Red Metal

CHAPTER 55

President of the United States Jonathan Henry hung up the phone, placing it back on the cradle on the Resolute desk, which dominated the Oval Office. He then breathed out a slow sigh of relief.

He’d done it. He’d bought his forces some time.

The call to the Taiwanese president had been masterful in its subtext. Henry was friendly but persuasive, at once encouraging and supportive as well as faintly threatening while maintaining plausible deniability of being so.

He’d explained that he had been forced to redirect a carrier battle group that had been steaming toward Taiwan. Right now it was north of Jakarta, Indonesia, but it had just been ordered to turn 180 degrees and race at top speed to the African coast.

Removing this carrier battle group and all its firepower from Asia just at the moment when China was set to invade had been necessary, but it meant America’s response to any Chinese aggression would be weakened.

The Taiwanese president simply inquired as to what he was being asked to do, and Jonathan Henry did not hesitate to extend his request.

“I need you to postpone your elections, just by one month. It’s in your constitution: you can do it in the case of national crisis.”

There was a long silence on the line after the translation was delivered. Finally the Taiwanese president said, “Postponing an election is a dramatic move in a democracy such as the Republic of China. This will make me appear weak to my supporters and enemies alike.”

Henry had a good relationship with the president, and he hoped that would remain the case after he took the gloves off now. “Sir… not as weak as you will look if China conquers your island and puts you up against a wall to be shot.”

The delay in the response this time was much longer than before — so long that Henry continued. “Mr. President, it’s one month. You will take some heat for the decision, I agree, but I truly believe it is in your best interests.”

“And what if your other carrier cannot return in a month? What if your forces are defeated by the Russians?”

To this Henry simply said, “Then God help us both, Mr. President.”

There was no immediate commitment, and Henry put the odds at 50 percent, but within hours the Taiwanese president held a live televised address and postponed the election for thirty days.

The Chinese troopships turned back to ports on the mainland within hours. The soldiers had been at sea for months; conditions were miserable, and this bought them some time as well.

Henry was pleased with what he’d done, but geography and math were not in America’s favor. The USS John Warner, tracking the Russian-Iranian flotilla in the Gulf of Aden, sent a flash message that the enemy ships had turned shortly after shooting down the B-1B Lancers, and they now appeared to be heading to port, not in Mombasa, but in Djibouti City. This would take nearly a day off their time on the water, and hinder the West from targeting them again from the air.

The Pentagon quickly calculated it would take the Russians two full days to get from Djibouti to southern Kenya. The Marines heading to the mine at Mrima Hill on board the USS Boxer would get there first, but they would be seriously outgunned and outmanned.

The carrier battle group on the way to the Marines’ rescue, on the other hand, needed a full three and a half days to get close enough to begin air ops in Kenya.

No, Henry realized. If the Marines raced across the ocean and then up to Mrima Hill, they would have just enough time to dig in. And then, for at least an entire day, the Marines would be on their own as Boris Lazar attacked.

The battle around the Old Town of Wrocław was finally over, but Paulina Tobiasz could still hear explosions off to the east and northeast. The fighting moved farther and farther away each minute, and this was comforting, but the occasional sounds of fighter aircraft over the city were much less so.

She’d been involved in three more brief engagements since she’d fired from the window of the office building next to the town hall, each time when retreating Russian scout cars had raced back through Market Square, alone and frantic to get away from the attack. She hadn’t destroyed another vehicle, but she’d fired her RPG at a group of dismounts fleeing a downed GAZ Tigr while a dozen AKs simultaneously opened up on the young men, and she felt reasonably certain her rocket killed at least one or two of them.

Only now, after nine in the evening, did the Polish Land Forces move through the wrecked streets of the Old Town and declare over loudspeakers that the danger had passed, other than continued potential for Russian aerial attacks. Paulina left her position and crossed the road between the city hall and the bank, walking through the smoke and stench and utter chaos. She’d been handed a radio by a section commander of the militia, and on it she was told the militia was to be picked up by school buses in the next hour. But she’d left her purple backpack with her personal belongings in it at her initial fighting position in the bank, and she needed to go back and retrieve it and whoever remained, if anyone did, from her small squad.

Fires burned all around, smoke and the smell of burned rubber choked her, and she had to stop suddenly as an ambulance raced past along the sidewalk to get around the wreckage of a Tigr utility vehicle lying on its side.

There were bodies in the street; she hadn’t been counting but she’d passed two dozen at least. Some dead Russian soldiers, their burned skin black, more than a few with appendages missing.

She walked past a handsome Polish soldier in the uniform of a special forces sergeant, slumped against the wall on the sidewalk. His positioning made it appear as if he were sleeping, but Paulina could see death in his pallid face.

It wasn’t until she was halfway up the stairs to the bank that she remembered the girl she’d met just before the battle began. She wondered if she’d made it, but from the broken masonry and smoke-filled hallway of the bank offices, she thought the chances were slim.

She entered the room in the corner and saw bloody handprints on the wall. The windows that looked out to the town hall were blown in, office furniture smoldered still, and a group of militia sat huddled together, although Paulina was too far away to hear any talking.

A pair of bodies lay just inside the door; they were already covered with vinyl ponchos, and from the small boots of one of them she could tell a female corpse lay on its back.

Paulina Tobiasz had no idea why she was still alive when so many around her had died.

Again.

A voice spoke to her from behind.

“Not today.”

She turned. The small dark-haired girl from her team sat there, back against the wall. Her face was black, smeared with weapon grease and smoke and bits of burned paper.

Paulina nodded. “Not today. I’m glad to see you.”

“We lost two.”

Just two? Paulina thought but did not say. “Can you walk?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Good. Let me help you downstairs. Buses are coming to pick us up.”

“Where are we going?”

Paulina shrugged, aggravating her two-day-old shoulder wound yet again. “Don’t know. I guess we chase the Russians.”

French special forces captain Apollo Arc-Blanchette was seated near enough to the front window to look out of the Airbus A400M Atlas as it descended through the clouds. The dark brown rocks of the northern mountains of Djibouti were visible to the west, but in front of them was a seemingly endless expanse of brown flatlands interspersed here and there with tiny villages. It was a wholly different terrain, weather, and population from where he had been fighting just days earlier, and he found it surreal to be in Africa while there was a war going on in Europe.

After his two firefights with Russian Spetsnaz forces, Apollo had been recalled to Brussels and then ordered to attach to the Troupes de Marine, the former colonial troops of the French army, now the French Expeditionary Forces Command in Africa.

The Dragoons were the most eligible and best-trained unit to go to the tiny African nation of Djibouti, now the presumed landing port of the Russian forces that the West felt certain were on their way to the rare-earth mine in Kenya.

A minute before landing, Apollo saw the coastline and the azure waters of the Gulf of Aden, and he scanned until he found what he was looking for. It was the new Chinese naval port facility. The Chinese had a military base here in Djibouti, but they didn’t have much in the way of infantry forces, so Apollo assumed the Russians weren’t worried about landing here.

Plus, China didn’t have much of a stake in this fight. The discovery of the massive rare-earth deposits in Kenya was bad news for China no matter who ran the mine. They’d be forced to pay either the West or the Russians for the metals, and it would drive down prices of their own REMs, so there was no use getting in the middle of a superpower war and picking a side whose victory wouldn’t make much beneficial difference to them but could cause a deepening of hostilities with the other power.

Furthermore, China had its eye fixed firmly on another prize now: Taiwan.

The Airbus bounced once on touchdown; then the pilot hit the brakes and reversed the engines, slowing the big machine. It taxied to the airport’s service apron on the French military side and slowly came to a stop.

The sixty-four men of the French special forces, 13th Parachute Dragoons, stood simultaneously, shouldered their packs and weapons, and began preparing to move the heavier equipment off the big aircraft.

As the hatch opened, Apollo was slammed in the face by the oppressive heat, like a blast from a furnace. He squinted into the brightness, marveling at the fact that he’d been fighting for his life in deep snow less than seventy-two hours earlier.

As he reached for his sunglasses, he was met at the open hatch by the French military attaché, a commandant in rank, which was equivalent to major. Behind him stood an overtly perspiring diplomat in a tropic-weight tan suit. Both men looked harried, panicked.

Apollo stepped up to them.

“Vous êtes Capitaine Arc-Blanchette?” the major asked.

“Oui, mon commandant.”

The commandant extended a hand with a sealed file in it. “Your orders. I am not authorized to talk to you about the contents. Now, get your men and their gear off the plane, because we need to get on. We’ve been ordered to evacuate all consular personnel immediately.” The commandant gestured outside, and through the open hatch Apollo saw a long line of civilians, all sweating profusely and carrying their possessions in backpacks and roller luggage. They poured across the tarmac toward the aircraft, jostling one another in the process.

Apollo turned to the cabin, and loudly ordered his men to get their gear and get off as quickly as possible. Before they hit the bottom of the ramp, several men tried to squeeze around Apollo’s heavily laden troopers.

They were unsuccessful.

Once on the tarmac, Apollo pulled his men off to the side and out of the way. Here Sergent-Chef Dariel called them to order. When the men were at attention, Dariel saluted Apollo, who returned the salute. Dariel then gave the booming command to pivot to the right and marched the men in as sharp a column as they could maintain, given the heavy bags, right past the scrum of French civilians.

The commandant remained at Apollo’s side. “Thank you, Captain. It’s been a hell of a day. Two ladies threatened me this morning. One hit me with her bag across the face.” He pointed to a large red welt; clearly the bag had a metal buckle. “The other was the wife of an oil CEO. Apparently she knows the prime minister’s wife pretty well. At least, that’s what I understand after the four phone calls I received from Paris.”

Apollo saluted the superior officer, uninterested in the man’s situation. He had his own issues to concern himself with, and he prioritized them higher than this man’s getting hit with a handbag.

He turned to the diplomat. “I might ask you, sir: Do you know a man named Pascal Arc-Blanchette?”

“Yes, I know him. He’s not here. He was told he could leave, but he didn’t show up at the airport, and we’re not waiting around.”

“He’s my father. I just want to know if he’s reachable via mobile phone.”

“I don’t know, young man. Call him and see. But word is — and you didn’t hear this from me, Capitaine—that the Russians have been hacking into the cell networks. They have been more unreliable than ever, and sometimes you can hear strange clicks on the line.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Apollo.

Both the diplomat and the commandant left the Dragoons behind as they rushed toward the aircraft stairs, eager to get themselves on the turnaround flight to France.

The flotilla of Russian and Iranian warships and the remaining commercial cargo and fuel haulers arrived in port in Djibouti City at eight a.m.

While the frigates patrolled the mouth of the harbor, the other ships docked so they could off-load their men, fuel, and stores.

By nine the off-loading of Iranian transport and cargo containers was going smoothly. Colonel General Lazar watched from the pier side, flanked by Colonel Kir, as the huge cargo crane swept back on board the big Iranian vessel in front of them and then lowered its boom and began unspooling its braided steel cable.

The Iranians were particularly harsh to the Djiboutian dockworkers, working them on double-quick time, presumably to impress their Russian leadership. Shouts in Arabic, French, Farsi, and English echoed across the water in the bustling Djiboutian industrial harbor. The Iranian naval personnel now seemed bent on meeting the off-loading deadline they had promised.

Lazar watched the crane come up from the hold with three BTR-82A armored personnel carriers marked for and guarded by Colonel Borbikov’s Spetsnaz personnel. The vehicles were braced next to one another on the ends of the cables and the strain made the crane’s winches squeal. He was pretty sure they were maxing out the allowable weight to get three off at a time, but the crane held, and moments later it placed them gently on the pier.

Lazar knew that a half dozen nuclear artillery shells would be secured in one of the vehicles, and he tried to determine exactly which one by the number of hulking special forces soldiers guarding the massive machines on the dock. Just behind the two command vehicles tasked to Borbikov, a third BTR was virtually surrounded by Spetsnaz once it was unhooked from the hoists, and Lazar could see Borbikov, still on the ship, looking down at it.

Well, there you are. Borbikov’s nukes, Lazar told himself.

The whole idea of bringing nuclear ordnance to Africa was insane as far as Lazar was concerned. He understood that it would be an important bargaining chip once he took the mines, a way to get the rest of the world to hesitate before making any attempt to retake Mrima Hill for fear of causing the Russians to fire on approaching forces at distance — or, worse from an economic standpoint, to set fuses and vacate the area, leaving behind nuclear devastation that would render the entire mine unusable for centuries.

But Lazar was a conventional soldier, and he did not like this escalation from his side, because he suspected that it would lead only to an escalation from the other side.

Lazar told himself for the hundredth time in the past four months that he must be successful in taking and holding the mine so that there would never be any detonation that could start a full-scale nuclear war.

The general’s own BTR command-and-control vehicles came out of the hold next. Unlike the fighting variant of BTR, which carried troops and a 30mm cannon, Lazar’s C2 variant had an extendable communications mast and an array of antennas. Without satellite phones or a spot to set up a long-wire high-frequency radio, he would be able to talk to his own brigade for a limited time, but he would feel immeasurably more comfortable once aboard, on the move, and surrounded by his maps, with Colonel Kir directing traffic. They would stop periodically to throw up the bigger antennas, and about halfway through their drive south they’d get satellite comms up again and begin making regular reports back to the Kremlin.

Lazar signaled to Colonel Kir to mount up and take the three vehicles to the staging area. The general had decided to walk instead. He would be cramped in the BTR on the drive south to Kenya, and he felt the walk might be his last stroll for a while.

Along the way, he spoke with pockets of Russian soldiers marching in platoons toward the head of the pier. Stretching his legs and chatting with the boys raised his spirits. He hailed familiar faces as he went and received a few cheers in response. With a smile on his face, he reached the end of the pier and spotted Kir and the assembling troops and lines of vehicles. They were about halfway done; in another few hours they’d be fully off-loaded.