Ian Slater: Warshot

If some of the officers were surprised, Dick Norton wasn’t. He’d got the first fax copy of the New York Times that morning, and if, unlike the La Roche tabloids, the mainstream papers weren’t exactly calling Freeman a warmonger — their more genteel prose amounted to the same thing. The Times had written:

General Douglas Freeman has proved to have been not only a loyal implementor of U.S. national policy, but a prescient and brilliant soldier. The raid he led on Pyongyang, the brilliant strategy that allowed the Allies to break out of the infamous Soviet-ringed Dortmund/Bielefeld pocket on the north German plain earlier in this conflict, and his dashing seizure of the initiative once the Siberian military threat in Lake Baikal had been realized, have made his name synonymous in the history of American arms with “daring” and “brilliant,” if at times “eccentric,” leadership.

This having been said, however, we believe that the time has come for Douglas Freeman to be recalled, as he was once the European threat was quashed. He is a fighting general, and not, as is increasingly being pointed out in the Congress, a peace general. He has done his job extraordinarily well, and the nation, as it did upon his return from Europe, should shower its honors upon him for his outstanding leadership of operation “Arctic Front,” which made it possible for the present cease-fire to be instigated. But now it is time for someone else to take his place in Siberia. He is, as he was in Europe — and there is no easy way to say this — too “volatile” for the peace. He is a soldier’s soldier, and one who has much to teach in the staff colleges of the nation. With the battlefield now thankfully silent, and with spring imminent, it is fitting that with a change in season there be a change in command, a transition from the time of war to a season of hope.

“By God!” Freeman had commented upon seeing the editorial, whipping off his reading glasses, conveying the impression he didn’t really need “visual assist,” when he plainly did. He was certain The New York Times and other papers were merely parroting administration policy, which he believed had been deliberately leaked to signal his end. “Where do those Pentagon fairies get that horse manure from, Dick? ‘Season of hope’! Good God, don’t they understand the Siberians outnumber us more than five to one?”

Dick Norton thought it inadvisable to remind the general that before the cease-fire, one of the Pentagon fairies he’d referred to had won the Silver Star in the vicious fighting on the road east of Skovordino, and that in his view Washington might be right. Norton looked down at the editorial. “Sounds like James Knutson to me — Yale, not the Pentagon.”

“Well,” grumped Freeman, his hands cupping a mug of coffee as he overlooked the frozen Amur River from his Khabarovsk HQ, the tall, war-scarred smokestacks reaching into the ice-cold blue, “it’s an Ivy League fairy, then. Worst kind. Don’t realize their freedom to pontificate upon national policy has been paid for in blood from Iwo Jima to this…” He paused, searching for the right word to describe the confluence of vast mountain ranges and endless taiga of fir, beech, larch, silver pine, and the steppe beyond Baikal. It was so vast, whole armies had been swallowed by and could hide in it without a trace. “Soon be spring,” he said. But there was none of the optimism with which most others on his staff had been anticipating the coming of the season. “Ice’ll start to melt. There’ll be floods. Our tanks could be in a quagmire. Immobile.” He took a sip of coffee, its steam condensing.

The HQ door banged open, a G-2 lieutenant stamping his feet, shucking off the snow. “ ‘Cept for the permafrost,” Freeman went on. “That’s rock-hard. But that won’t help us when the rivers start to crack.” Norton could see that even as the general was speaking, his conversation about the cold was evidence of a much deeper concern about whether the cease-fire would hold. He wanted it to, but to be caught napping at any of the hundreds of weak points along the vast “box” was a heavier load than anyone else was carrying, here or back in the Pentagon. “What do you think, Dick?” Freeman asked. “Don’t dress it up. You think they’ll attack in winter?”

“No, sir — I think the cease-fire’ll hold. Summer’s the time for war in this country. They sure as hell won’t try to move while Lake Baikal is frozen. We could reinforce our M-1 battalions on the western shore in a matter of hours— just scoot across that lake with close air support A-10 Thunderbolts riding shotgun. They’d soon sort out the T-72s. Look what they did on the road to Basra.” Norton was talking about the massacre the Thunderbolts had wrought in the Iraqi desert with their Volkswagen-sized gun mount forward of the plane’s titanium “bath” seat — the Thunderbolts’ thirty-millimeter cannon chopping up Hussein’s fleeing armored columns, sending them careening in panic. “Besides, General, Baikal won’t even begin to melt till late spring — four, six weeks away at least.”

“Maybe, Dick, but I don’t trust ‘em. I want to know the moment that son of a bitch starts to crack.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Under the rules,” Freeman said contemptuously, putting down his cap, the beech stick’s knobby end smacking the four-hundred-mile-long lake, “we can move anything but food supply trucks across the lake. Washington says anything else would give the wrong signal to Novosibirsk.”

“Yes, sir. I know.”

Freeman pulled his gloves on, deciding to leave after all, stretching the fur-lined leather into a fist. Dick Norton opened the door for him and immediately turned his face from the icy blast. “You tell me, Dick, the moment that ice starts to melt — first goddamn crack. You hear?”

“Yes, sir, but I honestly don’t think you’ve anything to worry about.”

As Freeman stepped out into swirling fresh snow, someone cried, “Look out, General!” Almost too late, the general stepped back, barely missed by two hooded skiers.

“God damn it!” exploded Freeman as they swooshed by.

“You okay, General?” asked Norton.

“Yes, yes,” said Freeman brusquely, pulling up his collar. “Women drivers — what d’you expect? Man’s not safe in his own camp.”

Norton laughed with him. It was a comment that’d get him killed in the media, but Norton knew he held no prejudice against women — had used them as his lead pilots in the attack on Pyongyang. On the other hand, he’d vehemently opposed the idea of women in tanks — had said, quite rightly, there was no place “to piss in private.”

In the headquarters of Beijing MR, the most important of the seven military regions in China, the imperturbable General Cheng was perturbed. In one fell swoop, with Siberia’s annexation of Outer Mongolia — to which Cheng had no doubt Ulan Bator had willingly agreed, given the Mongolians’ ancient hatred of the Chinese — the traditional buffer zone between north China, Inner Mongolia, and Siberia had been removed. It wasn’t just the stationing there of the Siberian Thirty-ninth Army with its “category one”—top readiness, armored and motor-rifle divisions — that concerned Cheng. They had always been posted on the Mongolian-Chinese border and had always been a thorn in China’s side. But now several more divisions were stationed closer along the Mongolian-Chinese border around Saynshand in the Gobi Desert. The annexation meant that not even the formalities of Siberian-Mongolian discussions were necessary before the Siberians could move their troops at will in and about Outer Mongolia, threatening China’s enormous province of Inner Mongolia,