Battlefield Ukraine

Before You Leave

Sergeant Childers counted to two, then leaned slightly out the window and dropped the grenade he had been holding into the gaggle of soldiers stacking up against the wall of the ground floor below him. The Russians immediately dove for cover as the grenade went off, killing and injuring many in the group that had been piling up to breach their building. As Childers quickly ducked his head and arm back inside the building, the window sill began to explode into splinters and shards; the soldiers below him and outside the building began to open up on where he had just been. Lying on his belly, he crawled quickly out of the room and into the hallway before getting up and running quickly to the back of the building and into the next room. One of his soldiers was waiting for him as he arrived and waved him through the hole they had cut out in the wall that allowed them to pass from one building to another.

“You sure stirred up a hornet’s nest out there, Sergeant,” the private said with a wicked grin.

“You could say that,” Luke responded, snickering. Then his facial expression quickly went serious. “Hey, they are going to breach the first floor shortly. Get the charge set, and let’s get out of here. We need to get to the next building before they arrive.”

Childers stopped a minute to catch his breath as the other soldier finished tying the tripwire to the claymore mine. When the Russians saw the hole between the two buildings, they would rush through it in hopes of following the Americans. If they did, then they would hit the tripwire, causing the claymore to go off. Hopefully, it would take several more of them out.

The Russians had finally punched through the NATO lines at the outskirts of the city ten hours ago, and it had been a mad melee of house-to-house fighting ever since. The German brigade was supposed to fall back in an orderly manner and allow time for the new lines to form, but the Russians had gotten to them before they reorganized, and the brigade collapsed. A group of Su-25s dove on the Germans and took out a good chunk of their tanks. The Russians saw a weak spot and fully exploited it, resulting in the breakdown of part of the city’s defenses. Once they had a hole in the lines, they rammed as many units as possible through it, crumpling much of the NATO lines.

Nemesis Troop was forced to take cover in a block of buildings not far from Patona Bridge. British engineers had dropped the Darnyts'kyi Bridge when the breach in the lines occurred, but were unable to successfully destroy the Patona bridge before it was captured. A company of American tanks tried to recapture the bridge with support from a British infantry unit, but was summarily beaten back by waves of precision guided anti-tank missiles. At first, no one knew where the missiles were coming from, since there were no Su-25s in the area. Then a British soldier spotted them off in the distance — drones. The Russians had brought forward nearly a dozen of their newest anti-tank infantry support drones for this battle, the now-infamous Zhukovs.

Each one of the drones carried six anti-tank missiles, which quickly wiped out the American tanks attempting to re-secure the bridge (or at least get in position to destroy it). It was a blessing and a curse when those drones finally left — a blessing because they had run out of missiles, a curse because everyone knew they would be back and wreak further havoc.

The remnants of SFC Childers’ platoon was now held up in a building several blocks away from the bridge, doing their best to slow the Russians up and find a way out of the city themselves. Word had come down from the higher-ups that NATO was going to abandon the city and that the Allied forces should begin conducting a fighting retreat. This made a lot of sense; however, the problem was, a lot of Allied units had been lost or cut off in various parts of the city from the other main elements, leaving thousands of soldiers in a bad spot. Unless the area commander could figure out where the pockets of Allied soldiers were all taking cover and find a way to break some of them out, a lot of soldiers were going to end up being captured as they ran out of ammo.