Red Metal

CHAPTER 42

Three hours after stopping in Stuttgart, General Sabaneyev moved himself and his headquarters element from the covert Red Blizzard 1 Strizh train over to Red Blizzard 2, the unmasked, overt attack train that had followed along a few hours behind the assault.

Red Blizzard 2 was similar to the assault train that led the way into Stuttgart in many regards, but it was bigger and able to pack a more powerful punch. A military train, it offered no pretense of camouflage or stealth. Relying on the strength of its arsenal of defensive and offensive weapons, it wasn’t looking to hide and could destroy most anything thrown at it.

With a total of fifty-eight railcars of different types, the train was loosely divided into thirds. One-third of the cars was filled with logistic items, like ammunition and fuel to resupply the thirsty tanks, Bumerangs, scout vehicles, and so on. Another third of the train was set up for command and control and troop transportation. Much like the assault train, the C2 had a battle-control detachment with a full communication suite including satellite and radio, antiair missiles, multiple-launch rocket systems, and another set of 120mm mortars.

The last third contained a fully mechanized armor battalion, bringing more fight to the assault task force should Dryagin need it.

It had been a gamble to send the overt combat train in just hours behind the trailing edge of the main invasion force, but Borbikov had counted on the Poles and the Germans in the area where the invasion already passed to be shell-shocked and disoriented, and his gamble had paid off. Red Blizzard 2 would serve as the center of the Russian raiding force for the rest of this invasion.

An hour after moving to the new train, Eduard Sabaneyev stood in a troop transport car looking over a group of twenty: nineteen men and one woman. They were seated or lying on the floor next to the wall; most were handcuffed behind their backs, but a few were wounded and left unrestrained.

These were his captives.

The attack on AFRICOM had taken less than an hour, a fourth of the time Borbikov had allotted for it. The Americans had relied too heavily on their communications systems and satellites giving them real-time pictures. With hoods over their eyes, they were bumbling fools, Sabaneyev had noted to subordinates when the fighting was over. He’d fought foes in the basements and rubble of Chechnya more stalwart and competent than what he’d faced from NATO in the past thirty-six hours.

He looked over a wide mix of uniforms and ranks on the prisoners: U.S. and German army and air force, over a dozen colonels and four general officers, including the deputy commander of AFRICOM.

Russian soldiers guarded the twenty, but Sabaneyev could see there was no fight in this group of officers. Most of the prisoners looked dazed by the power and shock of the Russian lightning raid. Russian doctors worked over the wounded, administering medicine and bandages and assessing which of the captives would need to have shrapnel removed or bones set. The deputy commander of AFRICOM was the highest prize and he received the most ardent medical attention, although the injuries to his back and shoulder were not grave.

Still, he would be taken into the train’s surgical suite and sewn up first.

Eight Russian soldiers also sat in the passenger cars, bandaged and bleeding from their own various wounds. They’d have to wait on treatment, because the prisoners were more valuable than a few kids from the farms around Moscow and Yaroslavl’ and Yekaterinburg.

Red Blizzard 1 had to be abandoned here in Stuttgart. It was no longer practical, and turning two trains around would require extensive labor and time that didn’t figure into their blitz assault into and back out of Germany. Besides, their attack had been successful and they didn’t need to remain covert any longer.

Red Blizzard 1 had been taken to a set of tracks east of the Hauptbahnhof along Rosensteinstrasse, carefully loaded with explosives, and destroyed in a ball of fire.

Sabaneyev hated to see it go, but he knew Red Blizzard 2 held everything he needed to get home, from fuel to ammo to fire support. In fact, the second train had more antiair missiles and mortar systems than the assault train. The Russian flag had been painted on the side just an hour earlier, and its dark camouflage pattern gave it a potent and ominous appearance.

The general turned away from his prisoners without a word, and headed for the headquarters car. He stepped to a window and looked outside.

The train was parked near the Hauptbahnhof, and central Stuttgart was quiet in the afternoon gloom. He saw Russian soldiers and armor around the station providing a protective security cordon for him and his train, but he saw no German citizens or soldiers anywhere. They’d cleared the streets quickly when the fighting had begun this morning, and they’d huddled in their homes and apartments throughout the day.

Smoke hung in the air still, black just below the low gray clouds.

The general stood with his hands on his hips for several minutes, impatiently waiting for word from Dryagin. The colonel had directed part of his attack element to Ramstein Air Base and a few smaller airfields in the area. They would crater the runways to prevent landings and destroy any combat aircraft they could find, and then they would return to Stuttgart. The general was happy to degrade NATO further. It would hamper the West in their ability to launch any potential counterattack, and would only serve to provide more proof to NATO that Russia was in the driver’s seat in this conflict, which would help with the negotiations to come.

Finally, Sabaneyev’s aide stepped up to him. “General, Colonel Dryagin reports all objectives met at Ramstein. He has smaller units still prosecuting the attack at other airfields but will begin his return to Stuttgart within the hour. ETA: twenty-one hundred hours.”

“Khorosho,” (“Good”) Sabaneyev said. A feeling of pride washed over him. He’d done it. His war was over, other than the return to Russia.

Now it was up to the politicians and that old goat Boris Lazar.

He walked on through the train to the command car, which he found to be a hive of activity. Soldiers passed into and out of the operations center car to the command car, and the antiair missile defense battery men were alert at their radar screens, reviewing the status of each of their missiles. The fire support officers had all their firing batteries listed as “green” and ready on the coordination boards posted in the middle of the car.

General Sabaneyev walked over to the communications officer, who was seated in front of the high-frequency radio. The HF could not reach all the way back to Moscow but could certainly reach as far as the Russian headquarters in Belarus.

The officer held up the handset and the general took it.

Sabaneyev yelled out to the room now. “Operations officer? Quiet down the ops center.” The room wasn’t that loud, but he was making a show to get all attention focused on him. The radio transmission he was about to make was important and he wanted everyone listening as he made it.

The officers in the room instantly hushed to low tones and the general began speaking over the radio. “Attack Headquarters, Attack Headquarters, this is Krasnyi Metal force commander. How do you read me?”

After a moment, a crackle and a ping noise came over the speakers. This was the first response, indicating an electronically encrypted transmission was coming through. Soon a distant but audible voice responded: “This is Attack Headquarters, Krasnyi Metal. We are receiving you. Send your transmission.”

Sabaneyev said, “I am now ready to report the raid on the headquarters in Stuttgart has been successful. We have minimal casualties and damage. We have twenty prisoners, including the deputy commander of AFRICOM and much of his staff. Names and ranks of the prisoners will follow this transmission. I am pleased to report we have destroyed all communications systems as well as both AFRICOM and EUCOM headquarters buildings. We continue to attack all tertiary objectives. Those attacks will be complete within the hour. Begin the diplomatic process.”

He smiled as he concluded the transmission, looking around the railcar at his proud headquarters staff.

The reply took several seconds, coming from just inside the Belarusian border. “This is Attack Headquarters. We understand all. All primary objectives met, all secondary objectives met, and you are prosecuting all tertiary targets. We will send the code that Moscow can begin the process for your safe return.”

A cheer roared through the train. None of the prisoners could speak Russian, but those who hadn’t been deafened by the attack well understood the meaning of the jubilant tones of the men.

Whatever the hell had just happened, Russia had won.

General Sabaneyev handed the radio back and walked to the operations officer to confer on the next moves. He wanted to have this train heading east by the time Dryagin made it back to the city. Hopefully the prisoners would serve as sufficient bargaining chips. The Americans could have their people back as long as they allowed his raid forces safe passage back into Belarus and ultimately Russia, and NATO could avoid even more destruction by staying out of their way.

The Kremlin sent the coded message through the one direct Moscow-to-D.C. undersea cable they had left intact for just this purpose. An administrative team had worked day and night to craft the perfect words, taking great care that their English translations could not be misunderstood. They added some of the data from General Sabaneyev’s transmission, the number of prisoners and their names and ranks, so the veracity of their claims of captives would not be in dispute.

The message was lengthy, boisterous, and highly fictionalized. According to the Kremlin, the advance guard force of a massive invasion had made it as far as Stuttgart, but the attack’s progress had been sluggish due to NATO’s combined armor and air forces, so the decision had been made in Moscow to hold the main invasion force in Russia. Claiming the situation to be a stalemate, they offered terms for the Russian withdrawal from Europe, but declared that if their advance guard force was not allowed to return to Belarus unmolested, Russia would press their general invasion of Europe, further imperiling Poland and Germany.

The cable mentioned Western crimes and recent military buildups in Central Europe as the justifications for going to war but nevertheless requested an immediate cessation of hostilities and a return to preinvasion borders.

In the Pentagon the message was met with confusion. First, no massive buildup of Russian forces had been detected before the loss of satellite coverage over western Russia and Belarus. Second, even though the reports from NATO units in the combat area of Poland and Germany were only coming through in a spotty fashion, no one at the Pentagon had the impression that NATO was doing much at all to slow the advance of the probing enemy. So why the hell were the Russians so reluctant to commit their larger forces to battle? They had, after all, caught NATO with its pants down at Christmas, and the great majority of U.S. forces were now in the Pacific.

Many suspected the entire attack had simply been a way for Russia to flex its muscles, to bolster support for the nationalist government domestically, and to weaken the NATO alliance by showing all how ineffective they had become.

But others at the Pentagon drank the Kool-Aid offered by the Kremlin. After all, the talk of a larger Russian invasion had followed their expected pattern of attack: a small but decisive vanguard action, followed by a massive invasion. The Pentagon officials celebrated the fact they’d stopped the Russians even while blind and deaf to their forces in Europe. They praised their local commanders’ quick decision to counterattack, feeling this had given the Russian advance force a bloody nose, one they seemed unable to recover from and continue their intended advance across Europe. It was a “stalemate” victory as the Russian communiqué suggested, to be sure. As far as some generals in the Pentagon were concerned, this proved without a doubt that NATO’s strategy of frontline defense with a massive fly-in retaliatory response to a Russian attack had worked definitively to prevent an all-out war.

It didn’t hurt that this same notion underscored the shortsightedness of years of congressional cuts to European and NATO defense pact budgets. Nearly two decades of fighting in the Middle East and a general lack of belief that Russia was capable or even willing to enter back into armed conflict. It was as if the idea were so remote that the West had placed all its bets against it.

The decision to ultimately accept or reject the cease-fire from the Russians was officially in the hands of NATO, but with the degraded communications infrastructure in Europe and the fact that response forces from America would be necessary to fight off an invasion, NATO leaders in Brussels deferred to the American president.

Privately, not publicly.

President Jonathan Henry sat at the conference table in the White House Situation Room reading the cable for the fourth time. Around him his National Security staff, all well versed in Russia’s proposal, sat quietly while he did so.

When Henry was finished, he rubbed his tired eyes and then went around the table seeking the informed counsel of his advisors. All in the room were incensed about the attack in Germany, and many thought it madness to accept the Russians’ terms, but no one could paint a rosy picture of the United States and NATO continuing the fight while still nearly deaf, dumb, and blind.

The president most wanted to hear from his secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, but he saved them for last. When he finally got to them, to Henry’s surprise both men recommended accepting the cease-fire.

The secretary of defense put the Pentagon’s reasoning clearly: “You accept, Mr. President, and we’ve won. Just like that. You will have personally thwarted a full invasion of Europe. We took a gut punch but prevented a knockout blow, and we delivered a few jabs of our own. Better still, we won while facing war on two fronts with world powers. That’s a win, Mr. President. A big win. We sell it as such and immediately return our focus to containing China. We beef up Europe with our reserves and then draw up some sanctions to impose on Russia — punish them severely. Plus, no one in Congress but the whack jobs is going to fight us for a renewed increase in military spending in the next fiscal year.

“But if you reject the cease-fire, and either Europe is subjected to an invasion of forces we haven’t even identified — or else this attack element that, in a day and a half, made it all the way from Belarus to near the French border… well, then we’ll have to fight a dangerous, bloody campaign that we cannot win quickly or easily. We will lose more American and European lives, and our ability to repel any subsequent Russian attack, should it come, will be degraded.”

The secretary of defense added, “And if we reject the cease-fire, you essentially will be laying down a welcome mat in front of Taiwan for the Chinese to walk on in. They will see that America’s forces are split, and they will know that their time to reabsorb their breakaway state has come.”

Henry pushed back that once communications were fully restored, the media would spend weeks showing the devastation wrought by Russia, and he would look weak for letting them get away with it; but he was promised by everyone in the room, especially the secretary of state, that Russia would be held to account for their crimes.

The secretary of state said, “Anatoly Rivkin threw a Hail Mary to save his regime by attacking Europe. It didn’t work as planned. Let him lick his wounds for a couple of months while we deal with this crisis in Asia, and then we’ll hit him with our economic might. Russia is poor and getting poorer. When we pushed them away from that rare-earth mine in Kenya a few years ago, we started a clock ticking on Rivkin’s political survival, and that clock is winding down, sir.”

The secretary of state then added, “Mr. President, I don’t like letting Russian forces kill our people and then just walk away, but the bigger issue is China, Taiwan, and the stability of our Pacific Rim allies.”

Henry put his head in his hands. “Give me a second, ladies and gentlemen.” Then he sat quietly for over three minutes. His national security advisor started to make another point, but Henry held up his hand, appealing for silence.

Finally he mumbled, “Shit.” Looking up, he addressed the table. “Two adversaries, both world powers, threatening at the exact same time. That’s the angle in all this. Like Hal said, America needs to focus on what happens in Asia next week; we can’t afford to build up to go on the attack in Europe right now.

“I’ll spend the rest of my years in office making certain Russia pays for what they’ve done over the past two days. But we need to show nothing but strength and resolve in the Pacific now to prevent a war. Europe can defend itself. They have NATO. On the other hand… Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, our Pacific partners, don’t have a strong mutual defense treaty like NATO. There’s nothing there to balance the region. SEATO was dissolved years ago.”

The Southeast Asia Treaty Organization had been a diplomatic failure, and that was never clearer than right now.

He stood up and then addressed his secretary of state. “Okay… here’s my decision: Notify Brussels that they should accept the cease-fire and allow the Russian forces currently in Germany safe return to the Belarusian border, under armed escort. They’ll rue the day they decided to fuck with us, but we’ll give them the next couple of weeks to gloat and think they bested us.”

“A wise decision, Mr. President.”

Three hours later, two a.m. Stuttgart time, Colonel General Eduard Sabaneyev received the message from Moscow that the terms had been agreed to and that he should effect his immediate return to neutral Belarus with haste. Colonel Dryagin and his force, now augmented with armor and troops off-loaded from Red Blizzard 1 in Stuttgart before its destruction, started off to the east soon after.

Red Blizzard 2 stayed in Stuttgart long enough to off-load some of the tanks and Bumerangs from the railcars, to further bolster Dryagin’s firepower.

“If the NATO bastards decide to renege on the agreement, it will be in Poland,” he said.

Sabaneyev knew that he needed to get back over the border before America realized that what Lazar was doing thousands of kilometers away was directly related to Russia’s actions in Europe, and the “cease-fire” was really nothing more than a ploy to get Russian forces home with their unequivocal win in Europe before Red Metal entered its final phase.