Ralph Peters - Red Army

Well, Shilko thought, it didn't matter. He and his boys would fight and fight well, no matter who made the decisions. The event was infinitely greater than the men caught up in it.

The mood in the fire control post had begun to change. The frantic action tapered off. Officers began to sit down. Men looked up at the master clock above the communications bank.

It would not be long now. Shilko looked at his watch, even though he had just glanced at the clock. He went to the samovar and tipped himself another cup of tea. Then he took his chair near the situation map, proofing the schedule of fires one last time.

The radios were silent. Romilinsky sat down beside Shilko and nervously patted the handle of the field telephone, the wires of which led directly to the gun batteries. Soon it would be time to pick it up and say the single word that would unleash the storm.

Shilko was almost as proud of the big guns with which he had been entrusted as he was of his men. When he had entered the service, his first unit had been equipped with field pieces designed before the Great Patriotic War, towed by Studebaker trucks from the war years. Now the enormous self-propelled pieces in his battalion made those little towed weapons seem like toys. Shilko felt that he had seen enormous progress in his lifetime.

"Comrade Battalion Commander," Romilinsky said, "you seem ad-mirably relaxed."

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Ralph Peters

"The sleep did me good," Shilko said, content to wait and think through these last minutes.

But the chief of staff wanted to talk. "I believe we are as ready as possible."

Shilko accepted that the needs of other men were different from his own. If his chief of staff needed to talk away the final minutes of peace, Shilko was willing to oblige him.

"I'm confident that we're ready, Vassili Rodionovitch. This is a good battalion. I have great faith."

"I can't help thinking, though, of things we should have done, of training that should have received more stress . . ."

Shilko waved the comment away. "No one is ever as prepared as they should be. You know the dialectic. A constant state of flux."

"Five minutes," a voice announced.

Shilko looked up at the clock. Then he sat back. "You know," he began in his most personable voice, "when I was a junior lieutenant, I was horrified by the conditions I found upon arrival at my first unit. Nothing seemed to be as we had been promised at the academy. Nothing was as precise, or as rigorous, or even as clean. I was very disturbed by what I viewed as a betrayal of the high standards of the Soviet military. Oh, I wasn't especially ambitious. I never expected to change the world. But this unit didn't seem as though it could go to war against a pack of dance-hall girls. Half of the equipment didn't work. The situation seemed intolerable to a brand-new lieutenant who had been coached to go up against the capitalist aggressors at a moment's notice. Anyway, my commander was a wise man—a veteran, of course, in those days. He watched my struggles with some amusement, I think. Then, one day, he called me into his office. I was worried. It wasn't so common for a battalion commander to speak to a lieutenant in those days. And it usually didn't happen because the lieutenant had done something to be proud of. So I went to his office in quite a state. I couldn't think of anything I'd done incorrectly. But you never knew. Anyway, he asked me how I enjoyed being in the army, and how I liked the unit. He was teasing me, although I didn't realize it then. I talked around my real feelings.

Finally, he just smiled, and he called me closer. Very close to his desk.

And he said he was going to reveal to me the one military truth, and that if only I remembered it, I would do very well in my military career."

Shilko looked around. Everyone was listening to him, despite the unmistakable tension.

The clock showed two minutes to go.

Shilko grinned. "You know what he said to me? He leaned over that 54

RED ARMY

desk, so close I could see the old scars on his cheek, and he half whispered, 'Shilko, wars are not won by the most competent army—they are won by the least incompetent army.'"

His audience responded with pleasant laughter. But the undercurrent of anticipation had grown so intense now that no man could fully master it. The tension seemed almost like a physical wave, rising to sweep them all away.

Romilinsky gripped the field telephone, ready.

Less than one minute to go.

In the distance, a number of guns sounded, startling in the perfect stillness. Someone had fired early, either because of a bad clock or through nervousness.

Shilko looked at the clock one final time. Other batteries and full battalions took up the challenge of the first lone battery, rising to a vast orchestra of calibers. Shilko turned to Romilinsky, utterly serious now.

"Give the order to open fire."

55

FOUR

Junior Lieutenant Plinnikov wiped at his nose with his fingers and ordered his driver forward. The view through the vehicle commander's optics allowed no meaningful orientation. Rapid flashes dazzled in the periscope's lens, leaving a deep gray veil of smoke in their wake. The view was further disrupted by raindrops that found their way under the external cowl of the lens block. Plinnikov felt as though he were guiding his reconnaissance track through hell at the bottom of the sea.

The shudder of the powerful artillery bursts reached through the metal walls of the vehicle. Suddenly, the armor seemed hopelessly thin, the tracks too weak to hold, and the automatic cannon little more than a toy.

Occasionally, a tinny sprinkling of debris struck the vehicle, faintly audible through Plinnikov's headset and over the engine whine. He could feel the engine pulling, straining to move the tracks through the mud of the farm trail.

"Comrade Lieutenant, we're very close to the barrage," his driver told him.

Plinnikov understood that the driver meant too close. But the lieutenant was determined to outperform every other reconnaissance platoon leader in the battalion, if not in the entire Second Guards Tank Army.

"Keep moving," Plinnikov commanded, "just keep moving. Head straight through the smoke."

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The driver obeyed, but Plinnikov could feel his unwillingness through the metal frame that separated them. For a moment, Plinnikov took his eyes away from the periscope and looked to the side, checking on his gunner. But Belonov was all right, eyes locked to his own periscope.

Three men in a rolling steel box. There was no margin of safety in personnel now; everyone had to do his job without fail. Plinnikov had never received the additional soldiers required to fill out his reconnaissance platoon for war, and he had no extra meat, no dismount strength in his own vehicle. As it was, he could barely man the essential positions in each of his three vehicles.

It was impossible to judge the exact location of his vehicle now. If everything was still on track, his second vehicle would be tucked in behind him, with Senior Sergeant Malyarchuk to the rear in an over-watch position. Plinnikov laughed to himself. Overwatch. You couldn't see ten meters. He glanced at his map, anxious to orient himself.

He could feel the trail dropping toward a valley or ravine. Artillery rounds struck immediately to the front.