by Ralph Peters
In the track parked opposite, a lone radio operator sat sprawled over his notepads, microphone hanging limply from a coil cord. On the radio, a foreign voice called the dead.
Plinnikov was sick. He tried to make it to the trees, out of some elementary human instinct, but he stumbled over the dead man on the ramp for a second time and vomited on the corpse’s back. As he looked down at his mess Plinnikov panicked to see blood smeared over his own chest before realizing that it had come from his embrace of the middle-aged corpse.
Plinnikov felt empty, his belly burning with acid and his heart vacantly sick. He stared at the slow progress of his vomit down the angled ramp. He wanted to be home, safe, and never to see war or anything military ever again.
He wiped the strands from his lips, wondering if his crew had watched his little performance. The taste in his mouth made him feel sick again. He realized, belatedly, that the amazed man with his hands up had been trying to surrender, and that it had been wrong to gun him down. But during the fighting, it had never occurred to him to do anything but shoot at everything in front of him.
The voice on the radio called again. Plinnikov imagined that he could detect a pleading tone.
Suddenly, he braced himself. He stared at the silver ornaments on the epaulets of the corpse on the ramp. This was a command post. There would be documents. Maps. Radio communications data.
Stomach twisting, Plinnikov turned to his task.
Senior Lieutenant Filov failed to grasp what was happening until it was too late. He brought his company of tanks on line behind the smokescreen, moving at combat speed toward the enemy, maintaining reasonable order despite his spiky nervousness. Then the tanks began to sink in what had appeared to be a normal field.
Reconnaissance had not reported any difficulties. Now his command tank stood mired to the deck, and none of his vehicles succeeded in backing out. Their efforts only worked them deeper into the marshy soil. His entire company had ground to a halt in a tattered cartoon of their battle formation.
Filov attempted to call back through the battalion for more smoke and for recovery vehicles. But the smokescreen began to dissipate noticeably before he could establish radio contact. The nets were cluttered with strange voices.
“Prepare to engage, prepare to engage,” he shouted into his microphone. When his platoon commanders failed to respond, he realized with a feeling of near-panic that he had been speaking only through the intercom. He switched channels, fingers clumsy on the control mechanism, and repeated his orders.
“Misha, I’m stuck,” one of his platoon commanders responded.
“We’re all stuck. Use your call sign. And mine. And use your head.”
Filov tried to raise battalion again. Without more smoke, they’d be dead. Filov was sure the enemy had trapped them, that this was a clever ambush, and that enemy antitank gunners were waiting to destroy them.
The smoke continued to thin.
Nothing on the battalion net. It was as though battalion had vanished from the earth. Filov’s gunner, a Muslim from Uzbekistan, was praying. Filov slapped him hard on the side of his headset.
“God won’t help, you bastard. Get on your gunsight.”
Flares popped hot bright through the last meager smoke. From the angle of their arc, Filov could tell that none of his people had fired them. In any case, the use of flares was inappropriate. Even with the rain and smoke, there was still plenty of light. Probably a distress signal, Filov thought. But he had no idea who could have fired.
He tried the battalion net again, begging the electronics to respond. The gun tube of his tank was so low to the ground that it barely cleared the wild grasses.
Filov wondered if they could dig themselves out. He knew how to recover tanks in a classroom, when the problem allowed nearby trees. But now they were stuck dead center in a meadow. He was about to order all of his vehicles to begin erecting their camouflage nets and to send one of his lieutenants back on foot to locate the rest of the battalion when the last smoke blew off.
The battlefield showed its secrets with painful clarity, the light rain and mist offering no real protection. Less than five hundred meters from his line of tanks, set at an angle, Filov saw five enemy tanks. The enemy vehicles were also bogged down almost to the turrets.
“Fire,” Filov screamed, paying no attention to which channel he was riding, forgetting all fire discipline and procedures. His gunner dutifully sent off” a round in the general direction of the enemy. Filov tried to remember the proper sequence of fire commands. He began to turn the turret without making a decision on which enemy vehicle to engage.
The enemy fired back. Filov’s entire line fired, in booming disorder. Nobody seemed to hit anything.
Filov settled on a target. “Loading sabot. Range, four-fifty.”
The automatic loader slammed the round into the breech.
“Correct to four hundred.”
“Ready.”
“Fire.”
The round went wide, despite the ridiculously short distance to the target. But another one of the enemy vehicles disappeared in a bloom of sparks, flame, and smoke under the massed fires of Filov’s right flank platoon. Filov’s headset shrieked with broken transmissions.
“I’ve lost one. I’ve lost one.”
“Range, five hundred.”
“Wrong net, you sonofabitch.”
The enemy tanks fired as swiftly as they could, their rounds skimming through the marshy grasses. Filov could not understand why he could not hit his targets. He had always fired top scores on the range, perfect fives. He tried to slow down and behave as though he were back on a local gunnery range.
Filov’s gunner sent another round toward the enemy tank. This time it struck home.
The enemy tank failed to explode. After a bright flash, the big angular turret was still there, settling back down as though its sleep had been disturbed. But the vehicle’s crew began to clamber out through the hatches, clumsy in their haste.
Out of the corner of his field of vision, Filov saw the turret of one of his own tanks fly high into the air, as though it were no heavier than a soccer ball. Then another enemy tank flared up in a fuel-tank fire.
It was too much. Filov opened his hatch and scrambled out. This was insane. Murder. All of his visions collapsed inward. His headset jerked at his neck, and he tore it off. He stumbled down over the slippery deck of his tank, then abandoned his last caution and jumped for the grass. He saw other men running across the field in the distance.
It was senseless to stay. For what? They’d all die. Just shoot until they all killed each other. What would it accomplish?
The whisk and thunder of the tank battle continued behind him, punctuated occasionally by the metallic ring and blast of a round meeting its target. The sopping marshland clutched at Filov’s boots. In his panic, he began smashing at his legs, as if he could slap them into cooperation, as if he could beat the earth from underfoot. He ran without looking back.
Plinnikov stood up in his hatch, fumbling to ready the smoke grenade. He heard the helicopter before he saw it. The weather had an odd effect on the sound, diffusing it against the background of the artillery barrage, so that it was difficult to identify the exact azimuth of the aircraft’s approach. All at once, just offset from Plinnikov’s line of sight, the small helicopter emerged from the mist, a quick blur that swiftly grew larger and began to define itself. Plinnikov tossed the smoke canister so that the wind would lead the colored fog away from his vehicle. He could tell immediately that the pilot was one of the Afgantsy, a real veteran, by the way he came in fast and very low, despite the rain and reduced visibility.
The pilot never really powered down. His copilot leapt from the settling aircraft and raced through the drizzle, bareheaded. Plinnikov jumped from his track, clutching the rolled maps and documents. The maps and some of the papers were stained with blood and the spillage of ripped bodies, and Plinnikov was anxious to be rid of them. He held them out to the aviator like
a bouquet.
“Anything else?” the copilot shouted. The wash off the rotors half submerged his voice.
Plinnikov shook his head.
The smoke spread out in a shredded carpet across the green field. The enemy would see it, too, and there was no time to waste.
The copilot raced back to his helicopter. He hurriedly tossed the captured materials behind his seat, and the pilot began to lift off even before his partner was properly seated. The aircraft rose just enough to clear the trees, then shot off in a dogleg from its approach direction.
Plinnikov vaulted onto the deck of his vehicle, almost losing his balance on the slippery metal. He dropped into the turret.
“Let’s move. Back into the woods.”
The vehicle whined into life, rocking out across the furrows of the field until it could turn and nose back into the trail between the trees. Plinnikov studied his map again, searching for a good route deeper into the enemy’s rear. No obvious routes suggested themselves, and his calculations began to seem hopelessly complicated to him. In irritation, he ordered the driver to double back onto the trail that had proven so lucrative earlier, hoping a course would be easier to develop while working through the actual landscape than it was on the map.
At a trail crossing, he turned to the map for reference. It was a very high-quality map, with extensive military detail. But it almost seemed as though the trails in the German woods created themselves out of nothing, as though the forest were haunted.
He chose the trail that seemed to head west. At first, it was a fair dirt track. Then the forest began to close in. Plinnikov found himself pushing wet branches away from the vehicle. His uniform was already soaking and uncomfortable, and his spirits dropped suddenly, as though someone had pulled a cork.
“Depress the gun tube. It’s catching the branches. Driver, go slowly.”
Then Plinnikov’s fortunes seemed to change. The trees thinned again, and the terrain began to show slight undulations. A hollow off to his right discharged a small stream that then flowed parallel to the track. He checked his map again, hoping the feature and the trail, side by side, would allow him to orient himself. But he could not identify his location; the only possibilities on the map didn’t really seem to make sense in terms of the distance he estimated they had traveled. He needed a clear landmark, or an open view.
Through all of his trials, Plinnikov tried not to think of the dead enemy, to hold their creeping, insistent reality at a distance. He sought harmless thoughts, gleaning his memories of the military academy and the seemingly endless dilemmas of the lieutenancy that followed graduation. But all of the forced images faded into the vivid sights, sounds, and smells of the recent combat. He could not help refighting the action over and over again, scrutinizing his failures. The dead men died again and again, their reality already changing slightly, as though warping and mutating in his overheated memory.
Unexpectedly, the forest ended. The vehicle lay fully exposed where Plinnikov ordered it to halt. He shook off the last of his daydreams. A church spire rose above a copse of trees, dark against the low gray sky. He wiped the back of his fingers across his nose and reached down for his map.
He neither saw nor heard the round that killed him. It tore into the hull of the vehicle below the turret, ripping off his lower legs and mincing his hands as it exploded. The quick secondary blast shot his torso up through the commander’s hatch, breaking his neck against the hatch rim and shattering his back as the pressure compressed his body through the circular opening and blew it into the sky like a bundle of rags.
Five
Kryshinin had never faced such a frustrating problem. As commander of the forward security element, it was his job to move fast, to locate the enemy and overrun him, if possible, or, otherwise, to fix the enemy until the advance guard came up, meanwhile searching for a bypass around the enemy position. Textbook stuff. Yet here the enemy had already pulled back. And his element was blocked by nothing more than a mined road crater and an unknown number of mines in the surrounding meadows.
He had no idea where the combat reconnaissance patrol had gone, or how they had gotten through. They should have warned him of this situation. Now Kryshinin was stuck. His engineers had become separated from his element in the confusion of initial contact and penetration of the enemy’s covering troops. He had no mine-clearing capability without them.
He judged that the advance guard was no more than twenty minutes behind, unless they had gotten bogged down in more fighting. Leading the Second Guards Tank Army attack, the division’s lead regiments had struck the thin enemy deployments so hard that it had been surprisingly easy to force a gap. Kryshinin had not lost a single vehicle in combat. He was only missing the wandering engineers. Until the lead infantry fighting vehicle attempted to work around the road crater. A mine had torn out its belly and butchered the crew.
Now Kryshinin’s element was static. Thirteen infantry fighting vehicles, three tanks, a battery of 122mm self-propelled guns, and over a dozen specialized vehicles with ground-to-air radios, artillery communications, antitank missiles, and light surface-to-air missiles were backed up along a single country road. It was a tough little combat package, well-suited to the mission and the terrain. But now, without engineers, it was helpless.
Kryshinin dismounted and began walking swiftly forward along the bunched column. But before he reached its head, he saw one of his lieutenants flush all of the soldiers out of their fighting vehicle. The lieutenant got into the driver’s compartment and, after a jerking start, edged slowly toward the blasted vehicle.
The lieutenant guided his vehicle behind the hulk and began pushing it. Kryshinin stood still for a moment in surprise. Then he began to shout at the motorized rifle troops who were standing around watching as casually as if this was a training demonstration. He came back to life now, as if awakening, stirred by his lieutenant’s example. He ordered the vehicles into a more tactical posture. He was suddenly ashamed of himself. He had allowed them all to back up on the road like perfect targets while he had waited for inspiration.
The lieutenant had not been able to push the destroyed vehicle in a straight line. Finally, he just edged it out of the way, crunching and grinding metal. The mine-struck vehicle had peeled off a track, and the hulk curled off to the left as its naked road wheels bit into the turf and sank.
The lieutenant drove slowly forward, seeking a safe path to the roadway on the far side of the crater. He was a new officer, and Kryshinin had had little sense of him. Another lieutenant. Now the boy had taken the lead when his superior had failed.
Kryshinin stood in the disheartening German rain, painfully conscious of his inadequacy. He regretted all of the opportunities he had let slip to better train himself and his officers, to get to know his lieutenants a little better.
The infantry fighting vehicle’s engine had a girlish sort of whine, even grinding forward in the lowest gear. Kryshinin watched, fists clenched, as the vehicle neared its destination.
The left side of the vehicle suddenly lifted into the air, lofted on a pillow of fire.
Kryshinin instinctively ducked against the nearest vehicle. When he looked up, the lieutenant’s vehicle stood in flames.
Without looking around, Kryshinin could feel the crushing disappointment in all of the soldiers. They had been united in their hopes for the lieutenant. Now expectation collapsed into a desolate emptiness.
As Kryshinin stood helplessly again a young sergeant ordered all of his soldiers out of their vehicle. And the sergeant drove slowly in the lieutenant’s traces until the prow of his track crunched against the flaming rear doors of the newly stricken vehicle. Then he applied power.
Before the sergeant finished working the burning vehicle out of the way, a tank pulled out of the column and carefully worked its way up along the shoulder of the road, ready to take its turn in case another probe vehicle was needed.
Kryshinin knew it was all right then. They would get through. He began to sho
ut encouragement. Following his lead, his soldiers began to shout as well.
The flaming wreck veered out of the way, and the sergeant aimed at the roadway beyond the crater.
Kryshinin felt as though he could win the war with just a handful of men such as these. He was suddenly eager to get back on the move, to find the enemy.
“Could it be a deception?” Trimenko said, asking the question more of himself than of his audience. He reached into the leather tobacco pouch in which he carried his pistachios. Eating them was a habit he had picked up during his years in the Transcaucasus Military District. In Germany, his staff went to great lengths to keep him supplied. Often, he hardly tasted the nuts, but he found that peeling away the shells had a soothing influence on him, draining away nervousness the way worry beads worked for a Muslim.
“The documents appear to be genuine,” the army’s deputy chief of staff for operations said. “They were reportedly taken from a command post that was completely destroyed.”
“Have you seen the documents? Has anyone here seen them?”
“They’re on their way up from the division. We only know what the chief of reconnaissance reported from his initial exploitation. But it makes sense,” the operations chief said, pointing at the map. “It puts their corps boundary here, not far from where we had assessed it.”
“Far enough, though,” Trimenko said. “It makes a difference. We need to execute the option shifting Malyshev’s division onto the central tactical direction with Khrenov. The combat power has to converge.” He slipped the bared pistachio between his lips.
“Comrade Army Commander, that may slow the seizure of Lueneburg.”
At the mention of Lueneburg, Trimenko’s temper quickened. But his facial expression gave no indication of any change. He still chafed at the thought of the Lueneburg operation. He had not been allowed to explain its purpose to anyone else; as far as his staff knew, it was a serious undertaking with a military purpose. But it irritated Trimenko that none of them seemed to question it. To him, it was obviously a stupid diversion of combat power. Yet his officers accepted it without a murmur. He looked at his operations chief. The man’s mind was too slow; he was always too ready to state the self-evident. Trimenko felt disgustedly that he could think at least twice as fast and several times more clearly than any of his subordinates. He reached for another pistachio.