Fortunes of War

10

When he was maneuvering to consolidate his power, Aleksandr Kalugin dwelled for a dark moment on Marshal Ivan Samsonov, the army chief of staff. The two men were opposites in every way. Kalugin loved money above all things, had no scruples that anyone had ever been able to detect, and never told the truth if a lie would serve, even for a little while. Samsonov, on the other hand, had spent his adult life in uniform and seemed to embody the military virtues. He was honest, courageous, patriotic, and, amazingly, embedded as he was in a bureaucracy that fed on half-truths and innuendo, boldly frank. Ivan Sam-sonov was universally regarded as a soldier’s soldier. Pondering these things, Kalugin decided he would sleep better at night if Samsonov did not have the armed forces at his beck and call. He had Samsonov quietly arrested, shot, and buried. With that unpleasantness behind him, Kalugin faced his next problem: whom to put in Samsonov’s place. The invasion of Siberia had certainly been a grand political opportunity for Kalugin, but he knew that even a dictator must have military victories in order to survive. He needed an accomplished soldier to win those victories, one who could and would save Russia, yet a man in debt to Kalugin for his place. After the nation was saved, well, if necessary, the hero could go into the ground beside Samsonov. Until then … Kalugin pretended to fret the choice for days while the Japanese army marched ever deeper into Siberia. He had already decided to name the man whom Samsonov had replaced, Marshal Oleg Stolypin, but the outpouring of raw patriotism occurring in Russia just then made it seem politic to remain quiet. Since the collapse of communism in 1991, the national scene had too often reflected the public mood: rancor, acrimony, hardball politics, charges and countercharges resulting in political deadlock, which made it impossible for any group to govern. The politicians bickered and postured and clawed at one another while the nation rotted. Until now. At last the Russian people had an enemy they could unite against.

Kalugin thought the moment sublime. He savored it. He was the absolute master of Russia. None opposed him or even dreamed of doing so. All looked to him to save the nation. Unfortunately, the euphoria would eventually wear off. Sooner or later people would want action. One evening, Kalugin sent a car to Stolypin’s dacha in the Lenin Hills to bring the old soldier to the Kremlin. “I have sent for you,” he told the retired officer when he walked into the president’s office, “because Russia needs you.” Stolypin was escorted by several members of Kalugin’s private security force, men he paid personally who did not work for any government agency. The security people withdrew, reluctantly. They had searched the former soldier from head to toe, looking for weapons, contraband, letters from people in prison, anything. The hallways outside were filled with armed guards, men personally loyal to Kalugin because he had been feeding them and their families for almost twenty years. They were also in the courtyard outside the window, on the roofs across the street. Kalugin was taking no chances. Now the president offered the old man hot tea. Stolypin had retired from the army before Kalugin won the presidency, so they had never worked together, although they had a nodding acquaintance from parties and official functions. The marshal was in his early seventies. He had short, white hair and thick peasant’s hands. He was stolid, too, like a peasant, and as he sipped his tea, he looked around the president’s office vacantly, without interest. “Tell me frankly,” Kalugin said, “what we must do to defeat the Japanese in Siberia.”

“I don’t know that we can,” the old man replied, then sipped more tea. “The draft laws have not been enforced for years; the logistics system has collapsed; weapons procurement has stopped … Baldly, Mr. President, we have no army … No army, no NAVY, no air force.”

“If we spend the summer and fall building an army, can we not win when the Japanese are buried under a Siberian winter?”

“I am not sanguine. Japan is a rich nation. They can supply their forces by air. We will be the ones most hindered by winter.”

“Come, come, Marshal,” Kalugin scoffed. “The Russian man is tough, able to endure great hardships. Winter is the Russian season.”

“In another age, Mr. President, winter was a large battalion. It ruined the French, the Poles, and the Germans. The world has changed since then. Japan is physically closer to the Siberian oil fields than we are. By winter they will be comfortably established, well dug in. Russia will have to mobilize, put the entire economy on a war footing, like we did during World War Two. Even then, we may not win.”

“Enoughst” Kalugin roared. “Enough of this defeatism! I will not hear it. I am the guardian of holy Mother Russia. We will defend her to the very last drop of Russian blood.”

Stolypin shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Mr. President, everything we do must be based on the hard realities. We must work with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. The bitter truth is that the armed forces are in the same condition as the rest of Russia. It will take time to change that.”

Kalugin rapped his knuckles on the desk. “Ask Samsonov,” Stolypin said. “Get his opinion.”

“What is your advice?” Kalugin said, his knuckle poised above the desk. “Negotiate the best deal possible with the Japanese— buy time. Rebuild the army. When we are strong enough, drive them into the sea.”

Kalugin made a gesture of dismissal. “That course is politically impossible. By all appearances, we would be compromising with aggression. The people would never stand for it.”

“Mr. President, you asked for a professional opinion and I have given it. Building an army will take time.”

“Nothing can be done in the interim?”

“We can use small units, bleed the Japanese where we can without excessive cost. However, we must ensure that we do not squander assets that we will need to win the victory later.”

“We must do more. More than pinpricks.” Kalugin’s face had a hard, unyielding look. Stolypin shifted his feet. He cleared his throat, sipped tea, and sized up the politician in the tailored gray Italian suit seated behind the desk. “What does Marshal Samsonov say?” he asked finally. “Why isn’t he here?”

“He’s dead. Tragically. A heart attack, two nights ago. We have not announced it yet … The people put such faith in him.”

Stolypin grimaced. “A good man, the very best. Ah well, death comes for us all.” He sighed. After a bit, he asked, “Who is to replace him?”

“Y.”

Stolypin was genuinely surprised.

“I’m too old, too tired. You need a young man full of fire. He will need to weld together an army, which will not be a small task.”

“I am giving you the responsibility, Marshal,” Kalugin said crisply. “Your country needs you.”

“Can we get foreign help? Military help?”

“We are working on that.”

“The military protocol with the United States — will they send troops?

Equipment? Fuel? Food? Weapons? God knows, we need everything we can get.”

“They are offering a squadron of planes.”

“A squadron?” Stolypin thundered. He sprang from his chair with a vigor that surprised Kalugin, then paced back and forth. “A squadron! They promised to come to our aid if we destroyed our nuclear weapons. So we did. Fools that we were, we believed their lies.”

He stopped in front of a picture of Stalin hanging over a fireplace and stood staring at it. “At least some of the politicians believed them.”

“You didn’t?”

“Do you have any vodka for this tea?”

“Yes.” Kalugin reached into the lower reaches of his desk for a bottle and poured a shot into Stolypin’s tea. Stolypin sipped the mixture. “I didn’t believe any of it, Mr. President. The Americans always act in America’s best interests, just as we always act in Russia’s best interests. They made a promise, just a promise, written on good paper and signed with good ink and worth maybe ten rubles at a curio shop. So I acted in Russia’s best interests. I secreted ten warheads, kept them back so they were not destroyed. The last time I saw Samsonov, he said we still have them.”

Kalugin couldn’t believe his ears. “We still have nuclear weapons?”

“Ten.”

“Only ten?”

“Only? We had to lie and cheat to keep ten.”

Kalugin was trying to comprehend the enormity of this revelation. “Where are the weapons?” he asked after a bit. “Mr. President, they are at Trojan Island.”

“I am not familiar with the place.”

“Trojan Island is an extinct cone-shaped volcano near the Kuril Strait. Although the island is fairly small, the volcano reaches up over two thousand meters, so it is almost always shrouded in clouds, which kept it hidden from satellite photography when we built the base. The nearby waters are deep, ice-free year-round, and there is good access to the Pacific. For these reasons, we built a submarine base there twenty years ago, a base that can only be entered underwater. It is similar to the base at Bolshaya Litsa, on the Kola Peninsula.”

“Do the Japanese know of this place?”

“I would be amazed if they did, sir. The base was officially abandoned when the last of the boomer boats were scrapped. We hid the warheads there for just that reason.”

“Nuclear weapons,” Kalugin mused, his eyelids reducing his eyes to mere slits. “The use of nuclear weapons involves huge, incalculable risks,” Sto-lypin said. “That road is unknown. We devoted much thought to pondering where it might lead years ago, when we had such weapons in quantity.”

“And what were your conclusions?”

“That we would use them only as a last resort, when all else had failed.”

Kalugin merely grunted. He was deep in thought. Stolypin dropped into a chair, helped himself to more vodka and tea. Kalugin grinned wolfishly. “Marshal Stolypin, let us drink to Russia. You have answered my prayers, and saved your country.”

“God saves Russia, Mr. President,” Stolypin replied. “He even saved Russia from the Communists, although He took his time with the Reds. Let us pray that He can save Russia one more time.”

Several minutes later Kalugin asked, “Are you a believer?”

“I believe in Russia, sir. So does God.”

“You are in charge. Fight them. Give me some victories.”

“I will use what we have,” Stolypin said sourly, “which is very little. If you expect a furious battle that can be filmed for a television spectacle, you had better get someone else, someone who can make an army from street rabble with a snap of his fingers.”

Kalugin was thinking about nuclear weapons. When he came out of his reverie, he heard Stolypin saying, “Political posturing is not part of a soldier’s job.”

Kalugin handed the old marshal an envelope. “Your appointment as chief of staff is in here. I signed it before you arrived. Go to headquarters and take charge. Mobilize our resources, fill the ranks, requisition the guns, clothes, food, fuel, all of it. Do whatever you have to do. Any decrees that you need, draft them and send them to me. Together, we are going to save Russia.”

Stolypin reached for the envelope and opened it.

“It is a tragedy that Samsonov is not here,” the old soldier said gravely as he read the papers. “He was the most brilliant soldier Russia has produced since Georgi Zhukov.”

“I am placing the details in your capable hands, Marshal Stolypin.”

“I have given you the same advice that Samsonov would. I wish to God he were here now.”

“We will feel his loss keenly,” said Kalugin as he walked with Sto-lypin toward the door.

The sky was growing light in the northeast as Jiro Kimura and three wingmen climbed to 34,000 feet on their way to bomb and strafe the airfield at Khabarovsk, at the great bend of the Amur River. Khabarovsk was a rail, highway, and electrical power nerve center, the strategic key to the far eastern sector. When they held Khabarovsk, the Japanese would own the Russian far east, and not before. The troops were within forty miles now, coming up the railroad and highways from Vladivostok.

For the past two days, Jiro and his squadron mates had flown close air support for the advancing troops, bombing, rocketing, and strafing knots of Russian troops that were preparing positions to delay the Japanese advance. This morning, however, the general had sent this flight to Khabarovsk.

It was going to be a perfect morning. Not a cloud anywhere. To the northeast the rising sun revealed the pure deep blue of the sky and the va/s of the endless green Siberian landscape. From 34,000 feet none of man’s engineering projects were visible as the low-angle sunlight flooded the land in starkly contrasting light and shadow. When the sun got a little higher, all one would see from horizon to horizon would be green land under an endless blue sky.

Jiro was flying three or four flights a day, every day. The previous afternoon his plane had needed unexpected maintenance, and he had fallen asleep in the briefing room, after lying down on the floor with his flight gear as a pillow. He was constantly exhausted and always on the verge of sleep.

Some of his comrades were disappointed that the Russians had suddenly withdrawn their airplanes. Jiro had eleven kills when the Russians vanished from the sky, ceding air superiority. One still had to stay alert for possible enemy aircraft, of course, but they just weren’t there.

Although the Russians on the ground felt free to shoot like wild men with everything they had, they rarely hit anyone. The Japanese planes stayed out of the light AAA envelope except when actually delivering ordnance. Rear-quarter heat-seekers would also have been a problem if they stayed near the ground for very long, so they didn’t.

The Japanese had lost only two Zeroes at this stage of the war. One pilot crashed and died while making an approach to Vladivostok as evening fog rolled in. Another had a total electrical failure and lost his wingmen while he busied himself in the cockpit pulling circuit breakers and trying to reset alternators. He and his flight had been on their way to Nikolayevsk, at the mouth of the Amur, when the failure occurred. The luckless pilot never found the city or the base. He crashed in the boondocks a hundred miles northwest of Nikolayevsk when his fuel was exhausted. Fortunately a satellite picked up the plane’s battery-powered emergency beeper after the pilot ejected, and a helicopter rescued him the next day.

Jiro retarded his throttles and began his letdown eighty miles from Khabarovsk. The four war planes drifted apart into a combat spread. Jiro and his wingman, Sasai, were ahead and to the right, Ota and Miura behind and to the left. Ota dropped farther back so that he could swing right and follow the first flight if the ground topography required it.

The shadows on the ground were still dark, impenetrable. Jiro looked at his watch. In eight minutes they would arrive at the target, come out of the rising sun. It would be a splendid tactic, if the sun rose on schedule.

He swung farther east to give God another minute or two with the sun.

“Blue Leader, this is Control.” The radio was scrambled, of course, and gave a beep before and after the words.

Jiro pushed his mike button, waited for the beep, then said, “Control, Blue Leader, go ahead.”

“We believe a plane has just taken off from your target. It is headed three zero zero degrees, ten miles northwest, climbing. Please intercept.”

“Wilco.”

Jiro looked around at Sasai. He pointed toward Ota, then jerked his thumb. Sasai nodded vigorously, then slipped aft and away.

Jiro turned left, advanced his throttles, and pulled his machine into a slight climb. He settled on a course of 275, which should allow him to intercept. Now he pushed buttons on the computer display in front of him. When he was satisfied, he tickled the radar. It swept once. There was the plane. Thirty-four nautical miles away, interception course 278 degrees. He turned to that heading and reset his armament panel. He had been set up to strafe, then shoot rockets. Now he armed the two heat-seeking Sidewinder missiles that the Zero always carried, one on each wingtip. He tripped the radar sweep again. Thirty-one miles. The enemy plane was accelerating nicely, headed almost straight away from Jiro, who was now committed to a stern-quarter approach. He eyed his fuel gauges, then pushed the throttle farther forward. The Zero slid through the sonic barrier without a buffet or bump. With the throttles all the way forward, but without using his afterburners, the Zero quickly accelerated to Mach 1.3. Jiro decided to risk another sweep. Twenty-four miles. He was at ten thousand feet now, so he leveled there. He wanted the other plane above him, against the dark background of the western sky. Far below, out to the left, he could see a faint ribbon of light wandering off to the northwest. That would be the Amur River, flowing southeast to Khabarovsk. On the far side was Manchuria. From Khabarovsk, the river flowed northeast to the Sea of Okhotsk. It was always frozen solid in winter. He was still fifteen miles from the bogey when he first saw it, a spot of silver reflecting the rising sun, against the dark of the fading night. It’s a big plane, he thought. A transport!

He checked his ECM panel as the implications of that fact sunk in. The panel was dark. Because you never really trust an electronic device, Jiro turned in his seat and looked carefully about him, concentrating on the rear quadrants. Empty sky, everywhere. A transport — defenseless. He heard Ota tell Control that he was attacking the primary target, and he heard Control acknowledge. Jiro closed quickly on the transport from dead astern. When it was no more than four miles ahead, Jiro retarded his throttles. The gap between the planes continued to close as he coasted up on it. The bogey was a four-engine transport, very similar to an old Boeing 707, with the engines in pods on the wings, climbing at full power, just now it was passing through fifteen thousand feet.

Jiro stabilized a few hundred yards aft, directly behind, well below the transport’s wash. He sat looking at it for what seemed like a long, long time, unsure of what to do. Actually the time was less than a minute, but it seemed longer to Jiro. He slid out to the right, so he could see the side of the plane and the tail, illuminated by the rising sun. Then he dropped back into trail. Finally he keyed the mike. After the beep, he spoke. The hoarseness of his voice surprised him. “Control, Blue Leader.”

“Go ahead, Blue Leader.”

“This bogey you wanted investigated. It’s an airliner — four-engines, silver. Lots of windows. Aeroflot markings.”

“Wait.”

Silence, broken only by Jiro sucking on his oxygen, with the background hum of the engines. He eased up and under the transport; the roar of the Russian’s engines became audible. He could just feel a bit of the rumble of the air disturbed by the big plane’s passage, its wash. He dropped down a bit; the ride smoothed and the Russian’s engine noise faded. “Ah, Blue Leader,” Control said. “Destroy the bogey and RTB.”

Jiro sat looking at the airliner. They were climbing through twenty thousand feet now. “Blue Leader, this is Control. Did you copy? Destroy the bogey and return to base.” The mission controller was in Japan, in a basement at the defense ministry probably, staring at his computer screens. The reason his voice sounded so clear and strong on the radio was because the radio signal was directed at a satellite, which rebroadcast it. Jiro’s eyes flicked around the cockpit, taking in the various displays and switches. He took off his oxygen mask and rubbed his face furiously, then put the mask back on. “Blue Leader, Control …”

Well, there was nothing to be gained by prolonging this. “Control, Blue Leader.”

“Did you copy, Blue Leader?”

“Understand you want me to destroy this airliner and return to base.”

“Destroy the bogey, Blue Leader. Report bogey destroyed.”

“Control, this thing’s an airliner. Tell me that you understand that this bogey is an Aeroflot airliner.”

Silence. He was being grossly insubordinate. He could just imagine the clenched jaws of the senior officers. Well, hell, if they didn’t like it, they could cashier him, send him back to Japan. “Blue Leader, Control. We understand the bogey has Aeroflot markings. You are hereby ordered to destroy it. Acknowledge.”

“I copy.”

He retarded the throttle, let the airliner pull ahead. The distance began to grow: five hundred yards, a thousand, fifteen hundred. Jiro flicked a switch on the throttle to select the left Sidewinder. He pulled the nose up, put the dot in the center of the HUD directly on the airliner. The Sidewinder growled: It had locked on one of the big plane’s engines. Jiro squeezed the trigger on the stick. The Sidewinder leapt off the rail and shot forward. Straight as a bullet it flew across the gap toward the four-engined monster. A puff of smoke. A hit: the inboard left engine. He sat there watching as the airliner’s engine began trailing smoke. Now the big silver plane began to move back toward him, which was an optical illusion. Actually, it was slowing and he was creeping up on it. He retarded his throttles, cracked the speed brakes. “Fuck.” Jiro said the word in English. “Fuck? Now he screamed it. Furious, he selected the right Sidewinder, got the tone, then squeezed it off. It impacted one of the transport’s right engines: another little flash. The huge silver plane wasn’t climbing anymore. Its left wing came down, twenty…, now thirty degrees; the nose dropped. It began a turn back toward Khabarovsk. “Fall, you Russian bastard,” Jiro whispered. He opened his speed brakes to the stops and dropped his left wing, cutting across the turn, closing the distance. He was out to the left now, in plain view of the pilots if they only took the time to look this way. The airliner’s left engine was visibly on fire. No, the wing was burning. Shrapnel from the missile’s warhead must have punctured the wing tank, and jet fuel was burning in the slipstream. The big silver plane’s angle of bank was at least sixty degrees now, its nose down ten degrees.

It was then that Jiro realized that the big plane was out of control. Perhaps the controls had been damaged by the missile shrapnel or the fire. He pulled away, got his nose level, and watched the silver plane spiral down into the early-morning gloom. Down, down, down … miles to fall … Time seemed to stand still. The airliner got smaller and smaller. The Russian plane was just a tiny silver dot, almost lost from view, when its flight ended in a flash, a tiny smear of fire amid the morning shadows. That was all. A splash of fire, and they were gone. Jiro pointed the nose of his plane south, toward Vladivostok. He pushed the throttles forward and let the nose rise into a climb. “Control, Blue Leader …”

“Blue Leader, Control, go ahead with your report.”

After an evening of cogitation, Aleksandr Kalugin decided to deliver an ultimatum to Japan threatening nuclear holocaust. Since he had bombs and Japan didn’t, he could see no good reason why he should not put the bombs in play. He was not committing himself to any specific course of action, merely threatening one. He called in Danilov, the foreign minister, and had him draft the ultimatum. Two hours later, he looked the document over carefully as Danilov sat on the edge of his seat, his hands folded in his lap. Danilov was nearly seventy years old. He had spent his adult life as a professional diplomat. Never had he seen a Soviet or Russian government seriously weigh the use of nuclear weapons. Now, to his horror, Kalugin was threatening their use without even discussing the matter with his ministers. Is this where perestroika and democracy lead? To nuclear war?

“Sir, Japan may not withdraw from Siberia.”

Kalugin finished the paragraph he was reading before he looked at Danilov. “They might not.”

“They may not believe this ultimatum.”

“What is your point?”

“We have repeatedly assured the world that our nuclear weapons were destroyed. Now, by implication, we are admitting that those statements were not true.” Kalugin said nothing. He merely stared at the foreign minister, who felt his skin crawl. “Japan may believe that we do not have any weapons remaining,” the minister observed, “in which case they will disregard this ultimatum.” Kalugin went back to the draft document. A sunbeam peeped into the room between the drapes on the high window behind the president, who sat reading, his head lowered. He might nuke the Japanese, Danilov thought, suddenly sure that the ultimatum was not an idle threat. If they don’t pull out of Siberia, Kalugin might really do it.