by Ian Slater
Trainor’s beaming smile was not simply that of a PR man’s victory but one of genuine affection for his boss; the Hemingway paraphrase about thrashing a bully was a master stroke, he thought — so long as no one pointed out that Hemingway had committed suicide.
* * *
By 4:17 a.m. the Fulda Gap was choked with armor, the destruction by the U.S. Fifth Army’s artillery so unabatedly concentrated that east of the Gap, the plain looked like some vast scrap-yard strewn with the steaming hulls of over a thousand Soviet-Warsaw Pact tanks, the majority of these being obsolete T-62s, of which the Russians alone had twenty-three thousand in reserve and which were unofficially known among the Moscow general staff as dryan— “fodder.” But the tanks had kept coming, and at times, with the air-ripping scream of wire-guided and fire-and-forget antitank missiles, blanket artillery fire and the cacophony of assorted small arms, barrels threatening to jam from unprecedented sustained action, U.S. and West German troops manning tank graders had to be called in to clear a way through as more and more NATO units arrived.
The A-10 Thunderbolts, or rather those who managed to penetrate the increasingly accurate Russian SAM screen, continued to buoy Meir’s spirit. Though his hearing had long gone in the deep fallback bunker at Alfa Two, he still managed to glimpse with awe the twin-engined jets screaming in just above tree level, their seven-barreled Avenger Gatling guns ripping into the oncoming S-WP armor, the stream of the thirty-millimeter cannon fire stuttering into the tanks at over seventy rounds a second, many of the tanks exploding, illuminating others nearby, which became the Thunderbolts’ next targets.
The antitank missiles were doing well, but it was the A-10s that, despite their losses, continued to be the best antitank weapon NATO had in the field, augmenting the fire of the hidden M-1s, whose 120-millimeters kept thumping away from the woods, although many of the American tanks, over 270, had been destroyed by the Soviet-Warsaw Pact onslaught.
As the carnage continued, the biggest surprise to the NATO generals was that the highly touted and sophisticated Swedish BILL antitank missile system, proven so effective at homing in above and destroying the thinner turret armor, was being foiled by the less-sophisticated Soviet T-72 tanks with reactive armor packs on the turret as well as around it and by foil-spewing ejectors that scrambled the incoming missiles’ homing radar. The BILL top-attack warheads, however, extracted a savage price in S-WP infantry — the Russian BMPs’, personnel carriers’, much thinner armor and tracks easily penetrated by the missiles. But still the Russians and East Germans kept coming, astonishing the forward infantry companies of U.S. Fifth Army by using infantry in several instances to clear a minefield before the tanks by running through it, an old Russian tactic from the days of Stalingrad.
Then at 5:00 a.m., 4:00 p.m. Washington time, Russia’s C in C of the western military theater, or TVD, Major General Agursky, received reports that brigades from West Germany’s First Armored and Second Mechanized Divisions were being diverted to reinforce the NATO semicircle of armor around Fulda Gap and that the British First Army, in position south of the Elbe, was moving farther south to shore up the areas depleted by the West Germans heading to Fulda. Agursky gave orders for the second phase of Operation Home Rule to begin.
The Soviet Ninth Armored Division, leading an attack of thirty Soviet-Warsaw Pact divisions, fifteen armored, fifteen mechanized infantry — over 450,000 troops in all — struck and broke through in the far northern sector of NATO’s front, twenty-four miles east of the Elbe, racing for Hamburg and Bremerhaven, the prime designated ports for U.S. resupply of NATO. NATO headquarters had never been sure of Denmark’s willingness to intervene against such a Russian-Warsaw Pact right hook south of Denmark’s border, and eventually NATO’s high command was proven correct, for while the West German Sixth Mechanized Division in Schleswig-Holstein attacked bravely and without hesitation, aided by elements of the eighty-four thousand First German Corps and northern elements of British First Army, the Danish Parliament debated the advisability of becoming involved. By the time they’d decided to send a stern note to Moscow, the Soviet-Warsaw Pact blitzkrieg, spearheaded by five thousand Soviet T-90s, was racing through the dawn toward the vital ports of Hamburg and Bremerhaven, the T-90s’ 135-millimeter laser-guided cannons blasting everything before them. The most strategic bridges over the Elbe were quickly in the hands of the Soviet 207th Airborne, who started a row at Soviet-WP HQ by taking all the glory for having secured the bridges when it was in fact SPETSNAZ, special force teams, already in place in the west, who had secured the bridge crossings by thwarting NATO demolition teams in the first place.
* * *
At Fulda Gap, one of the T-90 five-tank-platoon leaders was Lt. Sergei Marchenko, twenty-four, younger son of Kiril Marchenko and who, because fate had decreed that he be less than five feet six inches in height, had automatically been conscripted to the Soviet Tank Corps, the 2.10-meter-high T-90 being the lowest silhouette of any tank in the world. But what Sergei Marchenko had really wanted to do was fly. What his father wanted him to do was to obey orders so that in time, if he acquitted himself well as a tank commander, he might qualify for transfer. Right now, however, all that Marchenko was concerned about was staying alive — the inside of his T-90, devoid of the airconditioning of the American M-1s, extraordinarily hot due not only to the heat generated by the tank engine and the motors that moved the ten-ton turret but by the smoke and heat generated by the scores of other tanks in the 270-tank division moving toward the Gap. Many of the tanks were now more than fifty meters apart, violating the normal “twenty-five meter” rule of Russian armor. It was an on-the-spot decision by the corps commander to get his tanks as far from one another as possible in an effort to avoid the heavy punishment being meted out by the Thunderbolts and the legendary concentrated artillery fire of the Americans, many of whose guns, as in Fulda Gap, had long been pre-positioned to saturate grids within grids. Apart from the heat in the tank, Marchenko, after two hours of combat, found the noise of the turret grating and squeaking, the crash of the automatic loader, the high whine of electric motors, and above all the radio traffic, was so overwhelming in its disorientation, he removed his headset. It was a court-martial offense during full attack, but whoever wrote the rules in Moscow didn’t drive a tank.
Lowering his dust goggles, he stood up, one arm resting against the 12.70 machine gun, as he watched another wave of armor and armored personnel carriers barely visible forging through the dust and smoke, the whole division under orders that once they were through the Gap, they were to wheel south in an effort to engage American and German reinforcements on the Fulda front. What they needed now, thought Sergei, even more than air-conditioning, was for the Soviet MiGs to deal a death blow to the F-15s and F-16s and to clear the skies of damned American Apache helicopters that were so good at ducking down in gaps between the woods and ambushing two to three tanks at a time before they were blown out of the air. Unfortunately the Soviet Havoc helicopters at a distance could easily be mistaken for an American Apache, and some of these had reportedly been hit by mistake. Above the smoke and crash of the ground battle, over sixteen hundred NATO and Soviet-Warsaw Pact aircraft, from high-performance jets to subsonic ground-support aircraft, were engaged in a fierce battle, the NATO air force’s biggest problem being that, although they could launch over three sorties per plane in the first ten hours compared to the Russians’ two, their heat-seeking missiles had in fact taken out over thirty of their own aircraft in the high-tech confusion over Fulda Gap, where Murphy’s Law operated with even more devastating effect than in peacetime, when laser beams fixing on the wrong target simply resulted in an embarrassed pilot. In the skies over Fulda it meant the death of a pilot, and while the West could replace fighters at a faster rate than the Soviet-Warsaw Pact alliance, the Russians’ reserve of pilots had been carefully built up to a three-to-one superiority over NATO.
As Marchenko looked above him, glimpsing dogfights through the wafting smoke cover, he
wondered who was getting the best of it. He wasn’t even sure what was happening in his sector, let alone what part he played in the master plan. All he knew was what any other commander, tank crewman, or infantryman knew. Their local action, no matter how small, was merely part of the master plan hatched by some genius out of the Frunze Military Academy after Gorbachev had so stupidly signed the INF, ridding NATO of all its medium-range missiles and so forcing NATO to face only two possibilities in Western Europe: either a modern conventional war now under way or all-out, long-range nuclear holocaust in which no one would be the winner.
* * *
Marchenko’s troop of five tanks had stopped for refueling when they got the message “German armor ahead.” Marchenko felt his stomach tighten — half fear, half excitement. If you beat the Germans, you’d done something. The Americans were tough, but this was German home soil. “What are they?” Marchenko asked. “M-1s or Pattons?”
“Leopards.”
“Ones or twos?”
His wingman signaled that they had finished refueling.
“What’s the difference?” asked the sergeant over the radio from the starboard tank. “A Leopard’s a Leopard.”
“Oh,” said Sergei with mocking nonchalance. “No difference. You clod. The Mark Two’s reach is an extra thousand meters. A slight advantage over the One, wouldn’t you agree?”
That was the major trouble, thought Sergei — never quite knowing what you were up against. His was only a small piece in a great puzzle of war. Now, if you were a fighter pilot — then at least you’d have more freedom of movement than in one of the nine hundred tanks now wheeling en masse to engage the West Germans, the biggest problem for the next few miles being a collision in the damn smoke.
Then news came that another lightning strike had been unleashed by Major General Agursky, this time a left hook around the Czechoslovakian-Austrian corner near the Bohemian Forest’ across the river in Inn — fanning out on the ancient Danube plain and streaming into Bavaria.
“Who told you that?” shouted Sergei.
“American armed forces network.”
Sergei smiled, despite the dust-thick air that was making it almost impossible to breathe. Why did the Americans tell everybody? He couldn’t understand it. They had to tell everyone everything. They were telling the world NATO was on the run, reeling two hundred miles to the north, the S-WP forces smashing through the Dutch 415th Armored and now two hundred miles south through the Austrian border, splitting the NATO defenses into three sectors. Clearly Agursky was set on the right course, seeking to divide the NATO pockets, then pulverize them into submission before America’s enormous production potential to resupply could come into play. And the farther the S-WP penetrated into West Germany, the less likely it became that the Americans could even consider the nuclear alternative. The radio crackled, informing Marchenko that the Leopard tanks were Mark Ones.
“God is good,” Sergei said, and got a belly laugh from the driver, who was so wound up that the thought of his T-90 having a thousand-meter advantage over the Leopard One seemed to him nothing less than a gift.
“I’d still rather be up north,” put in the driver, “if the American radio is right.”
“Why?” asked Sergei.
“I’d rather be fighting those Dutch hippies,” said the driver. “The Krauts are a different matter, Comrade.”
“Ah,” said Sergei, dismissing the odds, “we’ll shit all over—” The tank swerved violently to the left to avoid a forty-five-degree antitank slab. There was a tremendous thwack and Sergei saw a fine red mist, then his gunner’s head rolling by his feet, the man’s torso bubbling with blood.
* * *
In the south on the Donau, or Danube, plain, the weather over the Bohemian Forest was closing in, hampering NATO’s Fourth Allied Tactical Air Force, so that to its Luftwaffe commander, General Heiss, it seemed that even God was against NATO.
* * *
Before Congress had even heard of and ratified the president’s declaration of war, the British convoy, under British naval escort, was already under way, the U.S. Navy to take up escort duty twelve hundred miles north of Newfoundland, and in Manhattan, Lana La Roche, nee Brentwood, had carefully aligned the arrows on the child-proof safety top of her vial of sleeping pills and poured them down the toilet.
Earlier that day she had left her apartment on the Upper East Side and walked down to the Plaza — for some reason, which at first she couldn’t explain, she found Central Park to be a kind of magnet in her depression. She had scrupulously avoided watching television or reading a newspaper, for her own bad news about her marriage — Jay would still not agree to a divorce — was enough to cope with. And it was a long time before she realized why she had been going to Central Park, often at night. It was dangerous, a punishment for her failure in her marriage, at college, at living. Then, whether she liked it or not, the world came crashing in on her.
She had been standing by the park wall, across from the Plaza’s north entrance, barely noticing the traffic sliding by — a young man showing off, coming out of the hotel, crossing over to the horse-drawn cabriolets, bowing deeply before a bejeweled blonde, twice his years. Soon she would grow old and he’d still be young.
The whip struck the horse’s flank and it began the lover’s walk through the park. Raucous rock was booming from the band shell, and roller skaters with ghetto blasters weaved by. Why didn’t they get Walkmans or earphones or something and just blow off their own ears? she wondered. Then she saw someone nearby reading The Times, its banner headline telling the world that an American warship, the USS Blaine, had been hit in the East China Sea. She had felt her heart racing with the shock, yet simultaneously she felt a surge of exhilaration for the overwhelming fact was that for the first time in over a year of utter defeat, she knew exactly what to do. A few days in New York to get things set up and then to California.
* * *
David Brentwood hadn’t had the freedom that his sister, for all her troubles, had, and as one of the six-month reservists, his was a stark choice. Deferment, then go where the army sent you, or volunteer now for the marines. Stacy and Melissa, who had come over to the ROTC office, were watching him.
“Marines,” he said. The look on Stacy’s face was worth it— or so David thought until David got to Parris Island and quickly came to the conclusion that it had been the dumbest decision he’d ever made. He’d said “marines” to impress Melissa. That bastard Stacy had conned him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
“A baker’s bar?” asked Lana.
“No, a baker bar,” explained the surgeon at San Diego’s War Vets Hospital. His Swiss-German accent was clear, his manner polite, coat as white as the gleaming walls of the intensive burn wing. “It is named after its inventor.” After all night on the red-eye flight from New York, Lana still wasn’t getting an answer to her question of why she was unable to see Ray. God, if she’d known this — hadn’t been so impulsive in the first place-she could have stayed in New York. But then, she didn’t want to be in New York. That was the whole idea — to get out, away from the pills, the corrosive self-pity. To be with her brother. The plan was to comfort him, to think of someone else for a change. Their parents.
Beth and the two children had come down again from Bremerton. It was supposed to be what a family did in crisis, but here was Dr. Franz Lehman, maxillofacial specialist, seemingly still unmoved by their pleas to see him.
In fact, he understood their concerns very well. It was for that reason he was so insistent on them not seeing Ray so soon after the first of the long series of operations that would be necessary to reconstruct something that resembled a face. Skin grafts from the arm and hip seemed promising, but in any event, it would be a long time.
The “baker bar,” Dr. Lehman explained, would be only a small part of it, a curved four-inch gold rod cemented to the top jaw, replacing bone that had been smashed by shrapnel. After building the bar, anchoring it either side in the remaining b
one, a partial denture of five teeth could be attached to the bar by two small inverted U-shaped clips inside the denture, the gum line being a meld of plastic and gold to reduce expansion and contraction coefficients. A millimeter difference could cause maxillofacial strain on the mandibular joint, and the telltale click, in most people merely the sound of the joint functioning, would in Ray Brentwood’s case cause massive malfunction, the precursor of severe headaches that would involve the whole head and radiate deep into the neck, shoulders, and lower back.
“Couldn’t we see him for just a second?” Lana pleaded, though she knew well enough from her premed days that it was useless to push. But she felt somehow that if she could see him, it would help — just say a few words to him.
But in the doctor’s experience, it didn’t help at all. It was doubtful whether, under the pain medication, which was only partially effective in burn cases anyway, the patient was fully cognizant of what was going on, and often the confusion only added to the burden of inner anxiety being suffered.
It was better to wait awhile, not because the patient didn’t need support or, like so many Vietnam vets, was refusing to see anyone out of a sense of bitterness, of having been rejected by his country. But the ugliness of the tight, polished skin where the fire aboard the Blaine had burned him made Ray Brentwood want to withdraw into a deep cave of cool silence, where the pain from the searing fire that made every breath an agony might finally abate. In that cave, Dr. Lehman knew, the greatest fear of all could be hidden for a while, to prepare him for the shock in the mirror of the visitor’s eyes, the eyes that could never lie despite the visitor’s determination not to betray shock or any other kind of surprise. In Ray Brentwood’s case there was an added torture to the constant searing pain of his disfigurement: As captain of the Blaine, he was solely to blame not only for his own condition but for all those, one hundred forty-three men, who had died in the attack on the Blaine. Like the parent of a lost child, he constantly replayed the attack. If only he’d given an order for left-hand rudder, perhaps the missile might have missed them altogether. If only he had picked up the skimmer on radar — or was it fired by a ship? In which case he couldn’t be blamed. Could he?