Ralph Peters - Red Army

Kryshinin watched one of his own antitank missiles stream toward the enemy tanks, then spring out of control, soaring briefly into the empty sky, then plunging into a meadow. He turned away in disgust.

He followed the directions toward the attic. He felt unusually light, almost as though he were floating, yet it was a hard climb going up the narrow stairs. He began to feel as though his torso could fly but his feet were weighted down with irons. When he reached the attic, he found it cluttered with forgotten property, stinking with mildew. The trash of generations troubled his course, barring his feet with old framed pictures and antique household machinery, all strewn with ragged fabric.

The roof windows had been shattered. Kryshinin leaned out through the nearest, which opened toward the canal.

Bylov lay sprawled on his belly on the roof tiles, talking into a radio set, with a satchel of gear open beside him.

Kryshinin could not understand a single word the air force officer said.

The level of noise was incredible, maddening. It seemed to give the air a tangible thickness, as though you could stir it with your hand.

Kryshinin tugged at Bylov's leg.

The air force officer held up a finger. Wait. He rolled onto his back, scanning the gray sky.

Kryshinin followed Bylov's line of sight but could see nothing.

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Nonetheless, Bylov reached into his satchel, retrieving a flare pistol and two explosive canisters of colored smoke. He spoke once into his microphone, then rose to his knees on the slick tile, just high enough to peer over the roofbeam.

With a sure motion, Bylov threw a smoke canister to the right, then quickly hurled another to the left, marking the line of friendly troops. He fumbled briefly at the flare pistol, then fired two green flares in succession in the direction of the enemy.

Bylov threw his satchel at Kryshinin, knocking him back into the attic.

The air force officer followed the bag, quick as a cat, dragging his radio after him. Without a look at Kryshinin, Bylov flattened onto the floor, hands over his ears.

Kryshinin swiftly imitated him.

A powerful rush of jet engines seemed to pass right through the room, shaking the floor even more powerfully than had the artillery blasts. The passage was closely followed by small blasts, then by enormous booms that seemed to tear several seconds out of their lives. The air itself drew tighter.

"Fuel air explosives," Bylov shouted. "Great stuff."

"Good work," Kryshinin shouted back.

"Count on the air force," Bylov told him. "We serve the Motherland and all that."

"How did you get the sorties?"

Bylov looked at him in honest surprise. "We've got top priority. I've got more on the way."

Bylov methodically began to gather his spilled tools, checking his radio, a technician of the sky. In his own little world of airplanes, Bylov had not noticed—or, at any rate, had said nothing about—Kryshinin's wound. But Kryshinin felt changes coming over his body now. He was losing strength fast. He needed to have a look at the wound, yet he was afraid that the sight of his damaged flesh, of his own blood on his own skin, might paralyze him. And he was determined to hang on, no matter what happened.

Kryshinin slowly raised himself and worked his way back down the stairs to the lieutenant's observation post. The lieutenant's torso lay smashed against a wall, head and limbs twisted out of any skeletal sense, eyes bulging. From behind another wall, a machine gun fired.

Kryshinin peered out of the battered window frame. The valley had filled with black smoke.

Then he saw the first enemy tank in close. The airplanes had missed at RED ARMY

least a platoon. Four enemy tanks came over the crest, one after another. One tank trailed fire off its deck, resembling a mythical dragon. They drove beside the farm complex, leaving Kryshinin's field of vision.

He hurried back down the stairs to the accompaniment of blasts and rapid fires. Men shouted in a contest of complaints and commands.

From the doorway, the farmyard appeared chaotic. Kryshinin watched as his own vehicle attempted to pull off, only to explode in the entrance gateway. The heat of the blast reached into the foyer of the house, rinsing Kryshinin with a wave of unnatural warmth.

Above the billows of smoke, he saw two more helicopters appear. But these were from his side, "bumblebees," loaded with weaponry. They flew an orientation pass. Kryshinin wanted to get into the fight, to insure that his tank platoon had moved to intercept the enemy tanks that had broken through. But flames blocked the gateway.

He searched hurriedly through the ground floor of the house, hunting for a side door. Nothing in the building seemed to be left whole. In the kitchen, he found two soldiers casually sitting against a cupboard, as though they were on an authorized rest period.

"Come with me," Kryshinin shouted, heading for the open space where a door had been ripped from its hinges.

Outside, the black smoke covered the landscape between the farm buildings and the original positions of the enemy tanks. The amount of firing that continued seemed incredible, first because it seemed as though all of the ammunition should have been used up already, and, second, because it was hard to believe so many survivors remained. But Kryshinin felt reassured that so many of his men continued to engage the enemy.

He heard the beat of the Soviet gunships returning. And the battle noises clearly revealed a tank fight going on down toward the canal.

The two riflemen followed Kryshinin obediently, simply waiting for his instructions. Kryshinin hustled around a corner. One of his infantry fighting vehicles sat in perfect condition, scanning for targets, even as the battle had passed it by. Kryshinin let it stand as a sentinel. Growing weaker and dizzy almost to nausea, he worked along the wall of the ruined barn, weapon ready, seeking a view back toward the canal. He came up behind a rain barrel, and, taking a chance, he raised his head.

The finest, most welcome sight of his life awaited him. The twin ridgeline on the eastern side of the canal streamed with Soviet vehicles.

Air-defense elements raced across the high fields to find correctly spaced 85

Ralph Peters

positions, and self-propelled guns bristled their tubes at the sky. In the valley bottom, the enemy tanks that had penetrated Kryshinin's thin line burned away like lamps to light the rainy day. Soviet tanks roared through the tunnel, blooming out into a long, beautiful line and heading straight for Kryshinin's position.

Kryshinin collapsed against the wall of the barn, letting go at last.

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Six

The view from the air filled Trimenko with a sense of his personal power. The army commander was not given to self-indulgent emotions; his life had been spent in a struggle to master the weaknesses of individual temperament, but the sight through the rain-speckled windows of the helicopter excited him with a pleasant awe. These were his endless columns of combat vehicles and support units, his tens of dozens of deployed artillery batteries, with the rearmost hurrying to move, others locked in close column on the roads, and still more executing fire missions against the stone-colored horizon. His air-defense systems lurked on hilltops like great metal cats, radar ears twitching and spinning.

Trimenko's pilot flew the road trace, staying low, unwilling to trust the protection of the big red star on the fuselage of the aircraft. But the army commander had transcended such petty worries in the greatness of the moment. He felt consumed by the growling enormity of men and machines flowing to the west like a steel torrent, absorbed into a being greater than the self.