Taras Zenkovitch, the burly Ukrainian field marshal in the Amur heights, watched a split-screen monitor that simultaneously showed spy-eye views of the western Amur basin and the Irkutsk region around Lake Baikal. 'Were I Chang Wei,' he rumbled into his scrambler circuit to the Supreme Council room deep in the Urals, 'I would be mobilizing at Ulan Bator for a strike toward
Chairman Oleg Konieff's reply lanced out of the mumble of several voices: 'Ski troops in August, Marshal Zenkovitch?'
'They will need skis before Chang is through testing us there.'
'Indeed. Have you less concern for their movement from Sinkiang into Kirghiz and Kazakhstan?'
'With the shoulder-fired weapons we furnish the Kazakhs, I would say Chang is the one who will have the greater concern,' Zenkovitch replied. 'If the Afghans had been as well supplied against us in 1980, our gunships and personnel carriers would have availed us little.'
It was a gamble to trust the southern Islamic republics which had once been member states of the USSR, but so far it was paying off. The doughty Turkic-speaking Kazakhs and Kirghiz valued their nomadic traditions more than progress. A mounted, befurred Kazakh with a self-guided SSM at his shoulder comprised a wicked welcome for an Indian gun-ship. RUS leaders were beginning to hope that buffer republics were more economical than tributary states.
'The SinoInds will suffer far more attrition than we, along the southwestern border,' Konieff agreed. 'Our situation south of Baikal may be more serious—
'We will know that by the efforts they make to destroy it,' said Zenkovitch. 'Will they send conventional air strikes, or nuke the UstKut and Kumora railyards?'
Another voice; Zenkovitch guessed it was Suslov, the dour Georgian marshal. 'You seem to take the loss of our rail link for granted.'
'We have known it was vulnerable. We can only sell it dearly and,' he tried rough optimism, 'hope the sale is not transacted.'
Konieff, the crucial connection between the RUS Army high command and the all-powerful Supreme Council, headed off this clash of generals with, 'Can our troops move beyond those passes to Ulan Bator?'
'I could have two divisions in Mongolia in sixty hours,' Suslov rasped. 'But they would only draw more Chinese into a region that must be defended man against man. Far more efficient to strike directly into Sinkiang, as I outlined in my summary.'
Murmurs of agreement, with no grave dissent. RUS supply lines were much better to the Kazakhstan- Sinkiang border, and the Kazakhs — more or less friendly — were not expected to resist RUS troops moving toward China.
'And where do you stand on the defense of Irkutsk?'
'I concur with Zenkovitch,' said Suslov, 'with division HQ supporting a brigade of mountain troops in the passes north of Ulan Bator. No more than a brigade at the moment; we do not want to overstate our preparations there.'
When Suslov and Zenkovitch agreed, it was a marriage of exigency and monolithic far-sightedness: fox and hedgehog. Konieff expected agreement from the Supreme Council and said as much.
In another war room near Yangku, Minister of Defense Chang Wei mused over a battle map with strategists of the CPA; the Chinese People's Army. The relief map might have seemed anachronistic with Chang, at forty-three the most vigorous leader of the CPA since Lin Piao during the historic Long March. Yet the solidity of the map lent an air of realism somehow lacking in video displays. Chang's heavy-lidded eyes were cool, but the pulse at his temple was prominent: When he spoke now, the chiefs of staff knew he addressed rotund Jung Hsia, Marshal of the 3rd CPA. 'The flatlands and marshes of the Amur were a bitter lesson, compatriots. We would have done better to strike from Ulan Bator.'
Jung swallowed audibly. Wu Shih, a Jung disciple who was quick to see an implication, took the apologist's role. 'The Amur spearhead was a courageous blow, esteemed Chang. With more hovercraft, the 3rd Army might have reached the Dzhagdy Chain before the counterblow fell.' The Dzhagdy range was the last natural barrier to the Okhotsk Sea. Once into those recesses, the CPA troops could have lived through the Wall of Lenin. “We all accepted the risk; must we not accept its consequences?'
As Chang replied he removed small counters from the map, bitterly aware of their symbolism. 'Three front- line divisions are a costly consequence,' he said, and glanced almost shyly at the small colorless man who had so far said nothing. 'Fortunately, I am assured, Minister Cha can extract a greater toll from the enemy.'
Cha Tsuni, Vice Minister of Health, gave a barely perceptible nod. A microbiologist and by far the least- known of CPA weaponeers, Cha was accorded special status. Few outside his laboratories in Tsinghai province knew exactly what he was doing. Cha adopted the serenity of a mandarin, the oral grace of a poet. Somehow this mannered image did not seem incongruous as he outlined his plan for mass destruction.
'The RUS would not be surprised,' he began, placing his palm over the map's flat Mongolian expanse, 'to find our mongol clients defecting as we expand our air bases in the Gobi Desert. They have had the same problem,' he added with the barest of sarcasms. “They probably would welcome such a general defection, a migration to safety among the Buryat people — something like a pincers surrounding Lake Baikal.
'It is possible that such an exodus would be turned back by force, but the RUS needs laborers and, for the moment, can feed them. Now, esteemed comrades, I ask you what would happen if it should be discovered that refugees had spread smallpox into the Baikal region?'
The response was immediate consternation save Chang, who had already heard the arguments. Once eradicated from the globe except for laboratory strains, smallpox could be spread easily by immunized carriers. When CPA infantry advanced into the epidemic, they would be protected by vaccination. Such a weapon could be countered within a few months, of course, but by that time the Irkutsk region would be in Chinese hands. So would the Baikal-Amur railway, and by a lightning thrust northward China could cut the Russian Union of Soviets in two. The natural resources of Siberia could then be at SinoInd disposal, and an armistice might be quickly arranged with RUS leaders whose troops might not advance into an epidemic. Time enough, after that, to deal with America and the other allies. American concentration into urban clots had made it easy to diminish its gross national product a hundredfold. Under such circumstances, — and always assuming that Canada would not prove too meddlesome — an encroachment on the US might prove interesting.
Jung Hsia: 'And why did we not use this tactic earlier?'
'Because we did not know what similar weapons the enemy might use in retaliation,' Chang supplied. 'But paranthrax is sweeping the eastern portion of the United States to such effect that we should be able to make the RUS see reason. They have not, hence probably will not, use germ warfare on this continent. In other words, after one quick success we might obtain a pan-Asian moratorium on biological weapons.'
'A dangerous presumption,' said Wu. 'And the others?'
'Americans are more vulnerable than we, and less advanced in the precise tailoring of microbes,' Cha smiled. “Even with their delivery systems, they could not destroy us as easily with microbes as we could destroy them. Besides: it was India, not we, who spread paranthrax on them. We have already expressed regrets, by suitable channels, to the Americans about that.'
Jung stared at his relief map and sighed. “How quickly the tactics become a simple matter of ethnocide.'
'I think not,' Chang replied smoothly. 'The US/RUS allies will surely see, and soon, that the statistics of genocide favor us. It will not be long before atmospheric contamination has risen so high that the RUS and US will be begging one another not to drop another nuclear device anywhere on the globe.'
'Curtailing their own special advantage,' Wu put in.
'Exactly. As I have already told you,' Chang added obliquely, 'our own, ah, delivery system is well underway in Szechuan. Only China is so experienced in coordinating thousands of small industrial centers. Only we know just how many small factories are contributing to the devices. Not even Casimiro must discover it in India; there is no way to maintain a secret that is shared by five hundred members of a democratic Parliament.'
There had already been one leak from the Lok Sabha, India's lower house of Parliament, on the Florida invasion. This was only a minor irritant in the Yangku war room, for neither the invaders nor their delivery system
