Ralph Peters - Red Army

RED ARMY

frontal assets. Really, he had enjoyed all of the advantages. But Starukhin w a s a n anachronism.

The pilots saw the tracer rounds rising toward the windshield. The senior pilot had made the decision to fly higher than usual, afraid of snagging power lines in the morbid German darkness. He had not expected any problems with air defenses so far behind Soviet lines.

But the tracers reached insistently toward the little aircraft, pulsing up toward the pilots with a peculiar slow-motion effect. The pilot-navigator shouted from the right-hand seat, and the senior pilot tried to bank the helicopter away from the staccato flashes.

The desperate maneuver of the aircraft woke Trimenko from his reverie. Over the shoulders of the pilots, the distant battlefield turned on end until it was a vertical band of light. Trimenko's maps and papers skittered off the seat, and he grasped for anything he could use to stabilize himself. Then the aircraft jolted several times in rapid succession, and a shock of white filled Trimenko's eyes as one of his own mobile air-defense guns blasted him out of the sky.

191

FIFTEEN

Captain Levin stood in a deserted restaurant in Hameln, munching on bread and cold ham. Outside, small-arms fire intermittently tested the night around the air-assault battalion's perimeter, but there was a definite lull in the fighting. You could sense it as clearly as you could predict what was coming next during an uninspired political lecture or in a mediocre piece of music. Levin knew that the war would return, that the British or the Germans or somebody would come back hard at the air-assault force. They would come with well-organized firepower, with determination, perhaps in the last moments before dawn. But now, in the darkness, there were a few moments during which a man could think.

Levin tried to remember anything that he might have left undone, any small detail that might contribute to the outcome of the fighting. But his mind strayed willfully back to the experience of the air assault itself, and to the heady first minutes of combat. Levin had alternated between an awareness of his own fear and the electrifying thrill of the experience. He remembered the absolute joy of overrunning the enemy position from behind, the feeling of accomplishment disproportionate to the actual event. And the conflict with Gordunov over the importance of preserving the historical monuments in the old town. The great surprise, however, was how much he frankly had enjoye

19d

2the fighting. He had worried for

RED ARMY

years that he might be a coward, and he had expected to feel somber and troubled with cosmic guilts in the wake of battle. But the action only left him eager and confident. He felt younger than he had felt in years, almost a schoolboy at play.

At the meeting of the command and staff collective, the defense had been rationalized. To Levin's surprise, Gordunov had ordered him to take command of the approach that led from the railway station and Highway 1 to the east back to the town center and the near ends of the bridges. He had been given a platoon reinforced with an automatic grenade launcher section. Levin had not been entirely sure whether the battalion commander had given him the assignment as a reward or as an ironic joke, since the failure to hold the main road approach to the ring road that circled the medieval heart of the town could funnel the combat right into the old town itself. But it was a key position, in any case, since its penetration would split the eastern-bank defense in two.

Levin had positioned his handful of men carefully, trying to remember all of the rules learned from textbooks and training exercises. He tied in to Anureyev's company on the southern approaches and the southern bridge itself, and to the special assault platoon in the hospital grounds and on the northern bridge. A special assault squad detailed to seize the railway station had failed, but now they formed an outpost line for Levin's defense. He organized the supply of ammunition and rations for his force. Feeding the men turned out to be the easiest part of the mission, since the German shops were astonishingly full. There was even fresh bread.

Everything seemed plentiful, not just food. Despite the confusion and urgency of battle, it had been impossible not to notice the riches tumbled about in the shattered storefronts. Airborne and air-assault soldiers were highly disciplined; still, it had been difficult to keep them out of the shops. At one point, Levin had been forced to shout at and threaten several troops who were looting a jewelry store, helping themselves to watches and trophies for girlfriends back home.

Breaking up the thievery proved unusually difficult for Levin, since he could not quite bring himself to blame or disdain the boys with any heartfelt vigor. In the wreckage of the jewelry shop, the disordered contents of smashed showcases shone like mythical treasures under the beam of his officer's pocket lamp. He could not understand how the West Germans could make up their minds what to buy from so vast a selection.

And, while he would never have dreamed of taking anything for himself, he had been tempted to grab up a trinket for Yelena.

— 193

Ralph Peters

In the end, he had mastered himself. He took nothing. But he had not been particularly harsh on the soldiers. He chased them away but allowed them to flee with treasures in hand.

Levin gnawed off another mouthful of ham and thought of Yelena. She had acquired a totally unexpected taste for Western things. She especially liked Western fashions now, although they did not suit her. She had grown into a woman unfathomably different from the girl with whom he had fallen in love. Yelena had always had the quickness and edge of a city girl. Yet, when they first met under the hilariously correct circumstances of a Komsomol gathering, she had spoken as a true believer, speaking her lines with conviction when the exchanges covered the triumphs of socialism and the road to inevitable communism, or the dignity of the proletariat and the need to revitalize the role of the Party through restructuring. But there had been nothing dignified or formal in her lovemaking. It was youthful, and animal, and it held Levin spellbound. It was only much later that he realized the extent to which she had led the way. He had fancied himself as serious and mature, destined to lead men.

But Yelena had led him. Her father, an urban Party official of influence, had opposed their marriage at first. Levin had been at a loss to understand why, since he had a perfect Komsomol record and he was a model student at the academy for military-political education.

Yelena had her way. They married. She was an only child, and she always had her way with her family. Levin had dutifully volunteered for the airborne forces, and, as a new junior lieutenant, he received a prized posting to the Baltic Military District.

They had a child. Mikhail. Levin, who spent his off-duty time studying and preparing his classes for the troops, was astonished when this new life appeared, as though Yelena's months of pregnancy and complaints had merely been another academic problem. Suddenly, he was a father.

Now when he spoke at lectures and political-education seminars about the duty of the Soviet soldier to prepare the road to a better future for all mankind, the word "future" and the tumult of concepts and images associated with it resonated with a deeper meaning than ever before. A better future. A better world. Levin realized, to the tune-of an infant's cries, how these notions really had been little more than cold abstractions for him in the past. But now it was all different. The better world would be the world in which his son would live.