Fortunes of War (16 page)

“What paperwork?”

“A standardization program, evaluations, records; a safety program, lectures, inspections; training records; sexual harassment prevention, counseling, investigations, all of that.”

“Who says we have to do that stuff?”

Malan pulled a message from the Air Force chief of staff from the pile waiting for Cassidy's attention. “Right here, in black and white.” He began to read from the message.

Bob Cassidy reached for the document, removed it from Malan's hands, and methodically tore it into tiny pieces. He dribbled the pieces into a wastebasket. “Any questions?”

The others laughed.

An hour later, they had hashed out a plan. Cassidy felt relieved—both Guelich and Malan were professionals. Guelich had given his first impression that the job was impossible, yet when told that they were going to do it anyway, he had jumped in with both feet. Malan immediately started planning how to do it.

Cassidy ran them out finally, so he could get some sleep. He was exhausted. When the door closed, he fell into bed still dressed.

When he was maneuvering to consolidate his power, Aleksandr Kalugin dwelled for a dark moment on Marshal Ivan Samsonov, the army chief of staff. The two men were opposites in every way. Kalugin loved money above all things, had no scruples that anyone had ever been able to detect, and never told the truth if a lie would serve, even for a little while. Samsonov, on the other hand, had spent his adult life in uniform and seemed to embody the military virtues. He was honest, courageous, patriotic, and, amazingly, embedded as he was in a bureaucracy that fed on half-truths and innuendo, boldly frank. Ivan Samsonov was universally regarded as a soldier's soldier.

Pondering these things, Kalugin decided he would sleep better at night if Samsonov did not have the armed forces at his beck and call. He had Samsonov quietly arrested, shot, and buried.

With that unpleasantness behind him, Kalugin faced his next problem: whom to put in Samsonov's place. The invasion of Siberia had certainly been a grand political opportunity for Kalugin, but he knew that even a dictator must have military victories in order to survive. He needed an accomplished soldier to win those victories, one who could and would save Russia, yet a man in debt to Kalugin for his place. After the nation was saved, well, if necessary, the hero could go into the ground beside Samsonov. Until then…

Kalugin pretended to fret the choice for days while the Japanese army marched ever deeper into Siberia. He had already decided to name the man whom Samsonov had replaced, Marshal Oleg Stolypin, but the outpouring of raw patriotism occurring in Russia just then made it seem politic to remain quiet. Since the collapse of communism in 1991, the national scene had too often reflected the public mood: rancor, acrimony, hardball politics, charges and countercharges resulting in political deadlock, which made it impossible for any group to govern. The politicians bickered and postured and clawed at one another while the nation rotted. Until now. At last the Russian people had an enemy they could unite against.

Kalugin thought the moment sublime. He savored it. He was the absolute master of Russia. None opposed him or even dreamed of doing so. All looked to him to save the nation.

Unfortunately, the euphoria would eventually wear off. Sooner or later people would want action. One evening, Kalugin sent a car to Stolypin's dacha in the Lenin Hills to bring the old soldier to the Kremlin.

“I have sent for you,” he told the retired officer when he walked into the president's office, “because Russia needs you.” Stolypin was escorted by several members of Kalugin's private security force, men he paid personally who did not work for any government agency.

The security people withdrew, reluctantly. They had searched the former soldier from head to toe, looking for weapons, contraband, letters from people in prison, anything. The hallways outside were filled with armed guards, men personally loyal to Kalugin because he had been feeding them and their families for almost twenty years. They were also in the courtyard outside the window, on the roofs across the street. Kalugin was taking no chances.

Now the president offered the old man hot tea. Stolypin had retired from the army before Kalugin won the presidency, so they had never worked together, although they had a nodding acquaintance from parties and official functions.

The marshal was in his early seventies. He had short, white hair and thick peasant's hands. He was stolid, too, like a peasant, and as he sipped his tea, he looked around the president's office vacantly, without interest.

“Tell me frankly,” Kalugin said, “what we must do to defeat the Japanese in Siberia.”

“I don't know that we can,” the old man replied, then sipped more tea. “The draft laws have not been enforced for years; the logistics system has collapsed; weapons procurement has stopped…. Baldly, Mr. President, we have no army…. No army, no navy, no air force.”

“If we spend the summer and fall building an army, can we not win when the Japanese are buried under a Siberian winter?”

“I am not sanguine. Japan is a rich nation. They can supply their forces by air. We will be the ones most hindered by winter.”

“Come, come, Marshal,” Kalugin scoffed. “The Russian man is tough, able to endure great hardships. Winter is the Russian season.”

“In another age, Mr. President, winter was a large battalion. It ruined the French, the Poles, and the Germans. The world has changed
since then. Japan is physically closer to the Siberian oil fields than we are. By winter they will be comfortably established, well dug in. Russia will have to mobilize, put the entire economy on a war footing, like we did during World War Two. Even then, we may not win.”

“
Enough!
” Kalugin roared. “Enough of this defeatism! I will not hear it. I am the guardian of holy Mother Russia. We will defend her to the very last drop of Russian blood.”

Stolypin shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Mr. President, everything we do must be based on the hard realities. We must work with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. The bitter truth is that the armed forces are in the same condition as the rest of Russia. It will take time to change that.”

Kalugin rapped his knuckles on the desk.

“Ask Samsonov,” Stolypin said. “Get his opinion.”

“What is your advice?” Kalugin said, his knuckle poised above the desk.

“Negotiate the best deal possible with the Japanese—buy time. Rebuild the army. When we are strong enough, drive them into the sea.”

Kalugin made a gesture of dismissal. “That course is politically impossible. By all appearances, we would be compromising with aggression. The people would never stand for it.”

“Mr. President, you asked for a professional opinion and I have given it. Building an army will take time.”

“Nothing can be done in the interim?”

“We can use small units, bleed the Japanese where we can without excessive cost. However, we must ensure that we do not squander assets that we will need to win the victory later.”

“We must do more. More than pinpricks.” Kalugin's face had a hard, unyielding look.

Stolypin shifted his feet. He cleared his throat, sipped tea, and sized up the politician in the tailored gray Italian suit seated behind the desk.

“What does Marshal Samsonov say?” he asked finally. “Why isn't he here?”

“He's dead. Tragically. A heart attack, two nights ago. We have not announced it yet…. The people put such faith in him.”

Stolypin grimaced. “A good man, the very best. Ah well, death comes for us all.” He sighed. After a bit, he asked, “Who is to replace him?”

“You.”

Stolypin was genuinely surprised.

“I'm too old, too tired. You need a young man full of fire. He will need to weld together an army, which will not be a small task.”

“I am giving you the responsibility, Marshal,” Kalugin said crisply. “Your country needs you.”

“Can we get foreign help? Military help?”

“We are working on that.”

“The military protocol with the United States—will they send troops? Equipment? Fuel? Food? Weapons? God knows, we need everything we can get.”

“They are offering a squadron of planes.”

“A squadron?” Stolypin thundered. He sprang from his chair with a vigor that surprised Kalugin, then paced back and forth. “A
squadron
! They promised to come to our aid if we destroyed our nuclear weapons. So we did. Fools that we were, we believed their lies.”

He stopped in front of a picture of Stalin hanging over a fireplace and stood staring at it. “At least some of the politicians believed them.”

“You didn't?”

“Do you have any vodka for this tea?”

“Yes.” Kalugin reached into the lower reaches of his desk for a bottle and poured a shot into Stolypin's tea. Stolypin sipped the mixture.

“I didn't believe any of it, Mr. President. The Americans always act in America's best interests, just as we always act in Russia's best interests. They made a promise, just a promise, written on good paper and signed with good ink and worth maybe ten rubles at a curio shop. So I acted in Russia's best interests. I secreted ten warheads, kept them back so they were not destroyed. The last time I saw Samsonov, he said we still have them.”

Kalugin couldn't believe his ears. “We still have nuclear weapons?”

“Ten.”

“Only ten?”

“Only? We had to lie and cheat to keep ten.”

Kalugin was trying to comprehend the enormity of this revelation. “Where are the weapons?” he asked after a bit.

“Mr. President, they are at Trojan Island.”

“I am not familiar with the place.”

“Trojan Island is an extinct cone-shaped volcano near the Kuril Strait. Although the island is fairly small, the volcano reaches up over two thousand meters, so it is almost always shrouded in clouds, which kept it hidden from satellite photography when we built the base. The nearby waters are deep, ice-free year-round, and there is good access to
the Pacific. For these reasons, we built a submarine base there twenty years ago, a base that can only be entered underwater. It is similar to the base at Bolshaya Litsa, on the Kola Peninsula.”

“Do the Japanese know of this place?”

“I would be amazed if they did, sir. The base was officially abandoned when the last of the boomer boats were scrapped. We hid the warheads there for just that reason.”

“Nuclear weapons,” Kalugin mused, his eyelids reducing his eyes to mere slits.

“The use of nuclear weapons involves huge, incalculable risks,” Stolypin said. “That road is unknown. We devoted much thought to pondering where it might lead years ago, when we had such weapons in quantity.”

“And what were your conclusions?”

“That we would use them only as a last resort, when all else had failed.”

Kalugin merely grunted. He was deep in thought.

Stolypin dropped into a chair, helped himself to more vodka and tea.

Kalugin grinned wolfishly. “Marshal Stolypin, let us drink to Russia. You have answered my prayers, and saved your country.”

“God saves Russia, Mr. President,” Stolypin replied. “He even saved Russia from the Communists, although He took his time with the Reds. Let us pray that He can save Russia one more time.”

Several minutes later Kalugin asked, “Are you a believer?”

“I believe in Russia, sir. So does God.”

“You are in charge. Fight them. Give me some victories.”

“I will use what we have,” Stolypin said sourly, “which is very little. If you expect a furious battle that can be filmed for a television spectacle, you had better get someone else, someone who can make an army from street rabble with a snap of his fingers.”

Kalugin was thinking about nuclear weapons. When he came out of his reverie, he heard Stolypin saying, “Political posturing is not part of a soldier's job.”

Kalugin handed the old marshal an envelope. “Your appointment as chief of staff is in here. I signed it before you arrived. Go to headquarters and take charge. Mobilize our resources, fill the ranks, requisition the guns, clothes, food, fuel, all of it. Do whatever you have to do. Any decrees that you need, draft them and send them to me. Together, we are going to save Russia.”

Stolypin reached for the envelope and opened it.

“It is a tragedy that Samsonov is not here,” the old soldier said gravely as he read the papers. “He was the most brilliant soldier Russia has produced since Georgi Zhukov.”

“I am placing the details in your capable hands, Marshal Stolypin.”

“I have given you the same advice that Samsonov would. I wish to God he were here now.”

“We will feel his loss keenly,” said Kalugin as he walked with Stolypin toward the door.

 

The sky was growing light in the northeast as Jiro Kimura and three wingmen climbed to 34,000 feet on their way to bomb and strafe the airfield at Khabarovsk, at the great bend of the Amur River. Khabarovsk was a rail, highway, and electrical power nerve center, the strategic key to the far eastern sector. When they held Khabarovsk, the Japanese would own the Russian far east, and not before. The troops were within forty miles now, coming up the railroad and highways from Vladivostok.

For the past two days, Jiro and his squadron mates had flown close air support for the advancing troops, bombing, rocketing, and strafing knots of Russian troops that were preparing positions to delay the Japanese advance. This morning, however, the general had sent this flight to Khabarovsk.

It was going to be a perfect morning. Not a cloud anywhere. To the northeast the rising sun revealed the pure deep blue of the sky and the vastness of the endless green Siberian landscape. From 34,000 feet none of man's engineering projects were visible as the low-angle sunlight flooded the land in starkly contrasting light and shadow. When the sun got a little higher, all one would see from horizon to horizon would be green land under an endless blue sky.

Jiro was flying three or four flights a day, every day. The previous afternoon his plane had needed unexpected maintenance, and he had fallen asleep in the briefing room, after lying down on the floor with his flight gear as a pillow. He was constantly exhausted and always on the verge of sleep.

Some of his comrades were disappointed that the Russians had suddenly withdrawn their airplanes. Jiro had eleven kills when the Russians vanished from the sky, ceding air superiority. One still had to stay alert for possible enemy aircraft, of course, but they just weren't there.

Although the Russians on the ground felt free to shoot like wild men with everything they had, they rarely hit anyone. The Japanese planes stayed out of the light AAA envelope except when actually delivering ordnance. Rear-quarter heat-seekers would also have been a problem if they stayed near the ground for very long, so they didn't.

The Japanese had lost only two Zeroes at this stage of the war. One pilot crashed and died while making an approach to Vladivostok as evening fog rolled in. Another had a total electrical failure and lost his wingmen while he busied himself in the cockpit pulling circuit breakers and trying to reset alternators. He and his flight had been on their way to Nikolayevsk, at the mouth of the Amur, when the failure occurred. The luckless pilot never found the city or the base. He crashed in the boondocks a hundred miles northwest of Nikolayevsk when his fuel was exhausted. Fortunately a satellite picked up the plane's battery-powered emergency beeper after the pilot ejected, and a helicopter rescued him the next day.