Mancuso nodded. “Okay. What can we do? What kind of shape are we in?”
The four-star commanding Seventh Fleet leaned forward: “I’m in pretty decent shape. My carriers are all available or nearly so, but my aviators could use some more training time. Surface assets—well, Ed?”
Vice Admiral Goldsmith looked over to his boss. “We’re good, Bart.”
COMSUBPAC nodded. “It’ll take a little time to surge more of my boats west, but they’re trained up, and we can give their navy a major bellyache if we have to.”
Then eyes turned to the Marine. “I hope you’re not going to tell me to invade the Chinese mainland with one division,” he observed. Besides, all of Pacific Fleet didn’t have enough amphibious-warfare ships to land more than a brigade landing force, and they knew that. Good as the Marines were, they couldn’t take on the entire People’s Liberation Army.
“What sort of shape are the Russians in?” Seventh Fleet asked General Lahr.
“Not good, sir. Their new Commander Far East is well regarded, but he’s hurting for assets. The PLA has him outnumbered a good eight to one, probably more. So, the Russians don’t have much in the way of deep-strike capabilities, and just defending themselves against air attack is going to be a stretch.”
“That’s a fact,” agreed the general commanding the Air Force assets in the Pacific Theater. “Ivan’s pissed away a lot of his available assets dealing with the Chechens. Most of their aircraft are grounded with maintenance problems. That means his drivers aren’t getting the stick time they need to be proficient airmen. The Chinese, on the other hand, have been training pretty well for several years. I’d say their air force component is in pretty good shape.”
“What can we move west with?”
“A lot,” the USAF four-star answered. “But will it be enough? Depends on a lot of variables. It’ll be nice to have your carriers around to back us up.” Which was unusually gracious of the United States Air Force.
“Okay,” Mancuso said next. “I want to see some options. Mike, let’s firm up our intelligence estimates on what the Chinese are capable of, first of all, and second, what they’re thinking.”
“The Agency is altering the tasking of its satellites. We ought to be getting a lot of overheads soon, plus our friends on Taiwan—they keep a pretty good eye on things for us.”
“Are they in on this SNIE?” Seventh Fleet asked.
Lahr shook his head. “No, not yet. This stuff is being held pretty close.”
“Might want to tell Washington that they have a better feel for Beijing’s internal politics than we do,” the senior Marine observed. “They ought to. They speak the same language. Same thought processes and stuff. Taiwan ought to be a prime asset to us.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Lahr countered. “If a shooting war starts, they won’t jump in for the fun of it. Sure, they’re our friends, but they don’t really have a dog in this fight yet, and the smart play for them is to play it cautious. They’ll go to a high alert status, but they will not commence offensive operations on their own hook.”
“Will we really back the Russians if it comes to that? More to the point, will the Chinese regard that as a credible option on our part?” COMAIRPAC asked. He administratively “owned” the carriers and naval air wings. Getting them trained was his job.
“Reading their minds is CIA’s job, not ours,” Lahr answered. “As far as I know, DIA has no high-quality sources in Beijing, except what we get from intercepts out of Fort Meade. If you’re asking me for a personal opinion, well, we have to remember that their political assessments are made by Maoist politicians who tend to see things their own way rather than with what we would term an objective outlook. Short version, I don’t know, and I don’t know anyone who does, but the asset that got us this information tells us that they’re serious about this possible move. Serious enough to bring Russia into NATO. You could call that rather a desperate move toward deterring the PRC, Admiral.”
“So, we regard war as a highly possible eventuality?” Mancuso summarized.
“Yes, sir,” Lahr agreed.
“Okay, gentlemen. Then we treat it that way. I want plans and options for giving our Chinese brethren a bellyache. Rough outlines after lunch tomorrow, and firm options in forty-eight hours. Questions?” There were none. “Okay, let’s get to work on this.”
Al Gregory was working late. A computer-software expert, he was accustomed to working odd hours, and this was no exception. At the moment he was aboard USS Gettysburg, an Aegis-class cruiser. The ship was not in the water, but rather in dry dock, sitting on a collection of wooden blocks while undergoing propeller replacement. Gettysburg had tangled with a buoy that had parted its mooring chain and drifted into the fairway, rather to the detriment of the cruiser’s port crew. The yard was taking its time to do the replacement because the ship’s engines were about due for programmed maintenance anyway. This was good for the crew. Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, part of the Norfolk Naval Base complex, wasn’t exactly a garden spot, but it was where most of the crew’s families lived, and that made it attractive enough.
Gregory was in the ship’s CIC, or Combat Information Center, the compartment from which the captain “fought” the ship. All the weapons systems were controlled from this large space. The SPY radar display was found on three side-by-side displays about the size of a good big-screen TV. The problem was the computers that drove the systems.
“You know,” Gregory observed to the senior chief who maintained the systems, “an old iMac has a ton more power than this.”
“Doc, this system is the flower of 1975 technology,” the senior chief protested. “And it ain’t all that hard to track a missile, is it?”
“Besides, Dr. Gregory,” another chief put it, “that radar of mine is still the best fucking system ever put to sea.”
“That’s a fact,” Gregory had to agree. The solid-state components could combine to blast six megawatts of RF power down a one-degree line of bearing, enough to make a helicopter pilot, for example, produce what cruel physicians called FLKs: funny-looking kids. And more than enough to track a ballistic reentry vehicle at a thousand miles or more. The limitation there also was computer software, which was the new gold standard in just about every weapons system in the world.
“So, when you want to track an RV, what do you do?”
“We call it ‘inserting the chip,’ ” the senior chief answered.
“What? It’s hardware?” Al asked. He had trouble believing that. This wasn’t a computer that you slid a board into.
“No, sir, it’s software. We upload a different control program.”
“Why do you need a second program for that? Can’t your regular one track airplanes and missiles?” the TRW vice president demanded.
“Sir, I just maintain and operate the bitch. I don’t design the things. RCA and IBM do that.”
“Shit,” Gregory observed.
“You could talk to Lieutenant Olson,” the other chief thought aloud. “He’s a Dartmouth boy. Pretty smart for a j.g.”
“Yeah,” the first chief agreed. “He writes software as sort of a hobby.”
“Dennis the Menace. Weps and the XO get annoyed with him sometimes.”
“Why?” Gregory asked.
“Because he talks like you, sir,” Senior Chief Leek answered. “But he ain’t in your pay grade.”
“He’s a good kid, though,” Senior Chief Matson observed. “Takes good care of his troops, and he knows his stuff, doesn’t he, Tim?”
“Yeah, George, good kid, going places if he stays in.”
“He won’t. Computer companies are already trying to recruit him. Shit, Compaq offered him three hundred big ones last week.”
“That’s a living wage,” Chief Leek commented. “What did Dennis say?”
“He said no. I told him to hold out for half a mil.” Matson laughed as he reached for some coffee.
“What d‘ya think, Dr. Gregory? The kid worth that kinda money in the
’puter business?”
“If he can do really good code, maybe,” Al replied, making a mental note to check out this Lieutenant Olson himself. TRW always had room for talent. Dartmouth was known for its computer science department. Add field experience to that, and you had a real candidate for the ongoing SAM project. “Okay, if you insert the chip, what happens?”
“Then you change the range of the radar. You know how it works, the RF energy goes out forever on its own, but we only accept signals that bounce back within a specific time gate. This”—Senior Chief Leek held up a floppy disk with a hand-printed label on it—“changes the gate. It extends the effective rage of the SPY out to, oh, two thousand kilometers. Damned sight farther than the missiles’ll go. I was on Port Royal out at Kwajalein five years ago doing a theater-missile test, and we were tracking the inbound from the time it popped over the horizon all the way in.”
“You hit it?” Gregory asked with immediate interest.
Leek shook his head. “Guidance-fin failure on the bird, it was an early Block-IV. We got within fifty meters, but that was a cunt hair outside the warhead’s kill perimeter, and they only allowed us one shot, for some reason or other nobody ever told me about. Shiloh got a kill the next year. Splattered it with a skin-skin kill. The video of that one is a son of a bitch,” the senior chief assured his guest.
Gregory believed it. When an object going one way at fourteen thousand miles per hour got hit by something going the other way at two thousand miles per hour, the result could be quite impressive. “First-round hit?” he asked.
“You bet. The sucker was coming straight at us, and this baby doesn’t miss much.”
“We always clean up with Vandal tests off Wallops Island,” Chief Matson confirmed.
“What are those exactly?”
“Old Talos SAMs,” Matson explained. “Big stovepipes, ramjet engines, they can come in on a ballistic track at about twenty-two hundred miles per hour. Pretty hot on the deck, too. That’s what we worry about. The Russians came out with a sea-skimmer we call Sunburn—”
“Aegis-killer, some folks call it,” Chief Leek added. “Low and fast.”
“But we ain’t missed one yet,” Matson announced. “The Aegis system’s pretty good. So, Dr. Gregory, what exactly are you checking out?”
“I want to see if your system can be used to stop a ballistic inbound.”
“How fast?” Matson asked.
“A for-real ICBM. When you detect it on radar, it’ll be doing about seventeen thousand miles per hour, call it seventy-six hundred meters per second.”
“That’s real fast,” Leek observed. “Seven, eight times the speed of a rifle bullet.”
“Faster’n a theater ballistic weapon like a Scud. Not sure we can do it,” Matson worried.
“This radar system’ll track it just fine. It’s very similar to the Cobra Dane system in the Aleutians. Question is, can your SAMs react fast enough to get a hit?”
“How hard’s the target?” Matson asked.
“Softer than an aircraft. The RV’s designed to withstand heat, not an impact. Like the space shuttle. When you fly it through a rainstorm, it plays hell with the tiles.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yep.” Gregory nodded. “Like foam coffee cups.”
“Okay, so then the problem’s getting the SM2 close enough to have the warhead pop off when the target’s in the fragmentation cone.”
“Correct.” They might be enlisted men, Gregory thought, but that didn’t make them dumb.
“Software fix in the seeker head, right?”
“Also correct. I’ve rewritten the code. Pretty easy job, really. I reprogrammed the way the laser mutates. Ought to work okay if the infrared homing system works as advertised. At least it did in the computer simulations up in Washington.”
“It worked just fine on Shiloh, Doc. We got the videotape aboard somewhere,” Leek assured him. “Wanna see it?”
“You bet,” Dr. Gregory said with enthusiasm.
“Okay.” Senior Chief Leek checked his watch. “I’m free now. Let me head aft for a smoke, and then we’ll roll the videotape,” he said, sounding like Warner Wolf on WCBS New York.
“You can’t smoke in here?”
Leek grunted annoyance. “It’s the New Navy, Doc. The cap’n’s a health Nazi. You gotta go aft to light up. Not even in chief’s quarters,” Leek groused.
“I quit,” Matson said. “Not a pussy like Tim here.”
“My ass,” Leek responded. “There’s a few real men left aboard.”
“How come you sit sideways here?” Gregory asked, rising to his feet to follow them aft. “The important displays go to the right side of the ship instead of fore and aft. How come?”
“ ’Cuz it helps you puke if you’re in a seaway.” Matson laughed. “Whoever designed these ships didn’t like sailors much, but at least the air-conditioning works.” It rarely got above sixty degrees in the CIC, causing most of the men who worked there to wear sweaters. Aegis cruisers were decidedly not known for their comforts.
This is serious?” Colonel Aliyev asked. It was a stupid question, and he knew it. But it just had to come out anyway, and his commander knew that.
“We have orders to treat it that way, Colonel,” Bondarenko replied crossly. “What do we have to stop them?”
“The 265th Motor-Rifle Division is at roughly fifty percent combat efficiency,” the theater operations officer replied. “Beyond that, two tank regiments at forty percent or so. Our reserve formations are mostly theoretical,” Aliyev concluded. “Our air assets—one regiment of fighter-interceptors ready for operations, another three who don’t have even half their aircraft fit to fly.”
Bondarenko nodded at the news. It was better than it had been upon his arrival in theater, and he’d done well to bring things that far, but that wouldn’t impress the Chinese very much.
“Opposition?” he asked next. Far East’s intelligence officer was another colonel, Vladimir Konstantinovich Tolkunov.
“Our Chinese neighbors are in good military shape, Comrade General. The nearest enemy formation is Thirty-fourth Shock Army, a Type A Group Army commanded by General Peng Xi-Wang,” he began, showing off what he knew. “That one formation has triple or more our mechanized assets, and is well trained. Chinese aircraft—well, their tactical aircraft number over two thousand, and we must assume they will commit everything to this operation. Comrades, we do not have anything like the assets we need to stop them.”
“So, we will use space to our advantage,” the general proposed. “Of that we have much. We will fight a holding action and await reinforcements from the west. I’ll be talking with Stavka later today. Let’s draw up what we’ll need to stop these barbarians.”
“All down one line of railroad,” Aliyev observed. “And our fucking engineers have been busily clearing a route for the Chinks to take to the oil fields. General, first of all, we need to get our engineers working on minefields. We have millions of mines, and the route the Chinese will take is easily predicted.”
The overall problem was that the Chinese had strategic, if not tactical, surprise. The former was a political exercise, and like Hitler in 1941, the Chinese had pulled it off. At least Bondarenko would have tactical warning, which was more than Stalin had allowed his Red Army. He also expected to have freedom of maneuver, because also unlike Stalin, his President Grushavoy would be thinking with his brain instead of his balls. With freedom of maneuver Bondarenko would have the room to play a mobile war with his enemy, denying the Chinese a chance at decisive engagement, allowing hard contact only when it served his advantage. Then he’d be able to wait for reinforcements to give him a chance to fight a set-piece battle on his own terms, at a place and time of his choosing.
“How good are the Chinese, really, Pavel?”
“The People’s Liberation Army has not engaged in large-scale combat operations for over fifty years, since the Korean War with the Americans, unless you cite the border clashes we had w
ith them in the late ‘60s and early ’70s. In that case, the Red Army dealt with them well, but to do that we had massive firepower, and the Chinese were only fighting for limited objectives. They are trained largely on our old model. Their soldiers will not have the ability to think for themselves. Their discipline is worse than draconian. The smallest infraction can result in summary execution, and that makes for obedience. At the operational level, their general officers are well-trained in theoretical terms. Qualitatively, their weapons are roughly the equal of ours. With their greater funding, their training levels mean that their soldiers are intimately familiar with their weapons and rudimentary tactics,” Zhdanov told the assembled staff. “But they are probably not our equal in operational-maneuver thinking. Unfortunately, they do have numbers going for them, and quantity has a quality all its own, as the NATO armies used to say of us. What they will want to do, and what I fear they will, is try to roll over us quickly—just crush us and move on to their political and economic objectives as quickly as possible.”
Bondarenko nodded as he sipped his tea. This was mad, and the maddest part of all was that he was playing the role of a NATO commander from 1975—maybe a German one, which was truly insane—faced with adverse numbers, but blessed, as the Germans had not been, with space to play with, and Russians had always used space to their advantage. He leaned forward:
“Very well. Comrades, we will deny them the opportunity for decisive engagement. If they cross the border, we will fight a maneuver war. We will sting and move. We will hurt them and withdraw before they can counterattack. We will give them land, but we will not give them blood. The life of every single one of our soldiers is precious to us. The Chinese have a long way to go to their objectives. We will let them go a lot of that way, and we will bide our time and husband our men and equipment. We will make them pay for what they take, but we will not—we must not—give them the chance to catch our forces in decisive battle. Are we understood on that?” he asked his staff. “When in doubt, we will run away and deny the enemy what he wants. When we have what we need to strike back, we will make him wish he never heard of Russia, but until then, let him chase his butterflies.”