WW III wi-1

by Ian Slater

  “Good,” he said. “Very—” Then he saw the photo credit: James Law. “Gospodi!”— “My God!”

  “You see, Major,” said Chernko. “Now it pays off, eh? All the training. The waiting.”

  “Yes,” agreed the major. He had difficulty recalling Law’s face, as he had been one of the early illegals they had shipped over in Gorbachev’s time.

  The director was walking away, holding the photograph high. “Power of the press.”

  In Washington protestors had already started to gather about the White House, the photo galvanizing opposition to the war.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  In East Berlin the loading of the two giant four-engined Russian Condors, the world’s largest military air transports, was delayed. Each plane, assigned to carry 345 members of the Communist freedom volunteer force from East Berlin to Pyongyang via Khabarovsk, was waiting for the Cubans to arrive. The East German commander was annoyed, but the members of his “shock troop” company, though in full battle packs, had no complaint. The shock troops, who had been waiting for more than an hour in the huge, overheated cavern of the Condors, had been told that some of the Cubans sent to help the Communist volunteer force aid North Korea were women. They had also been told by their political officer they must not call any of the women “senorita” or “senora”; this was something you heard only in the decadent American Western films so beloved by equally decadent West Germans. Nowadays, they were instructed, they must address the women as “Comrade”— “Compañera.”

  But as they filed into the transports from the long flight from Havana to East Germany, the Cuban women, over twenty of them, aroused intense curiosity among the East German soldiers. For the East German troops, used to the hard, athletic beauty of their women, the Cuban women’s beautifully developed bodies were more supple in appearance. The compañeras’ swarthy Latin color, their golden faces beaded by sweat, their combat bras damp through their dark green T-shirts, were an intriguing and welcome sight. Several of them had to press up closely against the men in the tightly packed aircraft, but not one of the men complained. It would be a long flight.

  “Sicherheitsgürtel anfassen!”—”Fasten seat belts for takeoff.”

  Despite some eager helpers, not one compañera needed assistance, most of the 12 °Cubans wearing red A patches on their black berets, signifying they had served in the African campaigns of “fraternal assistance,” from Angola to the Sudan. As the pilots in the two Condors began the preflight checks, the seven hundred troops in the Condors were ordered to put in their earplugs as the engines went into their distinctive high-vibration scream. For a few token Bulgarian assault troops who had never been flown into action before, the noise in the huge military plane, devoid of the insulation normally accorded passenger aircraft, was frightening.

  Despite the noise and the earplugs, Dieter Meir, a tall, blond East German, the cousin of Hans Meir at Outpost Alfa, managed to introduce himself to the Cuban woman next to him.

  “Ich heisse Juanita “—”My name is Juanita,” she said, putting out her hand. Seeing his surprise at her knowing German, she explained, shouting close to him in competition with the engines, “We have many experts from Germany.”

  Meir nodded rather than saying anything, as now conversation was impossible; the huge Condor’s engines were in takeoff pitch as its nose wheels traced the white floodlit semicircles about Schönefeld terminal, beginning its lumbering and surprisingly bumpy roll toward the main tarmac. The second Condor was taxiing three hundred yards behind as they moved to the runway best suited for takeoff in the “Berliner Luft,” the legendary and invigorating wind that blew down across the old Prussian plain across West Berlin’s Grunewald Forest and toward the East German farms beyond Kopenick’s Forest.

  When Juanita had said “Germany” rather than “East Germany” to Dieter Meir, it struck a responsive chord, for he hoped that one day, in the heart, it truly would be Germany again— not just when the politicians declared it was, but united in spirit, in the same way that he and the Cuban, from thousands of miles away, had come together in their common ideology — to help unite another country. And yet he sometimes wondered if it would ever really happen in his own country, families, like his own, separated too long, still split asunder, the lingering legacy of having been apart for so many years beyond the 500-kilometer anti-Fascist barrier.

  Inside the terminal the Bereitschaftspolizei, “police band,” played a stirring rendition of “Freiheit and Peace,” at once entertaining the waiting passengers for domestic flights and being recorded by Soviet and other Eastern bloc radio and television networks to mark the historical occasion on which the socialist world had, after so much inner turmoil, risen as one in defense of the North Korean workers’ democracy in their struggle against the American assault. How typically stupid the Americans had been, to assume that after the workers’ democratic movements had erupted in the Gorbachev years somehow everyone would suddenly throw away the good socialist things with the bad and declare themselves lovers of capitalism — to trade socialist evils for the evils of capitalism, as if there was nothing in between.

  Aboard the Condors none of the more than seven hundred East German, Cuban, Bulgarian, and Romanian troops could hear the ceremonies or speeches, but there was excitement in the two huge transports. Most of the troops were under twenty-five and needed to prove themselves. On the other hand, Gen. Hans Demmler, commander in chief of the Communist volunteer force, could hear the pomp and circumstance over the earphones, plugged into the aircraft’s circuits, but he took no notice of it. His hands were full, hoping that as the different segments had not time to train together for the task at hand, they would fight well as self-contained units, not that he had any choice, for full integration would be impossible with the language barriers, despite liaison officers. Right now he was checking that each AK-74 was “tipped” to protect the barrel and front sight from any damage during the flight. Although the troops had been told the flight plan called for a landing at Khabarovsk, if possible they would refuel in the air, as Moscow deemed this would be an impressive logistical display for the Americans.

  The engines screamed in protest as the flaps were tested, then the brakes released, as the first Condor began the long run, gathering speed on the south runway.

  The shadowy figures of the two men on top of the eight-story Kreuzberg apartment block were all but invisible, one of them leaning against the northeastern comer of the water tank for support, head bowed, right hand as one with the gripstock of the Stinger. It was not the Stinger of Afghan guerrilla fame, which in fact had often refused to fire, but the much improved Stinger-POST, incorporating the passive optical scanning function so that the taxiing Condor completely filled the aiming circle, the edge a little fuzzy due to diffused heat waves at the plane’s extremities that were rising and falling in the Stinger’s sight like a mirage. The Condor was equipped with exhaust “baffles” or shields to minimize hot exhaust trail, but as the fully loaded plane rose and banked hard right, both port and starboard engine exhausts were clear to the naked eye, let alone the Stinger. The agent squeezed the grip, the Stinger’s back-blast illuminating the rooftop momentarily, scorching the agent’s arm. The Condor, in effect a climbing fuel tank with soldiers aboard, exploded like napalm, reminding Chin of the American Challenger explosion years before, one of the Condor’s engines, part of the wing still attached, cartwheeling, disintegrating in a fizzing halo of scarlet, ripping open the night. The main body of the Condor fell as if lead-weighted onto the tarmac like a zeppelin tight with hydrogen. As it burst into flame, the first fifty rows of tiny soldiers could be seen, heads black as burnt matches, then disappearing in the orange-white inferno that raced hundreds of meters down the runway.

  Suddenly the second Condor, in the process of braking, tires sparking, exploded, its four nose wheels collapsing, fuselage sliding along the tarmac like the chin of some huge dinosaur on black ice, plowing into the inferno of the first plane. In the near
daylight intensity of the scene, as fire engines screamed, the Koreans atop the building three-quarters of a mile away could plainly see some Communist volunteer troops in the second Condor sliding down open ramps, most of them afire, others coming down into a fuel slick that ignited seconds later, the ribbing of the fuselage now stretched against the skin of the aircraft in an X ray of the plane, the roar like a thousand Christmas trees going up. There were no screams, or at least none that could be heard over those of the sirens. A tongue of flame like a ceremonial dragon’s shot out and around the rear cargo door of the second Condor, incinerating the remainder of the fleeing troops. Then the Koreans could hear a rattling sound, becoming louder as searchlights streamed out into the night like wildly flung straws darting over the West German apartments across the bulldozed remnants of the Wall. The rattle was the sound of machine-gun fire.

  “Let’s go!” said Chin.

  * * *

  There was shooting all the way from Treptow, East Berlin’s most southerly suburb around the East German airport, to Pankow, East Berlin’s most northwesterly suburb sixteen miles away. Most of the shooting, however, was concentrated in Kreuzberg, from where the missiles had been fired.

  * * *

  Outside the apartment the big crowds that had been racing down from the back-street Kneipen—pubs — toward the wire fence along the River Spree now started to retreat as rifle and machine-gun fire increased. In the flickering light of a flare, Chin saw an old man in pajamas and robe standing in the street below the apartment complex gazing skyward. A woman darted out from beneath the ginkgo trees, shouting and dragging him away toward an old section of dilapidated Wall. It wasn’t certain who had started the small-arms fire, and Chin suspected that some of it was probably the ammunition going off in the Condors. In any event, now both sides were at it.

  “All here?” Chin asked in the darkness, the sky to the east glowing a soft pink.

  Each man responded. They went down to the gray BMW. “All in?” Chin asked again.

  “Yes.”

  “Where are the cases?”

  “The trunk.”

  Chin told the agent driving to pull up on the first bridge over the Teltow Canal on their way back to the trade legation offices. But there were too many people about, mainly police cars, and so they went on to another bridge, where Chin got out and ditched the two missile launchers. “Switch off,” he told the driver. He listened for a moment, thinking he’d heard footsteps nearby, but now all he could hear was the cracking and pop of the small-arms fire. “Now, look,” Chin said, stamping his feet; it was damper and colder by the canal. “You’ve all done a first-rate job. I want you to know — well—” He paused, never having been one for sentimentality but wanting to convey to his men how satisfied he was with their performance. The four of them had volunteered even though they didn’t know all the details of the job. “Komawō”—”Thanks,” he said.

  He shot the driver first, the man immediately behind the driver second, and then the third man, trying to scramble out the back door. The man in the center was begging for mercy, his hands up high. “Don’t, sir—”

  Chin stood back a little and shot him, trying not to get anything on his coat.

  * * *

  In a chain reaction all along NATO’s line, phones were ringing off the hook. Fighting had broken out in Berlin, and reinforced alert had become “general alert.” At Outpost Alfa, two hundred miles southeast of Berlin, Hans Meir, who, with an American, was manning the observation tower, the scene of Hitler’s Nazis crossing the Rhine Bridge clear in his mind, knew what to do. He was no less than Samson at the pass, only instead of the jawbone of an ass with which to beat back any breach of the “trace,” he had a direct line to Fifth Army Corp’s 120-millimeter artillery batteries behind him, ready to pulverize the Soviet and East German echelons, groups of five tanks, if they dared try to punch their way through. So far it was a quiet country night, broken only by the sound of an owl. Then Meir heard at least half a dozen dull thumps some miles to the east of him.

  “What was that?” asked his American partner. There was a faint pinkish glow, the size of a tennis ball from where they were. Hans Meir didn’t hesitate. Lifting the phone, he rang Alfa HQ. He couldn’t get through, the line sounding like frying eggs.

  In the main Alfa hut, a mile behind in a pine wood, they were trying to contact the Alfa tower, but all they heard was static on the line. It wasn’t a line in the old-fashioned sense of radio cables but rather the elaborate fiber-optics links that were on the blink. The fiber-optic system was thought to be impregnable against an EMP, electromagnetic impulse, the kind of shock blasts given off from a nuclear explosion, scrambling all sensitive electronic equipment from televisions to defense computers.

  At NATO’s headquarters in Brussels, calls were coming in from pay phones from as far south as Burghausen in Bavaria to Fehmarn in Schleswig-Holstein in the north. All computers and fiber-optic radio links between Bonn and NATO HQ, as well as all those between armor/infantry, artillery, and air forces, including ground tremor sensors, had simply gone mad, spewing out nonsense that was only adding to the general air of confusion.

  In the rain-slashed darkness around Alfa One, Klaus Meir and his army buddy, Johnny Malvinsky, were watching the gap when the American, his Bronx accent markedly different from Meir’s college-taught English, said something to Meir, who thought it sounded like “ruf.”

  “Ruf?” Meir said.

  “A ruf,” Malvinsky seemed to say. “It’s moving.”

  “Where?”

  Malvinsky handed him the infrared binoculars. “Two o’clock. By the rise near the barn.”

  The American was right, but it wasn’t a roof, at least not a full-sized one, more like that of a small toolshed moving, the infrared’s scope picking up spotty thermals.

  “What magnification is this?” asked Meir. They were still trying to call Alfa HQ since the order had come, taking them from “military vigilance” to “general alert.”

  “Usual setting,” said Malvinsky. “I didn’t change it.”

  At Alfa HQ the infantry troops had come through the door of the metal hut as if there were a fire, the lift-up counter slamming back, held down by the sergeant as he kept intoning, “Let’s go! Let’s go!” The M-1s were coughing once, then there was a deep, throaty purr, surprisingly quiet to infantry used to the old M-60 Patterns. No one questioned whether it was a drill or not. They’d get their butts kicked if they didn’t do it within the required time, and suffer restricted furlough as well. Outside as they moved beneath the pines into the Bradley armored personnel carriers, thirteen men apiece, the column started off for the trace near the tower.

  * * *

  Facing the Fulda Gap from the east, Meir’s and Malvinsky’s opposites, members of a squad from the East German Fourth and Soviet Thirty-ninth motorized rifle divisions, saw something moving along the plain through their infrared.

  “Looks like an outhouse moving,” the East German told his Russian liaison officer. The Russian agreed, but the thermal images were spotty because of the light rain that had now started. In any event, the shape of whatever they were watching was much smaller than that of a tank. Besides, in regular radio “line,” rather than fiber-optic, contact with their headquarters, they would have been informed of any unusual traffic.

  The farmer driving the tractor, like many others all along the front between East and West Germany, was one of those who had agreed to work farmland in and around the DMZ provided they were given special Risikoentgeld— “danger subsidies.” But the subsidy, the East German farmer had long since told his wife, did not cover nuclear war, thank you very much. Working patiently and only at night, he had fitted the tractor with a rude protective shield of steel slabs either side and over the roof, his wife and two children sitting behind him now on seats he had expressly built, along with a huge white flag that would flap as he unfurled it at the Fulda Gap.

  “And how,” his wife had asked him, “do we get across
the strip?” She meant the mines, many of which had been left in place after the West and Gorby’s Moscow had ended. He told her he had mounted a roller plow on the front with loose chains to act as flails. Nothing new about the idea. Old as the hills.

  “It’s crazy,” she told him.

  “Woman,” he’d replied, “when the shooting starts, there will not be time to discuss what we might do. But where do you prefer to take your chances? In the East or the West?” His argument was sound enough as it went, and a rainy night was made to order. Still there were two things wrong. The first was a loose bearing on the tractor’s right wheel, making the squeak of the tractor even more pronounced than usual, and the white flag, which wouldn’t have made any difference to the East Germans anyway, was so sodden by the rain that it didn’t flap at all but merely hugged the pole like some thin, frightened ghost.

  In the East German’s infrared scope, whatever was moving disappeared for a moment behind a wood but then came back into view as a frosty outline, nearing the fence. In Tower Alfa, Hans Meir tried to make his decision. This wasn’t the bridge leading to the Rhineland in ‘36 where Grandfather said you could see the Nazis clearly coming at you. But, of course, using camouflage is precisely what the Russians would do — trying to confuse Alfa just long enough.

  “Den Mann halten!”— “Stop him!” ordered the Russian liaison officer. “It’s an American mine clearer.” The East German fired. Meir didn’t see the antitank missile streaking toward the trace, only a white streak across the infrared scope—

  “Back-blast!” said Malvinsky. “Ten o’clock.”

  “Got it in sight?” asked Meir.

  “In sight,” answered Malvinsky, the AT launcher on his shoulder.