Iron Wolf

PROLOGUE

The Russian shelling had stopped. An eerie silence descended on the shattered and burning village.

Smoke drifted through the bomb-cratered streets, curling past wrecked homes and shops. A battered convoy made up of commandeered civilian trucks and cars and a few wheeled BTR-80 armored personnel carriers lined the main road. White truce flags fluttered from their radio antennas.

Wearily, Major Fedir Kravchenko pulled himself up onto the rear deck of one of the APCs. Even in his midthirties, the Ukrainian officer had kept himself fit and trim. But now, after months of brutal combat against separatist rebels and Russian “volunteers,” he felt more dead than alive.

“Major!” His radio crackled. “This is Colonel Romaniuk. The Russians are giving us just another thirty minutes to begin our evacuation before they open fire again. Get your troops moving!”

“Understood,” Kravchenko acknowledged tersely. Though they had no real choice, accepting defeat still left a bitter taste in his mouth.

Sighing, he stripped off his American-made Kevlar helmet and ran a grimy hand through his stiff, short-cropped hair. Then he filled his lungs and began shouting orders. “Men of the Kaniv Battalion! Let’s go! Form up! We’re pulling back.”

Ukrainian soldiers wearing torn and tattered camouflage uniforms climbed warily out of slit trenches and foxholes, slowly assembling in squads and then platoons. Lightly wounded men, wrapped in blood-soaked bandages, hobbled toward the waiting vehicles. Others, more seriously injured, were carried out on stretchers and carefully loaded onto flatbed trucks. All of them, whether wounded or unhurt, were haggard, dirty, and gaunt. Bloodshot eyes stared out of sunburned, unshaven faces.

Led by a handful of regular officers, the enthusiastic volunteers of the Kaniv Battalion had fought hard for weeks — grinding the Russian-backed separatists out of village after village as they closed in on the rebel stronghold of Donetsk. Casualties had been high, but they had been winning. Final victory seemed only days away.

And then Moscow had entered the war openly.

Massed columns of Russian tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, self-propelled artillery pieces, and rocket launchers poured across the border, defying every call from the United States and the West to withdraw. And all of Kiev’s pleas for military aid had been rebuffed by the Americans and NATO. Outnumbered and outgunned, Ukraine’s regular forces and volunteer units had been smashed in a series of bloody pitched battles.

Like so many others, the Kaniv Battalion had found itself surrounded, trapped in this burned-out village under constant shelling by Russian artillery batteries. Although they had repelled several enemy attacks, Kravchenko and his men knew they faced certain annihilation once their supplies and ammunition were exhausted. And so, early this morning, their commander, Colonel Romaniuk, had reluctantly accepted Moscow’s radioed offer of a temporary cease-fire and safe-conduct back to Ukrainian-held territory.

“So that’s it? We’re just cutting and running?” a voice rasped.

Kravchenko looked down, meeting the angry eyes of Sergeant Pavlo Lytvyn. Before the war, Lytvyn had been a professor of classics. Weeks of fighting had turned him into a ruthless, determined killer — and one of the best soldiers in the battalion.

The major shrugged. “For now, Pavlo.” He donned his helmet again. “But we’ll be back.”

Sourly, Lytvyn spat to one side. “Not in our lifetimes, Fedir. You’ll see. What those bastards in the Kremlin take, they hold. We’re not coming back here. Not ever.”

Thirty minutes later, perched uneasily atop the swaying deck of the BTR as it lurched south, Kravchenko pondered the sergeant’s grim prophecy. He craned his neck, staring back past the exhausted, silent soldiers crowded around him. Columns of smoke coiled upward from burning buildings, staining the blue summer sky. A distant rumble of guns off to the northeast signaled that other Ukrainian units were still fighting — still desperately trying to hold off the Russian onslaught.

For a moment, he wondered whether they should have spurned the Russian president’s offer of safe-conduct, instead choosing to sell their lives in a heroic last stand. Could such an act have inspired his countrymen to even greater patriotism in the face of Moscow’s aggression?

Then he shrugged. It was too late for suicidal heroism.

Obeying the withdrawal instructions signaled by the local Russian commander, the ragtag Ukrainian convoy of trucks, cars, and battle-scarred APCs turned off the main highway and onto a rutted dirt road paralleling the railroad to Mariupol. The BTR he was riding on was fourth in line, and the ruined village they’d abandoned was soon lost to sight. Thick woods hemmed them in on both sides.

Spewing a blue haze of exhaust fumes, the column moved slowly southward. Their white truce flags hung limp in the stagnant, humid air. Every rut jolted groans from the wounded men crammed into trucks and cars.

Suddenly the shrill roar of a gas turbine engine echoed off the surrounding trees. It was coming from ahead of the convoy.

Kravchenko scrambled to his feet to get a better look. He was in time to see a massive T-80 main battle tank clatter out onto the railroad tracks. The white, blue, and red tricolor of the Russian Federation streamed from its whip antenna.

“What the devil is that idiot doing?” he muttered. “He’s blocking the damned road.”

The T-80’s turret whined round, bringing its 125mm smoothbore gun to bear.

“Christ!” Lytvyn swore wildly. “It’s a fucking ambush!”

KA-BLAAMM!

One round from the T-80 blew Colonel Romaniuk’s prized UAZ Hunter staff car into a blazing, mangled wreck. Razor-edged fragments sleeted outward from the blast, smashing windshields and shredding men in nearby cars and trucks.

Seconds later, the convoy’s tail-end vehicle, a flatbed truck crowded with wounded Ukrainian soldiers, exploded in a ball of flame. It has been hit by another high-explosive tank round — this one fired by a T-72 tank marked in separatist colors. The rebel tank had roared out behind them to cut off any escape to the north.

With a chattering, rippling crackle, both tanks opened up with their 7.62mm coaxial and heavier 12.7mm turret-mounted machine guns. More stalled vehicles burst into flame or were torn open from end to end. Screaming men scrambled out of the wreckage and were cut down. Crumpled bodies piled up on the dirt road.

The Russian T-80 rumbled around Romaniuk’s wrecked staff car, maneuvering for clearer shots with its main gun. Its squealing treads crushed wounded Ukrainians writhing desperately to escape.

Wide-eyed in horror, Kravchenko grabbed Lytvyn and dragged him off the BTR-80 APC. They landed heavily in the tall grass growing beside the road and went prone. Most of those who’d been riding with them on the deck reacted too slowly. A hail of machine-gun rounds laced the BTR, ricocheting off its armor, but ripping through flesh and bone. Dead and dying soldiers tumbled down around the two men.

“Get to the woods!” Kravchenko shouted into the sergeant’s ear. “We’ve got to break out of this killing zone!”

Nodding, Lytvyn slithered ahead through the grass, hugging the earth to stay beneath the machine-gun bullets whipcracking just over their heads.

Kravchenko lagged behind, waving other survivors into the trees. “Move it! Go! Go! Go!”

A few yards away, the BTR’s gunner hand-cranked his turret around, desperately trying to bring his own heavy machine gun to bear on the Russian tank. His rounds wouldn’t be able to penetrate its thick armor, but they might knock out its optics and lighter weapons.

Kravchenko saw the turret turning and glanced to his left. The Russian tank’s big gun was whirring round, too, coming on target faster. “Oh, hell,” he snarled, scrambling to his feet and turning to run.

WHAAMM!

The T-80’s 125mm high-explosive antitank round slammed into the BTR, penetrated, and blew up.

Kravchenko had just enough time to see searing tongues of orange and red fire lance out of the APC’s open hatches and firing ports. And then the blast caught him. It picked him up, squeezed the air out of his lungs, and hurled him into the woods.

Everything went black.

Fedir Kravchenko swam slowly up out of darkness into a world of blinding light and searing pain. Every part of his body seemed wrapped in agony — his arms, his legs, his chest, his face. Every shallow, gasping breath he took turned the world around him red.

But his eyes were closed.

He struggled to open them.

“Calmly, Fedir. Calmly,” he heard a voice saying. It was a voice he recognized. It was the voice of Pavlo Lytvyn. “You must not move too fast or you will rip the dressings open and bleed out.”

Moaning, Kravchenko forced an eye open. But only one eye. There were bandages covering half his face.

Slowly, Lytvyn’s own grim face swam into focus. It was framed by tall sunflowers, bright yellow against the sky.

“I need to see,” he mumbled, tasting blood in his mouth.

“Yes,” the sergeant agreed slowly. “You must see.” Carefully, he propped Kravchenko up.

The major stared, trying to understand what he saw through the waves of anguish surging through his mangled body. They were deep in a field of sunflowers, hidden among the tall plants. A few other Ukrainian soldiers, most spattered in blood and ashen-faced, squatted near them.

Thick plumes of oily, black smoke billowed above the distant trees. Each pillar of smoke marked the pyre of a wrecked vehicle and dead men.

Slowly, painfully, Kravchenko turned his head away. He stared at Lytvyn. “Where is the rest of the battalion?”

“The battalion?” The sergeant shook his head. His eyes were sad and distant. He nodded at the tiny handful of frightened men around them. “This, Major, is the battalion. All that survives.”

Kravchenko closed his eye. Part of him wanted to let go, to fall away from this place of pain and horror and humiliation into sheer nothingness. But then he felt a flood of rage buoying him up. It was not a blinding, maddening frenzy. Instead, it was as though he were gripped by a tide of ice-cold fury that cut through all pain and all confusion — laying open the real world in all its stark cruelty.

He looked again at Lytvyn, this time seeing the other man with crystalline clarity. He forced a twisted smile, knowing how strange and terrible it must look on his maimed, bandaged face. “Hear me, Pavlo.”

“Sir?”

“We will take our vengeance on those treacherous Russian bastards,” Kravchenko said coldly. “We will make widows of their wives and orphans of their children. We will kill them by the hundreds and the thousands and the tens of thousands. We will kill them here on our native soil and on the streets of Moscow itself. They will learn to fear us. And they will beg for mercy, but still we will kill them. This I swear this to you, and to our fallen comrades.” He fell silent, sliding back into unconsciousness.

Pavlo Lytvyn stared down at the gruesomely disfigured man who had been his commanding officer. “And so Nemesis awakes,” he murmured, recalling the ancient myths he had once studied and treasured. Then he remembered the scenes of slaughter he had just witnessed. His big, capable hands tightened on the AK-74 assault rifle he’d saved from the massacre and rout. “So be it.”