"Just that it's started in Siberia. The Chinese are across the border and Ivan's trying to stop 'em. No details. We ought to get an update when we go through Moscow, after lunchtime, I expect."

"Fair nuff."

"How are the troopers taking things?"

"No problems, bored with the train ride, want to get back in their tracks, the usual."

"How's their att.i.tude?"

"They're ready, Colonel," the sergeant-major a.s.sured him.

"Good." With that, Giusti turned and headed back to his seat, hoping he'd get a few hours anyway, and there wasn't much of Poland to see anyway. The annoying part was being so cut off. He had satellite radios in his vehicles, somewhere on the flatcars aft of this coach, but he couldn't get to them, and without them he didn't know what was happening up forward. A war was on. He knew that. But it wasn't the same as knowing the details, knowing where the train would stop, where and when he'd get to offload his equipment, get the Quarter Horse organized, and get back on the road, where they belonged.

The train part was working well. The Russian train service seemingly had a million flatcars designed expressly to transport tracked vehicles, undoubtedly intended to take their battle tanks west, into Germany for a war against NATO. Little had the builders ever suspected that the cars would be used to bring American tanks east to help defend Russia against an invader. Well, n.o.body could predict the future more than a few weeks. At the moment, he would have settled for five days or so.

The rest of First Armored was stretched back hundreds of miles on the east-west rail line. Colonel Don Lisle's Second Brigade was just finishing up boarding in Berlin, and would be tail-end Charlie for the division. They'd cross Poland in daylight, for what that was worth.

The Quarter Horse was in the lead, where it belonged. Wherever the drop-off point was, they'd set up perimeter security, and then lead the march farther east, in a maneuver called Advance to Contact, which was where the "fun" started. And he needed to be well-rested for that, Colonel Giusti reminded himself. So he settled back in his seat and closed his eyes, surrendering his body to the jerks and sways of the train car.

Dawn patrol was what fighter pilots all thought about. The t.i.tle for the duty went back to a 1930s Errol Flynn movie, and the term had probably originated with a real mission name, meaning to be the first up on a new day, to see the sun rise, and to seek out the enemy right after breakfast.

Bronco Winters didn't look much like Errol Flynn, but that was okay. You couldn't tell a warrior by the look of his face, though you could by the look on his face. He was a fighter pilot. As a youngster in New York, he'd ride the subway to La Guardia Airport, just to stand at the fence and watch the airplanes take off and land, knowing even then that he wanted to fly. He'd also known that fighters would be more fun than airliners, and known finally that to fly fighters he had to enter a service academy, and to do that he'd have to study. And so he'd worked hard all through school, especially in math and science, because airplanes were mechanical things, and that meant that science determined how they worked. So, he was something of a math whiz-that had been his college major at Colorado Springs-but his interest in it had ended the day he'd walked into Columbus Air Force Base in Mississippi, because once he got his hands on the controls of an aircraft, the "study" part of his mission was accomplished, and the "learning" part really began. He'd been the number one student in his cla.s.s at Columbus, quickly and easily mastering the Cessna Tweety Bird trainer, and then moving on to fighters, and since he'd been number one in his cla.s.s, he'd gotten his choice-and that choice, of course, had been the F-15 Eagle fighter, the strong and handsome grandson of the F-4 Phantom. An easy plane to fly, it was a harder one to fight, since the controls for the combat systems are located on the stick and the throttles, all in b.u.t.tons of different shapes so that you could manage all the systems by feel, and keep your eyes up and out of the aircraft instead of having to look down at instruments. It was something like playing two pianos at the same time, and it had taken Winters a disappointing six months to master. But now those controls came as naturally as twirling the wax into his Bismarck mustache, his one non-standard affectation, which he'd modeled on Robin Olds, a legend in the American fighter community, an instinctive pilot and a thinking-and therefore a very dangerous-tactician. An ace in World War II, an ace in Korea, and also an ace over North Vietnam, Olds was one of the best who'd ever strapped a fighter plane to his back, and one whose mustache had made Otto von Bismarck himself look like a p.u.s.s.y.

Colonel Winters wasn't thinking about that now. The thoughts were there even so, as much a part of his character as his situational awareness, the part of his brain that kept constant track of the three-dimensional reality around him at all times. Flying came as naturally to him as it did to the gyrfalcon mascot at the Air Force Academy. And so did hunting, and now he was hunting. His aircraft had instrumentation that downloaded the take from the AWACS aircraft a hundred fifty miles to his rear, and he divided his eye time equally between the sky around him and the display three feet from his 20-10 brown eyes . . .

. . . there . . . two hundred miles, bearing one-seven-two, four bandits heading north. Then four more, and another flight of four. Joe c.h.i.n.k was coming up to play, and the pigs were hungry.

"Boar Lead, this is Eagle Two." They were using encrypted burst-transmission radios that were very difficult to detect, and impossible to listen in on.

"Boar Lead." But he kept his transmission short anyway. Why spoil the surprise?

"Boar Lead, we have sixteen bandits, one-seven-zero your position at angels thirty, coming due north at five hundred knots."

"Got' em."

"They're still south of the border, but not for long," the young controller on the E-3B advised. "Boar, you are weapons-free at this time."

"Copy weapons-free," Colonel Winters acknowledged, and his left hand flipped a b.u.t.ton to activate his systems. A quick look down to his weapons-status display showed that everything was ready to fire. He didn't have his tracking/targeting radar on, though it was in standby mode. The F-15 had essentially been designed as an appendage to the monstrous radar in its nose-a design consideration that had defined the size of the fighter from the first sketch on paper-but over the years the pilots had gradually stopped using it, because it could warn an enemy with the right sort of threat receiver, telling him that there was an Eagle in the neighborhood with open eyes and sharp claws. Instead he could now cross-load the radar information from the AWACS, whose radar signals were unwelcome, but nothing an enemy could do anything about, and not directly threatening. The Chinese would be directed and controlled by ground radar, and the Boars were just at the fuzzy edge of that, maybe spotted, maybe not. Somewhere to his rear, a Rivet Joint EC-135 was monitoring both the radar and the radios used by the Chinese ground controllers, and would cross-load any warnings to the AWACS. But so far none of that. So, Joe c.h.i.n.k was coming north.

"Eagle, Boar, say bandit type, over."

"Boar, we're not sure, but probably Sierra-Uniform Two-Sevens by point of origin and flight profile, over."

"Roger." Okay, good, Winters thought. They thought the Su-27 was a pretty hot aircraft, and for a Russian-designed bird it was respectable. They put their best drivers into the Flanker, and they'd be the proud ones, the ones who thought they were as good as he was. Okay, Joe, let's see how good you are. "Boar, Lead, come left to one-three-five."

"Two." "Three." "Four," the flight acknowledged, and they all banked to the left. Winters took a look around to make sure he wasn't leaving any contrails to give away his position. Then he checked his threat receiver. It was getting some chirps from Chinese search radar, but still below the theoretical detection threshold. That would change in twenty miles or so. But then they'd just be unknowns on the Chinese screens, and fuzzy ones at that. Maybe the ground controllers would radio a warning, but maybe they'd just peer at their screens and try to decide if they were real contacts or not. The robin's-egg blue of the Eagles wasn't all that easy to spot visually, especially when you had the sun behind you, which was the oldest trick in the fighter-pilot bible, and one for which there was still no solution . . .

The Chinese pa.s.sed to his right, thirty miles away, heading north and looking for Russian fighters to engage, because the Chinese would want to control the sky over the battlefield they'd just opened up. That meant that they'd be turning on their own search radars, and when that happened, they'd spend most of their time looking down at the scope instead of out at the sky, and that was dangerous. When he was south of them, Winters brought his flight right, west, and down to twenty thousand feet, well below Joe c.h.i.n.k's cruising alt.i.tude, because fighter pilots might look back and up, but rarely back and down, because they'd been taught that height, like speed, was life. And so it was . . . most of the time. In another three minutes, they were due south of the enemy, and Winters increased power to maximum dry thrust so as to catch up. His flight of four split on command into two pairs. He went left, and then his eyes spotted them, dark flecks on the brightening blue sky. They were painted the same light gray the Russians liked-and that would be a real problem if Russian Flankers entered the area, because you didn't often get close enough to see if the wings had red stars or white-blue-red flags painted on them.

The audio tone came next. His Sidewinders could see the heat bloom from the Lyul'a turbofan engines, and that meant he was just about close enough. His wingman, a clever young lieutenant, was now about five hundred yards to his right, doing his job, which was covering his leader. Okay, Bronco Winters thought. He had a good hundred knots of overtake speed now.

"Boar, Eagle, be advised these guys are heading directly for us at the moment."

"Not for long, Eagle," Colonel Winters responded. They weren't flecks anymore. Now they were twin-rudder fighter aircraft. Cruising north, tucked in nice and pretty. His left forefinger selected Sidewinder to start, and the tone in his earphones was nice and loud. He'd start with two shots, one at the left-most Flanker, and the other at the right-most . . . right about . . .

"Fox-Two, Fox-Two with two birds away," Bronco reported. The smoke trails diverged, just as he wanted them to, streaking in on their targets. His gunsight camera was operating, and the picture was being recorded on videotape, just as it had been over Saudi the previous year. He needed one kill to make ace- -he got the first six seconds later, and the next half a second after that. Both Flankers tumbled right. The one on the left nearly collided with his wingman, but missed, and tumbled violently as pieces started coming off the airframe. The other one was rolling and then exploded into a nice white puffball. The first pilot ejected cleanly, but the second didn't.

Tough luck, Joe, Winters thought. The remaining two Chinese fighters hesitated, but both then split and started maneuvering in diverging directions. Winters switched on his radar and followed the one to the left. He had radar lock and it was well within the launch parameters for his AM-RAAM. His right forefinger squeezed the pickle switch.

"Fox-One, Fox-One, Slammer on guy to the west." He watched the Slammer, as it was called, race in. Technically a fire-and-forget weapon like the Sidewinder, it accelerated almost instantly to mach-two-plus and rapidly ate up the three miles between them. It only took about ten seconds to close and explode a mere few feet over the fuselage of its target, and that Flanker disintegrated with no chute coming away from it.

Okay, three. This morning was really shaping up, but now the situation went back to World War I. He had to search for targets visually, and searching for jet fighters in a clear sky wasn't . . .

. . . there . . .

"You with me, Skippy?" he called on the radio.

"Got you covered, Bronco," his wingman replied. "Bandit at your one o'lock, going left to right."

"On him," Winters replied, putting his nose on the distant spot in the sky. His radar spotted it, locked onto it, and the IFF transponder didn't say friendly. He triggered off his second Slammer: "Fox-One on the south guy! Eagle, Boar Lead, how we doing?"

"We show five kills to this point. Bandits are heading east and diving. Razorback is coming in from your west with four, angels three-five at six hundred, now at your ten o'lock. Check your IFF, Boar Lead." The controller was being careful, but that was okay.

"Boar, Lead, check IFF now!"

"Two." "Three." "Four," they all chimed in. Before the last of them confirmed his IFF transponder was in the transmit setting, his second Slammer found its target, running his morning's score to four. Well, d.a.m.n, Winters thought, this morning is really shaping up nice.

"Bronco, Skippy is on one!" his wingman reported, and Winters took position behind, low, and left of his wingman. "Skippy" was First Lieutenant Mario Acosta, a red-haired infant from Wichita who was coming along nicely for a child with only two hundred hours in type. "Fox-Two with one," Skippy called. His target had turned south, and was heading almost straight into the streaking missile. Winters saw the Sidewinder go right into his right-side intake, and the resulting explosion was pretty impressive.

"Eagle, Boar Lead, give me a vector, over."

"Boar Lead, come right at zero-nine-zero. I have a bandit at ten miles and low, angels ten, heading south at sixhundred-plus."

Winters executed the turn and checked his radar display. "Got him!" And this one also was well within the Slammer envelope. "Fox-One with Slammer." His fifth missile of the day leaped off the rail and rocketed east, angling down, and again Winters kept his nose on the target, ensuring that he'd get it on tape . . . yes! "That's a splash. Bronco has a splash, I think that's five."

"Confirm five kills to Bronco," Eagle Two confirmed. "Nice going, buddy."

"What else is around?"

"Boar Lead, the bandits are running south on burner, just went through Mach One. We show a total of nine kills plus one damage, with six bandits running back to the barn, over."

"Roger, copy that, Eagle. Anything else happening at the moment?"

"Ah, that's a negative, Boar Lead."

"Where's the closest tanker?"

"You can tank from Oliver-Six, vector zero-zero-five, distance two hundred, over."

"Roger that. Flight, this is Bronco. Let's a.s.semble and head off to tank. Form up on me."

"Two." "Three." "Four."

"How we doing?"

"Skippy has one," his wingman reported.

"Ducky has two," the second element leader chimed in.

"Ghost Man has two and a scratch."

It didn't add up, Winters thought. h.e.l.l, maybe the AWACS guys got confused. That's why they had videotape. All in all, not a bad morning. Best of all, they'd put a real dent in the ChiComm Flanker inventory, and probably punched a pinhole in the confidence of their Su-27 drivers. Shaking up a fighter jock's confidence was almost as good as a kill, especially if they'd bagged the squadron commander. It would make the survivors mad, but it would make them question themselves, their doctrine, and their aircraft. And that was good.

So?"

"The border defenses did about as well as one could reasonably expect," Colonel Aliyev replied. "The good news is that most of our men escaped with their lives. Total dead is under twenty, with fifteen wounded."

"What do they have across the river now?"

"Best guess, elements of three mechanized divisions. The Americans say that they now have six bridges completed and operating. So, we can expect that number to increase rapidly. Chinese reconnaissance elements are pushing forward. We've ambushed some of them, but no prisoners yet. Their direction of advance is exactly what we antic.i.p.ated, as is their speed of advance to this point."

"Is there any good news?" Bondarenko asked.

"Yes, General. Our air force and our American friends have given their air force a very b.l.o.o.d.y nose. We've killed over thirty of their aircraft with only four losses to this point, and two of the pilots have been rescued. We've captured six Chinese pilots. They're being taken west for interrogation. It's unlikely that they'll give us any really useful information, though I am sure the air force will want to grill them for technical things. Their plans and objectives are entirely straightforward, and they are probably right on, or even slightly in advance of their plans."

None of this was a surprise to General Bondarenko, but it was unpleasant even so. His intelligence staff was doing a fine job of telling him what they knew and what they expected, but it was like getting a weather report in winter: Yes, it was cold, and yes, it was snowing, and no, the cold and the snow will probably not stop, and isn't it a shame you don't have a warm coat to wear? He had nearly perfect information, but no ability to do anything to change the news. It was all very good that his airmen were killing Chinese airmen, but it was the Chinese tanks and infantry carriers that he had to stop.

"When will we be able to bring air power to bear on their spearheads?"

"We will start air-to-ground operations this afternoon with Su-31 ground-attack aircraft," Aliyev replied. "But . . ."

"But what?" Bondarenko demanded.

"But isn't it better to let them come in with minimal interference for a few days?" It was a courageous thing for his operations officer to say. It was also the right thing, Gennady Iosifovich realized on reflection. If his only strategic option was to lay a deep trap, then why waste what a.s.sets he had before the trap was fully set? This was not the Western Front in June of 1941, and he didn't have Stalin sitting in Moscow with a figurative pistol to his head.

No, in Moscow now, the government would be raising all manner of political h.e.l.l, probably calling for an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council, but that was just advertising. It was his job to defeat these yellow barbarians, and doing that was a matter of using what power he had in the most efficient manner possible, and that meant drawing them out. It meant making their commander as confident as a schoolyard bully looking down at a child five years his junior. It meant giving them what the j.a.panese had once called the Victory Disease. Make them feel invincible, and then leap at them like a tiger dropping from a tree.

"Andrey, only a few aircraft, and tell them not to risk themselves by pressing their attacks too hard. We can hurt their air force, but their ground forces-we let them keep their advantage for a while. Let them get fat on this fine table set before them for a while."

"I agree, Comrade General. It's a hard pill to swallow, but in the end, harder for them to eat-a.s.suming our political leadership allows us to do the right thing."

"Yes, that is the real issue at hand, isn't it?"

CHAPTER 52.

Deep Battle General Peng crossed over into Russia in his command vehicle, well behind the first regiment of heavy tanks. He thought of using a helicopter, but his operations staff warned him that the air battle was not going as well as the featherheads in the PLAAF had told him to expect. He felt uneasy, crossing the river in an armored vehicle on a floating bridge-like a brick tied to a balloon-but he did so, listening as his operations officer briefed him on the progress to this point.

"The Americans have surged a number of fighter aircraft forward, and along with them their E-3 airborne radar fighter-control aircraft. These are formidable, and difficult to counter, though our air force colleagues say that they have tactics to deal with them. I will believe that when I see it," Colonel Wa observed. "But that is the only bad news so far. We are several hours ahead of schedule. Russian resistance is lighter than I expected. The prisoners we've taken are very disheartened at their lack of support."

"Is that a fact?" Peng asked, as they left the ribbon bridge and thumped down on Russian soil.

"Yes, we have ten men captured from their defensive positions-we'll see them in a few minutes. They had escape tunnels and personnel carriers set to evacuate the men. They didn't expect to hold for long," Colonel Wa went on. "They planned to run away, rather than defend to the last as we expected. I think they lack the heart for combat, Comrade General."

That information got Peng's attention. It was important to know the fighting spirit of one's enemy: "Did any of them stand and fight to the end?"

"Only one of their bunker positions. It cost us thirty men, but we took them out. Perhaps their escape vehicle was destroyed and they had no choice," the colonel speculated.

"I want to see one of these positions at once," Peng ordered.

"Of course, Comrade General." Wa ducked inside and shouted an order to the track driver. The Type 90 armored personnel carrier lurched to the right, surprising the MP who was trying to do traffic control, but he didn't object. The four tall radio whips told him what sort of track this was. The command carrier moved off the beaten track directly toward an intact Russian bunker.

General Peng got out, ducking his head as he did so, and walked toward the mainly intact old gun turret. The "inverted frying pan" shape told him that this was off an old Stalin-3 tank-a very formidable vehicle, once upon a time, but now an obvious relic. A team of intelligence specialists was there. They snapped to attention when they saw the general approach.

"What did we kill it with?" Peng asked.

"We didn't, Comrade General. They abandoned it after firing fifteen cannon shots and about three hundred machine gun rounds. They didn't even destroy it before we captured it," the intelligence captain reported, waving the general down the tank hatch. "It's safe. We checked for b.o.o.by traps."

Peng climbed down. He saw what appeared to be a comfortable small barracks, sh.e.l.l storage for their big tank gun, ample rounds for their two machine guns. There were empty rounds for both types of guns on the floor, along with wrappers for field rations. It appeared to be a comfortable position, with bunks, shower, toilet, and plenty of food storage. Something worth fighting for, the general thought. "How did they leave?" Peng asked.

"This way," the young captain said, leading him north into the tunnel. "You see, the Russians planned for everything." The tunnel led under the crest of the hill to a covered parking pad for-probably for a BTR, it looked like, confirmed by the wheel tracks on the ground immediately off the concrete pad.

"How long did they hold?"

"We took the place just less than three hours after our initial bombardment. So, we had infantry surrounding the main gun emplacement, and soon thereafter, they ran away," the captain told his army commander.

"I see. Good work by our a.s.sault infantry." Then Peng saw that Colonel Wa had brought his command track over the hill to the end of the escape tunnel, allowing him to hop right aboard.

"Now what?" Wa asked.

"I want to see what we did to their artillery support positions."

Wa nodded and relayed the orders to the track commander. That took fifteen minutes of bouncing and jostling. The fifteen heavy guns were still there, though the two Peng pa.s.sed had been knocked over and destroyed by counter-battery fire. The position they visited was mainly intact, though a number of rockets had fallen close aboard, near enough that three bodies were still lying there untended next to their guns, the bodies surrounded by sticky pools of mainly dried blood. More men had survived, probably. Close to each gun was a two-meter-deep narrow trench lined with concrete that the bombardment hadn't done more than chip. Close by also was a large ammo-storage bunker with rails on which to move the sh.e.l.ls and propellant charges to the guns. The door was open.

"How many rounds did they get off?" he asked.

"No more than ten," another intelligence officer, this one a major, replied. "Our counter-battery fire was superb here. The Russian battery was fifteen guns, total. One of them got off twenty shots, but that was all. We had them out of action in less than ten minutes. The artillery-tracker radars worked brilliantly, Comrade General."

Peng nodded agreement. "So it would appear. This emplacement would have been fine twenty or thirty years ago-good protection for the gunners and a fine supply of sh.e.l.ls, but they did not antic.i.p.ate an enemy with the ability to pinpoint their guns so rapidly. If it stands still, Wa, you can kill it." Peng looked around. "Still, the engineers who sited this position and the other one, they were good. It's just that this sort of thing is out of date. What were our total casualties?"

"Killed, three hundred fifty, thereabouts. Wounded, six hundred twenty," operations replied. "It was not exactly cheap, but less than we expected. If the Russians had stood and fought, it could have been far worse."

"Why did they run so soon?" Peng asked. "Do we know?"