heavy mortars that formed the spearhead of Second Army’s II Corps lead tank battalion saw was the sudden appearance of the low-flying lead missile making a tight, right-hand turn before roaring overhead and exploding further down the line.
At the angle they saw it from it appeared to have detonated over the trees, but the CBN reporter with a tripod and zoom lens saw that it was exploding right over the midsection of the four-mile-long spearhead even as Second Army advance reconnaissance units looked back disbelievingly at the missile as it veered through the clear blue sky over the tip of the spearhead toward the center of the column. The CBN cameraman, too, was in awe, transfixed by the abrupt turn that another of the subsonic missiles made to avoid power lines. Rising no more than ten feet above them before descending again, its belly opening even as AA fire stuttered toward it, the missile exuded a hail of smaller missiles that buzzed in the air — antipersonnel flechettes and antitank bomblets. American tanks, the best in the world, were disintegrating, most of them still moving as if driven by ghosts, the screams of their dying crews soon lost amid the technicolor phantasm of light as the tanks spewed fountains of red and white rain as if being welded from the inside, a rain of sparks and flame oozing from the penetrated seals over the sloping glacis plate.
HEAT rounds exploded through the cupolas with a jetlike roar, and several tanks slewed broadside, ramming others, which were in turn struck by tanks coming from behind. The series of explosions from the fuel bladders sent sheets of orange-black flame billowing over the armored personnel carriers behind the tanks. The APCs’ crews and the twelve troopers inside each died agonizingly, the APCs becoming nothing more than ovens.
Those who made a run for it from the APCs’ rear doors were cut down by the buzzing bees of the flechettes, the darts not killing all but inflicting such terrible wounds that the medics and, as the CBN reporter would soon see, the MASH units to the rear were overwhelmed.
Chopper accidents added to the chaos as two air-sea rescue Blackhawks collided with four Cobra and Apache gunships in the thick battlefield smoke. One chopper, a Bell OH-58C Scout, slammed into one of the last incoming missiles. Chips of the heavy 350-millimeter, blocklike Chobham armor packs from the tanks whistled through the air, still intact, their resin-sandwiched steel, ceramic, and aluminum layers impenetrated but blown in toto away from the tanks when the M-1s’ fifty APFDS — armor-piercing fin-stabilized discarding Sabot rounds — reached their flash points and exploded internally, ripping the tank cupolas apart. The mechanized battalion’s tanks and the APCs of Freeman’s H Corps were further victims of the “bolt from the blue” Siberian attack against Freeman’s seven-corps, 379,000-man Second Army.
In addition to the sixty-six tanks destroyed, the Siberian cruise missiles had laid waste to and/or incapacitated over forty twelve-ton M-113 armored personnel carriers and twenty-three Marine Corps expeditionary force AAV-7A1 armed amphibious troop carriers and seventeen fourteen-ton light armored assault vehicles of the marines’ second expeditionary brigade, the vehicles now either gutted completely or burning.
In all 493 men were killed, over 600 wounded. Freeman’s Second Army spearhead was not much more than a smoking ruin. As suddenly as it had begun, the Siberian attack ceased, but not the suffering, as men, tearing open their CFA — combat first aid — kits sprinkled spore-contaminated antiseptic powder on wounds, which immediately turned the blood septic. In fact, only a few of the hundreds of the CFA kits were so contaminated, but the fear instigated by the certain knowledge that some had been tampered with meant that hundreds of men were loathe to use the packs. Consequently dozens more died, despite the exemplary efforts of medics and Medevac choppers.
The CBN reporter had not seen anything like it since the American A-10 Thunderbolts had come in with their cannon and chopped up the retreating Iraqi columns in the Gulf war. Though not immediately evident, it soon became clear, at least to Freeman’s G-2, that the Siberian cruise missiles’ TERCOM— terrain contour mapping — computers had been finely tuned and programmed not only to hit the tanks in the Second Army spearhead but to avoid the most forward, and hence far more lightly armed, Humvee scout cars.
Freeman was shattered, his hopes of a home run dashed, but he had no time to feel sorry for himself even if he had felt disposed to it, for now the ADATs and quickly deployed Patriot batteries were in position, or at least in the best position they could manage, given that some could not get out of the rubble of gutted vehicles, burning bodies and equipment. The antimissile Patriots’ box launchers were left where they were, their crews sent out to put the pole radar on higher ground. Now Freeman was receiving reports that there were massive troop movements heading east from Baikal toward Chita to the east, the troops identified as the Thirty-first “Stalingrad” Motorized Division. It was the army of Stalingrad fame.
“Son of a bitch!” said Jesus Valdez, called “Juan” by the other marines in his ten-man squad. “That’s all we need, man. Fucking Thirty-first.”
Another marine, hunkered down in the foxhole of ice, made so by the snow having been instantly melted in the heat of the missile attack after which the melt had refrozen, looked disbelievingly at the junkyard of burning tires, drooping guns, shattered armor, smoldering hulks of APCs, and the high, thick, black smoke churning from burning tires, red flames licking softly in the eerie blue twilight. Some of the marines gathered around the flames, warming themselves, until a marine lieutenant told them to douse the fires.
“Yeah,” said Jesus Valdez, “they might see where we are!” He’d lost three buddies in the missile onslaught and hadn’t found a trace of them. It was so terrible it didn’t seem real. The attack had lasted less than seven minutes — hardly a shot fired back, the Patriot launcher support units not then deployed, with the column being on the move. The marine lieutenant didn’t chew out Valdez for his sarcasm; the lieutenant, too, was still reeling inside at the carnage. He, too, had lost friends, and it took all his willpower to deploy the remaining seventeen of what only minutes before had been his thirty-man platoon to defensive positions off the road to take the radar aerials to the summit of the two-thousand-foot-high hills that ringed the death road between Never and Skovorodino.
Freeman’s first order after the attack was to keep out of the townships, attractive to tired, cold troops but a perfect setup, he believed, for another cruise attack. A townsite was perfect for terrain contour imaging, sticking out, in his words, “like a nun in a whorehouse.” Forward patrols reported that the railway had been ripped up from Never on and the pipeline running parallel to the Trans-Siberian shut down.
“How far away is their Thirty-first?” Freeman asked Dick Norton, momentarily too ashamed to look his aide in the face, a thing he normally detested in a man. Instead he was gazing at the wreckage, the acrid stench of defeat burning his nostrils. Mixed in with the oily reek of destroyed equipment and vehicles there came the sweet, sickly smell of burnt bodies.
“They’re coming from Chita,” said Norton. “Now as the crow flies it’s about—”
“Never mind the goddamn crow! How long till they can attack?”
Stunned by the general’s outburst, Norton stepped back. “Ah — they’re motorized. Five — four days. If they travel at night, maybe three.”
“Forty-eight hours,” declared Freeman, his left hand pulling so hard on the cuff of his right glove that Norton could see the general’s fingers straining against the white Gore-Tex. “Toughest outfit in their army — except for the SPETS. They’ll attack in forty-eight hours.” He was staring at the clump of smoking debris and a bloody, bone- pierced stump that had once been a man’s head. Freeman’s voice was tremulous. He coughed, swore, his tone steadier now but heavy with anger. “Can you tell me,” he turned to Norton, “can anyone in this godforsaken place tell the why I lost so many fine young men? Why those satellite intelligence outfits can tell me the Siberian Thirty- first— a whole goddamn army — is on the move and yet they can’t give us any warning of a multiple cruise launch? Even if radar contact missed ‘em because the bastards were coming in so low, how was it that our satellites didn’t see launch plumes? Or are their infrared spotters on goddamn holiday?”
A major, his head in a blood-splattered bandage, handed Freeman the updated casualty report. Those killed now numbered over five hundred, several of the most recent having died of flechette wounds either on the way to the MASH unit at Mukhino or after arriving.
Norton relayed the general’s question, keeping his voice low from force of habit, the speaker close to his ear.
“General,” he told Freeman, “marine G-2 says the Siberians started a whole bunch of fires in the forests around the suspected launch area. SATINT can’t distinguish between natural hot spots and exhaust plumes. Both give off heat signatures.” Freeman was walking away from the ruins of his advanced armored column. “So they lit fires to confuse satellite IR pickups, but they must have spotted trajectories?”
“No, sir. We’ve still got a big low that’s come down from the Kara Sea. We’ll have to wait until it clears a bit before—” Freeman was pulling out the map. “Before we can use the K-14,” Norton continued, referring to the
