“You’re too old to be a soldier. That’s a young man’s job.”
“I need not be an athlete to squeeze a trigger, comrade, and I know these woods.” To emphasize his words, Gogol stood and took down his old sniper rifle from the Great Patriotic War, leaving the new Austrian rifle. The meaning was clear. He’d fought with this arm before, and he was quite willing to do so again. Hanging on his wall still were a number of the gilded wolf skins, most of which had single holes in the head. He touched one, then looked back at his visitors. “I am a Russian. I will fight for my land.”
The mining chief figured he’d buck this information up to the military. Maybe they could take him out. For himself, he had no particular desire to entertain the Chinese army, and so he took his leave. Behind him, Pavel Petrovich Gogol opened a bottle of vodka and enjoyed a snort. Then he cleaned his rifle and thought of old times.
The train terminal was well-designed for their purposes, Colonel Welch thought. Russian engineers might have designed things clunky, but they’d also designed them to work, and the layout here was a lot more efficient than it looked on first inspection. The trains reversed direction on what American railroaders called a wye-Europeans called it a turning triangle-which allowed trains to back up to any one of ten off-loading ramps, and the Russians were doing it with skill and aplomb. The big VL80T electric locomotive eased backwards, with the conductors on the last car holding the air-release valve to activate the brakes when they reached the ramp. When the trains stopped, the soldiers jumped from their passenger coaches and ran back to their individual vehicles to start them up and drive them off. It didn’t take longer than thirty minutes to empty a train. That impressed Colonel Welch, who’d used the Auto Train to take his family to Disney World, and the off-loading procedure in Sanford, Florida, usually took an hour and a half or so. Then there was no further waiting. The big VL (Vladimir Lenin) engines immediately moved out for the return trip west to load up another ten thousand tons of train cars and cargo. It certainly appeared as though the Russians could make things happen when they had to.
“Colonel?” Welch turned to see a Russian major, who saluted crisply.
“Yes?”
“The first train with your personnel is due in four hours twenty minutes. We’ll take them to the southern assembly area. There is fuel there if they need it, and then we have guides to direct them east.”
“Very good.”
“Until then, if you wish to eat, there is a canteen inside the station building.”
“Thank you. We’re okay at the moment.” Welch walked over to where his satellite radio was set up, to get that information to General Diggs.
Colonel Bronco Winters now had seven red stars painted on the side panel of his F-15C, plus four of the now-defunct UIR flags. He could have painted on some marijuana or coca leaves as well, but that part of his life was long past, and those kills had been blacker than his uncle Ernie, who still lived in Harlem. So, he was a double-ace, and the Air Force hadn’t had many of those on active duty in a very long time. He took his flight to what they had taken to calling Bear Station, on the western edge of the Chinese advance.
It was an Eagle station. There were now over a hundred F-16 fighters in Siberia, but they were mainly air-to-mud rather than air-to-air, and so the fighting part of the fighter mission was his department, while the -16 jocks grumbled about being second-class citizens. Which they were, as far as Colonel Winters thought. Damned little single-engine pukes.
Except for the F-16CGs. They were useful because they were dedicated to taking out enemy radars and SAM sites. The Siberian Air Force (so they now deemed themselves) hadn’t done any air-to-mud yet. They had orders not to, which offended the guys whose idea of fun was killing crunchies on the ground instead of more manly pursuits. They didn’t have enough bombs for a proper bombing campaign yet, and so they were coming up just to ride guard on the E-3Bs in case Joe Chink decided to go after them-it was a hard mission, but marginally doable, and Bronco was surprised that they hadn’t made the attempt yet. It was a sure way to lose a lot of fighter planes, but they’d lost a bunch anyway, and why not lose them to a purpose …?
“Boar Lead, this is Eagle Two, over.”
“Boar Leader.”
“We show something happening, numerous bandits one-four-five your position, angels three-three, range two hundred fifty miles, coming north at six hundred knots-make that count thirty-plus bandits, looks like they’re coming right for us, Boar Lead,” the controller on the AWACS reported.
“Roger, copy that. Boar, Lead,” he told his flight of four. “Let’s get our ears perked up.”
“Two.” “Three.” “Four,” the rest of his flight chimed in.
“Boar Leader, this is Eagle Two. The bandits just went supersonic, and they are heading right for us. Looks like they’re not kidding. Vector right to course one-three-five and prepare to engage.”
“Roger, Eagle. Boar Lead, come right to one-three-five.”
“Two.” “Three.” “Four.”
Winters checked his fuel first of all. He had plenty. Then he looked at his radar display for the picture transmitted from the AWACS, and sure enough, there was a passel of bandits inbound, like a complete ChiComm regiment of fighters. The bastards had read his mind.
“Damn, Bronco, this looks like a knife fight coming.”
“Be cool, Ducky, we got better knives.”
“You say so, Bronco,” the other element leader answered.
“Let’s loosen it up, people,” Colonel Winters ordered. The flight of four F-15Cs separated into two pairs, and the pairs slipped apart as well so that each could cover the other, but a single missile could not engage both.
The display between his legs showed that the Chinese fighters were just over a hundred miles off now, and the velocity vectors indicated speeds of over eight hundred knots. Then the picture dirtied up some.
“Boar Lead, looks like they just dropped off tanks.”
“Roger that.” So, they’d burned off fuel to get altitude, and now they were committed to the battle with full internal fuel. That would give them better legs than usual, and they had closed to less than two hundred miles between them and the E-3B Sentry they clearly wanted to kill. There were thirty people on that converted 707, and Winters knew a lot of them. They’d worked together for years, mainly in exercises, and each controller on the Sentry had a specialty. Some were good at getting you to a tanker. Some were good at sending you out to hunt. Some were best at defending themselves against enemies. This third group would now take over. The Sentry crewmen would think this wasn’t cricket, that it wasn’t exactly fair to chase deliberately after a converted obsolete airliner … just because it acted as bird-dog for those who were killing off their fighter-pilot comrades. Well, that’s life, Winters thought. But he wasn’t going to give any of these bandits a free shot at another USAF aircraft.
Eighty miles now. “Skippy, follow me up,” the colonel ordered.
“Roger, Lead.” The two clawed up to forty thousand feet, so that the cold ground behind the targets would give a better contrast for their infrared seekers. He checked the radar display again. There had to be a good thirty of them, and that was a lot. If the Chinese were smart, they’d have two teams, one to engage and distract the American fighters, and the other to blow through after their primary target. He’d try to concentrate on the latter, but if the former group’s pilots were competent, that might not be easy.