"Let's move, Sergeant," Aleksandrov ordered, and together they ran to their BRM for their first trek into the woods for their own third installment of frog leap backwards.

There they go again," Major Tucker said, after getting three whole hours of sleep on a thin mattress four feet from the Dark Star terminal. It was Ingrid Bergman up again, positioned so that she could see both the reconnaissance element and main body of the Chinese army. "You know, they really stick to the book, don't they?"

"So it would seem," Colonel Tolkunov agreed.

"So, going by that, tonight they'll go to about here." Tucker made a green mark on the acetate-covered map. "That puts them at the gold mine day after tomorrow. Where do you plan to make your stand?" the major asked.

"That depends on how quickly the Two Zero One can get forward."

"Gas?" Tucker asked.

"Diesel fuel, but, yes, that is the main problem with moving so large a force."

"Yeah, with us it's bombs."

"When will you begin to attack Chinese targets?" Tolkunov asked.

"Not my department, Colonel, but when it happens, you'll see it here, live and in color."

Ryan had gotten two hours of nap in the afternoon, while Arnie van Damm covered his appointments (the Chief of Staff needed his sleep, too, but like most people in the White House, he put the President's needs before his own), and now he was watching TV, the feed from Ingrid Bergman.

"This is amazing," he observed. "You could almost get on the phone and tell a guy where to go with his tank."

"We try to avoid that, sir," Mickey Moore said at once. In Vietnam it had been called the "squad leader in the sky" when battalion commanders had directed sergeants on their patrols, not always to the enlisted men's benefit. The miracle of modern communications could also be a curse, with the expected effect that the people in harm's way would ignore their radios or just turn the d.a.m.ned things off until they had something to say themselves.

Ryan nodded. He'd been a second lieutenant of Marines once, and though it hadn't been for long, he remembered it as demanding work for a kid just out of college.

"Do the Chinese know we're doing this?"

"Not as far as we can tell. If they did, they'd sure as h.e.l.l try to take the Dark Star down, and we'd notice if they tried. That's not easy, though. They're d.a.m.ned near invisible on radar, and tough to spot visually, so the Air Force tells me."

"Not too many fighters can reach sixty thousand feet, much less cruise up there," Robby agreed. "It's a stretch even for a Tomcat." His eyes, too, were locked on the screen. No officer in the history of military operations had ever had a capability akin to this, not even two percent of it, Jackson was sure. Most of war-fighting involved finding the enemy so that you knew where to kill him. These new things made it like watching a Hollywood movie-and if the Chinese knew they were there, they'd freak. Considerable efforts had been designed into Dark Star to prevent that from happening. Their transmitters were directional, and locked onto satellites, instead of radiating outward in the manner of a normal radio. So, they might as well have been black holes up there, orbiting twelve miles over the battlefield.

"What's the important thing here?" Jack asked General Moore.

"Logistics, sir, always logistics. Told you this morning, sir, they're burning up a lot of diesel fuel, and replenishing that is a mother of a task. The Russians have the same problem. They're trying to race a fresh division north of the Chinese spearhead, to made a stand around Aldan, close to where the gold strike is. It's only even money they can make it, even over roads and without opposition. They have to move a lot of fuel, too, and the other problem for them is that it'll wear out the tracks on their vehicles. They don't have lowboy trailers like ours, and so their tanks have to do it all on their own. Tanks are a lot more delicate to operate than they look. Figure they'll lose a quarter to a third of their strength just from the approach march."

"Can they fight?" Jackson asked.

"They're using the T-80U. It would have given the M60A3 a good fight, but no, not as good as our first-flight M1, much less the M1A2, but against the Chinese M-90, call it an even match, qualitatively. It's just that the Chinese have a lot more of them. It comes down to training. The Russian divisions that they're sending into the fight are their best-trained and -equipped. Question is, are they good enough? We'll just have to see."

"And our guys?"

"They start arriving at Chita tomorrow morning. The Russians want them to a.s.semble and move east-southeast. The operational concept is for them to stop the Chinese cold, and then we chop them off from their supplies right near the Amur River. It makes sense theoretically," Mickey Moore said neutrally, "and the Russians say they have all the fuel we'll need in underground bunkers that have been there for d.a.m.ned near fifty years. We'll see."

CHAPTER 55.

Looks and Hurts General Peng was all the way forward now, with the leading elements of his lead armored division, the 302nd. Things were going well for him-sufficiently well, in fact, that he was becoming nervous about it. No opposition at all? he asked himself. Not so much as a single rifle round, much less a barrage of artillery. Were the Russians totally asleep, totally devoid of troops in this sector? They had a full army group command section at Chabarsovil, commanded by that Bondarenko fellow, who was reported to be a competent, even a courageous, officer. But where the h.e.l.l were his troops? Intelligence said that a complete Russian motor-rifle division was here, the 265th, and a Russian motor-rifle division was a superbly designed mechanized formation, with enough tanks to punch a hole in most things, and manned with enough infantry to hold any position for a long time. Theoretically. But where the h.e.l.l was it? And where were the reinforcements the Russians had to be sending? Peng had asked for information, and the air force had supposedly sent photo-reconnaissance aircraft to look for his enemies, but with no result. He had expected to be mainly on his own for this campaign, but not entirely on his own. Fifty kilometers in advance of the 302nd Armored was a reconnaissance screen that had reported nothing but some tracks in the ground that might or might not have been fresh. The few helicopter flights that had gone out had reported nothing. They should have spotted something, but no, only some civilians, who for the most part got the h.e.l.l out of the way and stayed there.

Meanwhile, his troops had crewed up this ancient railroad right-of-way, but it wasn't much worse than traveling along a wide gravel road. His only potential operational concern was fuel, but two hundred 10,000-liter fuel trucks were delivering an adequate amount from the pipeline the engineers were extending at a rate of forty kilometers per day from the end of the railhead on the far bank of the Amur. In fact, that was the most impressive feat of the war so far. Well behind him, engineer regiments were laying the pipe, then covering it under a meter of earth for proper concealment. The only things they couldn't conceal were the pumping stations, but they had the spare parts to build plenty more should they be destroyed.

No, Peng's only real concern was the location of the Russian Army. The dilemma was that either his intelligence was faulty, and there were no Russian formations in his area of interest, or it was accurate and the Russians were just running away and denying him the chance to engage and destroy them. But since when did Russians not fight for their land? Chinese soldiers surely would. And it just didn't fit with Bondarenko's reputation. None of this situation made sense. Peng sighed. But battlefields were often that way, he told himself. For the moment, he was on-actually slightly ahead of-schedule, and his first strategic objective, the gold mine, was three days away from his leading reconnaissance element. He'd never seen a gold mine before.

I'll be d.a.m.ned!" Pavel Petrovich said. "This is my land. No c.h.i.n.k's going to chase me off of it!"

"They are only three or four days away, Pasha."

"So? I have lived here for over fifty years. I'm not going to leave now." The old man was well to the left of defiant. The chief of the mining company had come personally to drive him out, and expected him to come willingly. But he'd misread the old man's character.

"Pasha, we can't leave you here in their way. This is their objective, the thing they invaded us to steal-"

"Then I shall fight for it!" he retorted. "I killed Germans, I've killed bears, I've killed wolves. Now, I will kill Chinese. I'm an old man, not an old woman, comrade!"

"Will you fight against enemy soldiers?"

"And why not?" Gogol asked. "This is my land. I know all its places. I know where to hide, and I know how to shoot. I've killed soldiers before." He pointed to his wall. The old service rifle was there, and the mining chief could easily see the notches he'd cut on the stock with a knife, one for every German. "I can hunt wolves and bear. I can hunt men, too."

"You're too old to be a soldier. That's a young man's job."

"I need not be an athlete to squeeze a trigger, comrade, and I know these woods." To emphasize his words, Gogol stood and took down his old sniper rifle from the Great Patriotic War, leaving the new Austrian rifle. The meaning was clear. He'd fought with this arm before, and he was quite willing to do so again. Hanging on his wall still were a number of the gilded wolf skins, most of which had single holes in the head. He touched one, then looked back at his visitors. "I am a Russian. I will fight for my land."

The mining chief figured he'd buck this information up to the military. Maybe they could take him out. For himself, he had no particular desire to entertain the Chinese army, and so he took his leave. Behind him, Pavel Petrovich Gogol opened a bottle of vodka and enjoyed a snort. Then he cleaned his rifle and thought of old times.

The train terminal was well-designed for their purposes, Colonel Welch thought. Russian engineers might have designed things clunky, but they'd also designed them to work, and the layout here was a lot more efficient than it looked on first inspection. The trains reversed direction on what American railroaders called a wye-Europeans called it a turning triangle-which allowed trains to back up to any one of ten off-loading ramps, and the Russians were doing it with skill and aplomb. The big VL80T electric locomotive eased backwards, with the conductors on the last car holding the air-release valve to activate the brakes when they reached the ramp. When the trains stopped, the soldiers jumped from their pa.s.senger coaches and ran back to their individual vehicles to start them up and drive them off. It didn't take longer than thirty minutes to empty a train. That impressed Colonel Welch, who'd used the Auto Train to take his family to Disney World, and the off-loading procedure in Sanford, Florida, usually took an hour and a half or so. Then there was no further waiting. The big VL (Vladimir Lenin) engines immediately moved out for the return trip west to load up another ten thousand tons of train cars and cargo. It certainly appeared as though the Russians could make things happen when they had to.

"Colonel?" Welch turned to see a Russian major, who saluted crisply.

"Yes?"

"The first train with your personnel is due in four hours twenty minutes. We'll take them to the southern a.s.sembly area. There is fuel there if they need it, and then we have guides to direct them east."

"Very good."

"Until then, if you wish to eat, there is a canteen inside the station building."

"Thank you. We're okay at the moment." Welch walked over to where his satellite radio was set up, to get that information to General Diggs.

Colonel Bronco Winters now had seven red stars painted on the side panel of his F-15C, plus four of the nowdefunct UIR flags. He could have painted on some marijuana or coca leaves as well, but that part of his life was long past, and those kills had been blacker than his uncle Ernie, who still lived in Harlem. So, he was a double-ace, and the Air Force hadn't had many of those on active duty in a very long time. He took his flight to what they had taken to calling Bear Station, on the western edge of the Chinese advance.

It was an Eagle station. There were now over a hundred F-16 fighters in Siberia, but they were mainly air-to-mud rather than air-to-air, and so the fighting part of the fighter mission was his department, while the -16 jocks grumbled about being second-cla.s.s citizens. Which they were, as far as Colonel Winters thought. d.a.m.ned little single-engine pukes.

Except for the F-16CGs. They were useful because they were dedicated to taking out enemy radars and SAM sites. The Siberian Air Force (so they now deemed themselves) hadn't done any air-to-mud yet. They had orders not to, which offended the guys whose idea of fun was killing crunchies on the ground instead of more manly pursuits. They didn't have enough bombs for a proper bombing campaign yet, and so they were coming up just to ride guard on the E-3Bs in case Joe c.h.i.n.k decided to go after them-it was a hard mission, but marginally doable, and Bronco was surprised that they hadn't made the attempt yet. It was a sure way to lose a lot of fighter planes, but they'd lost a bunch anyway, and why not lose them to a purpose . . .?

"Boar Lead, this is Eagle Two, over."

"Boar Leader."

"We show something happening, numerous bandits onefour-five your position, angels three-three, range two hundred fifty miles, coming north at six hundred knots-make that count thirty-plus bandits, looks like they're coming right for us, Boar Lead," the controller on the AWACS reported.

"Roger, copy that. Boar, Lead," he told his flight of four. "Let's get our ears perked up."

"Two." "Three." "Four," the rest of his flight chimed in.

"Boar Leader, this is Eagle Two. The bandits just went supersonic, and they are heading right for us. Looks like they're not kidding. Vector right to course one-three-five and prepare to engage."

"Roger, Eagle. Boar Lead, come right to one-three-five."

"Two." "Three." "Four."

Winters checked his fuel first of all. He had plenty. Then he looked at his radar display for the picture transmitted from the AWACS, and sure enough, there was a pa.s.sel of bandits inbound, like a complete ChiComm regiment of fighters. The b.a.s.t.a.r.ds had read his mind.

"d.a.m.n, Bronco, this looks like a knife fight coming."

"Be cool, Ducky, we got better knives."

"You say so, Bronco," the other element leader answered.

"Let's loosen it up, people," Colonel Winters ordered. The flight of four F-15Cs separated into two pairs, and the pairs slipped apart as well so that each could cover the other, but a single missile could not engage both.

The display between his legs showed that the Chinese fighters were just over a hundred miles off now, and the velocity vectors indicated speeds of over eight hundred knots. Then the picture dirtied up some.

"Boar Lead, looks like they just dropped off tanks."

"Roger that." So, they'd burned off fuel to get alt.i.tude, and now they were committed to the battle with full internal fuel. That would give them better legs than usual, and they had closed to less than two hundred miles between them and the E-3B Sentry they clearly wanted to kill. There were thirty people on that converted 707, and Winters knew a lot of them. They'd worked together for years, mainly in exercises, and each controller on the Sentry had a specialty. Some were good at getting you to a tanker. Some were good at sending you out to hunt. Some were best at defending themselves against enemies. This third group would now take over. The Sentry crewmen would think this wasn't cricket, that it wasn't exactly fair to chase deliberately after a converted obsolete airliner . . . just because it acted as bird-dog for those who were killing off their fighter-pilot comrades. Well, that's life, Winters thought. But he wasn't going to give any of these bandits a free shot at another USAF aircraft.

Eighty miles now. "Skippy, follow me up," the colonel ordered.

"Roger, Lead." The two clawed up to forty thousand feet, so that the cold ground behind the targets would give a better contrast for their infrared seekers. He checked the radar display again. There had to be a good thirty of them, and that was a lot. If the Chinese were smart, they'd have two teams, one to engage and distract the American fighters, and the other to blow through after their primary target. He'd try to concentrate on the latter, but if the former group's pilots were competent, that might not be easy.

The warbling tone started in his headphones. The range was now sixty miles. Why not now? he asked himself. They were beyond visual range, but not beyond range of his AM-RAAM missiles. Time to shoot 'em in the lips.

"Going Slammer," he called on the radio.

"Roger, Slammer," Skippy replied from half a mile to his right.

"Fox-One!" Winters called, as the first one leapt off the rails. The first Slammer angled left, seeking its designated target, one of the enemy's leading fighters. The closure speed between missile and target would be well over two thousand miles per hour. His eyes dropped to the radar display. His first missile appeared to hit-yes, the target blip expanded and started dropping. Number Eight. Time for another: "Fox-One!"

"Fox-One," his wingman called. Seconds later: "Kill!" Lieutenant Acosta called.

Winters's second missile somehow missed, but there wasn't time for wondering why. He had six more AMRAAMs, and he pickled four of them off in the next minute. By that time, he could see the inbound fighters. They were Shenyang J-8IIs, and they had radars and missiles, too. Winters flipped on his jammer pod, wondering if it would work or not, and wondering if their infrared missiles had all-aspect targeting like his Sidewinders. He'd probably find out soon, but first he fired off two 'winders. "Breaking right, Skippy."

"I'm with you, Bronco," Acosta replied.

d.a.m.n, Winters thought, there are still at least twenty of the f.u.c.kers. He headed down, speeding up as he went and calling for a vector.

"Boar Lead, Eagle, there's twenty-three of them left and they're still coming. Dividing into two elements. You have bandits at your seven o'clock and closing."

Winters reversed his turn and racked his head against the g-forces to spot it. Yeah, a J-8 all right, the Chinese two-engine remake of the MiG-21, trying to get position to launch on him-no, two of the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. He reefed the turn in tight, pulling seven gees, and after ten endless seconds, getting his nose on the targets. His left hand selected Sidewinder and he triggered two off.

The bandits saw the smoke trails of the missiles and broke apart, in opposite directions. One would escape, but both the heat-seekers locked on the guy to the right, and both erased his aircraft from the sky. But where had the other one gone? Winters' eyes swept a sky that was both crowded and empty at the same time. His threat receiver made its unwelcome screeching sound, and now he'd find out if the jammer pod worked or not. Somebody was trying to lock him up with a radar-guided missile. His eyes swept around looking for who that might be, but he couldn't see anyone- -Smoke trail! A missile, heading in his general direction, but then it veered and exploded with its target-friend or foe, Winters couldn't tell.

"Boar Flight, Lead, check in!" he ordered.

"Two." "Three." A pause before: "Four!"

"Skippy, where are you?"

"Low and right, one mile, Leader. Heads up, there's a bandit at your three and closing."

"Oh, yeah?" Winters yanked his fighter to the right and was rewarded with an immediate warbling tone-but was it friend or foe? His wingman said the latter, but he couldn't tell, until- Whoever it was, it had launched at him, and so he triggered a Sidewinder in reply, then dove hard for the deck while punching off flares and chaff to distract it. It worked. The missile, a radar seeker, exploded harmlessly half a mile behind him, but his Sidewinder didn't miss. He'd just gotten another kill, but he didn't know how many today, and there wasn't time to think things over.

"Skippy, form up on me, we're going north."

"Roger, Bronco."

Winters had his radar on, and he saw at least eight enemy blips to the north. He went to afterburner to chase, checking his fuel state. Still okay. The Eagle accelerated rapidly, but just to be safe, he popped off a string of chaff and flares in case some unknown Chinese was shooting at him. The threat receiver was screeching continuously now, though not in the distinctive chirping tone that suggested lock-up. He checked his weapons board. Three AIM-9X Sidewinders left. Where the h.e.l.l had this day gone to?

"Ducky is. .h.i.t, Ducky is. .h.i.t!" a voice called. "Aw, s.h.i.t!"

"Ghost Man here, got the f.u.c.ker for you, Ducky. Come right, let me give you a damage check."

"One engine gone, other one's running hot," the second element leader reported, in a voice more angry than afraid. He didn't have time for fear yet. Another thirty seconds or so and that would start to take hold, Winters was sure.

"Ducky, you're trailing vapor of some sort, recommend you find a place to set it down."

"Eagle Two, Bronco, what's happening?"

"Bronco, we have six still inbound, putting Rodeo on it now. You have a bandit at your one o'clock at twenty miles, angels three-one, speed seven-five-zero."

"Roger that, Eagle. I'm on him." Winters came a little right and got another acquisition tone. "Fox-Two!" he called. The smoke trail ran straight for several miles, then corkscrewed to the left as it approached the little dot of gray-blue and . . . yes!

"Rodeo Lead," a new voice called. "Fox-One, Fox-One with two!"

"Conan, Fox-One!"

Now things were really getting nervous. Winters knew that he might be in the line of fire for those Slammers. He looked down to see that the light on his IFF was a friendly, constant green. The Identification Friend or Foe was supposed to tell American radars and missiles that he was on their side, but Winters didn't entirely trust computer chips with his life, and so he squinted his eyes to look for smoke trails that weren't going sideways. His radar could see the AWACS now, and it was moving west, taking the first part of evasive action, but its radar was still transmitting, even with Chinese fighters within . . . twenty miles? s.h.i.t! But then two more blips disappeared, and the remaining ones all had friendly IFF markers.

Winters checked his weapons display. No missiles left. How had all that happened? He was the United States Air Force champ for situational awareness, but he'd just lost track of a combat action. He couldn't remember firing all his missiles.

"Eagle Two, this is Boar Lead. I'm Winchester. Do you need any help?" "Winchester" meant out of weapons. That wasn't entirely true. He still had a full magazine of 20-mm cannon sh.e.l.ls, but suddenly all the gees and all the excitement were pulling on him. His arms felt leaden as he eased his Eagle back to level flight.

"Boar Lead, Eagle. Looks like we're okay now, but that was kinda exciting, fella."