Red Metal

by Mark Greaney

  Return gunfire chattered all around Paulina. Instinctively she looked around her, left and right, and saw men and women with weapons aimed and firing to the east.

  In the span of a few seconds she also witnessed men and women just kneeling, sitting, or even lying down in the dirt and covering their heads. Beyond this she saw the camouflaged outline of a big man running out of the next trench, west toward the wood line behind them.

  Paulina’s and Bruno’s eyes met now: they were both terrified and unable to hide it from each other. After less than a second the young, acne-scarred boy spun away, hefted the RPG-7 onto his left shoulder, and rose up to his feet. His upper torso and head were exposed over the earthen berm as he aimed.

  Paulina rose up on her feet behind him. As the loader she had to prep the next round, but it was also her responsibility to help him with the firing of the weapon. She braced him with her right hand on his back, her arm stiff, turning away from him and checking the area behind the weapon’s tube to make sure no one was in the way.

  Around her in the trench, the sound of ripping gunfire was maddening.

  “Backblast clear!” Paulina screamed, looking at the snow to the wood line in the opposite direction and anticipating the jolt, noise, and flash of the launch.

  But the hot blast of the launch never came. She started to shout again that the area behind her gunner was clear, but before the words came out she felt Bruno lurch back against her hand, and where she’d expected to see the flash of a rocket launch she instead saw a dark red spray.

  Blood shot over the back of the trench and into the snow, a scatter path of crimson four meters long.

  Bruno went limp and fell against her, and now she tumbled down into the trench over her bandolier of rockets. As she turned around and pushed him off, all around her guns fired, men and women screamed and shouted and fell and fought, and she looked at her crewmate and saw that his helmet was off and the back of his head was gone.

  It was his blood that had sprayed like the backblast of the weapon he never even fired.

  Paulina screamed but she did not freeze in terror. With reflexes spurred on by the primordial desire for survival, she grabbed the RPG-7, hoisted it onto her shoulder, rose to her feet, and looked for a target over the berm.

  The nearest APC was much closer than she expected, sixty-five meters away now and racing right at her. She focused on the big armored vehicle, lined it up in the ring-and-post sight, and pressed the trigger.

  As in training, the weapon shuddered and flashed.

  The rocket streaked across the open ground, slammed into the turret of the armored vehicle, and exploded in a fireball.

  But the APC did not slow down at all; it just rolled through the flame and continued on, closing by the second.

  Lieutenant Nowicki’s voice came over the radio lying in the dirt in E Section. “Troops! Dismounting troops!” The terror in the young officer’s voice coming through the speaker only added to the chaos in the hole around her.

  Russian troops wearing all white and carrying black rifles poured out of the fog behind the armored vehicles. Some dropped to their knees to fire, some dove to the ground and fired from a prone position, and others continued advancing toward the trenches in a run, firing all the way.

  Nowicki screamed, “Riflemen, engage the dismounts! Dabrowski, Borowicz, stay on those PKs! Rake that hill!”

  The four vehicles ground to a halt in the snow; then the main guns began thumping automatic fire. Almost instantly Paulina heard cracks in the forest behind her as tree limbs and trunks were struck by the heavy machine guns. Close fire snapped over Paulina’s head, angry, amplified wasps buzzing beyond the speed of sound.

  Icy tears ran down her cheeks and her arms shook as she reloaded and then leveled her grenade launcher at the same vehicle as before.

  Next to her Urszula hefted a rocket-propelled grenade with one hand and slapped Kluk on the back with the other, letting him know the area was clear behind him. He fired his RPG at the same time Paulina fired hers.

  Kluk’s grenade hit the Bumerang but did no damage. Paulina’s explosive overshot the approaching assault vehicle and detonated in the hill two hundred meters behind it.

  “Gówno!”

  Nowicki’s voice came over the radio. “Again! Lower your aim! Hurry!”

  Just then, new blasts rocked the hillside around Paulina. Her ears began ringing and her heart seemed to slosh left and right in her chest. Frozen earth rained down all over.

  Jesus, please protect me.

  The earthen berm in front of her kicked up, dirt clods rocketed ten meters into the air, and Paulina dropped the launcher and dove to the trench floor. She heard screams and grunts around her, and she instinctively looked over to her right. Urszula lay there in the dirt facing away, unmoving in the fetal position, as if she were asleep. Above Urszula’s still form, Kluk leveled the RPG launcher alone, but then he lurched back as a machine-gun round caught him in the chest.

  He tumbled back over Urszula and lay still on top of her, eyes wide open.

  Something snapped in Paulina Tobiasz upon seeing her best friend lying there. She reached out for the closest weapon, her long wooden Mosin-Nagant. She climbed out of her hole with the bolt-action rifle, then stood on the berm, searching for targets in the heavy weather.

  Dismounted soldiers moved in the near distance, their rifles spitting fire, revealing themselves in the snowfall. Paulina began to level her weapon on one of the figures, but then, like wraiths in the fog, two white-clad Russian soldiers materialized in front of her, out of the whipping snow, just fifteen meters away.

  She spun her big weapon toward them, and they both saw the movement at the same time.

  * * *

  • • •

  A seventy-one-year-old pensioner stood in the hamlet above the battle, using the Nikon he’d bought to photograph birds to record the unbelievable sight before him on the normally placid sheep-grazing pasture. He saw a blonde with a ponytail raise her head out of a trench, not three meters from where a brunette just fell. There was something about the blonde’s movement, the certitude of it, the decisiveness of it. In a half-minute battle in which many of the overmatched Poles cowered and hesitated to reveal themselves but died just the same, the blonde climbed completely out of the trench and onto the berm in front of her. In her right hand she held an old wooden-stocked rifle, and to the pensioner she looked like a young partisan from the Second World War. He centered his 500mm lens on the girl. The snowy ground just a few meters in front of her exploded with fire and smoke, brown earth kicked up with the detonation of a grenade, but she took no notice. Instead she took one or two steps out of the trench toward the approaching Russian troops and shouldered her weapon, leveling it at the men coming her way.

  He held the button on his Nikon down, snapped dozens of photos as the young woman almost a kilometer away ignored the branches of the trees rimming the berm exploding into the air and rocked back a little while firing her rifle. The closest Russian was not fifteen meters from her, and he spun into the snow with her shot, falling to the ground. The girl worked the bolt, the pensioner kept shooting pictures, the girl raised the weapon again to fire, and—just when he tried to capture perfectly the fire and smoke from her long wooden rifle—she lurched back again.

  But this time it was not the recoil of her weapon that sent her to her heels. She spun around on the dirt and stumbled backward, her right arm jutting out, holding the weapon fully extended as her legs weakened and she fell back, all the way back.

  She dropped the rifle as she dropped face-first into the trench.

  The gun remained on the dirty snow at the edge of the earthen berm, but the girl was gone.

  He kept taking pictures, but his mind was on the girl even as the man she’d shot climbed back to his feet, lifted his rifle out of the snow, and resumed his advance.

  She’d
clearly hit him in his body armor, and he’d suffered no lasting effects.

  And off to the south, just two hundred meters beyond the battle, the unceasing column of Russian armor rolled on to the east as if they were wholly unaware of the fight.

  * * *

  • • •

  Paulina Tobiasz felt an incredible jolt against the stock of her rifle, and it spun her back into the ditch, where she landed hard on her chest on the frozen ground.

  It took her a second to realize she was not dead—not yet, anyway—and once she understood this she reached out with her right hand and grabbed like mad for a new weapon among the dead and wounded around her. Her Mosin-Nagant hadn’t made it back into the trench with her, so she was determined to take hold of any lethal device she could find.

  She saw a wire-stocked AK just two meters away, half under the body of a dead twenty-six-year-old truck driver named Radek with eyes so bad that the Land Forces had refused to take him. His thick eyeglasses lay broken next to the weapon, but it wasn’t Radek’s rifle; he’d wielded an SKS in the fight.

  She didn’t worry about the Kalashnikov’s provenance now. She just wanted to take it in her frozen hand, climb back out of the trench, and fire one last burst before the Russians killed her and every one of her friends.

  On the far side of poor Radek, the forty-five-year-old soccer coach from Warsaw named Jerzy pulled himself to his knees, his face covered with dirt and streaked with blood, and he looked at the AK himself. Seeing Paulina crawling over Radek, Jerzy lunged for the weapon, scrambling over her. Even though he was gushing blood above his right ear from a vicious shrapnel wound to his scalp, he had more fight in him, just as the girl alive in the trench did. But Jerzy crushed Paulina with his weight as he crawled on top of her, smashing her down on top of Radek, and he got the AK in his right hand. He spun around with it, lying on Paulina’s back and knocking the breath fully out of her. Although Paulina couldn’t see what he was doing because she was pinned facedown in the broken earth, she heard close-in gunfire now, so she squeezed her eyes shut.

  * * *

  • • •

  The pensioner on the top of the hill caught several groups of white-clad Russians running up the berm in front of the trench where the brave blonde had fallen. As he looked through his powerful lens, the young soldiers began aiming down into it. They sprayed into the pit with their AKs, some unslinging their weapons and, holding their guns high, not bothering to aim, pointed them straight down as they shot round after round, emptying their magazines.

  The Russian troops were massacring the wounded.

  The main column had continued rolling up the road for the entire duration of the fight, and now down on the road below him the photographer could see supply trucks and other vehicles among the tanks and assault vehicles. He photographed what he could, looked down at his screen, and saw he had taken more than five hundred images in the past three minutes.

  He decided he needed to get the hell out of there.

  CHAPTER 32

  GRAFENWÖHR, GERMANY

  25 DECEMBER

  Lieutenant Colonel Tom Grant was in a particularly foul mood already, and he hadn’t even started his workday. He’d gotten up a half hour earlier to FaceTime with his wife back in Boulder and wish her a merry Christmas only to find he had no Internet connection on his phone. He then tried to call her and, after sitting there with the phone to his ear for over a minute, realized his cell service was down as well.

  His wife would be going to bed pissed at him.

  Some Christmas morning this was shaping up to be.

  Grant had been here at U.S. Army Garrison Grafenwöhr for the past month, preparing equipment for Broadsword, a massive NATO exercise to take place in Germany in late January. As commander of a tank maintenance regiment, he was ultimately responsible for the function of every single American Abrams tank in the operation, so he wasn’t able to spend Christmas with his family.

  Broadsword was a NATO exercise, but the Poles, Germans, and Americans were the most heavily invested in terms of troops.

  The other member nations were involved, but the three countries that would maneuver the vast majority of the regiments of ground power and wings of airpower remained the three most committed to the defense of northern Europe.

  His job was tough enough without communications problems first thing this morning. He’d taken a shower while cursing Apple and Deutsche Telekom and various other vague, undefined forces conspiring against him, then dressed in his BDU and laced up his boots. He tried to dial home again as he walked down the hall, past the doors to the giant tank maintenance bays.

  A former University of Minnesota tackle, Grant had been a muscular six feet back in the day. It had helped him immensely as a young tanker, hefting rounds and changing tank tracks. Now some of the muscle had sagged to his waist, and his auburn hair had thinned in front and given way to gray. He still maintained a blocky, solid appearance, but as with most driven men, he regretted that his duties gave him less time to concentrate on his fitness.

  “Sir?” a voice from an open doorway called out, interrupting his attempt at a phone call that wasn’t going anywhere anyway. He turned to Lieutenant Darnell Chandler, his assistant logistics officer. “Morning, sir. There’s a call for you in the Layette Room.”

  “At least one damn phone is working,” Grant said.

  “Yes, sir. Couldn’t connect with my girlfriend this morning on Skype. Internet is down. Guess that’s gonna be my fault when I finally do talk to her.”

  “No, Chandler,” Grant said as he passed him. “Not until you marry her. Then everything’s your fault.”

  Grant had a personal rule about not getting his first good whiff of engine oil and hydraulic fluid until after breakfast, but he and Chandler headed out into the maintenance bay on his way to the room where the tools and other equipment were kept.

  As he passed through the door, he was happy to see that several German soldiers and U.S. Army tankers were paired up and working hard. Inside the maintenance bay was a pair of massive M1A2 SEP Abrams tanks, and all of the men working on them were coated with different amounts of grease.

  “Lieutenant Colonel Grant, Lieutenant Colonel Grant,” repeated the PA system as he walked along between the big tanks. “Phone call, line one.”

  Tom Grant hastened his stride and glanced at his cell again. The damn thing still said Keine Verbindung. (No connection.)

  He nodded as he walked by two senior enlisted leaders, Master Sergeant Kellogg and Oberstabsfeldwebel Wolfram, who was the German army equivalent of a master sergeant.

  “Sir, they’re calling for you in the maintenance office,” said Kellogg.

  “Yep, heard.” He kept walking, with Chandler right behind him.

  * * *

  • • •

  After the major was out of earshot, the German turned to his American counterpart. “How’s your new boss?”

  “He’s good,” said Kellogg. “I’ve been breaking him in slowly. But I think he gets it. He’s been around the block a few times, mainly at the tactical level. He finished ABOLC, the tank officer basic school, so he’s a legit tanker. Tank commander, even. But something got screwed up along the way.”

  Wolfram wiped grease from his hands with a well-used rag. “What do you mean?”

  “He got sent on a military training mission in Iraq, and they only send guys there as a punishment when they fuck up. It’s not pretty when an officer falls from grace. They give them the worst shit duty they have, and if they survive—shine, even—only then do they have any chance of saving their career.”

  “You Americans are so much too hard on your officers. One mistake and all washed out, no?”

  “Well, not exactly, but Grant won’t make it past lieutenant colonel no matter what he does.” He shrugged. “Anyhow, they sent him to maintenance officer school and he’s now a really damn
good one. The troops love him. He’s got a nonstop work ethic, though—I’ll give him that. Dude even sleeps in the maintenance office some nights.”

  The German said, “This sounds like my boss. I think maybe your lieutenant colonel and my major are stressed about the exercise next month.”

  LTC Grant’s voice came over the PA. “I need Major Ott, Master Sergeant Kellogg, and Oberstabsfeldwebel Wolfram in the Layette Room immediately.”

  The German and American master sergeants exchanged a look. “Shit,” Kellogg said. “Gotta teach the boss to not sound so high-strung on the PA. Dude sounds like there’s a damn war goin’ on.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Three minutes later the two senior enlisted men stood in the Layette Room with Lieutenant Colonel Grant and Lieutenant Chandler. Grant hung up the landline phone and turned to the three men as Major Blaz Ott, commander of the German contingent here, came in to join them, looking worried.

  “Blaz, grab a seat. I have something hot.”

  A U.S. sergeant walked in with a clipboard of paperwork and interrupted. “Hey, Top, I can’t order that code ‘oh-three’ you wanted. The Internet is down again and—”

  Kellogg snapped his finger and shouted, “Go away, trooper!”

  The sergeant backed out and shut the door.

  Grant said, “I got a call on the landline from our bosses, who, as you know, are up in Belgium on Christmas break with their families. They say cell service is out across all of Europe. So is all Internet. A few landlines are still working—they got through to me for a minute, but we got cut off.

  “But here’s what I do know. The Russians have launched an attack in Poland.”

  Every man in front of Grant sat up straighter, eyes wide.

  “Fuck me,” muttered Kellogg.

  “We don’t know yet what their exact composition is, and we have no idea what their intentions are.”