Arc Light (72 page)

A crashing noise and a spattering of pings from outside reminded Chandler that the artillery still fell. He turned to see the artillery bursts erupting from all around the railbed. Chandler looked again back at the ridge and saw two new vehicles, one BTR and one T-72 with its turret blackened and gun at a steep elevation, dashing back up the slope. The BTR that had played hide-and-seek when last he looked lay on its side burning. No new vehicles appeared at the ridge, and as he scanned the battlefield for signs of life the retreating tank and BTR exploded almost simultaneously.

“Gunner, cease fire!” Chandler yelled. “Stand by.”

The artillery raining down around Chandler began to diminish. At any moment, however, a lucky direct hit could kill one of his tanks, or a near miss could riddle a Bradley and the infantry inside. At a minimum, the shrapnel might scrape off an aerial or smash a sight.

Chandler's throat was dry. The main guns of his and the armored cav tanks had fallen silent, replaced by the smoke and heat from the muzzles of their machine guns and the spillage of the spent cartridges from the sides of the guns' chambers as they peppered the few pitiful human figures scrambling desperately about the battlefield.

Is that it?
Chandler thought.
No more?
The situation, the doctrine, screamed at him from the books and lectures. The seconds ticked off, and he sat there uncertainly. There would never be a situation more clear cut, but still he struggled with the decision. It was so clear!
If only I had an out,
he thought. He remembered the plaque outside the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth.
“Audace, audace, toujours audace”
—“Audacity, audacity, always audacity.”

Chandler switched to the battalion net. “Victor Whiskey, this is Juliet Lima One, do you read, over?”

“Juliet Lima One, this is Victor Whiskey. Affirmative, over,” the Fire Support Officer commanding Chandler's FIST, his Fire Support Team, said.

“Smoke—Objective Mercedes—fire, out,” Chandler ordered.

“Smoke—Objective Mercedes—wilco, out,” the young officer responded, plotting the fire from inside his modified M-113 armored personnel carrier and directing the mortar platoon to target the ridge across the battlefield.

In just seconds, the first mortars exploded on the crest of the ridge ahead.

“Splash—over,” the FSO said to report first impact.

The smoke quickly obscured the hill from Chandler's view. The Russian artillery had died off completely, smashed to pieces, undoubtedly, by counterbattery fire or air attack. Chandler considered changing his plan, calling it off, but the adrenaline of the fight had pumped him up so much that his grip on the handholds was painfully tight.

“All units,” Chandler said, keying the radio and swallowing to wet his dry throat, “this is Juliet Lima One. Advance to contact, I say again, advance to contact. Out.”

“What should I do with the colors?” the commander of the 104th Guards Airborne Division asked, barely audible on the shortwave radio over the swirling electronic howl of the distance between Iceland and Moscow. “Should I present them to the Americans, or burn them?”

Razov looked down the table at the other
STAVKA
officers and held out his hand in question. Most averted their eyes, and the few who returned his look glared at him without answers.

“Burn them,” Razov said, and before the general could answer there was an explosion and a series of popping sounds. “General Trifonov?” Razov said in a raised voice. “General Trifonov?”

“Yes, yes!” he replied angrily as the popping noise continued in great ripping bursts. “It's just their damned gunships, those transport aircraft—AC-130s—that they've converted into weapons platforms.” There was another loud boom. “Ever since we ran out of antiaircraft missiles they've just been circling up there and firing directly down on us. They apparently located our signals unit about five hundred meters away and are tearing it to pieces.”

“You have my permission to surrender at any time, General Trifonov,” Razov said. “You've done your job. Your part in this is over. Make contact and call a cease-fire.”

There was a long pause before the acknowledgment came. With it came something else. “Before I sign off, there's one more thing that I have to get off my chest.” Razov looked up at Admiral Verkhovensky, who raised his eyebrows at the tone of voice used by the field general. “When you sent us to this godforsaken island, did you intend to leave us here with no support or supplies, or was it just a miscalculation?”

Admiral Verkhovensky flared and raised his hand to punch the speaker button and disconnect the impudent officer. Razov grabbed his wrist, and Verkhovensky stared at him angrily before Razov said, “He deserves an answer,” in a low voice. Verkhovensky drew his hand back, and Razov turned to the speaker and said, “We sent you there knowing that we would not be able to supply you for long. By forcing the Americans to fight there, you have tied up some of their best infantry units—their 82nd Airborne and Rangers, plus a light infantry division and a Canadian brigade group. We thought they might also introduce their marine forces in the Atlantic to Iceland, but that was not to be. You have fought well and hard, and the people of Russia will long remember your sacrifices.”

Again there was a pause, but then the general commanding Russian forces in Iceland said, “Well, we tied them up for almost three weeks, but they're all yours now. Watch out, because they're good, especially their Rangers and paratroopers. They never backed off an engagement. They're fine light infantry. It would have been a good fight, if only we had the ammunition to give it a go.”

As soon as the line was disconnected, Air Force General Mishin shouted, “We never should have pulled our support of those troops!”

“And what would you have us do?” Admiral Verkhovensky snapped back. “If I operated my forces much longer in the Norwegian Sea with the American carrier battle group sitting astride my fleet's lines of supply in the Barents, I would have lost them also. Besides,” Verkhovensky said, his eyes narrowing as he stared at his accuser, “we committed five of your air wings to Iceland, and how long did it take the Americans to brush them aside? Four days! Four days of air cover, and then complete air supremacy for the Americans after that!”

“And how long do you expect your precious ships in the Barents Sea to last,” Mishin said, “with an American carrier battle group bearing down on them at last report?”

“Iceland is a sideshow,” General Karyakin, commander of the rebuilding Strategic Rocket Forces, said calmly, and both the admiral and the air force general appeared satisfied with letting the argument drop. “We have more pressing concerns.” Karyakin looked over now at Razov. “Like how to recover from that stupid attack at the Dnepr.”

“It was a calculated risk,” Razov said.

“It was a
foolish
risk!” Verkhovensky said, rising to the opportunity to vent his frustration on somebody else.

“In the Far East,” Razov responded calmly, “their marines and their army's Ninth Corps are pushing up the Sikhote-Alin mountains cutting off the bulk of our combat power to the south. It's all we can
do to hold the Chinese off our remaining supply bases inside Occupied Territory and mount a few tactical counterattacks. To the south of Moscow, their armored cavalry spearhead should be at Bryansk in a couple of weeks, with an entire corps of their Army Reserve and National Guardsmen moving forward, barely three hundred and fifty kilometers from Moscow. Unless we can get fuel to the 19th Tank Army in Ryazan, we will have no mobile forces with which to counterattack. And they now have mobile forces freed of their commitments in Iceland. We have no satellites to tell us what they are doing because they have all been destroyed, as have our launch facilities.”

“We have raised Provisional Troops from every town and city on the road to Moscow,” General Abramov, commander of the Provisionals, said. “They're mainly building defensive works now, but as the Americans approach we'll arm them. The Americans will pay in blood for every one of those towns. Plus, there is the ‘Moscow Line.' We'll have two hundred thousand men at work there shortly, with a hundred thousand of them under arms.”

Razov just looked at him, forcing himself to mute his sarcasm, and then continued. “The Americans have air superiority at all points north, south, and west of Moscow, and south and east of Khabarovsk in Siberia. Outside of coastal waters,” Razov said, “the navy has no,
no
surface units responding except for the battle group in the Barents Sea and just five attack submarines. The American carrier strikes from the Black Sea at our oil transport facilities in the Caucasus and the cessation of oil deliveries from secessionist Siberian republics has seriously reduced our fuel supplies. On all other materials, we are operating on stocks only; military production is almost at a standstill. Desertion rates are rising and morale is plummeting. We are losing entire combat formations on first contact with the American armored units.”

Razov looked around the table at the officers, but they averted their eyes. “And have any of you left the Kremlin recently?” When no one responded, Razov said, “I thought not. Colonel Filipov”—Razov turned to see Filipov rise from his seat behind him—“would you please give us a report on the civil situation?”

Filipov stepped up to the table. “There is no food. The people are starving,” Filipov said in a grim tone. “Estimates are that by the end of August, Moscow will be losing between five and ten thousand dead per day from starvation or diseases related to malnutrition, primarily among the very old and the very young. The apartments and public buildings are jammed with refugees. The power is on for six hours per day on a rotating basis around the city, but it is uncertain how long we will be able to sustain even that level of power generation. If the Americans ever come back at us with something more
than the occasional cruise missile they now use for harassment of operations, or if they break their self-imposed moratorium on attacks of our nuclear reactors after the contamination incident at Lyubertsy No. 2, there will be only emergency power. The anarchists are operating completely openly, organizing block committees and holding public demonstrations, especially in the smaller cities to the east and around Moscow University here in the capital. Their membership is swelling dramatically.”

“Where the hell is the Minister of Security?” Verkhovensky asked, looking around the table for the usually silent “civilian” minister whose forces were in charge of maintaining domestic political order.

“He is on an inspection tour of their units in Nizhni Novgorod,” Razov replied.

The old commander of Construction Troops loosed a raspy laugh that metamorphosed into a hacking cough. “The little KGB weasel is inspecting his vital facilities to the east, eh?” and several other men laughed, the pattern from the last world war repeating itself. The old man ended by pulling his handkerchief out and coughing until he was red-faced.

Razov felt the tension break in the room. After a moment's hesitation he said quietly, “I propose a cease-fire.”

There was silence in the room. Finally Verkhovensky asked, “On what terms?”

Razov stared back at him without answering.

“Impossible!” Mishin shouted. “We still have two army groups in the Urals and one in the Baltic countries that have yet to fire a shot! Plus the 19th Tank Army at Ryazan, and the St. Petersburg garrison that we can pull back to join up with the Provisionals around Moscow! We can regroup, fight all the way back to the Urals if we have to.”

“And if they attack on a third front?” Razov asked. “We have forces deployed around St. Petersburg and in the Baltic States, yes, but after they have run through their stocks—or the ten percent of the stocks that are left after the American air and Special Forces attacks—with what will we supply them? And how do we plan on moving, engaging, fighting these army groups without fuel? Do we bury them up to their turrets like Saddam Hussein and hope the Americans waltz by within range of their
guns?”
Razov was shouting, exasperated and frustrated at his rapidly diminishing ability to control events.