Ian Slater: Arctic Front

“It’s their answer, Mr. President,” said Trainor solemnly. “They haven’t blinked. You go nuclear. They go nuclear. Nobody wins.”

Mayne, shoulders rounded, head bent like an accountant confronted by the overwhelming power of the IRS ranged against his client, reluctantly flipped over the other photographs. More black donuts in the Siberian snows. “Then it has to be all-out conventional,” he said glumly to Trainor.

“Yes, Mr. President. But, as the Joint Chiefs point out, we’ll have to neutralize the ICBM silos on Kamchatka sooner or later— can’t afford to leave them there so they can pummel us anytime they like.” Trainor pulled over a CIA report.”Siberian conventional ammunition reserves are sixty days. After that we’d risk them going nuclear.”

Again Mayne was struck by the terrible irony of the nuclear age. You invented nuclear weapons, which supposedly made conventional arms obsolete but in order to make sure nuclear arms would never be used you had to fight modern wars with conventional forces and yet if supplies for the conventional weapons of one side ran out it might revert to nuclear anyway. So this meant you needed even more conventional weapons in the first place to take out the launch sites — to take out the nuclear possibility. It was an equation that the “Massachusetters,” which was Mayne’s term for all the doves, never understood, from George McGovern on down. But it was something with which every president, Democrat and Republican, had to contend once he sat in the Oval Office.

“Then,” said Mayne, “looks like we’re back in the war room.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“Damn!” With that Mayne got up and asked Trainor for a Tylenol 3 and an aspirin 222. Only the “double whammy” stood any chance of dulling the tightening steel band of pain around his head and the thick pain that had waylaid his trapezius and neck muscles so that they felt as hard as bridge cables. Trainor saw him wince on the way down, but once in the corridor leading to the room there was no sign that the president was in pain, and anyone noticing his drawn features, the bags beneath bis eyes from lack of sleep, and the worry lines etched deep into his forehead saw these as the inevitable signs of the enormous responsibility shouldered by the commander in chief. And Trainor knew it was the truth, the strain taking its toll: more gray hair about the president’s temples and a set about his jaw that came from him being a nighttime “grinder,” the nightmare of a new war continuing to sabotage his already war-torn sleep.

It was not a very long meeting for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chief of naval operations, and the president’s special national security adviser Harry Schuman. They were of one accord. As well as ordering the offensive on the western front reactivated, pushing from Moscow toward the Urals, U.S. forces, with Canadian air cover as an assist, would have to engage in an airland battle to attack Siberia’s eastern flank and so establish a beachhead for Allied land operations against the United Siberian Soviet Republics.

“Cross Bering Strait?” proffered Mayne, seeking unanimous agreement.

“Yes, sir,” replied the CNO. “But first the navy and air force planes’ll have to knock out Big Diomede’s early warning and AA as well as antiship missile batteries. No chance with a land force. Two Diomedes Islands’ll be surrounded by a sea of jumbled drift ice.” The CNO produced a photograph of the jagged expanse of pressure ridges created by wind and sea action, many of the ridges up to sixty feet in height and six feet thick. “Carrier-launched planes’ll hit it from the south. Air force from the Alaskan peninsula.”

“How about the Russian subs attacking our carrier?” put in Mayne.

“Our battle groups’ll have usual guided missile destroyer and cruiser screen as well as helos and air cover — including fighter cover from the carrier itself and helos. Also we have several batteries of heavy guns on Little Diomede. Range to Big Diomede is less than three miles. Or five — depending on angle of fire.”

“Can our batteries do much against granite?”

“Some. All depends how deep the Russians are dug in. But our big ordnance bombs should do the job.” His right hand massaging his temple, Mayne said nothing, his mood of deep concentration inviting no comment. When he finally did speak, his tone was subdued. The confidence exuded by “big ordnance” men in the air force wasn’t shared by him. They had never really learned the lesson of Vietnam or Iraq. In Vietnam they’d dropped more bombs on the network collectively known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail than they had in all of World War II, and they still hadn’t beaten the North Vietnamese. In Iraq they’d hit Hussein’s troops with over three thousand sorties within the first week, but at the end of the day the coalition had still needed the ground war to win. And Hussein’s troops, though inferior to the Siberians, were dug in in sand, not granite. Also, the Siberians’ morale was rock solid compared to the Iraqis’. No, Mayne wanted backup — just in case. “Freeman.” It was more a question than a decision. After saying it he looked up at Trainor, the CNO, and the Joint Chiefs in turn as well as soliciting the wisdom of his special adviser Harry Schuman. Trainor heard the breath go out of General Grey, chief of the army.

The president shifted his gaze to the general. “What is it, Jimmy?”

“Sir. Douglas Freeman’s a good man, but in his present condition, I don’t think it’d be fair — either to the troops or to him.”

Mayne was nonplussed.”You think he’s too tired? Hell, General, we’re all tired.”

General Grey shot a glance of surprise in Trainor’s direction then back at the president. “I thought you knew, sir. CIA report came in about an hour ago.”

Trainor made no apologies. Reports were coming in all the time. There was a river of reports; you got buried in reports.

“What, about Freeman?”

“No, sir — his wife. In critical condition in Peninsula Hospital. Multiple stab wounds, they say.”

Mayne tried to remember whether he’d ever met Mrs. Freeman — some reception or other for the Desert Storm veterans back from Iraq. A tall, good-looking woman, unpretentious, but the exact features of her face were lost amid a blur of official receptions.

“When did this happen?” asked Mayne, emotionally reassured by his own concern, that after a war that had claimed the lives of countless thousands he could still feel compassion for an individual. What was it Stalin had said? One death is a tragedy, and more is a statistic. It’s something you had to guard against, particularly as president.

“Last night apparently,” answered Trainor.”FBI was called in by the MPs at Fort Ord, Freeman’s new HQ — because it had been called in on the police radio as a break and entry, possible burglary. But army intelligence figure it might be one of Chernko’s boys.”

“A SPETS attack?” asked Mayne, surprised. After all, Freeman was no longer a threat to the Russians.

The SPETS, short for SPETSNAZ or Voiska Spetsialnogo Naznacheniya, Special-Purpose Forces, were the highest trained, foreign-speaking, Russian commando elite who, among other things, had spread havoc when, dressed in American and British uniforms, they’d been dropped behind the Allied lines in the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket. Under the command of GRU’s, or Military Intelligence’s, Second Chief Directorate, the twenty-five-thousand-man force was the most brutal and best trained of the Russian special forces. But an attack on General Freeman’s wife? After all, hitting a commander’s wife didn’t stop a commander, and besides, Freeman was being recalled.