by Victor Milán
"That's it," he said. "Jagun 23, it's time to go."
Chapter TWENTY-FIVE
As the rebels rode south, strung out over terrain dotted with gray-green shrubs called wormwood, just like in the Bible—though Eddie, who'd watched a lot of Western movies on late-night TV, knew they were nothing but sagebrush—the ground began to jitter beneath the feet of their horses, who jittered back. Thunderclaps rolled like tsunami across the desert as self-propelled howitzers and 122mm rockets worked over the ridges they'd just left.
Ridges running parallel to the League axis of advance striated the arid land. That was convenient; it slowed the lead elements' advance, and made it take longer for the main force to catch up when the lead got hit. It channeled the League fighting vehicles into the breaks between ridges, and provided natural vantage points for the rebels to ambush them from.
It also offered convenient aiming points for the League's fine artillery. Desert Wind commanders may have been following a battle plan more suited to taking on Americans than rebels who weren't much more than guerrillas, but they did know how to read ground, and they knew perfectly well where they were going to be ambushed from. At the first Hash of a rocket motor, they were going to rake the high ground big-time.
With not much time to learn the terrain, Eddie was thrown back on improvisation. That was how he preferred to play it anyway. Intricate plans and elaborate strategies weren't his game, and besides he had no faith in them: the reality of battle was more complex than you could ever plan for.
He already had his first fallback line picked out and conveyed to his section leaders. It was on the third ridge system back from their original positions. That gave the League force two potential red zones that had to be sterilized with artillery and approached with care, and also gave the rear echelon types time to get mightily pissed off at the regiment for slowing its triumphant advance.
Under normal circumstances horses can't outrun APCs. But this country slowed horses far less than BMPs, and the League was burning a lot of time pouring troops out of their track-laying cans to bust an ambush that was long gone.
In an hour Jagun 23 reached its rendezvous. As it began digging in, the earth shook. The second ridgeline took its pounding without complaint.
An hour and a half later, Jagun 23 heard the clatter and whine of tracked vehicles approaching. The men began to exchange nervous glances and watch Eddie very closely. "If the rockets come—"
Eddie shrugged. At that moment he didn't actually care. The way he had it worked out, if a BM-21 rocket came in and smeared him all over the rocks, it would extricate him very neatly from a situation he could see no other way out of.
He was quite aware that reasoning was nuts. But it worked, which was enough for now.
No rockets landed. Instead League tracks appeared around the flank of the ridge to the north. The regimental commander wasn't screwing around with reconnaissance patrols anymore; this was the lead company in wedge formation, with three T-80 main battle tanks in line-abreast out front.
"Astakhfiruilaa," someone breathed. By God.
"Jagun 23, T-BOs and BMPs, 2000 meters north. TOWs and MILANs will engage by depth on my command. Leave the tanks to God. Fire."
This time eight launchers fired, the four TOWs and four MILANs. Eddie watched until he saw explosions, then called "Cease tracking" and ordered his rocket teams back over the hill and away. Nobody argued. There was something about those tanks, low-slung and massive, that made you go cold all the way through.
The first impact he saw was a flier that gouged a big harmless hole in the earth. Ideally both kinds of missiles guided themselves to the target, provided the operator kept it in the eye of his computer sight. But no weapon system is infallible.
He noted six vehicles smoking; there had been another miss, or one BMP had been double-teamed. "Machine guns, fire fifty and get the hell out. RPGs fire and flee too." He'd ordered the men with RPG launchers to load OG-7 high-explosive rounds into them. They wouldn't defeat a BMP's armor; but then, they couldn't actually reach the vehicles from here. The idea was to create noisy explosions to convince the Leaguers they'd run into a major strongpoint.
Eddie could see soldiers diving out of undamaged BMPs as well as the ones his men had hit. Everybody's doctrine— not to mention reflex—was to get the troops out of their APCs at the first sign of a weapon that could destroy them. They couldn't really fight effectively from inside one, the Infantry Fighting Vehicle concept notwithstanding, but they could all go up in the same greasy pyre.
RPG rounds began to explode, well short of the League troops-—they were designed to self-destruct after less than a kilometer's flight, to prevent their warheads' falling into enemy hands or creating a safety problem when battle was over. Soviet and League farmers had been blowing their legs off stumbling over stray ordnance from the Great Patriotic War—and malcontents had been scrounging leftover explosives and weapons—for half a century.
It didn't matter. Eddie's troops weren't looking to cause casualties. The reality, alkaline-harsh as the Central Asian soil, was that in a stand-up fight they couldn't lay much hurt on a full League regiment before they were wiped out. Their job was to slow them down, shake them up. And damage their transport.
Return fire was starting to whip the ridge's foreslope.
Eddie called a pull-out, both by his fancy satlink set—which miraculously hadn't gone down yet—and arm signals. The rest of the Jagun scampered back over the crest to where squadmates held their horses.
Pulling back from combat is a tricky, treacherous game. The difference between deliberate withdrawal and full-scale rout is a tiny attitude switch. In a way, it's easier for irregulars than it is for regular forces, because if they're trained right they don't have any expectation of holding the line and absorbing what the enemy dishes out. Eddie took pride in the fact he'd brought these boys up right; they knew they could scatter to the four colors of the old Mongol compass and regroup again, and they weren't ashamed to do so.
As they rode away, the military crest of the ridge, on the far side of the summit, erupted in a wall of smoke and horrible noise. The mobile artillery had evidently held position after its last bombardment, waiting to see if the regiment needed it again before it pulled out of range. Eddie grinned at Maqsut, who gave him a thumbs-up. The League column was now going to play inch worm, tanks and APCs advancing to the forward edge of artillery support, then waiting for the tracked howitzers and missile trucks to catch up. That was slow. It made it less likely the League would catch them. It also meant that Division, imbued with Al Capone's straight-ahead philosophy—and with his staff undoubtedly ringing them up every ten minutes to wonder why the hell their lead elements weren't pulling up at the Sonic Drive-in just north of Bukhara yet—was going to be chewing nonstop on the regimental commander's butt.
When they had the mass of the next ridge south between them and the shelling and they could hear again, one of Eddie's riders hollered "Astakhfirullaa!" and brandished his Kalashnikov over his head. "These Nikolays aren't any trouble at all. We should stand and fight—they're just no good."
"You talk like a fool," old Uncle Lucky said in his quavery voice. "The basmachi are tough; we've got the best of them now, but they won't give up."
"Uncle Lucky," Eddie said gently, "as the man said, we're the basmachi."
The ancient shook his head firmly. He was wearing something that looked like a horribly decrepit hunting cap, and the greasy tattered earflaps flopped like wings.
"When I was a Red Stick and fought the basmachi, they were bandits," he said. "They fought against the revolution, which was going to bring peace and justice and freedom to all Turkestanis, Sarts and hillmen alike. We beat them, and then we found out that the revolution wasn't about those things at all. It was about trading one set of European masters for another—and a worse lot, at that. The Bolsheviks tried to kill us off, one and all; of my old Red Stick band, only I survived, by the will of God."
He took out a
handkerchief, blew his nose, and wiped his eyes, which struck Eddie as awfully unsanitary. "They killed my children. My sons and daughters—all. Allaaga shukur that I found a new young wife later, before the war against the fascists, or my line would have ended.
"The Nikolays stole and tortured and killed; they were the bandits. So now I fight them, and they are basmachi."
"They're all asleep by now too, if they were listening to you, grandfather," jeered Dinmukhammed, a lantern-jawed Uzbek carpenter.
"You might be a wiser young man than your prattle suggests," the centenarian said. "For though I dearly loved my beautiful Qoqigul, the women of Samarkand all longed for me; and their breasts are as succulent as the melons they grow, and esiz, alas, I was not always strong. So I might be your grandfather—"
Something pulled Eddie's eyes up from mistrustfully watching Sertikan's hooves pick their way down the rock-littered slope. A shadow flashed across them.
He heard a rush of jet engines, and the hillside bloomed in a thousand wildflowers of yellow flame. Sertikan reared, screaming. Eddie clung to her mane and miraculously didn't go flying off in the feather grass.
A Frogfoot was streaking away, not five hundred feet above the gray valley floor. As Sertikan's forefeet dropped to the ground, a SAM-7 Strela sprinted after the plane. The little shoulder-fired rocket guided to the engine tucked up near its starboard flank and exploded.
Nothing happened. The Su-25 didn't even haye the grace to waver in flight. It banked away to the north and crossed the ridgeline out of sight, leaving not even a smoke trail behind to mark the hit.
"Fucking Russian piece of shit!" Eddie raged, trying to bring his mare back under control. "A Stinger would've had the bastard." The Strela warhead was just too damned light.
The vicious crackle of the cluster bomblets going off was replaying itself as the sound waves bounced back at them off the ridges. Eddie heard the screaming of men and horses. The nearby riders stared at him with round eyes. The bomblet pattern had missed his immediate area, slashing across part of his section and the Singer's.
"Spread out!" Eddie shouted, waving his arm and almost losing Sertikan again. "Just scatter. If the wounded can't ride, just leave them."
He put his head down and dug his heels into the mare's yellow flank. Belatedly catching the drift that this wasn't a good time to assert her autonomy and empowerment, she took off obediently to the southwest.
He passed a couple of men lying inert in patches of maroon-stained earth. He didn't stop to try to first-aid them. Beyond, a horse lay kicking on its side, legs tangled in its own guts. He said "Jesus" and reined up just long enough to unsling his Kalashnikov and quiet the animal with a burst.
A couple of hundred meters farther on he broke through some alhagi scrub and down the fortunately collapsed bank of a shallow wadi. Giant Rahman was sitting with his twin brother's head cradled in his lap, bawling.
Rahim looked as if some kid had opened him up to see what made a Gypsy work. As Eddie reined in, the crimson
arc pulsing from the base of the man's throat sputtered and died.
"Leave him!" Eddie shouted. "You can ride behind me."
"Yoq, no, I can't," Rahman sobbed. He stood up, hefting his brother's huge limp body in his arms as if it were a child's. It reminded Eddie of a painting he'd seen in Moscow by a contemporary Russian artist, of the painter standing by the roadside in his skivvies, holding in his arms the body of his chow dog who'd just been killed by a hit-and-run driver.
"Come on!" Eddie yelled. Rahman started a slogging run through the soft sand, and Eddie realized that one of the twins' horses was standing calmly over by the bank with the reins looped over its neck, sublimely unaffected by blood smell and commotion. Deciding there was no accounting for horses, or indiges either, Eddie gave Sertikan full throttle and took olf.
The country opened out here into apparent flats that were actually scored by tortuous twining wadis. Ten klicks farther on, it reared up into bluffs and foothills and then some rocky junior-grade mountains before falling away into the vast red bowl of sand at the desert's heart.
It was great country for fleeing. Riding the wadi bottoms lessened the chance of being spotted from the ground or even air. Eddie took stock via his comm unit, whose smart antenna was lashed behind his saddle. His section commanders were uninjured, and only six men seemed to be missing. That was enough of a loss to demoralize irregulars, but morale still seemed high. The boys had a sense of having hurt the Nikolays worse than the Nikolays had hit them, and of being able to keep it up.
They didn't see the Su-25 again, and eventually the hair settled at the back of Eddie's neck. He hadn't really expected the strike plane to make a second pass, and intellectually he wasn't that worried if it did. Though slow for a jet, the heavily armored Shtormovik was still a fast mover. It was suited for its primary role, hunting out the conspicuous and relatively stationary targets made by APCs and tanks and shredding them with bombs and rockets and machine cannon firing depleted-uranium slugs. But its pilot could only see troops on the ground by accident, and with the Jagun strewn across klicks of desert, even the sprawling kill zone of a cluster-bomb dispenser would only catch a few of them if he did.
It was helicopters that worried Eddie. They could catch and kill dispersed infantry. They could also spot effectively for the motor rifle division's powerful, long-range artillery, or drop VDV desant squads south of the rebels to play anvil to the advancing regiment's hammer. His lightweight surface-to-air missiles could knock hell out of choppers, even the well-armored Hind "flying tanks." But helos could take them to pieces if League commanders were willing to suck up some losses—and they would be, the way the terrain and harassing ambushes had slowed them up, and the way Anatoliy Karponin was undoubtedly shrieking at them to advance, advance, always advance.
Eddie looked up at the sky. The midafternoon sun spilled below the brim of his cap and splashed his face like acid despite the thermonuclear blast-proof sunscreen he'd smeared over every exposed surface of his body before dawn that morning.
No choppers. Far to the south what looked like a vapor trail drifted across the sky—except it was angled sharply down, into the planet, which didn't look good for Frontal Av.
Eddie was afraid. He wasn't that afraid of death—that fear didn't prey on him. He was afraid of the powerlessness. At the crucial junctures of his life he had been without power—when the bigger, older kids teased him for being a Jew, when his mother went away, when he was sent to America, when he was sent to Central Asia. He hated that feeling worse than anything.
The motor rifle regiment grinding behind didn't make him feel powerless. It could squash him and his little force, no question, but on the evidence it couldn't catch them. This wasn't Europe's rolling hills, or the dead-flat Southern Desert of Arabia. The speed the League relied on was cut to bone.
But he had felt powerless when the Shtormovik struck, when he'd ridden past the inert bodies of the soldiers, when he'd seen Rahim die in his brother's arms. They were rebels, they were supposed to be his enemy. But they were his men.
The day had gone their way, so far. That would change. In war, it always did.
After all, why should war be different from real life?
They popped a new trick on the League. While three sections took up ambush positions well to the south, Eddie handed off command of Alfa to Maqsut and stayed back with Charlie Section, now under one-eyed Tashmat Kagorovich, who'd taken over when Shoreh went to the ghazi.
Charlie was overall the greenest section, but from its cadre of kumli desert dwellers the newbies had learned fairly quickly How Not to be Seen, as the old Monty Python routine had it. They went to earth with RPGs and a MILAN launcher prepped and let the lead company roil over them and past.
From ahead, the TOW launchers—including one detached from Charlie—engaged the tanks; it was time for God to collect on one or two, keep the black-tab bastards inside from getting too smug. While that was going on, Eddie and Charlie popped u
p out of their wadis and engaged the rear BMPs of the wedge formation with RPGs from two hundred and fifty meters.
It was beautiful: complete confusion. One of the T-80s went up like Mount St. Helens. Before the squaddies had even begun to tumble out of their carriers, the BMPs were slammed from behind, and when the troops did get their asses in the grass, they found themselves under concentrated small-arms fire from well within effective range.
The body of the regiment was trailing the lead company by about five kilometers. Following doctrine—charge!—-it lunged ahead to support its embattled unit.
Eddie let the firefight cruise for five minutes. He himself let off a couple of magazines from his Advanced AK—after all, no one could really tell that he was aiming his bursts over the heads of the League soldiers, and everybody was having such a wonderful time busting caps that he could have been playing solitaire, for all anyone noticed.
When he called for the section to pull out and exfiltrate around either end of the League company, he had most of the riflemen and BMP gunners firing north, to their own rear. With any luck they would still be doing that when the rest of the regiment pulled into range, and Regiment, thinking itself under fire by bad ragheads, would fire up its own comrades. Mix-ups like that are lethally common in warfare even without outside help.
Russian blood was being spilled, Eddie felt only exaltation, a sensation he knew would pass as quickly as his earlier despondency. He had taken on a bigger enemy and won. That was the biggest head rash he knew.
It had not been without cost. A kumli and two Tadzhiks were dead, two other Tadzhiks injured but able to ride unassisted, and the MILAN launcher smashed by a burst of 30mm grenades from an AGS-17 automatic launcher. On the plus side, one T-80 was toast, and the exultant rebels were claiming ten or a dozen BMPs knocked out. Eddie wasn't sure about that, but from the glimpses he got as they worked from wadi to wadi, there was a lot of wrecked machinery out there. And the surviving T-80s were suppressed— it's tough to get tank drivers to advance in the teeth of dug-in AT rockets; that's what infantry is for, to go dig the missile troops out.