over fourteen thousand kilometers. Only forty were built, but the little wing at Engels Air Base near Saratov, six hundred kilometers southeast of Moscow, was the pride of the Russian air force.
Gryzlov made his way back from the cockpit and sat in the instructor’s seat between the navigator/bombardier and defensive-systems officers, who sat side by side in their ejection seats behind the two pilots. Although the Tu-160 was a dream to fly, and the best seat in the house was definitely the cockpit — except during landing, when the long nose and very high approach and landing speeds made landing the Blackjack very, very hairy — all the action was back here. He stopped at the “honey bucket” in the rest area between the pilots’ and systems officers’ compartments and took a pee, glancing wryly at the toilet-paper holder hanging on a wire next to the bucket — the only piece of wood, it was said, carried aloft on a Russian attack plane.
The systems operators’ compartment was dark but spacious — there was even enough room for beach chairs and ice chests back here for very long flights, although they were not needed on this one. “How is it going, Major?” Gryzlov asked cross-cockpit.
“Very well, sir,” Major Boris Bolkeim, the navigator/bombardier, replied. He gave the DSO, or defensive systems officer, a swat on the shoulder, and the other man hurriedly safed his ejection seat and started to unstrap so Gryzlov could sit there. But Gryzlov shook his hand at the DSO to tell him to stay put and instead took the jump seat. “Twenty minutes to initial point. The system’s doing well.”
“Any warning broadcasts, Captain?”
“None, sir,” responded Captain Mikhail Osipov, the defensive systems officer. “All known frequencies are silent. I’m a little surprised.”
“Hopefully it means everyone’s done his job,” Gryzlov said. Bolkeim offered Gryzlov a Russian cigarette, but the chief of staff took out a pack of Marlboros, and both he and the DSO accepted hungrily. As they smoked, they chatted about the mission, the military, their families at home. It was just like old times, Gryzlov thought — taking a break before the action started, talking about everything and nothing in particular. This was the part of the job he really enjoyed, getting out into the field with the troops, having a little fun, and doing some serious business at the same time. Sure, he was showing his stars, too, but that wasn’t the main reason he did it.
It was not a particularly good time to be chief of the general staff. Anatoliy Gryzlov was unlucky enough to take over the position from the disgraced and imprisoned Valeriy Zhurbenko, who had tried to make a deal with a Russian mobster to force a number of Balkan states to agree to allow the mobster, Pavel Kazakov, to build a pipeline through their country. Gryzlov was nothing more than a politically expedient choice — he was a highly decorated and capable but profoundly unpolitical air force officer — just the way the Russian parliament wanted it.
Unfortunately, that also meant he was no friend of anyone in the Kremlin, especially the president, Valentin Gennadievich Sen’kov. So far that didn’t seem to make too much difference. Sen’kov was lying low, reluctant to poke his nose out of the Kremlin too far for fear of its getting bitten off by some zealous — or jealous — politician. Things were just plain stagnant in Moscow these days. There was no money to do anything — which was fine with most folks, since no one really wanted to do much of anything anyway.
But Gryzlov wanted something more. Gryzlov was a former Russian air force interceptor pilot, flight test pilot, and astronaut. With his gymnast’s physique, he exuded energy — and he saw most of his energy going to waste in the eyes of his troops, everyone from generals to the lowliest clerks and cooks.
A perfect example of the lack of Russian determination: Chechnya. The little Russian enclave in southern Russia, between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, had already been granted limited autonomy by the Russian government, yet the Muslim separatists there still held considerable power and still performed acts of terrorism throughout Russia, especially in neighboring Dagestan province. The separatists were being openly supported by the pro-Muslim governments of nearby Azerbaijan, who in turn were funded and supported by the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Republic of Turkey.
The place was still a Russian province, for God’s sake. And with just a few hundred thousand people in all of the province of Chechnya, most of whom lived in the major cities of Grozny and Gudermes, and very few resources except for the fertile farmlands in the east. It should be simple, Gryzlov thought, to crush the Chechen rebels no matter how much support they were getting from overseas. But the terrain was very rugged in the south, which made it easy for guerrillas and terrorists to covertly move out of the country into Dagestan and the former Soviet republic of Georgia.
That’s why, when reliable intelligence information came in about rebel movements, it was important to react quickly. Sending in ground forces was almost always a waste of time — the rebels knew the mountains better than the military did. Helicopter gunships were effective, but the rebels had every known or suspected full- or part-time helicopter base within five hundred kilometers under constant surveillance. If a single helicopter moved, the rebels knew about it instantly.
The best way to deal with the rebels was by air from well outside the region. Anatoliy Gryzlov preferred the long-range bombers. Not because he was a former bomber pilot, but because they were the most effective weapon system for the job — as long as the political will to use them still existed. He was determined to spark that political will. He wanted nothing more than to begin an era of Russian military dominance in all of Central Asia and Europe — starting with the breakaway province of Chechnya.
“Ten minutes to initial point,” the bombardier announced.
“General?” the pilot called back on intercom.
“I’ll stay back here,” Gryzlov said. The spare pilot took the copilot’s seat, and Gryzlov tightened his shoulder straps in the jump seat and got ready for the action.
Large numbers of rebel forces had been detected moving north from the Republic of Georgia along the Caucasus Mountains between Dagestan and Chechnya. They had been untouchable and virtually untrackable until they were most likely forced to leave the protection of the mountains — driven out, no doubt, by the freezing temperatures and unbearable living conditions of the mountains — and moved into the small mining town of Vedeno, just sixteen kilometers north of the provincial border. The force was estimated at about two to three thousand — a very large force to be traveling together. Not all were fighters, perhaps four or five hundred; the rest were family members and support personnel.
“Initial point in one minute,” the navigator/bombardier announced. He checked his inertial navigation system’s drift rate — less than two miles per hour, pretty good for this system. He made the final radar update and zeroed out all of the system’s velocity errors, then dumped the latest alignment, heading, position, and velocity information to the twenty-four Kh-15 short-range attack missiles they carried in the bomber’s two huge bomb bays.
The plan was simple: first cut it off, then kill it.
At the initial point the bombardier began launching the missiles. One by one, each 1,200-kilogram missile dropped from its rotary launcher, ignited its solid-rocket motor, and shot off into space. A protective coating kept the missile safe as it flew at over twice the speed of sound up to fifteen thousand meters altitude, then started its terminal dive on its targets.
The first twelve missiles, carrying 150-kilogram high-explosive warheads, hit bridges and major intersections of the roads leading in and out of the rebels’ sanctuary at Vedeno. Since the missiles had a range of almost ninety kilometers, no one on the ground had any warning of the attack. Five other Tu-160 Blackjack bombers also launched their missiles around the outskirts of Vedeno from long range, blasting away at known vehicle-marshaling areas, storage facilities, hideouts, and encampments outside the town.
The second phase of the attack didn’t commence for ten minutes. The reason was simple: The rebels’ typical pattern when under attack was to leave their families behind in town and try to escape into the mountains. In ten minutes they should just be discovering that their escape routes had been cut off — leaving them out in the open. At that moment the Tu-160s opened up their aft bomb bays.
And the real carnage began.
All the aft bomb bays carried twelve more Kh-15 missiles on rotary launchers, but the warheads on these contained fuel-air explosive devices. Explosive fuel was dispensed in a large cloud about two hundred meters aboveground and then ignited, creating a massive fireball over three hundred meters in diameter that instantly incinerated anything it touched. And each missile was targeted not just for the outskirts of Vedeno but for the town itself.
Within moments the place that was once the city of Vedeno was completely engulfed in fire. Over four square kilometers were leveled and burned instantly, and the overpressure caused by the multiple fuel-air explosions
