prospect of losing a hundred thousand soldiers in a war of conquest.”
“And I can stop it only by dropping a nuclear bomb on their capital-which will, by the way, kill a couple of million ordinary people. God damn it!” Ryan swore again.
“More like five million, maybe as many as ten,” General Moore pointed out, earning him a withering look from his Commander in Chief. “Yes, sir, that would work, but I agree the price of doing it’s a little high.”
“Robby?” Jack turned to his Vice President in hope of hearing something encouraging.
“What do you want me to say, Jack? We can hope they realize that this is going to cost them more than they expect, but it would appear the odds are against it.”
“One other thing we need to do is prepare the people for this,” Arnie said. “Tomorrow we should alert the press, and then you’ll have to go on TV and tell everybody what’s happening and why.”
“You know, I really don’t like this job very much-excuse me. That’s rather a puerile thing to say, isn’t it?” SWORDSMAN apologized.
“Ain’t supposed to be fun, Jack,” van Damm observed. “You’ve played the game okay to this point, but you can’t always control the other people at the card table.”
The President’s phone rang. Jack answered it. “Yes? Okay.” He looked up. “Ed, it’s for you.”
Foley stood and walked to take the phone. “Foley … Okay, good, thanks.” He replaced the phone. “Weather’s clearing over Northeast China. We’ll have some visual imagery in half an hour.”
“Mickey, how fast can we get aerial recon assets in place?” Jackson asked.
“We have to fly them in. We have things we can stage out of California, but it’s a lot more efficient to fly them over in a C-17 and lift them off from a Siberian airfield. We can do that in, oh … thirty-six hours from your order.”
“The order is given,” Ryan said. “What sort of aircraft are they?”
“They’re UAVs, sir. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, used to call them drones. They’re stealthy and they stay up a long time. We can download real-time video from them. They’re fabulous for battlefield reconnaissance, the best new toys the Air Force has fielded, so far as the Army is concerned. I can get them going right now.”
“Do it,” Ryan told him.
“Assuming we have a place to land them. But we could stage them out of Elmendorf in Alaska if we have to.” Moore lifted the phone and made his call to the National Military Command Center, the NMCC, in the Pentagon.
For General Peng, things were getting busy. The operation order was topped with the ideographs Long Chun, SPRING DRAGON. The “dragon” part sounded auspicious, since for thousands of years the dragon had been the symbol of imperial rule and also good fortune. There was still plenty of daylight. That suited Peng, and he hoped it would suit his soldiers. Daylight made for good hunting, and made it harder for large bodies of men to hide or move unseen, and that suited his mission.
He was not without misgivings. He was a general officer with orders to fight a war, and nothing makes such a man reflective like instructions to perform the things he’d claimed the ability to do. He would have preferred more artillery and air support, but he had a good deal of the former, and probably enough of the latter. At the moment, he was going over intelligence estimates and maps. He’d studied the Russian defenses on the far side of the border for years, to the point of occasionally putting reconnaissance specialists across the river to scout out the bunkers that had faced south for fifty years. The Russians were good military engineers, and those fixed defenses would take some dealing with.
But his attack plan was a simple one. Behind a massive artillery barrage, he’d put infantry across the Amur River in assault boats to deal with the Russian bunkers, simultaneously bringing up engineers to span the river with ribbon bridges in order to rush his mechanized forces across, up the hills on the far side, then farther north. He had helicopters, though not enough of the attack kind to suit his needs. He’d complained about this, but so had every other senior officer in the People’s Liberation Army. The only thing about the Russian Army that worried him were their Mi-24 attack helicopters. They were clumsy machines but dangerous in their capabilities, if wisely used.
His best intelligence came from reams of Humint from Chinese citizens living illegally but comfortably in Russia-shopkeepers and workers, a fair number of whom were officers or stringers for the Ministry for State Security. He would have preferred more photographs, but his country had only a single orbiting reconnaissance satellite, and the truth was that the imagery purchased from the French SPOT commercial satellite company was better, at one-meter resolution, than his own country could manage. It was also easier to acquire over the Internet, and for that his intelligence coordinator had a blank check. They showed the nearest Russian mechanized formation over a hundred kilometers away. That confirmed the human intelligence that had said only things within artillery range were garrison units assigned to the border defenses. It was interesting that the Russian high command had not surged forces forward, but they didn’t have many to surge, and defending a border, with its numerous crenellations and meanders, used up manpower as a sponge used up water-and they didn’t have that many troops to squander. He also possessed information that this General-Colonel Bondarenko was training his troops harder than his predecessor had, but that was not much cause for concern. The Chinese had been training hard for years, and Ivan would take time to catch up.
No, his only concern was distance. His army and its neighbors had a long way to go. Keeping them supplied would be a problem, because as Napoleon said that an army marched on its stomach, so tanks and tracked vehicles floated on a sea of diesel oil. His intelligence sources gave locations for large Russian stocks, but he couldn’t count on seizing them intact, desirable though that might be, and even though he had plans for helicopter assaults on every one he had charted.
Peng put out his sixtieth cigarette of the day and looked up at his operations officer. “Yes?”
“The final order has arrived. Jump off at 0330 in three days.”
“Will you have everything in place by then?” Peng asked.
“Yes, Comrade General, with twenty-four hours to spare.”
“Good. Let’s make sure that all our men are well fed. It may be a long time between meals for the next few weeks.”
“That order has already been given, Comrade General,” the colonel told him.
“And total radio silence.”
“Of course, Comrade General.”
Not a whisper,” the sergeant said. ”Not even carrier waves.”
The RC-135 Rivet Joint aircraft was the first USAF bird to deploy, flying out of Anderson Air Force base on the island of Guam. It had refueled over the Sea of Okhotsk and entered Russian airspace over the port city of Ayan, and now, two hours later, was just east of Skovorodino on the Russian side of the border. The Rivet Joint was an extensively modified windowless version of the old Boeing 707, crammed with radio-receiving equipment and crewed with experienced ferret personnel, one of only two USAF crews who spoke passable Chinese.
“Sergeant, what’s it mean when you have a lot of soldiers in the field and no radios?” the colonel in command of the mission asked. It was a rhetorical question, of course.
“Same thing it means when your two-year-old isn’t making any noise, sir. He’s crayoning the wall, or doing something else to get his bottom smacked.” The sergeant leaned back in the pilot-type seat, looking at the numerous visual scans tuned to known PLA frequencies. The screen was blank except for mild static. Maybe there’d been some chatter as the PLA had moved units into place, but now there was nothing but some commercial FM traffic, mainly music that was as alien to the American flight crew as Grand Ol’ Opry would have been in Beijing. Two crewmen listening to the civilian stations noted that the lyrics of the Chinese love ballads were as mindless as those of their Nashville counterparts, though the stations were leaning more heavily to patriotic songs at the moment.
The same was noted at Fort Meade, Maryland. The National Security Agency had a lot of ferret satellites up and circling the globe, including two monster Rhyolitetypes in geosynchronous orbit over the equator, and all were tuned to Chinese military and government channels. The FM-radio chatter associated with military formations had trended down to zero in the last twelve hours, and to the uniformed and civilian analysts alike that meant just one thing: A quiet army is an army planning to do something.
The people at the National Reconnaissance Office had the main tasking in finishing up a
