“L‘audace, I‘audace,” murmured a lieutenant colonel of artillery in the back row. “Toujours I’audace.”
“Speed!” thundered Freeman. “I don’t want to get any SIT-REPS whining about anyone being ‘pinned down.’ You get yourselves unpinned — and fast — and get on the move again. And keep moving! Is that clear?”
There was the silence of assent.
“I’m not going to pump sunshine up your ass and tell you that there won’t be substantial opposition. There’ll be plenty of it. This is their land, their home, and they’ll fight for it as hard as you would. They’ve got the numbers — in equipment and men — but I know we have the quality in equipment and men to stop them!” He paused, hands on his hips, looking out at the divisional and corps commanders. “Any questions?”
There were plenty, and Freeman knew it, but they were the kind that could be answered only in the coming battles.
“What do you think, Dick?” asked Freeman as the last of the officers shuffled out. Norton said it all depended on how many troops the Siberians could manage to move east to the coast.
Freeman was searching for his glasses again, patting his battle dress pockets. “Damn it! I can never find those goddamn reading things. Only need one of ‘em anyway. Have one of the boys in med corps make the up a single lens.”
“A pince-nez?” said Norton, surprised.
“Jesus, no. Look like a goddamn fairy. No, just one lens with something to clip it onto so I don’t lose the damn thing.”
“A monocle?” said Norton, amused by the idea.
“Fine. Now look here, Dick. Only way we’re going to get the jokers on the run is to stay mobile. We’ve got to keep moving. Keep ‘em off balance. Don’t give ‘em a chance to stabilize anything, from their big guns and armor to their airfields. Bill Miller’s boys’ll pound anything that looks as if it’s big enough for a mosquito to take off from. That’ll keep their PVO — air force — occupied. Meanwhile we’ve got to keep their ground forces off balance. Do the unexpected. Go around them.”
Freeman’s right hand made a sweeping movement west then south of the BAM — the northern Baikal-Amur mainline loop — to Irkutsk, just west of Baikal. “Get Airborne. SAS/Delta, air mobile artillery and armored units behind them. Light tanks, APCs, M-1s, multiple rocket launchers, and some concentrated rocket artillery barrages as well. Scatter them to hell, Dick-isolate them. If it’s too sticky in one area, then we’ll do a MacArthur island hop. Bypass the bastards, attack another unit. Keep them so damned occupied in their rear they’ll find themselves fighting on three fronts.” He pointed all the way west on the map four thousand miles to the north-south spine of the Urals. “British and American forces pressing east from Minsk. Our boys here heading west from Khabarovsk, and our special forces driving them crazy in the center.” The general, hands on his hips again, was nodding, satisfied with the plan. “You know about the fruit seller?”
“No.”
“Iraq,” explained Freeman. “Special forces. Our boys and the Brits. An Arab goes up to an Iraqi HQ with a basket of fresh fruit.” Freeman looked at Norton. “He’s a Brit in mufti — hadn’t washed for weeks. Son of a bitch argues, Dick, with the Iraqi commander over how many dinar for the fruit. I couldn’t do that. Hate goddamn haggling. Son of a bitch in Carmel tried to sell the a car like that once. It was beautiful. Forty-two Packard. Impeccable condition. Big hubcaps. Anyway, the Iraqi finally agrees on the price. While he’s in getting the money, this Brit pushes an infrared stick into the sand. Thirty minutes later, an F-18 attack. Thousand-pound Smart bomb. Not only got the commander but the whole goddamned HQ.”
Freeman stood back from the map, a myriad of details running through his head. “Sow havoc behind the lines, Dick. That’s what we have to do here. Like those SPETS bastards did to us in the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket.” Whether or not it was the mention of the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket or the long day the general had put in, Norton noticed Freeman’s hands had moved from his hips to his lower back, massaging it, a grimace of pain in his face. Norton wondered if the injury the general had sustained when being thrown out of the Humvee during the breakout was flaring up again. But he knew better than to mention it.
The general picked up the pointer stick, collapsed its telescoped sections to ballpoint-pen size, and clipped it in his battle dress pocket. “Be the biggest air drop in history, Dick. Bigger than Crete. Bigger than Arnhem, and we won’t make the mistake Montgomery did. There won’t be a bridge too far in this lot.” He turned to Norton. “Know why?”
Every general’s aide understands that part of his role is to be a constant sounding board for his commanding officer’s ideas, but now and then it was nice to be able to outguess them.” You’re not going to try to capture all of them?” proffered Norton. “Just enough to screw up their supply line here and there.”
The tone of Freeman’s voice changed. It was quiet, measured, as if his public persona had fled him and he was talking to his inner self, to his own memory, which he absolutely believed transcended his own lifetime, belonging to another time, to history. He turned away from the map, leaning against the edge of the Khabarovsk/Baikal model, gazing over the now-vacant seats. “Jung,” he told Norton, “tells the story of the Yucca moth. ‘Flowers of the Yucca plant open for one night only, and the moth takes pollen from one of the flowers, kneads it to a pellet, flies to another flower, slices open the pistil, lays eggs between the ovules, then stuffs the pellet into the funnelled opening of the pistil.’ “ He turned, his face barely a foot from Norton’s. “It does this, Dick, this complicated ritual. Then dies.”
Norton looked back at the general, utterly bewildered.
“How do you explain it, Dick? No learning involved. Yucca flower’s open for only one night. One night, Dick.” He looked back over the empty seats. “Can’t have been learned, you see. We call it intuition, by which we mean it is innate — already there, already known, in the brain of the moth. We have that same kind of pre-knowledge, Dick, but we don’t know what to call it exactly, so we take a stab at it and say it’s instinct.” He turned to Norton again. “You see what I’m saying. The moth has the image of the flower already in its brain. Before it’s even born. Remember what the poet said, Dick. ‘Trailing clouds of glory do we come from God who is our home.’ We’ve already been there. The moth already knows. We know. I know. It was in the dream — the map of Siberia. Something missing, Dick.” He eased himself away from the model, stretching, his hands again kneading the small of his back. “It came to the at breakfast. I was going over the dream — damn thing had kept the awake half the night, felt like I’d been on the rack.” He turned about to face the huge wall map. “Can you see it?”
“This “Wheel of Fortune,’ General?”
Freeman gave a rough smile, his right hand extended, moving from the Urals east across the west Siberian plain, the central plateau, and then the eastern mountains. “All their communications — all their topographical communications, Dick. Automobile enthusiast like myself should have spotted it right away. Different from any other map in the civilized world. No roads. No goddamn roads, Dick!” Freeman was visibly excited. “You see in the south, from Sverdlovsk in the Urals through Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, and on to Khabarovsk — no main roads. It’s all goddamn rivers, Dick. That’s the secret. The bridges. We forget about everything else but the bridges. We blow their bridges not to stop their road traffic but their river traffic. Their rivers are their roads — their lifelines — Dick. Frozen in the winter. Like Lake Lagoda.”