Ian Slater: Warshot

None of his colleagues answered. They were loyal to Minsky, but they knew his reference to Novosibirsk was really a dig at Yesov, who would have the final military say on whether to hold the cease-fire or not after Novosibirsk’s political decision.

“Well, what are we going to do?” said Minsky.

“I don’t know what you’re going to do, General,” said Yesov, putting on his greatcoat, his peaked, crimson-banded gray cap, and his gloves against the bitter winter cold. “But I’m going to dinner.”

But Minsky was not easily put off. Inside the officers’ mess he wondered aloud about the special vulnerability of Americans when they were so far from home. “I tell you, the Americans are crybabies. Three months away and they start to blubber for Mama.”

“General Minsky,” said Yesov quietly, his massive jaws demolishing thick, black bread, “perhaps the Americans will move against us.”

The other officers, nonplussed, glanced at one another, but for Minsky there was no doubt.

“They won’t,” he said confidently. “Washington wouldn’t permit Freeman to violate the cease-fire.”

The marshal took out his cigarette case and lit a Sobraine, holding it meditatively between thumb and forefinger, both of which were stained a dark yellow with nicotine. “Perhaps, comrades. We’ll see. But this Freeman — he has a flair for the unorthodox.”

Just how unorthodox, Yesov could have had no idea.

Freeman’s insistence that a team of navy SEAL — sea, air, and land — commandos be trained by deaf mutes, and that “Wolf dung! Lots of it!” be collected and brought to his HQ at Khabarovsk were two of the strangest orders issued by the commander of all American and Allied forces in eastern Siberia.

The victor of his daring nighttime commando raid on Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital, early in the war, and of his equally audacious airborne attack on Ratmanov Island, in the Bering Strait, only twenty-five miles from Alaska, Freeman had never approved of the cease-fire agreed to by the White House. “If we don’t finish it now,” Freeman warned Washington, “we’ll have to do it later at a higher cost.” But, as Schwarzkopf was told not to pursue the Republican Guard in Iraq any farther, so Washington had similarly ordered Freeman not to press his rout of the Siberian Fifth Army, spearheaded by the once-famed but now badly mauled Thirty-first Stalingrad Division.

The general’s order for wolf dung during the cease-fire Washington and Novosibirsk had pressed upon him, perplexed his aide, Dick Norton. But Freeman, as if his words were explanation enough, merely pointed out that “Intelligence reports all wolves have been taken from the Beijing Zoo and sent to the northern boundaries of the Beijing Military Region.”

In his Khabarovsk Quonset hut HQ, Freeman was studying the huge twelve-by-six-foot map of eastern Siberia, its green, mountainous terrain to the south contrasting with the treeless humps and plains of Mongolia to the south and west. His eyes followed the outline of a huge rectangle, the western edge formed by Lake Baikal, the annexed Mongolian People’s Republic to his south, the Yakutsk region of Siberia to his north, and behind him the Sea of Japan. There were many fancy military euphemisms for it, but every private in Freeman’s Second Army knew what it meant if the cease-fire didn’t hold. They’d be boxed in.

“Why can’t the damn fools see it?” demanded Freeman. “Novosibirsk is playing Washington for a sucker — again. I don’t trust those vodka-swilling sons of bitches as far as I can kick ‘em.” He turned from the map to face Norton and the other officers of his Khabarovsk HQ, some of them new boys flown in from Dutch Harbor, Alaska, on rotation. “You know what the new republics’ military were doing when Bush and Gorby were shaking hands, gentlemen?”

Norton knew — it was a rite of passage for any newcomer to his staff as far as Freeman was concerned.

“Well,” said Freeman, “there was a little mystery NATO couldn’t figure out. You all remember NATO?”

“North American Trust Organization?” proffered a cocky if ill-advised young captain — obviously not a career soldier.

Freeman ignored the smartass remark, but he’d already noted the man’s name: Tyler, M., a junior officer, liaison between Freeman’s G-2, intelligence section, and his first armored division. Cheeky bastard like Tyler would be a good man to put in the lead tank, Freeman thought. With that kind of chutzpa, he’d keep going where others would stop. Secret of an armored thrust was that you must never stop; your mobility was the best chance of securing victory and survival.

“Well,” continued Freeman, “our Russian friends in July, 1990—Soviet high command, to be exact — reported they had forty-one thousand tanks in Europe. Forty-one thousand, five hundred and eighty to be precise, gentlemen. Under the COFIE — conventional forces in Europe — treaty, a significant number of those tanks were to be destroyed, and so four months later the Soviets told us there were now only twenty thousand Soviet tanks in Europe. The question, however, gentlemen, was — I should say is —where did the other twenty thousand go? Scrap heap?” Freeman shook his head. “No, sir— none of them were junked. Not a one! We found out that many of the remainder were moved east of the Urals — out of Europe — just before the treaty document about ‘tanks in Europe’ was signed, and some were sent to the new central Asian republics. Now there were still eight thousand tanks missing, gentlemen, and if you’re puzzled about them, I can tell you that it was revealed in Sovetskaya Rossiya —a Russian paper — that the missing eight thousand tanks had been put in ‘storage bases’ in western Siberia and central Asia. Tanks, gentlemen — T-72s with laser sighting, thermal imaging, and appliqué armor — all of which could be used against us at any time. So my standing order is to keep your powder dry and make damn sure none of your forward OPS doze off—’specially during blizzards when our air cover from here west to Baikal will effectively be reduced to zero, even with our infrared capability. Any observer falls asleep at his post, I’ll have him flayed alive plus a hundred dollar fine for each man in the squad. Understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And the officer in charge busted to private.”

No one answered. Freeman was as frustrated as Norton had seen him. He had tried to warn the American people and the Congress of the danger a few days before, during his press conference in Khabarovsk, but for this he’d been attacked. Now, holding up one of the La Roche papers, he let the new members of his staff see the screaming four-inch headline: WARMONGER!

“What do you think?” he asked his staff. “Am I a warmonger? Anybody here think these jokers’ll rest with American troops on Siberian soil? When they’ve got us surrounded north to Yakutsk, west beyond Lake Baikal, south to Mongolia?”

No one cared to answer him.

“Warmonger!” he said, throwing the La Roche paper down. “Well, they’re right— when I see war coming. Like Churchill. My God, this is Saddam Insane all over again. Should have gone after that son of a bitch right into Baghdad. I’d have personally shot the mad bastard. Know how many Kurds we would have saved? Men, women, and children? Never mind Iraqis.” Freeman snatched up his cap and the thick beech stick he’d honed to a pointer, his tone changing — as if suddenly, uncharacteristically, resigned to the foibles of Washington and the State Department doyennes of Foggy Bottom. “Meanwhile,” he continued in a world-weary voice, “all those armchair fairies in State and the Pentagon are pumping the president full of— restraint.” He said it as if it were a dirty word, the beech stick smacking hard against the massed divisions west of Baikal. “Only restraint this crowd’ll understand will come from the barrel of an M-1 tank. Which is why, gentlemen, if I’m any judge, I expect to be ‘recalled for consultation’ any day.”