Ralph Peters - Red Army

"Roger, Orion. Did you copy that, Five-Eight?"

"Heading, two-four-five," Sobelev confirmed. "Waiting for voice from your forward."

Sobelev did not like this kind of mission. He preferred to know in advance exactly what kind of target he was going in after and exactly where it was located. But the Third Shock Army sector was apparently in trouble, and every available aircraft had been scrambled with only the vaguest of mission briefings. Now Sobelev had no idea if he would be directed against tanks or infantry, artillery positions or an enemy command post. And any one of those targets would be very, very difficult to identify from a hurtling aircraft flying low. The controller on the ground had to do his job correctly, or the mission was wasted.

Sobelev flew right through an artillery barrage. The aircraft shook and nearly bolted from him. We're down in the shit now, he thought.

"Unidentified forward, this is Five-Eight. I'm climbing. Tell me when you have me visual." Sobelev mastered the aircraft up into the sky, hoping that none of the air-defense troops, either Soviet or enemy, would decide to knock him down.

Everything went incredibly fast. Below him, lines of military vehicles crowded the roads, and clusters of equipment blurred by in the fields where units had deployed. In most cases, it was impossible to identify the vehicle types. Columns of smoke marked a nearby engagement, and 318

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islands of fire soon developed into an archipelago along the trace of the main road.

"Five-Eight. I have you visual," the forward air controller called.

"Decrease speed."

Like hell, Sobelev thought.

"Marking own troops with green flares," the controller said, rushing the words. "Hit the far treeline, hit the treeline."

Just in front of his aircraft, Sobelev caught sight of the flares arching into the sky above billows of black smoke.

"Visual on your markers. Here we go."

Sobelev corrected slightly on the flares and searched beyond the smoke for the designated treeline in the last quick seconds. He thought he had it, hoping it was the correct one. Terrain features rushed up so fast he could not see any enemy vehicles at all. He saw nothing but a fringe of trees.

He half heard the controller verifying that he was on the correct heading as he cast off his ordnance. Ground-attack aircraft had stopped doing initial orientation passes after the first day of the war.

Behind his tail section, the entire planet seemed to shake. The aircraft shimmied, and Sobelev prayed that it would just hold together and do what his fingers ordered it to do. He came out in a hard turn, heading back toward home.

Kill them, until they kill me, he told himself, sweating and shaking so badly that he could hardly guide the aircraft. Kill them, until they kill me . . . kill them . . .

The new mission startled Bezarin. He had expected to be withdrawn into a reconstitution area where his scattered unit could be reassembled and his tanks could be repaired and rearmed. But the orders, delivered by a staff officer in a hurry, were to dig in and prepare to defend the western bank bridgehead against an armored assault.

It made no sense to Bezarin. Certainly, the smothered thudding of a great battle had arisen in the distance. But it was inconceivable to him that the torrent of Soviet armor that had been pouring across the river since midnight could possibly be driven back to depend on his handful of battered tanks.

An engineer vehicle appeared to prepare defilade positions for his unit.

Bezarin almost laughed. He was very much in favor of protected fighting positions, but he did not think they would be of much use unless he received some ammunition. In the light of day, his remaining tanks looked like wrecks that would hardly be accepted by a vehicle cannibali-zation point. Reactive armor had blown or torn away, and the thinner 319

Ralph Peters

plates of metal twisted up to scratch the air. Little remained of the equipment racks and stowage boxes, and the snorkels, useless in the best of times, were hopelessly perforated by shell fragments. Bezarin roused his men and forced them to perform basic maintenance chores. He believed that, with ammunition and a bit more fuel, his unit could give a good account of itself in an emergency. But it seemed absurd to expect his tiny force to hold back any threat that could devour the unscathed new-model tanks that had passed in such great numbers to the west.

The bridgehead had taken on the character of a small military city.

Air-defense systems crowned the surrounding hills. Supplementary bridges lay in the Weser at intervals of several hundred meters, emplaced to augment the highway bridge or replace it, should enemy aircraft finally succeed in their efforts to drop the prize span in the water. The canvas of administrative entities had already begun to appear, although many organizations preferred to exploit buildings on the edge of the smoldering town. Bad Oeynhausen was quickly turning into a forward command and control center. On the eastern bank, artillery batteries poked deadly fingers into the sky. And in the midst of it all, the traffic controllers from the commandant's service waved their arms and shouted and argued, straining to sort out competing priorities on the roads.

Probably, Bezarin figured, his orders simply reflected caution. A systematic response to an enemy counterattack, aimed at preventing any Soviet forces from suffering the sort of surprise his tanks had inflicted on the enemy the day before. He set his face into his "I'm in command here"

expression and marched down among his vehicles, guiding the efforts of the big engineer tractor and refining individual zones of fire. He felt a profound surge of pride in his dirty, knocked-about tanks and in the new brotherhood of men who crewed them. Come what may, they would do their duty.

Still, Bezarin thought, it would have been nice to have a bit of ammunition.

Shilko felt as though he had stumbled into a cache of hidden treasures, like the hero in a folk tale. Splendid farm instruments crowded the barn, a harrow and a shining plow, a seeder and a hay mower of a new type with which Shilko was not familiar. And this wonderful assortment of devices for bringing life out of the earth apparently belonged to one private farmer here in West Germany. It did not seem fair. Shilko thought about how such tools would ease the tasks of his little agricultural collective back in garrison, and how much more they could produce. He reveled in the mingled smells of hay and dust, breathing lustily until it made him 320

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sneeze. In his heart, he grudgingly suspected that the Germans did, indeed, have superior talents or values in some respects. He sat on a bale of hay, leaning over his belly to rest his elbows on his knees. He envied the absent German farmer. He envied all of the farmers of the world, and it came to him that he had wasted his life.

Shilko rarely wandered off by himself, always preferring the crowding and company of his battalion officers, his second family, unless he needed to rest or faced a particularly unpleasant writing task. He loved to be surrounded by other men. Refusing to be suspicious—sensible, his wife called it—he warmed to every man who gave him the opportunity.

There would be plenty of time to spend alone in the grave. Life was meant to be enjoyed in the company of other human beings.

But now, west of the Weser River, perhaps a day's journey from the fabled Rhine, riding the currents of victory, Shilko's unruly thoughts had led him off for a few moments of solitude. He was not a man given to serious reflection, yet it seemed there were so many things that needed to be mulled over. Sitting in the rich twilight of the barn, with brilliant rays of light slicing through the amber gloom, he tried to sort things out. But he could not quite get a grip on any single train of thought. He wondered if he had ever understood anything about the world at all, or if he had merely gone through his life in a waking sleep. Whenever he thought of the face of the suffocating lieutenant, it seemed to him that that single moment of helplessness had revealed to him the failure of his entire life.