The Bear and the Dragon

“Did you graduate tank school?”

Komanov bobbed his head like a cadet. “Yes, Comrade General, eighth in my class.”

“Give him a company with BOYAR,” the general told his ops officer. “They’re short of officers.”

Major General Marion Diggs was in the third train out of Berlin; it wasn’t his choosing, just the way things worked out. He was thirty minutes behind Angelo Giusti’s cavalry squadron. The Russians were running their trains as closely together as safety allowed, and probably even shading that somewhat. What was working was that the Russian national train system was fully electrified, which meant that the engines accelerated well out of stations and out of the slow orders caused by track problems, which were numerous.

Diggs had grown up in Chicago. His father had been a Pullman porter with the Atcheson, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad, working the Super Chief between Chicago and Los Angeles until the passenger service had died in the early 1970s; then, remarkably enough, he’d changed unions to become an engineer. Marion remembered riding with him as a boy, and loving the feel of such a massive piece of equipment under his hands-and so, when he’d gone to West Point, he’d decided to be a tanker, and better yet, a cavalryman. Now he owned a lot of heavy equipment.

It was his first time in Russia, a place he certainly hadn’t expected to see when he’d been in the first half of his uniformed career, when the Russians he’d worried about seeing had been mainly from First Guards Tank and Third Shock armies, those massive formations that had once sat in East Germany, always poised to take a nice little drive to Paris, or so NATO had feared.

But no more, now that Russia was part of NATO, an idea that was like something from a bad science-fiction movie. There was no denying it, however. Looking out the windows of the train car, he could see the onion-topped spires of Russian Orthodox churches, ones that Stalin had evidently failed to tear down. The railyards were pretty familiar. Never the most artistic examples of architecture or city planning, they looked the same as the dreary yards leading into Chicago or any other American city. No, only the train yards that you built under your Christmas tree every year were pretty. But they didn’t have any Christmas trees in evidence here. The train rolled to a stop, probably waiting for a signal to proceed-

— but no, this looked to be some sort of military terminal. Russian tanks were in evidence off to the right, and a lot of sloped concrete ramps-the Russians had probably built this place to ship their own tracked vehicles west, he judged.

“General?” a voice called.

“Yo!”

“Somebody here to see you, sir,” the same voice announced.

Diggs stood and walked back to the sound. It was one of his junior staff officers, a new one fresh from Leavenworth, and behind him was a Russian general officer.

“You are Diggs?” the Russian asked in fair English.

“That’s right.”

“Come with me please.” The Russian walked out onto the platform. The air was fresh, but they were under low, gray clouds this morning.

“You going to tell me how things are going out east?” Diggs asked.

“We wish to fly you and some of your staff to Chabarsovil so that you can see for yourself.”

That made good sense, Diggs thought. “How many?”

“Six, plus you.”

“Okay.” The general nodded and reached for the captain who’d summoned him from his seat. “I want Colonels Masterman, Douglas, Welch, Turner, Major Hurst, and Lieutenant Colonel Garvey.”

“Yes, sir.” The boy disappeared.

“How soon?”

“The transport is waiting for you now.”

One of theirs, Diggs thought. He’d never flown on a Russian aircraft before. How safe would it be? How safe would it be to fly into a war zone? Well, the Army didn’t pay him to stay in safe places.

“Who are you?”

“Nosenko, Valentin Nosenko, general major, Stavka.”

“How bad is it?”

“It is not good, General Diggs. Our main problem will be getting reinforcements to the theater of action. But they have rivers to cross. The difficulties, as you Americans say, should even out.”

Diggs’s main worry was supply. His tanks and Bradleys all had basic ammo loads already aboard, and two and a half additional such loads for each vehicle were on supply trucks sitting on other trains like this one. After that, things got a little worrisome, especially for artillery. But the biggest worry of all was diesel fuel. He had enough to move his division maybe three or four hundred miles. That was a good long way in a straight line, but wars never allowed troops to travel in straight lines. That translated to maybe two hundred miles of actual travel at best, and that was not an impressive number at all. Then there was the question of jet fuel for his organic aircraft. So, his head logistician, Colonel Ted Douglas, was the first guy he needed, after Masterman, his operations brain. The officers started showing up.

“What gives, sir?” Masterman asked.

“We’re flying east to see what’s going on.”

“Okay, let me make sure we have some communications gear.” Masterman disappeared again. He left the train car, along with two enlisted men humping satellite radio equipment.

“Good call, Duke,” LTC Garvey observed. He was communications and electronic intelligence for First Tanks.

“Gentlemen, this is General Nosenko from Stavka. He’s taking us east, I gather?”

“Correct, I am an intelligence officer for Stavka. This way, please.” He led them off, to where four cars were waiting. The drive to a military airport took twenty minutes.

“How are your people taking this?” Diggs asked.

“The civilians, you mean? Too soon to tell. Much disbelief, but some anger. Anger is good,” Nosenko said. “Anger gives courage and determination.”

If the Russians were talking about anger and determination, the situation must be pretty bad, Diggs thought, looking out at the streets of the Moscow suburbs.

“What are you moving east ahead of us?”

“So far, four motor-rifle divisions,” Nosenko answered. “Those are our best-prepared formations. We are assembling other forces.”

“I’ve been out of touch. What else is NATO sending? Anything?” Diggs asked next.

“A British brigade is forming up now, the men based at Hohne. We hope to have them on the way here in two days.”

“No way we’d go into action without at least the Brits to back us up,” Diggs said. “Good, they’re equipped about the same way we are.” And better yet, they trained according to the same doctrine. Hohne, he thought, their 22nd Brigade from Haig Barracks, Brigadier Sam Turner. Drank whiskey like it was Perrier, but a good thinker and a superior tactician. And his brigade was all trained up from some fun and games down at Grafenwohr. “What about Germans?”

“That’s a political question,” Nosenko admitted.

“Tell your politicians that Hitler’s dead, Valentin. The Germans are pretty good to have on your side. Trust me, buddy. We play with them all the time. They’re down a little from ten years ago, but the German soldier ain’t no dummy, and neither are his officers. Their reconnaissance units are particularly good.”

“Yes, but that is a political question,” Nosenko repeated. And that, Diggs knew, was that, at least for now.

The aircraft waiting was an II-86, known to NATO as the Camber, manifestly the Russian copy of Lockheed’s C-141 Starlifter. This one had Aeroflot commercial markings, but retained the gun position in the tail that the Russians liked to keep on all their tactical aircraft. Diggs didn’t object to it at the moment. They’d scarcely had the