think we’ve been up all night. It’ll inflate his sense of self-worth.”
Ryan turned to look at the windows on his south wall. The drapes hadn’t been closed, and anyone passing by could have noted that the lights had been on all night. But, strangely, he didn’t know if the Secret Service ever turned them off at night.
“When do we start moving forces?” Jack asked next.
“The Air Attaché will call from Moscow when his talks have been concluded. Ought to be any time.”
The President grunted. “Longer night than ours.”
“He’s younger than we are,” Mickey Moore observed. “Just a colonel.”
“If this goes, what are our plans like?” van Damm asked.
“Hyperwar,” Moore answered. “The world doesn’t know the new weapons we’ve been developing. It’ll make DESERT STORM look like slow motion.”
CHAPTER 48
Opening Guns
While others were pulling all-nighters, Gennady Iosifovich Bondarenko was forgetting what sleep was supposed to have been. His teleprinter was running hot with dispatches from Moscow, reading that occupied his time, and not always to his profit. Russia had still not learned to leave people alone when they were doing their jobs, and as a result, his senior communications officer cringed when he came in with new “FLASH” traffic.
“Look,” the general said to his intelligence officer. “What I need is information on what equipment they have, where they are, and how they are postured to move north on us. Their politics and objectives are not as important to me as where they are right now!”
“I expect to have hard information from Moscow momentarily. It will be American satellite coverage, and—”
“God damn it! I remember when we had our own fucking satellites. What about aerial reconnaissance?”
“The proper aircraft are on their way to us now. We’ll have them flying by tomorrow noon, but do we dare send them over Chinese territory?” Colonel Tolkunov asked.
“Do we dare not to?” CINC-FAR EAST demanded in reply.
“General,” the G-2 said, “the concern is that we would be giving the Chinese a political excuse for the attack.”
“Who said that?”
“Stavka.”
Bondarenko’s head dropped over the map table. He took a breath and closed his eyes for three blissful seconds, but all that achieved was to make him wish for an hour—no, just thirty minutes of sleep. That’s all, he thought, just thirty minutes.
“A political excuse,” the general observed. “You know, Vladimir Konstantinovich, once upon a time, the Germans were sending high-flying reconnaissance aircraft deep into Western Russia, scouting us out prior to their invasion. There was a special squadron of fighters able to reach their altitude, and their regimental commander asked for permission to intercept them. He was relieved of his command on the spot. I suppose he was lucky that he wasn’t shot. He ended up a major ace and a Hero of the Soviet Union before some German fighter got him. You see, Stalin was afraid of provoking Hitler, too!”
“Comrade Colonel?” Heads turned. It was a young sergeant with an armful of large-format photographs.
“Here, quickly!”
The sergeant laid them on the table, obscuring the topographical maps that had occupied the previous four hours. The quality wasn’t good. The imagery had been transmitted over a fax machine instead of a proper photographic printer, but it was good enough for their purposes. There were even inserts, small white boxes with legends typed in, in English, to tell the ignorant what was in the pretty little pictures. The intelligence officer was the first to make sense of it all.
“Here they come,” the colonel breathed. He checked the coordinates and the time indicated in the lower-right corner of the top photo. “That’s a complete tank division, and it’s right”—he turned back to the printed map—“right here, just as we expected. Their marshaling point is Harbin. Well, it had to be. All their rail lines converge there. Their first objective will be Belogorsk.”
“And right up the valley from there,” Bondarenko agreed. “Through this pass, then northwest.” One didn’t need to be a Nobel laureate to predict a line of advance. The terrain was the prime objective condition to which all ambitions and plans had to bend. Bondarenko could read the mind of the enemy commander well enough, because any trained soldier would see the contour lines on the map and analyze them the same way. Flat was better than sloped. Clear was better than wooded. Dry was better than wet. There was a lot of sloped terrain on the border, but it smoothed out, and there were too many valleys inviting speedy advance. With enough troops, he could have made every one of