Warshot

biggest tractor tracks she’d ever seen. They were all around her, albino leviathans, crawling inexorably eastward toward Lake Baikal. After a while the old peasant woman stopped counting.

* * *

Each of the more than three hundred three-man-crewed Siberian T-72M main battle tanks — an APSDS, armor-piercing-fin-stabilized discarding sabot round, in its big 125mm gun — stopped seven miles from the western shore on the southern end of the four-hundred-mile-long, banana-shaped lake. The tank regiment’s overall komandir, General Minsky of the Tenth Guards “Slutsk” Division, had at last been given the task he craved: his orders to spearhead the attack and defeat the Americans. He was eager but tense, his head tank regiment, with ninety-three of the “Slutsk” guards’ division’s 328 main battle tanks, assigned to undertake zadacha dnia—a total rout in the American sector in the southwestern Baikal. And the zadacha dnia had to be completed in no less than twenty-four hours, before the Americans could recover and regroup.

Minsky’s initial artillery/tank attack in his sector would be followed by what Yesov had declared would be a merciless presledovatelnyi boi—a pursuit of lightning savagery — designed to finish off the retreating Americans on the ice before they reached the relative safety of the taiga twenty miles across the lake from the small town of Port Baikal. And following Minsky, ready to spread out north and south of him after his blitzkrieg, were the remainder of the four thousand tanks, advancing on a forty-eight-mile, or eighty-kilometer, front, the maximum that anyone like Yesov, trained at the Frunze Academy, felt comfortable with.

Immediately behind Minsky’s ninety-three-tank spearhead came the regiment’s forty-six BMPs — armored personnel carriers — with higher velocity and harder-hitting thirty-millimeter guns replacing the old seventy-three millimeters, and behind them the regiment’s eighteen self-propelled 120mm, thirteen-mile-range guns, and the BM-21 multiple rocket launchers, forty tubes to each launcher.

The Slutsk division’s artillery regiment of nine self-propelled S-3 152mm guns was kept as far back as possible, while up front Yesov had his self-propelled howitzers, their crews so razor-sharp that it would take them only seven minutes — under half the time required for the towed guns — to have the guns fully emplaced and ready for firing. These self-propelled howitzers were the new M-1974s, amphibious versions of the old M-1973, 152mm, 360-degree-rotation howitzer. Their drive sprockets, while well-protected — being located forward and beneath the sloping glacis plate — nevertheless squeaked like the unoiled rail cars of the Trans-Siberian, which, a few miles back on Minsky’s right, or southern, flank, were even now hauling the supplies toward the lake, including a full range of main battle-tank 125mm HE, APDS, and HESH — heat, squash head — ammunition.

The babushka, now back inside her small bungalow, the wood-carved fretwork beneath the snow-filled window boxes shuddering like something alive, watched fearfully as the entire advance came to a halt. For a moment she could hear only the noise of mournful howling of the blizzard driving itself against the already snow- laden birch forest, but then she saw something that completely mystified her as the armored personnel carriers, with their blunt, bargelike snouts, advanced in line through the columns of main battle tanks and self-propelled artillery and, obeying flag signals— Yesov having banned any radio transmits — slowly turned left, northward, in unison, like a long line of prehistoric monoliths issuing forth enormous billowing clouds of thick, flour-white smoke into the white purity of the blizzard.

“Stranno!” Crazy! the babushka told her husband, an old reservist who had lost a leg in the final days before the cease-fire, during the American commando attack on the missile-launching midget subs’ base at Baikal.

“They’re making camouflage,” he answered grumpily, cutting one of the rationed, brick-hard sugar cubes in half, clenching it between his teeth before sucking through the strong, hot, samovar-brewed tea, the samovar’s brassy shine in stark contrast to the dank darkness of the cabin.

“What do you mean, camouflage?” she asked him. “It’s crazy — the snow is already white — camouflage enough.”

“You don’t know anything,” he grumped, the sugar only now starting to dissolve. “It’s small-particle smoke,” he explained. “Thicker than usual. It will stop the Americans’ infrared scopes from seeing the heat exhaust of our tanks and big mobile guns when they begin the attack. Infrared can see through normal smoke.”

“It’s crazy,” she repeated.

“I’ll tell you what’s crazy,” he told her, reaching for his crutch, a rough triangle of birch wood, its shoulder pad a small arc of rubber from an American Humvee, part of the American equipment captured in one of the last firefights around the southern end of the lake before the cease-fire. “It’s crazy for us to stay up here. We’d best get down to the cellar before—”

There was a tremendous crash, the door flung open, the blizzard howling in — a half-dozen white-hooded, white-clothed figures barging in like angry ghosts.

“Idite!” You must go! ordered the lieutenant. “We are commandeering your house.” The other men were already pushing past the babushka, two of them moving toward the basement, unraveling a coil of wire held between them.

“Idi!” Go! said the babushka. “Where to, pray?”

“Back,” answered the lieutenant, using the AK-47 to motion westward over his shoulder in the general direction of Irkutsk.

“But that’s over forty kilometers,” she protested. The husband caught a glimpse of a blue-and-white-striped T-shirt as the lieutenant took off his white camouflage overlays to better handle the land lines that they were in the process of laying. The land lines would be much more secure for being sheathed, and so much less likely than wireless radio traffic to be jammed by American electronic countermeasures once the fighting started. The old man, however, was more interested in the blue-and-white T-shirt. It told him they were SPETS.

“Be quiet, Natasha,” he cautioned his wife.

“They’ll have a truck to take you back to Podkamennaya,” said the lieutenant, sticking the AK-47 through the line spool.

“That’s no good,” protested the babushka defiantly. “That’s still over twenty kilometers from Ir—”

“It’s warming!” the lieutenant said. “On the lake the ice is starting to break up. It won’t be such a cold walk.”

“Come on!” said the husband. He knew the SPETS would have another kind of answer if they protested too much. Didn’t she realize that a major attack was about to start? “Radi Boga, tishe!” For God’s sake, be quiet! he told her, pushing at her with the crutch, anxious to get as far away as possible. Once the land lines were connected, hell would erupt.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Khabarovsk

“I tell you,” declared Freeman, “I don’t trust the sons of bitches. They’re going to hit us, Dick.” He paused, looking at the map. “God damn this snow!” His hand swept up, covering the entire north-south axis of the lake. “No way we can protect it all, so we have to narrow the field. If he penetrates our defenses and gets on that ice — four hundred miles.” He shook his head at the thought. “He could move a division anywhere across there in less than —”

“Well, I know aerial reconnaissance doesn’t show anything because of the blizzard, General. But there’s no IR report either. Not a sign they’re advancing.”

“Could be using IR suppressor smoke. If only I could launch a preemptive strike on Irkutsk or—”

“We’d be condemned by every country in the U.N.,” cut in Norton. “As well as our allies. Fighting to push back the Chinese is one thing, sir, but us breaking the cease-fire with the Siberians would—”

“You’re right, dammit!” conceded Freeman, turning away from the map to the tote-board display, trying to put himself in Yesov’s shoes. “Great weakness of a democracy, Dick. We can only finish a war — can’t start it.”

“Would you want it any other way?” proffered Norton, anticipating the question might be asked in the news conference about to start in the briefing room.

Freeman didn’t answer, but his grimace was reply enough. “Hell, I’m in trouble enough with Washington,