Meir and Malvinsky knew that sooner or later they’d be overrun, no place to hide, caught between the steamrollers of the two opposing armies. Through screaming bursts of shell fire, Malvinsky was reporting tanks coming through in battalion strength, fifty at a time now that gaps in the minefield had been “ribboned out,” Russian and East German infantry having quite literally laid out fluorescent tape to mark the safe entry points through the strip. If that happened, disaster would result, with the Soviet-Warsaw Pact echelons pouring through, then splitting off into arrow formations, one right, northward towards Kassel, the other left, south to Frankfurt-am-Main, driving deep wedges into NATO’s central front.
The crisis for NATO at the moment, as Meir knew first in his forward position, was that of the fiber-optical-guided missiles. Long lauded as much cheaper than the old standard missiles, which had to carry their own expensive independent control system, the fiber-optical missiles were guided by images relayed back to a central fire control. But the fiber-optical missiles had now been neutered by the fuel/air explosions, one of which Meir and Malvinsky had seen earlier that night as a pinkish glow to the east and which had sent out pressure waves twice as powerful as that emitted by a two-kiloton nuclear bomb, the waves ineffectual against the old-fashioned clunky Russian missiles.
A motorcycle messenger sent out from Fifth Army headquarters to Alfa One was told about the fiber-optics screw-up and, hitting 120 miles an hour on the Autobahn, had taken the message back to Fifth Army HQ, which had still not heard anything directly from NATO’s commander in chief of the thirteen-hundred-kilometeR-1ong central front. Nevertheless, despite the dire situation, Fifth Army’s General Willison was refusing to unleash his “stochastic” robot mines, designed to be set loose to roam for up to four days, attaching themselves to the magnetic field of a tank, exploding with fifteen kilograms of explosive. The trouble with this plan, Willison realized, was that if the NATO forces couldn’t stop the enemy tanks at Fulda Gap and NATO tanks had to go into the Gap, then the stochastic mines would be just as much a menace to his U.S. M-1s, German Leopards, and British Challenger tanks.
The Fulda Gap was now a caldron of flying steel and volcanic earth as the Russians’ spearhead column littered the ground, many of its tanks still burning, crews dead or dying aboard, hulls of others ripped apart, but still the Russians kept coming. With a six-to-one-man ratio over NATO, the gap might still be breached, MiGs and F-15s thundering overhead in the night, contesting the space above the potential breakthrough point.
All Meir and Malvinsky, eyes red with fatigue and fear, could do was to keep changing dugout positions as much as they could, trying not to expose themselves to either enemy or “friendly” fire as they watched tracer arcing out from the M-1s, machine guns finding the range, the M-1s’ lasers put out of action either by the tanks’ own reactive armor packs exploding or direct Russian fire, over a hundred of the M-1s destroyed by East German 125-millimeter armor-piercing discarding sabot rounds, capable of piercing the M-1s’ twenty-centimeter steel.
It was now twenty minutes after two on the morning of September 3 when, because of the massive blackout of communication along NATO’s line, NATO’s European commander in Brussels, General Koch, had no alternative but to formally release, by pay telephones (those not plugged into the fiber-optic system) and dispatch riders, all sector commanders to proceed on their own initiative. He emphasized the main tenet of NATO’s “forward defense, flexible response” strategy — that the enemy should be engaged as far forward as possible to buy the desperate one week needed for the American reserves to enter the war — the nuclear option being the strategy of last resort and only permissible under the express orders of the NATO council.
For Koch, there were only two decisions he could have made: one, to do as he had done, or secondly, to defer to the NATO council. But in the time it would have taken him to convene the council, he was ordering the recall of “dual-based” troops from the United States, that is, those troops who, on paper, were in Europe but were only at half strength, an economic measure left over from the habit of bleeding the United States’ European garrisons to put reserves into Vietnam. Koch knew the decision he made to recall the dual-based troops was in effect a decision that might force the U.S. president’s hand. Unlike his NATO brief, Koch did not have the authority to move any U.S. unit higher than a forty-thousand-man corps. His request for the dual-based troops, a request that he knew would be known as quickly by Moscow as Washington, would be one that in effect would widen the war, but if not made, would make it impossible for the United States to reinforce Europe in time. Besides, if he didn’t issue the order, the Russians would see this as a weakness, and what might have been an intention simply to gobble up territory along the near front would expand anyway, encouraging the S-WP forces to press on farther into Western Europe, knowing the farther they went, the less likely it was that NATO’s nuclear option would be invoked.
Koch fully understood what it would mean for President Mayne, but historians could argue about it — if there was anything left to write about, which there wouldn’t be if the Russians broke through. The president could refuse the request, of course, but this also would be seen by Moscow as a lack of resolve, another Munich sellout, and would only encourage Moscow to grab even more territory.
When Press Secretary Trainor got the request, he was at once shaken and relieved. He and the president had been holding a decidedly gloomy discussion in the Oval Office with the Joint Chiefs about the political necessity of ascertaining whether or not the missiles that hit the Blaine were fired by NKA patrol boats or had come in via low air attack, launched by a Russian aircraft out of Cam Rahn Bay or from the southbound Soviet Far Eastern Fleet. But now the request from SACEUR— Supreme Allied Commander Europe — endorsed by CINC south and CINC north, rendered the question about who fired the missiles academic.
“The North Koreans have tripped the whole goddamned thing off anyway,” said Trainor.
A call came in from Premier Suzlov. He was demanding that Mayne order NATO to cease its fighting and surrender all territory gained by the Soviet-Warsaw Pact countries.
“Mr. Premier,” answered the president, “I don’t want this. You don’t want this. Call off your people in Korea.”
“I have no people in Korea. You have people in Korea.”
“I mean call off Pyongyang.”
“We have no people in Pyongyang. It would be interference in the internal affairs—”
“Then,” said Mayne calmly, “call off the ‘fraternal assistance’ you are giving East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia—”
“We did not begin this, Mr. President. Your act of terrorist aggression in East Berlin—”
‘ “That might well have been terrorist, Mr. Premier, but it was not an act of any government in the NATO alliance. Of this I can assure you.”
“Assure me? You can assure me of nothing. However, if you contain your NATO armies, I will agree to—”
“Mr. Premier?”
The line went dead.
“What the hell—” began Mayne.
The NSA electronic experts overseeing the White House and situation room communications punched all the right buttons, including time-of-conversation-cessation tone for number coding into the computer. Most likely explanation, they informed the president, “connections purposely cut.”