in so low that they merged not merely with ground clutter but with highway traffic as well. But they lacked the speed of ballistic weapons. That was the trouble with the fearsome weapons, but that was also their advantage. Twenty-five minutes from turning the “enable-launch” key to impact—even less for the sea-launched sort, which usually flew shorter distances. But those were all gone, except for the ones kept for ABM tests, and those had been modified to make them difficult to fit with warheads.
“Well, we just try to keep this one conventional. How many nuclear weapons could we deliver if we had to?”
“First strike, with the B-2s?” Moore asked. “Oh, eighty or so. If you figure two per target, enough to turn every major city in the PRC into a parking lot. It would kill upwards of a hundred million people,” the Chairman added. He didn’t have to say that he had no particular desire to do that. Even the most bloodthirsty soldiers were repelled by the idea of killing civilians in such numbers, and those who made four-star rank got there by being thoughtful, not psychotic.
“Well, if we let them know that, they ought to think hard about pissing us off that big,” Jackson decided.
“They ought to be that rational, I suppose,” Mickey Moore agreed. “Who wants to be the ruler of a parking lot?” But the problem with that, he didn’t add, was that people who started wars of aggression were never completely rational.
How do we go about calling up reserves?” Bondarenko asked.
Theoretically, almost every Russian male citizen was liable to such a call-up, because most of them had served in their country’s military at one time or another. It was a tradition that dated back to the czars, when the Russian army had been likened to a steamroller because of its enormous mass.
The practical problem today, however, was that the state didn’t know where they all lived. The state required that the veterans of uniformed service tell the army when they moved from one residence to another, but the men in question, since until recently they’d needed the state’s permission to move anywhere, assumed that the state knew where they were and rarely bothered, and the country’s vast and cumbersome bureaucracy was too elephantine to follow up on such things. As a result, neither Russia, nor the Soviet Union before it, had done much to test its ability to call up trained soldiers who’d left their uniforms behind. There were whole reserve divisions that had the most modern of equipment, but it had never been moved after being rolled into their warehouses, and was attended only by cadres of active-duty mechanics who actually spent the time to maintain it, turning over the engines in accordance with written schedules which they followed as mindlessly as the orders that had been drafted and printed. And so, the general commanding the Far East Military Theater had access to thousands of tanks and guns for which he had no soldiers, along with mountains of shells and virtual lakes of diesel fuel.
The word “camouflage,” meaning a trick to be played or a ruse, is French in origin. It really ought to be Russian, however, because Russians were the world’s experts at this military art. The storage sites for the real tanks that formed the backbone of Bondarenko’s theoretical army were so skillfully hidden that only his own staff knew where they were. A good fraction of the sites had even evaded American spy satellites that had searched for years for the locations. Even the roads leading to the storage sites were painted with deceptive colors, or planted with false conifer trees. This was all one more lesson of World War II, when the Soviet Army had totally befuddled the Germans so often that one wondered why the Wehrmacht even bothered employing intelligence officers, they had been snookered so frequently.
“We’re getting orders out now,” Colonel Aliyev replied. “With luck, half of them ought to find people who’ve worn the uniform. We could do better if we made a public announcement.”
“No,” Bondarenko replied. “We can’t let them know we’re getting ready. What about the officer corps?”
“For the reserve formations? Well, we have an ample supply of lieutenants and captains, just no privates or NCOs for them to command. I suppose if we need to we can field a complete regiment or so of junior officers driving tanks,” Aliyev observed dryly.
“Well, such a regiment ought to be fairly proficient,” the general observed with what passed