Ian Slater - Arctic Front

“No, sir, but I’m responsible for my men out there. I can’t run a MUST if half my men are killed.” Devine was pasty-faced from the effort.

“Devane, I think you’d better leave. Dismissed!”

“Sir,” said Devine, stepping back, saluting smartly but turning about shakily.

For a moment Freeman was speechless; then he kicked the wastebasket so violently that editorials exploded from it. Putting his glasses on he tried to concentrate on the map of Siberia. The railway, that was the key. In ‘45 Russkies had surprised the Japanese by being able to shift four entire armies from the western front to the far eastern theater in just eight weeks, utilizing 136,000 rail cars on the Trans-Siberian. The gall of that pipsqueak captain walking in… Where the hell did he think he was? Goddamn AMA convention? He snatched the phone. “Dick!”

“Yes, General?”

“That runt of a captain you sent the tore a goddamn strip off me. Me! Said I was endangering his chopper crew. How d’you like that? All I wanted to do was get back in the fighting. Said I could have cost him his whole crew — medics and all. Insolent son of a bitch told the enemy only took thirty seconds to bracket.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes, sir, what?” demanded Freeman.

“He’s correct, General.”

“No, he isn’t!” roared Freeman. “It’s twenty-five seconds to bracket, not thirty. Dick?”

“General?”

“Second that son of a bitch from MEU to my HQ. So goddamned smart he can run all the MUSTs.”

“Beg pardon, General, but not as captain. You have to be at least a colonel.”

“All right, make him a colonel. Field commission. No, I don’t want to hear any flak about normal channels. Remember what Von Runstedt said about normal channels, Dick.”

“Have an idea I’m about to find out, General.”

“A trap for officers without initiative. That Devane, he’s read-”

“Devine, sir. Name’s Devine.”

“Well, hell, Dick, with a name like that we’ll have to make him bishop. Walked right up to the and told the I’d screwed up. We need men like that. But Dick—”

“Sir?”

“Not too many.”

“No, sir.”

Freeman was now studying the enlarged satellite pictures of the Kamchatka Peninsula, in particular the region about Petropavlovsk where the enemy had built bombproof sub pens in the nineteen-eighties for forward naval defense. For a moment he couldn’t find his glasses and, cursing, patted his pockets, making a mental note to have one of his aides drill a hole in the magnifying glass handle. As he was shortsighted in only one eye, it would save him forever searching. No way would he wear one of those chains. He grabbed his parka and told the duty officer he’d be outside.

After the pipeline sabotage, two guards had been ordered by Norton to accompany the general wherever he went, just to be on the safe side — with the stipulation, however, that they must stay well back and make as little noise as possible. Pulling his forage cap down tightly beneath the parka hood, the general walked through snow flurries, head down against the wind and thwacking his thermal overlays with a swagger stick given him by CINCLANT — commander in chief Atlantic — at Norwood, U.K., before he’d left Europe.

Trudging through the snow he was doing what Norton and other aides referred to as his “Moses in the Desert”—meditating upon the forthcoming campaign, recalling, as was his wont, the great commanders of history; not their virtues — everyone knew those — but their defects, their mistakes. At such moments he was lost in a kind of reverie of anticipation and awesome responsibility, and now in the flurries of snow that soon gave way to a steady wind, the thought that stole quietly upon him then possessed him and would fuel all his tactics was a conviction that wherever possible he must choose the battleground— not the Siberians. He must force them to come to him — though it was their country — to fight on the ground of his choosing.

The trick, of course, was how to do it. It would involve doing precisely the opposite of what they would anticipate. The master plan excited him; but then, like the mournful cry of an Arctic wolf, the sound of the ice pressure ridges crushing carried the warning that the unfrozen sea to the south was both his way and his impediment to Siberia. Now that Ratmanov had been secured, marine expeditionary forces could be transported by air and air bases secured on the sparsely populated northern tundra of Siberia across the strait, bases from which U.S. air strikes could be made down the shield of Kamchatka Peninsula. But then what? He stopped suddenly in the snow, the two marine guards looking nonplussed at one another, snow now having been replaced by rain. Old “Von Freeman” was seemingly oblivious to the fact.

He had seen the burning bush. The Pentagon would think him mad, as they had thought MacArthur mad when he had decided to hit Inchon—”The worst possible choice,” the experts had told him; as they had thought Hannibal mad for crossing the Alps, extending his supply line against all common sense. And so, too, Schwarzkopf’s commanders had been shocked by the idea of an outflanking left hook around the Republican Guard. And there had been the great failures, too, which, as the Chiefs of Staff had said, were doomed and which had ruined many a career.

When Freeman showed it to Dick Norton, the only officer privy to his plan so far, Norton immediately saw the potential for a debacle. “In the middle of winter, General?”

“Remember Frederick the Great, Dick. ‘L’audace! L’audace! Toujours l’audace!’ “ It was one of the general’s favorite sayings.

“Perhaps, General,” said Norton, “but he won’t be with us.”

“Yes, he will,” said Freeman, and there wasn’t a trace of frivolity in the general’s tone, nor in his eyes. His eyes were fixed on the map. “You know what a steeplechase rider does before the jumps, Dick?”

“No idea, General.”

“Walks the course,” Freeman said, indicating the map. “I’ve walked the course, Dick.” He flashed a smile. “Metaphorically speaking, of course. But I’ve been with them, all right.” His hand swept out over the western front. “The German campaigns, Napoleon’s. But I must confess no one’s been here: Far Eastern TVD. And right now, Dick, those Commies in Novosibirsk are thinking, how can they outfox me?” He turned to Norton once more. “You think they have any surprises, Dick?”

“Be surprised if they didn’t, General.”

“So would I. But what are they?”

Freeman and Norton, together with the rest of his HQ staff, pored over the myriad details for three possible amphibious landings south of the Bering Strait.

Everything was considered: special forces that might be required for beach clearance, amphibious hovercraft going in over the icebreaker-cleared channels in the thicker coastal ice, assault ships, cargo-carrying choppers, airlift Hercules, attack helicopters, landing vehicles, air cover and close ground support from subsonic to Mach 2 aircraft. Then there were engineer and sapper battalions, supertough plastic piping “fascine”—tubes that could be dumped to fill a trench and across which a sixty-ton M-1 tank could pass, as well as flail and grader tanks to clear mines, and fiberglass-hulled mine clearers for the sea lanes. One armored division alone would need 620 thousand gallons of fuel, 319 thousand gallons of water, 82 thousand meals, and 6 thousand tons of ammunition a day. All had to be assigned, integrated into the overall attack plans. Freeman made it his personal responsibility to talk to the catering corps commanders, eliciting individual guarantees that each man in action would receive the required 3,000 calories a day, 4,200 for troops in Arctic battle.