by Ralph Peters
"Colonel Taylor, sir," the Soviet began, his voice infectiously distraught, "we have a great problem. The Kokchetav sector. A great problem. The enemy has broken through."
6
Northwest of Kokchetav
Northern Kazakhstan
1 November 2020
2200 hours
Major Babryshkin carefully fitted the last fresh filter into his protective mask, listening to the sounds of disaster. Chugging, overloaded civilian cars and trucks struggled to work their way northward without turning on their lights, while the mass of bundled refugees on foot trudged along, unwilling to keep to the side of the road. Apart from an occasional staccato of curses, the ragged parade rarely wasted energy on words. Black against the deep blue of the night, the mob shed sounds uniquely its own: a vast rustling and plodding, the grumble and wheeze of the overburdened vehicles, and the special silence of fear. Thousands behind thousands, the heavily dressed men, women, and children moved on booted feet, slapping gloved hands, shifting parcels, nudged along by the frustrated drivers of automobiles or trucks commandeered from an abandoned state enterprise. Now and again, a dark form simply collapsed by the roadside, a faint disturbance in the night, almost imperceptible. Others broke away to beg the soldiers for food. But the majority kept marching, driven by the memory of death witnessed, closely avoided, rumored. Startling in the darkness, a driven animal would suddenly bleat or bray, sensing the mortal fear of its owner. Then the big silence would return, the huge silence of the Kazakh steppes, an emptiness that drank in the sounds of dozens of battles, a hundred engagements. Only the sputtering horizon acknowledged the ceaseless combat. It was a bigness that trivialized death.
The sharp metallic sounds of the shovels biting into cold soil and the mechanical grunting of engineer equipment marked the positions of Babryshkin's command, deployed on both sides of the endless dirt road that served as a highway, occupying a long reverse-slope position on a decline so slight it was almost imperceptible even in the daylight. You made do.
There wasn't enough food. Babryshkin had been forced to order his men not to hand out any more of their rations to the refugees — the exodus of ethnic Russian and other non-Asian citizens of the Socialist Republic of Kazakhstan. The last precious issues of rations were fuel for the fight now, the same as petrol, as important as the dwindling stocks of ammunition. Without food, the men could not bear the sleeplessness of battle, the heavy duty of digging into the freezing steppes, the energy-robbing chill of the autumn nights. Babryshkin himself hated to get too near the column of his homeless countrymen. He shrank inside at the need to march by their pleas for a bit of food, which, when ignored or denied, so often drew forth insults about an "overfed" army, or, more painful still, about that army's failure.
There wasn't enough food. Nor was there enough medicine. Doctors sought to tend the wounded, injured, or sick by the side of the road, attempting to adapt modem knowledge and techniques to the physical conditions of earlier centuries. There were not enough combat systems or soldiers left, and there was insufficient ammunition for those who remained. The communications did not work. There was never enough time. And there were no answers.
The retreat had gone on for well over a thousand kilometers, punctuated by repeated attempts to dig in and halt the enemy and by successive failures. Combat was a nightmare, a hammering confusion in which each side's systems slammed against each other until the surviving Soviet forces were, inevitably, forced back yet again. Short, sharp exchanges, often a matter of minutes, highlighted days or weeks of nervous skirmishing and endless repositionings. Actual battles were characterized by their brevity and destructiveness. Six weeks before, Babryshkin had begun as a combined-arms battalion commander. Now he commanded the remnants of his brigade, which, except for attachments such as engineers and air defense troops, now fielded a combat force smaller than the battalion Babryshkin had initially led into combat. Staff officers crewed tanks, and cooks found themselves behind machine guns. No one had even formally ordered Babryshkin to assume command of the crippled unit. He had simply been the senior combat-arms officer left alive.
He struggled to maintain control of his force, to continue to deliver some resistance to the enemy, however feeble, to delay the end, to cover the human rivers meandering northward, to cling to this soil made Russian by the armies of the czars so many centuries before.
The worst of it was the chemical attacks. Time and again, the enemy delivered massive chemical weapons strikes against the Soviets, forcing the soldiers to live in their suffocating protective suits and the masks that shriveled then lacerated the skin of the face and neck. No doubt, another chemical attack would hit them soon. There was never any warning now — the entire system seemed to have broken down — and he had not received any messages from corps for days, save one stray broadcast reminding all officers that losses had to be documented on the proper forms.
Babryshkin was glad for this bit of fresh night air, this slight respite between batterings and sudden chemical hells. He had even taken a few moments to scribble a note to Valya, although he had no idea when he might be able to mail it, or if the mails still functioned. According to the last information he had, there had been no attacks on population centers deep in the Russian heartland. The war, brutal though it was, was oddly mannered, localized in the Central Asian republics, the Caucasian republics, and the Kuban. That meant that Valya was safe.
Still, it was far too easy to picture her trudging along in this mass, on legs not made for such labor. He had made his peace with his mental image of Valya now. He knew she had been unfaithful to him at least once in the past. She was foolish. And selfish. But he was a man, mature, perhaps matured beyond what was truly desirable now, and he was responsible for her. Lovely, unreliable Valya, his wife. In the wake of combat action after combat action, he had grown to appreciate his happiness, and it seemed to him that his life would be a very fine thing if only he might live to get on with it.
The cold air felt wonderful on his cut, chapped face, just cold enough to deaden the discomfort. He had allowed his men to strip off their protective suits to facilitate the process of digging positions. He knew it was unwise in a sense, since chemical rounds or bombs might descend upon them at any moment. But he knew they needed a rest, a chance to feel the living air again. Later, he would order them back into the old-fashioned rubberized suits. But it was increasingly a formality. Living and fighting in the costumes had pricked and tom them until they offered dozens of entry points to chemical agents. And there were no replacements.
Still, he reasoned, his men were far better off than the civilians. Chemical strikes against the unprotected refugee columns produced up to one hundred percent casualties. And there was nothing to be done.
He remembered the dead in Atbasar, thousands of blistered corpses in postures of torment, far worse than his teenaged memories of the plague years in Gorky, when the river bobbed with dead. Those were hard years, for hard men. But the combination of old-fashioned blood and blister agents, followed by virtually redundant nerve-agent strikes, had created scenes he knew he would carry with him forever.
It was, after all, a racial war. The unthinkable had come to pass. Certainly, few Soviet citizens of his generation— if any — had taken seriously the threadbare ramblings about international and interracial solidarity to which the schools still subjected their charges. But neither had anyone quite expected the peoples of the Soviet Union to explode with such vast and consequential hatred.
Babryshkin wondered which of his many enemies he would fight next. In one engagement or another, as the shrinking brigade had been shunted between sectors, his men had encountered the Iranians, the armored forces of the Arab Islamic Legion, and the rebels, the latter's equipment and uniforms largely mirroring those of Babryshkin's force. He wondered if any of the officers opposing him were men with whom he had attended the combined tank school: Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Turkmen, Tadzhiks, Kirgiz. There had always been a shortage of officer cadets fro
m the central Asian republics, and it told against the rebels now. Even after the military reforms that had allowed recruits from each fringe republic to serve in ethnically uniform units close to home, ethnic Russian or Ukrainian or other European Soviet officers had been required to fill out the command and staff positions. Most of them had been murdered or imprisoned by the mutineers at the start of the revolt, and consequently the rebel units suffered from a pronounced lack of qualified officers. Babryshkin had cut up rebel detachments again and again — only to suffer in turn when the invulnerable Japanese-built gunships returned, or when the Iranians or Islamic Legion forces bullied through with their Japanese-built combat vehicles, whose quality seemed to guarantee success no matter how inept the plan or its execution. The electronics brought to bear by the enemy prevented Babryshkin from communicating and fooled his target-acquisition systems, making a joke even of the Soviet Army's latest acquire-and-fire automatic tank fire control system. Soviet missiles and main gun rounds were drawn astray. And even when Babryshkin's men managed to land their fires dead-on, the enemy's prime fighting systems often seemed to be invulnerable.
He worried that his men would not be able to bear up much longer, that a point would come when the dwindling unit would simply dissolve. But, somehow, the men hung on. Probably, he realized, they felt many of the same emotions he himself felt. Desperation, a battered patriotism, and, above all, a furious hatred that could grow very cold without losing the least of its spiritual intensity. Babryshkin had never imagined himself as the sort of man who would develop a taste for killing, who would ache not only to kill his enemies but to kill them as painfully, as miserably as possible. Yet, he had unquestionably become such a man. The joy he felt when he saw an enemy vehicle explode was certainly different from, but matched in intensity, his best, early nights with Valya. After a time, after he had witnessed enough atrocities, the act of killing attained a sort of purity that would have been unimaginable to the man he once had been.
Babryshkin's brigade had been one of the ethnic Slav organizations garrisoned in Kazakhstan beside local "brother" units, each representing a distinct part of the regional population. Now the blood Russians made up these long columns of refugees, fleeing from the soil that had been their home for generations, that they had struggled to plough and make prosperous, fleeing from the wrath of people they had long imagined or pretended were their brothers in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Certainly, there had been problems before — the old enmity between the Armenians and Azerbaijanis, between dozens of other ethnic groups whose fates had brought them to the same watering trough. But the Soviet Union seemed to have worked beyond the time of troubles that followed the end of the Gorbachev period, the phases of reaction, counter-reaction, and uneasy compromise. A period of somnolence, of dreary but thankfully unmenacing mediocrity seemed to have settled back down upon tundra and desert, steppe and marshland. The clumsy, ultimately unsuccessful repressions, the anarchic impulses, the unsatisfied needs, both spiritual and rawly physical, seemed to drowse off under the cobbled-together solution of dramatically increased federalism, with far more authority devolved upon the individual republics. Racial tensions sputtered now and again, but always settled back down into the prevailing lethargy.
Marx had been right, though. Economics were fundamental. And economics had ultimately exacerbated the smoldering ethnic tensions. As the Soviet Union had struggled to find herself, first under Gorbachev, then under the troika of decayed conservative nonentities who attempted to rule after the blunt end of the Gorbachevshina, the rest of the world rushed by in an explosive series of technological revolutions. While in the Soviet Union, nothing ever seemed to quite work, no approach appeared to solve the ever-worsening problem of relative backwardness. With tremendous pain and effort, the Soviet Union took a step forward. The West took three or four. And Japan took five. Then the great Japanese-Islamic Axis had surfaced in the wake of American retrenchment and European neutrality. The combination of Japanese technology with Islamic natural resources and Islam's population base sparked a dynamism that inevitably attracted the impoverished Asian and traditionally Islamic populations within the Central Asian and Azerbaijani republics of the USSR. The total inability of the state medical system and the central government in general to cope with the stresses of the plague years, and the resultant local famines, lit the fuse. In retrospect, it only seemed remarkable to Babryshkin that the bomb had taken such a long time to explode.
Now, as so often throughout history, the Russian people and their ethnic brethren stood alone against the Asian onslaught. Even the East Europeans, who had long since slipped their tether, looked on with a sense of amusement, almost a black joy, as the mighty Russians got their comeuppance. Thankfully, China slept. The Chinese were lost in another of their long cycles of introspection, occasionally raising an eyelid to check on the Japanese, then closing it again, content that their carefully delineated sphere of influence had not been annoyed. The developing — or hopelessly underdeveloped — world supported the right of the Central Asian republics to complete independence, lashing out at a bankrupt Soviet Union that had sent them neither goods nor weapons for a generation. The Russians stood alone, again, with a fatalistic sense of history repeating itself. Mongols, Tartars, Turks, and now these steel horsemen out of the Asian darkness. Even the possibility of a brisk nuclear response, such as the one that had saved the Americans in Africa, had been stolen away by a world too ready to take the Soviet Union at its word in the aftermath of the American blow against Pretoria and the suicidal exchanges in the Middle East that had taken only three days to gut a circle of nations. The Soviets had bellowed loudly, glad for one last chance to strut upon the world stage, insisting on complete nuclear disarmament. And, indeed, the nuclear arsenals had finally, foolishly been dismantled. Babryshkin's handful of tanks and infantry fighting vehicles were all that remained.
* * *
"Comrade Commander?" Two helmeted figures approached Babryshkin in the starlit darkness. He recognized Major Gurevich, the brigade's deputy commander for political affairs, by his voice. The position had been abolished back in the nineties, only to be revived again in the conservative retrenchment, with its archaic language and grim nostalgia. Babryshkin was not certain exactly what the political officer still believed in at this point, but he knew that it was not hard work. Gurevich's fitful attempts at making a contribution were far more self-important than helpful, but thankfully they did not take long to sputter out. None of the men would listen to the political officer anymore, and when Gurevich had complained to Babryshkin, the latter had brushed him off with the observation that the men were too busy for lectures and, besides, what was left to say? The men were fighting. There were no deserters. What did Gurevich expect? The political officer had answered that it was not enough to take the correct action, if it was taken for the wrong reasons. The men had to be made to see the theoretical imperative, the political propriety of their actions. But Gurevich had not pressed the issue further, and Babryshkin suspected that the man was simply lost, trying to find some point to his continued service with the unit, to his continued existence. With the collapse of the empire, Gurevich's world had begun to crumble, as well.
"Comrade Commander," the political officer said now, enunciating the antique title in his eternally officious voice, "I've brought the chief of signals. We're picking up a broadcast from headquarters."
Babryshkin turned directly to Lazarsky. He had not recognized the communications officer in the darkness, away from his bank of radios.
"What do they say? What's happening? I thought the secure nets were all being jammed off the air?"
"Comrade Commander," Lazarsky said, "the message is coming in code groups over the unencrypted net. I believe they're broadcasting from an airborne platform. They're repeating it over and over."
Babryshkin stared at the two silhouettes before him. "Well, for God's sake, what does it say?"
"We're to withdraw
to the north," Gurevich cut in. "Immediately. It's a blanket message for all units and subunits that have been out of contact with their superior staffs. All units are to withdraw to a line just south of Petropavlovsk."
Babryshkin was stunned. That couldn't be right. "My God, that's over a hundred kilometers from here. At least." He shifted his eyes from one shadow to the other. "There must be some mistake."
"I checked the code groups myself," Gurevich said. Lazarsky shrugged. "We've been out of contact. The war's been moving on without us."
The only thing Babryshkin could detect in the signal officer's voice was weariness, resignation. But he suspected that Gurevich, despite all of his political demagoguery, did not mind resuming the withdrawal in the least. Instinctively, Babryshkin glanced back at the human river flowing along the road.
The order was impossible. It would leave countless thousands of refugees undefended. In any case, the road was so completely blocked up that the brigade would have to move across country, at a creeping pace. It was a journey beyond the capability of much of the unit's battered equipment. Besides, he was not even certain all of the vehicles had sufficient fuel to cover the distance.
Babryshkin could not believe that anyone who really understood the situation would issue such an order.
"Can we reach headquarters?" Babryshkin demanded. "Can we talk back to whoever's broadcasting?"
Gurevich cut off the commo officer's response, saying, "We can only receive — and that's faint. As soon as we try to call anyone, we're jammed off the air. If we continue with these vain attempts, we risk revealing our position. Such actions are irresponsible. And an order is an order."
"But, damnit," Babryshkin said, raising his voice, waving his right hand toward the road, "what about them?"
"Orders…" Gurevich stuttered.