“Good.” There was a brief pause. “How many men did you lose today, Colonel?”
“Four.”
“Four?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m sorry about General Roberts, Colonel.”
“I’m sorry about all of them, sir.”
“Yeah… you’re right. That was dumb of me. Look, Caffey, I’ve got a hell of a dirty job for you and more of your people are going to die. They tell me down here that you’re a tough cookie. They’d better be right because you’re all we’ve got at the moment. Savvy?”
“I think I get the drift.”
“The problem is, Colonel, that the Soviets have denied the incursion.”
“Denied! They can’t deny it!”
“Shut up and listen, Caffey. Of course they can deny it. Governments can do anything they like.”
“There is a heavily armed Soviet task force out here, sir. You can believe that.”
“They are not Soviets until I tell you they are. Do you understand that?
“No, sir. I don’t understand it.” He wrote FUCKING POLITICS! on the pad.
“What I’m trying to avoid, Caffey, is a war. Do you think you can understand that?”
“These are Russians, sir. They’re in the United States. They’ve killed sixteen people that I know of, including the commanding general of this command, who had his brains blown out ten hours ago. I don’t know what I’m supposed to think except to react to this as a definitely hostile action by a large, war-minded task force of very well-trained cold weather troops. I have a small unit here with four choppers and not much else, but these men are ready to fight if that’s the dirty job you’re referring to.
I’m not a politician, Mr. President. I don’t understand politics and I don’t particularly like politicians.
I’m a soldier. It’s the career I chose. So, if you have something you’d like me to do, sir, I’d like to get started.” Caffey took a long breath. He glanced up at Kate and Cordobes. Kate was smiling, shaking her head. The captain was white with astonishment.
“They told me you were a straight shooter, Caffey,” the president said after a moment. “They didn’t tell me you were articulate as well.”
“I just try to do my job, sir.”
“All right. They’re heading for the pipeline, Colonel. At White Hill. I want you to do what you can to slow them up.”
“How slow?”
“We don’t want them to reach it before the weather breaks.” There was a pause. “If you can peck at them, punch and run, keep them off balance until that lousy storm passes — I guarantee you a sky so full of F-16s you’ll swear it was a swarm of locusts.”
“When does the weather break?”
“The best estimate I have is three more days.”
“That’s a lot of pecking, sir.”
“Can you do it?”
Caffey scribbled on the pad. THREE DAYS. He stared at it several seconds. “Ask me again Thursday, Mr. President.”
The officers and noncoms sat in chairs or leaned against walls, each of them intent on the drawings Caffey had made on the small blackboard he’d found in the Joneses’ kitchen. It had been a long briefing
— Caffey had had a lot to say — and no one interrupted.
“And that’s it, in a nutshell, gentlemen,” Caffey was saying. “Each unit will have its own call sign.
When I call you you’d better be quick. All of us depend upon each unit doing his assigned job. We’re dead otherwise, and I mean that literally. I don’t care what you’ve been taught before. If it doesn’t agree with what I’ve outlined here it’s because we’re in a unique position. We don’t have any backup or support. We’re in this alone for the next seventy-two hours.” He glanced around the room. “Questions?”
A sergeant raised his hand.
“Go ahead.”
“Colonel, sir, ah, why not just set up ahead and just clobber the hell out of them when they come through a gorge? We could blast them to pieces. Couldn’t we… I mean—”
“That’s movie stuff, Sergeant. It doesn’t work in real combat. There’s no way we can meet them in force unless we want to give them one swift kick in the balls, maul them pretty good and show a lot of flag and muscle. But we’d only get one shot before they blew our little asses away. We’re outmanned and outgunned eight or ten to one. Our one advantage is our mobility.” He nodded toward the helicopters outside.
“There isn’t time to give you the full course in tactical strategy against a superior force. We’re not looking for one decisive battle. They’d eat our lunch. So, we avoid exposure to their flanks and leapfrog platoons with our birds, meet them sliding off their front and disengage before they bring up their heavy firepower. We’ll drive them crazy, which means they’ll have to be more cautious, move slower.
And that’s all we want.”
“Can we do it, sir?” A lieutenant stood up at the back who was the company adjutant. “I mean, can we keep it up for three days? I don’t mean to be disrespectful, sir. We all know of your reputation and we heard how you tricked that Russian patrol on the ridge with the snowmobile, but… well—”
“It looks good on paper but how will it work when real bullets are flying?” Caffey nodded. “I understand, Lieutenant. I won’t try to minimize the risks or feed you some bullshit about all of us getting home again. This is going to be one goddamn bitch of a game we’re playing — tickling a dragon’s tail. Men are going to die. You will see horrible death in combat. But fewer men will die if we do our jobs. That’s a fact, gentlemen.” He looked around the room again. “Anything else?”
“Ammunition,” Kate whispered from the radio operator’s seat.
“Right. We are low on everything and I mean everything. You’re going to have to make every round count. Impress that on your platoons.” Caffey picked up Cordobes’s inventory log. “We have eighty-six M-16s, ten thousand rounds of ammunition, six 7.62-caliber machine guns mounted on the Hueys, one M-72 missile-launcher with twelve antitank rounds, six 45-caliber pistols and two thousand rounds, two hundred grenades and thirty thousand gallons of medium-octane fuel for the choppers.” He glanced up from the page. “That’s all. It has to last three days. Ten thousand rounds is not a hell of a lot when you remember we’re supplying the Huey gunships from that stockpile. Tell your men to save their expended clips. When a man goes down his buddy is responsible for taking his rifle and cartridge belt.
We don’t leave any weapons behind.”
“What about the buddy?” someone asked.
“We leave our dead,” Caffey said grimly. “We get our wounded out, if possible.”
The room was terribly quiet for several moments. A corporal sitting on the floor directly in front of Caffey cleared his throat. “Sir, some of us never saw a dead body before. How will we know if—”
“You’ll know,” Caffey said. He glanced across the faces in the room. “It’s one of the first things you learn in combat.”
MOSCOW
Gorny was in a rage. He was in his “official” office, quickly thumbing through a thick folder detailing the size and disposition of units within the Soviet Army. He was standing before a large map that had been brought in by a pair of Soviet security officers and set up beside his desk. The map emphasized northeastern Siberia. A line of yellow-flagged pins marked off a route from the Chukchi Peninsula across the Bering Sea and ended in north Alaska.
Rudenski was also in the room, seated in a chair near the windows with a view of Red Square. Standing at attention directly in front of Gorny’s desk was Major Konstantin Suloff, formerly attached to Moscow Center’s military headquarters as a KGB aide. His hands were manacled in front of him.
“We have denied the unit exists!” Gorny was saying. He tore at the folder, searching. “If the unit does exist it is…”—he turned several more pages until he stopped—”it is the 22nd Infantry Brigade of the Far Eastern Military District.” He looked up at Suloff.