Ian Slater - Arctic Front

Worse was to come. With his choppers withdrawing, his tank crews knowing they’d been had, even if the helicopters had taken out some of the remote control quads in the forest, Freeman, the recon pics now rushed to him by dispatch rider, stood there in the cupola looking at the blowups. The caption over them bore the euphemistic title: “Simulated armored vehicles. French made.” The hastily typed G-2 report added the French manufacturer’s name, Lancelin-Barracuda, misspelled with a single “r.”

The fake tanks that had deceived the aerial reconnaissance were of fiberglass/plywood construction, their hollow interior containing a ten-gallon drum of gasoline, a four-cubic-foot box of junk metal — ample supplies of this available from the many disbanded old steam engines along the Trans-Siberian — and a clear-burning, Japanese-made kerosene lamp. The lamp produced the heat source for IF sensors aboard either the UAV reconnaissance craft or helicopters, such as those that had been flown by the thirty American helicopter pilots who were now dead. G-2 also informed Freeman that a Pentagon file matchup just received indicated that the cost to the Siberians of just one T-80 equalled the purchase price of at least sixty fake tanks. To add insult to injury, it was less subtly pointed out that C in C Second Army should also “be advised” that Allied intelligence “has known for some time that ZSU-23 quads could be tripped by the pulse of approaching aircraft engines,” which would “clearly explain the lack of troops.”

HEAVY CASUALTIES IN SECOND ARMY was the headline of The New York Times. The La Roche paper, in funereal tones that belied its brutally flippant headline, FREEMAN FOILED AGAIN, suggested it was time “to ask serious questions about General Freeman’s leadership.” This time there was not even a reference to the Pyongyang raid or the breakout of the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket and only an ambivalent reference to the “heavily won” victory on Ratmanov. Dick Norton and everyone else in Second Army now knew that Freeman had not swept a double header; what he had instead was a double humiliation. How Yesov must be laughing in Novosibirsk.

No one but Norton had the courage, when Freeman returned through the pall,of still-burning helicopters, to tell Freeman the news of his wife’s death. And at this moment, on the worst day of his life, General Douglas Freeman was also informed by the E-3A Sentry advance warning reconnaissance that another Siberian cruise missile offensive was on its way from Baikal. Freeman wanted to be alone with his grief for the one person who had shared his innermost ambitions and fears and all the joys and disappointments of their life together. And so did many others who had seen their closest friends literally torn asunder. But mourning was a luxury no war indulged, and the stars he wore on his collar dictated unequivocally that he give all his attention to, and husband whatever energy he had for, the welfare of his men in Second Army’s most perilous hours.

Though Second Army moved forward through Chichatka, its pace was sullen, the air of defeat heavy as skunk cabbage. On one level the problem was as simple as it was critical; the U.S. Tomahawk cruise missiles had reached Baikal and taken out their designated targets, but more Siberian cruise missiles kept coming. Of course the launch sites had to be fake — only convincing enough, like the fake T-80s, in heat emission, size, and shape, to sucker the Americans into wasting precious cruise missiles of their own in the same way Freeman had lost fifteen of his prime antitank weapons in the downed Apaches and Cobras. It was evident now, G-2 had told him, that the Siberians must be using mobile sites, somehow covering their tracks, which the satellites weren’t picking up.

“Maybe they’re dragging a bush behind them,” said a junior officer jokingly. But no one was laughing, especially not the commander of the marine expeditionary force, who had lost another fifty-six men and forty-three wounded to the latest Siberian cruise attack.

Freeman, Norton, and the G-2 colonel were poring over the latest satellite reconnaissance pictures of the Baikal area, the colonel having circled the four Ushkanyi Islands jutting up like pimples in the photograph. Next to the satellite pics he put four tatty amateur photographs of the islands, slightly out of focus, the islands looking like tiny white stones encrusted by the ice. “What are these splotches?” asked Freeman in as desultory a tone as Norton had ever heard. The general was putting on his long white camouflage winter coat, preparing to go for one of his walks, and Norton couldn’t blame him. It was bad enough to lose a game without having to suffer replays in the dugout.

“Splotches?” said the colonel. “Well, most of it, I think, is overexposure — especially on these amateur shots we were sent. Some of it, of course, is varying thicknesses in the ice.” He tapped the amateur photographs, brought to them by one of the Buryat underground who’d nearly got shot by a jittery marine and who “claimed,” the colonel said suspiciously, that he’d gotten them from some Jewish underground.

Freeman grunted, picked up his helmet, and, as he always did before he went out, checked that his belt revolver was fully loaded, ready to go.

“Want the to come along, General?” asked Norton.

“No. Thanks all the same, Dick.” He forced a grin, trying to belie his mood to the others. “Have to nut a few things out,” he said, and was gone, flurries of snow bursting in unceremoniously just before the door closed. Outside the wind was moaning through the taiga.

“Some congressmen,” said one of the G-2 officers, “are pressing for his recall.”

“Where the hell are they coming from?” asked Norton, refusing to be drawn into any speculation about Freeman’s fitness for command. But his interjection was taken by the others as one that any duty-bound aide would have to make when his superior had his back against the wall. But if they thought that Freeman was venturing out alone to lick his wounds, they were wrong. As the general moved along the edge of the road, trucks rolling by him in the darkness, the drivers wearing infrared goggles and guided by MPs stamping their feet in the bitter cold as they kept a convoy of Second Army inching along wherever the road’s shoulder was too narrow, Freeman asked himself one question: Would he have replaced any commander who had experienced the defeats he had in the last few days? The answer was an unequivocal yes— if the commander had had sound intelligence about a possible sucker ploy. And “No,” if he hadn’t had reliable information of what the Siberians were up to.

For the remainder of his walk, hands behind his back, head down against the bitter cold, Freeman thought of his index files, of all the notes he’d made about all the possible campaigns he might be called upon to fight, just as Schwarzkopf had predicted and readied himself for a desert war. He recalled the history of the Russias, of the Transbaikal, which he had read as assiduously as the chronicles of Sherman and Grant; and he thought, too, of Nolan Ryan of the Texas Rangers on that unforgettable day in ‘91 when, before the game against Toronto, Ryan confessed to his coach, “My back hurts, my heel hurts, and I’ve been pounding Advil all day. I don’t feel good. I feel old today. Watch me.” They had watched him, and after he performed the miracle, he proclaimed, “I never had command of all three pitches like I did tonight… It was my most overpowering no-hitter.”

“By God,” Freeman told himself, “watch me, you bastards!” He walked for another half hour and on the way back to the G-2 hut availed himself of the MEF’s satellite hookup, ordering a call to the Pentagon on scrambler after which, without a word, he put down the phone and made his way back to the G-2.