Tom Clancy - The Bear and the Dragon

Gregory believed it. When an object going one way at fourteen thousand miles per hour got hit by something going the other way at two thousand miles per hour, the result could be quite impressive. “First-round hit?” he asked.

“You bet. The sucker was coming straight at us, and this baby doesn’t miss much.”

“We always clean up with Vandal tests off Wallops Island,” Chief Matson confirmed.

“What are those exactly?”

“Old Talos SAMs,” Matson explained. “Big stovepipes, ramjet engines, they can come in on a ballistic track at about twenty-two hundred miles per hour. Pretty hot on the deck, too. That’s what we worry about. The Russians came out with a sea-skimmer we call Sunburn-”

“Aegis-killer, some folks call it,” Chief Leek added. “Low and fast.”

“But we ain’t missed one yet,” Matson announced. “The Aegis system’s pretty good. So, Dr. Gregory, what exactly are you checking out?”

“I want to see if your system can be used to stop a ballistic inbound.”

“How fast?” Matson asked.

“A for-real ICBM. When you detect it on radar, it’ll be doing about seventeen thousand miles per hour, call it seventy-six hundred meters per second.”

“That’s real fast,” Leek observed. “Seven, eight times the speed of a rifle bullet.”

“Faster’n a theater ballistic weapon like a Scud. Not sure we can do it,” Matson worried.

“This radar system’ll track it just fine. It’s very similar to the Cobra Dane system in the Aleutians. Question is, can your SAMs react fast enough to get a hit?”

“How hard’s the target?” Matson asked.

“Softer than an aircraft. The RV’s designed to withstand heat, not an impact. Like the space shuttle. When you fly it through a rainstorm, it plays hell with the tiles.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yep.” Gregory nodded. “Like foam coffee cups.”

“Okay, so then the problem’s getting the SM2 close enough to have the warhead pop off when the target’s in the fragmentation cone.”

“Correct.” They might be enlisted men, Gregory thought, but that didn’t make them dumb.

“Software fix in the seeker head, right?”

“Also correct. I’ve rewritten the code. Pretty easy job, really. I reprogrammed the way the laser mutates. Ought to work okay if the infrared homing system works as advertised. At least it did in the computer simulations up in Washington.”

“It worked just fine on Shiloh, Doc. We got the videotape aboard somewhere,” Leek assured him. “Wanna see it?”

“You bet,” Dr. Gregory said with enthusiasm.

“Okay.” Senior Chief Leek checked his watch. “I’m free now. Let me head aft for a smoke, and then we’ll roll the videotape,” he said, sounding like Warner Wolf on WCBS New York.

“You can’t smoke in here?”

Leek grunted annoyance. “It’s the New Navy, Doc. The cap’n’s a health Nazi. You gotta go aft to light up. Not even in chief’s quarters,” Leek groused.

“I quit,” Matson said. “Not a pussy like Tim here.”

“My ass,” Leek responded. “There’s a few real men left aboard.”

“How come you sit sideways here?” Gregory asked, rising to his feet to follow them aft. “The important displays go to the right side of the ship instead of fore and aft. How come?”

“ ’Cuz it helps you puke if you’re in a seaway.” Matson laughed. “Whoever designed these ships didn’t like sailors much, but at least the air-conditioning works.” It rarely got above sixty degrees in the CIC, causing most of the men who worked there to wear sweaters. Aegis cruisers were decidedly not known for their comforts.

This is serious?” Colonel Aliyev asked. It was a stupid question, and he knew it. But it just had to come out anyway, and his commander knew that.

“We have orders to treat it that way, Colonel,” Bondarenko replied crossly. “What do we have to stop them?”

“The 265th Motor-Rifle Division is at roughly fifty percent combat efficiency,” the theater operations officer replied. “Beyond that, two tank regiments at forty percent or so. Our reserve formations are mostly theoretical,” Aliyev concluded. “Our air assets-one regiment of fighter-interceptors ready for operations, another three who don’t have even half their aircraft fit to fly.”

Bondarenko nodded at the news. It was better than it had been upon his arrival in theater, and he’d done well to bring things that far, but that wouldn’t impress the Chinese very much.

“Opposition?” he asked next. Far East’s intelligence officer was another colonel, Vladimir Konstantinovich Tolkunov.

“Our Chinese neighbors are in good military shape, Comrade General. The nearest enemy formation is Thirty-fourth Shock Army, a Type A Group Army commanded by General Peng Xi-Wang,” he began, showing off what he knew. “That one formation has triple or more our mechanized assets, and is well trained. Chinese aircraft-well, their tactical aircraft number over two thousand, and we must assume they will commit everything to this operation. Comrades, we do not have anything like the assets we need to stop them.”

“So, we will use space to our advantage,” the general proposed. “Of that we have much. We will fight a holding action and await reinforcements from the west. I’ll be talking with Stavka later today. Let’s draw up what we’ll need to stop these barbarians.”

“All down one line of railroad,” Aliyev observed. “And our fucking engineers have been busily clearing a route for the Chinks to take to the oil fields. General, first of all, we need to get our engineers working on minefields. We have millions of mines, and the route the Chinese will take is easily predicted.”

The overall problem was that the Chinese had strategic, if not tactical, surprise. The former was a political exercise, and like Hitler in 1941, the Chinese had pulled it off. At least Bondarenko would have tactical warning, which was more than Stalin had allowed his Red Army. He also expected to have freedom of maneuver, because also unlike Stalin, his President Grushavoy would be thinking with his brain instead of his balls. With freedom of maneuver Bondarenko would have the room to play a mobile war with his enemy, denying the Chinese a chance at decisive engagement, allowing hard contact only when it served his advantage. Then he’d be able to wait for reinforcements to give him a chance to fight a set-piece battle on his own terms, at a place and time of his choosing.

“How good are the Chinese, really, Pavel?”

“The People’s Liberation Army has not engaged in large-scale combat operations for over fifty years, since the Korean War with the Americans, unless you cite the border clashes we had with them in the late ‘60s and early ’70s. In that case, the Red Army dealt with them well, but to do that we had massive firepower, and the Chinese were only fighting for limited objectives. They are trained largely on our old model. Their soldiers will not have the ability to think for themselves. Their discipline is worse than draconian. The smallest infraction can result in summary execution, and that makes for obedience. At the operational level, their general officers are well-trained in theoretical terms. Qualitatively, their weapons are roughly the equal of ours. With their greater funding, their training levels mean that their soldiers are intimately familiar with their weapons and rudimentary tactics,” Zhdanov told the assembled staff. “But they are probably not our equal in operational-maneuver thinking. Unfortunately, they do have numbers going for them, and quantity has a quality all its own, as the NATO armies used to say of us. What they will want to do, and what I fear they will, is try to roll over us quickly-just crush us and move on to their political and economic objectives as quickly as possible.”