Ian Slater - Rage of Battle

There was a knocking on the door.

Edouard, the muscles taut in his face, looked from her to the door and back at her from the precipice of decision. “Go!” she whispered hoarsely, then walked out into the hall through the kitchen toward the door, her eyes frantically searching again for anything that might betray Edouard’s presence in the apartment, catching her breath as she spotted one of his socks, having dropped from the dirty wash basket. She snatched it up and stuffed it back into the basket beneath slips and lace underwear — of various designs which the corporal had insisted on her wearing to make it “different” each time. He had complained bitterly of her “peasant” attire, and she had been forced to borrow some of her daughter-in-law’s more daring lingerie to keep him happy.

One hand at her throat, the other on the doorknob, she steadied herself for a moment. Putting on what she shamefully called her “collaborationist” grin, she opened the door.

He said nothing — the moment the door was closed, his hands were already under her skirt, bunching it about her waist, where he used it to pull her toward him, his lips smothering hers wetly, his garlic breath so strong, it made her want to throw up. He mumbled for her to try and stop him. She tried to push him away but couldn’t, his game becoming her panic, yet knowing she must yield. Backing her up against the hallway wall, he pushed against her so hard that the mirror of the hallway hutch shook, throwing their reflections in a quivering embrace. “Pull it!” he told her. She closed her eyes, buried her face into his neck, which he took as arousal. “You like it, eh?” He smiled, looking down at her, feeling her trembling. “Excited, eh?”

Surely, she thought, he must know how repulsed she was, that no amount of force could ever change her hatred for him and his kind.

“Come on, Malle,” he said, smacking her bottom. “To bed, eh? Turn around!” When she did as he commanded her, he grabbed her left hand and held it between his legs. “Pull,” he said. “Hey! — Wait!” He laughed roughly. “You don’t know your strength, Malle.”

No, you swine, she drought, you don’t.

“That’s better,” he sighed. “Whoa — steady, horse!” He made her stop by the small refrigerator, opening the door and peering in. “No beer?”

“No. We haven’t been allowed out to buy—” She had completely forgotten that he had brought two cans the day before and that in her distraction, she had put them in the small freezer section, so that now the cans were distorted.

“Ah—” he said, annoyed, taking them out and setting them on the small kitchen counter. “Soon they would explode. Like me, eh?” he said, laughing.

She didn’t hear him — her eyes riveted on the slightly opened cutlery drawer. She couldn’t be sure, but it looked as if the big serrated bread knife was missing.

“Hey, Malle!” he bellowed. “What is it?”

“What — oh, I’m sorry. They’re frozen.”

“What? — oh, the beer.” He pulled her close to him again. “But I’m hot, eh, Malle?”

She stopped. His expression had changed. He was looking high up in the kitchen. She felt her carotid artery pounding like a taut cable. Had he seen something? Oaf that he was, he had a natural animal instinct. But he was looking above the counter at the meagerly stocked shelf. “Like honey?” he asked.

Suddenly she thought she heard Edouard moving in the crawl space above the master bedroom only a few meters away to the right of the hallway. “Yes — yes I do,” she answered hastily. “Why?”

He let go of her hand, walked over, and brought down the small can of Danish honey, turning to her with a leer. “I’ll bet you do.” It took her a moment to realize what he meant, but didn’t know how long she could go on debasing herself. For as long as it took, she supposed, for as long as it took him and his barbarians to find whom they were searching for and leave the apartment block. For as long as she could prevent them from searching for Edouard. As he levered the lid off the can of honey, Malle moved back toward the single drawer.

“What are you doing?” he demanded. For a split second she saw suspicion in his eye. It was the same look he’d given her a day before when she’d tried to lure him away from the master bedroom.

“Why,” she said, “getting a towel. The bedspread’ll—”

“All right, but hurry. I have to be back by four. It’s already three.”

As she took the hand towel hanging on the small chromium rack beside the refrigerator, she glanced quickly in at the cutlery drawer. The knife was gone. She closed her eyes, her breath caught in her throat. No, she implored Edouard, as if by the sheer power of her mind she could forestall him from protecting her honor, from getting them all killed.

“Malle!” the corporal shouted impatiently from the bedroom. She could hear him undressing, the sound of his suspenders thwacking the bedside dresser. Taking a deep breath, she walked into the bedroom. He had a pillow under his knees, and it was staring at her like a one-eyed snake, and she knew that directly above them was her grandson.

“You want it, don’t you?” he asked. It was part of the game. He knew she didn’t. How could anyone think she wanted to?

“Yes,” she said.

“Say ‘I can’t wait.’ “

“I can’t wait.”

He handed her the small, opened can of honey. “Put some on me.”

She dipped her finger in the honey — trembling. She could not have him here another day. Edouard was probably right— his look had told her he believed his parents had been executed by the Viru Gate. And she knew that even when the troops left the Mustamäe apartments, the corporal would not stop “calling” on her. Edouard would always be a hostage to the corporal. How many other women was he doing this to? She put the honey on him.

“All round the top,” he instructed her, guiding her hand, groaning with pleasure. She made her decision. She would be especially nice to him, then ask him to take her to Kadriorg Park, and put an end to it.

“Now,” he said. “Be a good bear, eh?”

She smiled quizzically at him. “A bear?”

“Lick your honey,” he explained.

Tossing her head to one side with an abandon the corporal had not seen in her before, Malle pinned her hair back so as to keep it out of the way, then, her tongue moistening her lips, her eyes closed, she lowered herself to him. She would make it the best he’d had.

Before the war, the kill ratio on the NATO books was six to one — that is, six Soviet combatants had to be killed for every NATO combatant if NATO was to hold. Within four hours of the Fulda Gap, becoming the Fulda “Gash,” the ratio changed dramatically to ten to one, the armored spearheads of the Soviet divisions, a half million men in all, first crossing the Polish plain with a speed that surprised even General Marchenko. He had long held that the “fatal flaw” in NATO’s armor would be the West’s bourgeois reluctance to engage “other elements,” by which he meant the West’s reluctance to kill civilians. And he believed it would work in the Soviets’ favor.

He was right. The army of refugees fleeing west of Fulda, and indeed, all along the north-south axis that had been NATO’s central front, impeded NATO tank reinforcements. No matter how “hard-nosed,” as the Americans called it, NATO’s troops had been trained to be, most British, American, and particularly Dutch tank regiments found it unacceptable to fire point-blank into the human tide of refugees that clogged the roads. Some of the Allied tanks, seeing a blur of red, the treads of Russian T-90s mercilessly rushing and chopping through the screaming columns of refugees, did open fire. The belch of the M-1s and Leopards, their 120- and 105-millimeter guns sending white-hot, dartlike armor-piercing tungsten through the tightly packed refugees in efforts to stop the Russian T-90s, only added to the carnage. The air sleeve alone surrounding the armor-piercing needle, traveling and discarding its sabot, or shoe, at over forty-five hundred feet a second, was so hot that it alone seared people for distances up to two or three meters from the trajectory path. Even so, the molten discarding sabot rounds and the HESH — high-explosive squash heads — of molten metal that were deadly as tank killers, effective on both sloped as well as flat armor, were not the rounds that caused the major casualties among the refugees. This dubious honor was left to the high-explosive antipersonnel rounds which were favored by both sides, as much to destroy supporting infantry as the tanks that spearheaded them.