Ian Slater - Arctic Front

There was another alarm: more American planes rising from a carrier 130 miles east of the Far Eastern TVD’s port of Nakhodka, just over fifty miles due east of Vladivostok. An air corridor fives miles wide and a hundred miles long from Svetlaya on the coast westward toward Khabarovsk was being blasted out by the largest air bombardment since the Iraqi war, the number of sorties in the first twelve hours — launched from air bases from Otaru to Wakkanai on Japan’s Hokkaido — surpassing by 508 the 2,000 flown by the USAF in the first twenty-four hours of the Iraqi war. The fighter-protected American bombers were dropping everything from Smart bombs on the reinforced early-warning coastal radar stations to FAEs and in particular runway-destroying cluster bombs.

As the USS Winston Davis rolled slightly in the swell, Norton looking the worse for wear, Freeman searched for his glasses, couldn’t find them, and instead used the telescopic pointer, which he normally eschewed, to illustrate his project. Saying nothing yet to his divisional commanders gathered in the crowded helo maintenance deck, he stabbed at the lower left of Siberia on the steppes between the southernmost extremity of the Urals and the Aral Sea; the pointer then slid eastward along the fiftieth parallel, south of Novosibirsk, on through the mountainous region west of Lake Baikal, only a hundred miles now from the Mongolian border, then further east to the big 350-mile-wide horseshoe bend in the Amur River that formed the border with China. From there the tip moved abruptly up to the far northeast of the map in a right hook that took in the Pacific mountain barriers of Siberia’s eastern shield. He ignored the vast central Siberian plateau and river-veined west Siberian plain that was taiga, as well as the wide crescent of treeless tundra that was northern Siberia. “Eastern Siberia, gentlemen,” he told his audience, “is all we’re interested in — at the moment.”

He moved the pointer up and down the long Pacific flank. “Think of it as a hockey stick, the handle being the eastern mountain chain. At the bottom of the stick, in the groove, as it were, lies Khabarovsk, the gate to Lake Baikal and Irkutsk. The Siberians know the taiga is the best place for armor — ours as well as theirs. But first they have to stop us getting through this eastern shield to Khabarovsk — two hundred miles in from the coast.”

Freeman’s knuckles tapped out an impatient tattoo over the coastal range of the Sikhote-Alin. “Now a lot of these mountains are five thousand feet and up and we’d be nuts to try running armor through deep snow in those ravines. Next to no roads anyhow. One Siberian section with antitank rockets could hold us up for a week. What we have to do, gentlemen, is attack Khabarovsk from the south — here — from Rudnaya Pristan on the coast. Move a hundred and twenty miles inland then swing north for a hundred and twenty miles through the Malinovka River valley road to Dalnerechensk.” It was men the impatience of his dreams of endless snow and ice became manifest. “Don’t worry about bridges being blown — drive straight over the frozen rivers. They’re your roads in Siberia. Then, gentlemen, a two-hundred-mile run north, adjacent to the Ussuri River — on the left flank, the Chinese-Soviet border — to here.” His fist banged against Khabarovsk where the Ussuri met the Amur in the lowland forests and snow-covered meadows. “From there it’s west, young man. Along the Trans-Siberian rail route to Baikal and Irkutsk.”

Norton moved uneasily in his seat. When it was all added up, Lake Baikal was over a thousand miles to the west, and despite the valleys that formed the Trans-Siberian route, the last two hundred and fifty miles would be through high country like the Khamar Daban Range. But Freeman, as if reading Norton’s mind, had anticipated his aide’s question. “ATO,” (air task order), said Freeman, “will be to secure total air superiority from our beachhead at Rudnaya Pristan to Irkutsk forty-five miles from Baikal’s western shore.” Freeman turned to Miller, general of the air forces in Japan. “Bill, can your boys handle that? Or are they too fat from eating all that damn sushi in Tokyo?”

“What’s in it for me, General?” asked Miller cheekily.

“A medal if you do,” replied Freeman unhesitatingly. “A kick in the ass if you don’t! Have you got what you need?” Freeman asked Miller.

“Well, sir, Intelligence reports that Lake Baikal is surrounded by the most intense ABM and AA defenses we’ve ever seen. Denser than they were around Hanoi. Compared to what they’ve got around Baikal, Baghdad was just a bunch of firecrackers.”

Norton could see Freeman was getting impatient, smacking the pointer against his right leg. He didn’t want to hear all the problems; he already knew them. But Norton knew that Miller was building his case, giving the air force some leeway.

“How long?” asked Freeman, the levity of his earlier comments gone.

“Three weeks, General. Two if you can secure the beachhead at Rudnaya Pristan so the engineers can lay enough matting for an airfield. And we’ll have to have airfield perimeter defense.”

“Patriots.”

There was a cheer, the Patriot still enjoying its legendary status from the Iraqi war. But not with Freeman. He’d pored over the reports and understood that it was the Israeli defense forces who, not sticking to standard firing procedures, had introduced shortcuts that were responsible for the Patriots over Israel taking out most of the Scuds. But not the warheads. You could end up technically “knocking out” a Scud but causing more carnage on the ground when an unexploded warhead came down with the rest of the scrap metal.

Freeman had ordered in the armored-vehicle-mounted Oerlikon-Buhrie ADATs. The eight high-velocity ADAT missiles, equally effective against armor and aircraft, had only a commander/gunner crew and were air portable by chopper or C-130. With a twelve-mile radar scan, the ADATs had laser-beam ranging (up to five miles) and optical radar track with FLIR — forward-looking infrared — TV tracking. And ADATs could operate while the vehicle was on the move, the wingless missiles shooting out from the eight-container turret at two thousand miles per hour, target acquisition and aim taking less than one second.

For further perimeter air defense, Freeman also preferred the ninety-pound British Rapier — eight tracked missiles on an enclosed two-man vehicle — because the Rapier’s warhead was made to explode internally, not outside the target. An internal explosion meant you didn’t simply knock the incoming enemy missile off trajectory but actually blew up the warhead in the air.

Freeman sensed a current of opposition running through the American units who had been long used to the U.S. Patriot and Nike-Hercules and the West German Roland. Yet he understood that it wasn’t simply a matter of national pride. Hell, half the electronic components in the F-18s and Eagles were dependent on the Japanese electronics industry. No, what the Americans objected to was that they wouldn’t have time to retrain crews. But Freeman had thought of that, too, and had requested Canadian units from the joint Canadian/U.S. NORAD units. For once the Canadian Parliament did not debate the issue ad nauseam, and the Canadian ADATs team, along with a British-manned Rapier regiment, was already en route, taking the long flight from the U.S. west coast to Hawaii and then to Okinawa, skirting the still-unsecured sea lanes off the Kuril Islands.

“Gentlemen, I want this operation ready to roll in seventy-two hours. The carrier force that will make the Vladivostok feint south of Rudnaya Pristan is already underway out of Yokohama. Now I want to reiterate, for those of you who haven’t already heard it, that the great Communist weakness is their overdependence on centralization. Overcentralization. It grows naturally from suspicious minds, gentlemen. No one trusts anyone else — haven’t done so since nineteen seventeen. Why the hell should they change now? That’s why it took them so long to shoot that KAL airliner down. MiG pilots had to keep checking with central command so Far Eastern TVD wouldn’t think the sons of bitches were defecting to Japan.”