Grishanov nodded. There was no harm in giving secrets to this man, was there? 'The geologists say it is immensely strong, and we tunneled into it back in the late 1950s. I've been there twice. I helped supervise the air- defense office when they were building it. We expect - this is the truth, Robin - we expect to get our people there by train.'
'It won't matter. We know about it. If you know where it is, you can take it out, just a matter of how many bombs you put there.' The American had a hundred grams of vodka in him. 'Probably the Chinese do, too. But they'll go for Moscow anyway, especially if it's a surprise attack.'
'Three groups?'
'That's how I'd do it.' Robin's feet straddled an air-navigation chart of the southeastern Soviet Union. 'Three vectors, from these three bases, three aircraft each, two to carry the bombs, one a protective jammer. Jammer takes the lead. Bring in all three groups on line, like, spaced wide like this.' He traced likely courses on the map. 'Start your penetration descent here, take 'em right into these valleys, and by the time they hit the plains -'
'Steppes,' Kolya corrected.
'They're through your first line of defense, okay? They're smoking in low, tike three hundred feet. Maybe they don't even jam at first. Maybe you have one special group, even. The guys you really train.'
'What do you mean, Robin?'
'You have night flights into Moscow, airliners, I mean?'
'Of course.'
'Well, what say you take a Badger, and you leave the strobes on, okay, and maybe you have little glow lights down the fuselage that you can turn on and off - you know, like windows? Hey, I'm an airliner.'
'You mean?'
'It's something we looked at once. There's a squadron with the light kits still at... Pease, I think. That used to be the job - the B-47s based in England. If we ever decided like you guys were going to go after us, from intelligence or something, okay? You gotta have a plan for everything. That was one of ours. We called it Jumpshot. Probably in the dead files now, that was one of LeMay's specials. Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev - and Zhiguli. Three birds targeted there, two weapons each. Decap your whole political and military command structure. Hey, look, I'm an airliner!'
It would work, Grishanov thought with an eerie chill. The right time of year, the right time of day... the bomber comes in on a regularly scheduled airliner route. Even in a crisis, the very illusion of something normal would be like a touchstone while people looked for the unusual. Maybe an air-defense squadron would put an aircraft up, a young pilot standing night alert while the senior men slept. He'd close to a thousand meters or so, but at night... at night your mind saw what the brain told it to see. Lights on the fuselage, well, of course it's an airliner. What bomber would be lit up? That was one op-plan the KGB had never tumbled to. How many more gifts would Zacharias give him?
'Anyway, if I was John Chinaman, that's one option. If they don't have much imagination, and go with a straight attack, over this terrain, yeah, they can do that. Probably one group is diversionary. They have a real target, too, but short of Moscow. They fly in high, off vector. About this far out' - he swept a hand across the map - 'they make a radical turn and hit something, you can decide what's important, lots of good targets there. Chances are your fighters keep after them, right?'
'Da.' They'd think the inbound bombers were turning away for a secondary target.
'The other two groups loop around from another direction, and they smoke in low. One of 'em's gonna make it, too. We've played it out a million times, Kolya. We know your radars, we know your bases, we know your airplanes, we know how you train. You're not that hard to beat. And the Chinese, they studied with you, right? You taught them. They know your doctrine and everything.'
It was how he said it. No guile at all. And this was a man who had penetrated the North Vietnamese air defenses over eighty times. Eighty times.
'So how do I -'
'Defend against it?' Robin shrugged, bending down to examine the chart again. 'I need better maps, but first thing, you examine the passes one at a time. You remember that a bomber isn't a fighter. He can't maneuver all that great, especially low. Most of what he's doing is keeping the airplane from crunching into the ground, right? I don't know about you, but that makes me nervous. He's going to pick a valley he can maneuver in. Especially at night. You put your fighters there. You put ground radars there. You don't need big sexy ones. That's just a bell- ringer. Then you plan to catch him when he comes out.'
'Move the defenses back? I can't do that!'
'You put your defenses where they can work, Kolya, not to follow a dotted line on a piece of paper. Or do you like eating Chinese all that much? That's always been a weakness with you people. By the way, it also shortens your lines, right? You save money and assets. Next thing, you remember that the other guy, he knows how pilots think, too - a kill is a kill, right? Maybe there's decoy groups designed to draw your people out, okay? We have scads of radar lures we plan to use. You have to allow for that. You control your people. They stay in their sectors unless you have a really good reason to move them...'
Colonel Grishanov had studied his profession for more than twenty years, had studied Luftwaffe documents not merely related to prisoner interrogation, but also classified studies of how the Kammhuber Line had been set up. This was incredible, almost enough to make him take a drink himself. But not quite, he told himself. This wasn't a briefing document in the making, wasn't a learned White Paper for delivery at the Voroshilov Academy. This was a learned book, highly classified, but a book:Origin and Evolution of American Bomber Doctrine. From such a book he could go on to marshal's stars, all because of his American friend.
'Let's all stay back here,' Marty Young said. 'They're shooting all live stuff.'
'Makes sense to me,' Dutch said. 'I'm used to having things go off a couple hundred yards behind me.'
'And four hundred knots of delta-V,' Greer added for him.
'A lot safer that way, James,' Maxwell pointed out.
They stood behind an earthen berm, the official military term for a pile of dirt, two hundred yards from the camp. It made watching difficult, but two of the five had aviator's eyes, and they knew where to look.
'How long have they been moving in?'
'About an hour. Any time now,' Young breathed.
'I can't hear a thing,' Admiral Maxwell whispered.
It was hard enough to see the site. The buildings were visible only because of their straight lines, something which nature abhors for one reason or another. Further concentration revealed the dark rectangles of windows. The guard towers, erected only that day, were hard to spot as well.
'There's a few tricks we play,' Marty Young noted. 'Everybody gets vitamin-A supplements for night vision... Maybe a few percentage points of improvement in night vision. You play every card in the deck, right?' All they heard was the wind whispering through the treetops. There was a surreal element to being in the woods like this. Maxwell and Young were accustomed to the hum of an aircraft engine and the faint glow of instrument lights that their eyes scanned automatically between outward sweeps for hostile aircraft, and the gentle floating sensation of an aircraft moving through the night sky. Being rooted to the land gave the feeling of motion that didn't exist as they waited to see something they had never experienced.
'There!'
'Bad news if you saw him move,' Maxwell observed.
'Sir, sender green doesn't have a parking lot with white cars on it,' the voice pointed out. The fleeting shadow had been silhouetted against it, and only Kelly had seen it in any case.
'I guess that's right, Mr Clark.'
The radio sitting on the berm had been transmitting only the noise of static. That changed now, with four long dashes. They were answered at intervals by one, then two, then three, then four dots.
'Teams in place,' Kelly whispered. 'Hold your ears. The senior grenadier takes the first shot when he's ready, and that's the kickoff.'
'Shit,' Greer sneered. He soon regretted it.
The first thing they heard was a distant mutter of twin-bladed helicopter rotors. Designed to make heads turn, and even though every man at the berm knew the plan in intimate detail, it still worked, which pleased Kelly no end. He'd drawn up much of the plan, after all. All heads turned but his.
Kelly thought he might have caught a glimpse of the tritium-painted M-79 sights of one grenadier, but it might
