Ian Slater - Arctic Front

“How do you explain it, Dick? No learning involved. Yucca flower’s open for only one night. One night, Dick.” He looked back over the empty seats. “Can’t have been learned, you see. We call it intuition, by which we mean it is innate — already there, already known, in the brain of the moth. We have that same kind of pre-knowledge, Dick, but we don’t know what to call it exactly, so we take a stab at it and say it’s instinct.” He turned to Norton again. “You see what I’m saying. The moth has the image of the flower already in its brain. Before it’s even born. Remember what the poet said, Dick. ‘Trailing clouds of glory do we come from God who is our home.’ We’ve already been there. The moth already knows. We know. I know. It was in the dream — the map of Siberia. Something missing, Dick.” He eased himself away from the model, stretching, his hands again kneading the small of his back. “It came to the at breakfast. I was going over the dream — damn thing had kept the awake half the night, felt like I’d been on the rack.” He turned about to face the huge wall map. “Can you see it?”

“This “Wheel of Fortune,’ General?”

Freeman gave a rough smile, his right hand extended, moving from the Urals east across the west Siberian plain, the central plateau, and then the eastern mountains. “All their communications — all their topographical communications, Dick. Automobile enthusiast like myself should have spotted it right away. Different from any other map in the civilized world. No roads. No goddamn roads, Dick!” Freeman was visibly excited. “You see in the south, from Sverdlovsk in the Urals through Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, and on to Khabarovsk — no main roads. It’s all goddamn rivers, Dick. That’s the secret. The bridges. We forget about everything else but the bridges. We blow their bridges not to stop their road traffic but their river traffic. Their rivers are their roads — their lifelines — Dick. Frozen in the winter. Like Lake Lagoda.”

For once Norton, too, felt victorious. “You mean the Russians resupplying Leningrad in World War Two. By road from Murmansk and then across the frozen lake.”

“Goddamn it, Dick! You win the Toyota and the trip to Disneyland.”

“Well, I’ll be—”

“We collapse those bridges on them, Dick, and it’ll be like the Ventura Freeway at peak hour. Nothing’ll move.”

Norton looked more closely at the maps. Freeman was right on the money. It was so simple once you saw it. Three hundred miles or so east of Chita, itself three hundred miles east of Baikal, there was absolutely no main road into the Far Eastern TVD. “What about the Trans-Siberian Railway?” he asked Freeman.

“With our superiority we’ll cut it, too.”

That night both men went to sleep more easily than at any time during the previous two weeks. Freeman became somnolent recalling Churchill’s summons to Buckingham Palace after the Munich crisis of 1939. Finally called to be leader of the nation in its darkest hours, after having been out in his wilderness, Churchill had later said he had gone to bed peacefully that night, having no fears of the morrow and confident that “facts are better than dreams.”

“I’ll take both, Winston,” said Freeman, switching off his bed lamp. “I’ll take both.”

It had not occurred to the commander in chief of Operation Arctic Front that dreams are but often one step from nightmares and that the Siberians had dreams of their own and that these no less than those of the American commanders’ were rooted solidly in the recognition of certain indisputable facts— which they would soon give him ample evidence of.

The Yak vertical takeoff fighter bomber diving on the landing helicopter assault ship Winston Davis got off one Acrid radar homing missile before being taken out by saturation fire from the ship’s two “pope miters,” the high-domed, six-barrelled, twenty-millimeter Vulcan Phalanx Mark 15’s that fired one hundred rounds a second and enveloped the Siberian fighter in a dense hail of depleted uranium. The fireball that a moment ago had been the Yak now hit the LHD, the Yak’s starboard wing’s Koliesov/Rybinak vertical takeoff lift jets slamming into one of the forty-thousand-ton ship’s five antisurface guns, sending white-hot shrapnel whooshing through the air, killing the bridge’s port lookout, and raising fears among the two thousand marines below that if the twelve thousand tons of aviation fuel were hit they’d all be incinerated within a matter of minutes. As the shock of the impact continued to reverberate deafeningly through the jam-packed half-deck hangars below, a fully equipped battalion, gathered about its palletized supplies, which took up 150,000 cubic feet of the ship’s huge interior, waited anxiously for the landings that might or might not happen depending on the outcome of the great naval battle now swirling and crashing about them.

What Admiral Burke feared most was the Siberian fleet’s two ultramodern guided-missile cruisers, now still over two hundred miles away but racing south at flank speed to intercept him on his right flank. His only hope was that the two old Iowa class battle wagons, the Missouri and the Wisconsin, would stop them. But it was seen by Burke’s commander as a forlorn hope. And indeed because of the two ships’ age, despite weapons modernization, most of the officers in Burke’s fleet had serious doubts about the behemoths of another age being of any use in the high-tech war.

There were those, like Adm. John Brentwood, who, joined by others in the U.S. DOD — Department of Defense — and the British MOD — Ministry of Defence — were preoccupied by an unanswered question: Would the Tomahawk missiles aboard the Iowa class battleships be more than a match going up against the Kirov guided-missile cruisers’ SS-N-19, three-hundred-mile-range, four-thousand-pound missile? The latter, as well as being over a thousand pounds heavier than the Tomahawk, was more than three times as fast. The American cruise missile’s speed, at a subsonic 520 miles per hour, made it a slowpoke compared to the over-1700-miles per-hour Siberian missile. It was a difference that UK Liaison Officer Brigadier Soames at the White House referred to, with typical British understatement, as “a slight advantage for the Sibirs.”

The undeniable advantage of the Siberian’s speed allowed the Kirov cruisers to wait until the Missouri and Wisconsin had fired two Tomahawks apiece, two for each of the Siberian cruisers; they had ample time, even in the split-second world of over-the-horizon electronic warfare, to respond. It was a luxurious five seconds in all after each Tomahawk, in a feral roar and with its peculiar “ass-dragging” motion, skidded out from one of the eight armored box launchers like a huge, vertical cigar moving sideways, the missile arcing high enough to afford Siberian radar a glimpse and to get a back-track vector, before the American missile dropped in altitude.

At wave-skimming height, the Tomahawk’s cigar-tube shape began its metamorphosis, its tail unfolding, stubby wings extending and air intake popping up to gulp air, allowing the missile’s own engine to take over as the rocket booster finished. Looking now more like the V-l buzz bomb from which it had been derived, the missile’s 1,000-pound conventional warhead, replacing a 450-pound nuclear tip, followed its preprogrammed terrain-matching contour guide which afforded the Tomahawk a CEP — circular error of probability — of only 250 feet. This was normally not critical for most large land targets, but for a moving target at sea it raised the odds considerably.