good Jamaican coffee helped everyone at least simulate consciousness.
“I’m surprised that their Defense Minister is so narrow,” Robby thought aloud, his eyes tracing over the SORGE dispatch. “You pay the senior operators to be big-picture thinkers. When operations go as well as the one they’re running, you get suspicious. I did, anyway.”
“Okay, Robby, you used to be God of Operations across the river. What do you recommend?” Jack asked.
“The idea in a major operation is always to play with the other guy’s head. To lead him down the path you want him to go, or to get inside his decision cycle, just prevent him from analyzing the data and making a decision. I think we can do that here.”
“How?” Arnie van Damm asked.
“The common factor of every successful military plan in history is this: You show the guy what he expects and hopes to see, and then when he thinks he’s got the world by the ass, you cut his legs off in one swipe.” Robby leaned back, holding court for once. “The smart move is to let them keep going for a few more days, make it just seem easier and easier for them while we build up our capabilities, and then when we hit them, we land on them like the San Francisco earthquake—no warning at all, just the end of the fuckin’ world hits ’em. Mickey, what’s their most vulnerable point?”
General Moore had that answer: “It’s always logistics. They’re burning maybe nine hundred tons of diesel fuel a day to keep those tanks and tracks moving north. They have a full five thousand engineers working like beavers running a pipeline to keep up with their lead elements. We cut that, and they can make up some of the shortfall with fuel trucks, but not all of it—”
“And we use the Smart Pig to take care of those,” Vice President Jackson finished.
“That’s one way to handle it,” General Moore agreed.
“Smart Pig?” Ryan asked.
Robby explained, concluding: “We’ve been developing this and a few other tricks for the last eight years. I spent a month out at China Lake a few years ago with the prototype. It works, if we have enough of them.”
“Gus Wallace has that at the top of his Christmas list.”
“The other trick is the political side,” Jackson concluded.
“Funny, I have an idea for that. How is the PRC presenting this war to its people?”
It was Professor Weaver’s turn: “They’re saying that the Russians provoked a border incident—same thing Hitler did with Poland in 1939. The Big Lie technique. They’ve used it before. Every dictatorship has. It works if you control what your people see.”
“What’s the best weapon for fighting a lie?” Ryan asked.
“The truth, of course,” Arnie van Damm answered for the rest. “But they control their news distribution. How do we get the truth to their population?”
“Ed, how is the SORGE data coming out?”
“Over the ’Net, Jack. So?”
“How many Chinese citizens own computers?”
“Millions of them—the number’s really jumped in the past couple of years. That’s why they’re ripping that patent off Dell Computer that we made a stink about in the trade talks and—oh, yeah ...” Foley looked up with a smile. “I like it.”
“That could be dangerous,” Weaver warned.
“Dr. Weaver, there’s no safe way to fight a war,” Ryan said in reply. “This isn’t a negotiation between friends. General Moore?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Get the orders out.”
“Yes, sir.”
“The only question is, will it work?”
“Jack,” Robby Jackson said, “it’s like with baseball. You play the games to find out who the best is.”
The first reinforcing division to arrive at Chita was the 201st. The trains pulled into the built-for-the-purpose offloading sidings. The flatcars had been designed (and built in large numbers) to transport tracked military vehicles. To that end, flip-down bridging ramps were located at each end of every single car, and when those were tossed down in place, the tanks could drive straight off to the concrete ramps to where every train had backed up. It was a little demanding—the width of the cars was at best marginal for the tank tracks—but the drivers of each vehicle kept their path straight, breathing a small sigh of relief when they got to the concrete. Once on the ground, military police troops, acting as traffic cops, directed the armored vehicles to assembly areas. The 201st Motor Rifle Division’s commander and his staff were there already, of course, and the regimental officers got their marching orders, telling them what roads to take northeast to join Bondarenko’s Fifth Army, and by