“It could show that they're not kidding, that they are serious about not being interfered with.”
Most of the American forces had escaped out of the lager. The senior officer on the scene had decided on the spot to turn and run for cover in the woods and residential streets around the brigade base. He was a lieutenant-colonel, the brigade executive officer. The colonel commanding the brigade was nowhere to be found, and the XO was now considering his options. The brigade had two mechanized infantry battalions, and one of tanks. From the last, only nine of fifty-two M1A1s had gotten away. He could see the glow from the rest of them, still burning in their lager.
A DEFCON-THREE alert out of nowhere, and then minutes later, this. Over forty tanks and a hundred men lost, shot down without warning. Well, he'd see about that.
The Berlin Brigade had been in place since long before his birth, and scattered throughout its encampment were defensive positions. The colonel dispatched his remaining tanks, and ordered his Bradley fighting vehicles to volley-fire their TOW-2, missiles.
The Russian tanks had overrun the tank lager and stopped. They had no further orders. Battalion commanders were not yet in control of their formations, left behind by the mad dash of the T-8os across the line, and the regimental commander was nowhere to be found. Without orders, the tank companies stopped, sitting still, looking for targets. The regimental executive officer was also missing, and when the senior battalion commander realized this, his tank dashed off to the headquarters vehicle, since he was the next-senior officer in the regiment. It was amazing, he thought. First the readiness drill, next the flash alert from Moscow, and then the Americans had started shooting. He hadn't a clue what was going on. Even the barracks and administrative buildings were still lit up, he realized. Someone would have to get those lights off. His T-8o was back-lit as though on a target range.
“Command tank, two o'clock, skylined, moving left to right,” a sergeant told a corporal.
“Identified,” the gunner replied over the intercom.
“Fire.”
“On the way.” The corporal squeezed his trigger. The seal-cap blew off the missile tube, and the TOW-2 blasted out, trailing behind a thin control wire. The target was about twenty-five hundred meters away. The gunner kept his cross-hairs on target, guiding the antitank missile to its target. It took eight seconds, and the gunner had the satisfaction of seeing detonation right in the center of the turret.
“Target,” the Bradley commander said, indicating a direct hit. “Cease fire. Now let's find another one of these fuckers… ten o'clock, tank, coming around the PX!”
The turret came left. “Identified!”
“Okay, what does CIA make of this?” Fowler asked.
“Sir, again, all we have is scattered and unconnected information,” Ryan replied.
“ Roosevelt has a Soviet carrier battle group a few hundred miles behind them, and they carry MiG-29s,” Admiral Painter said.
“They're even closer to Libya, and our friend the colonel has a hundred of the same aircraft.”
“Flying over water at midnight?” Painter asked. “When's the last time you heard of the Libyans doing that — and twenty-some miles from one of our battle groups!”
“What about Berlin?” Liz Elliot asked.
“We don't know!” Ryan stopped and took a deep breath. “Remember that we just don't know much.”
“Ryan, what if SPINNAKER was right?” Elliot asked.
“What do you mean?”
“What if there is a military coup going on right now over there, and they set a bomb off over here to keep us from interfering, to decapitate us?”
“That's totally crazy,” Jack answered. “Risk a war? Why do it? What would we do if there were a coup? Attack at once?”
“Their military might expect us to,” Elliot pointed out.
“Disagree. I think SPINNAKER might have been lying to us from the beginning on this issue.”
“Are you making this up?” Fowler asked. It was coming home to the President now that he might actually have been the real target of the bomb, that Elizabeth 's theoretical model for the Russian plan was the only thing that made sense.
“No, sir!” Ryan snapped back indignantly. “I'm the hawk here, remember? The Russian military is too smart to pull something like this. It's too big a gamble.”
“Then explain the attacks on our forces!” Elliot said.
“We don't know for sure that there have been attacks on our forces.”
“So, now you think our people are lying?” Fowler asked.
“Mr. President, you are not thinking this through. Okay, let's assume that there is an on-going coup in the Soviet Union — I don't accept that hypothesis, but let's assume it, okay? The purpose, you say, for exploding the bomb over here is to keep us from interfering. Fine. Then why attack our military forces if they want us to sit on our hands?”
“To show that they're serious,” Elliot fired back.
“That's crazy! It's tantamount to telling us they did explode the bomb here. Do you think they would expect us not to respond to a nuclear attack?” Ryan demanded, then answered his own question: “It does not make sense!”
“Then give me something that does,” Fowler said.
“Mr. President, we are in the very earliest stages of a crisis. The information we have coming in now is scattered and confused. Until we know more, trying to put a spin on it is dangerous.”
Fowler's face bore down on the speaker phone. “Your job is to tell me what's going on, not to give me lessons in crisis-management. When you have something I can use, get back to me!”
“What in the hell are they thinking?” Ryan asked.
“Is there something I don't know here?” Goodley asked. The young academic looked as alarmed as Ryan felt.
“Why should you be any different from the rest of us?” Jack snapped back, and regretted it. “Welcome to crisis-management. Nobody knows crap, and you're expected to make good decisions anyway. Except it's not possible, it just isn't.”
“The thing with the carrier scares me,” the S&.T man observed.
“Wrong. If we only splashed four aircraft, it's only a handful of people,” Ryan pointed out. “Land combat is something else. If we really have a battle going on in Berlin, that's the scary one, almost as bad as an attack on some of our strategic assets. Let's see if we can get hold of SACEUR.”
The nine surviving M1A1 tanks were racing north along a Berlin avenue, along with a platoon of Bradley fighting vehicles. Street lights were on, heads sticking out windows and it was instantly apparent to the few onlookers that whatever was happening wasn't a drill. All the tanks had the speed governors removed from their engines, and they could all have been arrested in America for violating the national interstate highway limit. One mile north of their camp, they turned east. Leading the formation was a senior NCO who knew Berlin well — this was his third tour in the once-divided city — well enough that he had a perfect spot in mind, if the Russians hadn't got there first. There was a construction site. A memorial to the Wall and its victims was going up after a long competition. It overlooked the Russian and American compounds which were soon to be vacated, and bulldozers had pushed up a high berm of dirt for the sculpture that would sit, atop it. But it wasn't there yet, just a thick dirt ramp. The Soviet tanks were milling about on their objective, probably waiting for their infantry to show up or something. They were taking TOW hits from the Bradleya, and returning fire into the woods.
“Christ, they're going to kill those Bradley guys,” the unit commander — a captain whose tank was the last survivor of his company — said. “Okay, find your spots.” That took another minute. Then the tanks were hull-down, just their guns and the tops of turrets showing. “Straight down the line! Commence firing, fire at will.”