Darpa Alpha

Gayvoron, from which armaments by the ton were being delivered to the port of Vladivostok 150 miles to the southeast. FSB reported that ABC had in effect built a private military economic zone in the far east wherein they could manufacture and export armaments well beyond Moscow’s reach.

The idea of trying to oust the ABC risked a civil war in the area, and the very suggestion of yet another civil war in Russia and yet another breakaway territory like Chechnya was as unpalatable to Moscow’s ruling elite as it was to the civilian population at large. And so, in one of those strange, upside-down ironies that violated all the tenets of the Cold War, the Kremlin, while vigorously objecting to the U.S. plan in public, simultaneously saw it as the best chance of ridding Moscow of the ABC, whose so-called business practices, Pravda declared, were “even worse than Enron’s.”

Yet Moscow knew that the risk the Americans would be taking was enormous. Lake Khanka was 120 miles inland from Vladivostok. Moscow knew the Americans, led by this so-called American legend, General Freeman, would have to not only contend with a vicious ring of sophisticated anti-aircraft weaponry, including MANPADs and emplacements of four SAMs of the type that had downed the American Scott Brady’s fighter over Bosnia, but also fight against paid-off rebellious elements of the Russian navy.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Alerted by their coast watchers and unable to move their lucrative weapons complex, ABC was waiting. And ready. For the hundreds of men of the ad hoc Russian Regiment, everything was at stake, survival and money in amounts that the three disgruntled ex-Soviet generals had never dreamed they would be within striking distance of. The markup on Igla, Vanguard, and pirated Stinger-design MANPADs alone was 218 percent. Production costs had fallen drastically, with Lake Khanka providing a guaranteed supply of water for coolant. Productivity was also spurred on by bonuses for the fast loading of ABC’s ship-container-sized cargoes of twenty missiles per RORO — Roll-On, Roll-Off — load. Mideast sales tripled in the first six months of operation, bonuses for overtime so coveted that the soldiers from Abramov’s tank company, Beria’s infantry, and Chekashin’s air defense ground crews assembling the delicate guidance heads and 8 percent sulfur solid propellant were breaking all civilian productivity rates set in the go-slow environment of the old Soviet regime. And now they had in their possession the U.S.’s super-cavitating technology. More bonuses. As bonuses increased, so did expectations, the men wanting even more overtime. Indeed, a strict duty roster had to be enforced as some soldiers, particularly from Beria’s infantry battalions, had been skipping regular perimeter security duty so as to put in overtime on the assembly lines. When General Beria first heard from Big and Little in Moscow that an attack by the American ATFOR — American Anti- terrorism Force — was a possibility, he immediately tightened up all “perimeter skipping” by instituting the death penalty for any Russian absentee on the grounds that shirking this duty was desertion. It had a salutary effect, as those who wanted to make more money selling more missiles to Hamas and others were only too willing to inform on comrades whose executions created a vacancy and hence more lucrative overtime on the already lucrative assembly line.

“You won’t have to worry about the Americans,” Abramov assured Beria and Cherkashin. “My T-90s’ll take the bastards out before they get a chance to get out of their helicopter seats.”

“Bullshit!” announced Beria. “My infantry’ll be the force that’ll settle the matter. You’ll see.” He slapped Cherkashin on the shoulder. “Your air defense missiles and tank rounds can’t take out every individual, Sergei. I tell you, my lads’ll be onto whoever survives their drop.”

“Drop?” said Abramov brusquely. “They’re not crazy enough to try parachuting their force in. Besides, bad weather is coming. It will be like duck shooting for our men. No, General, the Americans’ll be ferrying them in by helicopter.” Abramov then turned to Cherkashin. “Your missile batteries should find them easily.”

“Not a problem, Comrade. We’ll blow them out of the sky. It’ll be raining Americans. Dead Americans.”

They all laughed. While none of the three believed it would be a cakewalk, it was obvious that the American MEU force of two-thousand-plus marines had no chance of surprising ABC when it had to move in from the Sea of Japan before unleashing any attack. Even so, the three rebel Russian generals were determined not to burden themselves with any time-wasting formalities that would slow down ABC’s production lines. Accordingly, the triumvirate phoned each of the company’s commanders, pointing out to them that insofar as everyone’s financial future, from general to private, was on the line, there’d be no time to implement what they called the “restraints” of the Geneva Convention. There would be no American prisoners taken.

“Should we issue a written directive?” posited Beria.

“Why?” said Abramov, shrugging at the infantry general’s question. “Then it’s on paper. You’re not in the party anymore, Viktor.” He paused, then added, “Remember what happened at the Wannsee Conference?”

Viktor and Sergei Cherkashin nodded. It had been the meeting convened by Reinhard Heydrich at Wannsee in Berlin where the final solution of the so-called Jewish Question was settled, of which no copies were to be kept, but one copy was, and because of this copy Adolph Eichmann and others paid the price. At the beginning of ABC’s formation they had rationalized their willingness to sell their souls to a terrorist clientele as a decision that was really based on an intention to rebuild and reassert Soviet might. But Putin and others hadn’t been able to get a handle on the Chechen terrorists, and so ABC had adopted the oldest rationale for corruption in mankind’s history: If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. And when they realized the enormous profits to be made selling hitherto stockpiled Soviet weaponry to terrorists, the crisp sound of newly printed currency soon drowned the conscience of any lingering party loyalist. Besides, there was no turning back. The dream of making a bundle, retiring to a dacha on the Black Sea, held them in its thrall. There would be swimming pools, caviar by the bowlful, your own private security as you lay in the hot Caspian sun. And flunkie lawyers arranging for you to go legitimate by investing in the big American pipeline being built through the Stans, the seven countries that before Gorbachev had been Soviet republics, kept in line by the kind of iron discipline the three generals had used to establish and maintain order at the Lake Khanka complex.

“Any sight of them yet?” Cherkashin, the most impatient of the three, asked his duty officer, who was monitoring the big screen of the air defense radar.

“No, sir. But we’ll know the second they take off from that helo carrier, the Yorktown.”

“You sure?” pressed Abramov.

“Yes, General. We have people on the coast.”

Abramov was now looking down to the right of the radar console at the situation table of the kind used by Royal Air Force controllers during the crucial Battle of Britain, contemplating the cutout silhouettes of the twelve American vessels. His old-fashioned reliance on the blackboard amused the younger computer-age duty officer. But all three of the Russian generals had seen what had happened to Saddam Hussein’s air force when the Americans had taken out the Iraqis’ early warning radar with Stealths. The Iraqis, with their sophisticated radar knocked out and without a “situation table” of the kind Abramov was now studying, were literally working in the dark and rapidly losing control of their dire situation.

“Question is,” pressed Abramov, “whether the Americans will launch fighters from the McCain.”

“No,” said Cherkashin confidently. “Moscow might turn a blind eye to a quick insertion of U.S. troops on our soil. After all, we accepted Allied intervention in 1917 in Archangel, but Moscow’s pride’ll draw the line at permitting foreign fighters in Russian airspace.”

“What I don’t understand,” said Abramov, is how American intelligence found its way to us.”

“Luck,” proffered Beria. “Pure, stupid American luck.”

“Whatever it was,” put in Cherkashin, “we should make damn sure we get this Freeman. He’s a cunning bastard. He’s like that Patton. And this’ll be the second time he’s been here. We don’t want to have to deal with him again.”

On this there was unanimous agreement.

“Well,” said Beria, “last I heard, our Arab friends were working with someone in Hamas.” He paused. “Or perhaps it was the Abu Haf’s al-Masri Martyr Brigades. Some youngster who has lived in America, studied there.”

“A bomber, you mean?” said Cherkashin.