Ralph Peters - Red Army

Pasha had been different from the girls. He had excelled at sports but had not been overly proud, with nothing of the bully about him. All things considered, he had been a kind boy, and decent to the girls. He had never given Shilko any serious trouble, and he had done well enough at the military academy.

Shilko had been proud to see the boy off to Afghanistan, although ashamed that he himself was staying behind. Then Pasha had come back missing parts. The boy had stubbornly tried to make it on his own, but the reception for the Afgantsy was not a good one. Shilko could not understand what was happening to the country. Instead of being respected, veterans were ignored, or even mocked and slighted. Pasha had been denied ground-floor living quarters, despite his handicap and although such an allocation had been easily within the powers of the local housing committee. And, as Pasha himself bitterly told it, when he complained about the low quality of his prostheses to the local specialist, the doctor had replied, "What do you expect me to do? / didn't send you 47

Ralph Peters

to Afghanistan." The prostheses had not changed much since the Great Patriotic War over forty years earlier. But something in the spirit of the people had changed.

No, Shilko told himself, that was probably incorrect. Even the Great Patriotic War had undoubtedly had its little human indignities and examples of ugliness. That was human nature. Yet . . . somehow . . .

there was something wrong.

Shilko fitted his cap to his head. He avoided wearing a helmet. He valued small comforts. And he was conscious of how foolish he looked with his big peasant face and potato nose under the little tin pot. He had no illusions concerning his appearance. He had grown fatter than he would have liked, and he would never appear as the hero in anyone's fantasies. But that was all right, as long as he didn't look like a complete fool.

He swung his legs out into the slow drizzle, then grunted and huffed his body out of the vehicle. He stood off to the side for a moment, relieving the pain in his kidneys. Then he moved toward the shelter of the fire-control post at a pace that compromised between his desire to get in out of the rain and his body's lethargy.

Inside, behind the flaps of tentage, the little control post was bright, crowded, and perfumed with tobacco smoke. Shilko felt instantly alert, comfortable with the reassuring sensory impressions of a lifetime's professional experience. The feel of the place was right, from the pine branches spread over the floor to keep the mud at bay to the intense, tired faces and the iron smell of the command and control vehicles that formed office compartments at the edge of the tentage.

The crew snapped to attention. Shilko loved the small tribute, even as it always embarrassed him just a little.

"Sit down, Comrades, sit down."

A sergeant bent to draw tea from the battered samovar, and Shilko knew the cup was for him. They were all good boys, a good team.

"Your tea, Comrade Battalion Commander."

Shilko took the hot cup lovingly in both of his big hands. It was another of life's small wonderful pleasures. Hot tea on a rainy night during maneuvers. The army couldn't run without its tea.

He caught himself. It wasn't a matter of maneuvers this time. He stepped into the fire direction center vehicle and bent over the gunnery officer's work station, where a captain with a long wave of hair down in his eyes poked at the new automated fire-control system.

"And how are we progressing, Vladimir Semyonovitch?"

The captain looked up. His face had a friendly, trusting look. It was the 48

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sort of look that Shilko wanted every one of his officers to have when their commander approached. "Oh, it will all sort out, Comrade Commander. We're just working out a few bugs in the line. The vehicles keep cutting our wires. But the battery centers are each functional individually."

Shilko put his hand on the man's shoulder. "I'm counting on you. You can't expect an old bear like me to figure out all of this new equipment."

Although he said it in a bantering tone, Shilko was serious. He understood the concepts involved and what these new technical means theoretically offered. And he was willing to accept any help they could give, just as he was ready to lay them aside if they failed. But he was personally frightened by the thought of sitting down behind one of the forbidding little panels and attempting to call it to life. He suspected that he would only embarrass himself. So he gladly let the young men pursue the future, and when they performed well, he was grateful, and he encouraged them to go on attacking the problem.

He approached his battalion chief of staff. Romilinsky and a lieutenant sat bent over a field desk covered in manuals, charts, and loose papers.

The lieutenant worked on a small East German-made pocket calculator that always seemed to be the most valuable piece of equipment in the battalion.

Romilinsky looked up. Shilko knew the man's expressions well enough to know that, beneath the staff discipline, Romilinsky was frustrated.

"Comrade Battalion Commander," Romilinsky said, "no matter how we do it, the numbers will not come out right. Look here. If we fired every mission assigned under the fire plan, as well as the projected number of response missions for the first day, we would not only have fired more units of fire than we have received under our three-day allocation, but we would not even have time to physically do it. The division's expectations are unrealistic. They're not used to working with our type of guns, and they think we can deliver the sun and the moon."

"Well, Vassili Rodionovitch, we'll do our best."

"If we were to conform fully to the tables, if we used the normative number of rounds per hectare to attain the designated level of suppression or destruction for each mission they've assigned us, it just wouldn't come out. The numbers refuse to compromise."

"Everyone wants the big guns," Shilko said. Then, in a more serious tone, he asked, "But we can meet each phase of the initial fire plan?"

Romilinsky nodded. "We're all right through the scheduled fires."

"And the rest," Shilko said, "is merely a projection."

"We're looking at minimum projection figures."

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"Don't worry. We'll manage. If they keep dropping off ammunition the way they've been dumping it since yesterday, we may end up with too many rounds and not enough vehicles to move it when we displace."

"But the matter of the physical inability to fire the missions within the time constraints?"

Shilko appreciated Romilinsky's nervous enthusiasm. He liked to have a worrier as chief of staff. "I have confidence in you," Shilko said. "You'll make it work, Vassili Rodionovitch. Now tell me, has Davidov gotten his battery out of the mud yet?"

Romilinsky smiled. There was a slight rivalry between Romilinsky and Davidov, and Shilko knew that the chief of staff had been amused at Davidov's embarrassment. He had delighted in helping the battery commander recover his bogged guns as publicly as possible.

"He's out and in position. But he was in a heat. We teased him a little.

You know, 'Getting one gun stuck may be an accident, but getting an entire battery mired begins to look like a plan.' He still hasn't calmed down completely."

Shilko stopped smiling for a moment. He truly did not like their fire positions. The terrain over which they had been deployed seemed like a German version of the Belorussian marshes. You had to go carefully, and there were areas where you absolutely could not get off the roads. The precious little islands and stretches of reasonably firm ground were absurdly overcrowded. His own guns were too close to one another, batteries well under a thousand meters apart. And still their position was not completely their own. A chemical defense unit, which, to Shilko's relief, appeared utterly unconcerned about the war, and an engineer heavy bridging battalion had both been directed to the same low ground.