by Ralph Peters
“More angle, little brother. Pull it around.”
Pilot First Class Captain Sobelev watched as an enemy air-defense missile miraculously passed beside his wingman’s aircraft and carried about five hundred feet before exploding. Sobelev felt his own aircraft buck like a wild horse at the blast.
“Steady now. Keep her steady, Fifty-nine.”
The planes had come out two and two, but the trailing pair had been shot down before they even reached the Weser River. Now, deep in the enemy’s rear, the air defenses had thinned. But it was still nightmarish flying. It was not at all like Afghanistan. Flying in and out of Kabul and good old Bagram had been bad enough. With the eternal haze over Kabul, filthy dust on the hot wind, and later the horribly accurate American Stinger missiles. But all of that had been child’s play compared to this.
“Fifty-eight, my artificial horizon’s out.”
Shit, Sobelev thought. “Just stay with me,” he answered. “We’re going to do just fine.”
Sobelev sympathized with the lieutenant’s nervousness. It was their second combat mission of the day, and today was the lieutenant’s first taste of war. If Afghanistan had been this bad, Sobelev thought, I might have quit flying.
“Stay with me, little brother. Talk to me.”
“I’m with you, Fifty-eight.”
“Good boy. Target heading, thirty degrees.”
“Roger.”
“Keep those wings level now… final reference point in sight… go to attack altitude… talk to me, Fifty-nine.”
“I have the reference point.”
“Executing version one.”
“Correcting to follow your approach.”
“On the combat course… now… hold on, it’s going to be hot.”
“Roger.”
“Target… ten kilometers… steady… I have visual.”
Sobelev saw the airfield coming up at them like a table spread for dinner. Enemy aircraft continued to land and take off.
“Hit the apron. I’ve got the main runway.”
“Roger.”
Air-defense artillery suddenly came to life in their path, drilling the sky with points of light.
“Let’s do this clean… hold it… hold straight. straighten your wings.”
In Afghanistan, you flew high and tossed outdated ordnance at the kishlaks with their mud buildings that had not changed for a thousand years. The bombs changed them in an instant.
Sobelev was determined to bring his wingman out. Wingboy, he thought, children at war, already forgetting how young he had been on his first tour of duty in Afghanistan.
Sobelev led them right into the general flight paths of the NATO aircraft taking off, making it impossible for the air-defense guns to follow them.
“Now.”
The lieutenant shouted into the radio in childish elation. The two planes lifted away from the enemy airfield, and, as they banked, Sobelev caught a glimpse of the heavy damage that already had been dealt to the base by previous sorties. Black burned patches and craters on the hardstand. Smoking ruins in the support area. Emergency vehicles raced through corridors of fire. Sobelev heard his flight’s payload detonate, adding to the destruction.
“Let’s go home, little brother… heading… one… six… five.”
An enemy plane suddenly shot straight up in front of Sobelev. He recognized a NATO F-16. As the plane twisted into the sky, disappearing from view in the grayness, Sobelev’s mouth opened behind his face mask. He had never seen a plane… a pilot… maneuver like that. It shocked him.
After a long, long few seconds, he spoke. “Hostiles, Fifty-nine… do what I do… do exactly what I do… do you understand?”
“Roger.” But the exuberance was gone from the lieutenant’s voice. He, too, had seen the enemy fighter’s acrobatic climb. Now they both wondered where the enemy aircraft had gone. Sobelev looked at his radar screen. It was a mess. Busy sky.
“Follow me now, Fifty-nine,” Sobelev commanded. And hope I know what I’m doing.
Major Astanbegyan leaned over the operator’s shoulder, watching the scanning line circle the radar display.
“Does anyone respond to query?” the major asked.
“Comrade Major,” the specialist sergeant said, with weary exasperation in his voice, “I register responses. But it’s all so cluttered that they intermingle before I can sort targets. Then the jamming starts again.”
Astanbegyan told the boy to keep on trying. He was beginning to feel like a unit political officer in his struggle to maintain a positive collective outlook in the control staff. He had begun the morning by shouting when things went wrong, but he had soon shouted himself out. There were so many unanticipated problems that he quickly realized he was only making the work harder. Now he simply did what he could to keep the entire air-defense sector from collapsing into anarchy.
He turned away from the boy at the console. He knew the sergeant was trying, that he sincerely wanted to do what was right. The officers manning scopes and target allocation systems were doing no better. The NATO aircraft were using the same penetration corridor in sector as those of the Warsaw Pact, and it was a hopeless muddle. Out on the ground, the batteries were operating primarily on visual identification.
The battle management computers were a disappointment as well. So far, they were handling systems location and logistics data fairly well — or seemed to be, since there was no way of knowing how accurate all of the inputs and outputs were at this point. But the sorting and assigning of targets was going badly. Astanbegyan had no doubt that aircraft were being knocked out of the sky. He had over a dozen reported kills. But he was less certain about who was being shot down.
“Comrade Major,” a communications specialist called to him. “The commander of Number Five Battery wishes to report.”
“Take his report, then.”
“He wishes to report to you personally, Comrade Major.”
Astanbegyan stepped over to the communications area and took the receiver from the specialist.
“Six-Four-Zero. Go ahead.”
“This is Six-Four-Five. I have two systems down. Enemy air-to-surface missiles, anti-radiation, I think. We got the bastard, though.”
“All right,” Astanbegyan said, although he was far from happy with the news. What could you do, order your subordinates to go back and start from the beginning and not lose the systems next time? “How are you receiving your encoded instructions?”
There was a momentary silence on the other end.
“This is Six-Four-Five,” the voice returned. “I haven’t received any for the last hour.”
Astanbegyan felt his self-control drain away. “Damn it, man, this isn’t an exercise. We’ve been sending constantly. Check your battery console.”
“Checking it now.”
“And next time don’t wait until you have to call me and tell me you’ve lost the rest of your battery.”
“Understood.” But the voice shook. “Listen, Comrade Major… we’re running low on missiles.”
“You can’t possibly have fired everything on your transporters.”
“Comrade Maj — I mean, Six-Four-Zero, I haven’t seen the trucks all day. The technical services officer became separated from the unit. You wouldn’t believe what the roads are like out here.”
“You find those damned trucks. If you have to walk to Poland. Better yet — you walk forward. Send somebody else to the rear. What the hell good are you without missiles? You ought to be court-martialed.”
“You don’t know what it’s like out here.”
“Comrade Major,” a radar-tracking specialist shouted, interrupting. “Multiple hostiles, subsector seven, moving to four.”
Immediately, the shriek of jets flying low penetrated the walls of the van complex, shaking the maps and charts on the walls, and drawing loud curses from electronics operators whose equipment flickered or failed.
“Where did they come from?” Astanbegyan screamed, giving up his last attempt a
t composure.
“They were ours, Comrade Major.”
Astanbegyan ran his hand back over his scalp, soothing himself. A good thing, too, he thought.
Seven
Colonel Tkachenko, the Second Guards Tank Army’s chief of engineers, watched the assault crossing operation from the lead regiment’s combat observation post. Intermittently, he could see as far as the canal line through the periscope. He had studied this canal for a long time, and he knew it well. There were sectors where it was elevated above the landscape, with tunnels passing beneath it, and other sectors, like this one, where the waterway was only a flat, dull trace along the valley floor. This sector had been carefully chosen, partly because of its suitability for an assault crossing, but largely because it was a point at which the enemy would not expect a major crossing effort, since the connectivity to the high-speed roads was marginal. Surprise was the most important single factor in such an operation, and the local trails and farm roads would be good enough to allow them to punch out and roll up the enemy. Then there would be better sites, with better connectivity, at a much lower cost. Tkachenko refocused the optics, looking at the sole bridge where it lay broken-backed in the water. A few hundred meters beyond, the smokescreen blotted out the horizon. Under its cover, the air assault troops had gone in by helicopter to secure the far bank, and now the assault engineers on the near bank appeared as tiny toys rushing forward with their rafts and demolitions. Beyond the smoke-cordoned arena, the fires of dozens of batteries of artillery blocked the far approaches to any enemy reserves.
A flight of helicopters shuttled additional security troops, with portable antitank weapons, to the far bank. Yet the action appeared very different now than it looked in the demonstration exercises in the training area crossing sites. The only order seemed to be in the overall direction of the activity, and the noise level, even from a distance, cut painfully into the ears. There was no well-rehearsed feel to this crossing, only the desperation of men hurrying to accomplish dangerous tasks, with random death teasing them. The banks of the canal were steep and reinforced with steel. There were no easy points of entry for amphibious vehicles. Everything had to be prepared. Ingress, egress. With the enemy’s searching fires crashing down.
The enemy artillery shot blindly at the banks of the canal. The Soviet smokescreen had been fired in along a ten-kilometer-long stretch of the waterway, and the enemy gunners were forced to guess the exact location of the crossing activities. Despite the difficulties, occasional shells found their mark, shredding tiny figures, hurling them about on waves of mud, and setting unlucky vehicles ablaze.
A flight of two Soviet gunships passed overhead, flying echelon right. Another pair followed the first, then a third couple came by. They flew heavily across a sky the color of dishwater, then disappeared into the smoke.
Gutsy pilots, Tkachenko thought. Not a good day to be an aviator.
Along the canal line, a ragged series of demolitions began. The explosions on the near bank were soon followed by blasts from the western bank. Tkachenko tried to keep count. At least eight points of entry.
More low blasts punctuated the horizon.
Tkachenko felt pride in the courage of the engineers down on the water. At New Year’s, 1814, bridging trains from the Imperial Russian Army had supported the Prussian crossing of the Rhine. Only the Russian engineers had had the equipment and the skill to force the great river. Now Tkachenko intended to repeat the earlier event, and he wondered how many days it would take to fight all the way to the Rhine. The engineers would have plenty of practice on the way, given the dense drainage pattern of northern Germany.
Tkachenko turned to the motorized rifle regiment commander, a major.
“You can get a company of infantry fighting vehicles across now. No promises on the quality of the egress cuts, but we’ll winch them out if we have to. As soon as you get your first wave across, we’ll put in the assault bridges.”
The enemy artillery barrage intensified again, as if they sensed the progress along the canal. The blasts and smoke made it difficult to see. But Tkachenko soon made out a column of infantry fighting vehicles, prepared for swimming. They emerged from a hide position several hundred meters back from the bank, then began to deploy on line, searching for their markers and guides.
Tkachenko left the periscope. Time to go forward. He waved his hand at the commander of the engineer assault bridging battalion.
“It’s time. Let’s get them in the water.”
Together, the two engineers slogged through the mud, past the local security troops with their machine guns and shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles. Tkachenko began to climb laboriously into the younger commander’s control vehicle.
“Comrade Colonel?”
Tkachenko looked around at the handsome young Estonian. Fit. The new breed. Tkachenko knew he was getting too old for all of this. It was time for a good teaching position, where you slept in a soft, warm bed every night and there were no real risks to be taken.
“I’m going with you,” Tkachenko told the younger man. “You don’t begrudge a grandfather a little fun, do you?”
The younger officer looked confused. Tkachenko continued to work his bulky way into the cramped armored vehicle. Of course, the battalion commander would not particularly want the chief of engineers looking over his shoulder. But that was just too bad, Tkachenko told himself. He didn’t want to miss the actual crossing. All of his military career, he had been waiting to use his skills for a serious purpose. Now it was his duty to be down there with them all, putting in the bridges and running the ferries.
The Estonian battalion commander yanked the hatch shut behind them and tugged on his headset. Tkachenko relaxed as best he could in the cramped interior, hunkering against a shelf of radios. It was up to the younger man to deliver them to the crossing site. Tkachenko figured there was nothing he could do to protect them from bad luck or to deflect an enemy round. Content, he sat and waited.
Once before, he had thought that he was to have an opportunity to put his skills to practical use. He had been selected for a posting as an adviser to the Angolans. The assignment had brought him the greatest disillusionment of his life. He had hated the Angolans. They were greedy and subhuman to him. Filthy. Inhuman to each other. And the Cubans, in their clever, degenerate way, had been worse. None of them had even once shown the appropriate level of respect for the Soviet Union or for Soviet officers. It was all lip service, meaningless agreement, and lies. He had spent most of his tour drinking Western liquor and building barracks and bridges to house and carry the future of the developing world. He had even gone into combat once, when the situation in the south had deteriorated to the point that the Soviets themselves had been required to stabilize the front. Yet how could you call those worthless grasslands or the deadly junglelike forests a front? It was a place where men scarcely dignified by ragtag uniforms murdered each other in horrible ways, torturing prisoners gleefully, like children tormenting small animals just to hear them scream. It wasn’t even really a matter of interrogation. They flayed men alive. Or cut them up a piece at a time. And there were no particular efforts to spare the women. They were all counterrevolutionaries, of course. Africa, Tkachenko thought, with the same sort of disgust another man might feel at the word syphilis. It was a pit of disease, bad water, and poisonous creatures, all wrong for a Russian.
Tkachenko chuckled at a turn in his memories. Wrapped in his headset, eyes fixed to his optics, the younger officer had no sense of the old colonel behind him. Tkachenko remembered that he had had visions of tropical cities in the moonlight, of native women who were somehow clean and cheaply willing, and of serving a worthy cause as well. His illusions had not lasted one week in-country. They had hardly lasted a day.
In an odd way, the cumulative effect of the system of bribery had been even worse than the violence, against which Tkachenko had normally been shielded. It had been a never-ending frustration, and not a matter of little gifts to get your na
me moved up on the waiting list for a television set like back home. The Angolan officials looked for big bribes before they would allow you to do things for their people. Tkachenko often suspected the Cubans and Angolans of collusion to milk every last drop from the Soviet cow. A Soviet officer could not touch certain Soviet materiel that had been off-loaded at Luanda. A gift from the Soviet people, the materiel had become Angolan property. The Soviets in the military assistance group then had to barter to obtain key supplies in order to accomplish their assigned tasks in support of the Angolans, who controlled the materiel. And the whoring Cubans had been in the middle of it all. Tkachenko had watched the Cubans go to pieces in Angola.
Perhaps there had been a few good ones, a few believers. But most of them had exploited the situation to their own advantage in every possible respect. Tkachenko himself had returned from Angola with a bad liver, a persistent skin disease, and a hatred for everything that was not Soviet from west of the Urals, everything that was not Greater Russian. In Luanda, Western businessmen had commanded more respect and courtesy than a Soviet officer. That wasn’t socialism. Africa was a swamp of insatiable greed and corruption. The corruption of the spirit and of the flesh. Tkachenko had come home convinced that the Soviet Union had nothing to gain in Africa.
Nearby blasts rocked the vehicle, snapping Tkachenko back to the present. The vehicle turned off the road and bumped across broken ground. Tkachenko gripped at a metal brace, holding on. He told himself again that he was getting too old for this.
The Estonian ripped off his headset and grabbed his helmet.
“We’re here.”
The bridgehead appeared hopelessly confused at first. A column of tanks had come up too soon, and the big truck-launched bridge sections had to be worked around them. Vehicles backed antitank guns toward temporary positions, and a ditcher bit at the muck, beginning to prepare bridgehead fortifications. Engineers and commandant service troops, whose mission it was to control traffic, waved arms and flags, and another wave of amphibious infantry fighting vehicles skidded down through blasted mud into the water of the canal. The vehicles began swimming awkwardly, struggling to gain control, like limbless ducks. As Tkachenko watched, one vehicle took a chance direct hit, exploding into the water, resurfacing in shreds, then sinking finally beneath the surface, carrying its occupants down with it. Another vehicle hit trouble at the far bank, unable to find enough purchase to haul itself out of the water.