“Do we have nuke-tipped cruise missiles?”
“No, the President has to authorize that. The birds and the warheads are co-located at Whiteman Air Force Base along with the B-2s. It would take a day or so to mate them up. I’d recommend that the President authorize that if this Chinese situation goes any further,” Moore concluded.
And the best way to deliver nuclear-tipped cruise missiles-off Navy submarines or carrier-based strike aircraft-was impossible because the Navy had been completely stripped of its nuclear weapons inventory, and fixing that would not be especially easy, Jackson knew. The fallout of the nuclear explosion in Denver, which had brought the world to the brink of a full-scale nuclear exchange, had caused Russia and America to take a deep breath and then to eliminate all of their ballistic launchers. Both sides still had nuclear weapons, of course. For America they were mostly B-61 and -83 gravity bombs and W-80 thermonuclear warheads that could be affixed to cruise missiles. Both systems could be delivered with a high degree of confidence and accuracy, and stealth. The B-2A bomber was invisible to radar (and hard enough to spot visually unless you were right next to it) and the cruise missiles smoked in so low that they merged not merely with ground clutter but with highway traffic as well. But they lacked the speed of ballistic weapons. That was the trouble with the fearsome weapons, but that was also their advantage. Twenty-five minutes from turning the “enable-launch” key to impact-even less for the sea-launched sort, which usually flew shorter distances. But those were all gone, except for the ones kept for ABM tests, and those had been modified to make them difficult to fit with warheads.
“Well, we just try to keep this one conventional. How many nuclear weapons could we deliver if we had to?”
“First strike, with the B-2s?” Moore asked. “Oh, eighty or so. If you figure two per target, enough to turn every major city in the PRC into a parking lot. It would kill upwards of a hundred million people,” the Chairman added. He didn’t have to say that he had no particular desire to do that. Even the most bloodthirsty soldiers were repelled by the idea of killing civilians in such numbers, and those who made four-star rank got there by being thoughtful, not psychotic.
“Well, if we let them know that, they ought to think hard about pissing us off that big,” Jackson decided.
“They ought to be
How do we go about calling up reserves?” Bondarenko asked.
Theoretically, almost every Russian male citizen was liable to such a call-up, because most of them had served in their country’s military at one time or another. It was a tradition that dated back to the czars, when the Russian army had been likened to a steamroller because of its enormous mass.
The practical problem today, however, was that the state didn’t know where they all lived. The state required that the veterans of uniformed service tell the army when they moved from one residence to another, but the men in question, since until recently they’d needed the state’s permission to move anywhere, assumed that the state knew where they were and rarely bothered, and the country’s vast and cumbersome bureaucracy was too elephantine to follow up on such things. As a result, neither Russia, nor the Soviet Union before it, had done much to test its ability to call up trained soldiers who’d left their uniforms behind. There were whole reserve divisions that had the most modern of equipment, but it had never been moved after being rolled into their warehouses, and was attended only by cadres of active-duty mechanics who actually spent the time to maintain it, turning over the engines in accordance with written schedules which they followed as mindlessly as the orders that had been drafted and printed. And so, the general commanding the Far East Military Theater had access to thousands of tanks and guns for which he had no soldiers, along with mountains of shells and virtual lakes of diesel fuel.
The word “camouflage,” meaning a trick to be played or a ruse, is French in origin. It really ought to be Russian, however, because Russians were the world’s experts at this military art. The storage sites for the real tanks that formed the backbone of Bondarenko’s theoretical army were so skillfully hidden that only his own staff knew where they were. A good fraction of the sites had even evaded American spy satellites that had searched for years for the locations. Even the roads leading to the storage sites were painted with deceptive colors, or planted with false conifer trees. This was all one more lesson of World War II, when the Soviet Army had totally befuddled the Germans so often that one wondered why the Wehrmacht even bothered employing intelligence officers, they had been snookered so frequently.
“We’re getting orders out now,” Colonel Aliyev replied. “With luck, half of them ought to find people who’ve worn the uniform. We could do better if we made a public announcement.”
“No,” Bondarenko replied. “We can’t let them know we’re getting ready. What about the officer corps?”
“For the reserve formations? Well, we have an ample supply of lieutenants and captains, just no privates or NCOs for them to command. I suppose if we need to we can field a complete regiment or so of junior officers driving tanks,” Aliyev observed dryly.
“Well, such a regiment ought to be fairly proficient,” the general observed with what passed for light humor. “How fast to make the call-up happen?”
“The letters are already addressed and stamped. They should all be delivered in three days.”
“Mail them at once. See to it yourself, Andrey,” Bondarenko ordered.
“By your command, Comrade General.” Then he paused. “What do you make of this NATO business?”
“If it brings us help, then I am for it. I’d love to have American aircraft at my command. I remember what they did to Iraq. There are a lot of bridges I’d like to see dropped into the rivers they span.”
“And their land forces?”
“Do not underestimate them. I’ve seen how they train, and I’ve driven some of their equipment. It’s excellent, and their men know how to make use of it. One company of American tanks, competently led and supported, can hold off a whole regiment. Remember what they did to the army of the United Islamic Republic. Two active-duty regiments and a brigade of territorials crushed two heavy corps as if it were a sand-table exercise. That’s why I want to upgrade our training. Our men are as good as theirs, Andrey Petrovich, but their training is the best I have ever seen. Couple that to their equipment, and there you have their advantage.”
“And their commanders?”
“Good, but no better than ours. Shit, they copy our doctrine time and again. I’ve challenged them on this face-to-face, and they freely admit that they admire our operational thinking. But they make better use of our doctrine than we do-because they train their men better.”
“And they train better because they have more money to spend.”
“There you have it. They don’t have tank commanders painting rocks around the motor pool, as we do,” Bondarenko noted sourly. He’d just begun to change that, but just-begun was a long way from mission- accomplished. “Get the call-up letters out, and remember, we must keep this quiet. Go. I have to talk to Moscow.”
“Yes, Comrade General.” The G-3 made his departure.
Well, ain’t that something?” Major General Diggs commented after watching the TV show.
“Makes you wonder what NATO is for,” Colonel Masterman agreed.
“Duke, I grew up expecting to see T-72 tanks rolling through the Fulda Gap like cockroaches on a Bronx apartment floor. Hell, now they’re our friends?” He had to shake his head in disbelief. “I’ve met a few of their senior people, like that Bondarenko guy running the Far East Theater. He’s pretty smart, serious professional. Visited me at Fort Irwin. Caught on real fast, really hit it off with Al Hamm and the Blackhorse. Our kind of soldier.”
“Well, sir, I guess he really is now, eh?”
That’s when the phone rang. Diggs lifted it. “General Diggs. Okay, put him through…. Morning, sir…. Just fine, thanks, and-yes? What’s that? … This is serious, I presume…. Yes, sir. Yes, sir, we’re ready as hell. Very well, sir. Bye.” He set the phone back down. “Duke, good thing you’re sitting down.”
“What gives?”
“That was SACEUR. We got alert orders to be ready to entrain and move east.”
“East where?” the divisional operations officer asked, surprised. An unscheduled exercise in Eastern Germany, maybe?
“Maybe as far as Russia, the eastern part. Siberia, maybe,” Diggs added in a voice that didn’t entirely believe
