In New York oil prices set an all-time high, with a ten-dollar increase per barrel. Also, fears that the Siberians might use chemical weapons as a last resort drove up the price of Fuller’s earth, used in decontamination field hospitals, while shares in Mediclean 2000 water-spray-vacuum decontamination MASH units and in activated charcoal dressings rose dramatically, many of the companies owned by Jay La Roche Pharmaceuticals. ABC’s “Nightline” charged that the rumors of impending use of CBW — chemical biological warfare — by the Siberians were false, planted by unscrupulous war profiteers to drive up their shares, not only in America but abroad.
The allegations were false, however, and because of this, subsequent rumors that nerve-gas-resistant bromide pills had been laced with cyanide by KGB sleepers were vigorously denied. They were proven true, however — Freeman’s first casualties on the beachhead at Rudnaya Pristan being a marine platoon who, mistaking colored tear gas fired by the Yakut militia as a possible CBW attack, swallowed the bromide pills and died agonizing deaths as their central nervous systems went into spasm, their ordeal ends with defecation and suffocation. Bromide company shares collapsed, but for Jay La Roche it was like a shark sniffing blood. Through conduits on the Shanghai Free Trading Area stock exchange, he bought all available shares of Chinese companies licensed by the Chinese government— seventeen in all — concentrating only on those who made cherry food coloring, used for everything from cherry candy to cherry-flavored fruit pies for export. The cherry flavoring also contained an essential ingredient for the making of lethal BZ gas, which the Soviets had already used to kill many of the rioters in dissident republics.
The news report in the morning was followed by an FBI announcement that “invoking the president’s suspension of civil rights, a full counterintelligence investigation was being made of the bromide scandal.” By breakfast time the following morning, now 9:00 p.m. in eastern Siberia, the bromide pill incident had been overshadowed by the shock that a General Dynamics factory in California, manufacturing the F-16, had been attacked. No guards were killed, but in the sheds on which the mortars had landed, eleven damaged F-16s were write-offs. The cost of testing even marginally damaged planes and the intricate microchip circuitry of the war planes was considered to be both ethically and financially unacceptable.
Meanwhile the La Roche tabloids had hit the streets, screaming, BROMIDE BARRAGE KILLS OUR BOYS!
Jay La Roche loved the headline. Circulation of his tabloids would skyrocket in every supermarket in the country, and he was making a killing on the stock market, both from toxic chemicals used in the war and their antidotes.
Freeman had been badly shaken by the poisoned-pill disaster and although pressing on, leading the marine column in his Humvee along the road from Rudnaya Pristan, he was waiting for the Siberian tiger to bite. But so far Second Army’s spearhead column of thirty M-1 A-1 sixty-ton battle tanks rolled unmolested.
Then, approaching Dalnegorsk, twenty miles inland and northwest of the beachhead, the men in Able Company, Second Battalion of the seventeen-thousand-man MEF First Division heard five or six muffled explosions on the mountains on either side of the Rudnaya River road, the steepest mountain on their left. Then they saw the mountainsides begin to move as thousands of tons of snow avalanched down, smashing into and covering the middle of the column, burying over fifty marines.
Freeman immediately ordered air strikes in from the carriers standing off in the Sea of Japan, but the pilots could not bomb for fear of setting off more avalanches — one of the first lessons of the Siberian campaign. Besides which there were no targets. If there had been any Siberian sappers around, left behind to detonate the avalanches, they were now gone.
It took four hours to dig all the men out, Marine Corps tradition demanding that they try, as far as humanly possible, to bring out their own dead. But not all could be recovered, and Freeman ordered the column on to Dalnegorsk, which the pilots found easy to locate, using the thousand-foot smokestacks as a reference point. By now engineering corps officers had radioed Freeman that there had apparently been no enemy units on the mountainsides, the charges having been set off by pressure-triggered circuits when the M-1 tanks rolled over them. By the time Dalnegorsk and the road to Krasnorechensk and Zavetnoye, on the way to Bikin and Khabarovsk, had been secured, it was discovered by the advance marine patrols, covered by low-flying Falcons and tank-killing A-10s, that the towns had been abandoned. Not a living soul was left, all livestock had been butchered and the towns set afire in the last few hours. Freeman looked at Norton worriedly. “In Normandy, twenty miles in six hours would have been a miracle. Here, with these distances, it’s nothing. It’s worse than nothing, Dick. It’s disastrous!”
Norton remained silent.
“This isn’t a Siberian feint,” declared Freeman, pulling his collar up against the bitter cold, steam rising from the lead tank behind his Humvee.”This is our fuckup. A monumental, Grade A, mega-sized fuckup! And damn it!” Freeman was standing up in the back of the Humvee, left hand resting on the.50 caliber machine gun, right hand crunching and flinging ice disgustedly away. “It’s my damn fault!”
The cold was so intense that it made Norton’s throat sore just to try to speak, but in all fairness he felt he should point out that much of it, the weather, for example, was beyond any general’s control. Behind the Humvee the stationary M-1 was idling, keeping up the revs, the gas turbine’s purring remarkably low for such a powerful engine. Even so it was eerily unsettling in the great white valley, the high ground far above them, Norton unable to shake the conviction that the mountains were waiting, biding their time to fall in on them once more.
“At this rate,” said Freeman, “we’ll be old as Canadians in Florida before we get to Bikin, goddamn it! Dick, We’ve got to get out of this hole. We’re not on first base yet, and we’re huffing and puffing like—” It was then that the Apache strike choppers appeared, over thirty of them, swarming up the valley like angry gnats, going on ahead to secure the road as far as possible while engineers sent a remote-controlled “sniffer” vehicle ahead.
The sniffer slowed the advance further but was safer. And then Freeman got his surprise. It came from a marine intelligence officer in the advance patrol who was bright enough to note the sight of hastily left meals and some livestock not slaughtered but peering out dolefully from the elaborately carved white window shutters of their barns, which looked better than most of the ramshackle houses nearby. What this told the marine, and thus Freeman, was that the Siberian withdrawal had been so rushed that even the traditional Siberian scorched-earth policy had been abandoned in their flight, a few militia men probably being the only ones who had had time to rig up a set of avalanche charges. Even so Freeman sent demolition teams ahead, suspecting that the hurried evacuation itself might be a Siberian bluff, though he also had a hunch that the marine lieutenant’s observation, given that they’d landed in such a sparsely populated area, was correct.