The Bear and the Dragon

a Chinese coolie hat, it will probably deflect most bombs, but not the deep penetrators, the GBU-27s we used on the railroad bridges-”

“If they have any left over there. Better ask Gus Wallace,” the Vice President warned.

“What do you mean?” Bretano asked.

“I mean we never made all that many of them, and the Air Force must have dropped about forty last night.”

“I’ll check that,” SecDef promised.

“What if he doesn’t?” Jack asked.

“Then either we get some more in one big hurry, or we think up something else,” TOMCAT replied.

“Like what, Robby?”

“Hell, send in a special-operations team and blow them the fuck up,” the former fighter pilot suggested.

“I wouldn’t much want to try that myself,” Mickey Moore observed.

“Beats the hell out of a five-megaton bomb going off on Capitol Hill, Mickey,” Jackson shot back. “Look, the preferred thing to do is find out if Gus Wallace has the right bombs. It’s a long stretch for the Black Jets, but you can tank them going and coming-and put fighters up to protect the tankers. It’s complicated, but we practice that sort of thing. If he doesn’t have the goddamned bombs, we fly them to him, assuming there are any. You know, weapons storage isn’t a cornucopia, guys. There’s a finite, discrete number for every item in the inventory.”

“General Moore,” Ryan said, “call General Wallace and find out, right now, if you would.”

“Yes, sir.” Moore stood and left the Situation Room.

“Look,” Ed Foley said, pointing to the TV. “It’s started.”

The wood line erupted in a sheet of flame two kilometers across. The sight caused the eyes of the Chinese tankers to flare, but most of the front rank of tank crews didn’t have time for much more than that. Of the thirty tanks in that line, only three escaped immediate destruction. It was little better for the personnel carriers interspersed with them.

“You may commence firing, Colonel,” Sinyavskiy told his artillery commander.

The command was relayed at once, and the ground shook beneath their feet.

It was spectacular to see on the computer terminal. The Chinese had walked straight into the ambush, and the effect of the Russian opening volley was ghastly to behold.

Major Tucker took in a deep breath as he saw several hundred men lose their lives.

“Back to their artillery,” Bondarenko ordered.

“Yes, sir.” Tucker complied at once, altering the focus of the high-altitude camera and finding the Chinese artillery. It was mainly of the towed sort, being pulled behind trucks and tractors. They were a little slow getting the word. The first Russian shells were falling around them before any effort was made to stop the trucks and lift the limbers off the towing hooks, and for all that the Chinese gunners worked rapidly.

But theirs was a race against Death, and Death had a head start. Tucker watched one gun crew struggle to manhandle their 122-mm gun into a firing position. The gunners were loading the weapon when three shells landed close enough to upset the weapon and kill more than half their number. Zooming in the camera, he could see one private writhing on the ground, and there was no one close by to offer him assistance.

“It is a miserable business, isn’t it?” Bondarenko observed quietly.

“Yeah,” Tucker agreed. When a tank blew up it was easy to tell yourself that a tank was just a thing. Even though you knew that three or four human beings were inside, you couldn’t see them. As a fighter pilot never killed a fellow pilot, but only shot down his aircraft, so Tucker adhered to the Air Force ethos that death was something that happened to objects rather than people. Well, that poor bastard with blood on his shirt wasn’t a thing, was he? He backed off the camera, taking a wider field that permitted godlike distancing from the up-close-and-personal aspects of the observation.

“Better that they should have remained in their own country, Major,” the Russian explained to him.

Jesus, what a mess,” Ryan said. He’d seen death up-close-and-personal himself in his time, having shot people who had at the time been quite willing to shoot him, but that didn’t make this imagery any the more palatable. Not by a long fucking shot. The President turned.

“Is this going out, Ed?” he asked the DCI.

“Ought to be,” Foley replied.

And it was, on a URL-“Uniform Resource Locator” in ‘Netspeak-called http://www.darkstarfeed.cia.gov/siberiabattle/realtime.ram. It didn’t even have to be advertised. Some ’Net crawlers stumbled onto it in the first five minutes, and the “hits” from people looking at the “streaming video” site climbed up from 0 to 10 in a matter of three minutes. Then some of them must have ducked into chat rooms to spread the word. The monitoring program for the URL at CIA headquarters also kept track of the locations of the people logging into it. The first Asian country, not unexpectedly, was Japan, and the fascination of the people there in military operations guaranteed a rising number of hits. The video also included audio, the realtime comments of Air Force personnel giving some perverse color-commentary back to their comrades in uniform. It was sufficiently colorful that Ryan commented on it.

“It’s not meant for anyone much over the age of thirty to hear,” General Moore said, coming back into the room.

“What’s the story on the bombs?” Jackson asked at once.

“He’s only got two of them,” Moore replied. “The nearest others are at the factory, Lockheed-Martin, Sunnyvale. They’re just doing a production run right now.”

“Uh-oh,” Robby observed. “Back to Plan B.”

“It might have to be a special operation, then, unless, Mr. President, that is, you are willing to authorize a strike with cruise missiles.”

“What kind of cruise missiles?” Ryan asked, knowing the answer even so.

“Well, we have twenty-eight of them on Guam with W-80 warheads. They’re little ones, only about three hundred pounds. It has two settings, one-fifty or one-seventy kilotons.”

“Thermonuclear weapons, you mean?”

General Moore let out a breath before replying. “Yes, Mr. President.”

“That’s the only option we have for taking those missiles out?” He didn’t have to say that he would not voluntarily launch a nuclear strike.

“We could go in with conventional smart bombs-GBU-10s and -15s. Gus has enough of those, but not deep penetrators, and the protection on the silos would have a fair chance at deflecting the weapon away from the target. Now, that might not matter. The CSS-4 missiles are delicate bastards, and the impact even of a miss could scramble their guidance systems … but we couldn’t be sure.”

“I’d prefer that those things not fly.”

“Jack, nobody wants them to fly,” the Vice President said. “Mickey, put together a plan. We need something to take them out, and we need it in one big fuckin’ hurry.”

“I’ll call SOCOM about it, but, hell, they’re down in Tampa.”

“Do the Russians have special-operations people?” Ryan asked.

“Sure, it’s called Spetsnaz.”

“And some of these missiles are targeted on Russia?”

“It certainly appears so, yes, sir,” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs confirmed.

“Then they owe us one, and they damned well owe it to themselves,” Jack said, reaching for a phone. “I need to talk to Sergey Golovko in Moscow,” he told the operator.

The American President,” his secretary said.

“Ivan Emmetovich!” Golovko said in hearty greeting. “The reports from Siberia are good.”

“I know, Sergey, I’m watching it live now myself. Want to do it yourself?”

“It is possible?”

“You have a computer with a modem?”