Special National Intelligence Estimate, because people tended to believe photographs more than mere words. The imagery had been computer-matched with the radar-imaging satellites’ “take,” but surprisingly to no one, the assembly areas were mostly empty now. The tanks and other tracked vehicles had lingered only long enough to get reorganized after the train trip, and had moved out north, judging by the ruts they’d left in the mainly dirt roads of the region. They’d taken the time to spread their camouflage nets over the redeployed tanks, but that, too, had been a pro forma waste of time, because they could as little hide the track marks of hundreds of such vehicles as they could hide a mountain range. And scarcely any such effort had been taken with the hundreds of supply trucks, which, they saw, were still moving in tight little convoys, at about thirty kilometers per hour, heading for assembly areas just a few klicks south of where the shooters were. The imagery was printed up on six of the big laser printers custom-made for the NRO, and driven to the White House, where people were mainly sitting around in the Oval Office pulling a Presidential all-nighter, which was rather more special than those done by the deliveryman, an Army sergeant E-5 in this case. The civilian analyst who’d come with him stayed inside while the NCO walked back out to the government Ford sedan, having left behind a Newport hundred-millimeter cigarette for the President.
“Jack, you’re bad,” Jackson observed. “Bumming a smoke off that innocent young boy.”
“Stick it, Robby,” POTUS replied with a grin. The smoke made him cough, but it helped him stay awake as much as the premium coffee did. “You handle the stress your way, I’ll handle it my way. Okay, what do we have here?” the President asked the senior analyst.
“Sir, this is as many armored vehicles in one area as I have ever seen in China, plus all their equipment. They’re going north, and soon, in less than three days, I’d say.”
“What about air?” Jackson asked.
“Right here, sir.” The analyst’s finger traced over one of the photos. “Dedicated fighter base at Jinxi is a good example. Here’s a squadron of Russian-made Su-27s, plus a whole regiment of J-7s. The Sukhoi’s a pretty good fighter plane, similar in mission and capabilities to an early F-15. The -7’s a day-fighter knockoff of the old MiG-21, modified for ground attack as well as mixing up in the furball. You can count sixty-eight aircraft. Probably at least four were in the air when the satellite went overhead. Note the fueling trucks right on the ramp, and this aircraft has ground crew tinkering with it. We estimate that this base was stood-down for five days-”
“-getting everything ready?” Jackson asked. That’s how people did it.
“Yes, sir. You will also note missile noses peeking out under the wings of all these aircraft. They appear to be loaded for combat.”
“White ones on the rails,” Robby observed. “They’re planning to go do some work.”
“Unless our note gets them to calm down,” Ryan said, with a minor degree of hope in his voice. A very minor note, the others in the room thought. The President got one last puff off the purloined Newport and stubbed it out. “Might it help for me to make a direct personal call to Premier Xu?”
“Honest answer?” It was Professor Weaver, rather the worse for wear at four in the Washington morning.
“The other sort isn’t much use to me at the moment,” Ryan replied, not quite testily.
“It will look good in the papers and maybe the history books, but it is unlikely to affect their decision-making process.”
“It’s worth a try,” Ed Foley said in disagreement. “What do we have to lose?”
“Wait until eight, Jack,” van Damm thought. “We don’t want him to think we’ve been up all night. It’ll inflate his sense of self-worth.”
Ryan turned to look at the windows on his south wall. The drapes hadn’t been closed, and anyone passing by could have noted that the lights had been on all night. But, strangely, he didn’t know if the Secret Service ever turned them off at night.
“When do we start moving forces?” Jack asked next.
“The Air Attache will call from Moscow when his talks have been concluded. Ought to be any time.”
The President grunted. “Longer night than ours.”
“He’s younger than we are,” Mickey Moore observed. “Just a colonel.”
“If this goes, what are our plans like?” van Damm asked.
“Hyperwar,” Moore answered. “The world doesn’t know the new weapons we’ve been developing. It’ll make DESERT STORM look like slow motion.”
CHAPTER 48 Opening Guns
While others were pulling all-nighters, Gennady Iosifovich Bondarenko was forgetting what sleep was supposed to have been. His teleprinter was running hot with dispatches from Moscow, reading that occupied his time, and not always to his profit. Russia had still not learned to leave people alone when they were doing their jobs, and as a result, his senior communications officer cringed when he came in with new “FLASH” traffic.
“Look,” the general said to his intelligence officer. “What I need is information on what equipment they have, where they are, and how they are postured to move north on us. Their politics and objectives are not as important to me as where they are right now!”
“I expect to have hard information from Moscow momentarily. It will be American satellite coverage, and-”
“God damn it! I remember when we had our own fucking satellites. What about aerial reconnaissance?”
“The proper aircraft are on their way to us now. We’ll have them flying by tomorrow noon, but do we dare send them over Chinese territory?” Colonel Tolkunov asked.
“Do we dare not to?” CINC-FAR EAST demanded in reply.
“General,” the G-2 said, “the concern is that we would be giving the Chinese a political excuse for the attack.”
“Who said that?”
“Stavka.”
Bondarenko’s head dropped over the map table. He took a breath and closed his eyes for three blissful seconds, but all that achieved was to make him wish for an hour-no, just thirty minutes of sleep. That’s all, he thought, just thirty minutes.
“A political excuse,” the general observed. “You know, Vladimir Konstantinovich, once upon a time, the Germans were sending high-flying reconnaissance aircraft deep into Western Russia, scouting us out prior to their invasion. There was a special squadron of fighters able to reach their altitude, and their regimental commander asked for permission to intercept them. He was relieved of his command on the spot. I suppose he was lucky that he wasn’t shot. He ended up a major ace and a Hero of the Soviet Union before some German fighter got him. You see, Stalin was afraid of provoking Hitler, too!”
“Comrade Colonel?” Heads turned. It was a young sergeant with an armful of large-format photographs.
“Here, quickly!”
The sergeant laid them on the table, obscuring the topographical maps that had occupied the previous four hours. The quality wasn’t good. The imagery had been transmitted over a fax machine instead of a proper photographic printer, but it was good enough for their purposes. There were even inserts, small white boxes with legends typed in, in English, to tell the ignorant what was in the pretty little pictures. The intelligence officer was the first to make sense of it all.
“Here they come,” the colonel breathed. He checked the coordinates and the time indicated in the lower-right corner of the top photo. “That’s a complete tank division, and it’s right”-he turned back to the printed map-“right here, just as we expected. Their marshaling point is Harbin. Well, it had to be. All their rail lines converge there. Their first objective will be Belogorsk.”
“And right up the valley from there,” Bondarenko agreed. “Through this pass, then northwest.” One didn’t need to be a Nobel laureate to predict a line of advance. The terrain was the prime objective condition to which all ambitions and plans had to bend. Bondarenko could read the mind of the enemy commander well enough, because any trained soldier would see the contour lines on the map and analyze them the same way. Flat was better than
