by Walt Gragg
The Patriot community was a small one. While they looked into each other’s startled eyes, Fowler and Morgan understood they’d lost many friends on this bright winter morning. They also knew if it hadn’t been for a smart American pilot, their names would have been added to that list.
It was Fowler who would break the second bout of prolonged silence that enveloped the crowded space.
“Jesus Christ!” he said. “Take a look at this!”
The screens started filling with triangles once more. In an endless stream, they poured across the Czech border.
Before it was over, two thousand hostiles would cover nearly every square inch of both screens.
Seventeen hundred transports carrying five divisions of Russian paratroopers, and three hundred escorting fighters, were headed deep into Germany.
The next phase of General Yovanovich’s plan was about to commence.
CHAPTER 28
January 29—12:31 a.m. (Eastern Standard Time)
World News Network Studios
Boston
The anchorperson sat behind the desk during the commercial break. A makeup artist stood over her.
“Ten seconds, Bonnie,” the director said.
In millions of homes around the world, the television screen changed from one of a happy man driving a shiny new car to a picture of the American and Soviet flags clashing with the words THE BATTLE FOR GERMANY running across its bottom. The theme music for the war, primarily trumpets and percussion instruments, blared. When the music ended, the picture changed to the smiling anchorperson.
“Welcome back. This is Bonnie Lloyd at the WNN news desk in Boston. We’ve just received word from our Berlin correspondent, Stewart Turner, that Berlin has fallen to the Russians. For more on this story, we take you to Berlin and WNN’s correspondent, Stewart Turner.”
The picture changed to a handsome man in his late twenties standing on a snowy rooftop in the middle of the German capital. Turner held a microphone with a gloved hand. He was wearing a heavy overcoat and thick scarf to protect himself from the stark cold. His breath was visible with every word he spoke.
“Thank you, Bonnie. I’m reporting to you from the roof of the Sheraton Hotel in the center of downtown Berlin. It’s eight thirty in the morning here. And as you can see behind me, the sun has fully risen. The winter storm that held Europe in its powerful grip for the past few days dissipated late last night. The dawn has broken clear, but cold.
“The Soviet forces are visibly in control of this ancient city, so symbolic of the reunification of Germany. Russian tanks are absolutely everywhere. They’ve taken up positions at all the main intersections inside the city. So far, there’s been little resistance from within Berlin itself. From time to time, gunfire and shelling can be heard in the distance.”
The camera swung away from Turner and toward the edge of the rooftop. The cameraman slowly panned up and down a wide boulevard.
“The streets are empty except for the movement of the Russian tanks. In the distance, you should be able to make out the Brandenburg Gate.”
The cameraman focused on the massive monument so filled with German history. A dozen tanks could be seen sitting beneath its wide arches.
The camera returned to Stewart Turner. “Other than that, this city, taken by complete surprise by the swift nighttime attack, is quiet and still on this shocking winter morning.”
“Stewart,” Bonnie Lloyd said, “we’ve heard rumors from some pretty reliable sources that most of what used to be East Germany is now under Soviet control. Can you confirm or deny those rumors?”
“No, I can’t, Bonnie. Similar rumors have circulated through the press corps here in Berlin. But so far they’re just rumors . . . What?” With a puzzled expression on his face, Turner looked at his cameraman. “Hold on for a second, Bonnie. My cameraman is indicating that there’s some kind of activity in the street below us. We’re going to attempt to give WNN’s viewers a look at what’s going on.”
The camera swung over the side of the hotel rooftop. The picture showed five Russian soldiers dragging a pair of men in civilian clothing out of a building on the other side of the street. The men were shoved against a wall. In front of millions of television viewers, the Russians opened fire with their automatic weapons. Both men were killed instantly. They slumped to the ground. The soldiers turned and walked away. The crumpled bodies lay where they’d fallen.
There were five seconds of stunned silence in both Berlin and Boston. The producer cut away from Berlin and cued Bonnie Lloyd.
“I’m told that we’ve temporarily lost our picture from Berlin,” she said. “After this commercial break, we’ll be back to speak with our White House correspondent Steven Dillard and, following that, with WNN’s military analyst, retired Colonel Philip McPherson.”
The screen changed to the already familiar picture of the American and Soviet flags clashing with the bold words THE BATTLE FOR GERMANY beneath them. The war’s theme music sounded for a few seconds.
The picture switched to a happy group of attractive men and women romping on the beach while enjoying their favorite beer.
CHAPTER 29
January 29—8:40 a.m.
On the Eastern Fence
Ramstein Air Base
Arturo Rios sat in the sandbagged bunker. His hands were frozen on the .50-caliber machine gun’s grips. He stared into the snow-laden evergreens on the other side of the chain-link fence. The sun’s slow rise had caused his spirits to rise also. As its first rays peeked through the shimmering trees, its false promise of winter warmth reached out for him. There’d only been twenty minutes of daylight, but Rios was beginning to accept that the interminable night was finally over. For the past seven hours, he’d believed it would never end.
Seven hours. A lifetime while he crouched alone in the darkness and peered into the sinister trees on the far side of the icy wire.
The day had broken cold, but clear. The snows had stopped hours earlier. And as was common after a winter storm, not a cloud could be seen in a bright blue sky. He’d left Miami to see the world. One of the things he’d always wanted to see was snow. Yet as the blizzard pelted his exposed position, he’d concluded that he’d seen enough of it to last him for the rest of his days.
He shivered in his world of sand. The airman had long ago lost all feeling in his hands and feet. An hour earlier, a truck had arrived with a huge breakfast. So he was no longer hungry. He was, however, feeling one emotion quite strongly.
He was feeling utterly ashamed.
Much to his embarrassment, his active imagination had gotten the better of him during the night. Certain he’d seen movement on the other side of the fence, Rios had twice fired at shadowy enemy soldiers who existed only in his inventive mind. On both occasions, his firing brought reinforcements running from every direction. There was nothing out there, of course. Just the wind and snow, and a mind that insisted on making its own reality. Rios took no comfort in the fact that nearly every .50-caliber position on the lonely eastern perimeter had fallen prey to these same frailties at some time during the torturous darkness. The firing had become so commonplace that by night’s end, the reinforcements barely responded at all.
• • •
Flying at an altitude of twelve hundred feet, scores of Antonov An-12 cargo planes neared their destination. Inside the belly of each “Cub,” sixty of Russia’s finest soldiers rose to their feet and turned toward the open door. A frigid wind rushed in to greet them. Each removed the powder-blue beret from his head, shoved it into his pocket, and replaced it with a helmet. Weighed down by their equipment, they waited for the light to turn green, signaling for them to jump.
They were the elite parachutists of the 3rd Regiment, 105th Parachute Division. Each of the division’s soldiers was bursting with boundless pride. The 105th had received the most honored role. Its three regiments had been assi
gned the task of destroying the most important targets. The American air bases at Ramstein, Spangdahlem, and Rhein-Main were their goals. And to the men of the division’s 3rd Regiment had gone the greatest prize of all—Ramstein, headquarters of the United States’ air forces in Europe.
Two other airborne divisions had been chosen to attack the six German fighter bases—a pair in the southeast near Munich and four in the northwest. Another division would seize the bridges over the southern portion of the Rhine River. If the bridges couldn’t be held, they would be demolished.
The final division, the 103rd, was the second most honored. It would send one regiment against the British air base in the northern part of the country. A second regiment would attack and lay waste to the Americans’ two divisions of pre-positioned armored equipment near Kaiserslautern. The 103rd’s final regiment sat on the ground in the western Ukraine. They anxiously waited to join the battle. The moment word was received that any of their countrymen had failed to eliminate their objective, the reserve regiment would take to the air to annihilate and destroy.
The Russians were taking a huge gamble—a risk justified by the potential reward. They were using nearly all the cargo aircraft in the Military Transport Aviation fleet to carry their airborne soldiers deep into Germany. Thirty-six thousand of the Soviet Union’s best and brightest, and the tons of equipment that supported them, were on a flight path fraught with danger. For thirty minutes, each Cub had been carrying its sixty soldiers deep inside the borders of the enemy country.
The Warsaw Pact’s air attack had opened a number of corridors into the heart of Germany. In addition, three hundred MiGs were escorting the transports. Even so, the slow-flying cargo planes were vulnerable. They were easy targets should they inadvertently stray into the path of the surviving Allied air defenses. And with the vast range of their missiles, the American F-35s, F-22s, and F-16s were quite capable of circumventing the protective cover provided by the MiGs to reach out and kill.
General Yovanovich had estimated that even with the earlier efforts of the Russian fighter aircraft to clear the way, there would be significant losses. His evaluation had been correct. One by one, the persistent Americans picked off over three hundred of the plodding planes. By the time the Russian transports reached their drop zones, 20 percent of the parachutists lay dead in fallow farmers’ fields throughout Germany. Twenty percent of their combat vehicles had also been destroyed. Shot down by NATO fighters or air-defense missiles, one out of five of the lumbering planes had plunged to the earth or exploded in the brilliant blue sky.
Unlike the Americans, whose last division-level combat jump had occurred during the Korean War, the Russians believed in a strong airborne presence. The parachute divisions were the pride of the Soviet military and the Soviet people. America had reduced her airborne units to one airborne division and one air-assault division used primarily as light, mobile fighting forces. But the Russians retained eight divisions of airborne soldiers. The Russian airborne divisions were self-contained. Their combat vehicles, and everything they needed for battle, parachuted in with the divisions’ soldiers.
Between the combatants, there were marked philosophical differences in the use of airborne forces. These were based primarily upon the attitudes the competing countries had toward the acceptable levels of losses of its military. The Americans couldn’t withstand the close scrutiny the exceptionally high casualties of an airborne campaign brought. They’d long ago given up such tactics. For the Russians, however, there was no press or active voice in the citizenry to question their military decisions. Eighty percent losses were regrettable. Nevertheless, if it took such casualties to accomplish the mission, so be it. The common good would always outshine the individual life.
Despite the stark contrast in the competing countries’ approaches to the use of their airborne forces, there was a single characteristic that tied the American and Soviet airborne soldiers together. Like the soldiers of the American 82nd Airborne Division, their Russian counterparts had a proud history of battle to uphold. The American airborne soldiers in their burgundy berets, and the Russian airborne soldiers in their berets of powder blue, correctly considered themselves to be some of the truly elite combat soldiers in the world.
• • •
Inside the lead Cub, the light turned from red to green. In a steady stream, sixty paratroopers plunged out the door and into a winter sky’s icy nothingness. Each hurtled toward the frozen ground below.
All around them, the lethal regiment’s soldiers did the same.
While Arturo Rios sat rejoicing at the coming of the sun, ten miles away, close to two thousand of Russia’s best soldiers rained down from the sky like a frightful summer storm.
All over western Germany, a rain of billowing white parachutes began to fall—a torrential rain of terror for those who dared to stand against it.
Even with the 3rd Regiment’s losses in the German skies, three hundred combat vehicles cascaded from the passing aircraft. The armored equipment dangled on the ends of huge triple parachutes. Along with the parachutists, the vehicles fell into the farm country northeast of Ramstein.
As with any combat jump, there are mistakes. The strong winds shift at a critical moment. A pilot miscalculates the jump point. Equipment and soldiers descend into wooded areas. Parachutes fail to open. While they drop into the mantle of solid white, many soldiers miscalculate their impact point with the frozen ground. An ankle is twisted, a leg is broken, a knee is smashed. A neck is snapped by a misdirected parachutist’s encounter with the highest reaches of a mighty evergreen. Two chutes become hopelessly entangled in the close quarters, and a hapless pair of soldiers plummet together to their death.
General Yovanovich understood that another 10 percent of the men and equipment would never rise from the drop zone to join in the battle.
As the 3rd Regiment’s parachutists rose from the snows, the unit was down to 70 percent of its original strength. Seventeen hundred highly skilled men and two hundred and fifty combat vehicles would soon be on their way to Ramstein. Their prize was the total destruction of the great American air base.
Waiting to contest them were four thousand lightly armed airmen. At stake were the Americans’ last hopes of ruling the skies.
• • •
Arturo Rios sat at the end of the runway with an amused grin on his face as his wandering daydreams took him to the warm winds of home. His reverie was shattered as two Humvees screeched to a stop behind him. The Humvees were filled with anxious airmen cradling M-4s.
“All right, everybody out,” the first Humvee’s air-police driver said.
The airmen climbed out of the vehicles.
“Wright, Goodman, Michaels, Wheatley, Wilson, and Velasquez. You’re to support this defensive position and everything for one hundred yards each way. Rios here . . . You are Rios, right?”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
“Rios is the only one of you with combat training. So even though he’s the lowest-ranking airman out here, you’ll take your orders from him when it comes to defending this section of the fence. Does anyone have a problem with that?”
The fidgeting airmen knew they were out of their element. No one said a word.
“Good. Let’s hurry up and get the sandbags out of the Humvees,” the air policeman said. “We need to get some more bunkers set up right away. The Russians could be here any minute.”
With the air policeman’s fateful words, Rios’s daydreams became nothing more than distant memories. Unsure of what was happening, he gripped the machine gun even tighter. Along the lengthy fence line, other Humvees were disgorging men and sandbags to support the .50-caliber positions.
The Cuban-American airman watched the ominous woods for any sign of the enemy while his countrymen rushed to prepare the new positions. A small bunker was hastily thrown together fifty yards to the left. An identical one was quickly erected on the righ
t. When they were finished, the air policemen returned to their Humvees to grab some final items. They headed back to the main bunker.
“Here, you’re probably going to need these.” The air policeman put two additional ammunition containers on the ground next to the machine gun. His partner laid a dozen hand grenades on top of the sand.
Before Rios could respond, the duo rushed to their Humvees and sped away. The new arrivals crowded around the bunker, waiting for him to take charge.
Rios only knew one of the six airmen. He turned toward him. “Goodman, what the hell’s going on?”
“Man, haven’t you heard? The Russians just parachuted thousands of men in a few miles from here. The air police told us they’re certain they’re on their way to wipe out Ramstein.”
“Hey, does anyone remember which end of this thing I point at the Russians?” Wheatley said while fumbling with his M-4.
“Don’t you think we ought to get organized?” Goodman said.
“What do you want us to do?” another asked.
For Rios, his brief stint in the Air Force had involved only taking orders. He’d never before had to give one.
“Well, I guess the first thing we need to do is not all be standing in one place. Let’s put two of you guys in each of the new bunkers. And two of you stay with me.” Rios pointed at Wheatley and Velasquez. “You and you, take that bunker.”
Clutching their rifles, the airmen picked up a couple of hand grenades and ran over to the bunker on the left.
Rios pointed to Michaels and Wright. “You and you, take the other one.”
The pair also grabbed their rifles and some of the grenades. They ran off to the right.
“Goodman, that leaves you and . . .”
“Wilson,” the chubby-faced airman with the broad grin said.
“You and Wilson with me.”