Ralph Peters - Red Army

As soon as he reached the backup stairwell and found it deserted, he nearly collapsed with pent-up coughing. He felt as though his face must be changing color with the intensity of the struggle for breath. He went up the stairs slowly, lungs clotted shut. With no one to see him, he spit as though ridding himself of wreckage. He hurriedly took one of his steroid pills, which were only to be used in emergencies, washing it down with his own saliva. In the cemented stairwell, his coughing sounded especially destructive.

What did that bastard Starukhin see when he looked at him? An asthmatic little Jew? Chibisov had come up through the airborne forces, and he had been a martial-arts specialist as a young officer. He had done everything possible to toughen himself, to reject every weak, infuriating image clinging to him from a thousand years of pathetic East European Jewish history. He resolutely turned his back on all aspects of Jewishness.

He worked to be a better Soviet patriot than any of them, a better Russian patriot, as had his father and his grandfather, the first enlight-ened members of a fiercely traditional family. He even downplayed his intellectual abilities when it came to studying the theoretical aspects of socialism and communism, since he felt it was too Jewish to overly master political philosophy. Instead, he had turned to military engineering and mathematics, to cybernetics and troop control theory. Then they tried to turn him into an instructor, the star young theorist on the staff of the Ryazan Higher Airborne Command School. But he maneuvered his way back into a fighter's job, even volunteering, although already in his middle thirties, for training as a special operations officer.

Accepted despite his age, he survived the agonizing training only to be defeated by an unreasonable and unexpected enemy: asthma. It was as though a millennium of weak-lunged Jewishness, of reeking ghettos, had taken their revenge on him, as though some bitter and malicious Jehovah 34

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were having his little joke. He completed his training only to collapse and end up in a military sanatorium in Baku. His jumping days were over.

But he refused to give in. He fought to remain an officer, obsessive in his determination to wear the uniform. He knew they did not understand him. He had never in his life attended a Jewish service. He had no understanding of the Jews who wanted to leave the Soviet Union, to leave Russia, their home. To Chibisov, the emigres were incomprehensible, weak, and selfish. For him, Israel was a distant land of superstition and fascist enthusiasms. And yet he knew that his fellow officers always saw him as the little Jew, a born staff man, perhaps meant to be a senior bookkeeper in some great Jewish banking house, or a student of arcane texts, shut in a musty study. Chibisov, the little Jew who wanted to be a Soviet paratroop officer.

Chibisov left the stairwell, sweating, near exhaustion. He labored up the ramp to the massive blast-proof entry doors. The interior guards saluted with their weapons, and, behind a glass panel, the duty officer jumped to his feet. Everyone knew the little Jew chief of staff, Chibisov thought bitterly.

He stood in limbo for a moment as the inner door shut behind him.

Then the outer door began to slide back, and the cool air raced in, carrying flecks of rain and a multilayered drone of constant noise from the trails and roads and highways. The forecast called for a wet first day of the war, and Chibisov felt lucky to emerge from the bunker at a moment when the rain had softened to little more than a mist. As the outer door closed Chibisov stood still, breathing as deeply as his lungs would permit, almost gasping. The nearest sounds came from the departing helicopters that carried away the more important briefing attendees. The blades hacked at the darkness to gain lift. Underlying the throb of the rotors, countless vehicles groaned toward carefully planned destinations. Chibisov's mind filled with timetables. It had been a key consideration that the Soviet forces could not close on their jump-off positions too early. It was unthinkable to put everything neatly into place, then wait in a silence that telegraphed to the enemy that you were ready to attack, with your final deployments even telling him where the main effort would come. The plan kept forces on the move, shifting, realigning toward a fluid perfection that would appear no different than the preceding days of road marches and hasty bivouacs, but that would allow the swift convergence of overwhelming forces at the points of decision, achieving tactical surprise, and even a measure of operational surprise. Chibisov looked at his watch. If the march tables were on schedule, the noise in the distance would be from one of the divisions of 35

Ralph Peters

the Seventh Tank Army, leapfrogging closer to the Elbe. As the lead echelons moved into the attack the follow-on forces would already be closing on their vacated positions, leaving as few exploitable gaps as possible. Chibisov had confidence in the mathematical model and in its tolerances. Yet he recognized that, to the drivers and the junior commanders out on the roads, it probably seemed like chaos. It was important to cultivate Malinsky's talent for standing back, Chibisov thought. Not to get caught up in the frustrating details, even though you remained aware of them. From the grand perspective, the minor scenes of confusion on the roads or in assembly areas simply disappeared, consumed by the macro-efficiencies of the model.

It only seemed remarkable to Chibisov that the enemy had not reached out to strike a preemptive blow. He and Dudorov had discussed the situation at length with Malinsky. In the twenty-four hours prior to the attack, the posture of virtually all of the Warsaw Pact forces, and especially their supply and rear services deployments, was terribly vulnerable. But so far, NATO had done nothing. Dudorov was convinced that there was absolutely no danger of NATO striking first. But neither Chibisov nor Malinsky could quite believe that the enemy would passively wait to receive the obviously impending blow.

Chibisov tasted the night air. The passages of his lungs had reopened slightly, and he felt like a man reprieved. He thought that the plan for a high-powered, relentless offensive would be like depriving a man of oxygen. NATO would have its wind taken away by the initial impact, and it would never be allowed to regain its breath. The damp night air felt vivid with power; the vehicle noise sounded as if the earth itself were moving. In just a few hours, the first wave of aircraft would be on their way. And still the enemy did nothing.

A lone helicopter growled by overhead. Probably Starukhin, Chibisov thought. But the army commander had already receded in his mind.

The last faint rain stopped. Chibisov could feel that it would return, stronger than before. But for the moment, he stood peacefully in the spongy air and thought of Malinsky, who had saved him. Recovering from his collapse in the sanatorium, Chibisov found that paperwork had been initiated without his knowledge to remove him from active service.

The old anti-Semitism. He struggled through the bureaucracy until he managed an interview with the deputy commander of the Transcaucasus Military District. That was the first time he met Malinsky. Comrade Deputy Commander, the army is my life. I'm as good as any officer in this uniform. Malinsky listened, watching him in silence, unlike the bluster-36

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ing, self-important general officers with whom Chibisov was familiar.

The Starukhins of the world.

Malinsky put a stop to the separation proceedings and gave Chibisov a trial job in his operations department. They were designing contingency plans for the invasion of Iran at the time, and they needed someone with a solid background in airborne matters. Chibisov quickly discovered something new in himself. Perhaps because of his technical training, he had an eye for the telling detail, and he almost intuitively understood how to make a plan intelligible to its executors. He loved the work.