Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (568 page)

“I agree, Comrade General. It’s a hard pill to swallow, but in the end, harder for them to eat—assuming our political leadership allows us to do the right thing.”

“Yes, that is the real issue at hand, isn’t it?”

CHAPTER 52

Deep Battle

G
eneral Peng crossed over into Russia in his command vehicle, well behind the first regiment of heavy tanks. He thought of using a helicopter, but his operations staff warned him that the air battle was not going as well as the featherheads in the PLAAF had told him to expect. He felt uneasy, crossing the river in an armored vehicle on a floating bridge—like a brick tied to a balloon—but he did so, listening as his operations officer briefed him on the progress to this point.

“The Americans have surged a number of fighter aircraft forward, and along with them their E-3 airborne radar fighter-control aircraft. These are formidable, and difficult to counter, though our air force colleagues say that they have tactics to deal with them. I will believe that when I see it,” Colonel Wa observed. “But that is the only bad news so far. We are several hours ahead of schedule. Russian resistance is lighter than I expected. The prisoners we’ve taken are very disheartened at their lack of support.”

“Is that a fact?” Peng asked, as they left the ribbon bridge and thumped down on Russian soil.

“Yes, we have ten men captured from their defensive positions—we’ ll see them in a few minutes. They had escape tunnels and personnel carriers set to evacuate the men. They didn’t expect to hold for long,” Colonel Wa went on. “They
planned
to run away, rather than defend to the last as we expected. I think they lack the heart for combat, Comrade General.”

That information got Peng’s attention. It was important to know the fighting spirit of one’s enemy: “Did any of them stand and fight to the end?”

“Only one of their bunker positions. It cost us thirty men, but we took them out. Perhaps their escape vehicle was destroyed and they had no choice,” the colonel speculated.

“I want to see one of these positions at once,” Peng ordered.

“Of course, Comrade General.” Wa ducked inside and shouted an order to the track driver. The Type 90 armored personnel carrier lurched to the right, surprising the MP who was trying to do traffic control, but he didn’t object. The four tall radio whips told him what sort of track this was. The command carrier moved off the beaten track directly toward an intact Russian bunker.

General Peng got out, ducking his head as he did so, and walked toward the mainly intact old gun turret. The “inverted frying pan” shape told him that this was off an old Stalin-3 tank—a very formidable vehicle, once upon a time, but now an obvious relic. A team of intelligence specialists was there. They snapped to attention when they saw the general approach.

“What did we kill it with?” Peng asked.

“We didn’t, Comrade General. They abandoned it after firing fifteen cannon shots and about three hundred machine gun rounds. They didn’t even destroy it before we captured it,” the intelligence captain reported, waving the general down the tank hatch. “It’s safe. We checked for booby traps.”

Peng climbed down. He saw what appeared to be a comfortable small barracks, shell storage for their big tank gun, ample rounds for their two machine guns. There were empty rounds for both types of guns on the floor, along with wrappers for field rations. It appeared to be a comfortable position, with bunks, shower, toilet, and plenty of food storage. Something worth fighting for, the general thought. “How did they leave?” Peng asked.

“This way,” the young captain said, leading him north into the tunnel. “You see, the Russians planned for everything.” The tunnel led under the crest of the hill to a covered parking pad for—probably for a BTR, it looked like, confirmed by the wheel tracks on the ground immediately off the concrete pad.

“How long did they hold?”

“We took the place just less than three hours after our initial bombardment. So, we had infantry surrounding the main gun emplacement, and soon thereafter, they ran away,” the captain told his army commander.

“I see. Good work by our assault infantry.” Then Peng saw that Colonel Wa had brought his command track over the hill to the end of the escape tunnel, allowing him to hop right aboard.

“Now what?” Wa asked.

“I want to see what we did to their artillery support positions.”

Wa nodded and relayed the orders to the track commander. That took fifteen minutes of bouncing and jostling. The fifteen heavy guns were still there, though the two Peng passed had been knocked over and destroyed by counter-battery fire. The position they visited was mainly intact, though a number of rockets had fallen close aboard, near enough that three bodies were still lying there untended next to their guns, the bodies surrounded by sticky pools of mainly dried blood. More men had survived, probably. Close to each gun was a two-meter-deep narrow trench lined with concrete that the bombardment hadn’t done more than chip. Close by also was a large ammo-storage bunker with rails on which to move the shells and propellant charges to the guns. The door was open.

“How many rounds did they get off?” he asked.

“No more than ten,” another intelligence officer, this one a major, replied. “Our counter-battery fire was superb here. The Russian battery was fifteen guns, total. One of them got off twenty shots, but that was all. We had them out of action in less than ten minutes. The artillery-tracker radars worked brilliantly, Comrade General.”

Peng nodded agreement. “So it would appear. This emplacement would have been fine twenty or thirty years ago—good protection for the gunners and a fine supply of shells, but they did not anticipate an enemy with the ability to pinpoint their guns so rapidly. If it stands still, Wa, you can kill it.” Peng looked around. “Still, the engineers who sited this position and the other one, they were good. It’s just that this sort of thing is out of date. What were our total casualties?”

“Killed, three hundred fifty, thereabouts. Wounded, six hundred twenty,” operations replied. “It was not exactly cheap, but less than we expected. If the Russians had stood and fought, it could have been far worse.”

“Why did they run so soon?” Peng asked. “Do we know?”

“We found a written order in one of the bunkers, authorizing them to leave when they thought things were untenable. That surprised me,” Colonel Wa observed. “Historically, the Russians fight very hard on the defense, as the Germans found. But that was under Stalin. The Russians had discipline then. And courage. Not today, it would seem.”

“Their evacuation was conducted with some skill,” Peng thought out loud. “We ought to have taken more prisoners.”

“They ran too fast, Comrade General,” operations explained.

“He who fights and runs away,” General Peng quoted, “lives to fight another day. Bear that in mind, Colonel.”

“Yes, Comrade General, but he who runs away is not an immediate threat”

“Let’s go,” the general said, heading off to his command track. He wanted to see the front, such as it was.

S
o?” Bondarenko asked the lieutenant. The youngster had been through a bad day, and being required to stand and make a report to his theater commander made it no better. ”Stand easy, boy. You’re alive. It could have been worse.”

“General, we could have held if we’d been given a little support,” Komanov said, allowing his frustration to appear.

“There was none to give you. Go on.” The general pointed at the map on the wall.

“They crossed here, and came through this saddle, and over this ridge to attack us. Leg infantry, no vehicles that we ever saw. They had man-portable anti-tank weapons, nothing special or unexpected, but they had massive artillery support. There must have been an entire battery concentrated just on my one position. Heavy guns, fifteen-centimeter or more. And artillery rockets that wiped out our artillery support almost immediately.”

“That’s the one surprise they threw at us,” Aliyev confirmed. “They must have a lot more of those fire-finder systems than we expected, and they’re using their Type 83 rockets as dedicated counter-battery weapons, like the Americans did in Saudi. It’s an effective tactic. We’ll have to go after their counter-battery systems first of all, or use self-propelled guns to fire and move after only two or three shots. There’s no way to spoof them that I know of, and jamming radars of that type is extremely difficult.”

“So, we have to work on a way to kill them early on,” Bondarenko said. “We have electronic-intelligence units. Let them seek out those Chink radars and eliminate them with rockets of our own.” He turned. “Go, on. Lieutenant. Tell me about the Chinese infantry.”

“They are not cowards, Comrade General. They take fire and act properly under it. They are well-drilled. My position and the one next to us took down at least two hundred, and they kept coming. Their battle drill is quite good, like a soccer team. If you do
this,
they do
that,
almost instantly. For certain, they call in artillery fire with great skill.”

“They had the batteries already lined up, Lieutenant, lined up and waiting,” Aliyev told the junior officer. “It helps if you are following a prepared script. Anything else?”

“We never saw a tank. They had us taken out before they finished their bridges. Their infantry looked well-prepared, well-trained, even eager to move forward. I did not see evidence of flexible thinking, but I did not see much of anything, and as you say, their part of the operation was preplanned, and thoroughly rehearsed.”

“Typically, the Chinese tell their men a good deal about their planned operations beforehand. They don’t believe in secrecy the way we do,” Aliyev said. “Perhaps it makes for comradely solidarity on the battlefield.”

“But things are going their way, Andrey. The measure of an army is how it reacts when things go badly. We haven’t seen that yet, however.”
And would they ever?
Bondarenko wondered. He shook his head. He had to banish that sort of thinking from his mind. If he had no confidence, how could his men have it? “What about your men, Valeriy Mikhailovich? How did they fight?”

“We
fought,
Comrade General,” Komanov assured the senior officer. “We killed two hundred, and we would have killed many more with a little artillery support.”

“Will your men fight some more?” Aliyev asked.

“Fuck, yes!” Komanov snarled back. “Those little bastards are invading
our
country. Give us the right weapons, and we’ll fucking kill them all!”

“Did you graduate tank school?”

Komanov bobbed his head like a cadet. “Yes, Comrade General, eighth in my class.”

“Give him a company with BOYAR,” the general told his ops officer. “They’re short of officers.”

M
ajor General Marion Diggs was in the third train out of Berlin; it wasn’t his choosing, just the way things worked out. He was thirty minutes behind Angelo Giusti’s cavalry squadron. The Russians were running their trains as closely together as safety allowed, and probably even shading that somewhat. What
was
working was that the Russian national train system was fully electrified, which meant that the engines accelerated well out of stations and out of the slow orders caused by track problems, which were numerous.

Diggs had grown up in Chicago. His father had been a Pullman porter with the Atcheson, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad, working the Super Chief between Chicago and Los Angeles until the passenger service had died in the early 1970s; then, remarkably enough, he’d changed unions to become an engineer. Marion remembered riding with him as a boy, and loving the feel of such a massive piece of equipment under his hands—and so, when he’d gone to West Point, he’d decided to be a tanker, and better yet, a cavalryman. Now he owned a lot of heavy equipment.

It was his first time in Russia, a place he certainly hadn’t expected to see when he’d been in the first half of his uniformed career, when the Russians he’d worried about seeing had been mainly from First Guards Tank and Third Shock armies, those massive formations that had once sat in East Germany, always poised to take a nice little drive to Paris, or so NATO had feared.

But no more, now that Russia was part of NATO, an idea that was like something from a bad science-fiction movie. There was no denying it, however. Looking out the windows of the train car, he could see the onion-topped spires of Russian Orthodox churches, ones that Stalin had evidently failed to tear down. The railyards were pretty familiar. Never the most artistic examples of architecture or city planning, they looked the same as the dreary yards leading into Chicago or any other American city. No, only the train yards that you built under your Christmas tree every year were pretty. But they didn’t have any Christmas trees in evidence here. The train rolled to a stop, probably waiting for a signal to proceed—

—but no, this looked to be some sort of military terminal. Russian tanks were in evidence off to the right, and a lot of sloped concrete ramps—the Russians had probably built this place to ship their own tracked vehicles west, he judged.

“General?” a voice called.

“Yo!”

“Somebody here to see you, sir,” the same voice announced.

Diggs stood and walked back to the sound. It was one of his junior staff officers, a new one fresh from Leavenworth, and behind him was a Russian general officer.

“You are Diggs?” the Russian asked in fair English.

“That’s right.”

“Come with me please.” The Russian walked out onto the platform. The air was fresh, but they were under low, gray clouds this morning.

“You going to tell me how things are going out east?” Diggs asked.

“We wish to fly you and some of your staff to Chabarsovil so that you can see for yourself.”

That made good sense,
Diggs thought. “How many?”

“Six, plus you.”