“The Russians are stuck, too. General. Snow is neutral.”
“The hell it is. For the Russians it comes with mother’s milk.”
“Maybe, sir, but the fact of the matter is, they are digging in for the moment.”
Freeman nodded, pulling up his coat collar and tightening his belt as he walked unhurriedly in the pouring rain to the plane. “Stuck! But for how long. Jim? Russia’s vast, all right, but their supply problems are still not as rough as ours. We can blow up their rail tracks. They fix them. We blow them up again, they can use horses to haul supplies if necessary. But we have to cross an ocean.” Deep in thought, the general walked up the stairs to the plane. “You know the greatest surprise in this war, Jim?”
“What’s that. General?”
“All the experts said that there would never be trench warfare again because it would be a war of mobility — the fastest-moving war men had ever seen. Fact is, soldiers have never been worn out physically and mentally as fast before — all because of this mobility. At this point in history, both sides are exhausted.” Colonel Norton thought it impolitic to remind the general of what he had said earlier about stress being an excuse for cowardice. Geniuses, he figured, had the right to be inconsistent.
“We’ve got to surprise them, Jim. Somehow we have to—”
“Merlin?” proffered Norton, referring to the plan the general had been working on, a plan so secret that only he, Norton, and his G-2 knew about it.
Freeman shook his head. “Our boys aren’t ready yet, Jim. God knows I’m not known for overcaution, but we’d only have one shot at it. Besides, it’s a last-ditch scenario. Don’t want to use it until I absolutely have to. First let’s try to untie this logjam in Korea, beat the Chinese and North Koreans back over the Yalu. If we do that, we can take pressure off our boys around Brest while our jokers figure out what the hell is going on with our convoys. Something screwy going on with the Russian subs. Well,” he sighed, “at least the Russians don’t seem to know I’m over here.”
“No, sir. Flying over the East Sea’s going to be the most restful part of the trip.”
“Good. I sure as hell could use the sleep.”
As the general buckled up, the Boeing’s jets screaming into high pitch, Norton was called up to the communications console. Moments later, he walked back through the eerily lit alley of winking consoles and computers and handed Freeman a top secret message of unconfirmed gas attacks by PLA— Communist Chinese — forces against several South Korean positions across the Yalu.
CHAPTER THIRTY
The twin-finned MiG 29-A, NATO designation Fulcrum A, was not only top of its class; some NATO pilots believed it to be the best fighter in the world, smaller than the Tomcat, more powerful than the F-18. In ready rooms all along the NATO front, Allied pilots held that, were the Soviets allowed time to produce enough of them, the Allies would no longer have the edge in the European war.
Sergei Marchenko, holder of the Order of Lenin, Hero of the Soviet Union, and Distinguished Flying Medal for his actions both at Fulda Gap at the war’s beginning and later over the Aleutians, where his MiG-27 Flogger D had downed, among others, Frank Shirer’s F-14 Tomcat and where, in turn, Marchenko himself had been downed, snatched from the freezing Bering Sea with only moments to spare, was known by sight to all civilian and military personnel at the huge Khabarovsk air base. Yet he was not liked — there was a hardness about him that was off-putting — a brutal streak, some said. But as a pilot, it was said he had no equal.
In a world of high-tech millisecond avionics, Marchenko’s fame — his ability to make split-second decisions and his extraordinary skill at handling the Fulcrum — had spread throughout the armed services. Not only was he recognized as a natural in the air, but it was common knowledge that despite the best possible connections in Moscow, he had proven himself as an ordinary soldier in the blood and dust of the boynya— “abattoir”—of Fulda Gap, where the sun itself had been obscured by the massive clouds of exhaust, dust, and shellfire from the massed American and Russian armor locked in battle. And even those who saw the killer too often in his eyes acknowledged that, unlike the sons of other important men, he had not placed himself within the highly protected walls of the Kremlin, in the STAVKA’s HQ as an officer, but had volunteered for frontline duty in the Far Eastern TVD. Despite this, he remained a loner, occasionally sociable in the mess and ready room, but always holding something in reserve. The cold, hard streak, which some claimed verged on the sadistic, didn’t show itself, however, until he was in aerial combat.
Among the ground crew he was known as “Nemignuvshiy”—”No Blink”—a reference to the story that had been passed on from his training days after he’d moved out of the two-seater L-29 jet trainers at the Yuri Gagarin Academy, qualifying for MiG-21s at the Gagnon Higher Aviation Academy. They had been readying for an air race at the end of the course to test them before they could go on to fly the top-of-the-line fighters. The test, in MiG-23s, involved a low-level half roll and loop, then a return to level flight over the academy’s airfield prior to receiving the coveted wings to go with the green “CA” shoulder boards. Before the race, the pilots, six of them including Sergei Marchenko, had walked, as was customary, through the maneuvers on the chalk lines outside the academy’s glass-and-cement tower. Even then one of the instructors had remarked on Marchenko’s total concentration while the other cadets occasionally glanced at one another, to see how the others were doing, indulging in a joke or two as they slowed the walk to avoid near misses.
The six went up, moving off two at a time, the MiG-23s’ Tumansky R-29s on full afterburner, swing wings at sixteen degrees, the MiGs gaining altitude, retracting landing gear, extending the dorsal fin and spreading wings to forty-five degrees. The fighters formed a six-plane perfect diamond, performed one thundering low-level pass over the field, separated, and climbed for the ten-thousand-foot ceiling, the training video camera in each plane, mounted beneath the sight for later replay, already whirring, the instructors in the tower listening closely to the chatter for any sign of hesitancy. All six MiGs then came in for the low roll under Mach 1 but in excess of six hundred miles per hour, where a split-second mistake would put them into the ground.
They came out of the half roll in unison and were into the second half of a loop. There was a cry from one of the pilots at the apogee of the roll. The instructor’s shouted correction from the tower came too late — the MiG-23 a ball of fire in the birch trees on the eastern edge of the runway. In that moment, as the videotapes of the remaining five planes later showed, only one pilot, Sergei Marchenko, hadn’t looked down at the crash but, in that instant, had exerted maximum throttle — and won.
Zipping up his G suit, Marchenko said nothing as the other pilots on the mission talked animatedly among themselves, most, he noticed, strictly observing the ritual of zipping up either right or left boot first. To Marchenko it didn’t matter. Their rituals to him were those of juvenile superstitions, of talismans, lucky numbers, obsessions held as tightly as American baseball players who, an instructor had once told him, often favored the same pair of socks or undershirt as being “lucky” for their game. Marchenko viewed such rituals with the same contempt as he did belief in God. It was all voodoo. The only belief one could rely on was the belief in oneself, in one’s own precision and ability — the best talisman being the sure knowledge that you could do it — and win.