Darpa Alpha

“How do you possibly come to that conclusion? You think I’m an idiot? You think I’ve decoded the message incorrectly?”

“No,” answered Beria. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with your decoding, but that you haven’t understood what Freeman means.”

“I’ve misunderstood, you say? What it tells me, Viktor — and, I might add, what it tells Cherkashin — is that we need everybody here, particularly crack troops like yours, to guard headquarters and the computer. The whole thrust of Freeman’s message — if you’d read it carefully—is that he intends to attack the entrance. Freeman knows, and he’s right, that if he destroys us and the computer here at headquarters, the Americans have won. Lathes — all the engineering stuff in the tunnels — can be replaced, but if the DARPA ALPHA information, is destroyed, then we’re finished. My propali! Kaput! Didn’t you read the decode, or what?”

Beria was stunned. What the hell was Abramov ranting about, asking him ad nauseam whether he understood the intercepted message between Freeman and Tibbet?

“Da,” Beria said, employing the sullen tone of a disrespectful peasant, staring angrily at Abramov and his big-prick cigar. “Yes, Comrade General, I saw your fucking decode, but you’re so cocksure of yourself, Mikhail, you’re not seeing what the hell is happening, are you?” Beria paused, using his revolver hand to angrily wave away the thick, bluish gray smoke, the Havana’s stink mixing with the choking fumes of Abramov’s twenty massed main battle tanks. “Aren’t you watching Freeman’s troops over there through your binoculars? If you ask me, they’re more than a diversionary force. They’re marines from the American fleet. They’re tough bastards.”

“Huh,” said Abramov dismissively. “You’re seeing what you want to believe.”

Beria looked hard at Abramov. With the sounds of battle growing closer, he reached inside his battle tunic, pulled out his copy of Abramov’s decoded intercept, and quickly read it aloud, then asked Abramov, “The reference to this Peter Rose?”

“Yes, I saw it,” said Abramov. “It’s probably a good-luck phrase the Americans use in the same way that we—”

“Do you know who Pete Rose is?” Beria pressed, breaking open his pistol. It was always the last check he made before going into action, like rubbing a rabbit’s foot for good luck.

“No,” Abramov answered testily, “I don’t know who he is and, as I said, it doesn’t matter. A go-code or an operational name can be anything. Operation ‘Bird Rescue,’ for example.”

Beria, seeing that each chamber was loaded, snapped the revolver shut. “You see no other significance in the name?”

“No.”

Beria, slipping the revolver into his holster, asked Cherkashin the same question.

“No,” answered Cherkashin, who, up to this point, had been ignoring the argument, poring instead over his pilot’s tactical charts and the meteorological reports, which called for more heavy rain.

“Rose,” said Beria, “was an American baseball player. Famous.”

Neither the air force general nor Abramov showed much interest.

“I don’t follow sports,” said Abramov, with an air of condescension, as a wine snob might address a beer drinker, after which he took obvious satisfaction, as commander of the Sixth Siberian Armored as well as overall garrison commander, in ordering that the bulk of ABC’s forces, at least three-quarters of all personnel, were to secure H-block. His tanks would form a ring of steel around it so that the assault force, which the American was no doubt assembling with a fresh infusion of marines from the second wave, would not be met by a skeleton ABC force as Freeman would no doubt have it, but instead would be annihilated. And if the guards in the tunnels could not hold, the duty officer need only press a button and the RDX would vaporize the enemy in the tunnels — as well as many of ABC’s soldiers. But Abramov knew that such “collateral damage” could always be replaced by ABC’s danger bonuses. Russia was full of desperate men without work, soldiers without work.

“Pete Rose,” Beria continued, “was disgraced and never made baseball’s Hall of Fame at Cooperstown because he had been caught betting on baseball games. I think mention of him by Freeman is to tell Tibbet that everything in the message is exactly the opposite of what Freeman intends to do.”

“You’re crazy,” said Abramov. “You’ve been reading too much American press. It’s full of lies.”

Beria ignored the remark and continued calmly, “During World War II, when English-speaking Japanese pilots tried to pass themselves off on radio as Americans, the American pilots, if suspicious, used to ask questions, the answers to which were common knowledge to born-and-bred Americans. If the American pilots didn’t get the right responses, they knew there was a spy amongst them. And if you’ve bothered to read Freeman’s file — indeed, if you know anything about Freeman — you’ll know he has an encyclopedic mind about things military, and it’s exactly the kind of trickery and wartime practice that he’d know about.”

Abramov opened his hands, like a holy man, in the universal gesture of conciliation. “I tell you, Viktor, this Pete Rose thing is nothing. The phrase is probably merely a decryption identification key for their intercomputer traffic. You’re being paranoid, Viktor. Now recall your infantry.”

Before Beria could respond, Cherkashin added, “Mikhail’s right, Viktor. You’re making too much of this. We’re all on edge. But you have to recall your naval platoons because we’ll need them here. We’ll finish the Americans off together, eh?”

It was two against one, so Beria compromised. He recalled two of the four platoons — eighty of the best, and now most highly paid, terrorist infantry in the world.

“Good decision, Viktor,” said Abramov. “Now I should tell you both that I’ve ordered several company HQs to assign video technicians along the two-mile front. That means, Comrades, the pictures of the Americans being decimated as they attack us will be on CNN and Al Jazeera this evening, tomorrow morning’s newscasts at the latest.”

Cherkashin was a tad uncomfortable with Abramov’s use of the word “decimated.” The tank general was using it, Cherkashin knew, as most people did, to mean a casualty rate of nine out of ten, when in fact it had originally meant one casualty in ten. Still, this was a high rate for American commanders. Abramov’s TV idea was a good one, because the American public always started to panic as soon as they saw a single body bag coming off an aircraft on CNN. And when the CNN woman with the big chest, Marte Price, started yakking about more American casualties, the Americans would start going weak at the knees. She and other American media announcers were considered by ABC’s clientele such as El-Hage, Hamas, and Hezbollah as valuable, albeit unwitting, propagandists for the terrorist cause.

One of a pair of Hummers flown in less than ten minutes before from the second wave and ordered by Tibbet to assist Freeman in his attack through the tunnels’ exit, skidded to a stop as its gunner saw tanks moving and snaking quickly through the minefield’s safe road. The four tanks’ commanders were doing an Israeli, standing up, cupolas open to see better in the pouring rain, despite the T-90s’ infrared recon and laser-targeting system. The commanders, four of Abramov’s best from the Siberian Sixth, were cursing the snaking course of the road, meant to keep the tanks off a straight line to prevent any anti-armor units having time to “frame” them for successful missile attack. But now that the American line was reported as being still five hundred yards southeast of the square mile of mines, it was unlikely any of them would see any more Russian armor in the heavy rain.

Radio silence between the four T-90s was maintained. Instead, the tanks’ COs were communicating by the tried-and-true Russian method of using rapid yet distinct flag signals, such as those still used by such elite forces as the British Royal Navy when a ship was requested to go SID — Signals Dead — for reasons of launching a surprise attack against the enemy. Colonel Nureyev, Abramov’s second in command and tactical leader of the T-90 force, took the small but distinct yellow flag he used on such occasions and held it out snappily to his left. Soon they would be out of the minefield, the crackle and spit of small-arms fire so loud now that he could see the flashes of the soon-to-be outnumbered and outmechanized American force in this area.

Because of the midair collision of the Cobras during the first wave, many marines, because their transport helos had had to take sharp evasive action, ended up being too far north of the minefield and too close to the lake. Fighting their way westward from the lake, then south, they were exhausted and desperately short of ammunition and food. Worst of all, they were now too far away to lend support to Freeman’s team.

The three-man fire team of Kegg and the two other marines, one of them with the SAW machine gun, formed a C-shaped defensive arc facing away from the general area indicated on the Korean’s