"Yes. The missile is pretty primitive, and the silos are oriented on their targets because the missile doesn't have much in the way of cross-range maneuverability. Two are targeted on Washington. Others on LA,
San Francisco, and Chicago. Plus Moscow, Kiev, St. Petersburg. They're all leftovers from the Bad Old Days, and they haven't been modified in anyway."
"Any way to take them out?" Jackson asked.
"I suppose we could stage a mission with fighter or bomber aircraft and go after the silos with PGMs," Moore allowed. "But we'd have to fly the bombs to Suntar first, and even then it'll be rather a lengthy mission for the F-117s."
"What about B-2s out of Guam?" Jackson asked.
"I'm not sure they can carry the right weapons. I'll have to check that."
"Jack, this is something we need to think about, okay?"
"I hear you, Robby. General, have somebody look into this, okay?"
"Yes, sir."
"Gennady Iosifovich!" General Diggs called on entering the map room.
"Marion Ivanovich!" The Russian came over to take his hand, followed by a hug. He even kissed his guest, in the Russian fashion, and Diggs flinched from this, in the American fashion. "In!"
And Diggs waited for ten seconds: "Out!" Both men shared the laugh of an insider's joke.
"The turtle bordello is still there?"
"It was the last time I looked, Gennady." Then Diggs had to explain to the others. "Out at Fort Irwin-we collected all the desert tortoises and put them in a safe place so the tanks wouldn't squish 'em and piss off the tree-huggers. I suppose they're still in there making little turtles, but the damned things screw so slow they must fall asleep doing it."
"I have told that story many times, Marion." Then the Russian turned serious. "I am glad to see you. I will be more glad to see your division."
"How bad is it?"
"It is not good. Come." They walked over to the big wall map. "These are their positions as of thirty minutes ago."
"How are you keeping track of them?"
"We now have your Dark Star invisible drones, and I have a smart young captain on the ground watching them as well."
"That far…" Diggs said. Colonel Masterman was right beside him now. "Duke?" Then he looked at his Russian host. "This is Colonel Masterman, my G-3. His last job was as a squadron commander in the Tenth Cav."
"Buffalo Soldier, yes?"
"Yes, sir," Masterman confirmed with a nod, but his eyes didn't leave the map. "Ambitious bastards, aren't they?"
"Their first objective will be here," Colonel Aliyev said, using a pointer. "This is the Gogol Gold Strike."
"Well, hell, if you're gonna steal something, might as well be a gold mine, right?" Duke asked rhetorically. "What do you have to stop them with?"
"Two-Six-Five Motor Rifle is here." Aliyev pointed.
"Full strength?"
"Not quite, but we've been training them up. We have four more motor-rifle divisions en route. The first arrives at Chita tomorrow noon." Aliyev's voice was a little too optimistic for the situation. He didn't want to show weakness to Americans.
"That's still a long way to move," Masterman observed. He looked over at his boss.
"What are you planning, Gennady?"
"I want to take the four Russian divisions north to link up with the 265th, and stop them about here. Then, perhaps, we will use your forces to cross east through here and cut them off."
Now it wasn't the Chinese who were being ambitious, both Diggs and Masterman thought. Moving First Infantry Division (Mechanized) from Fort Riley, Kansas, to Fort Carson, Colorado, would have been about the same distance, but it would have been on flat ground and against no opposition. Here that task would involve a lot of hills and serious resistance. Those factors did make a difference, the American officers thought.
"No serious contact yet?"
Bondarenko shook his head. "No, I'm keeping my mechanized forces well away from them. The Chinese are advancing against no opposition."
"You want 'em to fall asleep, get sloppy?" Masterman asked.
"Da, better that they should get overconfident."
The American colonel nodded. That made good sense, and as always, war was as much a psychological game as a physical one. "If we jump off the trains at Chita, it's still a long-approach march to where you want us, General."
"What about fuel?" Colonel Douglas asked.
"That is the one thing we have plenty of," answered Colonel Aliyev. "The blue spots on the map, fuel storage-it is the same as your Number Two Diesel."
"How much?" Douglas asked.
"At each fuel depot, one billion two hundred fifty million liters."
"Shit!" Douglas observed. "That much?"
Aliyev explained, "The fuel depots were established to support a large mobile force in a border conflict. They were built in the time of Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev. Huge concrete-and-steel storage tanks, all underground, well hidden."
"They must be," Mitch Turner observed. "I've never been briefed on them."
"So, we evaded even your satellite photos, yes?" That pleased the Russian. "Each depot is manned by a force of twenty engineers, with ample electric pumps."
"I like the locations," Masterman said. "What's this unit here?"
"That is BOYAR, a reserve mechanized force. The men have just been called up. Their weapons are from a hidden equipment-storage bunker. It's a short division, old equipment-T-55s and such-but serviceable. We're keeping that force hidden," Aliyev said.
The American G-3 arched his eyebrows. Maybe they were out-manned, but they weren't dumb. That BOYAR force was in a particularly interesting place… if Ivan could make proper use of it. Their overall operational concept looked good-theoretically. A lot of soldiers could come up with good ideas. The problem was executing them. Did the Russians have the ability to do that? Russia's military theorists were as good as any the world had ever seen-good enough that the United States Army regularly stole their ideas. The problem was that the U.S. Army could apply those theories to a real battlefield, and the Russians could not.
"How are your people handling this?" Masterman asked.
"Our soldiers, you mean?" Aliyev asked. "The Russian soldier knows how to fight," he assured his American counterpart.
"Hey, Colonel, I am not questioning their guts," Duke assured his host. "How's their spirit, for one thing?"
Bondarenko handled that one: "Yesterday I had to face one of my young officers, Komanov, from the border defenses. He was furious that we were unable to give him the support he needed to defeat the Chinese. And I was ashamed," the general admitted to his guests. "My men have the spirit. Their training is lacking-I just got here a few months ago, and my changes have barely begun to take effect. But, you will see, the Russian soldier has always risen to the occasion, and he will today-if we here are worthy of him."
Masterman didn't share a look with his boss. Diggs had spoken well of this Russian general, and Diggs was both a good operational soldier and a good judge of men. But the Russian had just admitted that his men weren't trained up as well as they ought to be. The good news was that on the battlefield, men learned the soldier's trade rapidly. The bad news was that the battlefield was the most brutal Darwinian environment on the face of the planet. Some men would learn, but others would die in the process, and the Russians didn't have all that many they could afford to lose. This wasn't 1941, and they weren't fighting with half their population base this time around.
"You're going to want us to move out fast when the trains drop us off at Chita?" Tony Welch asked. He was the divisional chief of staff.
"Yes," Aliyev confirmed.
"Okay, well, then I need to get down there and look over the facilities. What about fuel for our choppers?"
"Our air force bases have fuel storage similar to the diesel depots," Aliyev told him. "Your word is infrastructure, yes? That is the one thing we have much of. When will they arrive?"
"The Air Force is still working that out. They're going to fly our aviation brigade in. Apaches first. Dick Boyle's chomping at the bit."