"Okay, where are the ships?"

"There's one here now," Bretano answered.

"Oh? When did that happen?" Robby Jackson asked.

"Less than an hour ago. Gettysburg. There's another one going to New York-and San Francisco and Los Angeles. Also Seattle, though that's not really a target as far as we know. The software upgrade is going out to them to get their missiles reprogrammed."

"Okay, that's something. What about taking those missiles out, before they can launch?" Ryan asked next.

"The Chinese silos have recently been upgraded in protection, steel armor on the concrete covers-shaped like a Chinese coolie hat, it will probably deflect most bombs, but not the deep penetrators, the GBU-27s we used on the railroad bridges-"

"If they have any left over there. Better ask Gus Wallace," the Vice President warned.

"What do you mean?" Bretano asked.

"I mean we never made all that many of them, and the Air Force must have dropped about forty last night."

"I'll check that," SecDef promised.

"What if he doesn't?" Jack asked.

"Then either we get some more in one big hurry, or we think up something else," TOMCAT replied.

"Like what, Robby?"

"h.e.l.l, send in a special-operations team and blow them the f.u.c.k up," the former fighter pilot suggested.

"I wouldn't much want to try that myself," Mickey Moore observed.

"Beats the h.e.l.l out of a five-megaton bomb going off on Capitol Hill, Mickey," Jackson shot back. "Look, the preferred thing to do is find out if Gus Wallace has the right bombs. It's a long stretch for the Black Jets, but you can tank them going and coming-and put fighters up to protect the tankers. It's complicated, but we practice that sort of thing. If he doesn't have the G.o.dd.a.m.ned bombs, we fly them to him, a.s.suming there are any. You know, weapons storage isn't a cornucopia, guys. There's a finite, discrete number for every item in the inventory."

"General Moore," Ryan said, "call General Wallace and find out, right now, if you would."

"Yes, sir." Moore stood and left the Situation Room.

"Look," Ed Foley said, pointing to the TV. "It's started."

The wood line erupted in a sheet of flame two kilometers across. The sight caused the eyes of the Chinese tankers to flare, but most of the front rank of tank crews didn't have time for much more than that. Of the thirty tanks in that line, only three escaped immediate destruction. It was little better for the personnel carriers interspersed with them.

"You may commence firing, Colonel," Sinyavskiy told his artillery commander.

The command was relayed at once, and the ground shook beneath their feet.

It was spectacular to see on the computer terminal. The Chinese had walked straight into the ambush, and the effect of the Russian opening volley was ghastly to behold.

Major Tucker took in a deep breath as he saw several hundred men lose their lives.

"Back to their artillery," Bondarenko ordered.

"Yes, sir." Tucker complied at once, altering the focus of the high-alt.i.tude camera and finding the Chinese artillery. It was mainly of the towed sort, being pulled behind trucks and tractors. They were a little slow getting the word. The first Russian sh.e.l.ls were falling around them before any effort was made to stop the trucks and lift the limbers off the towing hooks, and for all that the Chinese gunners worked rapidly.

But theirs was a race against Death, and Death had a head start. Tucker watched one gun crew struggle to manhandle their 122-mm gun into a firing position. The gunners were loading the weapon when three sh.e.l.ls landed close enough to upset the weapon and kill more than half their number. Zooming in the camera, he could see one private writhing on the ground, and there was no one close by to offer him a.s.sistance.

"It is a miserable business, isn't it?" Bondarenko observed quietly.

"Yeah," Tucker agreed. When a tank blew up it was easy to tell yourself that a tank was just a thing. Even though you knew that three or four human beings were inside, you couldn't see them. As a fighter pilot never killed a fellow pilot, but only shot down his aircraft, so Tucker adhered to the Air Force ethos that death was something that happened to objects rather than people. Well, that poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d with blood on his shirt wasn't a thing, was he? He backed off the camera, taking a wider field that permitted G.o.dlike distancing from the up-close-and-personal aspects of the observation.

"Better that they should have remained in their own country, Major," the Russian explained to him.

Jesus, what a mess," Ryan said. He'd seen death up-close-and-personal himself in his time, having shot people who had at the time been quite willing to shoot him, but that didn't make this imagery any the more palatable. Not by a long f.u.c.king shot. The President turned.

"Is this going out, Ed?" he asked the DCI.

"Ought to be," Foley replied.

And it was, on a URL-"Uniform Resource Locator" in'Netspeak-called http://www.darkstarfeed.cia.gov/siberiabattle/realtime.ram. It didn't even have to be advertised. Some 'Net crawlers stumbled onto it in the first five minutes, and the "hits" from people looking at the "streaming video" site climbed up from 0 to 10 in a matter of three minutes. Then some of them must have ducked into chat rooms to spread the word. The monitoring program for the URL at CIA headquarters also kept track of the locations of the people logging into it. The first Asian country, not unexpectedly, was j.a.pan, and the fascination of the people there in military operations guaranteed a rising number of hits. The video also included audio, the real-time comments of Air Force personnel giving some perverse color-commentary back to their comrades in uniform. It was sufficiently colorful that Ryan commented on it.

"It's not meant for anyone much over the age of thirty to hear," General Moore said, coming back into the room.

"What's the story on the bombs?" Jackson asked at once.

"He's only got two of them," Moore replied. "The nearest others are at the factory, Lockheed-Martin, Sunnyvale. They're just doing a production run right now."

"Uh-oh," Robby observed. "Back to Plan B."

"It might have to be a special operation, then, unless, Mr. President, that is, you are willing to authorize a strike with cruise missiles."

"What kind of cruise missiles?" Ryan asked, knowing the answer even so.

"Well, we have twenty-eight of them on Guam with W-80 warheads. They're little ones, only about three hundred pounds. It has two settings, one-fifty or one-seventy kilotons."

"Thermonuclear weapons, you mean?"

General Moore let out a breath before replying. "Yes, Mr. President."

"That's the only option we have for taking those missiles out?" He didn't have to say that he would not voluntarily launch a nuclear strike.

"We could go in with conventional smart bombs-GBU-10s and -15s. Gus has enough of those, but not deep penetrators, and the protection on the silos would have a fair chance at deflecting the weapon away from the target. Now, that might not matter. The CSS-4 missiles are delicate b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, and the impact even of a miss could scramble their guidance systems . . . but we couldn't be sure."

"I'd prefer that those things not fly."

"Jack, n.o.body wants them to fly," the Vice President said. "Mickey, put together a plan. We need something to take them out, and we need it in one big f.u.c.kin' hurry."

"I'll call SOCOM about it, but, h.e.l.l, they're down in Tampa."

"Do the Russians have special-operations people?" Ryan asked.

"Sure, it's called Spetsnaz."

"And some of these missiles are targeted on Russia?"

"It certainly appears so, yes, sir," the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs confirmed.

"Then they owe us one, and they d.a.m.ned well owe it to themselves," Jack said, reaching for a phone. "I need to talk to Sergey Golovko in Moscow," he told the operator.

The American President," his secretary said.

"Ivan Emmetovich!" Golovko said in hearty greeting. "The reports from Siberia are good."

"I know, Sergey, I'm watching it live now myself. Want to do it yourself?"

"It is possible?"

"You have a computer with a modem?"

"One cannot exist without the d.a.m.ned things," the Russian replied.

Ryan read off the URL identifier. "Just log onto that. We're putting the feed from our Dark Star drones onto the Internet."

"Why is that, Jack?" Golovko asked at once.

"Because as of two minutes ago, one thousand six hundred and fifty Chinese citizens are watching it, and the number is going up fast."

"A political operation against them, yes? You wish to destabilize their government?"

"Well, it won't hurt our purposes if their citizens find out what's happening, will it?"

"The virtues of a free press. I must study this. Very clever, Ivan Emmetovich."

"That's not why I called."

"Why is that, Tovarisch Prezidyent?" the SVR chairman asked, with sudden concern at the change in his tone. Ryan was not one to conceal his feelings well.

"Sergey, we have a very adverse indication from their Politburo. I'm faxing it to you now," he heard. "I'll stay on the line while you read it."

Golovko wasn't surprised to see the pages arrive on his personal fax machine. He had Ryan's personal numbers, and the Americans had his. It was just one way for an intelligence service to demonstrate its prowess in a harmless way. The first sheets to come across were the English translation of the Chinese ideographs that came through immediately thereafter.

Sergey, I sent you our original feed in case your linguists or psychologists are better than ours," the President said, with an apologetic glance at Dr. Sears. The CIA a.n.a.lyst waved it off. "They have twelve CSS-4 missiles, half aimed at you, half at us. I think we need to do something about those things. They may not be entirely rational, the way things are going now."

"And your sh.o.r.e bombardment might have pushed them to the edge, Mr. President," the Russian said over the speakerphone. "I agree, this is a matter of some concern. Why don't you bomb the things with your brilliant bombs from your magical invisible bombers."

"Because we're out of bombs, Sergey. They ran out of the sort they need."

"Nichevo" was the reaction.

"You should see it from my side. My people are thinking about a commando-type operation."

"I see. Let me consult with some of my people. Give me twenty minutes, Mr. President."

"Okay, you know where to reach me." Ryan punched the kill b.u.t.ton on the phone and looked sourly at the tray of coffee things. "One more cup of this s.h.i.t and I'm going to turn into an urn myself."

The only reason he was alive now, he was sure, was that The'd withdrawn to the command section for 34th Army. His tank division was being roughly handled. One of his battalions had been immolated in the first minute of the battle. Another was now trying to maneuver east, trying to draw the Russians out into a running battle for which his men were trained. The division's artillery had been halved at best by Russian ma.s.sed fire, and 34th Army's advance was now a thing of the past. His current task was to try and use his two mechanized divisions to establish a base of fire from which he could try to wrest back control of the battle. But every time he tried to move a unit, something happened to it, as though the Russians were reading his mind.

"Wa, pull what's left of Three-Oh-Second back to the ten o'clock start-line, and do it now!" he ordered.

"But Marshal Luo won't-"

"And if he wishes to relieve me, he can, but he isn't here now, is he?" Ge snarled back. "Give the order!"

"Yes, Comrade General."

With this toy in our hands, the Germans would not have made it as far as Minsk," Bondarenko said.

"Yeah, it helps to know what the other guy's doing, doesn't it?"

"It's like being a G.o.d on Mount Olympus. Who thought this thing up?"

"Oh, a couple of people at Northrop started the idea, with an airplane called Tacit Rainbow, looked like a cross between a snow shovel and a French baguette, but it was manned, and the endurance wasn't so good."

"Whoever it is, I would like to buy him a bottle of good vodka," the Russian general said. "This is saving the lives of my soldiers."

And beating the living s.h.i.t out of the Chinese, Tucker didn't add. But combat was that sort of game, wasn't it?

"Do you have any other aircraft up?"

"Yes, sir. Grace Kelly's back up to cover First Armored."

"Show me."

Tucker used his mouse to shrink one video window and then opened another. General Diggs had a second terminal up and running, and Tucker just stole its take. There were what looked like two brigades operating, moving north at a measured pace and wrecking every Chinese truck and track they could find. The battlefield, if you could call it that, was a ma.s.s of smoke columns from shot-up trucks, reminding Tucker of the vandalized Kuwaiti oil fields of 1991. He zoomed in to see that most of the work was being done by the Bradleys. What targets there were simply were not worthy of a main-gun round from the tanks. The Abrams just rode herd on the lighter infantry carriers, doing protective overwatch as they ground mercilessly forward. The major slaved one camera to his terminal and went scouting around for more action . . .

"Who's this?" Tucker asked.

"That must be BOYAR," Bondarenko said.

It was what looked like twenty-five T-55 tanks advancing on line, and these tanks were using their main guns . . . against trucks and some infantry carriers . . .

Load HEAT," Lieutenant Komanov ordered. "Target track, one o'clock! Range two thousand."

"I have him," the gunner said a second later.

"Fire!"

"Firing," the gunner said, squeezing the trigger. The old tank rocked backwards from the shot. Gunner and commander watched the tracer arcing out . . .

"Over, d.a.m.n it, too high. Load another HEAT."

The loader slammed another round into the breech in a second: "Loaded!"