For once Norton, too, felt victorious. “You mean the Russians resupplying Leningrad in World War Two. By road from Murmansk and then across the frozen lake.”
“Goddamn it, Dick! You win the Toyota and the trip to Disneyland.”
“Well, I’ll be—”
“We collapse those bridges on them, Dick, and it’ll be like the Ventura Freeway at peak hour. Nothing’ll move.”
Norton looked more closely at the maps. Freeman was right on the money. It was so simple once you saw it. Three hundred miles or so east of Chita, itself three hundred miles east of Baikal, there was absolutely no main road into the Far Eastern TVD. “What about the Trans-Siberian Railway?” he asked Freeman.
“With our superiority we’ll cut it, too.”
That night both men went to sleep more easily than at any time during the previous two weeks. Freeman became somnolent recalling Churchill’s summons to Buckingham Palace after the Munich crisis of 1939. Finally called to be leader of the nation in its darkest hours, after having been out in his wilderness, Churchill had later said he had gone to bed peacefully that night, having no fears of the morrow and confident that “facts are better than dreams.”
“I’ll take both, Winston,” said Freeman, switching off his bed lamp. “I’ll take both.”
It had not occurred to the commander in chief of Operation Arctic Front that dreams are but often one step from nightmares and that the Siberians had dreams of their own and that these no less than those of the American commanders’ were rooted solidly in the recognition of certain indisputable facts— which they would soon give him ample evidence of.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Yak vertical takeoff fighter bomber diving on the landing helicopter assault ship Winston Davis got off one Acrid radar homing missile before being taken out by saturation fire from the ship’s two “pope miters,” the high-domed, six-barrelled, twenty-millimeter Vulcan Phalanx Mark 15’s that fired one hundred rounds a second and enveloped the Siberian fighter in a dense hail of depleted uranium. The fireball that a moment ago had been the Yak now hit the LHD, the Yak’s starboard wing’s Koliesov/Rybinak vertical takeoff lift jets slamming into one of the forty-thousand-ton ship’s five antisurface guns, sending white-hot shrapnel whooshing through the air, killing the bridge’s port lookout, and raising fears among the two thousand marines below that if the twelve thousand tons of aviation fuel were hit they’d all be incinerated within a matter of minutes. As the shock of the impact continued to reverberate deafeningly through the jam-packed half-deck hangars below, a fully equipped battalion, gathered about its palletized supplies, which took up 150,000 cubic feet of the ship’s huge interior, waited anxiously for the landings that might or might not happen depending on the outcome of the great naval battle now swirling and crashing about them.
What Admiral Burke feared most was the Siberian fleet’s two ultramodern guided-missile cruisers, now still over two hundred miles away but racing south at flank speed to intercept him on his right flank. His only hope was that the two old Iowa class battle wagons, the Missouri and the Wisconsin, would stop them. But it was seen by Burke’s commander as a forlorn hope. And indeed because of the two ships’ age, despite weapons modernization, most of the officers in Burke’s fleet had serious doubts about the behemoths of another age being of any use in the high-tech war.
There were those, like Adm. John Brentwood, who, joined by others in the U.S. DOD — Department of Defense — and the British MOD — Ministry of Defence — were preoccupied by an unanswered question: Would the Tomahawk missiles aboard the Iowa class battleships be more than a match going up against the Kirov guided-missile cruisers’ SS-N-19, three-hundred-mile-range, four-thousand-pound missile? The latter, as well as being over a thousand pounds heavier than the Tomahawk, was more than three times as fast. The American cruise missile’s speed, at a subsonic 520 miles per hour, made it a slowpoke compared to the over-1700-miles per-hour Siberian missile. It was a difference that UK Liaison Officer Brigadier Soames at the White House referred to, with typical British understatement, as “a slight advantage for the Sibirs.”
The undeniable advantage of the Siberian’s speed allowed the Kirov cruisers to wait until the Missouri and Wisconsin had fired two Tomahawks apiece, two for each of the Siberian cruisers; they had ample time, even in the split-second world of over-the-horizon electronic warfare, to respond. It was a luxurious five seconds in all after each Tomahawk, in a feral roar and with its peculiar “ass-dragging” motion, skidded out from one of the eight armored box launchers like a huge, vertical cigar moving sideways, the missile arcing high enough to afford Siberian radar a glimpse and to get a back-track vector, before the American missile dropped in altitude.
At wave-skimming height, the Tomahawk’s cigar-tube shape began its metamorphosis, its tail unfolding, stubby wings extending and air intake popping up to gulp air, allowing the missile’s own engine to take over as the rocket booster finished. Looking now more like the V-l buzz bomb from which it had been derived, the missile’s 1,000-pound conventional warhead, replacing a 450-pound nuclear tip, followed its preprogrammed terrain-matching contour guide which afforded the Tomahawk a CEP — circular error of probability — of only 250 feet. This was normally not critical for most large land targets, but for a moving target at sea it raised the odds considerably.
The captain of the nuclear-powered Frunze IV had personally picked up on the Tomahawks’ firing, receiving details of the Tomahawk’s trajectory from a Bear recon aircraft out of the Kommandorsky Islands to the north. In response the Frunze IV and the other Siberian cruiser had each launched five SS-19 missiles from hatches forward of the cruiser’s Gatling gun turret and from both port and starboard stations.
In all, ten missiles were now streaking toward the starye amerikanskie sufi—”old American bitches”—as the Missouri and Wisconsin were contemptuously referred to. The sinking of either one — or hopefully both — would only add to the impression in Novosibirsk of an overwhelming American naval defeat, the Americans still withdrawing south, one of the battle group’s foam-filled minesweepers already sunk. While her weight and nonmetallic fiberglass hull had not set off any pressure or magnetic mines, the sound of her props had triggered acoustic mines that had literally blown her clear of the water, her spine snapped, her foam-filled interior giving off a thick, oily, and highly toxic smoke, the two halves of the sweeper taking longer to go down than they would have without the foam that kept them floating about like some ancient fire ships sent among an enemy fleet to sow confusion and break up its order of battle.
By now the Missouri’s two Tomahawk cruise missiles were locked onto by the Frunze IV’s “Top Pair” three-dimensional, long-range radar scanner. They were intercepted eleven miles out by a cluster of type 4,6, and 9 missiles fired by the Frunze. It was impossible to say what type had downed one of the two American missiles, so many target and antitarget vectors were converging in the general area; so many Siberian missiles, in fact, that it was likely, given their inferior guidance system, that it had been a case of “fratricide”—debris and shock waves from one missile altering another’s course, preventing it from making a direct hit. Either way, one of the Tomahawks was down.