The Bear and the Dragon

“I want to volley-fire my tanks before firing my artillery. Why spoil the surprise, Gennady?” Sinyavskiy asked cruelly. “We are ready for them here.”

“Understood. Good luck, Yuriy.”

“And what of the other missions?”

“BOYAR is moving now, and the Americans are about to deploy their magical pigs. If you can handle the leading Chinese elements, those behind ought to be roughly handled.”

“You can rape their daughters for all I care, Gennady.”

“That is nekulturniy, Yuriy. Perhaps their wives,” he suggested, adding, “We are watching you on the television now.”

“Then I will smile for the cameras,” Sinyavskiy promised.

The orbiting F-16 fighters were under the tactical command of Major General Gus Wallace, but he, at the moment, was under the command-or at least operating under the direction-of a Russian, General-Colonel Gennady Bondarenko, who was in turn guided by the action of this skinny young Major Tucker and Grace Kelly, a soulless drone hovering over the battlefield.

“There they go, General,” Tucker said, as the leading Chinese echelons resumed their drive north.

“I think it is time, then.” He looked to Colonel Aliyev, who nodded agreement.

Bondarenko lifted the satellite phone. “General Wallace?”

“I’m here.”

“Please release your aircraft.”

“Roger that. Out.” And Wallace shifted phone receivers. “EAGLE ONE, this is ROUGHRIDER. Execute, execute, execute. Acknowledge.”

“Roger that, sir, copy your order to execute. Executing now. Out.” And the colonel on the lead AWACS shifted to a different frequency: “CADILLAC LEAD, this is EAGLE ONE. Execute your attack. Over.”

“Roger that,” the colonel heard. “Going down now. Out.”

The F-16s had been circling above the isolated clouds. Their threat receivers chirped a little bit, reporting the emissions of SAM radars somewhere down there, but the types indicated couldn’t reach this high, and their jammer pods were all on anyway. On command, the sleek fighters changed course for the battlefield far below and to their west. Their GPS locators told them exactly where they were, and they also knew where their targets were, and the mission became a strictly technical exercise.

Under the wings of each aircraft were the Smart Pigs, four to the fighter, and with forty-eight fighters, that came to 192 J-SOWs. Each of these was a canister thirteen feet long and not quite two feet wide, filled with BLU- 108 submunitions, twenty per container. The fighter pilots punched the release triggers, dropped their bombs, and then angled for home, letting the robots do the rest of the work. The Dark Star tapes would later tell them how they’d done.

The Smart Pigs separated from the fighters, extended their own little wings to guide themselves the rest of the way to the target area. They knew this information, having been programmed by the fighters and were now able to follow guidance from their own GPS receivers. This they did, acting in accordance with their own onboard minicomputers, until each reached a spot five thousand feet over their designated segment of the battlefield. They didn’t know that this was directly over the real estate occupied by the Chinese 29th Type A Group Army and its three heavy divisions, which included nearly seven hundred main-battle tanks, three hundred armored personnel carriers, and a hundred mobile guns. That made a total of roughly a thousand targets for the nearly four thousand descending submunitions. But the falling bomblets were guided, too, and each had a seeker looking for heat of the sort radiated by an operating tank, personnel carrier, self-propelled gun, or truck. There were a lot of them to look for.

No one saw them coming. They were small, no larger, really, than a common crow, and falling rapidly; they were also painted white, which helped them blend in to the morning sky. Each had a rudimentary steering mechanism, and at an altitude of two thousand feet they started looking for and homing in on targets. Their downward speed was such that a minor deflection of their control vanes was sufficient to get them close, and close meant straight down.

They exploded in bunches, almost in the same instant. Each contained a pound and a half of high-explosive, the heat from which melted the metal casing, which then turned into a projectile-the process was called “self- forging”-which blazed downward at a speed of ten thousand feet per second. The armor on the top of a tank is always the thinnest, and five times the thickness would have made no difference. Of the 921 tanks on the field, 762 took hits, and the least of these destroyed the vehicles’ diesel engine. Those less fortunate took hits through the turret, which killed the crews at once and/or ignited the ammunition storage, converting each armored vehicle into a small man-fabricated volcano. Just that quickly, three mechanized divisions were changed into one badly shaken and disorganized brigade. The infantry carriers fared no better, and it was worse for the trucks, most of them carrying ammunition or other flammable supplies.

All in all, it took less than ninety seconds to turn 29th Type A Group Army into a thinly spread junkyard and funeral pyre.

Holy God,” Ryan said. ”Is this for real?”

“Seeing is believing. Jack, when they came to me with the idea for J-SOW, I thought it had to be something from a science-fiction book. Then they demo’d the submunitions out at China Lake, and I thought, Jesus, we don’t need the Army or the Marines anymore. Just send over some F-18s and then a brigade of trucks full of body bags and some ministers to pray over them. Eh, Mickey?”

“It’s some capability,” General Moore agreed. He shook his head. “Damn, just like the tests.”

“Okay, what’s happening next?”

Next” was just off the coast near Guangszhou. Two Aegis cruisers, Mobile Bay and Princeton, plus the destroyers Fletcher, Fife, and John Young, steamed in line-ahead formation out of the morning fog and turned broadside to the shore. There was actually a decent beach at this spot. There was nothing much behind it, just a coastal-defense missile battery that the fighter-bombers had immolated a few hours before. To finish that job, the ships trained their guns to port and let loose a barrage of five-inch shells. The crack and thunder of the gunfire could be heard on shore, as was the shriek of the shells passing overhead, and the explosions of the detonations. That included one missile that the bombs of the previous night had missed, plus the crew getting it ready for launch. People living nearby saw the gray silhouettes against the morning sky, and many of them got on the telephone to report what they saw, but being civilians, they reported the wrong thing, of course.

It was just after nine in the morning in Beijing when the Politburo began its emergency session. Some of those present had enjoyed a restful night’s sleep, and then been disturbed by the news that came over the phone at breakfast. Those better informed had hardly slept at all past three in the morning and, though more awake than their colleagues, were not in a happier mood.

“Well, Luo, what is happening?” Interior Minister Tong Jie asked.

“Our enemies counterattacked last night. This sort of thing we must expect, of course,” he admitted in as low-key a voice as circumstances permitted.

“How serious were these counterattacks?” Tong asked.

“The most serious involved some damage to railroad bridges in Harbin and Bei’an, but repairs are underway.”

“I hope so. The repair effort will require some months,” Qian Kun interjected.

“Who said that!” Luo demanded harshly.

“Marshal, I supervised the construction of two of those bridges. This morning I called the division superintendent for our state railroad in Harbin. All six of them have been destroyed-the piers on both sides of the river are totally wrecked; it will take over a month just to clear the debris. I admit this surprised me. Those bridges were very sturdily built, but the division superintendent tells me they are quite beyond repair.”

“And who is this defeatist?” Luo demanded.