“Another thing — you can’t expect our air superiority to help much once we engage. You’ve seen it enough at Fort Hood, and the fact that this is snow, not sand, doesn’t make one whit of difference. Once the fighting starts, it’ll all be weasel shit and pebbles flying — identification friend or foe hard enough for us, let alone for our boys in the air. They’ll have enough work cut out looking after themselves. But remember, each of your tanks has infrared-visible ID marks. Last thing—” Freeman paused, taking off his battlefield Kevlar infantry helmet, putting it squarely on the briefing table, pulling a tank commander’s helmet to him. “Remember a la the Israelites?” He expected an answer, for it wasn’t a Biblical injunction but one passed down by the Israeli tank commanders in the Arab wars. The men roared in unison. “Keep moving!”
“Didn’t hear you.”
“Keep moving!”
“Right. Now, remember your buddies you left back there on that never-never road. Cream these jokers!” With that Freeman put on the new helmet, adjusting the throat mike and slicking his hair down under the rim. The interior of an Abrams M-1 A-1 was a high-tech marvel, but it was so cramped that a strand of hair loose over a laser sight could cost you the battle.
Norton told Freeman straight: if the general insisted on leading one of the front two command tanks of the twenty-two-tank battalion spearhead, then the colonel was going to make his protest official. Bravery was fine, but “damn foolhardiness,” to use Freeman’s own words, was something else. What would happen if Freeman was—
“General Wain’d take over,” responded Freeman. He turned, the front of the wide firing-control helmet almost touching Norton’s, his voice lowered. “Goddamn it, Dick, I appreciate your position. Respect it. But after that—” His thumb jerked back to the bloodied road whence they’d come, or rather inched over, in the last few hours. Several marine companies had been decimated, other Americans were dead, their bodies vanished, vaporized in the horror of modern explosives, the only memorial to them now bloodstained snow and a small white cross hammered into the hard Siberian soil. “I couldn’t live with myself after that if I didn’t lead,” he told Norton. “My God, Dick, ‘Skovorodino.’ “ He was looking into the distance — not into Siberia or any other place he’d known but to his field of glory. “Skovorodino! God, what a beautiful name. Even sounds victorious.” His mood suddenly darkened. “It should have been our victory.” He turned and climbed aboard the first of the two command M-1 tanks of the twenty-two-tank echelon that would lead the two-hundred-tank spearhead.
“No secret to the strategy, Dick. If anything happens to me, just keep pressing west — whichever way’ll get you to the east bank of Baikal and Irkutsk. Then we’d be far enough in to bomb the shit out of anything we like — far as the Kara Sea if we have to. Remember, the carriers can’t do it. Despite what the public thought, the flat tops accounted for less than five percent of all sorties flown in Iraq. We have to have land bases in deep.”
“Yes, General.”
“Don’t look so worried, Colonel,” said Freeman, grinning down at him. “We’re going to make ground round of ‘em!”
“Can I quote you, General?” It was the CBN reporter, hopping out of a Humvee, its driver looking apologetically nonplussed at Freeman.
“Sure!” said Freeman and, still standing up in the cupola, rapped on the tank. “Radio silence. Let’s go!”
Norton turned to the CBN newsman. “I thought it was made clear to you people that we’re running this by media pool and that none of you were allowed forward of Skovorodino.”
The reporter was shooting off the end of a roll of four hundred ASA at the general, snow flying up in clumps from the M-1’s tracks, the tank’s aerial leaning back as the war machine, for all of its sixty tons, shot forward from zero to twenty-five miles an hour in less than seven seconds, still nowhere near its forty-five-miles-per-hour cruising speed. It looked great. Freeman brought up his binoculars.
“Marvelous!” said the reporter. “He should be in the movies.”
“Listen!” insisted Norton. “I asked you what the hell are you doing up—”
“Got urgent news for the general,” said the reporter without even turning around. “His wife died.” The reporter was switching to another camera, Voightlander Vito B — older, simpler but with a good lens. “Didn’t think I should let him know before he goes into battle.”
Norton jerked the reporter around by the Voightlander’s strap. “You quote him, you set him up before this thing’s settled, and I’ll shoot you, you son of a bitch! You’ll be out of the pool, Dan! ‘Friendly fire.’ Got it?”
“Hey, hey. What the—”
“Shut up! Listen, big shot. While you’re beaming your videos back home he’s carrying over a thousand dead on his conscience. Nothing he could do about it then, but now he can. So don’t you report anything until the thing’s done. You get it? We don’t want any Baghdad Pete shit from you swinging your goddamned camera around so any Commie intelligence asshole can-”
“Hey. Easy, man.”
“You got it?” Norton was still holding him by the collar; an MP moved in to lend a hand.
“Wait until we’re done!” repeated Norton. The MP had never seen the colonel so mad.
The reporter put up his hands and backed away toward the Humvee, the cameras bashing against one another. The clouds were parting now, the sun turning the snow and endless taiga blindingly white, surface snow turning to ice. “Till you win, huh?” said the reporter sneeringly. “Christ, I’ll be an old man.”
Norton was moving menacingly toward the Humvee. “Get him out of here!” he yelled at the driver. The Humvee spun around in its own axis, splattering Norton head to foot with freezing, oil-stained slush.
Freeman’s tanks, though their gas turbines were the quietest of any main battle tank in the world, were still emitting a deep rumble through the taiga as arrowhead formations of A-10s came up to support high-flying B-52s. Navy carriers and cruisers in the Sea of Japan had already fired Tomahawk cruise missiles, programmed to hit the launch sites reported to be in the taiga around Lake Baikal far to the west.
“The boss runs over that Siberian armor up ahead and our cruise missiles flatten those launch sites, Colonel,” said Wain, “the general’ll sweep a double header.”
Dick Norton looked at his watch. He figured they wouldn’t have long to wait.
He was half right. The U.S. cruise-missile strike against SATINT-identified launch sites would take one hour and fifty-two minutes to reach the targets in the Baikal area, the U.S. cruises traveling at a ground-hugging five hundred miles per hour. Freeman’s armor should engage the enemy around Chichatka Station at about the same time.
It would be a decisive battle, Norton believed, because while there were thousands of Siberian main battle tanks and over fifty divisions within the Far Eastern TVD, Freeman’s master stroke had been in landing, like MacArthur had at Inchon, where no one thought he should or ought to land — on a remote part of the Southern TVD coastline. But like most master strokes it would be recognized as such only if Freeman won.
Despite the heavy armor reported to be concentrating around Chichatka, which Freeman was about to engage, U.S. air superiority meant that it was taking time for the Siberians to bring up troops and more tanks from the flatlands of the Siberian plain. The Siberians had few roads to do it, relying on relatively few rail lines together with the multiple track of the Trans-Siberian, If Freeman could inflict a decisive defeat here at Chichatka and move forward quickly, he might be able to take Irkutsk before the full weight of the Siberian divisions could be brought to bear on Second Army.