Arc Light (84 page)

He walked away, passing a small green device about the size of a bread box. The Chemical Alarm, sniffing, constantly sniffing. Sniffing for death in the air. There had been no chemical attacks since the first, but who knew what was coming. Things were bad—the ugliness
of it predominated all his recollections of the fighting—but it could get worse. A shout from a single canvas-covered truck that was being unloaded at the bottom of the hill drew Chandler's attention.

“Mail's here,” Barnes said at his side. Chandler looked up to see Barnes staring intently back at him. “Division Postal Detachment.” Barnes eyed him up and down. “We got some new two-strand—WD-1—and some D-cell batteries. Should we string the 312s?”

Chandler shook his head. They had been using the old TA-1 sound-powered telephones instead of radios when not on the move to reduce electromagnetic emissions that might pinpoint their position. They were out of batteries for the newer model field telephones, the TA-312, and they had also gotten the last of the double-strand wire required by the 312 chewed up by treads. But the battalion was moving out shortly, Chandler decided, and stringing the wire was not worth the time or effort.

“When we move out, should we back off MOPP Three?” Barnes asked.

Chandler tried to make his mind work. MOPP IV was all gear on. If the bread box's shrill buzz, which was audible for half a mile, went off, they'd go to MOPP IV or die trying. MOPP III, which they had been on for hours—suit, gloves, and boots on but mask carried—was hot and draining. He thought about ordering MOPP I and having everybody take everything off, if only to allow the men to scratch the million nagging itches under the thick suits and damp, dirty clothing.

“Take us down to MOPP II,” Chandler said—suit on, boots, gloves, and masks carried. It would take twenty seconds for a tanker to get to MOPP IV from MOPP I inside the confines of a tank—
too long, too many dead,
he decided.

Chandler looked down at the two M-1s that lay in the flat pasture below Hill 422. One tank was charred black in several spots, the blowout panels missing on the back deck, the hatches blackened, and one ugly hole on the side of the turret. The other tank, however, appeared unscathed, still neat and green. The only thing unusual was that its hatches were all thrown open.

“How're the two men from that one?” Chandler asked, pointing to the heavily damaged tank with the missing blowout panels—the only one from which survivors had emerged.

“One's pretty bad,” Barnes said. “Pro'bly lost a leg, if he makes it. The other one—I don't know. Didn't have a scratch on him, but he could hardly breathe. He was coughin' and red faced and . . . ” Barnes just shook his head.

Metal fume fever,
Chandler thought, nodding. At the enormous temperatures of penetration, the exotic metals that armored the vehicle burn and are highly toxic if inhaled. And then there was blast lung from the pressure of the hit. That got some. And spalling—molten metal knocked loose by the kinetic energy of the impact, becoming shrapnel in the enclosed space. The guys from that tank in Bravo Company bought it that way. And . . .

“You should get some sleep, sir,” Barnes said looking at him. “We got an hour or so till stand to.”

How long had it been?
Chandler wondered.
He had been in combat for five and a half weeks. He hadn't slept more than a couple of hours at a stretch the entire time.
“Okay,” he said, and he walked down the slope to his tank, weaving his way between the Russian hulks littering the ground where they had been caught, just short of Hill 422. Chandler's task force had rained death down upon them from the hill—the M-1's superior vehicle speed allowing it to attain the high ground first. Each of the kills was now chalk-marked with a big
X
on the vehicles' hulks indicating that the vehicle had been checked and was “secure,” its occupants still lying inside, no longer their enemy.

Almost every M-1 he passed was still also, its crew asleep. Each platoon had designated one man from each four-man tank crew to clean the main guns, and here and there men were manhandling the twenty-foot-long rammer in and out the length of a depressed gun barrel.

“The horse, the saddle and the man,”
Chandler remembered the old cavalry principle. His vehicles had all been refueled, reloaded, and cleaned before the infantry and tankers had lain down on the ground around them. They were just sleeping, but an odd chill came over him as he saw them lying completely still, some twisted at uncomfortable-looking angles.

He paused and looked carefully at one of the men whose chest rose and fell slowly in deep sleep, then walked on toward his tank. When he got there, Jefferson and the driver were lying by the treads sound asleep.

Chandler went around to the front of the tank. A long black streak to the right of the driver's hatch marked the point of impact of the antitank missile that had been their only near miss. It had hit the thickest armor of the tank, the glacis, along the extreme angle of the glacis's slope and had discharged its warhead harmlessly.

He brushed the black streak with his fingertips and rubbed the soot between his fingers. Snapping out of the fog, he lay down on the dry grass next to the tank and closed his eyes. His head hurt as
if ice picks were jammed into it, and he felt a scratchiness in his throat warning of a coming illness. He began to drift off, but a shot of adrenaline woke him when he began to worry whether Loomis was still on the net.
And I didn't look at the companies' positions,
he remembered.
Surely they put out OP/LPs.

He opened his eyes with effort and raised his head to look around. The infantrymen on the slope of the hill lay asleep on the ground.
Nobody's dug in.
His head fell again of its own weight, and his eyes sank closed.
I need sleep,
he thought.
I can't even see straight anymore.

But rest would not come. With a frustrated sigh, Chandler willed himself to his feet and headed off to find the companies' Observation Posts, staggering as he drifted in and out of sleep.

“Podolsk has fallen, Mr. President,” General Thomas said. “That puts the lead elements of V Corps' 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment about eighteen miles south of the Moscow suburbs, which they will reach, in all probability, sometime in the night, Moscow time.”

“The army's orders then, sir,” Lambert jumped in, “are to begin the envelopment of Moscow, all the while skirting the main defensive belts surrounding the city. We will leave the Noginsk road open for evacuation of Moscow as you directed.”

“
And
for resupply,” Marine General Fuller groused. “Hell, sir. If we're gonna go in there and get blood on our hands, we oughta do it right. We oughta go on and close the noose.”

“I don't want Razov feeling like a trapped animal,” the President said. “I don't want to back him in there and leave him no avenue for escape.” The President looked at each of the National Security Council members present, clearly intending to reinforce the point. “Now, what about St. Petersburg?”

“Same general plan, sir,” General Thomas said. “Skirt the defenses and envelop. Our people have taken Tosno and cut the main rail line between Moscow and St. Petersburg. They'll cut the last road link to Moscow on the twenty-sixth. Our timetables put the lead elements at the Baltic Sea by the thirtieth.”

“Are there any signs of movement from any of the independent Russian forces in the field?” the President asked. “From the
army groups in the Baltic countries, or from the south or east of Moscow?”

“None, sir,” Lambert answered. “We feel fairly confident that we can hold off any moves from the south of Moscow with the National Guard's III Corps. The Moscow operation, Operation Crown Prince, is therefore secure. And neither DIA nor CIA think the independent army group in the Baltics has the POL or spare parts to make a major mechanized move.”

“And everything is quieting down in the Far East?”

“Ever since Khabarovsk fell, the Russian resistance has practically collapsed. We're done on Sakhalin Island, as you know, and we're pushing west along the Trans-Siberian Railroad north of the Chinese border. Along the coast, the marines are moving north and report little more than a rear-guard action by the Russians.”

“I think it's time to consider calling a halt in the Far East, sir,” the director of the CIA said. “Have you seen our proposal for Operation Bent Sword?”

“You mean rearming the Russians to hold off the Chinese?”

“Yes, sir. We're going to find ourselves in a pretty pickle if the PLA decides it's time to resume the offensive. Are we going to defend Russian territory against the Chinese?”

“We can't afford, politically,” the Secretary of State said, “to use nuclear weapons in Asia again, Mr. President. Everything we do there now is going to be under a microscope. We have to watch our p's and q's if we hope to fashion any kind of security arrangement after the war to prevent the collapse of Russian rule in Siberia.”

“That's a problem for another day,” said the President. “Right now, I want to know if we have any indications that the two army groups at the Urals are moving?”

Thomas opened his mouth to speak, but he looked at the director of the CIA instead and remained silent. The President followed his eyes. “You want to talk about it now?” the President asked.

“I think now is the appropriate time.”

“All right,” the President said, sitting upright in his chair at the head of the table. “I'd like to ask,” he said, raising his voice and looking at the Wallflowers in the second row of chairs away from the conference table, “if everyone other than the principals could please leave the room. Thank you.”

There was a brief commotion as papers were rustled. The clearing of all but the principals was now becoming common, and the colonels and senior advisers rose quickly to file from the room.

“Okay,” the President said as the door to the nearly empty conference room was closed behind Colonel Rutherford, the last of the
departing aides. “Someone want to tell me about this Operation Samson and why I shouldn't be scared shitless by it? Jesus Christ, if it's for real . . . A Russian plan to fight an all-out, city-busting nuclear war with us? Evacuation of their cities. Dispersion of their troops and productive plants. Temporary earthen fallout shelters for seventy percent of their population!”

“Sir,” Lambert said quietly, as much to try to calm the President as answer his question. “The CIA doesn't buy Operation Samson. They're convinced that Damocles is a plant, a composite fictional agent representing
STAVKA
, and that Operation Samson is a plan leaked to us to lend credibility to the Russians' threats.”

“But if the Russians really were willing . . . ” The President's voice trailed off. “Is this thing, this Operation Samson, a realistic, workable plan?”

The director of the CIA shrugged.

“I can say that as far as the Joint Chiefs are concerned, Mr. President,” General Thomas said, “Operation Samson is consistent with the Russian Army's tactical doctrines for field deployment in a nuclear environment. The orders for dispersion of the two army groups at Nizhni Novgorod—the dispersion of the units over wide areas—would be appropriate to minimize their vulnerability to nuclear weapons, and it would be exactly the opposite of what you would do if you intended to move those units into contact with an enemy's ground force. To put it another way, sir, if those units begin to disperse, that intelligence will tell us two things: one, they do not plan on moving to engage us, and two, they anticipate the onset of nuclear war.”

The President's eyes sank to the table in worry before looking back up at Thomas. “I want you to watch those units like a hawk. If they actually do start to move, to disperse, then I suppose we can assume that the Russians have put Operation Samson into effect.” He scanned the table for disagreement and then went on. “What about the rest of the plan? Burying critical dies and molds from their factories, selective evacuations of scientists and engineers beginning already, all that? Does it sound real?”

“That's all old hat, sir,” the director of the CIA said. “That's the point about this whole thing. There's nothing new in any of it. Dispersing units in the field; every army since 1945 has known to do that. Burying aircraft molds—big deal. Hell, we ordered Boeing up in Seattle and McDonnell-Douglas in Fort Worth to do the same after the first exchange.”

The President sat forward to the table, shaking his head before lowering his face into his hands and rubbing his tired eyes. “I
don't get it. I never have been able to get it. This is your guy, this . . . this . . . ”

“Damocles,” the CIA director supplied.

“This Damocles is your source—either a CIA spy or a double agent, we don't know which. Ever since he came to you, what, a month ago, you've come in here every so often with some intelligence from this . . . this person that you tout as the God's truth. And then you come in here with
other
reports from the same source—vitally, vitally important intelligence like the fail-deadly firing policy for their nuclear submarines and now this Operation Samson—and you tell us that you discredit
that
intelligence completely.”

The CIA director leaned forward. “You see, sir, Damocles has given us a steady stream of intelligence about the Russian nuclear capabilities and planning. Some of it's little stuff, like the locations of reloaded ICBM silos, the tanker and strategic bomber reconstitution bases, which we knew about from satellite recon anyway, and the last known locations of the three stray boomers in the Western Pacific. All the little things Damocles has given us were verifiable. But neither of the two really big things Damocles has given us—the fail-deadly nuclear control policy of the Bastion's submarines or this new piece, Operation Samson—is verifiable at all. That's the
essence
of a properly run disinformation campaign. Dribble out little stuff that the target can verify to establish credibility of the source, and then lay the completely unverifiable whopper on him.”