Ralph Peters - Red Army

Already weary of their fun, the soldiers acquiesced to Sergeant Kassabian's paper-thin commands. Sergeant Kassabian wielded bits of half-remembered officer talk from old field exercises, struggling to please the lieutenant. The soldiers slumped off to guard the doors and windows.

Shortly afterward, Lieutenant Korchuk disappeared back into the night.

But the soldiers remained in their separate rooms, as much from inertia as from duty, as quiet as exhausted children.

Leonid and Seryosha took possession of an upstairs bedroom. The furniture had been toppled, and the mattress lay on the floor, where one of the soldiers had urinated on it. The two boys put down their rifles and flipped the mattress, then lifted it back onto the bed frame. They agreed that they would take turns sleeping—Seryosha first—after Leonid cleaned his uniform top. He carefully stuffed his precious cassette tapes into his trouser pockets and bent to his labor by the light of a dying candle. Water still ran in the pipes, and Leonid soaked and scrubbed his spattered tunic in the bathtub, as much impressed by the water pressure as by the luxury of the fixtures.

Leonid sat peaceably at the window as Seryosha drowsed, then muttered a few unintelligible words before beginning to snore with martial regularity. In a state of weariness that could not measure time, Leonid watched the brilliant display of battle on the horizon, the nighttime sequel to his own experience, in a war that had moved beyond him. He thought about music, and of how painful it would be at first to re-form the calluses on the fingertips of his left hand. He closed his eyes, chording his guitar in his mind. Twice he nearly collapsed into sleep, and the second time he woke himself just in time to see a beautiful pageant of colored rockets in the distance. The colored stars trailed off in slow deaths that filled Leonid with sadness to a depth he had never before known. The thought of the most trivial detail of home gained the power to bring tears to his eyes, and when he thought of his mother, the tears fell down his cheeks in the darkness just as the distant starbursts dropped 161

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into the darkened woodlands. Pulled loose from any real sense of the hours, he concluded that the night must be nearly over, and he carefully dried his eyes and the adolescent coarseness of his cheeks. Timidly, he began the task of waking Seryosha. He felt as though he would give anything just to sleep for a little while.

When Seryosha finally forced himself awake and stamped off to the guardpost at the window, Leonid told himself that he was lucky to have such a friend. His tunic was still too wet to wear, and he lay on the ammonia-scented mattress, wrapped in a coverlet ripped by the horse-play of his comrades. In a matter of minutes, he wept himself to sleep, filled with a vast, sorrowing, and indiscriminate feeling of love for his fellow man.

162

TWELVE

At first, the enemy tanks were only a big, chilling noise in the darkness. Then the flares went up, and Senior Sergeant Hornik spotted the first huge vehicles working their way up along the highway beyond the meadow covered by his unit. The enemy were clinging to the treeline on the far side of the road. The steel monsters grumbled into his antitank gun's zone of fire, and he worked with the other crew members to train the gun on the vehicle in the enemy formation that had most fully exposed its flank. He ordered his crew about with sharp, nervous commands, and the voices of the other gun commanders in the antitank battery seemed to echo him.

Ranging was very difficult. The light of the parachute flares had a garish, flattening effect that simultaneously seemed to freeze everything and to create small phantom movements just off center- from the observer's line of sight. The crews had been forced to hurriedly assess ranges and develop range cards with selected engagement points in the last twilight, while the engineers to their front raced to lay every last possible mine. Hornik had nonetheless felt confident as darkness draped over the guns. But now it was almost impossible to grasp the true perspective and distance to the target.

The enemy tanks sensed they were in for it. They deployed off the road, 164

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moving slowly toward the battery, hampered by the soggy terrain. Their turrets hunted targets, like animals setting their noses to the wind.

Hornik felt confident that the guns were well camouflaged, and he ordered his men to remain still. But an enemy tank fired and, in an instant, the dreadful clang of a round striking metal ruptured the integrity of the treeline. Shouts and screams followed in the wake of the blast.

How could they see? Hornik wondered. How could the enemy tank have detected a camouflaged gun position in the dark?

"Fire!"

The antitank guns responded in a broken volley.

None of the rounds found their mark, and the enemy tanks returned the fire with unnerving accuracy. But their movements seemed confused by the antitank ambush. Some drew back toward folds in the ground or into the trees on the far side of the road, while others did the opposite by moving out into the open, advancing on the battery.

One of the leading enemy tanks bleached white in an explosion that seemed to ripple the metal. Hornik decided that the vehicle had struck one of the antitank mines. He could see rounds from other antitank guns striking the enemy tanks now as the gunners found the correct lay. Yet there seemed to be no pronounced damage, even when a round hit dead on. The greatest triumph of the entire battery was a shot that broke loose a track, which briefly reared like a giant snake, then flopped lifelessly, leaving the vehicle stranded in the middle of the meadow.

"Fire at the one that stopped," Hornik yelled to anyone who could hear him, and he settled himself behind the optics of his own piece. The loader hurriedly slammed another round into the breech. Hornik went as carefully as his nerves and hands would allow, realigning to seek the most vulnerable point on the enemy vehicle.

"Fire."

The round struck. But Hornik could see no difference in the state of the vehicle after the flash and sparks had cleared away. For a moment, the vehicle had seemed to be engulfed in flame. But it was all illusion.

Hornik could not understand why these monsters would not die.

"Reload," he barked. "Hurry up."

Hornik stayed with his gun. The enemy tanks came on, blasting the battery into junk. The other crew members deserted him. But Hornik struggled to get off one last shot, cursing at the top of his lungs, filled with so much hatred for the closing enemy that he felt his fury alone must stop them.

* * *

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Leonid awoke to the enormous noise of Seryosha's machine gun firing through the window frame. Seryosha screamed and, for a moment, rocketing awake, Leonid thought his comrade had been wounded. But Seryosha was only shouting for help, as though Leonid might be reinforcement enough to halt the advancing enemy.

Leonid sat on the bed for a moment, unsure what to do. Outside the window, the world flashed. He felt for and pulled on his still-wet tunic, a reflex from hundreds of awakenings in the barracks. It took him several more seconds to locate his load-bearing equipment with the ammunition pouches and his assault rifle. All the while, Seryosha screamed for him and cursed at the world beyond the window.

Fitting himself in beside Seryosha and the piercing pak-pak-pak of the light machine gun, Leonid tried to decipher the situation. Outside, the garden and the field that led back to the treeline glimmered with speckles and broken trails of light. Fiery streaks hurtled chaotically.