Ian Slater - Rage of Battle

“The plan for the convoys is classified ‘for your eyes only,’ Mr. Premier.” It was the only answer the admiral could have given, but it aroused the curiosity of the other armed services so much that Suzlov decided to hear it along with the others. If he could not trust the STAVKA members, he could trust no one; besides, he was first and foremost a politician. He knew that a plan shared was responsibility shared, but when the admiral bared the plan from naval intelligence before them, Suzlov dearly wished he had kept his mouth shut. He would have preferred all the glory himself. It was a plan so stunning in its simplicity, so terrible for the Americans if it succeeded, that Suzlov knew it would win the war.

“Why have we not implemented this sooner?” he demanded.

“Timing, Mr. Premier. All the instruments were there, but the players must perform under a single baton, orchestrated, otherwise we lose the initiative.”

Suzlov nodded his assent. “Yes, of course, you are right. When may I expect results?”

Marchenko was struck by Suzlov’s use of “I” instead of “we.” A politician to his boot nails, thought Marchenko. Suzlov in an instant could take credit for something that others had been planning for so long. And it occurred to Marchenko that the admiral was almost as ambitious as he.

As Marchenko walked out to his black Zil limousine after the meeting, one of Suzlov’s other aides caught up with Marchenko, his questioning about Japan so transparently having come from Suzlov that Marchenko could not stop smiling. “What do you think Japan will do, Comrade Marchenko? Continue to play a passive role?”

“There’s hardly anything passive in Japanese antiaircraft fire, Captain.”

“No — no, of course not, Comrade. I merely meant — do you think she will commit herself more deeply?”

“It’s a world war, Comrade,” said Marchenko. His smile vanished. “You are either in it or you will soon be gobbled up.”

“Some are suggesting that Japan has lost her aggressiveness. Not in commerce, of course, but militarily.”

“Why are you so worried about Japan?” asked Marchenko, looking up at the dull autumn sky. “Do you have stocks on the Tokyo exchange?”

The aide was genuinely shocked. “Certainly not. But what—” The aide decided not to pussyfoot any longer and let Marchenko be so rude as to suggest that he, an aide to the Supreme Soviet, would be so guilty as to hold stocks in the—

“What the premier wishes to know,” said the aide tartly, “is whether you think Japan wants war or will simply sit it out as best she can — as an ally of the Americans.”

Marchenko made a face that said, “Who can tell?” yet he felt sorry for the aide. Besides, there was no sense in making enemies in a war that would see many dead — and many promoted. Had he himself not risen meteorically since the outbreak of the war?

Marchenko put his arm around the aide’s shoulders. “Comrade — I was only joking, of course, about the Tokyo exchange. But to answer your question seriously, I would have to say that, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese people will be reluctant to commit themselves to anything like war on this scale. They will prefer to leave it to the Americans — who, after all, began it with their aggression in South Korea. And wait for us to finish it. Ultimately we must win. You see, for all their gadgetry—” here Marchenko wiggled his fingers in caution “—and, mind, I do not underestimate their technology. It is quite frankly the best. But the Americans do not have the staying power. They have not lost twenty million dead, as we did in the Great Patriotic War. This puts iron in the blood.” He offered the aide a Marlboro. It was eagerly accepted, the aide putting it in his pocket for future use.

“Then,” said the aide, “although you wish us to be on the safe side, to keep our Far Eastern forces on alert, you do not think Japan will go much beyond her supporting role?”

“No,” said Marchenko. “I don’t think she will.”

Before his chauffeur closed the door, Marchenko handed the aide the packet of cigarettes. In case he was wrong.

Like Marchenko, many other strategic experts throughout the world had pondered the matter, believing themselves to have thought of every conceivable scenario and coming to much the same conclusion — that Japan would be America’s handmaiden but not much more.

Another expert, though completely unknown at this time, was Tadanabu Ito, a graduate student recently arrived at Washington State University as part of the exchange plan from Wasada University in Japan. He held two Japanese baccalaureate degrees, one in the field of “macro” or large-scale economics, the other in plate tectonics, or the study of the shifting of the suboceanic plates upon which the continents rest. Ito had submitted the first draft of a Ph.D. thesis on the subject at Washington State University but was told by his adviser that his English, while it might have “squeaked through” the B.Sc. and M.Sc. level, was simply “not up to par” for the Ph.D.

Ito was so despondent discovering how, when you can’t speak or use the language fluently, people automatically assume you’re not as smart as they are that he didn’t realize he was the only person in the world who, in his thesis, was predicting exactly what would happen vis-á-vis Japan. It was only a short chapter in his thesis — almost a footnote — and like a dream one has forgotten and only remembers later, he wasn’t yet aware that he was in possession of one of the most important hypotheses in history. One that would directly affect the lives of David Brentwood, trapped in the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket, his sister in the far-off Aleutian Islands, and Robert Brentwood and his crew in many of the same ways that it would affect the more than thirty million men and women in arms in the worst war in history.

In northwest Germany, 19 miles north of the 250-square-mile Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket, a crack regiment of Soviet SPETS commandos began to advance under the protective barrage that had kept the ill-dropped American airborne pinned down in the northern sector of the pocket.

In the early morning mist that clung to the waterways of lower Saxony and in particular along the Mittelell Canal held by the Soviet 207th Motorized Division and 47th Armored, the SPETS were being sent in to take advantage of the earlier gains made by the 11th Motorized and elements of the Soviets’ 57th and 20ui Armored Divisions. The Soviet tanks, though they had punched a ninety-mile corridor northwest toward the pocket through the American M-1s and the German Leopards, were now due for refit and resupply before the massive, and what Moscow hoped would be the final, assault by fifty divisions. In all, it would pit a million Russian troops against the two-hundred-thousand-odd beleaguered NATO troops in the pocket, who would first be pounded by simultaneous Soviet artillery and rocket barrages all along the now chopped-up snake line that had formerly been NATO’s central and southern fronts.

The hundreds of SPETS and other underground cells that had infiltrated the West during the East German rush through the wire, or rather through the gaps in the wire that had been cut by the Hungarians in 1989, had already carried out highly successful sabotage raids on the railway marshaling yards throughout western Germany as well as hitting four of the huge “prepo” storage sites dotted about the central region, including two outside Gottingen and Fulda which had contained many of the central front’s 150,000 military vehicles and nuclear warheads for 105-millimeter and 203-millimeter artillery. But not all of NATO’s depots had been gutted in the early hours and weeks of the war, and the troops in the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket were drawing on the deep underground reserve dumps of ammunition from around Munster, situated more or less in the middle of the kidney-shaped 250-square-mile pocket.