left for us to feed.”
“Yes,” confirmed the marine commander. “Only civilians to get out were prisoners. Apparently they were taken out by the KGB on the Trans-Siberian.”
Within twenty minutes of the Americans having entered Khabarovsk there was a series of enormous explosions in a rough semicircle east of the city center as far out as seventeen miles. Soon there was the glow of fires everywhere over the frozen salt marsh as fuel depots blew along with ammunition dumps. Anything the Siberians could not take with them they had destroyed, including the city’s four airfields. The brutish smokestacks, most of them in the northern sector of the city, stood in the flickering light, visible only to the four-hundred-foot level. They came in and out of view amid the choking, soot-colored smoke that rained black on the snow.
“Where’s the battle, General?” asked a CBN reporter.
Freeman grumpily ignored him, turning to Norton instead. “How about the Trans-Siberian?”
“G-2 says it’s ripped up from here to Birobidzhan.”
“Blown up?” asked Freeman irritably. “Or ripped up?”
Norton didn’t know.
“Goddamn it!” shouted Freeman. “Find out!”
“Yes, sir.”
From Khabarovsk west over the hundred miles of frozen salt marshes to Birobidzhan, then three hundred miles to Belogorsk, all the while following the Trans-Siberian Railway around the big, 250-mile-wide, right-to-left horseshoe bend in the Amur River — at times less than twenty miles from the Manchurian border, the U.S. Air Force having taken out Zavitinsk airfield fourteen hours before — the tooth of Freeman’s Second Army, its M-1 A-1s gulping, even at cruise speed, three gallons per mile, was fast outrunning the tail of its supply line.
The quarter-mile-wide ribbon of ice of the south-north Zeya River took on the look of burnished gold at Svobodnyy before more snow began falling and was, Freeman predicted, the perfect place for the Siberians to have blown the bridges. A few miles on and he found he was right. The enormous twisted steel of the railroad span was caught in the ice, a crippled skeleton of steel, the bridge’s pylons left standing naked, the fresh snow pillows atop them affording the pylons a symmetry and beauty amid the collapsed spans. But the Siberians’ scorched-earth policy, at least here, was of little account, holding Freeman up only for as long as it took his M-1 A-1s with plough blades and the engineers’ rocket-propelled pipeline charges to clear the ice of mines. Most mine positions were immediately obvious from the frozen mounds of scraped ice that stood out like pimples of broken glass amid the new snow that was not yet deep enough to obscure the detritus. Self-propelled howitzers could be seen here and there in the forest, intact, their crews blue and bloated if they could be picked out at all from the shattered timber and decapitated trees that marked where infrared Smart bomb attacks by the U.S. air force had been made from the captured airfields.
Where tarmacs had been blown up, the U.S. engineers simply hosed in hot water under pressure from the water trucks, the water-filled craters instantly freezing, after which the graders topped them off as one would level off a filled-in posthole, and the Marsden matting was laid. U.S. planes were using the fields within an hour of their completion.
The railway was another story. The Siberians, having sacrificed much of their heavy fighter cover — mainly MiG-29s — to protect sacrificial MiG-27 Flogger-D ground attack aircraft, had dropped each Flogger’s 6,600-pound ordnance on the multiple track west of the Zeya River between Shimanovsk and Mukhino. This meant that the pea- colored
Moving slowly through the dense, fogged-in and snow-draped taiga of larch, pine, and fir, the train approached the top of the horseshoe hump of the Amur. Instead of the usual caboose, the train dragged an enormous hook-shaped, stump-jump plough behind it, ripping up the ties like matchsticks, the splayed rail now pushed uselessly to the side on this eastern section of the forty-eight-hundred-mile railway. The guards at each tunnel entrance and bridge gratefully hopped aboard the last passenger carriage, the carriages alternating with AA quads mounted on flatbeds, every fourth flatbed in the car train sprouting SA-6 AA missiles. The “Mukhino Express,” as it had been wryly described by the American pilots who had come down through the heavy cloud layer only to have their infrared signature detectors thwarted for a time by the thick bone-chilling fog, was finally stopped in a river of high explosives before it could reach the station at Mukhino. The pale blue station disintegrated in a spectacular explosion that sent ancient pine planks, black earth, and fire-streaked snow, together with iron heating-stove plates and the woodpile, whirling in a mini-tornado a quarter mile high before it came down in a crashing hail.
Meanwhile Freeman and his commanders welcomed the pause necessitated by having to clear the minefields across the Zeya, for it gave the vitally needed tank and POL resupply trucks time to catch up. Freeman was asked by his chief of logistics, Gen. Malcolm Wain, whether they should go to blivets. Wain had been impressed by the way in which the blivets, or flexi-plastic bags containing thousands of gallons of fuel, had proved so useful in the Iraqi desert to store gas. But here he didn’t have in mind the huge, depot-sized bags that could be buried out of sight of aerial reconnaissance by the roadside but rather the tank-sized bags which, providing a tank was not in action but in transit, could be carried piggyback, an extra jerry can, as it were, one which could be jettisoned before getting the call to go into action or at the first sign of Second Army’s spearhead being attacked.
Freeman spread out the map, slipping in the single-lens monocle that had caused the name “Von Freeman” to stick among those who bore him ill will for his decision to use the fuel air explosive bombs to break the Ratmanov deadlock. The monocle was impatiently tapping sector twenty-one, northwest of Mukhino, and beyond twenty-one to sectors thirty-three and thirty-seven where the Amur reached the apogee of the hump. “I like it,” he told Wain. “Our rate of progress — soon be doing better than Erwin.”
Wain looked across at Norton without the general seeing. Whenever Freeman was making good time, the heroes of his military pantheon were referred to by their first names. If he got held up, it would quickly be that “bastard Rommel.”
“But,” Freeman sighed, “I don’t like it. Scorched-earth policy is one thing. I understand that. But this is — this is a turkey shoot. After Ratmanov I expected a fight.”
Wain disagreed. “I don’t see it that way, General. After Ratmanov they’re going to avoid a close-in fight if they can. Especially with our air superiority.”
“Maybe,” said Freeman, unconvinced. “But they’re not going to give up the whole damn country. They’ve got to stop — stand and fight somewhere. They’ve got to counterattack.” Freeman folded the map case and slipped it into the Humvee’s back seat, smacking his gloves together. “God, it’s cold!” He looked about unhappily at the column stopped for refueling.
It was against everything in Freeman’s book to halt. He’d built a career on movement. Movement! Movement! Movement! as against the Siberians’ obsession with refusing to attack until they had overwhelming numbers in men and materiel. If Freeman stopped, Norton knew, it would make everyone down the line happy — give them a chance to catch their breath and allow the supply tail to thicken. But, Freeman was asking himself as well as Norton and Wain, what was that crafty son of a bitch Yesov up to? Freeman was nodding to himself, concluding that Yesov would be gambling on his, Freeman’s, lifelong commitment to movement, the Siberians sucking him in deeper and deeper, the American supply line becoming ever more overextended.
“Mal.”
“Sir?”
“We’ll pause here. Twenty-four hours. Dick, give the order to establish defensive perimeter. Air task order — saturation fighter cover and attack gunships ready to go.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We’re in ‘overreach’ with our fighters. I realize that. We’re already heavily committed to in-air refueling.” It was as if he was trying to justify his uncharacteristic decision to stop. “But we need to consolidate here. Get another airstrip going. Must remember the aim, gentlemen — to capture Irkutsk. From there our fighter-bomber radius can hit the industrial underbelly. We’re now at a critical stage, however. We can’t pause for too long for resupply. I’ll bet that’s what Yesov’s counting on — hoping his scorched-earth policy’ll force us to drag our ass. But, gentlemen, his scorched-earth policy is outmoded. Takes no account of the American genius for resupply. He
