The Bear and the Dragon

cigarettes with his, and now they lay prone on wet dew-dampened ground, with their binoculars to their eyes. The Chinese had also had soldiers out of their tracks all night, set about a hundred meters away from them, so it seemed. They weren’t very adventurous, the captain thought. He would have spread his sentries much farther out, at least half a kilometer, in pairs with radios to go with their weapons. For that matter, he would have set up a mortar in the event that they spotted something dangerous. But the fox and the gardener seemed to be both conservative and confident, which was an odd combination of characteristics.

But their morning drill was precise. The petrol heaters came out for tea-probably tea, they all figured-and whatever it was that they had for breakfast. Then the camouflage nets came down. The outlying sentries came in and reported in person to their officers, and everyone mounted up. The first hop on their tracks was a short one, not even half a kilometer, and again the foot-scouts dismounted and moved forward, then quickly reported back for the second, much longer morning frog leap forward.

“Let’s move, Sergeant,” Aleksandrov ordered, and together they ran to their BRM for their first trek into the woods for their own third installment of frog leap backwards.

There they go again,” Major Tucker said, after getting three whole hours of sleep on a thin mattress four feet from the Dark Star terminal. It was Ingrid Bergman up again, positioned so that she could see both the reconnaissance element and main body of the Chinese army. ”You know, they really stick to the book, don’t they?”

“So it would seem,” Colonel Tolkunov agreed.

“So, going by that, tonight they’ll go to about here.” Tucker made a green mark on the acetate-covered map. “That puts them at the gold mine day after tomorrow. Where do you plan to make your stand?” the major asked.

“That depends on how quickly the Two Zero One can get forward.”

“Gas?” Tucker asked.

“Diesel fuel, but, yes, that is the main problem with moving so large a force.”

“Yeah, with us it’s bombs.”

“When will you begin to attack Chinese targets?” Tolkunov asked.

“Not my department, Colonel, but when it happens, you’ll see it here, live and in color.”

Ryan had gotten two hours of nap in the afternoon, while Arnie van Damm covered his appointments (the Chief of Staff needed his sleep, too, but like most people in the White House, he put the President’s needs before his own), and now he was watching TV, the feed from Ingrid Bergman.

“This is amazing,” he observed. “You could almost get on the phone and tell a guy where to go with his tank.”

“We try to avoid that, sir,” Mickey Moore said at once. In Vietnam it had been called the “squad leader in the sky” when battalion commanders had directed sergeants on their patrols, not always to the enlisted men’s benefit. The miracle of modern communications could also be a curse, with the expected effect that the people in harm’s way would ignore their radios or just turn the damned things off until they had something to say themselves.

Ryan nodded. He’d been a second lieutenant of Marines once, and though it hadn’t been for long, he remembered it as demanding work for a kid just out of college.

“Do the Chinese know we’re doing this?”

“Not as far as we can tell. If they did, they’d sure as hell try to take the Dark Star down, and we’d notice if they tried. That’s not easy, though. They’re damned near invisible on radar, and tough to spot visually, so the Air Force tells me.”

“Not too many fighters can reach sixty thousand feet, much less cruise up there,” Robby agreed. “It’s a stretch even for a Tomcat.” His eyes, too, were locked on the screen. No officer in the history of military operations had ever had a capability akin to this, not even two percent of it, Jackson was sure. Most of war-fighting involved finding the enemy so that you knew where to kill him. These new things made it like watching a Hollywood movie- and if the Chinese knew they were there, they’d freak. Considerable efforts had been designed into Dark Star to prevent that from happening. Their transmitters were directional, and locked onto satellites, instead of radiating outward in the manner of a normal radio. So, they might as well have been black holes up there, orbiting twelve miles over the battlefield.

“What’s the important thing here?” Jack asked General Moore.

“Logistics, sir, always logistics. Told you this morning, sir, they’re burning up a lot of diesel fuel, and replenishing that is a mother of a task. The Russians have the same problem. They’re trying to race a fresh division north of the Chinese spearhead, to made a stand around Aldan, close to where the gold strike is. It’s only even money they can make it, even over roads and without opposition. They have to move a lot of fuel, too, and the other problem for them is that it’ll wear out the tracks on their vehicles. They don’t have lowboy trailers like ours, and so their tanks have to do it all on their own. Tanks are a lot more delicate to operate than they look. Figure they’ll lose a quarter to a third of their strength just from the approach march.”

“Can they fight?” Jackson asked.

“They’re using the T-80U. It would have given the M60A3 a good fight, but no, not as good as our first-flight M1, much less the M1A2, but against the Chinese M-90, call it an even match, qualitatively. It’s just that the Chinese have a lot more of them. It comes down to training. The Russian divisions that they’re sending into the fight are their best-trained and — equipped. Question is, are they good enough? We’ll just have to see.”

“And our guys?”

“They start arriving at Chita tomorrow morning. The Russians want them to assemble and move east- southeast. The operational concept is for them to stop the Chinese cold, and then we chop them off from their supplies right near the Amur River. It makes sense theoretically,” Mickey Moore said neutrally, “and the Russians say they have all the fuel we’ll need in underground bunkers that have been there for damned near fifty years. We’ll see.”

CHAPTER 55 Looks and Hurts

General Peng was all the way forward now, with the leading elements of his lead armored division, the 302nd. Things were going well for him-sufficiently well, in fact, that he was becoming nervous about it. No opposition at all? he asked himself. Not so much as a single rifle round, much less a barrage of artillery. Were the Russians totally asleep, totally devoid of troops in this sector? They had a full army group command section at Chabarsovil, commanded by that Bondarenko fellow, who was reported to be a competent, even a courageous, officer. But where the hell were his troops? Intelligence said that a complete Russian motor-rifle division was here, the 265th, and a Russian motor-rifle division was a superbly designed mechanized formation, with enough tanks to punch a hole in most things, and manned with enough infantry to hold any position for a long time. Theoretically. But where the hell was it? And where were the reinforcements the Russians had to be sending? Peng had asked for information, and the air force had supposedly sent photo- reconnaissance aircraft to look for his enemies, but with no result. He had expected to be mainly on his own for this campaign, but not entirely on his own. Fifty kilometers in advance of the 302nd Armored was a reconnaissance screen that had reported nothing but some tracks in the ground that might or might not have been fresh. The few helicopter flights that had gone out had reported nothing. They should have spotted something, but no, only some civilians, who for the most part got the hell out of the way and stayed there.

Meanwhile, his troops had crewed up this ancient railroad right-of-way, but it wasn’t much worse than traveling along a wide gravel road. His only potential operational concern was fuel, but two hundred 10,000-liter fuel trucks were delivering an adequate amount from the pipeline the engineers were extending at a rate of forty kilometers per day from the end of the railhead on the far bank of the Amur. In fact, that was the most impressive feat of the war so far. Well behind him, engineer regiments were laying the pipe, then covering it under a meter of earth for proper concealment. The only things they couldn’t conceal were the pumping stations, but they had the spare parts to build plenty more should they be destroyed.