Arctic Front

from the fact that the American Seventh Fleet, for the first time in its history, had turned tail and run. But to stop would imperil his ships even more, making them stationary targets for the missiles already being fired by five Forgers who had dived through under cover of an arrowhead formation of Fulcrums.

* * *

In running Burke had bought himself valuable time and fought off the foil-borne attack craft, sinking twenty- three. Another two of them were victims of their own missile fire; another was blown out of the water by an American Adams class destroyer. Even so, one of the U.S.’s Wasp class LHAs, an amphibious landing helicopter assault ship a quarter-mile to the right of Freeman’s, was hit. Despite the pumps working overtime, the forty-two- thousand-ton vessel was reduced to three knots, with Marines and seamen working like navvies, the smell of their sweat mixing with the burning odors of battle as they strove to shift cargo from port to starboard to even the ship’s trim before the pumps, already overheating because of “spare uniform” clogged intakes, gave up the ghost.

Watching the scene through his infrared field glasses aboard the Davis, Freeman said nothing. This was the navy’s department, and he was too astute a commander not to know when to keep quiet. But Norton could tell the general was worried — as worried as he’d ever seen him. If the Siberians tried hard enough to stop the American force here, how much worse would it be when you tried to land on their soil and with the element of naval surprise completely lost? Two Forgers appeared, white shimmers in the rolling green sea of infrared.

“Inside!” yelled Freeman. “Quickly!”

Freeman saw one Forger disintegrate, the flash of a Tomcat— or was it a Strike Eagle? — streaking by, the Forger dropping toward the Davis, its “ODD Rods”—friend or foe identification antennae forward of the armored glass windscreen — glinting momentarily in the darkness, its Tumansky turbojet screaming in a seventeen-thousand-pound reverse thrust, its twin-barreled cannon spitting red tracer, before it crashed into the sea, the slap followed by a soft explosion of phosphorescent seawater that now fell like rain. But in diverting the U.S. task force away from the Kuril landing sites, the Siberian fleet only succeeded in forcing Freeman to shift the axis of his invasion force away from the Kurils south to the Sea of Japan for the main landing.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Khabarovsk

Beneath the picture of the scantily clad Georgian beauty in the Khabarovsk reading room the standby Klaxon blared. The Siberian pilots, including Sergei Marchenko, looked up at the computer screen and saw a cluster of X’s — enemy fighters and bombers rising up from Wakkanai out of Japan’s northernmost island, Hokkaido, 370 miles east-southeast. Too far for their Fulcrums to intercept and have enough fuel to return safely. The fighters out of Cape Krilon on Sakhalin Island’s southernmost tip would have to engage, but if the enemy got across the Tatarskiy Strait between Sakhalin and the mainland, the Khabarovsk wing would have to go up.

“We should have hit Japan with H-bombs on day one,” Marchenko’s wingman said. He knew he was talking rubbish — any nuclear exchange would be suicidal — the irony being that both sides had to fight the biggest conventional war in history. But the wingman was afraid. The American air force, though it could never win the war by itself against an enormous power like Siberia, over ten times the size of Iraq, had nevertheless already penetrated Siberia’s outer, Kuril/Sakhalin defenses. The best Siberia could hope for in the air was to slow them down, knowing that the truly decisive battles would be on the ground-across the vastness of Siberian mountains, taiga, and tundra.

There was another alarm: more American planes rising from a carrier 130 miles east of the Far Eastern TVD’s port of Nakhodka, just over fifty miles due east of Vladivostok. An air corridor fives miles wide and a hundred miles long from Svetlaya on the coast westward toward Khabarovsk was being blasted out by the largest air bombardment since the Iraqi war, the number of sorties in the first twelve hours — launched from air bases from Otaru to Wakkanai on Japan’s Hokkaido — surpassing by 508 the 2,000 flown by the USAF in the first twenty-four hours of the Iraqi war. The fighter-protected American bombers were dropping everything from Smart bombs on the reinforced early-warning coastal radar stations to FAEs and in particular runway-destroying cluster bombs.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

As the USS Winston Davis rolled slightly in the swell, Norton looking the worse for wear, Freeman searched for his glasses, couldn’t find them, and instead used the telescopic pointer, which he normally eschewed, to illustrate his project. Saying nothing yet to his divisional commanders gathered in the crowded helo maintenance deck, he stabbed at the lower left of Siberia on the steppes between the southernmost extremity of the Urals and the Aral Sea; the pointer then slid eastward along the fiftieth parallel, south of Novosibirsk, on through the mountainous region west of Lake Baikal, only a hundred miles now from the Mongolian border, then further east to the big 350-mile-wide horseshoe bend in the Amur River that formed the border with China. From there the tip moved abruptly up to the far northeast of the map in a right hook that took in the Pacific mountain barriers of Siberia’s eastern shield. He ignored the vast central Siberian plateau and river-veined west Siberian plain that was taiga, as well as the wide crescent of treeless tundra that was northern Siberia. “Eastern Siberia, gentlemen,” he told his audience, “is all we’re interested in — at the moment.”

He moved the pointer up and down the long Pacific flank. “Think of it as a hockey stick, the handle being the eastern mountain chain. At the bottom of the stick, in the groove, as it were, lies Khabarovsk, the gate to Lake Baikal and Irkutsk. The Siberians know the taiga is the best place for armor — ours as well as theirs. But first they have to stop us getting through this eastern shield to Khabarovsk — two hundred miles in from the coast.”

Freeman’s knuckles tapped out an impatient tattoo over the coastal range of the Sikhote-Alin. “Now a lot of these mountains are five thousand feet and up and we’d be nuts to try running armor through deep snow in those ravines. Next to no roads anyhow. One Siberian section with antitank rockets could hold us up for a week. What we have to do, gentlemen, is attack Khabarovsk from the south — here — from Rudnaya Pristan on the coast. Move a hundred and twenty miles inland then swing north for a hundred and twenty miles through the Malinovka River valley road to Dalnerechensk.” It was men the impatience of his dreams of endless snow and ice became manifest. “Don’t worry about bridges being blown — drive straight over the frozen rivers. They’re your roads in Siberia. Then, gentlemen, a two-hundred-mile run north, adjacent to the Ussuri River — on the left flank, the Chinese-Soviet border — to here.” His fist banged against Khabarovsk where the Ussuri met the Amur in the lowland forests and snow-covered meadows. “From there it’s west, young man. Along the Trans-Siberian rail route to Baikal and Irkutsk.”

Norton moved uneasily in his seat. When it was all added up, Lake Baikal was over a thousand miles to the west, and despite the valleys that formed the Trans-Siberian route, the last two hundred and fifty miles would be through high country like the Khamar Daban Range. But Freeman, as if reading Norton’s mind, had anticipated his aide’s question. “ATO,” (air task order), said Freeman, “will be to secure total air superiority from our beachhead at Rudnaya Pristan to Irkutsk forty-five miles from Baikal’s western shore.” Freeman turned to Miller, general of the air forces in Japan. “Bill, can your boys handle that? Or are they too fat from eating all that damn sushi in Tokyo?”

“What’s in it for me, General?” asked Miller cheekily.

“A medal if you do,” replied Freeman unhesitatingly. “A kick in the ass if you don’t! Have you got what you need?” Freeman asked Miller.

“Well, sir, Intelligence reports that Lake Baikal is surrounded by the most intense ABM and AA defenses we’ve ever seen. Denser than they were around Hanoi. Compared to what they’ve got around Baikal, Baghdad was just a bunch of firecrackers.”

Norton could see Freeman was getting impatient, smacking the pointer against his right leg. He didn’t want to hear all the problems; he already knew them. But Norton knew that Miller was building his case, giving the air force some leeway.

“How long?” asked Freeman, the levity of his earlier comments gone.

“Three weeks, General. Two if you can secure the beachhead at Rudnaya Pristan so the engineers can lay