Bondarenko hoped that someday he’d meet the team that had developed this American Dark Star drone. Never in history had a commander possessed such knowledge as this, and without it he would have been forced to commit his slender forces to battle just to ascertain what stood against him. Not now. He probably had a better feel for the location of the advancing Chinese than their own commander did.
Better yet, the leading regiment of the 201st Motor Rifle Division was only a few kilometers away, and the leading formation was the division’s steel fist, its independent tank regiment of ninety-five T-80U main-battle tanks.
The 265th was ready for the reinforcement, and its commander, Yuriy Sinyavskiy, proclaimed that he was tired of running away. A career professional soldier and mechanized infantryman, Sinyavskiy was a profane, cigar-chomping man of forty-six years, now leaning over a map table in Bondarenko’s headquarters.
“This, this is my ground, Gennady Iosifovich,” he said, stabbing at the point with his finger. It was just five kilometers north of the Gogol Gold Field, a line of ridges twenty kilometers across, facing open ground the Chinese would have to cross. “And put the Two-Oh-First’s tanks just here on my right. When we stop their advance guard, they can blow in from the west and roll them up.”
“Reconnaissance shows their leading division is strung out somewhat,” Bondarenko told him.
It was a mistake made by every army in the world. The sharpest teeth of any field force are its artillery, but even self-propelled artillery, mounted on tracks for cross-country mobility, can’t seem to keep up with the mechanized forces it is supposed to support. It was a lesson that had even surprised the Americans in the Persian Gulf, when they’d found their artillery could keep up with the leading tank echelons only with strenuous effort, and across flat ground. The People’s Liberation Army had tracked artillery, but a lot of it was still the towed variety, and was being pulled behind trucks that could not travel cross-country as well as the tracked kind.
General Diggs observed the discussion, which his rudimentary Russian could not quite keep up with, and Sinyavskiy spoke no English, which really slowed things down.
“You still have a lot of combat power to stop, Yuriy Andreyevich,” Diggs pointed out, waiting for the translation to get across.
“If we cannot stop them completely, at least we can give them a bloody nose” was the belated reply.
“Stay mobile,” Diggs advised. “If I were this General Peng, I’d maneuver east—the ground is better suited for it—and try to wrap you up from your left.”
“We will see how maneuver-minded they are,” Bondarenko said for his subordinate. “So far all they have done is drive straight forward, and I think they are becoming complacent. See how they are stretched out, Marion. Their units are too far separated to provide mutual support. They are in a pursuit phase of warfare, and that makes them disorganized, and they have little air support to warn them of what lies ahead. I think Yuriy is right: This is a good place for a stand.”
“I agree it’s good ground, Gennady, just don’t marry the place, okay?” Diggs warned.
Bondarenko translated that for his subordinate, who answered back in machine-gun Russian around his cigar.
“Yuriy says it is a place for a fucking, not a wedding. When will you join your command, Marion?”
“My chopper’s on the way in now, buddy. My cavalry screen is at the first fuel depot, with First Brigade right behind. We should be in contact in a day and a half or so.”
They’d already discussed Diggs’s plan of attack. First Armored would assemble northwest of Belogorsk, fueling at the last big Russian depot, then leap out in the darkness for the Chinese bridgehead. Intelligence said that the PLA’s 65th Type-B Group Army was there now, digging in to protect the left shoulder of their break-in. Not a mechanized force, it was still a lot for a single division to chew on. If the Chinese plan of attack had a weakness, it was that they’d bet all their mechanized forces on the drive forward. The forces left behind to secure the breakthrough were at best motorized—carried by wheeled vehicles instead of tracked ones—and at worst leg infantry, who had to walk where they went. That made them slow and vulnerable to men who sat down behind steel as they went to battle in their tracked vehicles.
But there were a hell of a lot of them, Diggs reminded himself.
Before he could leave, General Sinyavskiy reached into his hip pocket and pulled out a flask. “A drink for luck,” he said in his only words of broken English.
“Hell, why not?” Diggs tossed it off. It was good stuff, actually. “When this is all over, we will drink again,” he promised.
“Da,” the general replied. “Good luck, Diggs.”
“Marion,” Bondarenko said. “Be careful, comrade.”
“You, too, Gennady. You got enough medals, buddy. No sense getting your ass shot off trying to win another.”
“Generals are supposed to die in bed,” Bondarenko agreed on the way to the door.
Diggs trotted out to the UH-60. Colonel Boyle was flying this one. Diggs donned the crash helmet, wishing they’d come up with another name for the damned thing, and settled in the jump seat behind the pilots.
“How we doing, sir?” Boyle asked, letting the lieutenant take the chopper back off.
“Well, we have a plan, Dick. Question is, will it work?”
“Do I get let in on it?”
“Your Apaches are going to be busy.”
“There’s a surprise,” Boyle observed.
“How are your people?”
“Ready” was the one-word reply. “What are we calling this?”
“CHOPSTICKS.” Diggs then heard a laugh over the intercom wire.
“I love it.”
Okay, Mickey,” Robby Jackson said. ”I understand Gus’s position. But we have a big picture here to think about.”
They were in the Situation Room looking at the Chairman on TV from the Pentagon room known as The Tank. It was hard to hear what he was muttering that way, but the way he looked down was a sufficient indication of his feelings about Robby’s remark.
“General,” Ryan said, “the idea here is to rattle the cage of their political leadership. Best way to do that is to go after them in more places than one, overload ’em.”
“Sir, I agree with that idea, but General Wallace has his point, too. Taking down their radar fence will degrade their ability to use their fighters against us, and they still have a formidable fighter force, even though we’ve handled them pretty rough so far.”
“Mickey, if you handle a girl this way down in Mississippi, it’s called rape,” the Vice President observed. “Their fighter pilots look at their aircraft now and they see caskets, for Christ’s sake. Their confidence has got to be gone, and that’s all a fighter jock has to hold on to. Trust me on this one, will ya?”
“But Gus—”
“But Gus is too worried about his force. Okay, fine, let him send some Charlie-Golfs against their picket fence, but mainly we want those birds armed with Smart Pigs to go after their ground forces. The fighter force can look after itself.”
For the first time, General Mickey Moore regretted Ryan’s choice of Vice President. Robby was thinking like a politician rather than an operational commander—and that came as something of a surprise. He was seemingly less worried about the safety of his forces than of ...
... than of what the overall objective was, Moore corrected himself. And that was not a completely bad way to think, was it? Jackson had been a pretty good J-3 not so long before, hadn’t he?
American commanders no longer thought of their men as expendable assets. That was not a bad thing at all, but sometimes you had to put forces in harm’s way, and when you did that, some of them did not come home. And that was what they were paid for, whether you liked it or not. Robby Jackson had been a Navy fighter pilot, and he hadn’t forgotten the warrior ethos, despite his new job and pay grade.
“Sir,” Moore said, “what orders do I give General Wallace?”
/>
Cecil B. goddamned DeMille,” Mancuso observed crossly.
“Ever wanted to part the Red Sea?” General Lahr asked.
“I ain’t God, Mike,” CINCPAC said next.
“Well, it is elegant, and we do have most of the pieces in place,” his J-2 pointed out.
“This is a political operation. What the hell are we, a goddamned focus group?”
“Sir, you going to continue to rant, or are we going to get to work on this?”
Mancuso wished for a lupara to blast a hole in the wall, or Mike Lahr’s chest, but he was a uniformed officer, and he did now have orders from his Commander-in-Chief.
“All right. I just don’t like to have other people design my operations.”
“And you know the guy.”
“Mike, once upon a time, back when I had three stripes and driving a submarine was all I had to worry about, Ryan and I helped steal a whole Russian submarine, yeah—and if you repeat that to anyone, I’ll have one of my Marines shoot your ass. Sink some of their ships, yeah, splash a few of their airplanes, sure, but ‘trailing our coat’ in sight of land? Jesus.”
“It’ll shake them up some.”
“If they don’t sink some of my ships in the attempt.”
Hey, Tony,” the voice on the phone said. It took Bretano a second to recognize it.
“Where are you now, Al?” the Secretary of Defense asked.
“Norfolk. Didn’t you know? I’m on USS Gettysburg upgrading their SAMs. It was your idea, wasn’t it?”
“Well, yeah, I suppose it was,” Tony Bretano agreed, thinking back.
“You must have seen this Chinese thing coming a long way off, man.”
“As a matter of fact, we—” The SecDef paused for a second. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, if the ChiComms loft an ICBM at us, this Aegis system does give us something to fall back on, if the computer simulations are right. They ought to be. I wrote most of the software,” Gregory went on.
Secretary Bretano didn’t want to admit that he hadn’t really thought about that eventuality. Thinking things through was one of the things he was paid for, after all. “How ready are you?”
“The electronics stuff is okay, but we don’t have any SAMs aboard. They’re stashed at some depot or something, up on the York River, I think they said. When they load them aboard, I can upgrade the software on the seeker heads. The only missiles aboard, the ones I’ve been playing with, they’re blue ones, exercise missiles, not shooters, I just found out. You know, the Navy’s a little weird. The ship’s in a floating dry dock. They’re going to lower us back in the water in a few hours.” He couldn’t see his former boss’s face at the moment. If he could, he would have recognized the oh, shit expression on his Italian face.
“So, you’re confident in your systems?”
“A full-up test would be nice, but if we can loft three or four SAMs at the inbound, yeah, I think it oughta work.”
“Okay, thanks, Al.”
“So, how’s this war going? All I see on TV is how the Air Force is kicking some ass.”
“They are, the TV’s got that right, but the rest—can’t talk about it over the phone. Al, let me get back to you, okay?”
“Yes, sir.”
In his office, Bretano switched buttons. “Ask Admiral Seaton to come in to see me.” That didn’t take very long.
“You rang, Mr. Secretary,” the CNO said when he came in.
“Admiral, there’s a former employee of mine from TRW in Norfolk right now. I set him up to look at upgrading the Aegis missile system to engage ballistic targets.”
“I heard a little about that. How’s his project going?” Dave Seaton asked.
“He says he’s ready for a full-up test. But, Admiral, what if the Chinese launch one of their CSS-4s at us?”
“It wouldn’t be good,” Seaton replied.
“Then how about we take our Aegis ships and put them close to the likely targets?”
“Well, sir, the system’s not certified for ballistic targets yet, and we haven’t really run a test, and—”
“Is it better than nothing?” the SecDef asked, cutting him off.
“A little, I suppose.”
“Then let’s make that happen, and make it happen right now.”
Seaton straightened up. “Aye aye, sir.”
“Gettysburg first. Have her load up what missiles she needs, and bring her right here,” Bretano ordered.
“I’ll call SACLANT right now.”
It was the strangest damned thing, Gregory thought. This ship—not an especially big ship, smaller than the one he and Candi had taken a cruise on the previous winter, but still an oceangoing ship—was in an elevator. That’s what a floating dry dock was. They were flooding it now, to make it go down, back into the water to see if the new propeller worked. Sailors who worked on the dry dock were watching from their perches on—whatever the hell you called the walls of the damned thing.
“Weird, ain’t it, sir?”
Gregory smelled the smoke. It had to be Senior Chief Leek. He turned. It was.
“Never seen this sort of thing before.”
“Nobody does real often, ’cept’n those guys over there who operate this thing. Did you take the chance to walk under the ship?”
“Walk under ten thousand tons of metal?” Gregory responded. “I don’t think so.”
“You was a soldier, wasn’t you?”
“Told you, didn’t I? West Point, jump school, ranger school, back when I was young and foolish.”
“Well, Doc, it’s no big deal. Kinda interesting to see how she’s put together, ‘specially the sonar dome up forward. If I wasn’t a radar guy, I probably woulda been a sonar guy, ’cept there’s nothing for them to do anymore.”
Gregory looked down. Water was creeping across the gray metal floor—deck? he wondered—of the dry dock.
“Attention on deck!” a voice called. Sailors turned and saluted, including Chief Leek.
It was Captain Bob Blandy, Gettysburg’s CO. Gregory had met him only once, and then just to say hello.
“Dr. Gregory.”
“Captain.” They shook hands.
“How’s your project been going?”
“Well, the simulations look good. I’d like to try it against a live target.”
“You got sent to us by the SecDef?”
“Not exactly, but he called me in from California to look at the technical aspects of the problem. I worked for him when he was head of TRW.”
“You’re an SDI guy, right?”
“That and SAMs, yes, sir. Other things. I’m one of the world’s experts on adaptive optics, from my SDI days.”
“What’s that?” Captain Blandy asked.
“The rubber mirror, we called it. You use computer-controlled actuators to warp the mirror to compensate for atmospheric distortions. The idea was to use that to focus the energy beam from a free-electron laser. But it didn’t work out. The rubber mirror worked just fine, but for some reason we never figured out, the damned lasers didn’t scale up the way we hoped they would. Didn’t come up to the power requirements to smoke a missile body.” Gregory looked down in the dry dock again. It certainly took its time, but they probably didn’t want to drop anything this valuable. “I wasn’t directly involved in that, but I kibitzed some. It turned out to be a monster of a technical problem. We just kept bashing our heads against the wall until we got tired of the squishy sound.”
“I know mechanical engineering, some electrical, but not the high-energy stuff. So, what do you think of our Aegis system?”
“I love the radar. Just like the Cobra Dane the Air Force has up at Shemya in the Aleutians. A little more advanced, even. You could probably bounce a signal off the moon if you wanted to.”
“That’s a little out of our range gate,” Blandy observed. “Chief Leek here been taking good care of you?”
“When he leaves the Navy, we might have a place for him at TRW. We’re part of the ongoing
SAM project.”
“And Lieutenant Olson, too?” the skipper asked.
“He’s a very bright young officer, Captain. I can think of a lot of companies who might want him.” If Gregory had a fault, it was being too truthful.
“I ought to say something to discourage you from that, but—”
“Cap’n!” A sailor came up. “Flash-traffic from SACLANT, sir.” He handed over a clipboard. Captain Blandy signed the acknowledgment sheet and took the message. His eyes focused very closely.
“Do you know if the SecDef knows what you’re up to?”
“Yes, Captain, he does. I just spoke to Tony a few minutes ago.”
“What the hell did you tell him?”
Gregory shrugged. “Not much, just that the project was coming along nicely.”
“Uh-huh. Chief Leek, how’s your hardware?”
“Everything’s a hundred percent on line, Cap’n. We got a job, sir?” the senior chief asked.
“Looks like it. Dr. Gregory, if you will excuse me, I have to see my officers. Chief, we’re going to be getting under way soon. If any of your troops are on the beach, call ’em back. Spread the word.”
“Aye aye, sir.” He saluted as Captain Blandy hustled back forward. “What’s that all about?”
“Beats me, Chief.”
“What do I do? Getting under way?” Gregory asked.
“Got your toothbrush? If not, you can buy one in the ship’s store. Excuse me, Doc, I have to do a quick muster.” Leek tossed his cigarette over the side and went the same way that the captain had.
And there was precisely nothing for Gregory to do. There was no way for him to leave the ship, except to jump down into the flooding floating dry dock, and that didn’t look like a viable option. So, he headed back into the superstructure and found the ship’s store open. There he bought a toothbrush.
Bondarenko spent the next three hours with Major General Sinyavskiy, going over approach routes and fire plans.
“They have fire-finder radar, Yuriy, and their counter-battery rockets have a long reach.”