Arc Light (73 page)

“We've got huge caches of supplies,” Mishin insisted.

“But we can't move them!” Razov shouted. “We can't move them, not by rail, or by truck, or certainly by air, General, not unless
you have some secret weapon to wipe the Americans from the skies.”

“We couldn't even move them if we had air superiority,” the commander of Transportation grumbled, “not without reprioritization of fuel deliveries so that I can get fuel to
my
people.”

“Reprioritization from what?” the commander of the Western Front asked. “From tanks? BTRs? BMPs?”

“Moscow will fall,” Razov said quietly.

Nobody said anything. Finally, after the silence had turned oppressive, Verkhovensky said, almost in a whisper, “Yuri, we can't give up Moscow without a fight.”

“An open city!” Filipov blurted from behind Razov. “We can just declare Moscow an open city, like the French did with Paris in World War Two. Pull back everything we can salvage to the Urals and keep fighting like in 1812!”

Even though Razov knew his young aide was only getting started, Filipov fell quiet. There followed an awkward silence, and in that silence Razov knew that the worst would come true. To give up Moscow would be defeatist, and one of two things would happen: either the army would unravel, or some young Turk from lower levels of command would blow
STAVKA
to kingdom come and assume national command. Everyone's memory was mired in the Great Patriotic War. Hitler had been stopped by stiffened resistance and resolute leadership. None of the others here would dare give up Moscow without a fight. Neither would he.

“But we have fallen into a trap,” General Karyakin said, and Razov was instantly on guard. “We are thinking
defensively.”
He turned to stare at Razov. “What we need to do is start thinking offensively, strategically.”

“Like your plan to use chemical and biological weapons?”

“The disease has yet to manifest itself fully in the Chinese troops,” Karyakin said in a nonchalant tone. “Once it does, the effects will be debilitating and it will be quite a while before they pose a threat.
Strategic
thinking, don't you see?”

“And your nerve gas attacks against the Americans and British have produced, what?” Razov asked. “Two, three hundred dead, most of those by accident in that one mobile field hospital?”

“I wasn't talking about chemical or biological weapons for the Americans.”

“What would you have us do, General?” Razov said coolly. “Fire the Bastion's missiles? Bring them down to defeat with us?”

“ ‘Minimize the maximum gain of our opponent'?” Karyakin said, smiling. “It sounds a bit like those newspaper accounts of Livingston's decision to retaliate. The ‘Prisoner's Dilemma,' I believe
they called it.” He smiled again and shook his head. “No. There is more that those missiles can do than simply destroy and kill, you know. You're simply not approaching the problem creatively.”

“What are you talking about?” old Admiral Verkhovensky demanded.

“The Americans are not without their own problems. Judging from their news reports and from our human intelligence, there are large numbers—tens of millions—of people who are refugees from their cities. Just listen to the public exhortations of the President in his television and radio addresses and of his traveling minstrel show of Cabinet officers sent out to calm the natives. The Americans have an Achilles' heel.”

“And what might that be?” Air Force General Mishin asked, shocking Razov by showing interest. Suddenly he feared that out of desperation Karyakin might be reeling in the principal members of
STAVKA
.

“Colonel Filipov,” Karyakin said, turning to Pavel. “You are our expert on the United States. What do you think underlies the President's exhortations to return home to the cities?”

“They're concerned about falling rates of production.” Razov began to sense the broad outlines of the plan that Karyakin now leaned forward to explain, and he realized that getting Filipov, Razov's most trusted aide, to supply the plan's factual underpinnings was an artful ploy.

“The very thing that makes them so powerful,” Karyakin said, “their productive capacity, is also their Achilles' heel. Our boys—these Provisionals, for example,” he said, pandering to General Abramov, who nodded in gratitude for even some recognition, “can fight if you throw them a few sacks of potatoes and a stackful of old Kalashnikovs. But the Americans,” he said, leaning forward conspiratorially over the table with a glint in his eye, “their vaunted ‘systems'—these complicated mechanisms that require every third soldier to be a computer programmer whose job it is to get every last nut and bolt into bins at the front for ready access—they rely on an extraordinarily complex chain from factory to field. If any one of those little nuts or bolts—or more likely computer chips, or exotic hydraulic fluids, or little plastic sheaths on their bombs' laser designator kits, or whatever—if any one of those supplies falls to the critical stage, we start peeling back their ‘force multipliers.' Stripped of all those systems, it becomes tank vs. tank, soldier vs. soldier. The game is leveled, and we are, shall we say, on our home field.”

“Look, Karyakin,” Mishin said angrily, shaking a finger in the air at his face to the relief of Razov, “we've done absolutely everything we can to interdict and reduce their logistical effort. My boys
have been flying off to their death by the thousands attacking their rear areas in a conscious, and might I add somewhat short-sighted, attempt to shut down the flow of supplies to the front. If I had been allowed to contest control of the air by attacking their airfields like I wanted, we might still have—”

“I'm not talking about interdiction of their supplies on the way to the front,” Karyakin said, interrupting. “I'm talking
strategic
thinking! Shutting down their production at the source.
Fear,
gentlemen. I'm talking about instilling
fear
in the American populace, the working population of ordinary citizens. If we can force them from their cities, we can force them from their jobs! If there are no workers, there are no factories! How long,” Karyakin shouted, “how long can they maintain their current level of combat effectiveness if their production comes to a standstill? Two months? One month? One week, even?
Fear
—instilling a crippling fear in your enemies—that's the key to winning
battles,
and that's the key to winning wars.”

“Breakout!” Captain Loomis said as he jerked Chandler's hand left and right and then pulled him into a hug. Chandler warmed immediately and broke into a broad grin as the male celebration continued with the arrival of each new officer. The COs of the three armored companies, Chandler and Loomis, the battalion Executive Officer, punched each other's arms and laughed, as much an emotional release as a gaudy display of their incredible victory.

“Like shootin' turds in a toilet,” the commander of Alpha Company said to the laughter of all. At twenty-nine tanks, forty-four other armored vehicles, nineteen unarmored vehicles, and countless infantrymen, Alpha Company led the task force in kills.

“And how many did we lose?” Bravo Company commander asked for the benefit of Loomis, who had just arrived.

“Ze-e-r-o-o!”
the three men shouted in unison, laughing.

“Oh, oh,” Charlie Company commander said, almost choking on the big swig of water that he had taken from his canteen as if it were champagne. “I had one of my loaders hurt his wrist when they hit a bump,” he said with a grin on his face. “Sprain, they think.”

They laughed, and Alpha Company commander asked, “Did you Medevac him out?” and they all laughed again, the Charley Company CO trying to pour water on the head of his questioner but missing as he dodged and shoved him back.

“Oh, uh, Major Chandler,” Charlie Company commander said, “my tank's barrel count is one seventy-one. We may need a replacement before we get to Moscow.”

“Hey,” the Bravo CO said, pushing him with his open hand, “I got one guy who's cracked three hundred shots.”

“Well, we aren't getting any new barrels,” Chandler said. “Just aim higher.”

They laughed again and the banter continued, Chandler reveling in it. Hesitant to acknowledge just how spectacular their action had been, he'd listened in succession to the captains below and the colonel above. Harkness had practically raved, telling him the whole division was now doing some “broken field running” through “Chandler's Hole,” as some staff pukes called it at division.

It was Chandler's massacre of three regiments, weakened by the armored cav whose guns also contributed mightily to Chandler's own firepower, that had poked open the hole through which he had put his entire task force. For three hours they had run amok among lightly armed command, supply, and support troops. Finally, in a dash for the Iput River, Chandler had gotten there late, but had rolled right up on a Russian crossing operation. Every shot was a kill as the exposed vehicles swam at four miles per hour or crawled over the narrow floating bridges.

Two of the bridges had been seized intact, and after one of HQ Company's recovery vehicles had managed to drag the flaming hulk of a T-80 off one bridge, Harkness had ordered Chandler across.
That one was simple,
Chandler thought, recalling the ease with which he gave such a risky order. Only Loomis knew that it was brigade's order, however; the rest of the armored company commanders' confidence in Chandler-the-warrior-king reigned supreme. Chandler had issued the order to cross without a second thought, but he never would have crossed if left to make his own decision.

His entire task force and the support elements rolled or swam the Iput, and the turkey shoot began again over the next ridge. Despite having taken time to restock ammunition and refuel, Chandler's tanks had switched to machine guns for most of the killing. No need to waste main gun ammo on trucks and dismounted troops. Chandler had even learned to remain calm as the light and totally ineffective missiles streaked his way. Just keep your eyes open for the brilliant flare of the missiles' motor, train the .50 caliber on the source, and squeeze the trigger. Bullets fly faster than antitank missiles, and the missiles almost immediately went wildly out of control, the hand of its operator jerked off the joystick by fear or by the spasms of death.

Finally, when Chandler made another call for fuel and ammo,
division passed a new brigade to continue the advance. Now they stood at the center of the battalion's Maintenance Collection Point, basking in self-congratulatory adulation at the fenders of their four tanks.

Troops hustled all around, their spirits high as their accomplishments were clear to all, to set up a massive camouflage net over the group of Headquarters Company vehicles that ringed Chandler's Tactical Operations Center. The net was necessary even at night because of the vision devices of modern warfare. In the distance, barbed wire ringed the area and two sentries stood, M-16s at the ready, at the one break in the strand.

Chandler glanced over at the wall-mounted map in the battalion's Command M-577, a converted M-113 armored personnel carrier, which was clearly visible through the vehicle's open door under a canvas tent extension. The spike of his battalion's penetration had turned into a bulge as the trailing units had pushed out the flanks, the blue area marked with greasepaint on the map's plastic overlay expanding at an impressive rate. The company commanders would soon be copying the lines and symbols from his map onto theirs and returning to celebrate with their tired platoon leaders, who would take the good news down to the sergeants, and so forth.

Their “hasty defense” had quickly become a “supporting attack” to the advance that corps had planned. When it became even more successful, it was upgraded to the “main attack,” and Chandler and his Fire Support Officer had suddenly received incredible volumes of artillery and air support, surprising even for the main attack given the depth into which they had penetrated enemy territory and the logistical difficulties that constantly made their every move uncertain. They had used the firepower wantonly, blasting the earth ahead of them with rolling torrents of fire. A suspicious copse of trees here, a slight rise over which lay the unknown, a small group of farmhouses in which infantrymen could be hiding—Chandler and his FSO blasted them all to smithereens.

They had seized objective after objective ahead of schedule, each of which Chandler had been told was defended but none of which amounted to a fair fight. Chandler's record of successes grew with each slaughter. But he knew the successes were less than what they appeared to be back up the chain of command. He knew it from the dazed Russian infantry that stumbled from their holes, their weapons not even fired against the armored onslaught. But when the commendations had poured in over the radio, Chandler had remained quiet.
“If it's a fair fight,”
Chandler recalled from his training days way back in Officers Candidate School,
“you haven't done your job.”

Truck after truck rumbled by in the darkness outside their pool of light. The supply train of the main attack was well stocked with materials. Logistics was a martial art at which Americans excelled.

“Did you guys realize we're in Russia?” Loomis asked.

“You're kidding!” the Bravo CO said.

“Nope,” Loomis said. “Morrison told Dave that we were the first unit into Russia, right before we crossed the river.”

“Well,” Chandler said, “those jarheads over in Vladivostok might disagree.”

After a momentary pause, the company commanders exploded in laughter and began heaving shit onto Loomis, and Loomis tried unsuccessfully to defend himself. “He meant . . . he meant . . . he meant in Europe!”