Masterman said. “What’s this unit here?”
“That is BOYAR, a reserve mechanized force. The men have just been called up. Their weapons are from a hidden equipment-storage bunker. It’s a short division, old equipment—T- 55s and such—but serviceable. We’re keeping that force hidden,” Aliyev said.
The American G-3 arched his eyebrows. Maybe they were outmanned, but they weren’t dumb. That BOYAR force was in a particularly interesting place ... if Ivan could make proper use of it. Their overall operational concept looked good—theoretically. A lot of soldiers could come up with good ideas. The problem was executing them. Did the Russians have the ability to do that? Russia’s military theorists were as good as any the world had ever seen—good enough that the United States Army regularly stole their ideas. The problem was that the U.S. Army could apply those theories to a real battlefield, and the Russians could not.
“How are your people handling this?” Masterman asked.
“Our soldiers, you mean?” Aliyev asked. “The Russian soldier knows how to fight,” he assured his American counterpart.
“Hey, Colonel, I am not questioning their guts,” Duke assured his host. “How’s their spirit, for one thing?”
Bondarenko handled that one: “Yesterday I had to face one of my young officers, Komanov, from the border defenses. He was furious that we were unable to give him the support he needed to defeat the Chinese. And I was ashamed,” the general admitted to his guests. “My men have the spirit. Their training is lacking—I just got here a few months ago, and my changes have barely begun to take effect. But, you will see, the Russian soldier has always risen to the occasion, and he will today—if we here are worthy of him.”
Masterman didn’t share a look with his boss. Diggs had spoken well of this Russian general, and Diggs was both a good operational soldier and a good judge of men. But the Russian had just admitted that his men weren’t trained up as well as they ought to be. The good news was that on the battlefield, men learned the soldier’s trade rapidly. The bad news was that the battlefield was the most brutal Darwinian environment on the face of the planet. Some men would learn, but others would die in the process, and the Russians didn’t have all that many they could afford to lose. This wasn’t 1941, and they weren’t fighting with half their population base this time around.
“You’re going to want us to move out fast when the trains drop us off at Chita?” Tony Welch asked. He was the divisional chief of staff.
“Yes,” Aliyev confirmed.
“Okay, well, then I need to get down there and look over the facilities. What about fuel for our choppers?”
“Our air force bases have fuel storage similar to the diesel depots,” Aliyev told him. “Your word is infrastructure, yes? That is the one thing we have much of. When will they arrive?”
“The Air Force is still working that out. They’re going to fly our aviation brigade in. Apaches first. Dick Boyle’s chomping at the bit.”
“We will be very pleased to see your attack helicopters. We have all too few of our own, and our air force is also slow delivering them.”
“Duke,” Diggs said, “get on the horn to the Air Force. We need some choppers right the hell now, just so we can get around and see what we need to see.”
“Roger,” Masterman replied.
“Let me get a satellite radio set up,” Lieutenant Colonel Garvey said, heading for the door.
Ingrid Bergman was heading south now. General Wallace wanted a better idea for the Chinese logistical tail, and now he was getting it. The People’s Republic of China was in many ways like America had been at the turn of the previous century. Things moved mainly by rail. There were no major highways as Americans understood them, but a lot of railroads. Those were efficient for moving large quantities of anything over medium-to-long distances, but they were also inflexible, and hard to repair—especially the bridges—and most of all the tunnels, and so that was what he and his targeting people were looking at. The problem was that they had few bombs to drop. None of his attack assets—mainty F-15E Strike Eagles at the moment—had flown over with bombs on their wings, and he had barely enough air-to-mud munitions for an eight-ship strike mission. It was like going to a dance and finding no girls there. The music was fine, and so was the fruit punch, but there really wasn’t anything to do.