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  Arctic Front

  ( WW III - 4 )

  Ian Slater

  The American tanks smashed through the snow blockades in the terrible minus-seventy-degree Arctic battle. But they were outnumbered by troops of the Siberian Republic by five to one. In this, the worst winter in twenty years, blizzards wreaked havoc with U.S. air cover, and the smart money was on the Siberians. Their forebears had destroyed the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad. Now they would do the same to the Americans — unless the colorful and highly unorthodox U.S. General Feeman could devise a spectacular breakout…

  Ian Slater

  ARCTIC FRONT

  PROLOGUE

  “At least four republics have said they will leave the command structure of the Soviet Army and form their own armies.”

  The Economist, October 20, 1990

  “Nowadays it is not only misleading but also wrong to view Russia and the Soviet Union as one political entity… Districts like the Irkutsk regions of Siberia have adopted declarations of ‘equality and independence.’”

  Time magazine, November 12, 1990

  “In July 1990, Col. Gen. Nikolai Chervov announced that the Soviet Army had 41,580 tanks in Europe. With the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty signed in November 1990, there were hopes that a significant fraction of these tanks would be dismantled. Data released by the Soviets on 19 November 1990 indicate that there are now only 20,694 Soviet tanks in Europe. Where did all the other tanks go?

  After stonewalling the newly aggressive Soviet press for two months regarding the mystery, the Ministry of Defense Information Administration finally offered to clarify the situation for the paper Sovetskaya Rossiya. Officials claimed that in excess of 20,000 tanks were moved beyond the Urals prior to signing the treaty document. About 8,000 tanks from Europe were handed over to Soviet units in Asia, either to bring them up to strength or to replace old tanks. A further 8,392 tanks were placed into storage bases in Western Siberia or Central Asia.”

  Armed Forces Journal International, March 1991

  CHAPTER ONE

  General Chernko was a big man, his body hiding hers as he showed her the room. She had been chosen by Chernko’s subaltern purely at random. Despite the severe rationing she had the kind of full figure, accentuated by the dark red dress she was wearing, that the major knew General Chernko liked: kapitalnye titki— “prominent breasts,” as the general would say. “Something to hang onto.”

  “Don’t undress,” Chernko ordered her, and for a second the terror in the woman’s eyes harbored a faint hope — dashed by his next words. “We’ll have to hurry,” he told her, as if she had any choice in the matter. “Soon the Americans’ll be here.” As he pulled the drapes closed she glimpsed the Kremlin directly across the square, still burning.

  Even the goshawks, traditional guardians of the Kremlin’s snow-capped towers, were fleeing the shell-pocked Citadel, leaving the Supreme Soviet to the crows — the Russian surrender to the legendary American general Douglas Freeman having been signed at Minsk by Marshal Kirov. Though the Allied troops had not yet reached Moscow proper, thousands of red fires, smoking sullenly amid the black-stained snow, marked the end for the city.

  Chernko, chief of the Committee for Public Safety, the KGB, and now interim president of the USSR following President Suzlov’s death, could smell the sickly sweet odor of cooked flesh and the acrid fumes of burning diesel rising from the gutted T-90s in the city’s outer rings, the smoke bleeding darkly into the still, cold, blue air. Normally the sight of dead bodies didn’t bother him — he’d had thousands of people executed in the course of the war for un-Soviet activity and had carried out many of the executions himself — but now the sight of stiff, bloated bodies in the frigid dawn brought his own mortality closer. Had it been possible, he would have ordered the corpses buried in a mass grave, but the frozen ground was too hard for burial except in the craters left by the Allied bombing and the mass concentrated fire of the American 105-millimeter howitzers that had reduced much of the city to rubble.

  It was 7:00 a.m., and Chernko knew it could not be long before Freeman’s advance armored columns, with battle honors earned from Korea to Vietnam to the Iraqi desert, reached the inner city to occupy the Kremlin, which now lay smoldering across from his office in Dzerzhinsky Square. With President Suzlov dead, Chernko thought it possible the Allies might well use him as they’d used the Nazis in World War II to run the huge, complex government apparatus until they learned the ropes themselves. Or they might shoot him on the spot. He glanced impatiently at his watch.

  It was 7:03. “Major, where’s the car?” He was anxious to reach the new headquarters bunker in the outer ring. Communications here at the Dzerzhinsky Square offices were unreliable because of the artillery-severed underground cables. Any messages he wanted to send would have to be delivered by dispatch riders.

  “Car’s on its way, Comrade Director,” replied the major, not yet used to calling Chernko “Mr. President.” The Supreme Soviet Military Command — STAVKA — had backed Chernko when he had personally shot President Suzlov when the latter had issued the idiotic command to fight to the last Russian. But Chernko knew that while his action might have been supported by his Russian colleagues, it might not be so well received in the other republics. Everything was in flux.

  “With all the debris,” the major explained, “your car will probably have to make a detour around…”

  The major’s words were drowned out by a tremendous crash— the tower above the Kremlin’s Spassky Gate telescoping into itself, crumbling amid flames shooting so high they threw the Citadel’s rust-red walls into a stark, dancing relief. For Chernko the collapse of the tower was, ironically, like a shot of adrenaline, injecting him with an overwhelming urge to live. “Come here!” he ordered the woman.

  She didn’t utter a sound, didn’t look away, for to anger him would mean death for her family as well as for herself. She had never seen Chernko before except in photographs. Already she was trembling, trying to be brave. At least, she thought, Beria, Stalin’s KGB henchman, had gone out himself to prowl the streets for women. But Chernko no doubt considered himself above that. He sent underlings — his major.

  She could smell the expensive cologne on Chernko, no doubt purchased at one of the Party’s elite stores. In the end, Gorbachev and Yeltsin had changed nothing — the powerful were always the powerful. What could you do but submit?

  He opened his greatcoat. “Take that scarf off,” he commanded her. “You look like a peasant.” He sat down, told her to kneel in front of him, and tore open her gray prison blouse, reaching forward, roughly pushing down her calico bra beneath her breasts. Now she was aware of another smell — his, mixed up with the cologne. “If you bite,” he said matter-of-factly, sitting back in his doeskin recliner, “I’ll kill you. Understand?” Before she could answer, he unzipped his trousers. “Slowly at first,” he instructed her. “Go on!”

  She did it as she and so many others had done so many other things for the chairman of the Committee of Public Safety and his thugs who called themselves the KGB. Soon Chernko was grunting like a pig, leaning forward on the edge of his chair, pulling and pushing her head until suddenly he seized her breasts so violently she gasped with pain. He shuddered, pushed her away, and then, backing up in the chair, its rollers going off the heavy, protective plastic that onto the carpet, he shot her. Far enough away that no stains would get on his greatcoat, careful to use a U.S. nine-millimeter Parabellum load for his Makarov pistol in the unlikely event anyone would find her. Despite the physical release the woman had given him, Chernko was still anxious. He had learned from his agents in Novosibirsk that his name was on an official Sibirskie predateli—”Siberian traitors”—list for his part in Moscow’s decision to surre
nder. He decided it was time to take out some insurance, but he was under no illusion. His down payment to the Siberians would have to be something spectacular — the biggest secret of all — an offer that, as American gangsters would say, the Siberians couldn’t refuse. A plan that was certain to mollify Novosibirsk and protect him from the Siberian vengeance against those who had authorized the Russian surrender. A plan that would also wreak havoc with America.

  It was at that moment that a dispatch rider, his arm bleeding, grimy uniform smudged with oil smoke, arrived and handed Chernko two messages from the new army HQ in the outer ring. The first message, from the Siberian capital city of Novosibirsk seventeen hundred miles to the east, beyond the natural barrier of the Ural Mountains, was short and to the point. If Moscow had surrendered, Siberia hadn’t. Furthermore, it had no intention of doing so. Why should it? asked the Siberian Central Committee in Novosibirsk. Traditionally when Siberians speaking podusham— “from the heart”—spat out their contempt for “the West” they meant Moscow, which they distrusted as much as they did the U.S. Now the greatest collection of scientific minds in all the Russias, those of the Siberian mozgovity— “egghead”—city of Akademgorodok, just outside Novosibirsk, along with the Tartars and the twenty-nine other indigenous groups that made up the millions of Siberyaka, feared that with the mideast oil fields in a shambles from the war and still burning, the U.S., and particularly its resource-starved ally Japan, would take up where Moscow left off — sucking Siberia dry of her enormous natural wealth.

  More than one and a half times the size of the entire United States (including Alaska and Hawaii), stretching for four thousand miles through nine time zones, from the Urals in the west through the space-launch stations on the steppes to the ICBM-studded granite fastness of Kamchatka Peninsula, Siberia’s natural and industrial might — and now its own army — would be more than a match for the Allies. From its mountains, endless taiga, across its endless steppes to the deep gorges of its two-thousand-mile-long river systems, Siberia harbored vast reserves of oil, iron ore, gold, coal, timber, diamonds, and hosts of other strategic minerals, as well as the world’s largest natural gas field at Novyy Urengoy adjacent to the Kara Sea.

  The second message handed Chernko, from his KGB chief in Novokuznetsk — a Siberian industrial center 180 miles east of Novosibirsk — was the one he’d been waiting for. It contained the details of a plan conceived by the directors of the city’s giant Kuznetsky Metallurgical Kombinat, or KMK works. The conception was so daring, in Chernko’s opinion he was sure he could trade it for a promise from Novosibirsk not only to protect him from Siberian extremists but to afford him, albeit secretly, a leading role in the Siberian wartime government and assure his future after the Siberian victory. The plan from the KMK was, Chernko confessed to the major, nothing less than blestyashchiy—”stunning.” It would at first maul then consume the Americans if they dared attack Sibir.

  CHAPTER TWO

  To err is human.

  To forgive is not First Army policy.

  So read the shingle above Gen. Douglas Freeman’s headquarters in Minsk, which his aides were now in the process of taking down and packing for shipment back to the States. Freeman was a fighting general — of this the Pentagon, the president, and the Allied liaison commission in Washington had not the slightest doubt. At fifty-five he was the youngest four-star general in the U.S. Army — but not, as the State Department emphatically advised the White House, “diplomatic material.” His abilities, Foggy Bottom pointed out, lay in action, “not in the delicate business of helping Russia back on its feet.” The advisory memorandum from State quoted an interview that Freeman had, in State’s view, ill-advisedly given the Armed Forces Journal four months before in Europe. Freeman had declared unequivocally that “nobody seems awake to the fact that even in Gorbachev’s day the Soviet military had expanded, by getting rid of obsolete equipment and making it look as if it was reducing its forces”; that “in fact there were more mobile missile sites built during Gorbachev’s tenure than by any other Soviet leader since the Russian Revolution.” Which, Freeman had gone on to say just as unequivocally, “proves a sound military axiom, that you cannot trust any Commie son of a bitch as far as you can kick ‘im!” And that “what the American people have to understand is that, when you get right down to it, regardless of changing civilian leaders, it’s the Soviet military with which we will ultimately have to contend.”

  The Joint Chiefs of Staff, albeit reluctantly, agreed with State, yet they knew it would be unpopular in middle America to recall the general, and with such haste. It would be especially unpopular with the troops Freeman had led on his now-legendary nighttime airborne raid on Pyongyang in North Korea, whose leader he called “Kim II Runt,” and with those he’d led in an equally spectacular outflanking movement on Europe’s northern plain, breaking out of the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket — his armored columns racing ahead and breaching Moscow’s defenses. He was, however, too brusque for Washington — a soldier’s soldier — so that the Joint Chiefs of Staff felt they had no alternative than to agree with State in advising the president that it would be much “safer” for everyone to recall Freeman — to leave the peace to the experts.

  At 7:14 a.m. the first car, a hand-tooled Zil limousine, weaved its way through the rabble-strewn snow and drew up in front of Dzerzhinsky Square, the two KGB door guards snapping to attention despite their weariness. A group of bleary-eyed and emaciated-looking army officers walking, or rather shuffling, up from the old Intourist Hotel through the ruins of Marx Prospect slowed to stare across the square. They managed to see two figures in civilian coats entering the Zil, the gray-uniformed chauffeur quickly checking the limousine’s side mirror, and the car moving off quickly yet quietly in the snow. Several of the young army officers saluted but weren’t sure whether it was the new president or not behind the black curtains. Seconds later a battered white Moskvich taxi, a four-door compact, swung into the curb and the officers across the square saw another figure, also in civilian garb, emerge from the old KGB building, the two guards coming to attention just as they had done for the Zil.

  * * *

  Inside the Zil, Chernko’s aide tried to hide his surprise, having expected Chernko to wait and board the battered Moskvich decoy rather than following him into the highly visible Zil. The major said nothing, busying himself dialling the “Patrul “— “Flying Squad,” the special motorcycle-and-car security unit that was to be less than a minute away from the director at all times. On occasion, however, particularly during the shelling, they’d taken as long as ten minutes. Immediate demotion followed. The major checked the squad’s position against his watch the moment the unit answered his phone call. He glanced across at Chernko. “They’re where they should be, Comrade Director. I mean, Mr. President.” The KGB boss said nothing. The driver was busy finding his way through the body- and rubble-strewn Ordynika Street south through Red Square onto Gorky Street. A surprising amount of Soviet BMD armored personnel carriers were evident following the surrender, all strangely quiet on the hard-packed snow. Chernko pressed the driver intercom button on his plush leather armrest. “We’ll go up Gertsen,” he instructed the chauffeur, “around by the U.S. A./Canada Institute. What’s left of it.”

  “Yes, sir,” answered the chauffeur, and the limousine weaved through Manege Square past the alert military policeman, who had stopped all traffic the moment he’d seen the Zil in the outside VIP lane. The car turned right on Gertsen. The major was always tense at such moments. With Chernko you never knew. The director’s passion for security verged on the paranoid — a reflection of the fact that he himself had sent so many assassins abroad to hunt others. And there had always been the danger of Siberian separatists long agitating for autonomy from Moscow to run their own federation. Never varying your routine, Chernko knew, was the biggest single mistake, hence his proverki— “spot checks,” as he called them, on his flying squad. Despite the inconvenience it caused his own timetable, the major
had to concede that such precautions were part of the reason Chernko was still alive to be chief of First and Second Directorate and now president.

  An old babushka, a grandmother, head wrapped against the cold by the traditional black scarf, slipped on the icy sidewalk, the stroller she was pushing rolling out onto the road. The driver braked hard, and both Chernko and the major were jerked forward, restrained only by their seat belts. The driver instinctively slammed the car into a sliding reverse-turn. But it was too late. By then the Flying Squad had the road blocked behind and in front of the Zil — the gray figures of the squad emerging ghostlike, surrounding the limousine.

  There were no harsh words from Chernko to the driver, but the latter immediately knew he would be punished — and at a time when he and his family would desperately need what few perks remained for the driver of the most powerful man in the Soviet Union.

  The driver, normally a strong man, was reduced to a quivering jelly, looking back pleadingly, whey faced, at Chernko. He was crying. “I’m sorry, Comrade Director — Comrade President. I—”

  “Vladimir,” said Chernko, nodding at the two Flying Squad members holding the driver to release him, “it was only natural.”

  “But I should have known, Comrade. Remembered my training.”

  “Yes,” said Chernko, sitting back in the plush Afghan leather, “you should have. It could have been a Siberian, eh?” The man wanted to speak again but couldn’t find words. A small, bedraggled crowd of refugees was gathering; plainclothes KGB men quickly, brusquely, ordered them away.

  Chernko knew news of the incident would spread quickly, as he intended it should, and then — for a while at least — everyone on security would be on special alert, and he would be safe long enough to make his deal — gain his insurance policy — with Novosibirsk.