There were no more demolition charges found for several hours, and as suddenly as they’d been halted earlier, the marine tank column and mobile infantry leading Second Army picked up the pace. Freeman, the bit between his teeth, ordered full speed, the armored personnel carriers and supply trucks finding themselves on hard, tank-packed snow, the M-1s cruising at thirty-five miles per hour, Freeman holding them back from their maximum of fifty miles per hour only in order to get maximum mileage for minimum fuel spent. When demolition charges were sniffed out, the engineers quickly laid pipe charges, and the column had only to stop for a matter of minutes before speeding on again.
Within four days, while he had not equalled the rapid advance attained by McCaffrey’s Twenty-fourth Mechanized Infantry Division in Iraq or got anywhere near equaling Rommel’s armored run in France of two hundred miles in one day, he was in Bikin, pausing only to refuel, a blizzard swirling about him making for an anxious time but giving the U.S. pilots, with their more sophisticated electronics, the edge in instrument flying. Though if the Siberians’ night-fighting equipment wasn’t as good as the Americans’ there was nothing lacking in their courage. While the refueling was in process, the armored column could hear a distant thunder high overhead, massive B-52 raids out of Okinawa, the planes still within Khabarovsk’s AA missile envelope but protected by Eagles and Falcons as they pounded the city with more ordnance, including Smart bombs from lower-flying F-111s preceding them and dumb bombs, than was dropped on Baghdad in the opening hours of the Iraqi war.
“However,” warned Freeman in his first press conference since the landing, “Khabarovsk could be a major battle.”
When he got to Khabarovsk there was no major battle: the military was gone; only the population, confused and worried, left behind for the Americans to feed. Only some of them, mostly Jews, were happy to see the Americans. The regular army had vanished, and only the militia remained. They were no match for the American marines. The civilians, who hid in terror for the first few hours, were now venturing out, soon forming a sea around the tank columns. The tanks were warm, and all heat and electricity to the city and the sparsely populated coast had been cut off by the retreating regulars. The American pilots commented on how it reminded them of flying over Alaska and the Canadian north: utter darkness, not even lights of outlying settlements visible.
Norton was already looking exhausted; they’d been on the road for almost twenty-four hours without a break. “Sir, far as we can make out, no civilians were allowed to leave. Shops were stripped bare by the army, the crowds left for us to feed.”
“Yes,” confirmed the marine commander. “Only civilians to get out were prisoners. Apparently they were taken out by the KGB on the Trans-Siberian.”
Within twenty minutes of the Americans having entered Khabarovsk there was a series of enormous explosions in a rough semicircle east of the city center as far out as seventeen miles. Soon there was the glow of fires everywhere over the frozen salt marsh as fuel depots blew along with ammunition dumps. Anything the Siberians could not take with them they had destroyed, including the city’s four airfields. The brutish smokestacks, most of them in the northern sector of the city, stood in the flickering light, visible only to the four-hundred-foot level. They came in and out of view amid the choking, soot-colored smoke that rained black on the snow.
“Where’s the battle, General?” asked a CBN reporter.
Freeman grumpily ignored him, turning to Norton instead. “How about the Trans-Siberian?”
“G-2 says it’s ripped up from here to Birobidzhan.”
“Blown up?” asked Freeman irritably. “Or ripped up?”
Norton didn’t know.
“Goddamn it!” shouted Freeman. “Find out!”
“Yes, sir.”
From Khabarovsk west over the hundred miles of frozen salt marshes to Birobidzhan, then three hundred miles to Belogorsk, all the while following the Trans-Siberian Railway around the big, 250-mile-wide, right-to-left horseshoe bend in the Amur River — at times less than twenty miles from the Manchurian border, the U.S. Air Force having taken out Zavitinsk airfield fourteen hours before — the tooth of Freeman’s Second Army, its M-1 A-1s gulping, even at cruise speed, three gallons per mile, was fast outrunning the tail of its supply line.
The quarter-mile-wide ribbon of ice of the south-north Zeya River took on the look of burnished gold at Svobodnyy before more snow began falling and was, Freeman predicted, the perfect place for the Siberians to have blown the bridges. A few miles on and he found he was right. The enormous twisted steel of the railroad span was caught in the ice, a crippled skeleton of steel, the bridge’s pylons left standing naked, the fresh snow pillows atop them affording the pylons a symmetry and beauty amid the collapsed spans. But the Siberians’ scorched-earth policy, at least here, was of little account, holding Freeman up only for as long as it took his M-1 A-1s with plough blades and the engineers’ rocket-propelled pipeline charges to clear the ice of mines. Most mine positions were immediately obvious from the frozen mounds of scraped ice that stood out like pimples of broken glass amid the new snow that was not yet deep enough to obscure the detritus. Self-propelled howitzers could be seen here and there in the forest, intact, their crews blue and bloated if they could be picked out at all from the shattered timber and decapitated trees that marked where infrared Smart bomb attacks by the U.S. air force had been made from the captured airfields.
Where tarmacs had been blown up, the U.S. engineers simply hosed in hot water under pressure from the water trucks, the water-filled craters instantly freezing, after which the graders topped them off as one would level off a filled-in posthole, and the Marsden matting was laid. U.S. planes were using the fields within an hour of their completion.
The railway was another story. The Siberians, having sacrificed much of their heavy fighter cover — mainly MiG-29s — to protect sacrificial MiG-27 Flogger-D ground attack aircraft, had dropped each Flogger’s 6,600-pound ordnance on the multiple track west of the Zeya River between Shimanovsk and Mukhino. This meant that the pea-colored Rossiya, or “Train Number One,” which ran from Vladivostok to Moscow, was unable to proceed because of the downed transmission lines. The Siberians, however, quickly hitched the carriages carrying evacuees from Khabarovsk to three steam engines, drawn into service from the dozens of such locomotives which had previously been disbanded beside the line with the coming of the electric engines.
Moving slowly through the dense, fogged-in and snow-draped taiga of larch, pine, and fir, the train approached the top of the horseshoe hump of the Amur. Instead of the usual caboose, the train dragged an enormous hook-shaped, stump-jump plough behind it, ripping up the ties like matchsticks, the splayed rail now pushed uselessly to the side on this eastern section of the forty-eight-hundred-mile railway. The guards at each tunnel entrance and bridge gratefully hopped aboard the last passenger carriage, the carriages alternating with AA quads mounted on flatbeds, every fourth flatbed in the car train sprouting SA-6 AA missiles. The “Mukhino Express,” as it had been wryly described by the American pilots who had come down through the heavy cloud layer only to have their infrared signature detectors thwarted for a time by the thick bone-chilling fog, was finally stopped in a river of high explosives before it could reach the station at Mukhino. The pale blue station disintegrated in a spectacular explosion that sent ancient pine planks, black earth, and fire-streaked snow, together with iron heating-stove plates and the woodpile, whirling in a mini-tornado a quarter mile high before it came down in a crashing hail.