Arc Light (88 page)

M-113 ambulances and M-88 recovery vehicles were parked in the open along the sides of the road as Chandler's tank rolled by. The wreckage of war grew more stark and fresh the farther they drove, and when night fell the images along the side of the road became shadows to the naked eye or glowed bright green, otherworldly, in the thermal gunsights. By morning, two-and-one-half-ton trucks with canvas ripped and burned bumped along toward the rear on rims in plowed dirt tracks parallel to the main highway. Carcasses of Russian MTU bridge tanks and ZSU 23-4 antiaircraft gun carriers lined the shoulders, the sickly sweet smell of decaying corpses fouling the crisp, cool air. It was the Russian BMPs and BTRs, however, that spooked Chandler most—the personnel carriers presumably filled with their dead cargoes.

There were few live Russians to be seen. Several times they passed columns of prisoners, but there were no civilians. Every village was dark, most windows smashed or boarded shut.

As the day wore on, sounds of fighting had become audible in the distance, like thunder but not random. Soldiers gathered during a maintenance stop to comment on the rumbles and to speculate what they portended, while company first sergeants streamed to the rear in search of hot food for the troops. Crews refueled their vehicles, replacing finicky parts. And, of all things, they turned in their laundry and got clean uniforms. Chandler delivered a
SITREP
, or Situation Report, to the Brigade S-3; a
LOGREP
, or Logistics Report, to the S-1 and the S-4; and then met with Colonel Harkness for a briefing. They were going into Moscow, the colonel said simply. The objectives now were not hills and streams and villages and road junctions, but streets and blocks and city parks.

Chandler twisted back around on his seat, his butt itching and “saddle sore” from the ride. He was roughly in the middle of his task
force's road formation—Bailey half a mile in front, the trailing tank of Charlie Company a half mile behind. The haze on the horizon was becoming visible as individual columns of black smoke clustered around the sites of separate battlefields. That was where they were headed. They were headed into hell.

Chandler called the subordinates on his battalion net and ordered them to halve their formation spread from twenty meters per vehicle to ten. They were too dispersed for ground combat, and they would have to risk getting caught bunched up from the air.

The breeze streamed by at twenty-five miles per hour. They had been lucky mechanically: only two minor breakdowns. They were at about three-quarters fuel, and had full ammunition loads. They needed rest and a hot meal, but Chandler didn't count on getting either.

He twisted around to ensure that the formation was tightening its spacing. When he looked back toward the front, he could clearly see boiling orange flame from the source of one billowing black cloud of smoke, and the first faint and familiar crack of tank cannon echoed across the landscape. He remembered, suddenly, the day that he first rode atop that old M-60 to the tank firing range at Fort Knox so many years before, the sound of tank guns audible in the distance on a hot Kentucky afternoon. The wind chilled Chandler suddenly, and he considered breaking out his field jacket. He had never imagined in his wildest dreams that it would come to this.

Rolling over a small hill and through another desolate village, their highway ahead crossed open brown fields of some sort of farm. The tilled soil had been churned up by the treads of the massive self-propelled artillery pieces that lay in lines on either side of the highway inside of the tennis-ball-yellow streamers fluttering from iron rods demarking the area swept of land mines.
Heavy guns,
Chandler noted, looking at the huge, thick guns pointing toward the gray sky ahead.
Corps-level battery.

As they passed, Chandler looked at the twelve eight-inch howitzers. Mounted on the M-110A2 treads, the guns had been modified since he'd last seen them at Armor School over a decade earlier by the addition of a Kevlar and aluminum Crew Ballistic Shelter covering the previously exposed breech of the gun and its gun crew. Backed up to the rear of each of the guns was a tracked M-548 cargo carrier. A conveyor belt ran out of the cargo carrier and into the Crew Ballistic Shelter.

Chandler watched as they passed gun after gun before he caught sight of the first crewman. When he did, his heart skipped a beat. A soldier was hoisting a vented cloth bag of propellant, with small
disklike bags inside that could be removed to fine-tune the charge, across the open space between the M-548 and the howitzer. The man wore heavy protective clothing, a hood, and a gas mask.

Thomas's eyes roamed from screen to screen in the recently updated E-4B's main conference room. The planes had been long overdue for a technology upgrade, in a day and age in which many home entertainment systems' capabilities were superior, and Congress had, since the nuclear attack, appropriated the necessary funds. Real-time pictures of the Moscow skyline were projected onto one flat, wall-mounted LCD screen, the camera low to the ground across a brown field strewn with antitank obstacles, girders welded together to look like giant jacks from the old child's game. Another shot of the city, a picture from an aerial reconnaissance aircraft under a low gray sky, contrasted starkly with the crystal blue sky and water on the screen next to it, the picture on the latter being of the flight deck of the aircraft carrier
United States
in the north Kara Sea. Small streams of steam from the catapult streaked from its groove down the flight deck toward the stern. The ship had turned into the wind. All was ready.

The door to the conference room opened, and the muted conversations ceased. Even the Vice President on his own aircraft and the RAF general serving as liaison from his Flyingdales bunker in England, whose pictures appeared on a split screen beside each other, looked up at the entering air force officer.

“We've checked all channels, Sir,” the officer said to General Starnes. “We have received no communications from Moscow.”

“Damn!” the President muttered, and Thomas watched as the director of the CIA angrily tossed his control book to be used for Lambert's mission in the growing pile of outdated papers that littered the aircraft's deck behind the chairs of the busy men.

“Bastards,” Fuller said. “He went in under a fuckin' white flag.”

“What are your orders, sir?” General Thomas asked, in the back of his mind hoping for an extension.
We could use the time for preparations,
he reasoned, even though he knew the real reason for his secret urging: his fear of the unknown, of the Bastion.

“Well,” the President said, looking wistfully off into space. “We did everything we could in sending Greg.” He winced, his eyes shutting as his thoughts took him someplace he cared not to be. He shook
his head and said, “It's been well over two hours. You've got your orders, gentlemen. Let's get this thing over with.”

The sound of half a dozen telephones being lifted from their cradles signaled the beginning of the end.

“Son of a bitch!” Lambert shouted as he slammed the pay telephone back down onto its cradle, growing desperate.

“Doesn't work?” the paratroop lieutenant asked in Russian.

“Nyet!”
Lambert shouted, casting his eyes about the streets of the suburbs for another. “Na remont,” he thought.
Everything in Russia is
“na remont”—
out of order.

Just then they heard the eruption of automatic-weapons fire from the direction of the Yauza River, where they had left the main force one block away.

“Let's go!” the lieutenant shouted, and Lambert and the small group ran toward the sound, the paratroopers with weapons raised into the air and skirting the walls of the buildings, Lambert feeling naked and out of place in his suit as he followed at a trot. By the time they worked themselves down the side street to the smoky intersection ahead, the gunfire had ended and Filipov's men rounded up the last of the Russian soldiers from the three-vehicle convoy, two of which were army trucks that had crashed into a kiosk and the wall above the riverbank, and one of which was a limousine whose engine smoldered from under its pockmarked hood in the center of the road. At the next intersection ahead, Lambert saw the reason for the convoy's sudden stop: two BTR-80 armored fighting vehicles with cannon pointed in his direction, pulled out from a side street and blocked their route.

The movement of curtains from several windows on the mid-rise building across the street from the river caught Lambert's eye. Tenants of what must be an apartment building furtively looked down at the scene of combat on the streets below their homes. There were people in most of the windows, Lambert realized; the building must be packed.
What will it be like for them if the attack begins?
the thought occurred to him, and he immediately bolted out into the street to find Filipov from among the busy and agitated paratroopers, his “escorts”—the squad of six soldiers and the lieutenant—hurrying after him.

On the other side of the truck that had slammed into the kiosk,
Lambert saw Filipov, still in full combat gear, standing next to a man in dress uniform having blood dabbed from his forehead and cheek by a medic. To the side, the prisoners from the ambushed convoy stood with hands on their heads—their rifles, packs, and helmets being stacked on the pavement next to Filipov. Lambert ran up to the group.

“Pavel, the phone didn't work,” he shouted in English. “I've
got
to make contact!”

“General Razov,” Filipov said in Russian, “I have the pleasure to introduce to you Mr. Gregory Lambert. Mr. Lambert, General Yuri Razov.”

Greg looked at the familiar face of the man, in his late forties but tanned and hard like an athlete, and shook his hand. “It is a pleasure,” Razov said in English with an accent much heavier than Filipov's.

“My pleasure,” Lambert replied in proper Russian. “General Razov, I am here on a mission of vital importance. May we speak?”

“Proceed,” Razov said as the medic sewed stitches into a cut just above his right eyebrow, the pain causing a flutter of Razov's eyelid but no sign of a wince in his eyes or mouth.

“I am here to offer terms of peace. My country does not wish this war to continue, and this private offer is contingent on a prompt and immediate reply.”

“What are these terms?”

Lambert told him as the medic finished his job, finally taping across the stitches.

“These terms,” Razov said, “are acceptable.”
That's it?
Lambert thought, but then Razov said, “To
me”
completing his sentence. “Unfortunately, as you have seen, I am no longer in a position of authority with our government.”

Lambert's heart raced as he looked at his watch. Two hours and ten minutes had elapsed since he crossed the Russian lines. “There is one more thing. I must get to a radio, or a satellite phone, or something—immediately! Please, you've got to help me.”

Razov and Filipov both stared at Lambert now. “What is it that you are not telling us, Mr. Lambert?” Razov asked.

The words hovered at the edge of Lambert's breath. They were secrets, the most vital military secrets of the war, and he was agitated and could not force himself to decide whether to tell them, whether to trust them.

“Please, you've got to trust me,” Lambert pleaded. Razov hesitated, and then nodded at Filipov, who motioned the unit's radioman over. The paratrooper turned to face away, and Filipov fiddled with the controls on the radio backpack. The squeal and howl
of an electronic maelstrom blanketed the dial. Burping bursts of static through which barely distinguishable sounds of shouted Russian could be heard but not understood. “Jamming,” Filipov said softly as he concentrated.

“Arc Light, Arc Light,” they all heard clearly, in English. Razov and Filipov both shot looks at Lambert.

All at once, a rumble so deep and resonant that it sounded elemental in its source erupted in the far distance—individual, distant thuds forming the ragged conclusion to the unearthly growl. It was a sound that Lambert had never dreamed could be made by any force even in his darkest nightmares.

“Get down!” Filipov shouted as he, Razov, and the hundred-odd paratroopers and prisoners all scattered at once to the shelter of walls and sides of armored vehicles. Lambert was grabbed by his escort, the lieutenant, who hauled him bodily to the side of a stoop of an apartment building. He collapsed into a heap of soldiers who threw themselves for the same cover a split second ahead.

All was quiet save the ragged popping sounds randomly, briskly piercing the calm now from their great distance. All about the street the last movements of the paratroopers ceased as arms folded over their heads and the last legs were drawn into fetal position.

Oh, my God,
Lambert thought.
What in God's name is . . . ?

The world erupted in stunning, hot concussions, tidal waves of air and fire that burst over Lambert and tore at him from the very concrete on which he lay.
It's the end,
Lambert thought as from a thousand windows down the street fell shattered glass, and in one great rain it inundated him. He could feel on his head, neck, and hands the slicing cuts of the tiny shards as the breath seemed kicked from his lungs like a jarring blow on the sports field.

He struggled for breath as he raised his head, seeing instantly from across the river trees falling and half a dozen red fireballs rising quickly into the air from a park, the boiling red flame quickly turning into black smoke, whose rise continued hundreds of feet into the air. Another series of stunning blasts literally shook the sparkling glass as it lay on the street and cracked huge trees in the park in half before Lambert's eyes, the luminous shock waves like a thin cloud of vapor pushing outward from the newly rising balls of fire and disappearing in an instant as dust choked Lambert's lungs and he coughed.