Arc Light (76 page)

“Not undefended,” Thomas replied. “There are troops—coalition troops, mainly, from Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and, soon, Italy—all along the flanks of the advance being conducted by forces of the United States and Great Britain. In addition, as the advance gets deeper we will expend some effort to push out the flanks, primarily using the more mobile Italian forces. We also intend to use the National Guard's III Corps to provide not just a theater reserve but to form the ‘shoulders' of our deepest penetration. They should be in position to assume that responsibility in a week or so.”

“How long do you expect the fighting to last in Moscow itself?” Lambert turned to see the silver-haired man from the Italian delegation sit after asking his question.

Thomas arched his eyebrows and drew a deep breath. “Well . . . that's difficult to say. There is really no precedent for any of this, for an urban war with turn-of-the-twenty-first-century arms and tactics. If the Moscow Campaign remains true to our experiences so far, it will be mobile and quick.”

“But as I understand it,” an influential Republican Senator from Texas said—and Lambert turned to look at the woman whose name was being whispered for the next Presidential campaign, “one of the reasons for the high rate of advance so far has been because you bypassed the Russians' fixed defenses in ‘end runs.' You won't be able to do that when you go into Moscow or any of these other big cities.”

“That's not entirely correct, ma'am,” Thomas said. “I have given you rates of advance of twenty-five miles per day as an average for an entire army corps. Individual combat units' rates of advance have sometimes been spectacular—fifty, sixty miles per day, rivaling the rates from the 1973 Arab-Israeli or the 1991 Gulf wars, both involving flat-out running along desert terrain. The slower twenty-five-mile average accounts for consolidation of positions, reduction of pocketed Russian troop concentrations, and moderations of advance due to logistical constraints. What I'm trying to say is that once we have everything in place—armor, infantry, artillery, support and supply, everything—around Moscow it could very well go quickly. Under twenty-four hours, possibly.”

“What's the worst-case, General?” the Texas Senator pressed.

“A month.”

The audience immediately broke into a caldron of noise, the general sounds of restlessness and anxiety so obvious that the President rose to his feet and said, “Let's not get the cart before the horse here. We're talking about something that's at best case well over a month away.”

“Wouldn't the casualties from fighting in a city like Moscow be tremendous?” the Minority Leader of the Senate stood and asked as
the Republicans began to double-team Thomas.

The President looked to Thomas, and Thomas said, “Do you mean civilian casualties, or ours?”

“Both.”

“The answer to both questions is yes, the casualties would be high.” The buzz from the room was renewed.

“I think everybody here remembers Stalingrad,” the Minority Leader said, turning to work the crowd. “I don't think anybody wants to—”

“This is not the floor of the Senate!” the President snapped angrily, cutting off the opposition political leader. “This is a military briefing for members of Congress and our allies.”

“What are our casualties now, General?” another Republican, this one from the House, rose to ask.

“To date,” Thomas said, shuffling his papers, “in the first sixteen days of fighting we have had 11,316 Killed in Action, 21,476 Wounded, and 516 Missing.”

“So about”—the Congressman paused to do the math—“over two thousand Americans killed and wounded per day. That means, if this war takes three months, we're talking a quarter million killed and wounded?” From the rise in the tone of his voice on the last words of his sentence he indicated incredulity at the estimate.

“It doesn't work that way,” General Thomas protested over the stirrings of the crowd. “Casualty rates are nothing like rates of advance. They occur in bunches, around offensives, ours or theirs. Most of the casualties we've had to date are disproportionately among the marines in the Far East, who had an opposed landing north of Vladivostok. They also include several major naval losses, and the toughest part of the air campaign.”

“How many casualties do you expect by the time we take Moscow, on all fronts?” the Minority Leader asked, picking up the baton from his colleagues. “What is this war going to cost us in lives?”

Thomas stared down at the podium. “We have or will have something in excess of about three hundred seventy thousand U.S. ground troops—Army and Marine Corps—and about an equal number of personnel in the aggregate from the U.S. Navy and Air Force actively engaged in or around the periphery of the Russian Republic. Our estimates run, on the low side, about twenty-eight thousand dead and fifty-six thousand wounded among the ground troops, and about half as many killed and wounded from the other two services.”

“So about . . . forty-two thousand killed, and eighty-four thousand wounded—total?” the Minority Leader asked.

“That's a rough estimate.”

“That's not just a rough estimate, General. That's on the low side, you said. What's the high side?”

Thomas took a deep sigh. “Assuming that we remain nonnuclear,” he said, pausing to let the implications of that assumption sink in, “then the high side would be something on the order of double that, with most of the increase coming in casualties among our ground troops.”

Again the voices, in heated comments, boiled over from the restive audience. This time, however, it was the Minority Leader's voice that quieted them. “If my math is correct, General, what you are suggesting is that there is a possibility that we could lose upwards of two hundred thousand of our three hundred seventy thousand ground troops in this fight. And that assumes, I might add, that the Russians stop fighting after we take Moscow, which nobody has suggested will be the case.” He was arguing now to the crowd, and he had their complete attention. “Just what, General Thomas, is the reason for the widely varying estimates of casualties from your low to your high end?”

Thomas stared back at the Senator, and all eyes were on him. “It depends, sir, on how the fight goes in and around Moscow.”

Again the crowd exploded in raucous conversation. The President finally rose and said, “We may never get there. They may agree to a cease-fire.” The noise level diminished. “Or they may declare Moscow an open city.”

“And monkeys may fly outa my butt!” the Minority Leader shouted, and the crowd noise that followed signaled to Lambert a shift in sentiment to that expressed by the Minority Leader. “How, General Thomas,” the Minority Leader continued, “do you plan on replacing the losses of over half of your ground combat forces if the worst, or even the
average,
turns out to be the case?”

“Well, sir, the only way casualties could go that high in a non-nuclear scenario would be if the fighting in Moscow dragged on for some time, several weeks to a month. During that time, a lot of the wounded, especially those wounded in the early phases of the operation, would be ready to return to action. Some of the people wounded in the first days, those with broken bones or flesh wounds, should start returning to light duty this week. The majority of the replacement personnel, however, would come from new inductees.”

“You mean from draftees?” the Minority Leader said.

“And the volunteers, of which quite a few who joined in the big influx after the nuclear attack are already in basic training,” Thomas replied in a level voice. “We've shortened both the basic and advanced training courses by a week by working everybody ‘round the clock. That puts total training time for, say, Infantry at ten weeks.
And we're thinking about trying to shave off another week or so. Add to them the recall of everyone we've discharged from service in the last twenty-four months, who we don't think need any retraining, and there's a steady stream of personnel coming on line.”

“But we're talking about taking nineteen- , eighteen- , even seventeen-year-old kids, sending them through a couple of months of boot camp, and then putting them into a meat grinder on the city streets of Moscow—isn't that right, General? Isn't that what fighting in an urban environment would be like—a meat grinder?”

“The casualties . . . would be . . . ” Thomas, an articulate and educated man, Lambert knew, could not find the words. “I suppose a meat grinder is an apt analogy, if the worst-case scenario were to be true.”

Lambert saw the President flinch and clench his jaw, looking away angrily.

“What about the Russian civilian casualties in this worst-case scenario?” the leader of the Czech delegation interjected into this otherwise purely American political squabble.

“In a worst-case scenario?” Thomas asked. “Assuming no formal evacuation of Moscow, and a month or more of conventional warfare through the streets and buildings . . . ” Again he hesitated, the words clearly getting stuck in his throat. He resumed on a different tack. “In a worst-case scenario, naturally, we would be hard pressed not to be less . . . less conscious of the risks of collateral damage. Our unit commanders would have to be freed to target artillery or air strikes at buildings, which are the main ‘natural' obstacle in a city. If those buildings still housed their prewar tenants—”

“Answer the man's question, General Thomas,” the President said in a quiet tone as he sat slumped in his chair, his chin resting on his hand.

“If we fight our way through Moscow block by bloody block,” Thomas said in a slow, deep voice, “somewhere between one and two million Russian civilians could die.” There was no outburst now, only silence.

“London Bridge is falling down! Falling down! Falling down!” Melissa sang as Matthew screamed at the top of his lungs. “London Bridge is . . . !” The microwave beeped, and she said, “It's ready! Here it is, baby!” She rushed over to the chair that sat in its reclined position on the countertop and shoved the nipple into his mouth.

Melissa's eyes fell shut as she tried to calm her jangled nerves. The television that she'd been attempting to monitor during the nonstop network war coverage blasted at a volume that now seemed grossly excessive. “The addition of the U.S. Army National Guard forces of the III Corps to the main drive toward Moscow represents the last full commitment of U.S. troops immediately available to coalition forces. This has led defense analysts to conclude that President Costanzo has ordered a ‘blitzkrieg' toward the Russian capital in an attempt to end the war as quickly and decisively as possible. Sources at the Defense Department confirmed that the reservists of the 107th Armored Cavalry Regiment have made contact with Russian Army forces in Byelarus at Petriko approximately four hundred thirty-five miles southwest of Moscow. There is no word yet of any fighting from the III Corps' two main combat divisions, the 38th Infantry headquartered in Indianapolis, or the 49th Armored out of Austin, Texas.”

Chi-r-r-r-p. The phone!
Melissa's heart leapt, as always. She spotted the cordless handset on the coffee table, just out of reach, she discovered, from her post where she held the bottle in Matthew's mouth. Debating the next move for an instant, she pulled the bottle from his powerful, sucking lips and he immediately spluttered, turned red during a short buildup, and then began his howl, even
She picked up the phone in that maelstrom of noise and said, in the shaking, expectant voice with which she always answered the telephone now, “Hello?”

She jammed the nipple back into Matthew's mouth, and he made a long, loud slurp as he reacquired suction on the rubber.

“ . . . of the army. May I speak to Mrs. David Chandler?” a woman's officious voice asked.