“The other trick is the political side,” Jackson concluded.
“Funny, I have an idea for that. How is the PRC presenting this war to its people?”
It was Professor Weaver’s turn: “They’re saying that the Russians provoked a border incident-same thing Hitler did with Poland in 1939. The Big Lie technique. They’ve used it before. Every dictatorship has. It works if you control what your people see.”
“What’s the best weapon for fighting a lie?” Ryan asked.
“The truth, of course,” Arnie van Damm answered for the rest. “But they control their news distribution. How do we get the truth to their population?”
“Ed, how is the SORGE data coming out?”
“Over the ’Net, Jack. So?”
“How many Chinese citizens own computers?”
“Millions of them-the number’s really jumped in the past couple of years. That’s why they’re ripping that patent off Dell Computer that we made a stink about in the trade talks and-oh, yeah …” Foley looked up with a smile. “I like it.”
“That could be dangerous,” Weaver warned.
“Dr. Weaver, there’s no safe way to fight a war,” Ryan said in reply. “This isn’t a negotiation between friends. General Moore?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Get the orders out.”
“Yes, sir.”
“The only question is, will it work?”
“Jack,” Robby Jackson said, “it’s like with baseball. You play the games to find out who the best is.”
The first reinforcing division to arrive at Chita was the 201st. The trains pulled into the built-for-the-purpose offloading sidings. The flatcars had been designed (and built in large numbers) to transport tracked military vehicles. To that end, flip-down bridging ramps were located at each end of every single car, and when those were tossed down in place, the tanks could drive straight off to the concrete ramps to where every train had backed up. It was a little demanding-the width of the cars was at best marginal for the tank tracks-but the drivers of each vehicle kept their path straight, breathing a small sigh of relief when they got to the concrete. Once on the ground, military police troops, acting as traffic cops, directed the armored vehicles to assembly areas. The 201st Motor Rifle Division’s commander and his staff were there already, of course, and the regimental officers got their marching orders, telling them what roads to take northeast to join Bondarenko’s Fifth Army, and by joining it, to make it a real field army rather than a theoretical expression on paper.
The 201st, like the follow-on divisions, the 80th, 34th, and 94th, were equipped with the newest Russian hardware, and were at their full TO amp;E. Their immediate mission was to race north and east to get in front of the advancing Chinese. It would be quite a race. There weren’t many roads in this part of Russia, and what roads there were here were unpaved gravel, which suited the tracked vehicles. The problem would be diesel fuel, because there were few gas stations for the trucks which ran the roads in peacetime pursuits, and so the 201st had requisitioned every tanker truck its officers could locate, and even that might not be enough, the logisticians all worried, not that they had much choice in the matter. If they could get their tanks there, then they’d fight them as pillboxes if it came to that.
About the only thing they had going for them was the network of telephone lines, which enabled them to communicate without using radios. The entire area was under the strictest possible orders for radio silence, to deny all conceivable knowledge to the enemy; and the air forces in the area, American and Russian, were tasked to eliminate all tactical reconnaissance aircraft that Chinese would be sending about. So far, they’d been successful. A total of seventeen J-6 and -7 aircraft, thought to be the reconnaissance variants of their classes, had been “splashed” short of Chita.
The Chinese problem with reconnaissance was confirmed in Paris, of all places. SPOT, the French corporation which operated commercial photosatellites, had received numerous requests for photos of Siberia, and while many of them came from seemingly legitimate western businesses, mainly news agencies, all had been summarily denied. Though not as good as American reconnaissance satellites, the SPOT birds were good enough to identify all the trains assembled at Chita.
And since the People’s Republic of China still had a functioning embassy in Moscow, the other concern was that their Ministry of State Security had Russian nationals acting as paid spies, feeding data to Russia’s new enemy. Those individuals about whom the Russian Federal Security Service had suspicions were picked up and questioned, and those in custody were interrogated vigorously.
This number included Klementi Ivanovich Suvorov.
“You were in the service of an enemy country,” Pavel Yefremov observed. “You killed for a foreign power, and you conspired to kill our country’s president. We know all this. We’ve had you under surveillance for some time now. We have this.” He held up a photocopy of the onetime pad recovered from the dead-drop on the park bench. “You may talk now, or you may be shot. It is your life at risk, not mine.”
In the movies, this was the part where the suspect was supposed to say defiantly, “You’re going to kill me anyway,” except that Suvorov had no more wish to die than anyone else. He loved life as much as any man, and he’d never expected to be caught any more than the most foolish of street criminals did. If anything, he’d expected arrest even less than one of those criminals, because he knew how intelligent and clever he was, though this feeling had understandably deflated over the last few days.
The outlook of Klementi Ivan’ch Suvorov was rather bleak at the moment. He
“Have you truly arrested Kong?”
“We told you that before, but, no, we have not. Why tip them off that we’ve penetrated their operation?” Yefremov said honestly.
“Then you can use me against them.”
“How might we do that?” the FSS officer asked.
“I can tell them that the operation they propose is going forward, but that the situation in Siberia wrecked my chance to execute it in a timely fashion.”
“And if Kong cannot leave their embassy-we have it guarded and isolated now, of course-how would you get that information to him?”
“By electronic mail. Yes, you can monitor their landlines, but to monitor their cellular phones is more difficult. There’s a backup method for me to communicate with him electronically.”
“And the fact that you haven’t made use of it so far will not alert them?”
“The explanation is simple. My Spetsnaz contact was frightened off by the outbreak of hostilities, and so was I.”
“But we’ve already checked your electronic accounts.”
“Do you think they are all written down?” He tapped the side of his head. “Do you think I am totally foolish?”
“Go on, make your proposal.”
“I will propose that I can go forward with the mission. I require them to authorize it by a signal-the way they set the shades in their windows, for example.”
“And for this?”
“And for this I will not be executed,” the traitor suggested.
“I see,” Yefremov said quietly. He would have been perfectly content to shoot the traitor right here and now, but it might be politically useful to go forward with his proposal. He’d kick that one upstairs.
The bad part about watching them was that you had to anticipate everything they did, and that meant that they got to have more sleep, about an hour’s worth, Aleksandrov figured, and no more than that only because they were predictable. He’d had his morning tea. Sergeant Buikov had enjoyed two morning
