Arctic Front

enough matting for an airfield. And we’ll have to have airfield perimeter defense.”

“Patriots.”

There was a cheer, the Patriot still enjoying its legendary status from the Iraqi war. But not with Freeman. He’d pored over the reports and understood that it was the Israeli defense forces who, not sticking to standard firing procedures, had introduced shortcuts that were responsible for the Patriots over Israel taking out most of the Scuds. But not the warheads. You could end up technically “knocking out” a Scud but causing more carnage on the ground when an unexploded warhead came down with the rest of the scrap metal.

Freeman had ordered in the armored-vehicle-mounted Oerlikon-Buhrie ADATs. The eight high-velocity ADAT missiles, equally effective against armor and aircraft, had only a commander/gunner crew and were air portable by chopper or C-130. With a twelve-mile radar scan, the ADATs had laser-beam ranging (up to five miles) and optical radar track with FLIR — forward-looking infrared — TV tracking. And ADATs could operate while the vehicle was on the move, the wingless missiles shooting out from the eight-container turret at two thousand miles per hour, target acquisition and aim taking less than one second.

For further perimeter air defense, Freeman also preferred the ninety-pound British Rapier — eight tracked missiles on an enclosed two-man vehicle — because the Rapier’s warhead was made to explode internally, not outside the target. An internal explosion meant you didn’t simply knock the incoming enemy missile off trajectory but actually blew up the warhead in the air.

Freeman sensed a current of opposition running through the American units who had been long used to the U.S. Patriot and Nike-Hercules and the West German Roland. Yet he understood that it wasn’t simply a matter of national pride. Hell, half the electronic components in the F-18s and Eagles were dependent on the Japanese electronics industry. No, what the Americans objected to was that they wouldn’t have time to retrain crews. But Freeman had thought of that, too, and had requested Canadian units from the joint Canadian/U.S. NORAD units. For once the Canadian Parliament did not debate the issue ad nauseam, and the Canadian ADATs team, along with a British-manned Rapier regiment, was already en route, taking the long flight from the U.S. west coast to Hawaii and then to Okinawa, skirting the still-unsecured sea lanes off the Kuril Islands.

“Gentlemen, I want this operation ready to roll in seventy-two hours. The carrier force that will make the Vladivostok feint south of Rudnaya Pristan is already underway out of Yokohama. Now I want to reiterate, for those of you who haven’t already heard it, that the great Communist weakness is their overdependence on centralization. Overcentralization. It grows naturally from suspicious minds, gentlemen. No one trusts anyone else — haven’t done so since nineteen seventeen. Why the hell should they change now? That’s why it took them so long to shoot that KAL airliner down. MiG pilots had to keep checking with central command so Far Eastern TVD wouldn’t think the sons of bitches were defecting to Japan.”

There was a ripple of laughter in the audience as they watched Freeman getting wound up. “Overcentralization doesn’t only play havoc with tactical decisions, gentlemen. It is death to any self-sustaining tooth-to-tail logistical system. You’ve got to understand that in a Communist system — and I don’t give a shit where it is or who’s running it — goddamn Stalinists, Marxists, Leninists, and Maoists are all the same when it comes to administration. Everybody’s so busy covering their ass, signing forms in quadruplicate, that nothing ever gets done fast enough. Course in war, things speed up, but the disease, gentlemen, is in the body politic. On occasion it administers some self-help medicine, but they can’t cure it. You’ve all heard the stories about the factory making ten thousand left shoes and no right ones just to fulfill the five-year plan quota. Well, it’s not much of an exaggeration, I can tell you. Now I don’t know whether you realize it or not — and every one of you above the rank of colonel should — but no one below a Soviet sergeant is allowed to carry a goddamn map. That should tell you something right there. These are the telling details, gentlemen…”

Norton was watching the officers watching Freeman. It was the general at his best. He had what the troops called his “George C. Scott look.” He turned and thumped the map at Khabarovsk so hard that the entire Far Eastern TVD shook, several red pins marking the positions of Siberian divisions popping out, toppling over the Siberian/Chinese border into the vastness of Outer and Inner Mongolia and then to the floor. “The details, gentlemen. Such details are going to win the war for us — if we stay alert to them. But—” He hesitated. “That’s my job. Yours is to remember only one thing…”

“L‘audace, I‘audace,” murmured a lieutenant colonel of artillery in the back row. “Toujours I’audace.”

“Speed!” thundered Freeman. “I don’t want to get any SIT-REPS whining about anyone being ‘pinned down.’ You get yourselves unpinned — and fast — and get on the move again. And keep moving! Is that clear?”

There was the silence of assent.

“I’m not going to pump sunshine up your ass and tell you that there won’t be substantial opposition. There’ll be plenty of it. This is their land, their home, and they’ll fight for it as hard as you would. They’ve got the numbers — in equipment and men — but I know we have the quality in equipment and men to stop them!” He paused, hands on his hips, looking out at the divisional and corps commanders. “Any questions?”

There were plenty, and Freeman knew it, but they were the kind that could be answered only in the coming battles.

* * *

“What do you think, Dick?” asked Freeman as the last of the officers shuffled out. Norton said it all depended on how many troops the Siberians could manage to move east to the coast.

Freeman was searching for his glasses again, patting his battle dress pockets. “Damn it! I can never find those goddamn reading things. Only need one of ‘em anyway. Have one of the boys in med corps make the up a single lens.”

“A pince-nez?” said Norton, surprised.

“Jesus, no. Look like a goddamn fairy. No, just one lens with something to clip it onto so I don’t lose the damn thing.”

“A monocle?” said Norton, amused by the idea.

“Fine. Now look here, Dick. Only way we’re going to get the jokers on the run is to stay mobile. We’ve got to keep moving. Keep ‘em off balance. Don’t give ‘em a chance to stabilize anything, from their big guns and armor to their airfields. Bill Miller’s boys’ll pound anything that looks as if it’s big enough for a mosquito to take off from. That’ll keep their PVO — air force — occupied. Meanwhile we’ve got to keep their ground forces off balance. Do the unexpected. Go around them.”

Freeman’s right hand made a sweeping movement west then south of the BAM — the northern Baikal-Amur mainline loop — to Irkutsk, just west of Baikal. “Get Airborne. SAS/Delta, air mobile artillery and armored units behind them. Light tanks, APCs, M-1s, multiple rocket launchers, and some concentrated rocket artillery barrages as well. Scatter them to hell, Dick-isolate them. If it’s too sticky in one area, then we’ll do a MacArthur island hop. Bypass the bastards, attack another unit. Keep them so damned occupied in their rear they’ll find themselves fighting on three fronts.” He pointed all the way west on the map four thousand miles to the north-south spine of the Urals. “British and American forces pressing east from Minsk. Our boys here heading west from Khabarovsk, and our special forces driving them crazy in the center.” The general, hands on his hips again, was nodding, satisfied with the plan. “You know about the fruit seller?”

“No.”

“Iraq,” explained Freeman. “Special forces. Our boys and the Brits. An Arab goes up to an Iraqi HQ with a basket of fresh fruit.” Freeman looked at Norton. “He’s a Brit in mufti — hadn’t washed for weeks. Son of a bitch argues, Dick, with the Iraqi commander over how many dinar for the fruit. I couldn’t do that. Hate goddamn haggling. Son of a bitch in Carmel tried to sell the a car like that once. It was beautiful. Forty- two Packard. Impeccable condition. Big hubcaps. Anyway, the Iraqi finally agrees on the price. While he’s in getting the money, this Brit pushes an infrared stick into the sand. Thirty minutes later, an F-18 attack. Thousand-pound Smart bomb. Not only got the commander but the whole goddamned HQ.”

Freeman stood back from the map, a myriad of details running through his head. “Sow havoc behind the lines, Dick. That’s what we have to do here. Like those SPETS bastards did to us in the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket.” Whether or not it was the mention of the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket or the long day the general had put in, Norton noticed Freeman’s hands had moved from his hips to his lower back, massaging it, a grimace of pain in his face. Norton wondered if the injury the general had sustained when being thrown out of the Humvee during the breakout was flaring up again. But he knew better than to mention it.