The Bear and the Dragon

in?”

“The bridges on the Amur,” Tolkunov said at once. Tucker picked up a radio microphone.

“This is Major Tucker. We have a tasking request. Slew Camera Three onto the big crossing point.”

“Roger,” the speaker next to the monitor said.

The picture changed immediately, seeming to race across the screen like a ribbon from ten o‘clock down to four o’clock. Then it stabilized. The field of view must have been four kilometers across. It showed a total of what appeared to be eight bridges, each of them approached by what looked like a parade of insects.

“Give me control of Camera Three,” Tucker said next.

“You got it, sir,” the speaker acknowledged.

“Okay.” Tucker played with the mouse more than the keyboard, and the picture zoomed in-“isolated”-on the third bridge from the west. There were three tanks on it at once, moving at about ten kilometers per hour south to north. The display showed a compass rose in case you got disoriented, and it was even in color. Tolkunov asked why.

“No more expensive than black-and-white cameras, and we put it on the system because it sometimes shows you things you don’t get from gray. First time for overheads, even the satellites don’t do color yet,” Tucker explained. Then he frowned. “The angle’s wrong, can’t get the divisional markings on the tanks without moving the platform. Wait.” He picked up the microphone again. “Sergeant, who’s crossing the bridges now?”

“Appears to be their Three-Oh-Second armored division, sir, part of the Twenty-Ninth Group-A Army. The Thirty-Fourth Army is fully across now. We estimate one full regiment of the Three-Oh-Second is across and moving north at this time,” the intel weenie reported, as though relating the baseball scores from yesterday.

“Thanks, Sarge.”

“Roger that, Maj.”

“And they can’t see this drone?” Tolkunov asked.

“Well, on radar it’s pretty stealthy, and there’s another little trick we have on it. Goes back to World War II, called Project Yehudi back then, you put lights on the thing.”

“What?” Tolkunov asked.

“Yeah, you spot airplanes because they’re darker’n the sky, but if you put lightbulbs on ’em, they turn invisible. So, there are lights on the airframe, and a photo sensor dials the brightness automatically. They’re damned near impossible to spot-they cruise at sixty thousand feet, way the hell above contrail level, and they got no infrared signature at all, hardly-even if you know where to look, and they tell me you can’t hardly make an air-to-air missile lock onto one. Pretty cool toy, eh?”

“How long have you had this?”

“I’ve been working on it, oh, about four years now.”

“I’ve heard of Dark Star, but this capability is amazing.”

Tucker nodded. “Yeah, it’s pretty slick. Nice to know what the other guy’s doing. First time we deployed it was over Yugoslavia, and once we learned how to use it, and how to coordinate it with the shooters, well, we learned to make their lives pretty miserable. Tough shit, Joe.”

“Joe?”

“Joe Chink.” Tucker pointed at the screen. “That’s what we mainly call him.” The friendly nickname for Koreans had once been Luke the Gook. “Now, Ingrid doesn’t have it yet, but Grace Kelly does, a laser designator, so you can use these things to clobber targets. The fighter just lofts the bomb in from, oh, maybe twenty miles away, and we guide it into the target. I’ve only done that at Red Flag, and we can’t do it from here with this terminal, but they can up at Zhigansk.”

“Guide bombs from six hundred kilometers away?”

“Yeah. Hell, you can do it from Washington if you want. It all goes over the satellite, y’know?”

“Yob tvoyu maht!”

“Soon we’re going to make the fighter jocks obsolete, Colonel. Another year or so and we’ll be doing terminal guidance on missiles launched from a coupla hundred miles away. Won’t need fighter pilots then. Guess I’ll have to buy me a scarf. So, Colonel, what else do you want to see?”

The 11–86 landed at a rustic fighter base with only a few helicopters on it, Colonel Mitch Turner noted. As divisional intelligence officer, he was taking in a lot of what he saw in Russia, and what he saw wasn’t all that encouraging. Like General Diggs, he’d entered the Army when the USSR had been the main enemy and principal worry for the United States Army, and now he was wondering how many of the intelligence estimates he’d help draft as a young spook officer had been pure fantasy. Either that or the mighty had fallen farther and faster than any nation in history. The Russian army wasn’t even a shadow of what the Red Army had been. The “Rompin’, Stompin’ Russian Red Ass” so feared by NATO was as dead as the stegosaurus toys his son liked to play with, and right now that was not such a good thing. The Russian Federation looked like a rich family of old with no sons to defend it, and the girl kids were getting raped. Not a good thing. The Russians, like America, still had nuclear weapons-bombs, deliverable by bombers and tactical fighters. However, the Chinese had missiles to deliver theirs, and they were targeted at cities, and the Big Question was whether the Russians had the stones to trade a few cities and, say, forty million people for a gold mine and some oil fields. Probably not, Turner figured. Not something a smart man would do. Similarly, they could not afford a war of attrition against a country with nine times as many people and a healthier economy, even over this ground. No, if they were to defeat the Chinese, it had to be with maneuver and agility, but their military was in the shitter, and neither trained nor equipped to play maneuver warfare.

This, Turner thought on reflection, was going to be an interesting war. It was not the sort he wanted to fight. Better to clobber a dumb little enemy than mix it up with a smart powerful one. It might not be glorious, but it was a hell of a lot safer.

“Mitch,” General Diggs said, as they stood to walk off the airplane. “Thoughts?”

“Well, sir, we might have picked a better place to fly to. Way things look, this is going to be a little exciting.”

“Go on,” the general ordered.

“The other side has better cards. More troops, better-trained troops, more equipment. Their task, crossing a lot of nasty country, is not enviable, but neither is the Russian task, defending against it. To win they have to play maneuver warfare. But I don’t see that they have the horsepower to pull it off.”

“Their boss out here, Bondarenko. He’s pretty good.”

“So was Erwin Rommel, sir, but Montgomery whupped his ass.”

There were staff cars lined up to drive them into the Russian command post. The weather was clearer here, and they were close enough to the Chinese that a clear sky wasn’t something to enjoy anymore.

CHAPTER 53 Deep Concerns

So, what’s happening there?” Ryan asked.

“The Chinese are seventy miles inside Russia. They have a total of eight divisions over the river, and they’re pushing north,” General Moore replied, moving a pencil across the map spread on the conference table. “They blew through the Russian border defenses pretty fast-it was essentially the Maginot Line from 1940. I wouldn’t have expected it to hold very long, but our overheads showed them punching through fairly professionally with their leading infantry formations, supported by a lot of artillery. Now they have their tanks across-about eight hundred to this point, with another thousand or so to go.”

Ryan whistled. “That many?”

“When you invade a major country, sir, you don’t do it on the cheap. The only good news at this point is that we’ve really given their air force a bloody nose.”

“AWACS and -15s?” Jackson asked.

“Right.” The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs nodded. “One of our kids made ace in a single engagement. A Colonel Winters.”

“Bronco Winters,” Jackson said. “I’ve heard the name. Fighter jock. Okay, what else?”