Ian Slater: Warshot

Freeman was smiling at the oncoming pack, most of them on skis, telling Norton, “Not that blond bitch from the Investigator. Leave her till last. First question for the brunette from CBS. By God, I’d like to reconnoiter her, Dick.”

“Cool it, General.”

Freeman nodded as pleasantly as he could in minus forty. “Ladies, gentlemen.” Norton gave CBS the nod.

“General,” began the brunette, flicking away strands of nut-brown hair that just for a moment turned gold in the dying rays of the sun. “Is it true that morale in Second Army is at its lowest ebb since the signing of the ceasefire?”

“Not at all. We’re talking here — I presume you are talking about the self-inflicted—”

“The suicide!”

“One soldier’s tragedy hardly extends to a whole army,” said Freeman.

“General?” interjected a French reporter from Paris Match in a loud tone. “We’ve had rumors that the Siberian Interior Ministry is out to punish — is actively searching for collaborators who helped the British and American forces before the cease-fire.”

Freeman was struck by the man’s use of the phrase “actively searching for.” He wondered what “passively searching for” would be. “We’ve had no such reports,” Freeman told him truthfully. “What they do in the zone west of Baikal I can’t say, but there’ll be no tracking down of collaborators in our zone — that is, east of Baikal. We’re not here to exact vengeance. We’re here to keep the peace.”

“You don’t think any OMONs are after you personally, do you, General?”

“Hell, no!” Freeman laughed, looking down at the crowd which he always thought of as an audience. “Any of those black-bonneted bastards come to get me, I’ll give them a Second Army welcome.” He patted his waistband, beneath which he carried the Sig Sauer P-220, always loaded with a fifteen-round magazine of nine-millimeter Parabellum. “And if that isn’t enough for ‘em, I’ll introduce them to my friend Charles Winchester.” There were a few laughs from those who had been on the Second Army beat longest, who knew he was referring to the twelve-gauge riot gun, loaded with 00, that he kept by his bed. “Hell,” continued the general, “the Winchester twelve hundred’ll stop…” He paused, searching for an apt analogy.

“Amtrak!” suggested one of the reporters.

“Hell,” the general joked, “anything’ll stop Amtrak.”

That was the headline in the next morning’s National Investigator, Stateside: GENERAL SLAMS AMTRAK!

Marshal Yesov’s aides delivered the headline and story to the Siberian commander. They had been instructed by him to monitor everything said by and about the general. They’d had a special file on him ever since he had fought so brilliantly in the Iraqi War.

Marshal Yesov and the other Siberian generals had been delighted by the Iraqi War. It had been the real’noe vremya —”real-time”—testing range that told them which of the old Russian, now CIS, weapons needed to be junked. A case in point was the Scud. Moscow had said they’d updated it after the Iraqi War, but in Siberia, in Novosibirsk’s satellite city, Akademgorodok, home of the republic’s most eminent scientists, the joke amid the Siberians— who hated Moscow as much as they did the Americans— was that firing a Scud was like drinking a glass of cheap Moscow vodka: you never knew where you’d land!

Through front companies in Brussels, the world’s arms capital, Yesov ordered shipments of the new Israeli Arrow antimissile missile in lieu of the American Patriot. It wasn’t only that the American Patriot was unobtainable, even through third-party arms dealers, but that the Siberians had long suspected, even before The New York Times reporters, that the Patriot, highly lauded as it had been through media hype, was a missile with more of a reputation than it deserved. The Siberians’ concern was that while the Patriot had brought down so many Scuds over Israel, it had not always destroyed the warhead, sometimes merely exploding the Scud’s fuel tanks. Such hits were spectacular, especially to the millions of TV viewers — but they still left the warhead intact to fall and explode somewhere else. If you were aiming your missile at a large target — a city — this didn’t matter so much. But Marshal Yesov had expressed concern that if Novosibirsk decided on a preemptive strike against the Americans, then a very specific targeting capability would be needed, together with an integrated in-depth, antiaircraft and antimissile-missile defense ring around Lake Baikal’s western shore — which would be provided by the Mach-breaking Israeli Arrow. For Yesov, the new long-range 203mm howitzers operating within the deep AA defensive ring about west Baikal were the answer.

One of Yesov’s younger generals, Minsky, commander of the Siberians’ Far Eastern Military District’s elite udarnaya —shock troops of the Tenth Guards Cavalry Division — was pressing for just such a strike, pontificating aloud about the vulnerability of the Americans. Minsky was an Afghanistan veteran, recently appointed CO of the Tenth Guards Division — its honorific of “Slutsk” earned by his forebears in the Battle in Byelorussia in the Great Patriotic War of 1942-45. As its commander, Minsky was keen to prove his worth against the Americans.

“To hell with the cease-fire!” he proclaimed defiantly in the Siberians’ Irkutsk HQ. No general would have dared spoken in the marshal’s presence like this in the old days. But since Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and now Chernko, the up-and-coming young “Turks,” as Minsky’s ilk were called, could get away with it — if they showed results, as Minsky had in suppressing breakaway minorities farther north in the Yakutsk region. “I say push the bastards back to the sea!” he enjoined his colleagues. “We outnumber them five to one at least.”

Attending to his maps, Yesov said nothing. He was an old Soviet strategist of the Frunze Military Academy, a believer in the big battalions school of warfare dominated by artillery, the Bog voyny —“God of War”—and zarnitsa, or lightning war, behind the enemy’s lines; not only behind the battlefield, but wherever possible within the enemy’s supply base — in this case the United States itself. Having been a young soldier once himself, he well understood the impatience of Minsky’s generation, but he had risen to be a marshal because he had never lost, and as much as the young men now scoffed at Lenin, one Leninist dictum had guided and would continue to guide all Yesov’s actions: “It is a crime to undertake war with a better prepared opponent.”

Minsky, however, highly decorated in the Afghanistan War, was undeterred by Yesov’s Frunze Academy caution. He thought Yesov an old fogy. In turn, Yesov thought that dealing with Minsky was like staring down the laser sights of one of the new T-80’s 135mm, the biggest MBT — main battle tank gun — in the world. One frontal shot against the tank’s glacis armor plate wouldn’t be enough to stop it. Sometimes, Yesov knew, it was more prudent to withdraw to defilade position — to sit and wait.

“The Americans are dug in,” Minsky pressed. “Freezing their asses off. Snow — why, it’s mother’s milk to us. But not to the Americans. I say hit them before the ice starts to crack and close our roads.” There being precious few roads at all in Siberia, the frozen rivers were the only trustworthy supply lines along which the logistics “tail” could keep up with the head. “Besides,” added Minsky, indicating the map of eastern Siberia around Lake Baikal and south into Outer Mongolia, “we have the Trans-Siberian. In ‘forty-five it only took us two months to move four armies across from the west. And during the cease-fire, we’ve been moving supplies across the taiga constantly. Why doesn’t Novosibirsk attack?”