by Ralph Peters
“Vera,” Kryshinin said. “Vera, I have to explain.” He could not understand where Vera had gone. Only a moment ago, his wife had been beside him. Now he could not remember where she had gone.
His immediate surroundings returned. The grimy interior of a battlefield ambulance, waiting, sickening with exhaust fumes and the smells of ruined bodies. Two medical orderlies chatted with each other between the packed litters.
“This one’s gone.”
“Can’t be helped. Nothing to do. If they want to hold us up for everybody in the army to get past, we’ll lose them all. None of our doing.”
“Have a look. See if it’s still tanks going by.”
“You have a look if you want. I can tell by the sound that it’s tanks.”
“You’re closer to the door.”
They were stuck in a minefield, Kryshinin realized. They needed someone to lead them. He wanted to explain to them how it could be done, but they wouldn’t wait for him. He struggled to speak, muttering, but unable to get the words out in order.
“This one looks bad. He needs a transfusion quick,” an orderly said. “He’s white as snow.”
“Unless piss works, he’s out of luck.”
Kryshinin suddenly realized that they were talking about him. And he wanted to reply. But he did not know what to say, or how to say it now. And it seemed as though it would take an absurd, unreasonable amount of energy to speak.
“Well, to hell with them, anyway. At least they’re officers and they get to die in an ambulance.”
Vera. He knew he had seen her. She had been there a moment before, wearing her green dress that was growing a bit too tight. No. No. Grip reality. Vera is far away. Hold on to the actual. Don’t let go… But it was all so difficult.
He had not thought of Vera once during the battle. Perhaps that was a sign of how far apart they had grown. Nothing had worked out as planned. Nothing ever quite worked between them. They fought over trivial things, and he knew he drank too much at the officers’ canteen, but he did it anyway. And Vera carried her resentment in silence until it suddenly exploded into vicious, public anger, for all of the families in the officers’ quarters to hear.
But it could all be mended. Kryshinin felt the warmth of conviction. If only he could see her now, it could all be put right. It was all foolishness. And they must have children. When he found out that Vera had had two abortions without telling him, he had beaten her so badly that she could not go outside for almost two weeks. Two abortions. As if she wanted to kill every part of him that could have gotten inside of her.
“Get away from the window,” Kryshinin shouted. “Get back.”
But the lieutenant failed to obey the command. He reached to catch an object hurtling through the air, and he burst apart as though his body were the climax of a fireworks display.
“I need support, can you hear me? I need support. We can’t hold. They’re all over us. Please.”.
Vera surrounded by clouds of black smoke.
“Sounds as if this one had an interesting day,” one of the orderlies said in amusement.
“It just gets on your nerves after a while,” the other replied.
Halfway between the improvised helipad and the concealed forward command post of the Third Shock Army, the range car carrying Lieutenant General Starukhin down the muddy trail backfired once, shook, and sank to a stop. The sudden absence of mechanical noise startled the general. The world seemed to stop inside the big perceived silence, despite the vigor of the rain and the dull, distant sound of the war like a hangover in the ears. Each rustle of uniforms and wet leather straps seemed amplified, and the sour smell of tired men in damp uniforms grew unaccountably sharper.
Overcoming his initial bewilderment and horror, the junior sergeant behind the steering wheel clumsily tried to restart the vehicle, but the engine would not come to life. Instead of waiting for the dispatch of his own vehicle from the headquarters, Starukhin had hurriedly commandeered the immediately available range car, unwilling to lose the extra ten or fifteen minutes. Now he sat heavily in the little vehicle, with no means of communication, still several kilometers from his command post, mocked by the barrage of rain on the canvas roof.
The young driver carefully avoided looking around, fixing his eyes on the dashboard as though his stare might bully the machine back to life. The two aides accompanying Starukhin remained carefully silent. Starukhin listened to the boy’s fumbling for as long as he could bear it, then shouted:
“You can’t coax it to start, you drizzle ass. Get out and look at the engine.”
The boy shot out of the vehicle, banging against the door frame with bruising haste. Beyond the rain-smeared windshield, Starukhin could see him fumbling with the engine cover. In the blurred background, the rain seemed to have scoured all of the color out of the sky and landscape.
“And you two,” Starukhin bellowed, turning on his aides. “Get out there and help him. What’s the matter with you jackasses?”
The aides moved with the panic of men caught in a terrible crime. One of them, a lieutenant colonel, jostled wildly against Starukhin in his anxiety, and the army commander gave him a hard shove toward the door. Soon the two aides stood glum-faced beside the driver in the steady rain.
They were hopeless. All of them. Starukhin sat back, squaring his shoulders, convinced that he had to carry the entire army on his back. All of his life, he thought, he had had to drive his will head-on into the ponderous complacency characteristic of the system into which he had been born. Every day was a struggle. When something broke, those responsible would sheepishly sit down and wait to be told to fix it. Then they would take their own good time about the task. Unless you drove them. And Starukhin had learned how to drive men. But now, during the great test of his lifetime, he feared his inability to move the men under his command.
More than anything, he feared failure. He feared it because he believed it would reveal some secret incompetence hidden within him. Deep within his soul, where no other human being had ever been allowed to penetrate, Starukhin doubted himself, and nothing seemed more important to him than the preservation of his pride.
The damned whoring British would not break. It seemed incredible to him that he could not simply will his way through them, hammering them to nothing with his personal determination and the tank-heavy army under his command. He drifted back and forth between his bobbing doubts and waves of immeasurable energy. Now, as he envisioned the defending British, he sensed that it would be impossible for them to resist.
Yet the British were resisting, fighting bitterly for every road and water obstacle, seemingly for every worthless little village and godforsaken hill. While to the north, that bastard Trimenko was breaking through. Starukhin knew that Trimenko’s Second Guards Tank Army was already ahead of schedule, splitting the seam between the Germans and the Dutch. While he, Starukhin, had to butt head-on against the British.
That little Jewish shit Chibisov undoubtedly had a hand in it, Starukhin was convinced. He stared through the mud-speckled windshield at the soaking trio bent over the vehicle’s engine, feeling a strange pleasure at the thought of Chibisov. The hatred he felt was so intense, so pure and unexamined, that it was soothing. After the war… the Chibisovs would be made to pay. The Motherland had to be purged yet again. It was time to settle accounts with the Jews and the Jew-loving writers, with the leeching minorities and false reformers. In the wordless clarity of the moment, Chibisov embodied everything foul in the Soviet Union, all responsibility for the failures of Starukhin’s own kind. And yet Starukhin recognized that he hated Chibisov not merely for his Jewish-ness, but for his easy, controlled brilliance as well. Everything came too easily to Chibisov. Malinsky’s staff Jew could perform offhandedly tasks that confronted Starukhin with agony and consternation.
Surely, Starukhin decided, Chibisov was sabotaging him, poisoning Malinsky against him and cleverly throwing the front’s support behind Trimenko. As he sat in the hard, low vehicle seat un
der canvas vibrant with rain Starukhin imputed to Chibisov every action that he would have taken in the other man’s place.
And Malinsky. How could Malinsky fail to support him, even at the expense of Trimenko? Trimenko was nobody’s friend. But Starukhin had served as a baby-sitter for Malinsky’s son in Cuba. Just to keep the boy out of Afghanistan. Starukhin was certain that the posting had been no accident. No, Malinsky must have fixed it up for the boy. And Starukhin clearly understood who possessed power and how much. He had known what would be tacitly expected of him. Keep the son out of trouble.
Of course, the kid had not been so bad. He worked hard enough. As the officer responsible for training, he had done all that was required, even a bit more. Young Malinsky was clever at solving problems. Yet somehow, there was so little to the boy. It was as though he was never fully present, as though his heart really wasn’t tucked inside the tunic of his uniform. There was no fire. Young Malinsky had gone through all of the paces, performing with ease. But he just did not seem like a real soldier.
Young Malinsky didn’t even drink like a man. In Cuba, the boy had spent all of his spare time cuddled with his redheaded bitch of a wife, following her around like an excited dog. Starukhin doubted that the boy would have had the strength to raise his hand to his wife even if he had caught her in the act of being unfaithful to him. Not that Starukhin had any evidence that she had betrayed young Malinsky. No, the little cunt was probably too smart for that. She knew what she had to do to have it good. But she was still a whore. One look at her and you knew. You could smell it. And her independence of manner, her lack of respect… the boy seemed to have no control over her. You had to treat women the same way you treated the men beneath you. Break them down. Force your will on them. Get them by the ears and shove it down their throats.
Starukhin thought briefly, disgustedly, of his own wife. A sack of fat. The woman had no pride, no respect for her position. She had the soul of a peasant, not of a general’s wife. Young Malinsky’s wife, now — she at least looked the part. But she was a calculating little tramp.
Hearing a series of distant explosions, Starukhin pounded his big fist on the frame of the car. The war would not wait for him. His war. The opportunity of his lifetime. Even the daylight seemed to be floundering, failing, letting him down. Everything was running away from him, while he sat in a broken-down vehicle in the mud. He felt as if the universe had conspired to humiliate him. And Trimenko and Chibisov and all of the whoring Jewish bastards of the world were leaving him behind. Starukhin felt as though he would explode with the enormity of his anger.
He threw open the door of the car and clambered out into the mud just as the rain picked up again. He stared at the sergeant and the two aides. They were tinkering dutifully with the engine, but it was clear that not one of them knew what to do.
“You’re relieved,” Starukhin told the two officers. “I don’t want to see your goddamned faces anywhere around the headquarters. Your careers are finished.”
Suddenly, two NATO aircraft roared in low overhead. The sound of their passage was so big it shocked the ears like an explosion. The aides and the sergeant threw themselves into the mud. But Starukhin only raised his wide face to meet the jets, automatically sensing that they were after something bigger than a stranded range car. In the instant of their passage, he clearly saw the black squared crosses and the hard colors of the West German air force. A moment later, the tactical helipad that served the army’s command post threw a bouquet of fire high into the heavens, followed quickly by a second bloom, orange, yellow, and a ghostly red, tricking the eyes as it singed the air to black. The mud grasping at Starukhin’s boots turned to jelly, and waves crossed the surface of the puddles. Then the sound of the blasts arrived with an intensity that seemed to penetrate the skin as well as the ears.
Without a word or backward look, Starukhin turned down the swamped trail toward his forward command post, raging at the rain that fell on him, cursing every man and woman who crossed his mind, marching, almost running in the slop, fervent and vicious with fear.
Ten
Lieutenant Colonel Gordunov braced in the helicopter doorway, drenched with rain. His headset perked with the worries and technical exchanges of the pilots. Their talkativeness grated on him. Like junk-sellers in a bazaar. But he kept his silence and watched the crowded trace of the highway in the wet, fading light. The formation of gunships and transport helicopters throbbed between the last green hills before the target area.
Gordunov knew helicopter pilots, and he knew their machines. He knew the fliers who never thought of themselves as anything but fliers, the amateur killers, and he knew the warriors who just happened to be aviators. Far too few of the latter. And he knew the warning sounds that came into a pilot’s voice, requiring firm commands through the intercom. In Afghanistan, the troopships sagged through the air, swollen birds who had eaten too rich a diet of men. The mountains were too high, the air too thin, and the missiles came up at you like bright modern arrows. You learned early to command from a gunship that carried a light enough load to permit hasty maneuvers. You swallowed your pride and hid in the midst of the formation. If you were a good airborne officer, you learned a great deal about killing. If you had no aptitude for the work, or if you were not hard enough on yourself and your men, you learned about dying.
Gordunov forced his thoughts back to the present. The valley road beneath the bellies of the aircraft intersected the rail line. They were very close now. Gordunov knew the route along Highway 1 from the ground; he had traveled it just months before on mission training, disguised as a civilian assistant driver on an international transport route truck. The highways and roads leading to Hameln had impressed him with their quality and capacities, and by the swift orderliness of the traffic flow. Now those same roads were in chaos.
Intermittent NATO support columns heading east struggled against a creeping flood of refugee traffic. At key intersections, military policemen sought desperately to assert control, waving their arms in the dull rain. As the helicopters carrying the air assault battalion passed overhead soldier and citizen looked up in astonishment, shocked by this new dimension of trouble. Some of the more disciplined soldiers along the road opened fire at the waves of aircraft, but the small-arms fire had no effect beyond exciting the pilots. The aircraft returned the fire, nervous pilots devastating the mixed traffic with bursts from their Gatlings.
Gordunov let them go. As long as they didn’t overdo it. Terror was a magnificent weapon. Gordunov had learned his lessons from Afghanistan. War was only about winning. Killing the other one before he killed you. They killed one of your kind, or perhaps just made the attempt, and you responded by killing a dozen, or a hundred, of them.
Olive-painted transport trucks and fine, brightly colored German automobiles exploded into wild gasoline fires. Drivers turned into fields or steered desperately over embankments. Others smashed into one another. Gordunov’s rain-drenched face never changed expression.
He knew the garrison slang terms that sought to degrade, to cut him and those like him down to size. “Afghanistan mentality. Blood drinker. Crazy Afgantsy.” Name-calling that in the end only betrayed the nervousness, the awe and even fear of those who had not gone.
The destruction on the roads had a purpose. Purposes. Create panic. Convince the enemy that he is defeated. Convince him that further resistance is pointless and too expensive to be tolerable. And tie up the roads. Immobilize the enemy. It cut both ways, of course. But with any luck, the British or the Germans would clear the roads just in time for the Soviet armored formations that would be on their way to cross Gordunov’s bridges over the Weser.
Your men died. You could not let the fate of individuals weaken you. It was imperative to learn to regard them as resources, to be conserved whenever possible, but to be applied as necessary. In Afghanistan, and now in Germany, the missiles and the heavy machine-gun fire traced skyward, and the ships burst orange and yellow in a froth of black smoke.
No passenger ever survived the fireball.
But it was all right now. Gordunov had been prepared for the loss of up to fifty percent of his battalion going in. But the air defenses had been depleted along the penetration corridor. He could not be entirely certain, but from what he had personally observed, and from the pilot chatter, he believed he would get on the ground with over seventy-five percent of his force. Now it all depended on the air defenses at Hameln and what happened on the landing sites.
The rail tracks below the helicopter paralleled the main road, Highway 1, down into the sudden clutter of the town. Crammed into the valley on both sides of the Weser River. Suddenly, they were over the first buildings.
“Falcon, what do you have up there?” Gordunov spoke into the headset mike, switching the control to broadcast. He wanted a report from his battalion chief of staff, who was tucked into the first wave, just behind the advance party.
Pilot confusion bothered the net, with one transmission spoiling another.
“Eagle, this is Hawk,” the aircraft commander called him. “The rail yards are packed. You want us to hit the rolling stock?”
Gordunov could just make out the funnel-shaped expansion of the rail yards.
“This is Eagle,” he said. “Only strike combat-related activities. If there’s any vehicle off-loading, hit them.”
“Zero observed. But I’ve got heavies. I’m taking heavy machine-gun fire.”
Without waiting for his orders, the pilot and copilot-navigator of Gordunov’s aircraft began to bank the big gunship away from the rail line.
“Damn it,” Gordunov told them, “just go straight in. That’s nothing. Don’t break the formation.”
The pilots corrected back onto course. But the formation had grown ragged.
The chief of staff, Major Dukhonin, finally came up on the net. “One heavy on the northern bridge, Eagle. Clearing him now. Scattered lights. It’s manageable.”