The Bear and the Dragon - Tom Clancy [484]
It was two squadrons of F-16C fighter-bombers, and they were armed with Smart Pigs.
That was the nickname for J-SOW, the Joint Stand-Off Weapon. The night before, other F-l6s, the CG version, the new and somewhat downsized version of the F-4G Wild Weasel, had gone into China and struck at the line of border radar transmitters, hitting them with HARM antiradar missiles and knocking most of them off the air. That denied the Chinese foreknowledge of the inbound strike. They had been guided by two E-3B Sentry aircraft, and protected by three squadrons of F-15C Eagle air-superiority fighters in the event some Chinese fighters appeared again to die, but there had been little such fighter activity in the past thirty-six hours. The Chinese fighter regiments had paid a bloody price for their pride, and were staying close to home in what appeared to be a defense mode—on the principle that if you weren't attacking, then you were defending. In fact they were doing little but flying standing patrols over their own bases—that's how thoroughly they had been whipped by American and Russian fighters—and that left the air in American and Russian control, which was going to be bad news for the People's Liberation Army.
The F-l6s were at thirty thousand feet, holding to the east. They were several minutes early for the mission, and circled while awaiting word to attack. Some concertmaster was stage-managing this, they all thought. They hoped he didn't break his little baton-stick-thing.
"Getting closer," Pasha observed with studied nonchalance. "Range?" Aleksandrov asked the men down below in the track. "Twenty-one hundred meters, within range," Buikov reported from inside the gun turret. "The fox and the gardener approach, Comrade Captain."
"Leave them be for the moment, Boris Yevgeniyevich."
"As you say, Comrade Captain." Buikov was comfortable with the no-shoot rule, for once.
"How much farther to the reconnaissance screen?" Peng asked. "Two more kilometers," Ge replied over the radio. "But that might not be a good idea."
"Ge, have you turned into an old woman?" Peng asked lightly. "Comrade, it is the job of lieutenants to find the enemy, not the job of senior generals," the division commander replied in a reasonable voice.
"Is there any reason to believe the enemy is nearby?"
"We are in Russia, Peng. They're here somewhere."
"He is correct, Comrade General," Colonel Wa Cheng-gong pointed out to his commander.
"Rubbish. Go forward. Tell the reconnaissance element to stop and await us," Peng ordered. "A good commander leads from the front!" he announced over the radio.
"Oh, shit," Ge observed in his tank. "Peng wants to show off his ji-ji. Move out," he ordered his driver, a captain (his entire crew was made of officers). "Let's lead the emperor to the recon screen."
The brand-new T-98 tank surged forward, throwing up two rooster tails of dirt as it accelerated. General Ge was in the commander's hatch, with a major acting as gunner, a duty he practiced diligently because it was his job to keep his general alive in the event of contact with the enemy. For the moment, it meant going ahead of the senior general with blood in his eye.
"Why did they stop?" Buikov asked. The PLA tracks had suddenly halted nine hundred meters off, all five of them, and now the crews dismounted, manifestly to take a stretch, and five of them lit up smokes.
"They must be waiting for something," the captain thought aloud. Then he got on the radio. "GREEN WOLF here, the enemy has halted about a kilometer south of us. They're just sitting still."
"Have they seen you?"
"No, they've dismounted to take a piss, looks like, just standing there.