Читаем Barracuda: Final Bearing полностью

Len’s home in the city of Chabarovsk, now renamed by him as Changashan, had been in a rebellious Russian republic. Len had become involved, slowly, since at first he had been regarded as a Russian general and not to be trusted. Within two years he had become the head of a revolutionary movement, determined to split off from greater Russia. He had learned the lessons of other earlier, less successful succession movements, and had managed to consolidate support from China, then in the middle of its own bloody civil war. Len had alternated use of diplomacy and threats. China ceded its Greater Manchurian territory just as the White Army was advancing on it, perhaps knowing that Greater Manchuria would fall to the Whites anyway, but Len had managed to hold on to it as the rebel Chinese fighters had turned toward Beijing. By the time the Chinese Red Forces had consolidated power and taken back Beijing, Len had wrangled Sikhote Alin from Russia. The latter feat was a masterful stroke of diplomacy, but it had boiled down to the Russians being distracted by their own problems far to the west, an economic collapse narrowly averted in the months that Len was shoring up the borders of his new state one he had decided to name Greater Manchuria, a bone thrown to the Chinese that comprised half the land area of the region. Len’s military at the time had been skeletal and poorly equipped, though heavily manned.

All that had been three years ago. Len had just begun to feel confident that the country might survive. The government he had constructed functioned, if crudely, but the people were fed and the trains ran, if not necessarily on time. But it was then that the crisis hit. The Chinese Civil War ended, with West China, the Reds, taking up central and northeast China and East China, the Whites, taking the eastern coastline. Not long after, the West Chinese, sharing a border with southern Greater Manchuria, decided they wanted their territory back, though it took some time for them to assemble their infantry and armored forces along the border. The Russians, with their worldwide intelligence network left over from communist days, saw the Chinese forces, and decided to mass their own armies at the western and northern borders of Greater Manchuria.

At one point Len believed that Greater Manchuria had only days of survival left. Appeals to the Western nations were greeted with monetary aid and advisors, but there would be no one to fight the war for them.

Now, years later, the Western media credited Len with holding off both the Russians and Chinese without firing a shot, making him out to be a diplomatic hero. He had not been, but he had found a silver bullet. His aide. Col.

Woo Sei Wah, had flown into Changashan and found Len despondent: “I have news too sensitive for any radio circuit,” Woo had announced. Len had not looked up from his desk.

“The old Russian weapons depot at Tamga. We found missiles. Nuclear missiles. SS-34s, in perfect condition, their launchers all there and ready. There are enough weapons there to destroy the Chinese and Russian armies outside the borders and still have a half-dozen in reserve in case they come for more.”

At first Len could scarcely believe the news, but as Woo’s facts gathered irresistible force, what had happened became clear. The treaty banning all nuclear weapons in Asia had been signed by the Russian Republic as well as the other Asian nations. Something somewhere in the dusty, creaking Russian bureaucratic machine had malfunctioned, and a theater commander had failed to order the missiles turned over to the UN destruction committee. Apparently the mistake was never found. The Russians were not so stupid that they had forgotten about the nuclear missiles, but whoever the Sikhote Alin regional commander had been, Len knew he was an idiot. Through a combination of errors, the regional CO had neglected to report to the UN the Tamga facility. The mistake had to have been uncovered over the next year, since at some point the Russian army had evacuated the military bases and abandoned them, but Len’s theory was that the regional CO had thought it better to abandon the missiles and gamble on them not being found than to call attention to his humiliating, compromising mistake. He had to have rationalized his decision with the thought that the untutored Greater Manchurians would never understand how to use so modern a weapon system anyway. Whatever his thinking, a cache of SS-34s was now in Len’s quiver, and he used them wisely.