locked expression on the army commander’s face. “But what good does it do? Really? One of my divisions squanders its momentum, you tie up air-assault elements needed elsewhere, aircraft are diverted, and perhaps irreplaceable helicopters are lost. For what, Chibisov? So we can show the West Germans a movie? So we can broadcast to the world that we
Chibisov sympathized but could not relent. Malinsky had commented that this was the sort of thing the Mongols would have done, had they possessed the technology.
“But you see,” Chibisov said, “the broadcasts will portray
“What if the Dutch don’t fight for Lueneburg?”
“Immaterial. You saw the film. Even if the Dutch fade away tomorrow, they will still have caused the destruction of that town on the film. And film doesn’t lie, Comrade Army Commander. Technically, the Dutch may have proof to the contrary. But frightened men have no patience with involved explanations. What could the Dutch, or NATO, bring as an effective counterargument? A bluster of outrage? Denials are always weaker than accusations. It’s elementary physics, you might say.”
Colonel Shtein interrupted the conversation. As a representative of the general staff on a special mission, he was not about to let slight differences in rank get in his way.
“Comrades,” he told them, lecturing, “it is the assessment of the general staff that the West Germans have grown so materialistic, so comfortable, that they will not be able to endure the thought of seeing their country destroyed again. They have lost their will. The Bundeswehr will fight, initially. But the officer corps is not representative of the people. This operation will complement your encirclement of the German corps and its threatened destruction. And consider its veiled threat should NATO look to nuclear weapons for their salvation. It sets up numerous options for conflict termination.”
The army commander looked at the staff colonel. “And if it doesn’t work? If they simply ignore it? Or if they fight all the harder because of it?”
“They won’t,” Shtein said. “But no matter if they did respond that way initially. We have similar film for Hameln. And we may actually be required to strike one mid-sized city very hard, say Bremen or Hannover. But in the end, the General Staff is convinced that this approach will help bring the war to a rapid conclusion, and on very favorable terms.”
Trimenko turned to Chibisov. “I don’t like it. It’s unsoldierly. We mustn’t divert any assets from the true points of decision.”
Chibisov noted a change in Trimenko’s voice. The army commander was no longer as adamant in tone, despite his choice of words. He would accept his responsibility, as Chibisov had accepted his own. Now it just required another push, for form’s sake.
Chibisov turned to Dudorov, the chief of intelligence. “Yuri, what do you think of all this? You understand the West Germans better than any of us.” Dudorov always preferred to be called by his first name without the patronymic, another of his Western tastes.
Dudorov looked at Chibisov and the army commander with all of the solemnity his chubby face could manage. And he was unusually slow in speaking. “Comrade Generals… I think this is absolutely brilliant.”
Chibisov wandered down to the operations center after seeing Trimenko off. The local air controller did not want to clear Trimenko’s helicopter for takeoff, due to expected traffic. The air controller did not know that the traffic would be the beginning of the air offensive, only that he had been ordered to keep the skies cleared beginning one hour before military dawn for priority air movements. The clearance had required Chibisov’s personal involvement, and the delay further contributed to Trimenko’s bad mood. He needed to be at his army command post now. Shortly, the skies would be very crowded indeed, as aircraft shot to the west, their flights cross-timed with the launch of short-range missiles and artillery blasting corridors through the enemy’s air defenses. Then the entire front would erupt.
The operations center was calmer, quieter than Chibisov expected. The calm before the storm, he thought to himself. Malinsky was still napping, and Chibisov let him sleep. Tomorrow, Malinsky would move forward to be with the army commanders during critical periods and to direct operations from the front’s forward command post closer to the West German border. He needed all the rest he could get. Chibisov required less sleep than the front commander, and they had an unspoken arrangement between them on that, too.
An officer-clerk moved to the big map now and then, while other officers took information over telephones. The bank of control radios remained quiet, except for routine administrative traffic that the enemy would be expecting. Out in the darkness, formations and units were sending just enough routine transmissions, usually from bogus locations, to lull the enemy into a sense of normalcy. But the critical war nets still slumbered.
Seven minutes, and the first plane would take off from an airfield in Poland. Then the other aircraft between Poland and the great dividing line would come up in sequence, a metal blanket lifting into the sky. Chibisov agreed with Malinsky. The air offensive was critical.
Chibisov walked around a bank of data processors to the second row of desks back from the master situation map. He stopped at the position of the front’s radio electronic combat duty officer. He put his hand on the shoulder of the lieutenant colonel, signaling him to remain at his screen.
“Everything all right?”
“Yes, Comrade General.”
“No surprises?”
“Not yet. We won’t know for at least half an hour, maybe longer if it gets really bad. Nothing on this scale has ever been attempted before.”
Chibisov was aware of the potential problems. When you attempted to employ these weapons of the new age, attacking the enemy’s communications complexes and radars, there was always the worry that you would strike your own critical networks — that, somehow, key aspects had been overlooked or inadequately tested. There was so much that was about to happen for the first time. Chibisov pictured the electromagnetic spectrum as crowded with an almost visible flood of power. The manipulation of nature itself, Chibisov thought, of natural laws and properties, more of the deadly wonders of technology. Yet he knew that there were men out there, waiting to blast and fill and tear at the border barriers, waiting at the literal edge of war, who were as frightened as their earliest ancestors had been when they came out of their caves to do battle.
Chibisov moved on to check the latest returns on fuel consumption.
Three
Nobody wanted to touch the body. The soldiers stood around the corpse in the drizzling rain, staring. The rain tapped at the open, upturned eyes and rinsed the slack mouth under the glare of the lantern. Bibulov, the warrant officer who had been left in charge of the vehicle trans-loading, tried to remember the soldier’s name. He recalled that the boy was a Tadzhik. But the elusive Asian consonance of his name escaped him, teasing just beyond his mental grasp. The boy had come to the unit unable to speak any Russian beyond the primitive sounds necessary for survival. And all of the prissy, well-intentioned efforts of the language skills collective had not brought him to proper speech. The boy had done as ordered, imitating when he did not understand, and had waited as mutely as a resting animal between jobs. It seemed to Bibulov as though the boy had set his mind to endure the two years in uniform required of him with the minimum of personal engagement. To do as he was made to do, uncomplainingly, until it came time to return to his distant home. Now he was dead, and the war had not even begun.
Bibulov believed that there would, indeed, be a war, and that it would come soon. But now there was only the frantic shifting of cargoes in the middle of a rainy night. The guns had not yet begun to squander their accounts
