Arc Light (36 page)

Maps bathed Rutherford in their projected light. The old Mount Weather facility used front-projection technology—a slide show, basically—and as Rutherford stepped out of one projector's light he revealed a map of Eastern Europe covered with unit markers. The Russian 2nd Guards Army had deployed into Byelarus and the 9th Army had deployed into the Baltics after the Russian military coup in March, which had ended the long battle between reformers and hard-liners. The U.S. divisions counterdeployed into Poland and Slovakia over the last three months in response just across the thin, imaginary line of the border separating those countries. And now, most ominously, the Russian 8th Guards Army had just been detected deploying into Ukraine. The deployment was marked by a thick, menacing arrow.

“Of particular concern are Russian moves in these two areas,” Rutherford continued, his pointer first indicating Eastern Europe. “A few hours ago, the 8th Guards Army began deployment into Ukraine, apparently with the Ukrainian's consent.”

“Yeah,” General Fuller said in a whisper still loud enough to draw a pause from Rutherford. “I'm sure the Ukrainians were fuckin' thrilled about it.”

After the smattering of laughter died down, Rutherford continued. “The 8th Guards, which is one of Russia's better armies, comes from forces allocated to its Western Strategic Direction and is under operational command of the Moscow Military District's Independent Army Group. It currently fields the 22nd Tank Division and four motorized rifle divisions—the 9th and 16th Guards and the 47th and 60th—in addition to its army-level forces. There is no indication yet that the group commander is also sending the 4th Artillery Division, which he holds in reserve east of Kursk, Russia, into Ukraine with the 8th Guards Army.”

“The 22nd Tank and 16th Guards are good units,” Army General
Halcomb interrupted, “but the other rifle divisions are pretty much paper tigers at this point. They were stripped bare of serviceable equipment and practically all of their full-strength battalions for the Chinese war. DIA puts them at under fifty percent effectiveness, and I'd be surprised, quite frankly, if they were in good enough repair to make the Slovakian border.”

“I thought you said that it was one of Russia's better armies?” the President asked.

“It is, sir,” Halcomb said, staring back at him.

After a pause, Rutherford, one of the military's better briefers, Lambert knew, resumed. “Those deployments, combined with the fourteen separate Russian air-to-ground attacks reported by the 1st Cav in Poland, have resulted in our issuance of action orders to VII Armored Corps in Krakow to prepare for engagement.”

“I issued orders to disengage!” the President shouted from the semidarkness, slamming his hand down at the disobedience.

General Thomas turned quickly to address the President. “The action orders to VII Corps are just precautionary, Mr. President.”

“Sir,” Army Chief of Staff Halcomb said, “you can see the predicament my people are in just by looking at the map. The VII Corps commander is staring at a Russian combined-arms army barreling down on units he's got sitting in barracks with their heavy weapons still in pre-positioning warehouses or on rail sidings back in Germany. He's practically livid, sir. Now, the Russians may be having their problems, but if those forces don't stop at the border, our people are looking at first contact with at least twenty and maybe thirty or forty thousand Russian troops in under forty-eight hours. If we issue preparatory action orders right now, sir, the 4th Infantry Division in Slovakia could field one brigade reinforced with a few miscellaneous units—about six thousand men.”

There was a long silence during which the President's chair creaked and he snorted an angry huff. “All right! Tell him he can go ahead and deploy, but only to
defensive
positions.”

After a moment's silence, Rutherford resumed the briefing. “The other troublesome spot is in the Barents Sea. We were moving a carrier battle group, Task Group 20.3 with the carrier
United States,
up from the Norwegian Sea to stand ready to go into the Kara Sea Bastion if necessary. Satellite photos, however, indicate activity in the port of Arkhangelsk—not the sub pens which we struck with nuclear weapons but the conventional port—consistent with a staging operation for a Russian amphibious assault force. If that force puts to sea, it is the unanimous recommendation of the Joint Chiefs to intercept it off the coast of Norway to prevent any potential for a landing in Norway or Iceland.”

“You leave those ships alone,” the President said. “The Russians are just doing the same thing we are: posturing.” The President was tired, and his frustration at being unable to disengage forces from the fighting surfaced at every meeting now. “Everybody just sit tight; no itchy trigger fingers. How many times do I have to say this? The longer we let things cool off, the better the chance we can keep this from getting out of control.”

“Sir,” Thomas said, “if we let the Russians land that force astride our supply lines to Europe—”

“You will do
nothing,”
the President said, his resolve strengthening. “Don't you see? You're thinking in terms of ‘losing Iceland.' I'm trying to avoid World War III! Now, which of those two outcomes do you think I should weigh more heavily in my decision-making?” The President turned to take in the Joint Chiefs. “Which?” Nobody responded. “Okay, let's get on with this. What was that you were telling me, Greg, about possible use of biological-warfare weapons?”

“We had a report, sir,” Lambert said, “from our emergency air base in Guam that a ‘Sniffer'—an air sampler—had detected suspected biologicals in the air shortly after a single Russian submarine-launched cruise missile mined their runway with scatterable munitions. Now it would be atypical for a mine delivery system to include a special weapons subsystem like chemicals or biologicals, but the report was”—Lambert looked down to read—“ ‘Suspected Biological Agent—Indeterminate Nature.' ”

“It would make sense that they'd use 'em on a place like Guam, sir,” Air Force General Starnes said. “It would isolate the risk of the infection spreading. That way you'd only knock out our base and the civilian population of that island but not have it spread uncontrolled across whole continents.”

The President looked horrified. “Look, are those Sniffer things accurate?” the President asked, turning to Lambert. Lambert shrugged. “You don't buy the report, do you, Greg?”

“No, sir,” Lambert said, looking at General Starnes. “The Pacific Command has a team on the ground in Guam right now doing a more sophisticated analysis, but I think they just hadn't turned the Sniffer on in so long, or that it was tested so infrequently, or that it works so poorly, that it just went off as soon as they powered it up.”

“Well, when did they turn it on?” the President asked General Starnes. “Did it go off like Greg said the second they turned it on?”

“I don't know, sir,” Starnes replied.

“Could you find out for us, please?” the President suggested, and Starnes snatched his telephone from its cradle. “Okay,” the President
said, leaning back in his chair and locking his interlaced fingers on top of his head, “both Razov and I have issued orders for all units to stand down, but we have had over three hundred engagements in, what, the last forty-odd hours. ‘Friction,' I think you called it.
Plus
you think the Russians are getting ready to invade Norway or Iceland, and have
already
attacked us with germ weapons. I hate to even ask, but what's next on the agenda?”

“Deployments,” Thomas said, his voice and manner indicating a greater significance than the otherwise innocuous word would deserve. Thomas sat up and rested his elbows on the table, lifting the deployment plan that Lambert had read and reread several dozen times. “I've spoken with the Secretary of Defense in Philadelphia and with Mr. Lambert,” Thomas said, nodding at Greg. “Our considered advice to you, sir, is that we begin the general deployment of troops called for by our contingency plans in the event, God forbid, of war with Russia.”

“Now, wait a minute,” the President said. “I've already agreed to sign Congress's mobilization order. That means the Russians are going to be watching while the Selective Service Administration calls up every single able-bodied boy aged eighteen and nineteen, and holds a lottery to call up thirty-five percent of the young women of similar age and fitness. Now I know we're going to spin the call-up so that it looks like a massive community service effort to ‘Rebuild America,' but every one of those teenagers, as I understand it, is first going to be sweating their butts off on some rifle range in Georgia or wherever. If we start deploying troops consistent with plans we have for fighting a war with Russia, don't you think that'll be a red flag to the Kremlin? Wouldn't the Russians consider the two together somewhat threatening,” he asked in a sarcastic tone, “especially given the noise coming out of Congress and our own Vice President?”

“Well, sir,” Thomas replied, “if our most optimistic assessments of the intentions of the Russians in deploying troops into Ukraine and staging at Arkhangelsk are correct, then we would be doing nothing more than responding in kind. But if they plan on fighting . . . ”

After a few moments of silence, the President leaned forward and sighed. “What are the plans? Just the broad brush picture. Get me a copy of the details to read later.”

Thomas looked down at the tables and figures on the sheets he held and drew a deep breath. “Okay, sir. If you'll turn to tab Nine-A in your briefing book and look at the table on the first page entitled, ‘Summary USA, USMC, and USAF Deployments.' ”

A rustle of paper followed as the lights came up and everyone turned to tab Nine-A. The page to which the tab was attached said, “General War Plan—Russia.”

“If all of our efforts to avoid war fail, sir,” Thomas said, “we would need the six corps and the other independent ground units from the army, basically the entire Marine Corps, and sixteen tactical fighter wings from the air force—all as shown on the table—in order to implement the current version of our General War Plan. The effort just to deploy them would be tremendous, but we already had a lot of it under way—activation of the Civilian Reserve Air Fleet, mobilization of the Military Sealift Command Reserve units, et cetera—in the buildup prior to the North Korean invasion. And of course, sir, we had already completed substantial deployments to Eastern Europe in response to our treaty obligations.”

“Could we win that war with these forces?” the President asked, the tug of curiosity demanding that the question be posed, however reluctantly. He looked at Lambert.

“The Russian military,” Lambert said, “like most of the country, was in a shambles even before our nuclear counterattack. Add to that, sir, the two ruinous wars against the Chinese to which they currently have deployed the bulk of their armed forces.” Lambert shook his head. “I'd rather be coaching our team than theirs, sir.”

Livingston looked around the table at the stony faces of the military men.
Are they looks of confidence,
he wondered,
or grim resolution to give it a go, if necessary?
History would forget these men's names if the wrong decision was made. But not his. “Greg,” he said, turning to his young aide, “you say you'd rather coach our team, but do you mean it? After all, the Russians would be the home team, not to abuse the metaphor.”

“It's an odd situation, sir. Yes, we have farther to go, longer supply routes. But ours are, for the most part, unimpeded by war damage from the nuclear exchange, and most of it, at least until you get into Eastern Europe, is over a sea-road-rail grid developed to Western standards. The Russians, in contrast, had a piss-poor transportation network to start with. Ninety-two percent of their roads are unpaved. There are only six all-weather roads stretching across the west from Moscow to Europe, and the best of them is twenty-four feet wide. Ninety-eight percent of their freight moves by rail, and now the rail lines are chock full of holes and cut up with fallout patterns. We're basically dealing right now with a Russian military that's a bunch of parts, not any kind of cohesive whole. Plus, since the fall of the Soviet Union, they've suffered pilferage, poor maintenance, declines in morale and discipline and cannibalization of units for piecemeal dispatch to the Far East, in addition to their enormous
losses in the two wars there. The Russians quite simply are not able to mount operations on anything like the scale of the Soviet military of the eighties.”

“They never were that good,” Marine General Fuller growled in a low voice, and everyone turned to him. “Their equipment is shit. Back in the Gulf War, the Iraqis had this little problem with their T-72 tanks. Seems their turrets just sorta popped right off from the kinetic energy of a hit. Don't do too damn much good to have nice thick armor or bolt-on reactive plates if the turret comes off on ya.”

Is mine the only voice of caution here?
Livingston wondered with a sinking feeling. His eyes drifted back down to the deployment table.
God, God, God,
he thought as he contemplated the course of action he had entered the room privately committed to taking. He looked up at Lambert, at the blue eyes from which burned the bright light of intellect.
But judgment?
he thought.
Does he have judgment?

“Okay,” the President said. “I approve the deployments.” Everyone sat around the table in silence. “I approve all deployments,” the President said, leaning forward and speaking in a measured voice as if meant to be quoted, “that are consistent with preparation—
preparation
—for the possibility of continued hostilities with Russia.” He looked from eye to eye around the table. “I want you gentlemen to understand that my standing orders are still to do everything possible to disengage, and I will study the details of this deployment carefully after this meeting to determine for myself, with Mr. Lambert's help, whether any safe minimum separations appear to be violated or whether any of the deployments appear to me to so provoke the Russians as to be counterproductive. But if neither is the case, then you may—in fact I insist that you must—go ahead with all your deployments.”