“I’m doing that now, sir.”
“Good.” The general looked up at the cloud-shrouded summits, visible for a moment then gone. To others in the column, the deployment of what AA batteries had not been taken out by the missiles would afford a measure of security, a circling of the AA wagons, as it were, until the road was cleared for the column to move — anywhere but where they were. But Norton knew how bad it was for the general. Freeman had never exulted over the Patriot as others had after the Iraqi war. It bothered him that a Patriot had missed the Scud that killed the marines in Riyadh during the Iraqi war and that if the body of an incoming missile was hit, but not the actual warhead, the missile could end up wreaking the same kind of damage as occurred in Riyadh.
Dick Norton was making a quick call to Malcolm Wain to order in as many batteries of Starstreaks from Japan — from anywhere — as they could lay their hands on.
“How many are coming across now?” asked Wain.
“None,” said Norton. “Just get ‘em on choppers — C-5s, anything, but get them here. Any way you can.”
“By Christ!” said Freeman, coming up behind him. “I ‘d like to find the son of a bitch who engineered this.”
To do this, however, as he would soon discover for himself, would be impossible unless he was prepared to visit an Italian graveyard. But if he was not to meet the genius behind the Siberian missile assault, he soon experienced another assault — a cruise bombardment. Patriots, ADATs, and finally some Star-streaks were able to thin it out; nevertheless, it continued to pound Second Army so that Freeman was trapped. At the top of the Amur hump, unable to go either forward or back for fear of risking the disassembling of his AA defensive ring, he remained hemmed in by the high, snow-covered ridges, as he waited for clear weather so that the trajectories of the Siberian missiles could be more accurately traced. Casualties after the second attack were over two and a half thousand killed, sixteen hundred wounded.
To the public back home the mess from the Siberian front was bad enough, but they sought solace in the fact that the U.S. navy, thanks to the effectiveness of battle-wise skippers such as Robert Brentwood, commander of the nuclear sub USS Reagan, had been punishing the Siberian navy at an ever-increasing rate, protecting the vital sea lift resupply route from the American west coast to Japan.
Freeman prayed for good weather with all the energy his belief could muster. The bad weather didn’t clear; only a few gaps opened up as a new front howled malevolently down from the Laptev Sea over the tundra into the taiga, as if determined to take up where the previous front left off and continue making life as miserable as possible for Second Army. Meanwhile, news had come in via Japan that the British/American force approaching the Urals in much calmer conditions had come under fierce Siberian armored attack and was reeling southwest of Sverdlovsk. There were rumors of the Siberians having used sarin, a nerve gas whose “persistence” rating in cold, calm weather was high.
When Norton suggested to the general that he should carry his atropine injector — a self-contained hypodermic whose jab would penetrate a CBW suit — Freeman pretended not to hear him. He didn’t believe in doctors or any other medical assistance — until he was hurt. The general was more preoccupied with the report received moments before that yet another Siberian cruise missile attack was underway. This time SATINT and SIGINT would hopefully get much better trajectories. Freeman’s AA defenses opened fire, the roar of Patriots and the high scream of Starstreaks filling the hills about Never-Skovorodino, causing minor avalanches, one of these burying a scissor-folding mobile bridge span. The general was receiving SATINT from a fighter-protected E-3A Sentry early warning radar and control rotodome aircraft that the enemy cruise trajectories were definitely originating from around the Lake Baikal area.
“What in hell do they mean?” pressed Freeman, pulling out the Hershey bar from the MRE — meal ready to eat — tray, ignoring the rest. “From Lake Baikal?”
“Frozen lakes make as good a launch area as any other, I suppose,” said Norton. “Sure as heck not many trees around.”
“Yes, well,” said Freeman, chomping on the Hershey bar as if it were a cigar, “they’re about to get an education. Get out an ATO and tell them we want as many aircraft as possible flying against the Siberian cruise missile launch positions around or on Lake Baikal. They won’t be able to hide under cloud cover now.”
He was correct about the cloud cover, but there weren’t any launch sites on the ice. Instead, SATINT was suggesting that trajectories indicated mobile sites in the heavily forested areas around the northwestern edge of the 390-mile-long lake.
The F-15 and F-18 pilots, after passing through the heaviest antiaircraft gun and missile fire any of them had seen since the war began, including Ratmanov Island, lost fifteen American planes. Only six pilots bailed out. The remaining American fighters mixed it with a swarm of Fulcrums coming out of the superhardened concrete shelters hidden in the taiga, the bases circling the lake from Ulan-Ude in the southeast, barely a hundred miles north of the Mongolian border, to Kalakan northeast of the lake, back down through the Zima pipeline and rail junction on the Trans-Siberian west of the lake to Irkutsk on the Angara River, the lake’s only outflowing river.
For the next two days the Americans, despite increasing air losses, dropped more bombs on the infrared-spotted, cruciform-shaped cruise missile launch site clearings, while A-10 Thunderbolts covered Freeman’s column with their deadly thirty-millimeter antitank cannon as Second Army, refueled and resupplied, got on the move again through the taiga to Urusha and Yerofey Pavlovich, two towns over a hundred miles west. With the Thunderbolts looking for targets of opportunity and finding them, the lead air controller broke radio silence only once to give the grid reference of “massed armor” twenty-five miles west of Yerofey Pavlovich. The tanks, he reported, were in camouflaged revetments but detectable because the snow-weighted netting created unusual shadow patterns.
More up-gunned T-90s were reported lying in wait to ambush Second Army’s spearhead around Chichatka Station just a little further west, the tanks detectable through ID signature, heat given off by motors kept idling in the cold. Their exhaust was piped through flexihoses into snow berms — antitank ditches whose walls of ice were ten feet thick — but still heat patches showed up on infrared. The resulting air bombardment, a combination of A-10s, Eagles, Falcons, and F-111Fs, refueled midair from the coast, was as formidable an air strike as Freeman had ever seen, unloading more ordnance on the enemy’s newfound positions than was dropped on Hussein’s Republican Guard units in the first six days of that war.
Even so, Freeman, while exhorting his men, nevertheless cautioned them not to be “damned foolhardy,” adding, “when you attack, you are to assume that not one, I repeat, not one, of the enemy’s T-90s — or any other of his tanks — has been destroyed by the aerial bombardment. And I don’t give a damn about what reports we get from Air Command. They’re doing a great job — absolutely superb — but they’re not on the ground. We are. I don’t want you taking your tank platoons in there thinking that all We’ve got to do is mop up. The Russians taught the Iraqis how to revet their armor, remember — dug ‘em in so deep even our bombers couldn’t get at them until they decided to come out and make a run for it. Well, I can tell you one thing — those Siberian sons of bitches aren’t working for Hussein. They’re working for themselves. When they come out — if they’re not coming at us already — they’re not going to run away. That you can bank on.