a kilometer, and again the foot-scouts dismounted and moved forward, then quickly reported back for the second, much longer morning frog leap forward.