Ralph Peters - Red Army

The radio spoke.

Bezarin recognized the voice of the regiment's commander, passing a brevity code. Bezarin scrambled to copy the message, then to break it out using the sheets he kept in his breast pocket.

Movement. In ten minutes.

The time was unreasonably short after so long a wait. Bezarin hoped he could wake everyone and get all of the engines started in time. It would have been better to warm the engines slowly, since they had been sitting for several hours. Bezarin thought that he would have been wiser to have been readying his force instead of indulging in reveries. But the past was unalterable, and he forced himself to concentrate on the present.

Twenty-six tanks and a bedraggled motorized rifle company. Bezarin shouted at his crew to get their gear on and start up the tank, then he hoisted himself out of the commander's hatch. It required an awkward maneuver to slip down over the jewel boxes of reactive armor that had been bolted onto the tank, and Bezarin hit the ground flat-footed, jolting himself fully awake. He ran along the column, shouting to the officers, nagged by a small, cranky worry over additional mechanical breakdowns. He found that the prospect of moving toward the battle did not bother him at all but filled him with unexpected and even unreasonable energy. He was delighted to find that he was not afraid when it mattered.

Only scared of the girls, he decided.

The regiment's route, studded with traffic controllers, led them through the wreckage of earlier fighting. It was possible to reconstruct much of how the battle had gone from the position of the hulks. In one broad field, a Soviet tank company had been ambushed in battle formation. The burned-out wrecks formed an almost perfect line of battle. Bezarin felt certain that, somehow, he would never let that happen to his battalion, but he wondered simultaneously at the effect such a sight must have on his men as they rolled by with their hatches open.

The enemy appeared to be exclusively British, which both surprised and disappointed Bezarin. He had always pictured himself fighting the 208

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Americans or the West Germans. Now he wondered if his unit had not been shunted into a secondary sector, a sideshow. He felt punished by the lack of information from higher headquarters.

There were plenty of ruined British vehicles in evidence, even though visibility remained limited to a few hundred meters on either side of the road. But the obviously larger number of slaughtered vehicle carcasses from Soviet units annoyed Bezarin. The level of destruction appeared to have been terrible on both sides, but the losses were clearly not in balance. Bezarin soon stopped counting and comparing, consoling himself with the smoldering conviction that he would do better.

The British had died mostly in defensive positions, although here and there you could tell that a specific element had waited too long to pull off its position and had been caught in the open. One chaotic intermingling told the story of a local counterattack. The residue of battle left a bitter taste, as though neither side had shown the least mercy.

Bezarin blamed the superior quantitative performance of the British on technology. Of all the fears that intermittently gripped the Soviet officer corps, Bezarin knew that the greatest was of the technological edge the NATO armies possessed, all Party propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding. Often, the fear bordered on paranoia, with worries about secret weapons that NATO might have concealed for sudden employment on the first day of the war. Bezarin saw no evidence for wonder weapons now, but he cursed the mystifying superiority of the Western models of standard battlefield equipment.

One curious aspect of the battlefield was how few bodies were in evidence. Occasionally, a cluster of dead sprawled in a burned fringe around a combat vehicle or lay half-crushed along the roadway. But the greater effect was as if the battle had been a contest of machines, a tournament of systems, with only a handful of human puppeteers. That was an illusion, Bezarin knew. A troubling percentage of the stricken Soviet tanks had their turrets blown completely off. The hulls lay about like decapitated beasts. No crew member could survive such a catastrophic effect. When they died, the great steel animals devoured their human contents, as if in a last act of vengeance.

The last of the morning ground fog clung to the woodlines like decayed flesh slowly loosening from bones. The sky remained overcast, but the heaviness was gone, and the last gray would burn off as the sun climbed higher. Bezarin scanned the grayness. He could already hear the aircraft ripping by just above the visual ceiling. There was no way of telling whose aircraft these were, and Bezarin feared the impending clarity of the day. The march column moved swiftly, except for the odd accordion 209

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stop when a traffic controller faced a dilemma for which his orders had not prepared him. Yet Bezarin wanted them to go faster, to push the vehicles to the limit of their speed.

You had to close fast. That was what the books said, and Bezarin had dutifully read the books. If you closed fast, the enemy could not bring his air power or indirect fires to bear, and you cheapened your opponent's long-range antitank guided missiles. You had to close fast and get in among the enemy subunits, then you needed to keep going until you were behind him, to make it impossible for him to fight you according to his desires. It sounded very straightforward on the page. But Bezarin suspected that there was a bit more to it during the actual execution.

A loud thump-thump-thump sounded off to the right. A stand of trees bowed toward the march column, bending away from lashing, half-hidden bursts of fire.

The correct response was to button up, to seal the crews within the armor of the tanks and infantry fighting vehicles. But the prescribed action was impossible for the vehicle commanders. As long as they remained on radio listening silence, signal flags and then flares were the order of the day. The vehicle commanders had to remain exposed until the final battle deployment began. Bezarin unconsciously worked down lower in his turret, bracing his shoulder against his opened hatch. A flight of jets shrieked by so low that the noise cut sharply through the padded headgear.

You couldn't even see the damned things.

A row of birches straggled along the road. Birches even in West Germany. Anna of the birches. Bezarin felt the grime of sleeplessness on his face, lacquered over the film of tank exhaust and sweat. Not a very romantic picture, Anna. No dashing officers here out of some ball in an old novel. We are the unwashed warriors.

Up ahead, billows of smoke and dust suddenly engulfed the march column. Bezarin saw an antiaircraft piece swing its turret snappily about, its radar frantic. But the weapon did not fire. A bright burst, clearly an explosion, flared in the lead battalion's trail company, which was separated from Bezarin's unit by only a few tens of meters instead of the regulation number of kilometers. Everything seemed crammed, con-densed in both time and space, crippled by haste and necessity.

The column did not stop moving. A minute later, Bezarin's command tank turned off the road to move around a pair of burning infantry fighting vehicles. He could feel a distinct difference as the tank's tracks bit into the meadowland. The driver simply followed the vehicle to his front, and Bezarin inspected the vehicles that had been hit. The troop 210

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carriers burned in patches. There was no sign of life from within them.

You could not even see what hit you, Bezarin thought. The spectacle made him want to close with the enemy immediately, to pay them back.