by Ralph Peters
Red Army
Ralph Peters
In the heart of a European forest, a young private dreams of home and rock'n roll. At command headquarters. a four-star general pursues a family tradition of military honor that reaches back centuries. They could be any two soldiers in the world. It could be any army — but it's not. The place is the East German border. The time is the 1980's — and the Soviet Army is about to attack…
Ralph Peters
Red Army
FOR MARION…
comrade in all of life’s campaigns
“Here, across death’s other river
The Tartar horsemen shake their spears.”
T.S. Eliot
“The Wind Sprang Up At Four O’clock”
Prologue
Night came to Germany. In among the pines, the low, sharp-prowed hulls of the infantry fighting vehicles turned black, and the soldiers gathered closer into their squad groups, huddling against the weak rain. Whenever possible, the vehicle commanders had tried to back off the trails in such a way that the nearby trees formed a protective barrier, allowing a safe sleeping space. Those who failed to pay attention to such details risked being crushed during a night alert.
The bivouac site was not virgin territory. When the unit had pulled in under the last afternoon grayness, which was more an ambience than a true light, it was evident that other troops had recently vacated the area. Huge ruts and waves of churned mud, the signatures of tracked vehicles, had ruptured the trails and broken the forest floor. Tins and scraps of paper littered the remaining islands of moss and pine needles, and the smell of human waste was almost as strong as the odor of vehicle exhaust. It was all instantly familiar to Leonid, who had just over a year’s experience of training areas in East Germany, and he recognized his unit’s good fortune in occupying the site while there was still a bit of visibility. The vehicles were much too cramped to sleep in, even had it been permitted, and when you arrived at a new location at night you had no idea where you might decently lie down.
For the first few days after the unit hurried out of garrison, they had moved about only during the hours of darkness. But now the roads were constantly filled, and this last move had been conducted entirely during daylight, covered only by the overcast sky. Everyone craved news. It was evident that this was not a routine exercise, but little information reached the soldiers. Leonid had already heard enough rumors to cause him to worry. All of his life, his teachers and youth activities leaders had drummed into him that the United States and the other Western powers were anxious to unleash a nuclear war against the Soviet Union, and the descriptions of the horrors of such a conflict had been sufficiently graphic to stay with him. Now he wondered what in the world was happening.
Seryosha, the big man and unofficial leader of the squad’s privates, sat under the awning of the vehicle’s camouflage net, assuming its limited bit of protection against the elements as his due. He had opened an issue of combat rations. He picked at the food, telling more stories about his experiences with women. Seryosha was muscular and handsome, and he was from Leningrad. He loved to parade his sophistication.
Seryosha’s audience, to which Leonid belonged, sat in a rough circle. All lights were forbidden, but the officers had disappeared to wherever officers went, and several of the squad members smoked now. Along with the last feeble twilight, the welling glow of drawn cigarettes lent an eeriness to faces and objects that did nothing to improve Leonid’s mood. Off behind the trees, metal clanged against metal, and a voice fired a loud volley of what could only be curses in some Asian language. Then the local silence returned, coddled in the distant humming of the roads.
Sergeant Kassabian, their squad leader, came back from a trip into the woods. Leonid knew he was upset to find that Seryosha had broken open the reserve rations, but Kassabian paused before saying anything.
Seryosha ignored the sergeant’s return. “And city girls,” he went on, “know their way around. No nonsense, lads. They like it, too, and they know you know it.” He noisily fed himself another bite of dried biscuit.
“We’re not supposed to be eating those rations,” Sergeant Kassabian said suddenly, finding his courage.
Leonid could feel Seryosha grinning. Seryosha had a wide, ready grin that seemed to overcome all troubles. Leonid pictured that grin loaded with the chewed mush of the biscuit now. He resented Seryosha’s power but could do nothing about it.
Seryosha moved over to make room under the camouflage for another body. “Come and sit down,” he told Kassabian. “You can’t eat promises. If we wait for the battalion kitchens to feed us, it’ll be the same story as last night. Come on, sit down. If there’s a problem, I’ll handle it.”
Kassabian obediently took a seat beside Seryosha, as if the bigger boy’s natural authority might expand to include him. The rumble of another unit moving nearby seemed to bring a tangible weight to the darkness. The shadowy form of the sergeant seemed very small, almost childlike, beside the broad-shouldered outline of Seryosha. Kassabian was really just a conscript like the rest of them, except that he had been chosen for a few months of extra training, after which he had received the rank of junior sergeant. Perhaps in another squad, he might have gained more authority, but here Seryosha was impossibly powerful. When the officers were around, Kassabian passed on military orders and seemed to rule. But in the barracks, Seryosha was incontestably in charge.
“Seryosha,” Leonid asked tentatively, desperately wanting to be included in the intimate circle of the group, “you think it’s the real thing?”
The question was unexpected, and the seriousness in Leonid’s voice spoiled the atmosphere of imagined women and the freedom to touch them. Leonid realized that he had used poor judgment, but it was too late. When Seryosha answered him, irritation undercut the practiced nonchalance of his voice.
“Think they’d trust us to lug around live rounds if it wasn’t?” Seryosha laughed spitefully. “You think maybe we’re going to the range and we’ve just been lost for the last several days? You think you’re just out for a target shoot and snooze, boy?” Yet it was evident that Seryosha himself did not want to believe that they might truly go to battle.
Leonid tried to back out of his dilemma. “Lieutenant Korchuk didn’t actually say there was going to be a war.”
“Korchuk?” Seryosha said. “That sissy boy never says anything worth listening to. The Party loves you. The Party says, don’t play with yourself in your bunk at night. The Party says, don’t take a crap without a signed certificate giving you permission.”
It was always odd to hear Seryosha ridiculing Korchuk, the unit’s political officer, since Seryosha nevertheless went out of his way to cultivate Korchuk’s favor, and the political officer was so impressed by Seryosha that he frequently designated him to lead group discussions and badgered him to sign up for the whole Party program. Korchuk seemed to be struggling to win over Seryosha’s soul. But behind his back, Seryosha’s commentary on the downy-faced lieutenant was merciless.
Everyone laughed at Seryosha’s attack on Korchuk — except for Leonid. When the lieutenant had come by earlier to cheer them up, he had only managed to frighten Leonid badly. Leonid had counted himself lucky to be assigned to the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany. He had hoped that in the German Democratic Republic, so close to the West, he might be able to collect a few unusual rock music records or tapes from special groups whose recordings were unavailable or very expensive back home. Instead, he had spent his first year restricted to barracks like a prisoner or on sodden training ranges, except for one escorted tour to a war memorial and a museum in Magdeburg. Then the routine had suddenly collapsed. The unit responded to an alert, hastening to its local deployment area. That much had been normal enough. But the accustomed return to
garrison at the end of the test had been delayed. Instead, the unit had remained out all day, and at night they had marched their vehicles to a forest in the East German countryside. After that, the unit had shuttled about in a seemingly random manner for days. And then Lieutenant Korchuk had come by to ask them if they had any problems, and to encourage them to keep their spirits up. But the political officer had clearly been nervous about something, and he had talked a little too much and too earnestly about sacrifices for the Motherland and Internationalist Duty for Leonid’s peace of mind.
Leonid just wanted his two years of conscripted service — easily the most miserable period of his life — to end so that he could go home to the state farm outside of Chelyabinsk, to his mother and his guitar.
“And this girl, Yelena, she’s got a sister who wants to know what’s going on, see?” Seryosha went on with his tales. “Her father’s this big wheel in the Party, though, and everybody else is afraid to lay a finger on her. So I’m up in this fancy apartment, waiting for Yelena to come home…”
Everything seemed to come so easily to Seryosha. Leonid tried to master the prescribed military skills, but his uniform was never quite neat enough, and he bungled the physical execution even of tasks he clearly understood in his mind. But Seryosha seemed to be able to do everything perfectly the first time. And he made fun of Leonid, who was included in the squad group, but only as a member of the outer circle. Now, however, Leonid felt compelled to reach out to the others, to get through to Seryosha that matters were serious, indeed, and that something had to be done, although he had no idea what that something might be.
Seryosha finished his startlingly vulgar story, in which he was, as usual, a hero of dramatic capabilities. As the admiring laughter subsided Leonid tried again to reach the others, despite the risk.
“I think,” Leonid began, searching nervously for the right words, “I think that things are… things must be bad.”
He could feel Seryosha turning in the darkness. “Things are,” Seryosha said imperiously, “the way they always are. In the shit. If you’re not in one kind of shit, you’re in another.” Seryosha laughed bitterly, then began again, speaking in exaggerated English, “Leonid, baby. Mister Rock and Roll.” Then he collapsed into Russian. “You’ve been in pig shit all your life out on your collective farm, haven’t you?”
“State farm,” Leonid corrected.
“Out there in Chelyabinsk,” Seryosha continued. “No, I mean from beyond Chelyabinsk. You must know what it’s like to be in the shit.”
Leonid desperately wanted to express something. But he did not know exactly what it was. He thought of Lieutenant Korchuk’s pale cheeks and scrawny mustache, and of a mental collage of troubling images. But none of it would fit into words.
“I wish we had some music,” Leonid said, drawing back again. It seemed to him now that he had never been happier than when he had been at home, with his small, precious collection of rock and blues music, his Hungarian jeans, and his guitar. He had dreamed of going to Leningrad, where a real music scene existed. Or at least to Moscow, where you could hear good blues. Now that he knew Seryosha, he had ruled out Leningrad. That garbage? Seryosha had said, when Leonid tried to talk to him about music. That’s old hat. Nobody listens to the blues. They’d all laugh at you in Leningrad. Everybody listens to metal music now, everybody who knows what’s going on is a metallist. You’d be lost in Leningrad, you little pig farmer.
The intensity of the drizzle picked up slightly, and the soldiers herded closer, each maneuvering for a greater share of the leaking protection of the camouflage net and stray bits of canvas.
“You know what?” Seryosha said. “If there is a war, I’m going to take care of one of those German bitches with her nose in the air. And I don’t care if she’s West German or East German, unless you can prove there’s a difference between a capitalist piece and a socialist one. It just drives me crazy when we’re driving by them and they act like they don’t even see you, like they’re looking right through you.” He paused as they all remembered deployments that took them through tidy German towns where the handsome women showed no regard for them at all. “I’m going to take care of one of them,” Seryosha resumed. “And when I’m done, I’m going to turn Genghiz loose on her for good measure.”
The group laughed. Even Leonid laughed at this image. Genghiz was their nickname for Ali, their Central Asian antitank grenadier. Ali did not understand enough Russian to get the jokes, but he always laughed along. Once, during the squad’s first field exercise, Ali had tried to sneak more than his share of the rations. Seryosha had begun the beating, and they had all joined in. The squad had almost gotten in trouble over the incident, but in the end, Ali had not needed to stay in the sick bay overnight, and Seryosha had concocted a tale to bring in Lieutenant Korchuk on the side of the squad. Ali never repeated his mistake, and he carefully did exactly what Seryosha told him to do as long as the task was clearly explained.
“No music,” Seryosha said wistfully. “No women. And nothing to drink. My father used to say, ‘War solves all your problems.’ My old man was in the big one, and he had a girl or two. Hell, he was on his third wife when I popped out.”
“You father,” Ali said happily, surprising them all. “You no know you father, Russian bastard.”
The group laughed so hard they swayed and banged their shoulders against one another in the little circle. Even Seryosha laughed. It was a great moment, as if a dog or cat had spoken.
The squad grew boisterous. Everyone was supposed to be quiet, on pre-combat silence. But there were still no officers around, and you could clearly hear the other squads nearby.
Leonid wondered where the officers had gone, and why it was taking them so long. He wondered what in the world was going on.
Suddenly, a vehicle engine powered up a few hundred meters away. Then another vehicle came to life, closer this time.
“Here we go again,” Seryosha said disgustedly.
They rode crouched in their armored vehicle, with the troop hatches closed. Only the driver and the vehicle commander were allowed to look outside. The interior was cramped and extremely uncomfortable, even though the squad was understrength with only six soldiers. The smells of unwashed bodies and of other men’s stale breath mingled with the pungency of the poorly vented exhaust. The jittering of the vehicle’s tracks seemed to scramble the brain. Leonid knew from experience that he would soon have a severe headache.
“Where do you think we’re going this time?” a voice asked from the darkness.
“Paris,” Seryosha said. “New York.”
“Seriously.”
“Who the hell knows?”
“I think we’re going to war,” Leonid said with helpless conviction.
All of the voices went heavily silent. The whine of the engine, the clatter of the tracks on the hard-surface road, and the wrenched-bone noise of shifting gears surrounded the quiet of the soldiers.
“You don’t know,” Seryosha said angrily, doubtfully. “You’re just a little pig farmer from the middle of nowhere.”
Leonid did not know why he had said it. He recognized that, in fact, he did not know where they were going. But somehow, inside, he was convinced that he was correct. They were going to war. Perhaps it had already begun. NATO had attacked, and men were dying.
The vehicle stopped with a jerk, knocking the soldiers against one another or into the metal furnishings of the vehicle’s interior. Road marches were always the same. You went as fast as you could, then came to a sudden, unexplained stop and waited.
“Leonid?” a voice asked seriously, just loud enough to be heard over the idling engine. “Has somebody told you something? Do you really know something? What makes you think we’re going to war?”
Leonid shrugged. “It’s just my luck.”
One
Army General M. M. Malinsky, Commander of the First Western Front, sat alone in his private office, smoking a strong cigarette. The room was dark except f
or a bright pool where a bank of spotlights reflected off the situation map. Malinsky sat just out of the light, staring absently at the map he knew so well. Beyond the office walls, vivid action coursed through the hallways of the bunker, blood through arteries, despite the late hour. From his chair, Malinsky heard the activity as half-smothered footsteps and voices passing up and down the corridor, resembling valley noises heard from a cloud-wrapped mountain.
And that, Malinsky thought, is what war sounds like. Not just the blasting of artillery, the shooting and shouting. But the haste of a staff officer’s footsteps and the ticking of a clerk’s typewriter. And, of course, the special, half-magical noises of computers nowadays. Perhaps, Malinsky thought, this will be the last real one, the last great war fought by men aiming weapons. Perhaps the next big one would be fought entirely by means of cybernetics. Things were changing so troublingly fast.
But there would always be a next time. Malinsky was certain of that. Even if they were foolish enough to toss great nuclear bombs across oceans, Malinsky was convinced that enough of mankind would survive to organize new armies to fight over whatever remained. Mankind would remain mankind, and there would always be wars. And there would always be soldiers. And, in his heart, Malinsky was convinced there would always be a Russia.
A discreet hand knocked at the door.
“Enter,” Malinsky called, leaning back deeper into the shadows.
A fan of light swept the room, then disappeared as the door shut again. A staff major padded up to the map without a word and realigned unit symbols.
Malinsky watched in silence. Germany, east and west. Virtually his entire adult life — more, even his straight-backed adolescence as a Suvorov cadet — had been directed to this end. Elbe, Weser, Rhine and Maas. Mosel and Saar. With the low countries and the fields of France beyond, where Colonel of the Guards Count Malinsky had raised his curved saber against the cavalry of Napoleon.