the intertank Bradley infantry fighting vehicle and armored personnel carrier radio network in the event that any of the tank crews spotted infantry that, he suspected, even now could be moving through the trees on either flank, waiting until enough tanks had passed before launching antitank rockets against the American armor.
A rock hit the glacis, the front-sloped armor, and Freeman saw the loader start. Mindful of the beating he’d taken on the Never-Skovorodino Road, Freeman wondered for a second whether it might have been better to wait for the self-propelled, eleven-mile-range, 155-millimeter howitzers and seventeen-mile-range M-110 A-2 artillery. But everything was a judgment call, and by the time the Never-Skovorodino road behind him would be cleared of the burned-out hulks caused by the Siberian cruise missile attack, and so clear enough for the howitzers to pass through, the Siberian armor would have time to position itself.
“Dolly Patton, three o’clock!” shouted the gunner, and in the half second it took Freeman to spot the outline of the busty armor of what looked to be a four-hundred-millimeter-thick T-72 turret, the gunner, having seen the target hidden down a firebreak on the right flank, had already got off a HESH — high-explosive squash head — round, the cold, clean air in the tank immediately replaced by a gush of hot, acrid-smelling smoke, the rush of the air conditioners’ antigas overpressure system automatically cutting in. Freeman immediately spotted another angular shape, its hull down but just visible above a snow berm about a thousand meters down the road. Going to override he got the fix and, hearing the roar of a gunship overhead, squeezed the trigger, sending off another HESH round at over a thousand meters a second to the target, and saw another M-1 tank right aft of him firing. He fired again; the muffled “crump” he heard, octane exploding. The first target already burned fiercely, nothing visible but a wall of orange flame licking into the white-green forest on either side of the firebreak, snow from previously heavily laden branches sliding to the ground like sugar.
In 2.3 minutes Freeman’s M-1 A-1 fired ten rounds. At this rate he knew they’d be out of ammunition in just under ten minutes. It was well within the M-1 ‘s rate of fire, the midbarrel fume extractor capable of handling the rapid passage of the fifty-six-pound HEAT round down the smooth bore, but it also meant the logistics of resupply quickly loomed as a major consideration.
So far no M-1s had been hit, to Freeman’s knowledge, though in the confusion of battle, including the noise of choppers overhead, no one would really know what had happened until after. His M-1 still advancing, the low hum of the computers making constant adjustments for barrel bend, wind drift, and outside temperature audible between the heavy thumps of other M-1s firing, Freeman broke into the intertank radio circuit, ordering any tank with more than thirty of its fifty rounds expended to withdraw for rearming. Tanks further back were told to go to battle speed and to close the gap wherever the more open ground around Chichatka Station would allow. Freeman hated ordering any kind of withdrawal of tanks who still had ten rounds, but he was suspicious now because of the apparent absence of infantry.
The forests beyond the clear area were ideal for infantry antitank positions; he didn’t want to be the man who led his armor into a trap. But he already had.
For the gunships it had been an unmitigated disaster, and Freeman’s realization that, albeit unwittingly, he’d delivered his air cavalry into the snare of quads and AIRDEM mines set by Yesov came via a radio message from his G-2. It was short and blunt and immediately explained to the gunner in Freeman’s tank and in many other M-1s how it was that Freeman’s armor had been so successful so far, the only casualty being a bad eject of a spent shell that seriously burned a loader. The message sent in plain language from Freeman’s G-2, its conclusion verified by the unmanned reconnaissance aircraft, was: “Enemy tanks fake.”
Worse was to come. With his choppers withdrawing, his tank crews knowing they’d been had, even if the helicopters had taken out some of the remote control quads in the forest, Freeman, the recon pics now rushed to him by dispatch rider, stood there in the cupola looking at the blowups. The caption over them bore the euphemistic title: “Simulated armored vehicles. French made.” The hastily typed G-2 report added the French manufacturer’s name, Lancelin-Barracuda, misspelled with a single “r.”
The fake tanks that had deceived the aerial reconnaissance were of fiberglass/plywood construction, their hollow interior containing a ten-gallon drum of gasoline, a four-cubic-foot box of junk metal — ample supplies of this available from the many disbanded old steam engines along the Trans-Siberian — and a clear-burning, Japanese- made kerosene lamp. The lamp produced the heat source for IF sensors aboard either the UAV reconnaissance craft or helicopters, such as those that had been flown by the thirty American helicopter pilots who were now dead. G-2 also informed Freeman that a Pentagon file matchup just received indicated that the cost to the Siberians of just one T-80 equalled the purchase price of at least sixty fake tanks. To add insult to injury, it was less subtly pointed out that C in C Second Army should also “be advised” that Allied intelligence “has known for some time that ZSU-23 quads could be tripped by the pulse of approaching aircraft engines,” which would “clearly explain the lack of troops.”
HEAVY CASUALTIES IN SECOND ARMY was the headline of
No one but Norton had the courage, when Freeman returned through the pall,of still-burning helicopters, to tell Freeman the news of his wife’s death. And at this moment, on the worst day of his life, General Douglas Freeman was also informed by the E-3A Sentry advance warning reconnaissance that another Siberian cruise missile offensive was on its way from Baikal. Freeman wanted to be alone with his grief for the one person who had shared his innermost ambitions and fears and all the joys and disappointments of their life together. And so did many others who had seen their closest friends literally torn asunder. But mourning was a luxury no war indulged, and the stars he wore on his collar dictated unequivocally that he give all his attention to, and husband whatever energy he had for, the welfare of his men in Second Army’s most perilous hours.
Though Second Army moved forward through Chichatka, its pace was sullen, the air of defeat heavy as skunk cabbage. On one level the problem was as simple as it was critical; the U.S. Tomahawk cruise missiles had reached Baikal and taken out their designated targets, but more Siberian cruise missiles kept coming. Of course the launch sites had to be fake — only convincing enough, like the fake T-80s, in heat emission, size, and shape, to sucker the Americans into wasting precious cruise missiles of their own in the same way Freeman had lost fifteen of his prime antitank weapons in the downed Apaches and Cobras. It was evident now, G-2 had told him, that the Siberians must be using mobile sites, somehow covering their tracks, which the satellites weren’t picking up.
“Maybe they’re dragging a bush behind them,” said a junior officer jokingly. But no one was laughing, especially not the commander of the marine expeditionary force, who had lost another fifty-six men and forty-three wounded to the latest Siberian cruise attack.
Freeman, Norton, and the G-2 colonel were poring over the latest satellite reconnaissance pictures of the Baikal area, the colonel having circled the four Ushkanyi Islands jutting up like pimples in the photograph. Next to the satellite pics he put four tatty amateur photographs of the islands, slightly out of focus, the islands looking like tiny white stones encrusted by the ice. “What are these splotches?” asked Freeman in as desultory a tone as Norton had ever heard. The general was putting on his long white camouflage winter coat, preparing to go for one of his walks, and Norton couldn’t blame him. It was bad enough to lose a game without having to suffer replays in the dugout.
“Splotches?” said the colonel. “Well, most of it, I think, is overexposure — especially on these amateur shots we were sent. Some of it, of course, is varying thicknesses in the ice.” He tapped the amateur photographs, brought to them by one of the Buryat underground who’d nearly got shot by a jittery marine and who “claimed,” the colonel said suspiciously, that he’d gotten them from some Jewish underground.
Freeman grunted, picked up his helmet, and, as he always did before he went out, checked that his belt revolver was fully loaded, ready to go.
“Want the to come along, General?” asked Norton.
“No. Thanks all the same, Dick.” He forced a grin, trying to belie his mood to the others. “Have to nut a few things out,” he said, and was gone, flurries of snow bursting in unceremoniously just before the door closed. Outside the wind was moaning through the taiga.
“Some congressmen,” said one of the G-2 officers, “are pressing for his recall.”
