The aide guessed it was the Iraqis who had been training in Poland before the Iraqi war for just such a project as Chernko’s— but he wasn’t going to do anything to steal the Akademician’s thunder.
“The Iraqis!” proclaimed Grigorenko, pleased with himself, leaning back and taking a bottle of Smirnoff vodka — the best, something that the average Russian hadn’t seen for months, the aide thought. Everything from nylon stockings to toy production had been conscripted for war materials.
“Yes,” Grigorenko said, pouring the three vodkas, a little extra for himself, the aide noticed. “It will add insult to injury for the Americans, comrades, that half of the attacking force will be Iraqi.”
The aide was trying to look surprised, a difficult thing to do when he knew by heart the story of how Hussein had sent Iraqis to the eastern bloc to train for just such a project in the Gulf war but how, because of Gorbachev’s stupid bungling, and against the advice of his military, the Iraqis were not permitted to carry out such an attack in the Iraqi war. Unable to get back home because of the UN boycott and U.S. intelligence on the lookout for them, the Iraqis, all members of Hussein’s dreaded Mukhabarat—his secret police — were still in Siberia and as expert as their Russian, instructors. Grigorenko passed around the glasses and proposed a toast: “Za porazhenie amerikantsev!”— ‘To the American defeat!”
Yesov rifted the shot glass and allowed a thin smile to crease his otherwise bullish face. “Za unizhenie amerikantsev!”—”To the Americans’ humiliation!”
“Na mnogo luchshe!”—”Much better!” added Grigorenko. The aide was not a believer in psychic phenomena or anything else he called “mind rubbish,” but he could not deny the fact that within seconds of the general having proposed the toast, the call came in from Kultuk, 850 miles east of them at the southwestern end of Lake Baikal and only 76 miles from the Mongolian border, that everything for Chernko’s KMK project was gotov—”ready to go.”
Grigorenko looked across at the commander in chief of all United Siberian Soviet Republic forces like an expectant father, waiting for the general to give the word. The American, Freeman, had stopped at Mukhino, and though it was almost a thousand miles further east of Kultuk, well away from Novosibirsk, the scientist’s expression of pained expectation said it all, that every day Yesov waited — every hour — the Americans got closer to reaching Lake Baikal and Irkutsk. And from Irkutsk their aircraft could strike Novosibirsk. But Yesov refused to be hurried, holding his glass out for another drink. Using it as a pointer, he moved it east to Baikal to the hump of the Amur that formed the Siberian-Chinese border. “Let him reach the very top of the hump, comrades. Then we’re in the clear.”
The aide nodded and glanced knowingly at the general, his look clearly saying that while Grigorenko might be one of the world’s greatest scientists and engineers, his political urn— “savvy”—was about as sophisticated as a yak’s. Chita HQ, halfway in the crescent of mountains and forest between Baikal and the top of the hump, had repeatedly advised Novosibirsk, Yesov specifically, not to act too close to the Chinese border, particularly not anywhere along the Amur where there had been border clashes since time immemorial between the two countries.
“No,” said Yesov, in answer to Grigorenko’s silent plea. “Not yet. The Chinese don’t like the Americans any more than we do, Doctor, but they are very touchy about their border. No, we cannot fire across the hump for fear we may drop short into Chinese territory.” He meant inside the hump. “No, we’ll wait until he is at the top.” Yesov used the rim of the oily vodka glass to indicate the area where he would spring his trap. “Here, between Never and—” The general required his reading glasses. “—Skovorodino.” The seven-and-a-half-mile road between the two towns was 170 miles west of where Freeman had stopped.
“He’ll be reassured, resupplied,” said Yesov. “Tanks topped up.”
“Da,” said Grigorenko approvingly, “all the better. His humiliation will be all the worse.”
The cruise missiles came in so low that neither Freeman in his advance command Humvee nor the radars of the helicopters flying cover saw them, the eight 672-pound missiles visible only five miles from target along the Never-Skovorodino Road. The first thing that the fifty M-1 tanks and six M-3 Bradley fighting vehicles and six mobile heavy mortars that formed the spearhead of Second Army’s II Corps lead tank battalion saw was the sudden appearance of the low-flying lead missile making a tight, right-hand turn before roaring overhead and exploding further down the line.
At the angle they saw it from it appeared to have detonated over the trees, but the CBN reporter with a tripod and zoom lens saw that it was exploding right over the midsection of the four-mile-long spearhead even as Second Army advance reconnaissance units looked back disbelievingly at the missile as it veered through the clear blue sky over the tip of the spearhead toward the center of the column. The CBN cameraman, too, was in awe, transfixed by the abrupt turn that another of the subsonic missiles made to avoid power lines. Rising no more than ten feet above them before descending again, its belly opening even as AA fire stuttered toward it, the missile exuded a hail of smaller missiles that buzzed in the air — antipersonnel flechettes and antitank bomblets. American tanks, the best in the world, were disintegrating, most of them still moving as if driven by ghosts, the screams of their dying crews soon lost amid the technicolor phantasm of light as the tanks spewed fountains of red and white rain as if being welded from the inside, a rain of sparks and flame oozing from the penetrated seals over the sloping glacis plate.
HEAT rounds exploded through the cupolas with a jetlike roar, and several tanks slewed broadside, ramming others, which were in turn struck by tanks coming from behind. The series of explosions from the fuel bladders sent sheets of orange-black flame billowing over the armored personnel carriers behind the tanks. The APCs’ crews and the twelve troopers inside each died agonizingly, the APCs becoming nothing more than ovens.
Those who made a run for it from the APCs’ rear doors were cut down by the buzzing bees of the flechettes, the darts not killing all but inflicting such terrible wounds that the medics and, as the CBN reporter would soon see, the MASH units to the rear were overwhelmed.
Chopper accidents added to the chaos as two air-sea rescue Blackhawks collided with four Cobra and Apache gunships in the thick battlefield smoke. One chopper, a Bell OH-58C Scout, slammed into one of the last incoming missiles. Chips of the heavy 350-millimeter, blocklike Chobham armor packs from the tanks whistled through the air, still intact, their resin-sandwiched steel, ceramic, and aluminum layers impenetrated but blown in toto away from the tanks when the M-1s’ fifty APFDS — armor-piercing fin-stabilized discarding Sabot rounds — reached their flash points and exploded internally, ripping the tank cupolas apart. The mechanized battalion’s tanks and the APCs of Freeman’s H Corps were further victims of the “bolt from the blue” Siberian attack against Freeman’s seven-corps, 379,000-man Second Army.