Tom Clancy - The Bear and the Dragon

“Holy God,” Ryan said. “It’s like some kind of fucking video game. How long have we had this capability?”

“It’s pretty new, Jack, and yeah,” the Vice President agreed, “it is kind of obscene-but, well, it’s just what the operators see. I mean, the times I splashed airplanes, I got to see it, just I was in a G-suit with a Tomcat strapped to my back. Somehow this feels dirtier, man. Like watching a guy and a gal go at it, and not in training films-”

“What?”

“That’s what you call porno flicks on the boats, Jack, ‘training films.’ But this is like peeking in a window on a guy’s wedding night, and he doesn’t know about it … feels kinda dirty.”

“The people will like it,” Arnie van Damm predicted. “The average guy out there, especially kids, to them it’ll be like a movie.”

“Maybe so, Arnie, but it’s a snuff film. Real lives being snuffed out, and in large numbers. That division CP Diggs got with his MLRS rockets-I mean, Jesus Christ. It was like an act of an angry pagan god, like the meteor that got the dinosaurs, like a murderer wasting a kid in a schoolyard,” Robby said, searching for just how dirty it felt to him. But it was business, not personal, for what little consolation that might be to the families of the departed.

Getting some radio traffic,” Tolkunov told General Bondarenko. The intelligence officer had half a dozen electronic-intelligence groups out, listening in on the frequencies used by the PLA. They usually spoke in coded phrases which were difficult to figure out, especially since the words changed on a day-to-day basis, along with identifying names for the units and personalities involved.

But the security measures tended to fall by the wayside when an emergency happened, and senior officers wanted hard information in a hurry. In this case, Bondarenko had watched the take from Grace Kelly and felt little pity for the victims, wishing only that he’d been the one inflicting the casualties, because it was his country the Chinks had invaded.

“The American artillery doctrine is impressive, isn’t it?” Colonel Tolkunov observed.

“They’ve always had good artillery. But so do we, as this Peng fellow will discover in a few hours,” CINC-FAR EAST replied. “What do you think he’ll do?”

“It depends on what he finds out,” the G-2 replied. “The information that gets to him will probably be fairly confusing, and it will concern him, but less than his own mission.”

And that made sense, Gennady Iosifovich had to agree. Generals tended to think in terms of the missions assigned to them, leaving the missions of others to those others, trusting them to do the jobs assigned to them. It was the only way an army could function, really. Otherwise you’d be so worried about what was happening around you that you’d never get your own work done, and the entire thing would quickly grind to a halt. It was called tunnel vision when it didn’t work, and good teamwork when it did.

“What about the American deep strikes?”

“Those Stealth aircraft are amazing. The Chinese rail system is completely disrupted. Our guests will soon be running short of fuel.”

“Pity,” Bondarenko observed. The Americans were efficient warriors, and their doctrine of deep-strike, which the Russian military had scarcely considered, could be damned effective if you brought it off, and if your enemy couldn’t adapt to it. Whether the Chinese could adapt was something they’d have to see about. “But they still have sixteen mechanized divisions for us to deal with.”

“That is so, Comrade General,” Tolkunov agreed.

FALCON THREE to FALCON LEADER, I see me a SAM track. It’s a Holiday,” the pilot reported. ”Hilltop two miles west of the CLOVERLEAF-wait, there’s a Duck there, too.”

“Anything else?” FALCON LEAD asked. This captain commanded the Apaches tasked to SAM suppression.

“Some light flak, mainly two-five mike-mike set up around the SAMs. Request permission to fire, over.”

“Stand by,” FALCON LEAD replied. “EAGLE LEAD, this is FALCON LEAD, over.”

“EAGLE LEAD copies, FALCON,” Boyle replied from his Blackhawk.

“We have SAM tracks in view. Permission to engage, over.”

Boyle thought fast. His Apaches now had the tank laager in sight and surrounded on three sides. Okay, Falcon was approaching the hill overlooking the laager, code-named CLOVERLEAF. Well, it was about time.

“Permission granted. Engage the SAMs. Out.”

“Roger, engaging. FALCON THREE, this is LEAD. Take ’ em out.”

“Take your shot, Billy,” the pilot told his gunner.

“Hellfire, now!” The gunner in the front seat triggered off his first missile. The seven-inch-wide missile leaped off its launch-rail with a flare of yellow light, and immediately tracked on the laser dot. Through his thermal viewer, he saw a dismounted crewman looking that way, and he immediately pointed toward the helicopter. He was yelling to get someone’s attention, and the race was between the inbound missile and human reaction time. The missile had to win. He got the attention of someone, maybe his sergeant or lieutenant, who then looked in the direction he was pointing. You could tell by the way he cocked his head that he didn’t see anything at first, while the first one was jerking his arm like a fishing pole, and the second one saw it, but by that time there was nothing for him to do but throw himself to the ground, and even that was a waste of energy. The Hellfire hit the base of the launcher assembly and exploded, killing everything within a ten-meter circle.

“Tough luck, Joe.” Then the gunner switched over to the other one, the Holiday launcher. This crew had been alerted by the sound, and he could see them scurrying to light up their weapon. They’d just about gotten to their places when the Duck launcher blew up.

Next came the flak. There were six gun mounts, equally divided between 25-and 35-mm twin gun sets, and those could be nasty. The Apache closed in. The gunner selected his own 20-mm cannon and walked it across every site. The impacts looked like flashbulbs, and the guns were knocked over, some with exploding ammo boxes.

“EAGLE LEAD, FALCON THREE, this hilltop is cleaned off. We’re circling to make sure. No coverage over the CLOVERLEAF now. It’s wide open.”

“Roger that.” And Boyle ordered his Apaches in.

It was about as fair as putting a professional boxer into the ring against a six-year-old. The Apaches circled the laagered tanks just like Indians in the movies around a circled wagon train, except in this one, the settlers couldn’t fire back. The Chinese tank crewmen were mainly sleeping outside, next to their mounts. Some crews were in their vehicles, standing guard after a fashion, and some dismounted crewmen were walking around on guard, holding Type 68 rifles. They’d been alerted somewhat by the explosions on the hilltop overlooking the laager. Some of the junior officers were shouting to get their men up and into their tanks, not knowing the threat, but thinking naturally enough that the safe place to be was behind armor, from which place they could shoot back to defend themselves. They could scarcely have been more wrong.

The Apaches danced around the laager, sideslipping as the gunners triggered off their missiles. Three of the PLA tanks used their thermal viewers and actually saw helicopters and shot at them, but the range of the tank guns was only half that of the Hellfires, and all of the rounds fell well short, as did the six handheld HN-5 SAMs that were fired into the night. The Hellfires, however, did not, and in every case-only two of them missed-the huge warheads had the same effect on the steel tanks that a cherry bomb might have on a plastic model. Turrets flew into the air atop pillars of flame, then crashed back down, usually upside-down on the vehicles to which they’d been attached. There’d been eighty-six tanks here, and that amounted to three missiles per helicopter, with a few lucky gunners getting a fourth shot. All in all, the destruction of this brigade took less than three minutes, leaving the colonel who’d been in command to stand at his command post with openmouthed horror at the loss of the three hundred soldiers he’d been training for over a year for this very moment. He even survived a strafing of his command section by a departing Apache, seeing the helicopter streak overhead so quickly that he didn’t even have time to draw his service pistol.