Jack Ryan 11 - Bear And The Dragon (143 page)

“What about opposition on the ground?”

“There is a security force in the area. We figure maybe a hundred people on duty, total, say a squad at each silo. Can you get some Apaches out there to run interference?”

“Yeah, they can get that far, if they travel light.” Just cannon rounds and 2.75-inch rockets, he thought.

“Then get me your mission requirements,” General Diggs said. It wasn't quite an order. If he said it was impossible, then Diggs couldn't make him do it. But Boyle couldn't let his people go out and do something like this without being there to command them.

The MI-24s finished things off. The Russian doctrine for their attack helicopters wasn't too different from how they used their tanks. Indeed, the MI-24 -- called the Hind by NATO, but strangely unnamed by the Russians themselves -- was referred to as a flying tank. Using AT-6 Spiral missiles, they finished off a Chinese tank battalion in twenty minutes of jump and shoot, sustaining only two losses in the process. The sun was setting now, and what had been Thirty-fourth Shock Army was wreckage. What few vehicles had survived the day were pulling back, usually with wounded men clinging to their decks.

In his command post, General Sinyavskiy was all smiles. Vodka was snorted by all. His 265th Motor Rifle Division had halted and thrown back a force more than double its size, suffering fewer than three hundred dead in the process. The TV news crews were finally allowed out to where the soldiers were, and he delivered the briefing, paying frequent compliments to his theater commander, Gennady Iosifovich Bondarenko, for his cool head and faith in his subordinates. “He never lost his nerve,” Sinyavskiy said soberly. “And he allowed us to keep ours for when the time came. He is a Hero of Russia,” the division commander concluded. “And so are many of my men!”

“Thank you for that, Yuriy Andreyevich, and, yes, for that you will get your next star,” the theater commander told the television screen. Then he turned to his staff. “Andrey Petrovich, what do we do tomorrow?”

“I think we will let Two-Six-Five start moving south. We will be the hammer, and Diggs will be the anvil. They still have a Type-A Group army largely intact to the south, the Forty-third. We will smash it starting day after tomorrow, but first we will maneuver it into a place of our choosing.”

Bondarenko nodded. “Show me a plan, but first, I am going to sleep for a few hours.”

“Yes, Comrade General.”

It was the same Spetsnaz people they'd trained for the past month or so. Nearly everyone on the transport aircraft was a commissioned officer, doing sergeants' work, which had its good points and its bad ones. The really good thing was that they all spoke passable English. Of the RAINBOW troopers, only Ding Chavez and John Clark spoke conversational Russian.

The maps and photos came from SRV and CIA, the latter transmitted to the American Embassy in Moscow and messengered to the military airfield out of which they'd flown. They were in an Aeroflot airliner, fairly full with over a hundred passengers, all of them soldiers.

“I propose that we divide by nationalities,” Kirillin said. “Vanya, you and your RAINBOW men take this one here. My men and I will divide the rest among us, using our existing squad structures.”

“Looks okay, Yuriy. One target's pretty much as good as another. When will we be going in?”

“Just before dawn. Your helicopters must have good range to take us all the way down, then back with only one refueling.”

“Well, that'll be the safe part of the mission.”

“Except this fighter base at Anshan,” Kirillin said. “We pass within twenty kilometers of it.”

“Air Force is going to hit that, they tell me, Stealth fighters with smart bombs, they're gonna post-hole the runways before we drive past.”

“Ah, that is a fine idea,” Kirillin said.

“Kinda like that myself,” Chavez said. “Well, Mr. C, looks like I get to be a soldier again. It's been a while.”

“What fun,” Clark observed. Oh, yeah, sitting in the hack of a helicopter, going deep into Indian Country, where there were sure to be people with guns. Well, could be worse. Going in at dawn, at least the gomers on duty would be partly asleep, unless their boss was a real prick. How tough was discipline in the People's Liberation Army? John wondered. Probably pretty tough. Communist governments didn't encourage back talk.

“How, exactly, are we supposed to disable the missiles?” Ding asked.

“They're fueled by a ten-centimeter pipe -- two of them, actually -- from underground fueling tanks adjacent to the launch silo. First, we destroy the pipes,” Kirillin said. “Then we look for some way to access the missile silo itself. A simple hand grenade will suffice. These are delicate objects. They will not sustain much damage,” the general said confidently.

“What if the warhead goes off?” Ding asked.

Kirillin actually laughed at that. “They will not, Domingo Stepanovich. These items are very secure in their arming procedures, for all the obvious reasons. And the sites themselves will not be designed to protect against a direct assault. They are designed to protect against nuclear blast, not a squad of engineer-soldiers. You can be sure of that.”

Hope you're right on that one, fella, Chavez didn't say aloud.

“You seem knowledgeable on this subject, Yuriy.”

“Vanya, this mission is one Spetsnaz has practiced more than once. We Russians have thought from time to time about taking these missiles -- how you say? Take them out of play, yes?”

“Not a bad idea at all, Yuriy. Not my kind of weapons,” Clark said. He really did prefer to do his killing close enough to see the bastard's face. Old habits died hard, and a telescopic sight was just as good as a knife in that respect. Much better. A rifle bullet didn't make people flop around and make noise the way a knife across the throat did. But death was supposed to be administered one at a time, not whole cities at once. It just wasn't tidy or selective enough.

Chavez looked at his Team-2 troopers. They didn't look overtly tense, but good soldiers did their best to hide such feelings. Of their number, only Ettore Falcone wasn't a career soldier, but instead a cop from the Italian Carabinieri, which was about halfway between military and police. Chavez went over to see him.

“How you doing, BIG BIRD?” Ding asked.

“It is tense, this mission, no?” Falcone replied.

“It might be. You never really know until you get there.”

The Italian shrugged. “As with raids on mafiosi, sometimes you kick the door and there is nothing but men drinking wine and playing cards. Sometimes they have machinapistoli, but you must kick the door to find out.”

“You do a lot of those?”

“Eight,” Falcone replied. “I am usually the first one through the door because I am usually the best shot. But we have good men on the team there, and we have good men on the team here. It should go well, Domingo. I am tense, yes, but I will be all right. You will see,” BIG BIRD ended. Chavez clapped him on the shoulder and went off to see Sergeant-Major Price.

“Hey, Eddie.”

“Do we have a better idea for the mission yet?”

“Getting there. Looks like mainly a job for Paddy, blowing things up.”

“Connolly's the best explosives man I've ever seen,” Price observed. “But don't tell him that. His head's swollen enough already.”

“What about Falcone?”

“Ettore?” Price shook his head. “I will be very surprised if he puts a foot wrong. He's a very good man, Ding, bloody machine -- a robot with a pistol. That sort of confidence rarely goes bad. Things are too automatic for him.”

“Okay, well, we've picked our target. It the north- and east-most silo. Looks like it's on fairly flat ground, two four-inch pipes running to it. Paddy'll blow those, and then try to find a way to pop the cover off the silo or otherwise find an access door -- there's one on the overhead. Then get inside, toss a grenade to break the missile, and we get the hell out of Dodge City.”

“Usual division of the squad?” Price asked. It had to be, but there was no harm in making sure.

Chavez nodded. “You take Paddy, Louis, Hank, and Dieter, and your team handles the actual destruction of the missile. I take the rest to do security and overwatch.” Price nodded as Paddy Connolly came over.

“Are we getting chemical gear?”

“What?” Chavez asked.

“Ding, if we're going to be playing with bloody liquid-fueled missiles, we need chemical-warfare gear. The fuels for these things -- you don't want to breathe the vapor, trust me. Red-fuming nitric acid, nitrogen tetroxide, hydrazine, that sort of thing. Those are bloody corrosive chemicals they use to power rockets, not like a pint of bitter at the Green Dragon, I promise you. And if the missiles are fueled and we blow them, well, you don't want to be close, and you definitely don't want to be downwind. The gas cloud will be bloody lethal, like what you chaps use in America to execute murderers, but rather less pleasant.”

“I'll talk to John about that.” Chavez made his way back forward.

“Oh, shit,” Ed Foley observed when he took the call. “Okay, John, I'll get hold of the Army on that one. How long 'til you're there?”

“Hour and a half to the airfield.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah, sure, Ed, never been better.”

Foley was struck by the tone. Clark had been CIA's official iceman for close to twenty years. He'd gone out on all manner of field operations without so much as a blink. But being over fifty -- had it changed him, or did he just have a better appreciation of his own mortality now? The DCI figured that sort of thing came to everybody. “Okay, I'll get back to you.” He switched phones. “I need General Moore.”

“Yes, Director?” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs said in greeting. “What can I do for you?”

“Our special-operations people say they need chemical-warfare gear for their mission and -- ”

“Way ahead of you, Ed. SOCOM told us the same thing. First Armored's got the right stuff, and it'll be waiting for them at the field.”

“Thanks, Mickey.”

“How secure are those silos?”

“The fueling pipes are right in the open. Blowing them up ought not to be a problem. Also, every silo has a metal access door for the maintenance people, and again, getting into it ought not to be a problem. My only concern is the site security force; there may be as much as a whole infantry battalion spread out down there. We're waiting for a KH-11 to overfly the site now for a final check.”

“Well, Diggs is sending Apaches down to escort the raiding force. That'll be an equalizer,” Moore promised. “What about the command bunker?”

“It's centrally located, looks pretty secure, entirely underground, but we have a rough idea of the configuration from penetrating radar.” Foley referred to the KH-14 Lacrosse satellite. NASA had once published radar photos that had shown underground tributaries of the Nile that emptied into the Mediterranean Sea at Alexandria. But the capability hadn't been developed for hydrologists. It had also spotted Soviet missile silos that the Russians had thought to be well camouflaged, and other sensitive facilities, and America had wanted to let the Russians know that the locations were not the least bit secret. “Mickey, how do you feel about the mission?”

“I wish we had enough bombs to do it,” General Moore replied honestly.

“Yeah,” the DCI agreed.

The Politburo meeting had gone past midnight.

“So, Marshal Luo,” Qian said, “things went badly yesterday. How badly? We need the truth here,” he concluded roughly. If nothing else, Qian Kun had made his name in the past few days, as the only Politburo member with the courage to take on the ruling clique, expressing openly the misgivings that they'd all felt. Depending on who won, it could mean his downfall, either all the way to death or simply to mere obscurity, but it seemed he didn't care. That made him unusual among the men in the room, Fang Gan thought, and it made him a man to be respected.

“There was a major battle yesterday between 34th Shock Army and the Russians. It appears to have been a draw, and we are now maneuvering to press our advantage,” the Defense Minister told them. They were all suffering from fatigue in the room, and again the Finance Minister was the only one to rise to his words.

“In other words, a battle was fought, and we lost it,” Qian shot back.

“I didn't say that!” Luo responded angrily.

“But it is the truth, is it not?” Qian pressed the point.

“I told you the truth, Qian!” was the thundering reply.

“Comrade Marshal,” the Finance Minister said in a reasonable tone, “you must forgive me for my skepticism. You see, much of what you've said in this room has turned out to be less than completely accurate. Now, I do not blame you for this. Perhaps you have been misinformed by some of your subordinates. All of us are vulnerable to that, are we not? But now is the time for a careful examination of objective realities. I am developing the impression that objective reality may be adverse to the economic and political objectives on whose pursuit this body has sent our country and its people. Therefore, we must now know what the facts are, and what also are the dangers facing us. So, Comrade Marshal, now, what is the military situation in Siberia?”

“It has changed somewhat,” Luo admitted. “Not entirely to our benefit, but the situation is by no means lost.” He'd chosen his words a little too carefully.

By no means lost, everyone around the table knew, was a delicate way of saying that a disaster had taken place. As in any society, if you knew the aphorisms, you could break the code. Success here was always proclaimed in the most positive terms. Setbacks were brushed aside without admission as something less than a stunning success. Failure was something to be blamed on individuals who'd failed in their duty -- often to their great misfortune. But a real policy disaster was invariably explained as a situation that could yet be restored.

“Comrades, we still have our strengths,” Zhang told them all. “Of all the great powers of the world, only we have intercontinental missiles, and no one will dare strike us hard while we do.”