Ian Slater - Arctic Front

The railway was another story. The Siberians, having sacrificed much of their heavy fighter cover — mainly MiG-29s — to protect sacrificial MiG-27 Flogger-D ground attack aircraft, had dropped each Flogger’s 6,600-pound ordnance on the multiple track west of the Zeya River between Shimanovsk and Mukhino. This meant that the pea-colored Rossiya, or “Train Number One,” which ran from Vladivostok to Moscow, was unable to proceed because of the downed transmission lines. The Siberians, however, quickly hitched the carriages carrying evacuees from Khabarovsk to three steam engines, drawn into service from the dozens of such locomotives which had previously been disbanded beside the line with the coming of the electric engines.

Moving slowly through the dense, fogged-in and snow-draped taiga of larch, pine, and fir, the train approached the top of the horseshoe hump of the Amur. Instead of the usual caboose, the train dragged an enormous hook-shaped, stump-jump plough behind it, ripping up the ties like matchsticks, the splayed rail now pushed uselessly to the side on this eastern section of the forty-eight-hundred-mile railway. The guards at each tunnel entrance and bridge gratefully hopped aboard the last passenger carriage, the carriages alternating with AA quads mounted on flatbeds, every fourth flatbed in the car train sprouting SA-6 AA missiles. The “Mukhino Express,” as it had been wryly described by the American pilots who had come down through the heavy cloud layer only to have their infrared signature detectors thwarted for a time by the thick bone-chilling fog, was finally stopped in a river of high explosives before it could reach the station at Mukhino. The pale blue station disintegrated in a spectacular explosion that sent ancient pine planks, black earth, and fire-streaked snow, together with iron heating-stove plates and the woodpile, whirling in a mini-tornado a quarter mile high before it came down in a crashing hail.

Meanwhile Freeman and his commanders welcomed the pause necessitated by having to clear the minefields across the Zeya, for it gave the vitally needed tank and POL resupply trucks time to catch up. Freeman was asked by his chief of logistics, Gen. Malcolm Wain, whether they should go to blivets. Wain had been impressed by the way in which the blivets, or flexi-plastic bags containing thousands of gallons of fuel, had proved so useful in the Iraqi desert to store gas. But here he didn’t have in mind the huge, depot-sized bags that could be buried out of sight of aerial reconnaissance by the roadside but rather the tank-sized bags which, providing a tank was not in action but in transit, could be carried piggyback, an extra jerry can, as it were, one which could be jettisoned before getting the call to go into action or at the first sign of Second Army’s spearhead being attacked.

Freeman spread out the map, slipping in the single-lens monocle that had caused the name “Von Freeman” to stick among those who bore him ill will for his decision to use the fuel air explosive bombs to break the Ratmanov deadlock. The monocle was impatiently tapping sector twenty-one, northwest of Mukhino, and beyond twenty-one to sectors thirty-three and thirty-seven where the Amur reached the apogee of the hump. “I like it,” he told Wain. “Our rate of progress — soon be doing better than Erwin.”

Wain looked across at Norton without the general seeing. Whenever Freeman was making good time, the heroes of his military pantheon were referred to by their first names. If he got held up, it would quickly be that “bastard Rommel.”

“But,” Freeman sighed, “I don’t like it. Scorched-earth policy is one thing. I understand that. But this is — this is a turkey shoot. After Ratmanov I expected a fight.”

Wain disagreed. “I don’t see it that way, General. After Ratmanov they’re going to avoid a close-in fight if they can. Especially with our air superiority.”

“Maybe,” said Freeman, unconvinced. “But they’re not going to give up the whole damn country. They’ve got to stop — stand and fight somewhere. They’ve got to counterattack.” Freeman folded the map case and slipped it into the Humvee’s back seat, smacking his gloves together. “God, it’s cold!” He looked about unhappily at the column stopped for refueling.

It was against everything in Freeman’s book to halt. He’d built a career on movement. Movement! Movement! Movement! as against the Siberians’ obsession with refusing to attack until they had overwhelming numbers in men and materiel. If Freeman stopped, Norton knew, it would make everyone down the line happy — give them a chance to catch their breath and allow the supply tail to thicken. But, Freeman was asking himself as well as Norton and Wain, what was that crafty son of a bitch Yesov up to? Freeman was nodding to himself, concluding that Yesov would be gambling on his, Freeman’s, lifelong commitment to movement, the Siberians sucking him in deeper and deeper, the American supply line becoming ever more overextended.

“Mal.”

“Sir?”

“We’ll pause here. Twenty-four hours. Dick, give the order to establish defensive perimeter. Air task order — saturation fighter cover and attack gunships ready to go.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We’re in ‘overreach’ with our fighters. I realize that. We’re already heavily committed to in-air refueling.” It was as if he was trying to justify his uncharacteristic decision to stop. “But we need to consolidate here. Get another airstrip going. Must remember the aim, gentlemen — to capture Irkutsk. From there our fighter-bomber radius can hit the industrial underbelly. We’re now at a critical stage, however. We can’t pause for too long for resupply. I’ll bet that’s what Yesov’s counting on — hoping his scorched-earth policy’ll force us to drag our ass. But, gentlemen, his scorched-earth policy is outmoded. Takes no account of the American genius for resupply. He obviously hasn’t learned anything from Iraq. Well, let him withdraw. By the time he’s got his big battalions ready on the ramparts, we’ll be knocking the ramparts out from under him.”

Freeman held up his hand to silence any protest that his stopping was perhaps unwise for the same reasons that he was criticizing his Siberian counterpart, for stopping created a stationary target, and it was a maxim of Freeman’s military strategy that a stationary target in modern warfare has no chance. But neither Norton nor Wain had been about to protest, and Freeman holding up his hand seemed to them more a gesture of doubt than confidence, something they’d not seen in him before. Perhaps the terrible casualty rate on Ratmanov had affected the general more than they thought. At odd moments Norton had seen Freeman, when he thought no one was looking, leaning back, his hands massaging his lower back, still in pain. But for Norton there was no doubt — Freeman had made a sound military decision, right from the textbook. To go on without having consolidated your supply line was always a risky proposition.

Marshal Yesov’s aide was in a hurry, his chauffeur-driven Zil swishing past the great, snow-crowned dome of Novosibirsk’s opera and ballet theater. The statue of Lenin, his noble vision fixed on the future, was even more impressive in the strange, pinkish-brown light of the pollution-colored dusk. The soldier, sailor, and airman on Lenin’s right flanked him proudly; the heroic worker and torchbearer to his left were dusted by snow but looked equally heroic. It added to the aide’s excitement when, arriving at the Akademgorodok or “Science City” apartment block, he ran up the six flights — the elevator wasn’t working — to the apartment of Professor Leonid Grigorenko, the head of the KMK project. But when the door opened it was to Marshal Yesov that the aide blurted out, “On ostanovilsya!”— “He’s stopped! The American has stopped!”