Arctic Front

information via his spies, information chat Yesov had to grudgingly admit had served them well in stopping the Allies at the Urals, pummeling the Allies in fact. Still, he disliked the man’s opportunism. As far as he was concerned Chernko was little more than the old bourgeois “Communist”—as ideologically unsound and, at root, as uncommitted to the military as Gorbachev had been.

“I’m well satisfied,” said Chernko. “If the Thirty-first does as well in the east against this Freeman as we have in the west, eh. it’ll be over soon. A cease-fire, and then we go for American aid. The Americans are suckers. Once the Thirty-first mauls Freeman’s soft Second Ar—”

The apartment building shook, everyone thinking it was an earthquake, broken glass, whole windows popping out and whizzing through the air, expensive dresses of the elite slashed, many of the generals’ wives screaming from the minor cuts and abrasions created by the first shock wave. Yesov had moved under the mahogany dining table with all the finesse of a charging T-80, sending two colonels’ wives splaying on the plush Persian carpet. As people were getting up off the floor, his beeper was set off by the pressure of his folding gut.

“Machina!”—”Stop that thing!” one of the women screamed hysterically.

“Tishe!”— “Be quiet!” Yesov replied, red-faced, lumbering up with the help of an aide, whom he quickly shook off like an offending mullet. The marshal was in the throes of regaining his ruffled dignity. It was seven minutes, the phone lines being down, before he heard that the KMK works in Novokuznetsk had been badly hit, as well as the Institute of Defense Science in Akademgorodok.

The damage — over 192 killed, several hundred wounded, was not of particular concern to the marshal even though it abruptly ended the cocktail party. Whatever his faults might be, Yesov had been the first in that room, or in Novosibirsk’s Central Committee, to realize that the Americans had suddenly and dramatically demonstrated that they had the ability to reach deep into Sibir. It could only mean that the Americans must now have established forward air bases, despite the Thirty-first’s advance, from which to fire off their air-launch cruise missiles which, skimming at tree level across the taiga and steppe, had hit both the political heart and a vital industrial organ of Siberia. It was clearly a warning of the terrible danger that the vital Siberian oil fields at Mirnyy, in the very center of Siberia and without which she could not continue the war, were at immediate risk. The same would then be true of Siberia’s vital defense industries all the way from Mirnyy, believed to be invulnerable to all U.S. tactical missiles, to the oil field, barely two hundred miles north of Novosibirsk, at Belyy Yar. Everything was now within Freeman’s reach.

“You know what this means?” Professor Grigorenko demanded, rather than informing Yesov. But the marshal already knew. He might be slow afoot, but his brain was in excellent condition. Still the professor, shakily pouring himself a large vodka and ignoring the general’s glass, went on, “It’s brutally simple, Marshal. If they want to they can turn this into another Kuwait. On fire!”

“Do you really believe they’d do that?” asked an aide.

“Are you senile?” growled Yesov. “They’re not playing baseball, Comrade!”

“No, sir.”

* * *

In fact, Sonarman First Class Johnson aboard the GST was thinking in precisely those terms. They had stolen first base (the KMK works at Novokuznetsk), the second (Akademgorodok near Novosibirsk), and the third — he looked at his watch. Right about now.

Five hundred miles east of them the six one-thousand-pound cruise warheads came “shuffling” through the air over train tracks and a pipeline only yards apart in quadrant 5⁶ just west of Sbega. When he heard them coming in, a praporschika — a warrant officer — in the Siberian Thirty-first knew as well as anyone else in the Stalingrad division that if the explosions of the incoming subsonic missiles — loaded with armor-piercing bomblets — blew out the pipe or rail tracks, 90 percent of the Thirty-first’s supplies would be cut off, only 10 percent able to make it on the poor road system. They simply did not have the kind of airlift capacity of the Americans.

The first missile took out a copse of snow-laden birch trees and did no harm to speak of. The second missile, however, tore up more than thirty feet of track; the remaining four missiles tore up even more, and their rain of armor-piercing bomblets sliced through the Thirty-first Stalingrad Division trucks in showers of white-hot steel, hitting over fifty fully loaded troop trucks in the 2,300-vehicle convoy, most of the casualties — over nine hundred — caused not only from the detonation but from the hornetlike swarms of flechettes.

Far more serious was the severing of the pipeline by the thousands of bomblets from missiles four and five. The oil line running adjacent to the road erupted in flame, the fire speeding along the ruptured pipe like a quick fuse.

The oil, already under pressure, jetted out like water from a long, punctured hose along a snaking, forty-mile section that, like the rest of the line, ran close to the road. The long, spurting tongues of fire set trucks, armor, troops, and self-propelled 120-millimeter howitzer haulers ablaze, and consumed another hundred vehicles, including BMDs — armored personnel carriers — in the most devastating single loss — over four thousand killed or injured — suffered by Russian arms in the past year.

The fire alone attracted American fighters in the overcast. Although they paid heavily, losing over twenty- three to the Fulcrums, they had such overwhelming numerical and instrument-flying superiority, they delivered what the Thirty-first commanders and those few still alive in the column were calling a “Kuwaiti highway” massacre. A-10 Thunderbolts were coming in, their seven-barrelled, thirty-millimeter Avenger cannons blazing, picking off the Siberians’ T-80 tanks at will.

Streams of tracer poured down so fast that they created the illusion that the tanks were actually sucking the fire from the planes, the tanks exploding, providing more target identification for the American air force. They created such a massive traffic jam on the second-rate road, hemmed in by the taiga and snow banks, that Freeman, seeing his chance, issued orders that the carnage continue unabated and that he would personally court-martial anyone who let up attacking in the next twenty-four hours for any other reason than to refuel and rearm.

The Thirty-first Stalingrad was taking a terrible pummelling, its morale as savaged by the belief that it was now surrounded as by the actual punishment it was taking. So savage was the American counterattack that, despite the thick white overlay of cumulonimbus, the battle became visible as a pulsating, red vein to satellite reconnaissance.

As suddenly as it had seemed an overwhelming threat, the Thirty-first was now in full retreat. Freeman, the Baikal threat against him now removed, ordered his armored divisions into the “fishhook” configuration he’d been waiting for. One column of over a thousand tanks with close air support arced left, southward, heading for Irkutsk on any side roads and rivers they could find. Some roads had been literally bombed and napalmed out of the taiga by U.S. engineers. The right curve of the fishhook turned northward, heading for Yakutsk. Freeman’s Shermanlike breakout around the flanks of the smashed-Thirty-first became a rout, the Siberian division finally pocketed, unable to move, its GST backup, as Freeman announced in a message to the president, “no longer in service.” The greatest strain on the American supply line was surrendering Siberians, most of them wounded. U.S. Medevac facilities were stretched to the limit.

* * *

For the crews aboard the two GSTs in quadrant 6⁵ there was no warning, no gradual foreboding of ice growl or increase in subsurface turbidity. There was only the world coming to an end, the explosions of the two cruise missiles hitting them, so cataclysmic as to shock each man’s nervous system into instant, irreparable crisis, as surely as the subs’ hatches were buckled, preventing escape. The two GSTs, squashed like molten bottles, plummeted to over five thousand feet below into the primeval silt of the boreal forest.

* * *

“What can we do?” asked civilian members of the Novosibirsk Central Committee in panic. Yesov looked at each one of them in turn, then at all of them contemptuously. “Arrange a cease-fire, you fools!” He was a soldier first, he told them, but also a realist.

The American public, led by La Roche’s tabloids, were overwhelmingly in favor.

Freeman was appalled, Dick Norton handing him a faxed copy of the New York Times editorial which, like the La Roche papers, joined in heartily for an immediate cease-fire as offered by the Siberians, warning only that a cease-fire should not “extract unreasonable demands and sacrifices” from the Siberian people, “as did the Treaty of Versailles of the German nation, thereby assuring continued bitterness in the rebuilding that would have to be done.”

Outside his victorious forward headquarters at Sbega, west of the Chinese/Siberian hump, Freeman strode up