Ian Slater - Warshot

“Doesn’t the military have a backup?”

“Sure. Don’t have to use land lines — can use satellite pulses — but if the cesium clock’s out, it’s all over except for the crystals.”

“What are they?”

“Crystals? Closest things to the cesium clock in their beat accuracy. Only trouble is, they have to keep them in ‘double oven’—constant temperature. If you lose the clock, the idea is you go to ‘holdover,’ using the crystals as your drum.” The tall man paused, then smiled. “ ‘Course, if you cut off the electric power — no oven. That’s what your third man in the cell is going to do.”

“So then all the defense computers are down?”

“You’ve got it. Military gets the old ‘all circuits are busy’ crap just like everybody else. The entire continental-based missile defense system of the United States shuts down because over ninety percent of all military phones in this country are slaved to AT and T and the other companies. Private enterprise at its best, my friend.”

“What about the other carriers — Ma Bell and —”

“All in the same boat. The clock goes — they go. I love complex microchip technology. It’s so easy to fuck up.”

“When do we move?”

“When you see the ad.”

They walked down toward the Swedish Cottage, where they said good-bye. They would not meet again. Everything was in place. The man in blue turned left and exited on West Eighty-first Street; the other walked into the American Museum of Natural History. There was a new acquisition of pre-Cambrian fossils. It put everything in perspective. The fossils were all that remained of an entire epoch. The Christians were right about that — in the end, it was all dust to dust, ashes to ashes.

The exhibit’s attendant, who looked a little pre-Cambrian himself, gave the jogger a glance that said he wished visitors to the museum would be better dressed. Then again, he was mollified by the fact that, unlike the ruffians on the streets, here at least was a man of breeding, a man of cultural refinement.

The jogger looked up at the museum clock. It was 1300 hours. Kirov’s “Ballet” was about to begin. What the man in gray hadn’t told his cohort was that the really big payoff of such a massive computer screwup would be the havoc it would play with the navy’s “burst” coded communications for its submarines at sea. They wouldn’t know what the hell was going on, and if they came up near the surface to get emergency TACAMO — take charge and move out — aircraft messages, Novosibirsk would pick up the displacement bulge — the radiant heat difference between the sub and sea temperature — and BAM! — they’d be targeted by the Siberian fleet’s Hunter/Killer subs before the Americans knew it.

“It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” commented the attendant for the pre-Cambrian exhibit.

“Certainly is.”

Freeman was kneeling, saying his prayers. There was a crack — like pine board splitting. He spun about, grabbed the riot gun — its five rounds filled with razor-sharp flechettes — and aimed it at the door. He’d dismissed the reporter’s rumor about a possible SPETSNAZ attack, but all the same…

There was no one at the door. He lifted the phone connecting him to the duty officer. “What in hell was that?”

“River, sir. Ice splitting.”

“Call our Baikal command on the cease-fire line. Ask if the lake’s breaking up.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And lieutenant…”

“Sir?”

“You wake me the moment you hear.”

“Yes, General.”

The duty officer rang back moments later, reporting, “Everything’s fine at Baikal, sir. Nothing’s moving.”

“The world’s moving, Lieutenant — we just aren’t aware of it most of the time.”

“Yes, sir.”

Relieved, Freeman knelt to finish his prayer. “Almighty God, arm us. Amen.”

Before putting out the light, he scribbled a memo to the padre who had given a sermon for twenty minutes — ten longer than necessary, in Freeman’s view — a homily in which the padre had told the Second Army congregation that prayer may not indeed be heard by a supreme being but was a way of personally reminding ourselves of our individual responsibility to the collective spirit.

Freeman had been appalled. It wasn’t enough, he told Norton, that he had to put up with weak-kneed strategists back in Washington — now he had to contend with Goddamn revisionist priests who, rather than delivering the word of God straight and undiluted, had to stoop to secular interpretation of prayer so as not to offend the liberal fairies. The general, in an unprecedented move, had risen in the Quonset during the service and, looking about at the congregation of servicemen, helmet under his arm, declared, “With all due respect to the padre here, I feel it is my duty as your commanding officer to inform you that as far as I am concerned, God directly hears your prayers and will not fail us— if we prove worthy.” As the padre’s face grew redder by the second, Freeman had continued, “It is our bounden duty to thrash these neo-Communist sons of bitches in their new garb so soundly that they will never again doubt America’s will.”

On the memo pad by his bed he also scribbled an order to Colonel Dick Norton for immediate attention to Supply: “No fairy Bibles will be permitted in Second Army. King James version only. I don’t want my men fighting and dying — should it come to that — with some namby-pamby ‘God is my pal’ version of some liberal New York hippy diocese. I expect your cooperation. Signed, General Douglas Freeman.”

On the south bank, the Chinese side, of the Argun River, which formed the western side of the Amur, or Black Dragon, hump, the first round to rupture the cease-fire was audible to the Chinese seconds before it hit them. Its staccato shuffling sounded like some giant steam locomotive moving rapidly in the blackness above them, the heat envelope of the 155mm HE head having concertinaed the frigid air. It landed a hundred yards behind them, its explosion lighting up what looked like glass-covered brambles as the hoarfrost melted from uprooted bushes that a moment before had been under a mantle of virgin snow and were now flying through the air in an eruption of black dirt and snow, shrapnel singing like bees, slashing into the advance battery of the Shenyang Military Region’s Sixteenth Army, its 130mm field guns dug in under snow-camouflage netting high above the river.

Their forward observation posts, using the Soviet-made combination infrared laser range-finder, caught the flash of the second round two to three miles across the river, and the officer commanding the battery was on the radio to group army headquarters at Manzhouli, reporting that the direct fire was coming from high ground in the direction of Srednearaunsk in the hills on the American-held side. Within two minutes four other HE rounds had bracketed the Chinese position, killing one loader and exploding a Long March ammunition truck, and the Chinese battery had returned fire with six rounds of HE from their 130mm, thirteen-mile-range guns. Soon, in this, the southwestern sector of the Amur-Argun hump, firing erupted all along the line, especially along the west to east dip formed by the still extant wall of Genghis Khan forty-three miles east of Manzhouli. Quickly other American and Chinese batteries opened up on one another. American MLRSs — multiple launch rocket systems — lit up the night sky with what the MLRS troops called “white lasers,” streaking salvos of thirteen-foot-long, nine-inch-diameter, 667-pound rockets — each rocket with a range of eighteen miles — twelve rockets fired at once from each of a dozen MLRS units spread along the length of the Khan wall. At times there were salvos of 120 rockets in one minute, 120 white parallel lines in the night sky, the rockets not designed to take out pinpoint targets, but to saturate a wide area and to sow chaos among the enemy troops. This they did, especially among the forward units of the Shenyang Sixteenth Army as the “coffee cups,” or polyurethane foam containers, from 667-pound MLRS rockets, each carrying over six hundred antipersonnel/antimatériel submunitions, rained down. After each warhead’s time had set off its “blowout” black powder charge, thousands of tiny submunition chutes were scattered over an oval-shaped area of several miles in which the M-77 submunitions exploded on contact, ripping through flesh and/or light armor. In the Chinese battery that had been first hit, there were twenty-six dead and over two hundred wounded in the first ten minutes of combat.