Ian Slater - Rage of Battle

Waiting for the next flare, to get his bearings, he tried to listen through the crescendo of noise for the clinking sound of any of his buddies landing nearby. There was a burst of fire off somewhere to his right, sounding like the tearing of linoleum — a light machine gun. But Allied or Soviet, there was no way of telling. It was all so UFU — unbelievably fucked up. Then he heard the pop, like a champagne cork, a flare climbing unhurriedly to its apogee, its harsh, metallic glare casting a ghostly, flickering light a hundred yards across. From experience, he avoided watching the dark, serrated perimeter, where the flickering light could resemble the shapes of everything from a tank to a charging platoon to a machine-gun nest — when there wasn’t anything there. Instead, careful not to move, he froze in the prone position, watching the center of the ever-decreasing circle of light now that the flare was falling, and saw, with fright, a patch of greasy brown only six feet from him, a wriggle of barbed wire across it: a body, American or Russian — perhaps British.

The rolling thunder of approaching artillery shells told him that he was in the line of a creeping barrage. His throat was bone-dry, and he’d already urinated from fear. Now he quickly looked about for any sign of his company and friend Thelman, who had gone through Parris Island and Camp Lejeune with him. There was no sign of them — only the dark mush he’d seen seconds earlier and which he now knew had been a man’s face, the uniform that of a Russian SPETS commando, the outfit that had already been in place throughout Western Europe and had played havoc with the NATO depots the moment war had broken out. He saw what looked like the man’s finger a couple of feet away, but the hands seemed intact — all the fingers still there. Then he realized what the finger was. Jesus… Jesus…

He thought he saw something move between the man’s legs — or what was left of them — where an ooze of intestine had spread over where the man’s testicles had been. The movement Brentwood had seen was a cluster of leeches so fat, they seemed like slugs in the flare’s dying light.

“Yank?”

He swung the squad weapon around to his right, could see nothing, and then could feel the rain of hot earth coming down on him as the American 105-millimeter high-explosive barrage kept coming. He heard a man scream nearby but was too busy huddling beside the corpse, using it as protection, to know where the voice had come from, aware only that if someone didn’t quickly stop the American shelling, he’d be as dead as the maggot-infested corpse filling his nostrils with the putrefaction of death. The scream he’d heard seemed not far away, but it was impossible to tell in the barrage, and David drew himself up into the fetal position, not wishing to see anything, the next barrage so close, he could feel the earth leaping about him, and he wondered if both he and the voice he had heard would be killed — or, if they survived, who would kill whom.

The falling dirt was so thick now, it drummed down on his helmet and cascaded like hot sand over his bronze goggles, which were designed to protect him from harmful ultraviolet rays. “Like we’re going for a fucking suntan!” his buddy Thelman had said when they had been in training at Parris Island and then at jump school at Camp Lejeune. Where the hell was Thelman anyhow? David was getting mad at him — Thelman had only been two in front of him.

“Oh, Melissa…” he murmured, clutching the squad weapon, calling to his girl back home, wondering if he’d ever see her again.

Despite the rubberized earplugs, his ears were ringing so loudly from the shelling, he couldn’t tell whether it had ceased or not. But no earth was falling. Thank God someone had gotten through to the U.S. artillery unit firing the howitzers.

Then the star shells started. Flares with parachutes lit up an area a quarter mile wide, but all David could see was the pockmarked field, as desolate as the moon’s surface. He couldn’t tell from which direction the star shells had been fired — from Polish or American artillery. He thought he heard something scrabbling behind him. It slowed to a crawl. David swung quietly away from the corpse but found he’d slithered down a slight depression, slippery with the dead man’s blood. There was a tremendous explosion in the air — one of the drop transports? A fighter? He didn’t know. He couldn’t stop thinking about the Russian’s pecker being blown off like that.

Now, in the star shells’ light, he could see that beyond the pockmarked field, by the edge of a wood, inert bodies, some of them still strapped to their chutes, lay strewn about, one with only one arm and one leg. The wind was shifting again, the dead man’s chute ballooning, dragging his remains across the battlefield. Behind David, about a hundred yards away, there was a shout. He knew only that it wasn’t English. The next sound was unmistakable: bayonets being clipped on. Christ! They’d told him the bayonet was used nowadays only for opening cans and for ceremonial parades. Still holding his SAW in his left hand, he felt down for the parachute knife. “Hail Mary,” he whispered, but couldn’t think of the rest of it. Thelman knew the rest of it — he was Catholic — he knew it. Where the hell was he? David heard the slushing sound of boots about sixty, maybe seventy, yards behind him, advancing. Poles… He was sure they’d be Poles. They knew the Hail Mary, too… “Thelman, you bastard,” whispered David. Whatever happened, the man who’d called out to him earlier would have to show his colors. There might be some joy in that. Sweet Jesus… it sounded like a whole company was moving.

MPO Captain Malkov had ordered a roundup of all informers, including those listed in the GRU files.

He was surprised. The informers were not helpful. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to be, but apparently they knew nothing. They could be forced to talk, of course, but then all you got was rubbish. An informer would tell you it was the bishop or his grandmother behind the munitions sabotage in order to save his own skin. Whoever was behind the nerazorvavshiesya— “dud”—rockets and shells being sent to the Yumashev— and who knew how many other ships? — had planned it very carefully, as the duplicated serial numbers attested to. Malkov also suspected that several heretofore helpful informants had gone mute, after being bitten by the bug of Baltic nationalism that had broken out ever since Baba Gorbachev—”Auntie Gorbachev”—and his stupid “liberalization” policy.

Watching the swarm of gulls over Tallinn’s Number Three dock, the birds diving and rising above the giant gray gantries screeching so loudly that his driver did not hear him telling him to stop, Malkov marveled at the principle of internal organization that must be in operation to prevent the birds from colliding with one another. Malkov’s small, two-cylinder car was flanked by four armored personnel carriers. This much force he knew might not be necessary, but better to arrive with too much man too little. Nothing focused the mind more effectively than a.50 machine gun. For some, the stocky, brutish build of the captain and his rough informality were enough to make them feel intimidated, the joke on the docks being that Malkov had been chosen for his looks more than for his brains. Others said that becoming an MOP chief made you look like that anyway.

The simple fact that Malkov’s car stopped ten yards farther on than he had intended meant that a dirty-boiler-suited riveter, his huge riveting gun slung over his shoulder like a small, silver lamb as he headed toward the tool shed, and his apprentice, who walked with him, were selected as hostages rather than two other men farther back who were just coming on shift. The captain’s maritime troops had already sealed off the docks, and he had ordered two Pauk-class patrol Corvettes to pry the harbor fifty meters offshore in the event that anyone trying to evade questioning might attempt to swim farther down the docks. When the 230 workers, all but 21 of them men, had been assembled, the captain mounted a weather-worn dais used for new launches from the Tallinn yard. The gulls were increasing in number as more fish boats came in from the gulf, the birds’ screeching now so loud, the captain was obliged to ask an NCO to fetch a megaphone from one of the armored personnel carriers forming themselves in a semicircle around the workers. A row of troops from the APCs flanked the dais near the edge of the wharf, where crates of ordnance were awaiting shipment.