“Did you hear that?” Margaret asked her husband.
He pretended not to hear. Closing his eyes, he recalled the last known positions of the U.S. Navy’s carrier battle groups, and deduced that unless there had been a radical shift in their combat patrol areas, it would be Admiral Crowley’s Seventh Fleet CBG which would be closest to Lake Khanka. If this were the case, the MEU he was to lead would be that of Colonel Jack Tibbet aboard the Yorktown, one of Admiral Crowley’s twelve-vessels. Scuttlebutt had it that because the navy, as were the other branches of the American armed forces, was dangerously overextended, it might well be that Crowley, who used to be captain of the carrier McCain as well as overall admiral of the fleet, would have to serve as captain of Yorktown as well as admiral of the fleet for the duration of this mission.
“I mean, Douglas,” Margaret pressed him, “aren’t you getting too old for…” It was the worst possible thing she could have said.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
For domestic consumption, the Russian president, in his distinctive baritone, vociferously objected to any “interventionist plan” against Russia by the United States or any other country. The truth, however, was that the Russian president’s dire warning, wildly greeted by crowds from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok, was strictly pro forma. For the fact was that within the Kremlin from which Putin and his successors had tried to govern following the collapse of the Soviet Union after the Cold War, there was growing alarm at the rash of rebel commanders who, having been suborned by bagmen into becoming rapacious capitalist arms dealers, viewed Moscow as nothing more than an impediment to their rapidly growing fortunes. In this test of wills, there were those in the Kremlin who harbored a hope that the Americans could be used to help redress the imbalance of power in Russia, wresting control away from Moscow and transferring it to powerful regional rebel groups.
Such a group was the triumvirate in Russia’s far east dubbed by Big and Little, two veteran English-speaking rebel officers of the old KGB’s Thirteenth Directorate, as the “ABC,” a cabal of three generals, Mikhail Abramov of the Siberian Sixth Armored Division, Viktor Beria of the Siberian Third Infantry Division, and Sergei Cherkashin of the Siberian Air Defense Arm. FSB, the Russian security service, the new KGB, knew that ABC, jointly financed by Muscovite gangsters and fundamentalist Arab groups in the Middle East in open defiance of Moscow, had concentrated and arrayed their forces around Lake Khanka and were considered to be amongst the best dug in of any of the breakaway rebel units. ABC had been careful to funnel the initial money provided by their backers into securing the best frontline troops available to defend the Lake Khanka perimeter and the railhead in the town of Gayvoron, from which armaments by the ton were being delivered to the port of Vladivostok 150 miles to the southeast. FSB reported that ABC had in effect built a private military economic zone in the far east wherein they could manufacture and export armaments well beyond Moscow’s reach.
The idea of trying to oust the ABC risked a civil war in the area, and the very suggestion of yet another civil war in Russia and yet another breakaway territory like Chechnya was as unpalatable to Moscow’s ruling elite as it was to the civilian population at large. And so, in one of those strange, upside-down ironies that violated all the tenets of the Cold War, the Kremlin, while vigorously objecting to the U.S. plan in public, simultaneously saw it as the best chance of ridding Moscow of the ABC, whose so-called business practices, Pravda declared, were “even worse than Enron’s.”
Yet Moscow knew that the risk the Americans would be taking was enormous. Lake Khanka was 120 miles inland from Vladivostok. Moscow knew the Americans, led by this so-called American legend, General Freeman, would have to not only contend with a vicious ring of sophisticated anti-aircraft weaponry, including MANPADs and emplacements of four SAMs of the type that had downed the American Scott Brady’s fighter over Bosnia, but also fight against paid-off rebellious elements of the Russian navy.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Alerted by their coast watchers and unable to move their lucrative weapons complex, ABC was waiting. And ready. For the hundreds of men of the ad hoc Russian Regiment, everything was at stake, survival and money in amounts that the three disgruntled ex-Soviet generals had never dreamed they would be within striking distance of. The markup on Igla, Vanguard, and pirated Stinger-design MANPADs alone was 218 percent. Production costs had fallen drastically, with Lake Khanka providing a guaranteed supply of water for coolant. Productivity was also spurred on by bonuses for the fast loading of ABC’s ship-container-sized cargoes of twenty missiles per RORO — Roll-On, Roll-Off — load. Mideast sales tripled in the first six months of operation, bonuses for overtime so coveted that the soldiers from Abramov’s tank company, Beria’s infantry, and Chekashin’s air defense ground crews assembling the delicate guidance heads and 8 percent sulfur solid propellant were breaking all civilian productivity rates set in the go-slow environment of the old Soviet regime. And now they had in their possession the U.S.’s super-cavitating technology. More bonuses. As bonuses increased, so did expectations, the men wanting even more overtime. Indeed, a strict duty roster had to be enforced as some soldiers, particularly from Beria’s infantry battalions, had been skipping regular perimeter security duty so as to put in overtime on the assembly lines. When General Beria first heard from Big and Little in Moscow that an attack by the American ATFOR — American Anti-terrorism Force — was a possibility, he immediately tightened up all “perimeter skipping” by instituting the death penalty for any Russian absentee on the grounds that shirking this duty was desertion. It had a salutary effect, as those who wanted to make more money selling more missiles to Hamas and others were only too willing to inform on comrades whose executions created a vacancy and hence more lucrative overtime on the already lucrative assembly line.
“You won’t have to worry about the Americans,” Abramov assured Beria and Cherkashin. “My T-90s’ll take the bastards out before they get a chance to get out of their helicopter seats.”
“Bullshit!” announced Beria. “My infantry’ll be the force that’ll settle the matter. You’ll see.” He slapped Cherkashin on the shoulder. “Your air defense missiles and tank rounds can’t take out every individual, Sergei. I tell you, my lads’ll be onto whoever survives their drop.”
“Drop?” said Abramov brusquely. “They’re not crazy enough to try parachuting their force in. Besides, bad weather is coming. It will be like duck shooting for our men. No, General, the Americans’ll be ferrying them in by helicopter.” Abramov then turned to Cherkashin. “Your missile batteries should find them easily.”
“Not a problem, Comrade. We’ll blow them out of the sky. It’ll be raining Americans. Dead Americans.”
They all laughed. While none of the three believed it would be a cakewalk, it was obvious that the American MEU force of two-thousand-plus marines had no chance of surprising ABC when it had to move in from the Sea of Japan before unleashing any attack. Even so, the three rebel Russian generals were determined not to burden themselves with any time-wasting formalities that would slow down ABC’s production lines. Accordingly, the triumvirate phoned each of the company’s commanders, pointing out to them that insofar as everyone’s financial future, from general to private, was on the line, there’d be no time to implement what they called the “restraints” of the Geneva Convention. There would be no American prisoners taken.