Ian Slater - Warshot

“And yours, comrade, in Novosibirsk.”

“Where are my men?” snapped Latov. He meant the Black Berets.

“At your legation.”

“Tell them I want them to be in on the search for her. They know what she looks like.”

It was a stupid thing to say, and Latov regretted it the moment he had uttered it, feeling the PSB man’s contempt almost immediately.

“We have no difficulty recognizing foreigners, comrade.”

“You mean barbarians?” said Latov.

“As you wish.”

“I want my men involved in the search,” insisted Latov. “You find out who’s hiding her. But when that’s done, she’s to be brought back to me. That was the agreement. She’s a Siberian national.”

“She’s a Siberian whore.”

“As you wish, but she is my whore and I will punish her.”

“We will see.”

“You’ll do as you’re told, comrade, or else you’ll find yourself on the Amur front.”

“You mean the Black Dragon front, comrade?”

“It’s forty below up there, comrade.”

“We Chinese are used to the cold.”

Latov gave a contemptuous snort and reached for his wine. “It’s forty below and the Americans are shooting at you, comrade.”

“Not for long,” said the PSB man. “We know how to deal with Americans. We defeated them in Korea. They ran away.”

“Well…” Latov conceded, finally seeing the sniping was getting them nowhere. “That’s one thing we can agree on, comrade. We both want to defeat the Americans. So you find the girl and let my men return her to me. Agreed?” Latov waited. “I apologize for any untoward remark.”

The PSB man nodded curtly. He knew the barbarian didn’t mean it, but nevertheless it allowed the PSB to save face. Nodding abruptly, he left.

“What was all that about?” Latov’s wife asked him.

“Ah—” said Latov dismissively, reaching for black fungus, a Manchurian delicacy, “a prisoner giving us trouble.”

“Since when are you concerned with Chinese prisoners?”

“I’m not. She’s Siberian.”

“One of our people?” said Latov’s wife, surprised.

“No. A Jew.”

“Oh — Stalin knew what to do with them.”

In less than two hours American III Corps had suffered twenty percent casualties, seven thousand killed or wounded, against Yesov’s first echelons. Anything over thirty percent casualty level and the U.S. commanders knew that III Corps would no longer have enough fire power to withstand an onslaught by a second echelon Siberian attack. The printout on the analysis computers in Freeman’s Khabarovsk headquarters was unequivocal. The LER — loss exchange ratio — of 22.6:1 would mean that the troops manning the 155mm howitzers and the M-1 tanks on Lake Baikal’s southwestern shore would have to destroy twenty-three Russian guns for every American gun lost merely to stay even. To make matters worse, 155mm batteries had to be diverted left and right of III Corps’ defense line — that is, south and north of III Corps’ front at Baikal — in order to meet Yesov’s flanking attacks. This meant in the next hour that as the tracks of the M-1 tanks fought to grip the watery mirror finish of the lake — translucent in places down to thirty and sixty feet — the cold statistics of the loss exchange ratio jumped to 50:1.

The Apaches were swarming now over the vast, snow-covered taiga from the Primorskiy range, their 4,400-yard fire-and-forget Hellfire air-to-ground missiles streaking down in crimson balls, taking out thirty-two targets, Siberian T-80s, in spectacular explosions, of which fourteen were actual tanks going up. The remaining eighteen were poddelki —fakes — Yesov’s vertical aerial mines and mobile mounted ZSU twenty-three-millimeter Shilko AA gun quads and Kuadrat surface-to-air missiles taking out eleven of the sixty Apaches.

It was such a loss rate that Freeman knew he couldn’t sustain III Corps’ present position, the situation aggravated by the blizzard, which prevented any effective close fighter air support. And so, his counterattack effort in tatters almost as quickly as he had launched it, Freeman, in an order that all but choked him, instructed the remaining 29,000 men of II Corps to effect forthwith a fighting withdrawal across the seventeen-mile-wide lake and to set up a second line of defense in the taiga along the lake’s eastern shore. Hopefully it would give him time to rush in support, both men and materiel, from Khabarovsk, and Skovorodino, the latter atop the Amur River hump.

It was the only thing Freeman could do. And Yesov knew it. Refusing to yield to Minsky’s impatience, the marshal had held his massive, taiga-hidden formations in place, waiting for the temperature to fall while the lake, remaining frozen, would result in a less hard ice/air interface. This widened the V’s, or the cone-shaped eruptions, of the Siberians’ howitzers exploding on the lake, sending more shards of splinter ice and white-hot metal fragments even lower to the ground over an even wider area.

The perimeter of the American II Corps was now a bloody mess of body parts, interspersed with the junk of shattered matériel and gutted tanks burning fiercely, the explosions of their fifty rounds of high explosive, squash head, and discarding sabot ammo killing and maiming more Americans than Yesov’s howitzers.

In the U.S., the latest and, to date, most devastating attack of Operation Ballet was that experienced by the U.S. Navy during a five-minute heavy mortar barrage of Miramar Naval Air Station. This attack totally destroyed or put out of action an entire squadron of twenty-six F-15E Strike Eagles — a confidence-shattering display for the American “top guns” of just how vulnerable high-tech aircraft were to the determined and highly trained infiltration units. All ten men in the two SPETS mortar crews were killed by perimeter guards at Miramar, but not before shrapnel from their last 200mm, fifty-five-pound rounds sliced open the fuel tanks of two Lockheed “Fat Alberts.” The cavernous transports, replete with the new snow/taiga pattern, replacing their old NATO green/gray/khaki splotch camouflage, were in the process of loading 650 marines to relieve British Commonwealth cease-fire troops guarding the Allies’ R&R barracks along the Amur River outside Khabarovsk. In the explosion, so enormous local residents thought it was a nuclear bomb, 570 marines died, some killed by their own ammunition set off by the fire, all of them charred beyond recognition, most, teeth showing through the black leathery grins, still strapped to their seats.

Apart from the terrible loss of life, it wasn’t the millions of dollars wasted in destroyed equipment that shook Americans, who well understood their industrial capacity was still the best in the world. But all over the country the ghosts of Vietnam arose in the American psyche, invaded by memories of the infamous Tet Offensive, when the North Vietnamese Army, through infiltrators, had brought the war to the Americans’ doorsteps in Saigon, a turning point in the only war America had lost. Worse, the attacks on the sub at Bangor in Washington State and on the carrier John F. Kennedy in San Diego were the first on the West Coast since the Second World War, when one of the big Japanese I-class subs had shelled the oil installations near Santa Barbara, and Point Estevan on Canada’s Vancouver Island. That enemy was again bringing the war to the forty-eight contiguous U.S. states, and the repercussions of this shook Washington to its foundations.

Trainor couldn’t remember the president being so angry. As Mayne subconsciously massaged his forehead, reading the reports streaming in from Hillsboro, San Diego, Bangor, and Miramar, his aide knew, if no one else did, that the President of the United States was on the verge of a migraine attack, so that the next file Trainor brought him contained two sumatriptan pills taped to a report of the marines who had been killed in the attack on Miramar. The sumatriptan were perfectly legal and, Trainor knew, were prescribed for more than one senator, but in the rough-and-tumble world of politics, Trainor was as discreet as possible with the medication, fearing that some boozy congressman, doing three times as much damage to his body with his afterwork martinis, might make political capital of it.