“Mitch,” General Diggs said, as they stood to walk off the airplane. “Thoughts?”
“Well, sir, we might have picked a better place to fly to. Way things look, this is going to be a little exciting.”
“Go on,” the general ordered.
“The other side has better cards. More troops, better-trained troops, more equipment. Their task, crossing a lot of nasty country, is not enviable, but neither is the Russian task, defending against it. To win they have to play maneuver warfare. But I don’t see that they have the horsepower to pull it off.”
“Their boss out here, Bondarenko. He’s pretty good.”
“So was Erwin Rommel, sir, but Montgomery whupped his ass.”
There were staff cars lined up to drive them into the Russian command post. The weather was clearer here, and they were close enough to the Chinese that a clear sky wasn’t something to enjoy anymore.
CHAPTER 53 Deep Concerns
So, what’s happening there?” Ryan asked.
“The Chinese are seventy miles inside Russia. They have a total of eight divisions over the river, and they’re pushing north,” General Moore replied, moving a pencil across the map spread on the conference table. “They blew through the Russian border defenses pretty fast-it was essentially the Maginot Line from 1940. I wouldn’t have expected it to hold very long, but our overheads showed them punching through fairly professionally with their leading infantry formations, supported by a lot of artillery. Now they have their tanks across-about eight hundred to this point, with another thousand or so to go.”
Ryan whistled. “That many?”
“When you invade a major country, sir, you don’t do it on the cheap. The only good news at this point is that we’ve really given their air force a bloody nose.”
“AWACS and -15s?” Jackson asked.
“Right.” The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs nodded. “One of our kids made ace in a single engagement. A Colonel Winters.”
“Bronco Winters,” Jackson said. “I’ve heard the name. Fighter jock. Okay, what else?”
“Our biggest problem on the air side is going to be getting bombs to our airmen. Flying bombs in is not real efficient. I mean, you can use up a whole C-5 just to deliver half the bombs for one squadron of F-15Es, and we’ve got a lot of other things for the C-5s to do. We’re thinking about sending the bombs into Russia by train to Chita, say, and then flying them up to Suntar from there, but the Russian railroad is moving just tanks and vehicles for now, and that isn’t going to change soon. We’re trying to fight a war at the end of one railroad line. Sure, it’s double-tracked, but it’s still just one damned line. Our logistical people are already taking a lot of Maalox over this one.”
“Russian airlift capacity?” Ryan asked.
“FedEx has more,” General Moore replied. “In fact, FedEx has a lot more. We’re going to ask you to authorize call-up of the civilian reserve air fleet, Mr. President.”
“Approved,” Ryan said at once.
“And a few other little things,” Moore said. He closed his eyes. It was pushing midnight, and nobody had gotten much sleep lately. “VMH-1 is standing-to. We’re in a shooting war with a country that has nuclear weapons on ballistic launchers. So, we have to think about the possibility-remote maybe, but still a possibility-that they could launch at us. So, VMH-1 and the Air Force’s First Heli at Andrews are standing-to. We can get a chopper here to lift you and your family out in seven minutes. That concerns you, Mrs. O’Day,” Moore said to Andrea.
The President’s Principal Agent nodded. “We’re dialed in. It’s all in The Book,” she said. That nobody had opened that particular book since 1962 was beside the point. It was written down. Mrs. Price-O’Day looked a little peaked.
“You okay?” Ryan asked.
“Stomach,” she explained.
“Try some ginger?” Jack went on.
“Nothing much works for this, Dr. North tells me. Please excuse me, Mr. President.” She was embarrassed that he’d noticed her discomfort. She always wanted to be one of the boys. But the boys didn’t get pregnant, did they?
“Why don’t you drive home?”
“Sir, I-”
“Go,” Ryan said. “That’s an order. You’re a woman, and you’re pregnant. You can’t be a cop all the time, okay? Get some relief here and go. Right now.”
Special Agent Price-O’Day hesitated, but she did have an order, so she walked out the door. Another agent came in immediately.
“Machismo from a woman. What’s the goddamned world coming to?” Ryan asked the assembly.
“You’re not real liberated, Jack,” Jackson observed with a grin.
“It’s called objective circumstances, I think. She’s still a girl, even if she does carry a pistol. Cathy says she’s doing fine. This nausea stuff doesn’t last forever. Probably feels like it to her, though. Okay, General, what else?”
“Kneecap and Air Force One are on hot-pad alert ’round the clock. So, if we get a launch warning, in seven minutes or less, you and the Vice President are on choppers, five more minutes to Andrews, and three more after that you’re doing the takeoff roll. The drill is, your family goes to Air Force One and you go to Kneecap,” he concluded. Kneecap was actually the National Emergency Airborne Command Post (NEACP), but the official acronym was too hard to pronounce. Like the VC-25A that served as Air Force One, Kneecap was a converted 747 that was really just a wrapper for a bunch of radios flying in very close formation.
“Gee, that’s nice to know. What about my family?” POTUS asked.
“In these circumstances, we keep a chopper close to where your wife and kids are at all times, and then they’ll fly in whatever direction seems the safest at the moment. If that’s not Andrews, then they’ll get picked up later by a fixed-wing aircraft and taken to whatever place seems best. It’s all theoretical,” Moore explained, “but something you might as well know about.”
“Can the Russians stop the Chinese?” Ryan asked, turning his attention back to the map.
“Sir, that remains to be seen. They do have the nuclear option, but it’s not a card I would expect them to play. The Chinese do have twelve CSS-4 ICBMs. It’s essentially a duplicate of our old Titan-II liquid fuels, with a warhead estimated to be between three and five megatons.”
“City-buster?” Ryan asked.
“Correct. No counterforce capability, and there’s nothing we have left to use against it in that role anyway. The CEP on the warhead is estimated to be plus or minus a thousand meters or so. So, it’d do a city pretty well, but that’s about all.”
“Any idea where they’re targeted?” Jackson asked. Moore nodded at once.
“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 any way.”
“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.”