“Yes, sir.”
“What’s his disposition of forces?”
“We figure it at ten divisions minimum on the Manchurian border. More coming.”
“They got that damn Nanking Bridge fixed over the Yangtze?” It was the bridge that the captured Smythe and the other SEALs had attacked and severed earlier in the war.
“Figure they must have, General,” Norton said. “Either that or they’ve put a pontoon across — though that would take some making. It’s at least three miles across there.”
Freeman grunted, pulled up his collar, and buttoned it at the throat. “Should be warmer than this. We heard anything from that SAS/D troop?”
“No, sir.”
“That’s good news then.” The commandos were on radio silence.
“We hope, sir.”
“How far would they be from Ulan Bator?”
“They ‘re flying in on a Pave Low now.”
“What’s the drill?” Freeman asked. “A burst radio message approximately forty-eight hours from now when they’ve completed their mission?”
“Yes, sir — if they do.”
“Pray to God we get that message through, Dick.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Anything else?” He sensed there was — Norton had that look about him.
“Yes, sir.”
“Spit it out!”
Norton slipped a folder from his flip-top briefcase as they entered the Quonset hut. “Bad news I’m afraid. Photos,” he said, taking a steaming cup of coffee from the general. “All from Ofek-10.” It was the Israeli high-resolution electro-optical camera satellite, one of those launched by IAI–Israeli Aviation Industries — using a Shavit, or “comet” rocket, known to Freeman’s G-2 staff as a “Shove it!”
“Well,” Freeman said, looking down at the whitish shape made by the microdot-size pixels that looked about half the size of a cigarette filter against a background of gray, barren landscape. “Sure as hell aren’t Scuds.”
“East Winds,” Norton said. “Type four. Confirmed by the Pentagon. Conventional or three-megaton payload. Range three thousand miles. Has a circular error probability of around plus or minus two miles — so Tel Aviv says. But a CEP of plus or minus two miles doesn’t matter much if they’re after a big target like a city or—”
“An army,” Freeman said.
“Yes, sir. They’re theater-level offensive all right — not divisional. That’s why I thought you ought to see them straight away.”
Freeman sat down, patting his shirt for his bifocals, couldn’t find them, and had to go to the makeshift bedroom where he retrieved a spare pair from atop a Gideon Bible, its pages held open by a box of buckshot cartridges for the Winchester 1200 shotgun he kept by his bedside. The general found he didn’t need his glasses after all, for even without them Israeli and Pentagon intelligence reports had already concurred with Dick Norton’s assessment, classifying the missiles in large, black capitals as INF — intermediate nuclear forces — from PLA’s Second Artillery. He was shaking his head in disgust as well as alarm.
“I told them in Washington. I told them the moment those goddamned fairies signed that INF treaty with the Russians. While we were sending our Pershings to the scrap heap, and the Russians were doing the same—” He looked up at Norton, then back down at the missiles, a cluster of six of them. “Beijing, my friend, was grinning — ear-to-ear. Moment Gorby and Reagan signed the INF, China became the number one INF power in the world. You figure the fairies didn’t think of that?” Freeman was getting madder by the second. “I tell you what, Norton, when I think of all that goddamn incompetence running around loose in Washington it makes my blood—” The general stopped midsentence, directing a wary glance at Norton. “These infrared confirmed?”
“Yes, sir.” Norton knew that the general was remembering the humiliation heaped upon him by the press — the La Roche tabloids in particular — for the casualties Second Army had suffered earlier in the Siberian campaign, when Freeman believed, as intelligence had reported, that he was about to engage a division of enemy tanks hidden in the taiga. They had also been infrared confirmed, the Siberians having simply put battery-powered heaters inside the plastic mockups of the T-80s to give off a sufficient infrared signature to fool aerial reconnaissance.
As well as leading his armor into the trap, Freeman had sent Apaches on ahead to soften the Siberian armor up, only to have over fifteen of the Hellfire missile-armed choppers blown out of the sky by VAMs, or vertical area mines. Freeman knew that he’d been lucky that he’d lost only the battle on the Never-Skovorodino road and not the war. It was a lesson he’d not soon forget. “Any other confirmation?” he pressed Norton.
Norton reached over, turning past the photographs to page three of the typed report. “Yes, sir. Indentation. We can tell from blowups of the tire tracks in the desert approximately how many tons the carrier vehicles and loads are. The indentation weight equals that of a missile. If they’re fakes, they’re sure as hell heavy ones. And you know how the ChiComs are about fuel. It’s damn near a capital offense to waste a gallon in the Chinese army. I don’t think they’d be driving heavy fakes around for fun.”
From the coordinates, Freeman could tell at a glance that it was somewhere in Sinkiang province, Lanzhou military region. “Missile sites at Lop Nor?”
“Further west than that,” Norton answered. “Past the Turpan depression — in the foothills of the Tien Shan range. Pentagon and Israeli intelligence figure the missiles were originally situated there because Moscow was well within striking distance. They still don’t trust one another. Especially now. With the breakup of the old Soviet Union, Beijing’s afraid the disease’ll spread.”
“Maybe,” Freeman replied, “but the point is, Dick, their three-thousand-mile radius means they could easily reach us.”
“That’s what the report concludes, General. Washington and Tel Aviv are agreed on that. Only need to hit us with two or three in the first salvo and that’d be it for Second Army.”
Freeman was tapping his teeth with his bifocals, a habit that annoyed Norton intensely.
“By God, Dick, what we need is a preemptive strike. Apart from anything else those missiles are so close to the border they’re a gift to Yesov if he wanted to use them against us — if he and the Chinese are in cahoots. Remember in Siberia, Novosibirsk doesn’t like Moscow any more than Beijing.” The general saw Norton’s unease about a preemptive strike.
“I know, I know.” Freeman waved his hand impatiently. “Fairies’ll have a fit. Hopefully the White House will back us this time. I think that’s why MOSSAD sent their report straight to Washington.”
“But if we move anything in there, General, we’d be in a much wider war with China. Sixty-eight divisions against our forty-four, and these’re only the divisions on the Sino-Siberian border.”
Freeman didn’t need the figures. He already knew that China’s full-time army alone stood at over one hundred divisions — a million and a half men — and this ignored the two million men they had in the reserves. And Freeman knew the Chinese weren’t Iraqis. It wouldn’t be simply a mass of poorly led conscripts he’d have to face if it hit the fan. To a man, the Chinese were volunteers, and long-term volunteers at that. Like the German Wehrmacht, the PLA had taken pains to make sure that the members of any unit came from not only the same province, but wherever possible from the same village. It seemed like a small enough detail, but Freeman pointed out it was enormously important in terms of morale. You might bug out in front of strangers, but it’d be a long time before you’d let your own village down. Everyone in the village knew you and your parents. The disgrace would be total. It went a long way to making up for lack of sophisticated weaponry — the United States had learned that in ‘Nam.