Dead Hand

Chapter 22

The SAS and the legionnaires gave the American teams a head start of fifteen minutes before they moved out. Their movement to occupation of positions from which they could place effective fire upon the Russians huddled around the silo went off without a hitch. The Russians defending the silo, lulled into a slate of complacency by boredom and an all-consuming desire to stay warm, remained oblivious to the mortal danger closing in on them.

Thai the defending troops were not alerted to their presence was. to Andrew Fretello. nothing short of a minor miracle. Rather than gliding swiftly across the broken landscape in absolute silence as he had before, the British commandos and their brethren from across the Channel tromped and stumbled about like a line of Hindu beaters advancing through the bush during a tiger hunt. At least that was how Fretello saw it as he made his way forward between the two assault groups. He could not imagine them making any more noise than they did if they had tried.

Of course, as their leader, he was keenly aware of everything that was going on around him. Fretello was sensitive to every infraction of their stringent noise discipline, whether intentional or not. Only the knowledge that any action he might take to impose greater vigilance would generate even more of a commotion kept him from doing so. With no good choices available, the American major chose to do what all wise commanders do under similar circumstances. He ignored the problem as best he could and hoped for the best.

It wasn't until he received word that everyone had settled into position that Fretello began to feel a sense of relief. To his immediate right were Patrick Hogg's men. At a ninety-degree angle and to his left were the legionnaires. Like the Brits, they were deployed in a line that was more or less straight along ground that overlooked the Russian positions. This deployment allowed Fretello, located between the two teams, to observe the fire of each and its effect on the Russians below. Across from him, on the far side of the clearing in which the silo sat, were two sharpshooters detached from the Special Forces teams that were providing an outer ring of security. Rather then wasting them on the outer perimeter, where there would be no immediate targets for them, Fretello had taken the sharpshooters along with him for the assault on the silo. There they would be able to put their skills and high-powered weapons to good use. From their isolated position, these American marksmen would be free to take out any of the defenders who managed to find cover from the fire directed at them by the main force.

With everything set, all that remained to be done was for Fretello to initiate the action. In a man's life, there is nothing like the feeling of power that this sort of situation instills. It is absolutely intoxicating. It was more than the simple fact that he, as the commanding officer of an elite unit of commandos, was about to unleash a storm of fire that no living creature could survive. It was more than the godlike sense of power that some men experience when they realize that with a single word, they were about to snuff out lives. There is a certain rush a soldier feels when he pulls the trigger or twists the handle of a blasting machine. The smell of cordite, the kick of a weapon, the heat from the blast of air generated by an explosion washing over his face, all this has an allure so incredible that it raises a soldier's senses to a state of exquisite rapture, a feeling that is savored in the same way decent people enjoy those illicit pleasures that tempt them but of which they never speak, It is the feeling that a young boy experiences as he fondles a smooth stone in his hand while eyeing a windowpane that he has set his sights on.

As Andrew Fretello lay on the ground flanked by his command, the tension in the air was all but palpable. The cold, hard fact that he was about to give an order that would end the lives of the Russians before him never came into play. Only later, as many combat veterans discover when the world is once more at peace, would the horror of what they had done return to remind. Them of the hell in which they had once participated.

"Open fire!"

To his right, he shouted for all he was worth, using every ounce of breath his lungs held. Pausing only long enough to gulp down a fresh breath and turn his head, he repeated the command, this time to his left, to where the legionnaires lay. "Open fire!"

No one heard this second command. Even the British sniper curled up behind a tree stump not more than a meter away from him heard Fretello repeat the order to fire. The eruption of small-arms-fire from rifles, assault guns, machine guns, and grenade launchers was as deafening as it was deadly. All over the patch of open ground that surrounded the concrete silo cover, Russian soldiers were struck down in mid-stride. Some died before they had any idea that they were under attack. Others, who had not been marked for death during the initial devastating volley, ran, stopped, turned, and ran back from where they had come, much in the way a deer caught by an approaching car at night will bolt to safety, only to pivot about and go back toward the danger it so feared. This was panic, pure and simple.

Because he was the commanding officer, charged with orchestrating and directing the action, Andrew Fretello did not fire his weapon. Instead, he watched as his tiny command went about slaying its foe. The scene before him did not form a single, seamless image. Rather, the mind of the American major captured individual, discrete portraits of men in distress. Fretello's eyes fell upon the far end of the field, where the final seconds of a' man's life were glutted as he was hit trying to flee. Struck from behind, the Russian threw his arms out and his head back before flying forward onto the ground, face-first and stone-cold dead. Off to one side, another man was literally being chewed to bits by accurate machine-gun fire. Already on the ground but not yet finished, his limbs and torso flopped and bucked about wildly, up and down, side to side, as he was hit repeatedly by a sustained burst of fire. It was like watching a puppet being tossed about by invisible strings. Above all of this was the deafening report of weapons of every sort, manufactured by the leading arms makers of the world with but one purpose in mind: to deliver deadly, accurate fire. As best as Fretello could see, those firearms were more than meeting that criteria.

Like the American in charge, Patrick Hogg did not personally contribute to the mayhem and slaughter. But he was just as much a part of it as any of his men. With the coolness of a professional and the eye of a perfectionist, the SAS captain kept track of what his men were doing, the effect that their fire was having, and the manner in which the Russians were responding. When he saw a foe preparing to resist, Hogg would glance up and down his line of men, deciding who was in the best position to deal with the threat and direct that man's fire onto the Russian's position. His orders were crisp, clear, and direct. "Jamie! To your right. In the second hole."

There was no need to say anything more to Corporal James Cochran, a man armed with an Accuracy International PM. Known in the British Army as the L96A1, the bolt-action rifle fires a Match standard 7.62mm by 51mm round. Shifting it in the direction of his new target, Cochran lowered the barrel of his weapon until the bipod at the front of the stock was firmly planted. Once set, he leaned his cheek against the stock, made of high-impact plastic, brought his right eye up to the six-power scope, and laid the crosshairs on the mark his captain had identified for him. Pausing only long enough to take up a good sighting and capture the last of a breath that he was releasing in the same slow and deliberate manner he used when aiming, Cochran squeezed the trigger and waited for the discharge. While he did so, he entertained no personal thoughts. Nor did he struggle to overcome any moral dilemma. He simply executed his assigned duties and then, when he was sure that a second shot wasn't required, moved on.

Off to Fretello's left, Adjutant Hector Allons found that he could not refrain from actively participating in the attack. After ensuring that each of his men had a sector of fire for which he was responsible, the adjutant sized up a target that he had been saving for himself. Allons never heard the American give the order to fire. It was the crack of the first rifle report that cued him. With greater care than one would have imagined given the circumstances, the Spaniard took up a good sighting and let fly with a burst of fire from his assault rifle. The smile that lit his face when he saw the man he had taken under fire crumple into a lifeless heap did not come from a ghoulish sense of pleasure. Rather, it was the pride he took in his work. It does an officer good to know that he is still as competent as the best of his men and is able to prove it to them, as well as to himself.

Situated not more than five meters from Allons, Stanislaus Dombrowski was not concerned about proving anything. He was madly firing away into the target area even when he did not have a suitable target in his sights. Instead of seeking satisfaction or simply doing what was expected, the Polish legionnaire was working off the anger and frustration that was still eating at him over his efforts to restore his precious demolition to a functional state.

Beside him was his ever-constant companion, the corporal who had turned his back on an idyllic home tucked away in a picturesque Austrian valley in order to march through the world's sewers and hell holes. Franz Ingelmann's expression stood in stark contrast to that of Dombrowski's. Where the Polish NCO's face was contorted by an all-consuming rage, Ingelmann's was as inexpressive and impassionate as one could manage at a time such as this. Like his fellow corporal in the SAS, James Cochran, Ingelmann was simply doing what he had been trained to do. Unlike his Polish colleague, the Austrian had no particular feelings one way or another as far as the Russians were concerned. While portions of Austria had experienced the boot of the Red Army during the Second World War, those memories belonged to Ingelmann's grandparents. To him, the soldiers he was shooting at were no different than the African insurgents who had the dubious privilege of being the first foe he had ever faced, or the Bosnian Serbs whom he had been forced to shoot in order to pacify them.

Not a single Russian soldier occupying the kill zone was concerned with the motivations of the men who were in the process of killing them. Few had much of an opportunity to think about anything before their lives were ended with an indifference that was both shocking and brutal. Those who did manage to survive the initial fusillade as a result of luck or of some arduous spadework on their part were now confronted with several choices, none of them good.

In the blink of an eye, they were faced with the choice of fighting or fleeing. The decision each man made was more instinctive than cognitive, since no one can truly purge behavioral patterns that are as much a part of an individual's nature and personality as is the color of his eyes. Training can go a long way toward modeling a person's conduct in combat so as to conform to a desired response. But until genetic engineers figure out how to rewire the brain, men who stare into the face of battle will continue to behave in ways that are at once erratic and predictable, courageous and cowardly, self-serving and sacrificial.

The manner in which Andrew Fretello had deployed his troops made the choice of flight unwise. The fire delivered by his men swept the entire area from multiple angles. An obstruction that protected a Russian from the legionnaires did that man little good against fire coming from the SAS. More often than not, the act of fleeing was itself a death warrant. Rather than a means of escape, the frantic efforts of the panicked soldier doing his best to find safety was a prescription for disaster. The very motion necessary to find a haven in this storm of fire tended to attract the attention of several NATO commandos at the same instant. Those soldiers who found themselves in the embarrassing position of not having a worthy target in their own sector welcomed this unintended invitation. There wasn't a single man in Fretello's command who had any qualms about deviating from the established fire plan in order to take advantage of a target of opportunity that suddenly popped up in another man's sector. The result was a quick death to any Russian attempting to escape death through flight.

The Russians who had resolved to stand and fight lasted longer, but not by much. The exposed positions these stalwart individuals occupied left them open to the same crossfire that was pelting their confused comrades. The act of popping up out of their holes and engaging the NATO commandos all too often triggered a return volley from two or three assailants. Against these odds, the Russians who managed to survive this fire quickly came to appreciate that their situation was well-nigh hopeless.

Since a successful defense was not possible; those who were at heart soldiers resolved to inflict as much damage as they could before they fell victim to the cruel mathematics of war. To some, this was little more than vengeance, the trading of one's own life for as many of his enemy's as circumstances would permit. Others who fought on were less sanguine. They did so because the other option, that of surrender, was unthinkable or, in their judgment, impractical. Surrender requires that the victorious party be open to the idea. The Russians defending the silo, raked by fire and surrounded by death, had no way of knowing just how motivated or how fanatical the enemy they were facing was. Any effort to give themselves up could be just as deadly as trying to flee across open ground, an act that the surviving Russians had come to realize by now was as foolish as it was fatal. So they soldiered on, side by side with their own fanatics.

Other Russians who came to the same conclusion concerning their circumstances sought to preserve life and limb by testing the clemency of their foe. Every now and then, Andrew Fretello caught sight of a Russian in the kill zone suddenly jump up with his hands over his head. These attempts to surrender proved to be futile as each of these wretched souls was struck down without fail as soon as he moved out from behind whatever cover had been protecting him.

In the confusion and heat of the moment, Fretello had no way of knowing which of his subordinate commands carried out what amounted to an execution. Odds were, he suspected, they all were guilty of this heinous infraction of the laws governing the conduct of land warfare. That included himself, since he, as their commander, was responsible for everything his men did, especially when it came to the commission of what some would call a war crime. But since the lawyers and politicians who found it easy to define the fine line between doing one's duty by shooting a foe in battle and outright murder were not present, and Fretello had no idea of what he would do with prisoners, he made no effort to rein in his men. Besides, even if he were inclined to do so, he was unsure of how, exactly, to go about the difficult task of sorting out from the foe those who wished to give themselves up and those committed to fighting on until the end.

In the midst of all this chaos and death, there was one group of defenders who survived simply by doing nothing. Either paralyzed by fear or anxious to ride out the storm in the hope that their attackers would be more charitable when the shooting stopped, some Russians sought safety in the depths of their foxholes. That was, after all, one of the primary reasons soldiers dug defensive positions. And this was the reason why each of the more advanced armies of the world developed weaponry that could nullify whatever advantage an industrious infantryman could gain by going deep. On this day, the countermeasure to the Russian defensive positions came in the form of the grenade launcher, a weapon normally mounted under the barrel of an assault rifle. Both the French and British found the American-made M203 grenade launcher well suited for this particular endeavor. That strange and somewhat awkward weapon allows the grenadier carrying it to engage his enemy with either the standard 5.56mm round or a variety of 40mm grenades without having to make any adjustments or modifications to his piece. Armed with this weapon, a well-trained soldier is able to place the baseball-size grenade through a window at ranges up to 150 meters. Since the distance from where the NATO commandos were situated and that of the Russian positions was considerably less than that, the grenadiers belonging to Patrick Hogg and Hector Allons had no problem in lobbing rounds into each of the pits to their front. Once the initial volley had taken its toll and all the easy targets had been eliminated, the grenadiers began the systematic process of chunking a 40mm round into each enemy position. In the confined space of a foxhole, the effect of even the smallest explosive is magnified, making every round that finds a live victim fatal.

When the attack reached this point, Andrew Fretello carefully rose up off the ground onto one knee in an effort to get a better view of the site below. One by one, the soldiers to his left and right ceased fire, not because they had been ordered to, but due, instead, to the grim fact that they lacked targets. Only the grenadiers, methodically working their way from one pit to the next, continued to engage.

From his position, Patrick Hogg caught sight of his American commander and did likewise. "Hold your positions and keep your eyes open, lads," he called out to his men. "Make sure of your target before you fire."

Sensing that this lull was the prelude to his advance, Allons moved over to where Stanislaus Dombrowski lay on the ground, eyes wide open as he searched for new targets. Coming up behind the Pole, Allons was careful when he placed his hand upon Dombrowski's shoulder so as not to startle the man. "It is time. Prepare yourself, but do not move until I give the word."

Nodding as he pushed himself up off the ground, the Pole continued to observe his sector even as he called out to Ingelmann, "Well, my friend, it is time to find out if all of this has been for naught."

In the aftermath of the one-sided firefight, the ever-cheerful Austrian was unable to muster up little more than a weak "Oui" in response. Even if he had been able to quickly push aside his own role in the engagement, the ponderous, steady thump of another grenade being launched, followed seconds later by a dull explosion, served to remind him that the killing was not yet over.

The chatter of small-arms fire in the distance startled Demetre Orlov. Stopping short, the Russian colonel knew in an instant what it meant. The NATO commandos had beaten them to the silo. Though there was still the chance that their attack would fail, such a hope would not be a sound basis upon which to base his actions. Instinctively, he turned and looked back to the rear of the column, where his deputy normally stayed. It took him a moment to remember that Petkovic was no longer with them. That, he told himself, was a blunder that was going to cost them. Though the major may have betrayed him once, he was still a professional soldier who would have been a valuable asset in the circumstances they were about to face.

Without giving the matter further thought, Orlov called out the name of the next officer in the chain of command. "Captain Cherkov!"

From his place near the head of the column, the office summoned made his way over to where his commander waited. Every so often, Cherkov would glance over his shoulder when a fresh volley, sounding like a string of Chinese firecrackers in the distance, erupted.

Even before the anxious young officer reached him, his commanding officer was shouting out orders. "You're to take the first section and continue straight on to the objective."

Winded, Cherkov nodded as he struggled to catch his breath. "Yes, sir. Of course."

"If the NATO commander has done what he is supposed to do," Orlov continued, "you will hit their security screen. You are to maneuver as you see fit, but go after them with everything you have as soon as you make contact. Regardless of the cost, keep up the pressure. Don't let them break off the engagement."

The men who were able to overhear their commander's orders turned and looked at each other grim-faced when the words "regardless of the cost" were mentioned. Since the currency of battle is measured in men's lives, they understood that it would be their lives that would be used to cover the expense of the pending operation.

Orlov paid no heed to what his men were doing, and even less to what they might be thinking, as he went on outlining his plan to his new deputy. "While you are engaging their screen, 1 will take sections two and three and circle around to the right." Though he expected that Cherkov would have his hands full as the second in command, it was important that the captain know his commander's concept of operations just in case he found it necessary to step up and assume that position as well. "If we are in time," Orlov concluded, "I will hold one of the sections back just shy of the silo to provide a base of fire and use the other to rush in, disable any demolitions the NATO troops have managed to place, and secure the site. Is that clear?"

"Yes. Very clear." Then, having acknowledged his instructions, Cherkov threw a question at his harried commander. "Where do you want me to go with the first section if we manage to overwhelm the enemy?"

Not having thought out any permutations of the problem at hand, Orlov took a moment before he answered, "Go to the left. That way, if I'm stopped, you can come at the enemy from behind. If necessary, I will hold their attention while you clear the site."

Though all of this took but a few minutes, the sound of distant gunfire was already fading. Resistance at the silo, Orlov guessed, was coming to an end. Reaching out, he grabbed Cherkov's shoulder and gave it a shake. "Now go, quickly. We don't have much time."