by Mark Greaney
Dryagin straightened up and nodded. “Da, Comrade General, but that means the forward units will have to pause for the rear elements to catch up. Could be a delay of another twenty-four hours.”
Sabaneyev was surprised by this. “That long?”
“There is fighting to the west. Our forces there have to push through or go around. This will take time.”
Sabaneyev looked around. “This forest is decent protection. We have plenty of antiair to keep the enemy aircraft reticent about mounting any large-scale attack. We will stay in the woods and have our scouts keeping an eye out for those American tanks that have been bedeviling us for days. When we get our force together, we’ll continue.”
Sabaneyev thought about being stuck yet even longer in Poland, and anger welled inside him. “I want air defense on full alert at all times. Tell your men.”
“Of course, Comrade General.”
* * *
• • •
RADOM, POLAND
29 DECEMBER
Captain Raymond “Shank” Vance rubbed the cast on his left hand and thought about ripping it off to scratch the maddening itch that had been growing by the hour. But the dressings were tight and there was no way he could slide a finger through to get to the source of the discomfort.
The one time he had been able to catch his reflection in a window on the way to the hospital, he saw his left eye swollen shut and the left side of his face pockmarked by three deep lacerations and innumerable smaller cuts from canopy glass turned to shrapnel by an Su-57’s cannon.
His left hand was in the worst shape. It was broken and the doctors thought a fragment of a cannon round must have pierced it completely, but when they took him into surgery to remove shrapnel and set the bones, the surgeon said a visual inspection of the nerves around the damaged areas made him optimistic that Shank would regain full use of the hand.
For the time being, however, it hurt like hell.
His head ached behind his swollen eye now, but it wasn’t as bad as the itching or the pain in his hand.
He could tell he was receiving special treatment here at this aid station set up by the Territorial Defense Force. Even with the Polish Land Forces moving out of the area a couple hours earlier, he continued to receive good medical care from doctors working with the militia. He didn’t speak a word of Polish, but enough of them spoke English to make things work. Most referred to him simply as “Mr. Pilot,” which he didn’t mind.
He picked up from some of their discussions around him that the militia had watched as he destroyed the Russian train, only to see him get shot down by a Russian Sukhoi on his egress. A few dirty, war-ragged militia members, looking more like World War II anti-Nazi partisans than any modern-day military force, had come to the clinic to meet him in person. Some of the older Poles’ English was nonexistent, but they seemed happy to just pat him on the head and offer him sips of vodka or some other, unusual-smelling liquor.
Shank was lying alone with his thoughts now, his mind addled by painkillers and booze but still wondering about the fate of Nooner and the rest of the pilots in his squadron, when a young girl with dirty-blond hair stepped into the room full of wounded men on hospital beds. She wore a militia uniform with mud-caked knees, an AK-47 over her shoulder and a black knit cap on her head. Her face was smudged with smoke but pink from the cold and her youth.
Shank thought she looked both like a kid who might pour him a latte at Starbucks and also like a battle-hardened soldier.
Shank tracked her as she looked around at the two dozen or so patients, then stepped over to a middle-aged man with his foot in a cast suspended over his bed. She talked to him a moment, rubbing a cast on her left forearm as she did so. She then scanned the room until, surprisingly to Shank, she locked eyes with him. She walked to him, picking her way around the other wounded and moaning men lying on mattresses, bed frames, cots, chairs, and any other furniture the Polish orderlies had dragged into the room to turn this small office supply store into a makeshift hospital.
The blonde stepped up to his full-sized hospital bed. There was no smile, no pat on the head. No greeting at all. “You are the American pilot?”
Shank had spent years in and out of combat zones, and he sized the young woman up instantly by her intense eyes. This kid’s been in the shit for the past few days, and she’s lost friends.
He smiled at her a little. “Yes, ma’am. I’m the Hog driver who got shot down,” he said.
She was confused. “Hogs? Hogs . . . like pigs?”
“No . . . it’s my plane. We call it the Hog.”
“Yes. Your plane crash. It fly like pig.”
Shank laughed and winced with fresh pain. “Right.” He smiled, extended his right hand. “I’m Ray. People call me Shank.”
She took his hand but did not return the smile. “Tobiasz.”
“You got a first name?”
“Of course. Doctor says you walk, yes?”
“Yeah, I can walk,” Shank confirmed. He’d used the bedpan a couple of times, but just a few minutes earlier he’d walked across the room to the bathroom and had managed to put one foot in front of the other with a limp off his sore right ankle.
She looked over his swollen eye, the bandages on his cheek, and the cast on his hand and wrist. “You know to talk to the airplanes?” She shook her head quickly, clearly knowing her English was failing her. “You understand? You can talk to American planes in sky?”
“Not without a radio. A U.S. radio.”
“Wolniej . . . slower, please,” she said.
Shank pushed himself up in the bed with his right hand and spoke more slowly. “Yes, I can talk to American planes. But I would need the right radio.”
“I have American radio. Come with me. You talk to planes. Kill more Russians.”
Shank was confused. “There’s still fighting? Shit, I figured the Russians would be back in Belarus by now.”
“No. Russians not gone. Russians are all over south of Poland now, from Radom and Kraków to Belarus border. Polish Land Forces and militia follow Russians. Kill them. Push them from Poland. You understand?” She spoke slowly, but clearly she had paid attention in school; her vocabulary wasn’t bad.
“Yes, I understand.”
“You come now. We fight Russians. You talk to American planes for to help us. Is okay?”
Shank wanted to get back with his unit, but he knew this was a fluid situation, and the girl was insistent. He figured he could help them establish comms with NATO forces flying overhead, and then whoever he spoke with could alert his squadron of his location.
She told him to meet her outside; then she walked out of the room without looking behind her to see if he was even going to make it to his feet.
He pushed himself off the bed and rolled clumsily to his right side. He winced in pain, his left arm getting caught under him as he tried to sit. He pulled it up abruptly to hook it back into its sling. Shank threw off his blanket, climbed to his feet, and began getting dressed.
A few minutes later he headed for the door, leaning on the railing by the wooden steps to support his injured leg. The Polish field doctors watched him casually as he left; one caught up to him and handed him a crutch. Judging by the amount of dried blood Shank saw on it, he’d guessed the previous owner no longer needed it. Shank ran his right hand over his flight suit, an unthinking gesture to neaten his torn, filthy uniform, and, using the crutch, walked out into the winter air and blinding white landscape.
Shank had watched a lot of the landscape passing below him, but now that he had a chance to view it properly, he saw how picturesque it was. He doubted anyone in a thirty-mile radius had stopped to look at the snow-covered pine forests as a thing of beauty in a while—they would all be more preoccupied with the invasion of their nation—but to Shank it was so peaceful and serene. Even though he was wounded, the smell of fresh air
reminded him how close he’d come to death and how lucky he was to be alive.
He hobbled over toward the militia members, about fourteen of them, all hanging out next to the mix of military and commandeered civilian vehicles.
None offered him a hand as he approached them. Trying to maintain his balance was a challenge, but he persisted, and arrived at the group. Clearly the stroll from the makeshift hospital to the vehicles constituted a sort of test. When he made it, one offered him a cigarette, which he declined.
Paulina reached into the back of a small cargo van and pulled out a white down coat. It looked like it had been used as a pillow for someone dying from a head wound, but the blood was now dry, and Shank had nothing else to keep him safe from the subfreezing temperature.
She held it out to him, and he took it.
“A friend of yours?”
Paulina shook her head. “No. A civilian.” She looked out to the adjoining field. “We stripped the dead in Wrocław. We are the TDF; we don’t have much equipment.”
A man in his forties and dressed completely in civilian attire spoke up in perfectly fluent English. “Hey, man, glad to have you on our team. You know, some of us watched you strafing that train.” He smiled and took a long drag from his cigarette, then did his impression of the sound made by the GAU cannon on Shank’s aircraft.
Others started laughing.
Paulina did not laugh. She spoke rapidly in Polish to the man, and he looked up to Shank now. “We need to mount up. She wants us to get to a spot near Radom. The Reds have been doing a pretty good job sticking to the side roads and traveling in small clusters. We think they know that NATO airplanes are hunting for them, so they have changed their tactics and are moving in smaller groups.”
Shank nodded. “Smart. I’ll need a UHF radio if I am going to talk to NATO airplanes.”
“No problem.”
The man motioned Shank into the front passenger seat of a cargo van, and shut the door behind him after the American struggled to get his crutch inside. When the man climbed behind the wheel, Shank said, “The girl—she’s in charge?”
The man just nodded as he fired up the van. “Paulina Tobiasz. She’s our leader.”
Shank saw her climbing into another vehicle. He couldn’t get over how young she looked. “She’s, like, a lieutenant or something?”
“A what?” the man asked, momentarily confused by an English word he didn’t know. “Oh, like an officer. Good question.” He asked another of the Polish militia members something, and when he answered, the English speaker said, “We don’t know her rank in the militia. She’s just our leader. She’s famous. She has the . . . What’s the word? The odwaga. Courage, I think.”
“You don’t know her rank? How did she get to be in charge?”
“She’s a hero. There is a picture of her everywhere in Warsaw that shows her battling Russians on the first morning of the war. I think she killed, like, ten of them or something. The only thing she thinks about is killing Russians. That’s all,” the man said, then took a last drag and flicked the cigarette out the window as he started the truck and put it into gear.
CHAPTER 64
YABELO WILDLIFE SANCTUARY, ETHIOPIA
29 DECEMBER
The woods were spotty but dense with a tangle of vines and thickets. Mostly low scrub, but plenty of moderate trees to make visibility of Ethiopia’s Highway 80 difficult from here, five hundred meters to the east.
The Kaskazi winds blew constant dry air from the Persian Gulf across the sixty-one able-bodied men of the 13th Dragoons, and the sun baked any exposed skin as they sat there in the scrub of southern Ethiopia, swatting at mosquitoes and flies for more than two hours while awaiting the Russian column. They’d shooed off a group of curious tribesmen who’d approached on foot without a shred of fear of the heavily armed men, and a herd of ibex goats ambled through their position slowly, providing a humorous distraction.
Apollo and his men had planted explosives, all they had, on the highway, but also in the gullies and under dirt paths along it. The terrain was channelizing, and unless the Russians found the explosives before they got to them, they were going to be inconvenienced with the destruction of some of their lead elements and slowed by the need to check the area carefully before proceeding with the main column.
The lead units of the southbound column arrived in early afternoon. Apollo waited until the first four vehicles were directly in his kill zone before ordering the initiation of the first of the explosives. Four more BTRs, another platoon, raced up to protect their comrades, firing wildly in all directions. The Russians dismounted and Apollo detonated the rest of the charges.
It was a cold tactic, obliterating the response force. He’d seen it used to horrific effect by the insurgents in Afghanistan. But he also knew he could expect the exact same treatment from the Russians.
The Dragoons ran to their vehicles and raced south. Right now they were the only thing standing in the way of the brigade of Russians and they weren’t going to get many more free ambushes like that one. The plan was to keep up the hit-and-run as long as they could until help arrived or they were told to quit.
He pulled out his satellite phone, first looking for a call from his father; when he saw no calls, he contacted the Hexagone Balard, the French Pentagon.
Five minutes later he disconnected the call, a little smile on his face. He’d been told to hit the Russians one more time and then contact a contingent of U.S. Marines who were now heading north through Kenya, planning their own harassing action against the Russian column.
American Marines are coming to join the fray. It’s about time.
He decided to fall back to the border city of Moyale and try to take out a few more pieces of enemy armor to slow them down before contacting his new allies in the fight.
* * *
• • •
SOUTHERN ETHIOPIA
29 DECEMBER
The radio came alive in Colonel Kir’s ears, pulling him out of the most restful few minutes of sleep he’d managed in a day. It was Colonel Nishkin, commander of 1st Regiment, some two hours ahead of the headquarters element. After his spearhead elements were attacked and destroyed passing the Yabelo Wildlife Sanctuary three hours earlier, he’d managed to press on toward Moyale at the border.
And now he was unclear on his orders.
He didn’t explicitly say that over the radio, of course, but Kir inferred as much when Nishkin said he wanted to take “an operational security halt,” to let his men stretch their legs and top off their fuel tanks.
General Lazar had been standing up in the open top hatch of the BTR—he heard the call himself—and he squatted down next to Colonel Kir.
“Ah, old 1st Regiment. What do you think, Kir? Are they lost?”
Kir lowered the scarf that had been keeping dust out of his throat. “Perhaps, sir. We should give him permission to halt.”
“But if we do, we either require everyone to halt, which wastes time, or we continue driving and risk collapsing the distances between the regiments and bunching up, which will make us a juicy target for any Western friends flying around above us.”
“What do you want me to tell him, sir?”
“I want you to think, Kir. What do you think we should do?”
“Well . . . I would say, we tell him to push onward. Deny his request. Tell him we have no time, and if he halts, he will likely be attacked.”
“He is still lost, Dmitry. If he rushes forward now, he will only become more lost.”
Kir thought a moment. “Perhaps tell him to use his damn GPS or even his compass.”
Lazar gave a warm belly laugh at this. “Tempting, but that will do nothing but drive him off the radio. How about we just show some patience and coach him through his problem? We tell him he has only ten minutes to pause, and then remind him the sun is the correct direction of travel. He
need only follow it to get out of the mountains and into Kenya.”
Kir nodded thoughtfully. “Da . . . da, sir. That is the better response. If we get him to slow down for a few minutes, he will find his way, and it will be good for him to know he has our trust to continue.”
“Good. Now send that transmission, but tell 1st Regiment to be more cautious. According to the map, Moyale is a tricky city to navigate. If I were a Yankee, I would confirm our routing by watching a regiment pass through Moyale; then I would hit the follow-on regiment. I would hope to spread discord by attacking the center of our advance.”
“Sir . . . how can you know that?”
“Just my feeling, Colonel Kir. Tell 2nd Regiment to use the ten minutes to ensure his ZSU radars are up and ready.”
“But what if we are wrong?”
“Then we are wrong and 2nd Regiment wastes a few minutes and they are more prepared for air defense. Also, when you tell Colonel Nishkin he has ten minutes, I know he will actually take thirty. Either way, we will be prepared if the regiments bunch up in Moyale.”
Colonel Kir grabbed the radio and delivered the orders to 1st Regiment. He received Colonel Nishkin’s acknowledgment immediately. Kir was about to send the transmission to 2nd Regiment when he stopped, then looked back up at his boss. Lazar stared back down at him through the hatch. He smiled and winked at Kir, then stood up high in the turret, lost to Kir’s view and into the whirling dust outside the vehicle.
The old son of a bitch. He knows the battlefield because he knows his men and he knows the enemy. Lazar has spent over forty years being both the hunted and the hunter.
Kir replaced the scarf around his mouth, choking on dust and marveling at his boss’s intuition, then pulled the scarf down and transmitted the instructions to 2nd and 1st Regiment.