by Ralph Peters
Staruhkin looked at him. Chibisov had great faith in Starukhin’s ability to bully his way through the enemy. But just in case there were problems, he wanted to be certain that they fell on Starukhin’s shoulders, and that there were as few excuses as possible available to the man.
“About the ammunition,” Chibisov went on, “I believe I can help you with that. Front can provide an additional point-five units of fire for your heavy guns, and perhaps even for your multiple-rocket launchers, if we can align the transport. There’s a projected movement window opening up behind your divisions in midafternoon. Have your chief of the rear call Zdanyuk and tell him where you want it delivered. We’ll bring it right to the divisional guns. And the best of luck tomorrow, Comrade Army Commander.”
Starukhin went off without thanks, without even an acknowledgment, like a man turning away from an empty shop window. When the army commander’s entourage had left the room, Chibisov turned to one of his staff assistants.
“Tell Colonel Shtein that I’m a bit behind. Then see that Comrade Army Commander Trimenko has some refreshments and ask if he needs access to any communications means. Have Shtein begin the tapes as soon as General Trimenko has settled in. I’ll be down in a few minutes. Oh, and make sure Samurukov knows he’s to sit in.”
The staff officer turned smartly to execute his mission. The handful of technical and service officers remaining in the room had no immediate call on Chibisov’s time, and he went out into the hallway, fighting back his cough.
Even the stale air in the corridor felt refreshing after the smog of the briefing room. Chibisov strolled down the hall to the main tunnel corridor, not allowing himself to hurry. The officers and men of the front staff were careful to allow plenty of room as Chibisov passed. But the chief of staff was not prowling for defects tonight. He just wanted to breathe.
As soon as he reached the backup stairwell and found it deserted, he nearly collapsed with pent-up coughing. He felt as though his face must be changing color with the intensity of the struggle for breath. He went up the stairs slowly, lungs clotted shut. With no one to see him, he spit as though ridding himself of wreckage. He hurriedly took one of his steroid pills, which were only to be used in emergencies, washing it down with his own saliva. In the cemented stairwell, his coughing sounded especially destructive.
What did that bastard Starukhin see when he looked at him? An asthmatic little Jew? Chibisov had come up through the airborne forces, and he had been a martial-arts specialist as a young officer. He had done everything possible to toughen himself, to reject every weak, infuriating image clinging to him from a thousand years of pathetic East European Jewish history. He resolutely turned his back on all aspects of Jewishness. He worked to be a better Soviet patriot than any of them, a better Russian patriot, as had his father and his grandfather, the first enlightened members of a fiercely traditional family. He even downplayed his intellectual abilities when it came to studying the theoretical aspects of socialism and communism, since he felt it was too Jewish to overly master political philosophy. Instead, he had turned to military engineering and mathematics, to cybernetics and troop control theory. Then they tried to turn him into an instructor, the star young theorist on the staff of the Ryazan Higher Airborne Command School. But he maneuvered his way back into a fighter’s job, even volunteering, although already in his middle thirties, for training as a special operations officer.
Accepted despite his age, he survived the agonizing training only to be defeated by an unreasonable and unexpected enemy: asthma. It was as though a millennium of weak-lunged Jewishness, of reeking ghettos, had taken their revenge on him, as though some bitter and malicious Jehovah were having his little joke. He completed his training only to collapse and end up in a military sanatorium in Baku. His jumping days were over.
But he refused to give in. He fought to remain an officer, obsessive in his determination to wear the uniform. He knew they did not understand him. He had never in his life attended a Jewish service. He had no understanding of the Jews who wanted to leave the Soviet Union, to leave Russia, their home. To Chibisov, the émigrés were incomprehensible, weak, and selfish. For him, Israel was a distant land of superstition and fascist enthusiasms. And yet he knew that his fellow officers always saw him as the little Jew, a born staff” man, perhaps meant to be a senior bookkeeper in some great Jewish banking house, or a student of arcane texts, shut in a musty study. Chibisov, the little Jew who wanted to be a Soviet paratroop officer.
Chibisov left the stairwell, sweating, near exhaustion. He labored up the ramp to the massive blast-proof entry doors. The interior guards saluted with their weapons, and, behind a glass panel, the duty officer jumped to his feet. Everyone knew the little Jew chief of staff, Chibisov thought bitterly.
He stood in limbo for a moment as the inner door shut behind him. Then the outer door began to slide back, and the cool air raced in, carrying flecks of rain and a multilayered drone of constant noise from the trails and roads and highways. The forecast called for a wet first day of the war, and Chibisov felt lucky to emerge from the bunker at a moment when the rain had softened to little more than a mist. As the outer door closed Chibisov stood still, breathing as deeply as his lungs would permit, almost gasping. The nearest sounds came from the departing helicopters that carried away the more important briefing attendees. The blades hacked at the darkness to gain lift. Underlying the throb of the rotors, countless vehicles groaned toward carefully planned destinations. Chibisov’s mind filled with timetables. It had been a key consideration that the Soviet forces could not close on their jump-off positions too early. It was unthinkable to put everything neatly into place, then wait in a silence that telegraphed to the enemy that you were ready to attack, with your final deployments even telling him where the main effort would come. The plan kept forces on the move, shifting, realigning toward a fluid perfection that would appear no different than the preceding days of road marches and hasty bivouacs, but that would allow the swift convergence of overwhelming forces at the points of decision, achieving tactical surprise, and even a measure of operational surprise. Chibisov looked at his watch. If the march tables were on schedule, the noise in the distance would be from one of the divisions of the Seventh Tank Army, leapfrogging closer to the Elbe. As the lead echelons moved into the attack the follow-on forces would already be closing on their vacated positions, leaving as few exploitable gaps as possible. Chibisov had confidence in the mathematical model and in its tolerances. Yet he recognized that, to the drivers and the junior commanders out on the roads, it probably seemed like chaos. It was important to cultivate Malinsky’s talent for standing back, Chibisov thought. Not to get caught up in the frustrating details, even though you remained aware of them. From the grand perspective, the minor scenes of confusion on the roads or in assembly areas simply disappeared, consumed by the macro-efficiencies of the model.
It only seemed remarkable to Chibisov that the enemy had not reached out to strike a preemptive blow. He and Dudorov had discussed the situation at length with Malinsky. In the twenty-four hours prior to the attack, the posture of virtually all of the Warsaw Pact forces, and especially their supply and rear services deployments, was terribly vulnerable. But so far, NATO had done nothing. Dudorov was convinced that there was absolutely no danger of NATO striking first. But neither Chibisov nor Malinsky could quite believe that the enemy would passively wait to receive the obviously impending blow.
Chibisov tasted the night air. The passages of his lungs had reopened slightly, and he felt like a man reprieved. He thought that the plan for a high-powered, relentless offensive would be like depriving a man of oxygen. NATO would have its wind taken away by the initial impact, and it would never be allowed to regain its breath. The damp night air felt vivid with power; the vehicle noise sounded as if the earth itself were moving. In just a few hours, the first wave of aircraft would be on their way. And still the enemy did nothing.
A lone helicopter growled by overhead. Probabl
y Starukhin, Chibisov thought. But the army commander had already receded in his mind.
The last faint rain stopped. Chibisov could feel that it would return, stronger than before. But for the moment, he stood peacefully in the spongy air and thought of Malinsky, who had saved him. Recovering from his collapse in the sanatorium, Chibisov found that paperwork had been initiated without his knowledge to remove him from active service. The old anti-Semitism. He struggled through the bureaucracy until he managed an interview with the deputy commander of the Transcaucasus Military District. That was the first time he met Malinsky. Comrade Deputy Commander, the army is my life. I’m as good as any officer in this uniform. Malinsky listened, watching him in silence, unlike the blustering, self-important general officers with whom Chibisov was familiar. The Starukhins of the world.
Malinsky put a stop to the separation proceedings and gave Chibisov a trial job in his operations department. They were designing contingency plans for the invasion of Iran at the time, and they needed someone with a solid background in airborne matters. Chibisov quickly discovered something new in himself. Perhaps because of his technical training, he had an eye for the telling detail, and he almost intuitively understood how to make a plan intelligible to its executors. He loved the work.
He especially enjoyed working under Malinsky. Brilliant operational concepts and dazzling variations seemed to come effortlessly to Malinsky. Chibisov had never seen anyone who could grasp the overall context and true military essentials of a situation as thoroughly and as quickly as Malinsky. The two men seemed fated to work together, Malinsky rich with ideas and Chibisov perfectly suited to turn those ideas into the words and tables, the graphics and the monumental paperwork that moved armies and brought them efficiently to bear. In the end, Afghanistan had put all of the Iran plans on hold, possibly forever. But Chibisov had gone with Malinsky to the general’s first military district command, his trial run, in the Volga Military District. Chibisov had been the most junior military district chief of staff in the Soviet Army, and he did not underestimate the jealousies, or the pressure Malinsky received over the matter. The two men had worked together almost constantly since then, and it was Chibisov’s sole regret that he was not the sort of man who could ever tell Malinsky how deeply grateful he was to him.
Breathing regularly now, Chibisov turned back toward the bunker. There was no more time to waste. Trimenko, the Second Guards Tank Army Commander, would be almost through watching the videotapes now, and Chibisov did not want to waste any of the man’s time. He had no doubt that Trimenko, whose horizons did not extend beyond the strictly military, would be angry, impatient, and skeptical by now.
The tape was still running as Chibisov entered the darkened room. He stood until his eyes adjusted to the darkness, watching the colorful footage of destruction and disaster, some filmed on rainy days, other segments reflecting good weather in order to be prepared for either circumstance. Then he made his way to the chair that had remained empty for him between Colonel General Trimenko and Major General Dudorov. Samurukov, the front’s deputy commander for airborne and special operations forces, sat on the other side of Trimenko. Colonel Shtein, the master of ceremonies, stood beside the television screen.
Chibisov had seen the footage before, but it still seemed remarkable to him. The filmed destruction of a West German town that had not yet been taken in a war that had yet to begin. Shtein had been sent to the First Western Front directly from the special propaganda subdepartment of the general staff in Moscow. As Chibisov watched he was convinced by the sights and sounds that this was, indeed, what modern war must look like. The filming was magnificently done, never too artful, never too clear. The viewer always had the feeling that the cameraman was well aware of his own mortality. Chibisov could not understand the German voice-over, but it had all been explained to him the day before, when he and Malinsky saw the film for the first time. Only then had certain directives suddenly made sense to them. Malinsky had been furious that he had not been trusted longer in advance, and he was sincerely uneasy about the whole business. There was something old-fashioned, almost gallant about Malinsky, and this particular special operation was not well-suited to his temperament. The staff called Malinsky “the Count” behind his back, half-jokingly, half in affection. Such a thing would not even have passed as a joke when Chibisov was a junior officer, and he forbade the use of the nickname. But he secretly understood how it had developed. It was not just a matter of the well-known lineage, which Malinsky vainly imagined might be ignored. There was something aristocratic about the man himself.
Malinsky had readily agreed with Chibisov’s suggestion that he handle the matter with Shtein, freeing the commander for battlefield concerns. Chibisov had recognized the arrangement immediately as the only practical solution. Personally, he remained undecided on the potential effectiveness of the planned film and radio broadcasts. The approach was to attempt to convince populations under attack that it was only their resistance that made the destruction of their homes inevitable, and, further, to convince the West Germans that their allies took a cavalier attitude toward the destruction of their country. The goals were to create panic and a loss of the will to fight, while dividing the NATO allies. Chibisov doubted that such an approach would be effective against Russians, but Western Europeans remained something of an enigma to him.
Colonel Shtein commented on a few salient points as the film reached its climax. Then the screen suddenly fuzzed, and Shtein moved to turn up the lights.
Trimenko turned to Chibisov. It was clear from the bewildered look on the army commander’s face that he had not grasped the total context. Chibisov felt a certain kinship with Trimenko, although they were both men who kept their distance. Both of them were committed to the development and utilization of automated troop control systems as well as sharing the no-nonsense temperaments of accomplished technicians. In staff matters, they were both perfectionists, although Trimenko was quicker to ruin a subordinate’s career over a single error.
“At least,” Trimenko said coldly, “I now understand all the fuss about rapidly seizing Lueneburg. It never made military sense to me before — and I’m not certain it really makes military sense now.” Trimenko glanced at Shtein, hardly concealing his disgust. “Our friend from the general staff has explained his rationale to me. But I frankly view the scheme as frivolous, a diversion of critical resources. And” — Trimenko looked down at the floor, then back into Chibisov’s eyes — ”we’re not barbarians.”
Trimenko’s concern mirrored Chibisov’s own. But the chief of staff knew he had no choice but to support the General Staffs position. Overall, he was relieved that there had been so little interference with the front’s plan. Marshal Kribov’s approval had been good enough. This matter with Shtein was a special case, and it was important not to make too much of it. But Trimenko had to support it, one way or another.
“Comrade Army Commander, let me try to put it in a better perspective,” Chibisov said, unsure that he could manage to do what he was promising. “As you know, we are living in an age in which there has been something of a revolution in military affairs. Personally, I would say a series of revolutions — first the nuclear revolution, which may have been a false side road in history, then the automation revolution, with which you are intimately familiar. In the West, they speak of the ‘information age,’ and perhaps they’re correct in doing so. The Soviet system has always realized the value of information — for instance, the power of correct propaganda. Today, the powerful new means of arranging and disseminating information have opened new possibilities. In light of the successes of our propaganda efforts in the past, we must at least be open to the new and expanded opportunities offered by technology. Certainly, we both realize the value of battlefield deception, of blinding the enemy to your true activities and intentions, of confusing him, or even of steering him toward the decision you desire him to make. But how do we define the battlefield today? If warfare has expanded to include conf
lict between entire systems, then perhaps we must also be prepared to redefine the battlefield, or to accept that there are, in fact, a variety of battlefields. This little film is an information weapon, a deception weapon, aimed above the heads of the militarists. It targets the governments and populations of the West.”
“If the film is as accurate as Colonel Shtein tells us it is,” Trimenko said, “what’s the point of diverting a portion of my forces to actually destroy this town?”
“Lueneburg has been carefully selected by the general staff,” Chibisov said, parroting Shtein’s own arguments now. “It is easily within the grasp of our initial operations, it is defended by one of the weak sisters, and it has great sentimental value to the West Germans because of its medieval structures. Yet the town has no real economic value. Colonel Shtein’s department went to great expense to construct the model of the town square and other well-known features so that they could be destroyed for this film. The wonders of the Soviet film industry, you might say. But when this film is broadcast twenty-four hours from now, it must be augmented with additional dating footage, and, most importantly, it must stand up to any hasty enemy attempts at verification. The historic district must be flattened. We must destroy the real town now that we have filmed the destruction of the model.”
Trimenko was not yet ready to give in. Chibisov knew him as a hard and stubborn man, and he recognized the locked expression on the army commander’s face. “But what good does it do? Really? One of my divisions squanders its momentum, you tie up air-assault elements needed elsewhere, aircraft are diverted, and perhaps irreplaceable helicopters are lost. For what, Chibisov? So we can show the West Germans a movie? So we can broadcast to the world that we are barbarians after all?”
Chibisov sympathized but could not relent. Malinsky had commented that this was the sort of thing the Mongols would have done, had they possessed the technology.