The off-loading facilities could have been better, but the Soviets evidently hadn't had much experience with building gas stations. It was more efficient to pump the fuel into the division's fuel bowsers, which then motored off to fill the tanks and tracks four or six at a time.

"Okay, Mitch, what do we have on the enemy?" General Diggs asked his intelligence officer.

"Sir, we've got a Dark Star tasked directly to us now, and she'll be up for another nine hours. We're up against a leginfantry division. They're forty kilometers that way, mainly sitting along this line of hills. There's a regiment of ChiComm tanks supporting them."

"Artillery?"

"Some light and medium, all of it towed, setting up now, with fire-finder radars we need to worry about," Colonel Turner warned. "I've asked General Wallace to task some F-16s with HARMs to us. They can tune the seekers on those to the millimeter-band the fire-finders use."

"Make that happen," Diggs ordered.

"Yes, sir."

"Duke, how long to contact?" the general asked his operations officer.

"If we move on schedule, we'll be in their neighborhood about zero-two-hundred."

"Okay, let's get the brigade commanders briefed in. We party just after midnight," Diggs told his staff, not even regretting his choice of words. He was a soldier about to go into combat, and with that came a different and not entirely pleasant way of thinking.

CHAPTER 57.

Hyperwar I had been rather a tedious couple of days for USS Tucson. She'd been camped out on 406 for sixteen days, and was holding station seventeen thousand yards-eight and a half nautical miles-astern of the Chinese boomer, with a nuclear-powered fast-attack camped out just to the south of it at the moment. The SSN, at least, supposedly had a name, Hai Long, the intelligence weenies said it was. But to Tucson's sonarman, 406 was Sierra-Eleven, and Hai Long was Sierra-Twelve, and so they were known to the fire-control tracking party.

Tracking both targets was not demanding. Though both had nuclear power plants, the reactor systems were noisy, especially the feed pumps that ran cooling water through the nuclear pile. That, plus the sixty-hertz generators, made for two pairs of bright lines on the waterfall sonar display, and tracking both was about as difficult as watching two blind men in an empty shopping mall parking lot at high noon on a cloudless day. But it was more interesting than tracking whales in the North Pacific, which some of PACFLT's boats had been tasked to do of late, to keep the tree-huggers happy.

Things had gotten a little more interesting lately. Tucson ran to periscope/antenna depth twice a day, and the crew had learned, much to everyone's surprise, that Chinese and American armed forces were trading shots in Siberia, and that meant, the crew figured, that 406 might have to be made to disappear, and that was a mission, and while it might not exactly be fun, it was what they were paid to do, which made it a worthwhile activity.

406 had submarine-launched ballistic missiles aboard, twelve Ju Lang-1 CSS-N-3s, each with a single megatonrange warhead. The name meant "Great Wave," so the intelligence book said. It also said they had a range of less than three thousand kilometers, which was less than half the range needed to strike California, though it could hit Guam, which was American territory. That didn't really matter. What did matter was that 406 and Hai Long were ships of war belonging to a nation with which the United States was now trading shots.

The VLF radio fed off an antenna trailed off the after corner of Tucson's sail, and it received transmissions from a monstrous, mainly underground transmitter located in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The tree-huggers complained that the energy emanating from this radio confused migrating geese in the fall, but no hunters had yet complained about smaller bags of waterfowl, and so the radio remained in service. Built to send messages to American missile submarines, it still transmitted to the fast-attacks that remained in active service. When a transmission was received, a bell went off in the submarine's communications room, located aft of the attack center, on the starboard side.

The bell dinged. The sailor on watch called his officer, a lieutenant, j.g., who in turn called the captain, who took the submarine back up to antenna depth. Once there, he elevated the communications laser to track in on the Navy's own communications satellite, known as SSIX, the Submarine Satellite Information Exchange, telling it that he was ready for a transmission. The reply action message came over a directional S-band radio for the higher bandwidth. The signal was cross-loaded into the submarine's crypto machines, decoded, and printed up.

TO: USS TUCSON (SSN-770).

FROM: CINCPAC.

1. UPON RECEIVING "XQT SPEC OP" SIGNAL FROM VLS YOU WILL ENGAGE AND DESTROY PRC SSBN AND ANY PRC SHIPS IN CONTACT.

2. REPORT RESULTS OF ATTACK VIA SSIX.

3. SUBSEQUENT TO THIS OPERATION, CONDUCT UNRESTRICTED OPERATIONS AGAINST PRC NAVAL UNITS.

4. YOU WILL NOT RPT NOT ENGAGE COMMERCIAL TRAFFIC OF ANY KIND. CINCPAC SENDS.

END MESSAGE.

"Well, it's about G.o.dd.a.m.ned time," the CO observed to his executive officer.

"Doesn't say when to expect it," the XO observed.

"Call it two hours," the captain said. "Let's close to ten thousand yards. Get the troops perked up. Spin up the weapons."

"Aye."

"Anything else close?"

"There's a Chinese frigate off to the north, about thirty miles."

"Okay, after we do the subs, we'll Harpoon that one, then we'll close to finish it off, if necessary."

"Right." The XO went forward to the attack center. He checked his watch. It was dark topside. It didn't really matter to anyone aboard the submarine, but darkness made everybody feel a little more secure for some reason or other, even the XO.

It was tenser now. Giusti's reconnaissance troopers were now within twenty miles of the expected Chinese positions. That put them inside artillery range, and that made the job serious.

The mission was to advance to contact, and to find a hole in the Chinese positions for the division to exploit. The secondary objective was to shoot through the gap and break into the Chinese logistical area, just over the river from where they'd made their breakthrough. There they would rape and pillage, as LTC Giusti thought of it, probably turning north to roll up the Chinese rear with one or two brigades, and probably leaving the third to remain in place astride the Chinese line of communications as a blocking force.

His troopers had all put on their "makeup," as some called it, their camouflage paint, darkening the natural light spots of the face and lightening the dark ones. It had the overall effect of making them look like green and black s.p.a.ce aliens. The advance would be mounted, for the most part, with the cavalry scouts mostly staying in their Bradleys and depending on the thermal-imaging viewers used by the driver and gunner to spot enemies. They'd be jumping out occasionally, though, and so everyone checked his PVS-11 personal night-vision system. Every trooper had three sets of fresh AA batteries that were as important as the magazines for their M16A2 rifles. Most of the men gobbled down an MRE ration and chased it with water, and often some aspirin or Tylenol to ward off minor aches and pains that might come from b.u.mps or sprains. They all traded looks and jokes to lighten the stress of the night, plus the usual brave words meant as much for themselves as for others. Sergeants and junior officers reminded the men of their training, and told them to be confident in their abilities.

Then, on radioed command, the Bradleys started off, leading the heavier main-battle tanks off to the enemy, moving initially at about ten miles per hour.

The squadron's helicopters were up, all sixteen of them, moving very cautiously because armor on a helicopter is about as valuable as a sheet of newspaper, and because someone on the ground only needed a thermal-imaging viewer to see them, and a heat-seeking missile would snuff them out of the sky. The enemy had light flak, too, and that was just as deadly.

The OH-58D Kiowa Warriors had good night-vision systems, and in training the flight crews had learned to be confident of them, but people didn't often die in training. Knowing that there were people out there with live weapons and the orders to make use of them made everyone discount some of the lessons they'd learned. Getting shot down in one of those exercises meant being told over the radio to land, and maybe getting a tongue-lashing from the company commander for s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up, which usually ended with a reminder that in real combat operations, he'd be dead, his wife a widow, and his children orphans. But they weren't, really, and so those words were never taken as seriously as they were now. Now it could be real, and all of the flight crews had wives or sweethearts, and most of them had children as well.

And so they moved forward, using their own night-vision equipment to sweep the ground ahead, their hands a little more tingly than usual on the controls.

Division Headquarters had its own Dark Star terminal set up, with an Air Force captain running it. Diggs didn't much like being so far in the rear with his men going out in harm's way, but command wasn't the same thing as leadership. He'd been told that years before at Fort Leavenworth's Command and General Staff School, and he'd experienced it in Saudi Arabia only the previous year, but even so, he felt the need to be out forward, close to his men, so that he could share the danger with them. But the best way for him to mitigate the danger to them was to stay back here and establish effective control over operations, along with Colonel Masterman.

"Cookstoves?" Masterman asked.

"Yep," the USAF captain-his name was Frank Williams-agreed. "And these bright ones are campfires. Cool night. Ground temperature's about forty-three degrees, air temperature is forty-one. Good contrast for the thermal viewing systems. They seem to use the kind of stoves we had in the Boy Scouts. d.a.m.n, there's a bunch of'em. Like hundreds."

"Got a hole in their lines?"

"Looks thin right here, 'tween these two hills. They have a company on this hilltop, and another company here-I bet they're in different battalions," Williams said. "Always seems to work that way. The gap between them looks like a little more 'n a kilometer, but there's a little stream at the bottom."

"Bradleys don't mind getting a little wet," Diggs told the junior officer. "Duke?"

"Best bet for a blow-through I've seen so far. Aim Angelo for it?"

Diggs thought about that. It meant committing his cavalry screen, and that also meant committing at least one of his brigades, but such decisions were what generals were for. "What else is around?"

"I'd say their regimental headquarters is right about here, judging by the tents and trucks. You're going to want to hit it with artillery, I expect."

"Right about the time QUARTER HORSE gets there. No sense alerting them too soon," Masterman suggested. General Diggs thought it over one more time and made his first important decision of the night: "Agreed. Duke, tell Giusti to head for that gap."

"Yes, sir." Colonel Masterman moved off toward the radios. They were doing this on the fly, which wasn't exactly the way they preferred, but that was often the world of realtime combat operations.

"Roger," Diggs called.

Colonel Roger Ardan was his divisional artillery commander-GUNFIGHTER SIX on the divisional radio net-a tall thin man, rather like a not-tall-enough basketball player.

"Yes, sir."

"Here's your first fire mission. We're going to shoot Angelo Giusti through this gap. Company of infantry here and here, and what appears to be a regimental command post here."

"Enemy artillery?"

"Some one-twenty-twos here, and what looks like twooh-threes, eight inch, right here."

"No rocket-launchers?"

"None I've seen yet. That's a little odd, but they're not around that I can see," Captain Williams told the gunner.

"What about radars?" Colonel Ardan asked.

"Maybe one here, but hard to tell. It's under some camo nets." Williams selected the image with his mouse and expanded it.

"We'll take that one on general principles. Put a pin in it," Ardan said.

"Yes, sir. Print up a target list?"

"You bet, son."

"Here you go," Williams said. A command generated two sheets of paper out of the adjacent printer, with lat.i.tude-longitude positions down to the second of angle. The captain handed it across.

"How the h.e.l.l did we ever survive without GPS and overheads?" Ardan wondered aloud. "Okay, General, this we can do. When?"

"Call it thirty minutes."

"We'll be ready," GUNFIGHTER promised. "I'll TOT the regimental command post."

"Sounds good to me," Diggs observed.

First Armored had a beefed-up artillery brigade. The second and the third battalions of the First Field Artillery Regiment had the new Paladin self-propelled 155-mm howitzer, and the 2nd Battalion, 6th Field Artillery, had self-propelled eight-inch, plus the division's Multiple Launch Rocket System tracks, which ordinarily were under the direct order of the divisional commander, as his personal shotgun. These units were six miles behind the leading cavalry troops, and on order left the roads they were on and pulled off to firing positions north and south of the gravel track. Each of them had a Global Positioning Satellite, or GPS, receiver, and these told them where they were located down to an accuracy of less than three meters. A transmission over the Joint Tactical Information Distribution System, or J-TIDS, told them the locations of their targets, and onboard computers computed azimuth and range to them. Then they learned the sh.e.l.l selection, either "common" high-explosive or VT (for variable-time). These were loaded and the guns trained onto the distant targets, and the gunners just waited for the word to pull the strings. Their readiness was radioed back to the divisional HQ.

All set, sir," Colonel Ardan reported.

"Okay, we'll wait to see how Angelo's doing."

"Your screen is right here," Captain Williams told the senior officers. For him it was like being in a skybox at a football game, except that one team didn't know he was there, and didn't know the other team was on the field as well. "They're within three klicks of the enemy's first line of outposts."

"Duke, tell Angelo. Get it out on the IVIS."

"Done," Masterman replied. The only thing they couldn't do was cross-deck the "take" from the Dark Star drone.

SABRE SIX was now in his Bradley instead of the safer Abrams main-battle tank. He could see better out of this one, Giusti judged.

"IVIS is up," the track commander called. Colonel Giusti ducked down and twisted around the gun-turret structure to see where the sergeant was sitting. Whoever had designed the Bradley hadn't considered that a senior officer might use it-and his squadron didn't have one of the new "G.o.d" tracks yet, with the IVIS display in the back.

"First enemy post is right over there, sir, at eleven o'clock, behind this little rise," the sergeant said, tapping the screen.

"Well, let's go say hi."

"Roger that, Colonel. Kick it, Charlie," he told the driver. For the rest of the crew: "Perk it up, people. Heads up. We're in Indian Country."

How are things up north?" Diggs asked Captain Williams.

"Let's see." The captain deselected Marilyn Monroe and switched over to the "take" from Grace Kelly. "Here we go, the leading Chinese elements are within fifteen klicks of the Russians. Looks like they're settled in for the night, though. Looks like we'll be in contact first."

"Oh, well." Diggs shrugged. "Back to Miss Monroe."

"Yes, sir." More computer maneuvers. "Here we are. Here's your leading cavalry element, two klicks from John Chinaman's first hole in the ground."

Diggs had grown up watching boxing on TV. His father had been a real fan of Muhammad Ali, but even when Ali had lost to Leon Spinks, he'd known the other guy was in the ring with him. Not now. The camera zoomed in to isolate the hole. There were two men there. One was hunched down smoking a cigarette, and that must have ruined the night vision of one of them, maybe both, which explained why they hadn't seen anything yet, though they ought to have heard something . . . the Brad wasn't all that quiet . . .

"There, he just woke up a little," Williams said. On the TV screen, the head turned abruptly. Then the other head came up, and the bright point of the cigarette went flying off to their right front. Giusti's track was coming in from their left, and now both heads were oriented in that general direction.

"How close can you get?" Diggs asked.

"Let's see . . ." In five seconds, the two nameless Chinese infantrymen in their hand-dug foxhole took up half the screen. Then Williams did a split screen, like the picture-in-picture feature of some television sets. The big part showed the two doomed soldiers, and the little one was locked on the leading Bradley Scout, whose gun turret was now turning a little to the left . . . about eleven hundred meters now . . .

They had a field phone in the hole, Diggs could see now, sitting on the dirt between the two grunts. Their hole was the first in the enemy combat outpost line, and their job would have been to report back when something evil this way came. They heard something, but they weren't sure what it was, were probably waiting until they saw it. The PLA didn't have night-vision goggles, at least not at this level, Diggs thought. That was important information. "Okay, back it off."

"Right, sir." Williams dumped the close-up of the two grunts, returning to the picture that showed both them and the approaching Brad. Diggs was sure that Giusti's gunner could see them now. It was just a question of when he chose to take the first shot, and that was a call for the guy in the field to make, wasn't it?

"There!" The muzzle of the 25-mm chain gun flashed three times, causing the TV screen to flare, and there was a line of the tracers, streaking to the hole- -and the two grunts were dead, killed by three rounds of high-explosive incendiary-tracer ammunition. Diggs turned.

"GUNFIGHTER, commence firing!"

"Fire!" Colonel Ardan said into his microphone. Moments later, the ground shook under their feet, and a few seconds after that came the distant sound of thunder, and more than ninety sh.e.l.ls started arcing into the air.

Colonel Ardan had ordered a TOT, or time-on-target barrage, on the regimental command post behind the small pa.s.s that the Quarter Horse was driving for. An American invention from World War II, TOT was designed so that every round fired from the various guns targeted on the single spot on the map would arrive at the same instant, and so deny the people there the chance to dive for cover at the first warning. In the old days, that had meant laboriously computing the flight time of every single sh.e.l.l, but computers did that now in less time than it took to frame the thought. This particular mission had fallen to 2nd/6th and its eightinchers, universally regarded as the most accurate heavy guns in the United States Army. Two of the sh.e.l.ls were common impact-fused high-explosive, and the other ten were VT. That stood for "variable time," but really meant that in the nose of each sh.e.l.l was a tiny radar transponder set to explode the sh.e.l.l when it was about fifty feet off the ground. In this way, the fragments lancing away from the exploding sh.e.l.l were not wasted into the ground, but instead made an inverted cone of death about two hundred feet across at its base. The common sh.e.l.ls would have the effect of making craters, immolating those who might be in individual shelter holes.

Captain Williams switched Marilyn's focus to the enemy command post. From a high perspective the thermal cameras even caught the bright dots of the sh.e.l.ls racing through the night. Then the camera zoomed back in on the target. By Diggs's estimation, all of the sh.e.l.ls landed in less than two seconds The effects were horrific. The six tents there evaporated, and the glowing green stick figures of human beings fell flat and stopped moving. Some pieces separated from one another, an effect Diggs had never seen.

"Whoa!" Williams observed. "Stir-fry."

What was it about the Air Force? General Diggs wondered. Or maybe it was just the kid's youth.

On the screen, some people were still moving, having miraculously survived the first barrage, but instead of moving around (or of running away, because artillery barrages didn't arrive in groups of only one) they remained at their posts, some looking to the needs of the wounded. It was courageous, but it doomed most of them to death. The only one or two people in the regimental command post who were going to live were the ones who'd pick winning lottery tickets later in life. If there were going to be as many as two, that is. The second barrage landed twenty-eight seconds after the first, and then a third thirty-one seconds after that, according to the time display in the upper-right corner of the screen.