Diamond bits wear out here faster than anywhere else in the world. Then this bright spark comes along from Novosibirsk and figures out you don’t need miles and miles of piping underneath to tap the natural gas — or anything else, for that matter. Know what he does?”
Norton shook his head. It was time for what the general’s headquarter staff called “Jeopardy.” If you didn’t know the answers, Freeman took you prisoner in a ten-minute rundown on little-known minutiae.
“Well, it was costing them a fortune in piping, Dick— not just for drilling stock, but for pipe to pump the natural gas through.”
Dick Norton was finding it difficult to concentrate on what the general was saying, feeling too sleepy from the Demerol and too worried about the Siberian armor — already reported only sixty miles away. “Pipe?” he said, trying to sound interested, but imagining what would happen when the Siberians’ T-72s with the laser sights and all the lessons of the tanks’ shortcomings in the Iraqi War now known and overcome met up with the hastily assembled American defenses, only 227 American tanks having arrived on the BAM so far.
“Yes, pipe!” replied Freeman. “Don’t you see, they didn’t need it. Holes they drilled through the permafrost— vertical or horizontal — were natural aquifers. Natural pipes! Permafrost’s so thick and hard, you don’t need damn pipes. Use the permafrost.”
So, thought Norton, good for Freeman, resident U.S. expert on permafrost, but had the general thought through his battle plan to engage the Siberians with their two-to-one advantage? Worse still, Freeman had ordered his tanks to proceed north from Nizhneangarsk line abreast. Any first lieutenant knew that a well-dug-in enemy tank or AT missile battery had a much better chance to pick off tanks if they were coming at you stretched left to right rather than in line of column. And so Norton used Freeman’s homily about permafrost to alert the general, as unobtrusively as possible, to this potentially fatal tactical flaw.
Freeman, left hand on his hip, right clenched, thumb outstretched, was giving the hurry-up signal to an M-1 that had slewed off the Marsden matting that the resupply C-5s had dropped along with the howitzers also being taken north.
Freeman didn’t acknowledge that he’d heard Norton. Hands back on his hips, his collar up, eyes squinting in the first snow of the new storm, the general shook his head— not in dismay at the coming battle, but with unbridled admiration for his men. Norton could see the general was in his “attack mode,” as it was known among his officers. His holster’s metal clip was undone so that it wouldn’t freeze up and inhibit what he had, within earshot of a La Roche reporter, inadvisably called his “fast draw.” The La Roche tabloids had picked it up and gone wild with a “Cowboy General” headline, asking in the lead, “Does He Care About His Men?”—a headline that Norton had taken care the general hadn’t seen. Nevertheless, despite himself, Norton remained deeply troubled — not about whether Freeman cared about his troops, which was an insulting charge, but whether he had thought enough about the tactics of the coming battle of massed armor. Or was he simply flushed with the win at Nizhneangarsk? If the Nanking Bridge wasn’t blown, everyone on his staff knew the victory at the BAM railhead would be a strategic nonentity, a mere side blow to Yesov’s army rather than a knockout.
“You haven’t been listening, Dick!”
“General…?”
“Well, damn it, man, weren’t you at the briefing last night? All commanders?”
“Un, no, General, I was checking the situation vis-a-vis the, uh, Nanking Bridge.”
Freeman scowled. Whenever Norton had screwed up— which thank the Lord was rarely — he started this academic “vis-a-vis” bullshit, a leftover from his postgraduate days after West Point. “Vis-a-vis” really meant, “Give me time to think up a good answer.” Probably sitting on the damn can during the briefing, his good eye soaking up the “interviews” in
“Colonel — goddamn it! Don’t you slack off on me and go letting the logistical boys run line convoys through this stuff.” He meant single file through the permafrost. “Permafrost is hard as concrete, like I said, but you run a line of vehicles over it and the tire friction and exhaust spittle’ll melt the top couple of inches, and before you know it you’ll be bogged down. Like running warm water over an ice tray. Won’t melt the damn ice, but the top layer’ll go to mush, slick on you — half black ice, half mush. Armored tracks’ll be slewing and sliding like beginners’ day at the rink. Sitting ducks for the Siberians.”
“Yes, sir.” Maybe Freeman had been thinking permafrost tactics all along. Still, that didn’t change the two- to-one advantage of the Siberians.
The general’s expression had changed, his tone quiet now. “Ever tell you I met my wife at a skating rink?”
“No, General.”
“In California. Can you imagine? Middle of summer, too. High summer. God, it was beautiful, Dick. Cool. She had this kind of green stuff…”
“Costume?” said Norton.
“All green,” continued Freeman, “like the color of that water in Hawaii. Translucent, and every time she went into a spin it was — well, hell, I knew I’d marry her right mere and then.” He paused. “ ‘Course, never had much time to skate. I mean, go around with her, you know.”
“Yes, General.” In the howling of the approaching storm, Freeman stared up at the snow, then shifted his gaze toward the last of the tank support vehicles moving out. There were too few for the M1A1s, the tanks ideally needing a maintenance check every 120 miles. But “ideally” was always somewhere else. For every fifty of his 270- plus tanks, he knew he could expect twenty to twenty-five breakdowns. Most could be fixed in the field, but all would be time-consuming. The essence of being a good soldier and a good commander, as Freeman had lectured his officers so often, was to make the best of what you had. Seize the moment rather than wait for a logistics wish list. And Norton remembered, “Never let your own fears be known to the men.”
“Dick?”
“Sir?”
“Get Harvey Simmet up here, will you?”
“Yes, sir.”
Once again Norton, this time apologetically, called Harvey out of his warm cubbyhole of isobar charts, SAT pics, and other meteorological data, the printout piling up in a small hill by his printer. The hourly reports demanded by Freeman had now become half-hourly, and Dick Norton didn’t take it as a good sign. In his experience, senior officers, including the best of them, often — albeit unwittingly — gave in to the temptation to switch their attention to factors they couldn’t control whenever they had a deep-seated apprehension about their own strategies. It was a form of escape.
But if that’s what “George C. Scott,” as his troops called him, was hoping for, Norton saw that Simmet couldn’t offer the general any encouragement by way of the weather. In fact it was getting worse, a sullen sky overcast enough to sock in any air cover for the outnumbered M1A1s. And Harvey Simmet said there’d be no letup in the Arctic storm for at least thirty-six hours, its epicenter not yet having passed through the Yakutsk region.
And if Freeman thought anything, including his prayers, would change the weather in the
Freeman took the message sanguinely, and as well as Norton knew the general, he didn’t know whether this betokened superb acting, resignation, or resolve. The thought of Second Army suffering the same terrible fate that had overtaken III Corps, with over four thousand men slaughtered on the ice, was too much for Norton to contemplate. And what would be the reaction back home? The very thought of what the La Roche tabloids would do to Freeman, to him, to them all, likewise didn’t bear thinking about. As Norton and his most senior officers saw it, this northern battle was quickly turning out to be Freeman’s greatest risk so far, and except for the Second Army armored column now heading south from Skovorodino to the Siberian-Chinese border, awaiting the outcome of Operation Country Market, it constituted the spearhead of Freeman’s entire army. In the end Norton knew it was a question of faith in the man — a calculated risk, based on past performance, that he had not gone definitely and finally bonkers like some evangelical who, though he was of the earth, was not in it, lost in a quiet reverie of past glory. One general, Norton remembered, had smilingly declined all help to cross the Rhine. “No bother, Sar’major,”
