Arctic Front wi-4 Page 24

  At wave-skimming height, the Tomahawk’s cigar-tube shape began its metamorphosis, its tail unfolding, stubby wings extending and air intake popping up to gulp air, allowing the missile’s own engine to take over as the rocket booster finished. Looking now more like the V-l buzz bomb from which it had been derived, the missile’s 1,000-pound conventional warhead, replacing a 450-pound nuclear tip, followed its preprogrammed terrain-matching contour guide which afforded the Tomahawk a CEP — circular error of probability — of only 250 feet. This was normally not critical for most large land targets, but for a moving target at sea it raised the odds considerably.

  The captain of the nuclear-powered Frunze IV had personally picked up on the Tomahawks’ firing, receiving details of the Tomahawk’s trajectory from a Bear recon aircraft out of the Kommandorsky Islands to the north. In response the Frunze IV and the other Siberian cruiser had each launched five SS-19 missiles from hatches forward of the cruiser’s Gatling gun turret and from both port and starboard stations.

  In all, ten missiles were now streaking toward the starye amerikanskie sufi—”old American bitches”—as the Missouri and Wisconsin were contemptuously referred to. The sinking of either one — or hopefully both — would only add to the impression in Novosibirsk of an overwhelming American naval defeat, the Americans still withdrawing south, one of the battle group’s foam-filled minesweepers already sunk. While her weight and nonmetallic fiberglass hull had not set off any pressure or magnetic mines, the sound of her props had triggered acoustic mines that had literally blown her clear of the water, her spine snapped, her foam-filled interior giving off a thick, oily, and highly toxic smoke, the two halves of the sweeper taking longer to go down than they would have without the foam that kept them floating about like some ancient fire ships sent among an enemy fleet to sow confusion and break up its order of battle.

  By now the Missouri’s two Tomahawk cruise missiles were locked onto by the Frunze IV’s “Top Pair” three-dimensional, long-range radar scanner. They were intercepted eleven miles out by a cluster of type 4,6, and 9 missiles fired by the Frunze. It was impossible to say what type had downed one of the two American missiles, so many target and antitarget vectors were converging in the general area; so many Siberian missiles, in fact, that it was likely, given their inferior guidance system, that it had been a case of “fratricide”—debris and shock waves from one missile altering another’s course, preventing it from making a direct hit. Either way, one of the Tomahawks was down.

  The second Tomahawk hit the Frunze IV starboard midships, the explosion shattering all glass on the bridge, decapitating two officers on watch, while a great hole, over ten feet in diameter, now gaped at the waterline. The dark, inky sea turned to a frothing cauldron as it churned into the cruiser, the enormous intake of water causing the ship to roll sharply starboard and capsize — sinking in less than eleven minutes, all 794 hands lost. Most drowned in the first five minutes or so; others swam through the ice-cold sea of oil and flotsam to a few inflatable rafts where they hauled themselves aboard only to the shortly of pneumonia, coughing unceasingly, lungs coated in oil — in effect, drowning in their own fuel.

  Of the ten surface-to-surface SS-19s that the cruisers had fired at the Missouri and Wisconsin, two struck Missouri and three the Wisconsin. Three of the others were shot down by American Harpoon and Vulcan AA fire; the remaining two exploded in the sea, sending enormous spumes of white into the tracer-streaked night. And now the argument that had raged for years over the advisability of keeping the old battle wagons was answered.

  Both had seen active service, particularly the Missouri in the Iraqi war, but not ship-to-ship confrontations, and the moment the two battleships were struck, there was in the Pentagon an almost unseemly rush to hear what had happened. What happened was that of the two missiles that hit the Missouri, one exploded starboard side against the bridge, the other made a wide-angle hit on the stern deck that took out two of the battleship’s four SH60-Lamps helos; the other two helicopters were aloft on antisub watch.

  When the first missile hit the bridge it killed two men in number two turret from sheer concussion, its fireball so intense that the explosion took out four of the five-inch guns on that side, killing twenty-six men while engulfing one of the stern-facing five-inch guns, sending a sheet of dense, curdling fire rushing along the starboard side as if some enormous flamethrower had belched, the smoke and flame spilling over the stern’s triple sixteen-inch turret.

  It did not destroy it but, because of the heat, made the turret, even with its air conditioning, uninhabitable for the next half hour as fire hoses crisscrossed in dense smoke to get the deck fire under control. But the main concern was the missile that had hit the starboard side of the bridge, nearer the ship’s combat control center. It was known that no air-to-surface missile, such as the Exocet, which could smash through any of the lighter-armored modern ships, could penetrate the battleship’s armor belt, but now the surface-to-surface Siberian missile, striking the seventeen and a half inches of thick class A steel that girded the bridge, failed to penetrate.

  Inside the bridge two officers would lose their hearing forever from the impact, and several others would also be repatriated, suffering permanent inner-ear damage. But no one in combat control was killed, and while the navigation electronics were knocked out, the “stand-alone” fire control for the two forward turrets, with three guns apiece, and the fire control for the three guns in the lone stern turret were unaffected, despite the fact that the latter was still not visible because of the thick, choking, white smoke that had replaced the black as the fires were being doused; the urgent thump, thump, thump, of the pumps was audible to the Wisconsin several miles off the Missouri’s starboard quarter.

  The Wisconsin sustained damage to two of her four shafts from the missile that had hit the stern’s solid 12.5-inch-thick steel armor belt, causing spider fractures. But here, as aboard the Missouri, bulkheads had held. The “old” battle wagons, once so disparaged by the “bottom line” accounting experts as outmoded “floating nostalgia,” had more than once proved their resilience to enemy missiles, their armor belts far thicker than the thinly skinned, higher-tech cruisers and destroyers of more recent years.

  As if this weren’t enough, they were now about to do what no other ship in the fleet could. In addition to its array of Tomahawk missiles, Vulcan twenty-millimeter Gatling guns, and five-inch, dual-purpose guns, the old lathes’ nine sixteen-inch guns administered the coup de grace to the USAF’s bombing assault out of Attu against the Kommandorsky Islands. Each of the eighteen 16-inch guns of the two battleships hurled a 2,700-pound shell, the equivalent of throwing a Volkswagen Beetle twenty-three miles. And they did it thirty-six times a minute. The crews of the twenty-four smaller five-inch guns had to wait until the battle wagons got closer to the islands. The five-inch guns were only able to throw seventy-pound shells fourteen miles, by which time Missouri’s Harpoon missiles had dealt with three of the hydrofoils sent out from the Kommandorskys; the Wisconsin took out six.

  The Siberians’ mistake in having concentrated all their available air power from Kamchatka south against the American battle carrier group and losing the fight for air superiority was now compounded by the terrible punishment the two American battleships were meting out to the Kommandorsky airfields, killing any hope in Novosibirsk of using the Kommandorsky Islands as an advance carrier for the MiG-29s, the inferior V/STOL Forgers in Baku’s fleet unable to stop Burke’s task force from protecting Freeman’s landing.

  Worse still for the Siberian TVD, Far Eastern Military District HQ in Khabarovsk, was the dilemma now confronting them. Should they concentrate their forces south nearer the Sea of Japan — Japan being the Americans’ carrier in the far east, particularly the island of Hokkaido; or should they move those forces already in the south north to reinforce the Kuril garrisons? But this would be in vain if Freeman decided, in light of the terrible air offensive now underway against Sakhalin, to bypass the Kur
ils and Sakhalin and actually invade the mainland.

  Splitting their forces violated fundamental military doctrine, and particularly Soviet military doctrine, of concentrating all your forces, of amassing overwhelming strength before attacking. Even now, Novosibirsk was receiving information from the four Kuril Island Strait monitoring stations that the enemy-most likely the American navy’s Seals — was probing the straits, possibly readying to detonate the mines in one or all of the vital gateway channels between the Pacific and the Sea of Okhotsk.

  But in Novosibirsk, Marshal Yesov knew that if the Americans’ activity around the straits was a feint and they kept moving south, the Siberian garrisons on the Kurils and Sakhalin might simply be bypassed. Yet if the garrisons weren’t maintained, the Americans might decide to land there as a springboard for an attack on the mainland.

  General Dya Stavkin, C in C Fifth Army’s shock artillery division on the Pacific border, which included regiments of tactical missiles, self-propelled artillery, and massed Katyusha— mobile barrage rockets — approved of Yesov’s strategy, favoring “scorched earth” from the coast inland as far as it took to make what the Americans called their LOTS — logistics over the shore — supply problems as critical as possible. It had worked against Napoleon and the Wermacht — why not against Freeman? Better to obmanut amerikantsev— “suck the Americans in”—and give them what their whole national psyche was worst prepared for: not a quick campaign but a long, drawn-out one. Soviets could wait. The usually somber Yesov told his staff a joke to illustrate the point. “You won’t be able to get your new car for ten years,” the Moscow salesman tells a buyer.

  “When will it be delivered?” asks the buyer. “Morning or afternoon?”

  “Are you crazy?” says the salesman. “You have to wait ten years for your car and you want to know whether it will be delivered in the morning or afternoon? What’s the difference?”

  “Well, the plumber’s coming in the morning.”

  The Americans couldn’t wait for anything, Yesov told them; they like “drive-in, drive-out” wars. No, the strategy was, let their bombers out of Japan and the Seventh Fleet level the docks and sub pens of Vladivostok. Let their troops land where they wanted now that Baku had failed to stop them. Besides, Novosibirsk didn’t know where they were headed and so couldn’t do much about it. Suck them in and let the Russian winter and Chernko’s surprise do their job. And harass them all the time as Giap did in Vietnam. The Siberian army had many more soldiers and much better equipment that Giap ever had. And he won.

  It was during this conference of Yesov’s that the Siberian Fifth’s Stavkin, a man not easily excited, was first told of Chernko’s secret.

  “Bozhe May!”— “My God!” Stavkin said, leaning toward his colleague, a general who commanded the Chinghan Sixth Guards Tank Army. “The Arctic Foxes’ll be well fed this winter.” He meant fat with American dead.

  “Da!” agreed the Chinghan commander, whose titanium-capped teeth looked as tough as his T-90s. “This Chernko business will finish them.”

  Stavkin listened to Yesov outline his plans for the withdrawal in detail, stressing the importance to Khabarovsk and Chita HQ — further west of Khabarovsk — of coordinating the tactical withdrawals. But Stavkin had difficulty concentrating on the details, his excitement at being one of those who would defeat the legendary Freeman, the Freeman of Minsk and Ratmanov fame, making it difficult for him to sit still. Yesov, a thickset, bullish-looking man, his face, as the saying went, always the color of the party, was now pounding it into them that the Americans had an obsession with high ground. “If the Americans do not gain the high ground,” he said, “they immediately become depressed and need tranquilizers!”

  This was cause for great laughter throughout the Siberian officer corps.

  * * *

  “Unopposed?”

  “Unopposed, sir,” reported Norton, his face flushed with the effort of having run up the stairs to the LHA’s bridge to confirm what the marines had been reporting from the LCTs as they went into Rudnaya Pristan. Norton’s face was slack from the sense of relief.

  “No fire at all?” pressed Freeman.

  “Oh, a little,” Norton conceded, “but small arms, General. Looks like Buryat militia. Local units. And our UAV (unmanned air reconnaissance vehicle) has spotted only six 122-millimeter howitzers. They’re in firing position — high on their swivel trailer mounts but no trucks anywhere. And they’re not self-propelled. Firing’s sporadic, too.”

  “By God!” said Freeman, his mood suddenly the opposite of all those around him on the LHA’s bridge, his eyes narrowing as he took off his helmet, running his hand through the gray shock of hair. “I smell a big fat Commie rat here, Dick. What’s Yesov up to?” He turned around to the LHA’s captain and the marine commander.”Yesov’s a crafty son of a bitch. Saw some of his work in western Europe before he joined Siberian command.”

  “General,” said Dick Norton, “has it occurred to you that after Ratmanov and the beating they’ve taken trying to stop Burke’s task force that they might be having second thoughts?”

  Freeman glowered at him, as a coach might a player who’d opined that the other team looked like they’d had enough.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you, Dick? Some of those goddamned Aphids hitting us softened your brain? If this is a retreat, it’s tactical.” Freeman took up his field glasses, scanning the shoreline. “The one thing I want to make damn sure of is that there are no more mines around here. We wasted enough time on that bullshit already. Talking to some of those Seals who went in off of a Sea Wolf sub when we thought we might try the Kuril Straits. They told me the Siberians had every mine down there you could think of — magnetic, pressure, acoustic. One of the guys told the he figures the sons of bitches have probably got hamburger-sniffing mines.”

  “They got any general sniffers down there, sir?”

  It was an inappropriate remark, and Norton knew it the moment he’d said it; but it was too late — out before he could stop himself, so buoyant was his mood at the news of the landings being virtually unopposed.

  “So what’s a general sniffer?” asked Freeman, still scanning the shoreline with his binoculars.

  There was an awkward silence, the marine battalion commander winking at his second in command to ease the tension. Everyone was relieved; it was the kind of reverie that overtakes men who one minute are convinced they’re feeing death and the next find out they are not, or at least that it has been postponed.

  “Well?” pressed Freeman, turning the binoculars further down the beachhead. “How do you sniff a general?”

  “Ah — hot air, sir,” Norton replied sheepishly.

  Barely lowering the binoculars, Freeman glanced down at the map. “Yesov could have mined the road leading inland.”

  “Pretty deserted beach out here, General. Unless they knew your exact plans they wouldn’t have time for that. First they’d have to get the mines down here. Your point about centralization and…”

  “Yes, yes,” said Freeman impatiently, still unnerved by the lack of opposition. “Subs?” he said suddenly.

  “Still outside, sir. That’s one thing we’re sure of. MAD overflights from the P-3s have shown they’re still outside. No way they want to get trapped up in here with us commanding the Kuril entrances and our air force ready to hit them if they try to run through the Japanese Strait. No, sir, they’re outside — waiting to hit our supply lines, especially the Alaska-California oil runs.”

  “What are our POL reserves in Nippon, Dick?”

  Norton, fortunately, had the petrol, oil, and lubricant figures in his head. “Three months, with severe rationing in Japan and depending on our rate of advance.”

  “Well, the Japs’ve done a good job of burying their oil reserves. Less, o’ course, the Siberians have another Sorge who knows where they are.”

  Norton was alarmed. Richard Sorge had been the German Communist agent who, posing as a Nazi newspaper man in Tokyo d
uring the Second World War, had thrown flamboyant parties for the Japanese VIP’s on his yacht in Tokyo Bay while down below he was sending messages to Moscow, the most important one being that he had discovered that the Japanese weren’t going to attack Siberia’s flank after all but were heading south to take Hong Kong, Malaya, and on to Australia. This single piece of information allowed the Siberian reserves, a million fresh troops, to be withdrawn from Siberia and sent into Stalingrad where they turned the tide against Von Paulus’s Sixth Army. Even so, it wasn’t the mention of Sorge that worried Norton but the general’s lackadaisical use of “Japs” instead of “Japanese.” Lord, if the Japanese press got hold of that, outrage would rain down on the Americans like flechettes.

  “Japanese, sir,” Norton reminded him.

  “What? Oh, right. Well, let’s hope their depot sites are secret.”

  Unfortunately the hopes of a general do not carry any more weight than those of the humblest private. Every single depot, from the two within thirty miles of Tokyo’s sacred bridge across to the emperor’s palace to the four depots on the west coast, had been known to Chernko’s agents for years. If the Siberian air force could not penetrate the Eagles and Falcons of the U.S. in Japan then SPETS-recruited Communist agents from the Japanese underground “Red Army” could and did penetrate the POL dumps’ defenses. Within the next seventy-six hours, as Freeman’s troops poured ashore virtually unopposed at Rudnaya Pristan, already stretching their supply line, four of the six Japanese POL depots were hit. Only two of the attacks succeeded due to a vigorous, some said fanatical, defense by the Japanese defense force, which paid the price with twenty-nine dead and another sixteen wounded. Even so, the SPETS attacks reduced Freeman’s POL supply to six weeks.

  In New York oil prices set an all-time high, with a ten-dollar increase per barrel. Also, fears that the Siberians might use chemical weapons as a last resort drove up the price of Fuller’s earth, used in decontamination field hospitals, while shares in Mediclean 2000 water-spray-vacuum decontamination MASH units and in activated charcoal dressings rose dramatically, many of the companies owned by Jay La Roche Pharmaceuticals. ABC’s “Nightline” charged that the rumors of impending use of CBW — chemical biological warfare — by the Siberians were false, planted by unscrupulous war profiteers to drive up their shares, not only in America but abroad.