Red Army

Seventeen

The morning mist floated off the Weser, blending with the slow-moving darker smoke from the burning buildings. Gordunov sat concealed on the bank, alone, allowing himself a brief rest, fighting against his body to maintain the strength to lead. He had expected an assault at first light, but the dirty air had been growing paler for an hour, and still the only sign of hostility was the occasional rattle of a spooked rifleman or machine gunner in an outlying position. Communications checks with the network of observation posts returned only reports of vehicle noises back in the hills. Gordunov could not understand the delay. The reduced visibility provided by the mist and smoke offered perfect cover for an attacker. Later, after the mist burned off, an assault would have a much tougher time of it. Gordunov could feel the change in the weather. The last of the rain had sputtered out during the night, and the day would be warm and clear.

He was certain of one other thing, too. There would be little mercy shown on either side. As he’d made his tour of the perimeter in the first light he had been startled by the number of dead civilians in the Hameln streets. House fires had obviously driven them from their hiding places right into the midst of the fighting. In the night, they would have been impossible to distinguish from combatants. Dark running forms. A foreign language. Both sides would have shot them down. But Gordunov understood the psychology of the situation. The blame would fall solely on his men. When the enemy returned, they would see only the victims. They would not pause to consider that their own fires might have been as much at fault as Soviet weapons. And they would not be inclined to take prisoners. His men would get the message quickly enough.

So be it.

In many ways, so many ways, this was a totally different war from the lost war in Afghanistan. You rarely had such a heavy morning damp, or such thick mist off slow rivers. In high Asia, the air was thin, and the mountain torrents plunged through impassable gorges down into ruined valleys. You did not have so sturdy an urban area as this outside of Kabul itself. But haunting similarities remained. As a brand-new, unblooded officer, just off the troop rotation plane with the first windblown grit in his eyes and teeth, he had been garrisoned at Bagram, where the new airborne leaders learned the ropes. A priority then had been reopening the road to Kandahar. The Afghan forces failed, as always, and Soviet forces received the order to do the job. Gordunov commanded a company in a battalion equipped with airborne-variant infantry fighting vehicles. They road-marched south, a small part of a much larger operation, nervously awaiting an ambush that failed to materialize. Gordunov had not tasted combat directly that time. But he got his first look at war up close.

The column halted in a ruined village, whose dirt streets were littered with fly-covered carcasses. At first, he had only recognized the dead animals, large and obvious. Then he realized that the clumps of rags lying about were human bodies. Scavengers circled overhead, like gunships awaiting targets. The column idled in the stench and the heat, anxious for orders that would call them to support a combat operation ongoing in the next valley. But vehicles began to cook over, and still no word came. Gordunov dismounted to relieve himself, and he walked a few meters away from the column, hunting a place where the flies would not hurry off a nearby corpse and attack him before he could finish his business. He turned into an alley between two ruptured mud buildings. And he faced a carpet of human bodies, butchered until they were stacked three corpses high. The alley was at least fifteen meters long and perhaps a meter and a half wide. It ended bluntly against a masonry wall. The natives had been driven into the enclosure, then methodically murdered. Now they lay turning to leather in the sun. A few pillaging birds lazily lifted away at the sight of Gordunov, unsure of what he portended but too bloated to hasten. A fly pinched Gordunov’s cheek. He batted wildly at his face, gagging at the thought of some strange and hopeless infection. He struggled to master his insides just as a hand seized his slung weapon from behind.

It was a special-operations major, grinning. “Interesting, don’t you think, Captain?”

Proud, Gordunov struggled to mask his emotions. But it was useless. He still had many things to master.

“We … we certainly… didn’t do this,” Gordunov said.

The special-ops major laughed, releasing Gordunov’s weapon. The major’s skin had cooked a dark brown, almost as brown as the exposed, dehydrated corpses. He looked as though he lived in these mountains.

“Of course not,” the major said. “This village was loyal to the government.” And he paused, smirking, allowing Gordunov time to settle himself a bit. Then he continued, “We only do this sort of thing in villages that support the dushman. But get yourself an eyeful. And buy yourself a nice little camera in the bazaar. You’ll see plenty more, if you don’t go home in a tin box first. And you’ll want pictures to help you describe the glorious successes of our efforts at international solidarity.” And he walked away. Gordunov hurried back to the stalled column, seeking shelter in its vigor and familiarity. He pissed against the road wheels of his track, thinking about the special-operations officer, trying to understand him. He had failed in his efforts that day. But later on, he came to understand the man very well, indeed. Death became more trivial than a spilled drink.

Gordunov remembered standing there in the stink of death and shit and diesel fumes, wondering how the veterans could sit in their turrets spreading tinned meat on bread and eating it. In six months, he, too, had learned the art of not seeing.

Now he waited, exhausted, in a damp uniform, with the remnants of his battalion. He was a lieutenant colonel, fighting a civilized enemy half a world away from the land where he had first gotten to know himself. But as he walked through the litter of charred, or ripped, or fractured bodies in the streets of Hameln he knew it was going to be the same.

He placed his hand on the fender of a burned and blasted tank. A faint warmth lingered under the slick of the morning dew. He stared up calmly at the tank commander whose body had been caught halfway out of his hatch. In the fire, the body had shriveled so that it resembled a blackened monkey.

There was no point in trying to understand it all. The point was simply to win, to outlive the other bastard.

Gordunov limped back to the building near the northern bridge where a communications detachment had rigged an antenna. He sat down on the edge of a table, taking the weight off his hurt leg, and slowly worked out a coded message to send back to headquarters. “Bridges secured. Forty-five percent strength. Holding.”

He checked the code groups, then passed the message to a communications specialist he didn’t recognize, but who had taken charge of the long-range set. If they couldn’t communicate from this station, Gordunov was prepared to try again from Levin’s east side of the river, where the remainder of the staff and communications platoon had set up headquarters.

“Make sure you do it right. Get an acknowledgment.”

“Yes, Comrade Battalion Commander.”

Gordunov stepped back out into the chilly dampness, restless. He felt exhausted, but unable to calm down. He worried that he had almost reached the point where men made bad decisions. Bad luck about the leg, he thought. The pain had taken a lot out of him. Then he heard the first ripple of organized fire.

The initial assault was coming against Levin’s side of the river. Gordunov had not expected that. The deep reserves should have been on the western bank. Perhaps the enemy was having difficulty organizing his assault in the west. Perhaps only ill-trained reservists remained, grandfathers and pot-bellied family men. Perhaps they had even lost their will to fight. Gordunov wondered how the rest of the war was going. Where was the Soviet armor? How long would it take to arrive?

He ducked back inside the communications station. Picking up a field telephone, he rang the circuit. As the answers came he told everyone but Levin to drop off.

“Can you assess your situation yet?”

“The enemy is at the outpost line,” Levin said. His voice, too, sounded weary, its present excitement nothing but raw nerves. “No sign of them on the ring boulevard yet, but they’ll be down here as soon as they realize how little we have out front. The damned problem is all the little alleys. I’m afraid they’ll infiltrate the defense. I have a few men up on the rooftops, spotting, but nobody in the sewers. If they come that way, we’ll just have to fight them where they turn up.”

“Just get one or two men down in the sewers. Establish listening posts, so you at least have a bit of warning. Otherwise, you’ve made the correct decision. You can’t waste any firepower. The rooftops are more important.”

Another station cut into the line.

“Command, this is Outpost Four. There are vehicles moving in the treeline at the base of the hill.”

Outpost Four lay on Gordunov’s side of the river. The enemy would be coming from both sides.

Before Gordunov could respond, artillery rounds began to strike close by. Gordunov hit the floor, just before a blast smashed open the door.

The shocks continued, shaking the building and shattering the last surviving bits of glass. Between impacts, Gordunov could hear shouting. The rounds were falling too close to the command post to be a random volley.

“Everybody out of here. Out the back.”

The bastards had an observer in the town. It was the only possible explanation. Still, Gordunov was surprised at the intensity of the shelling. This was their town, these were their people.

The bridges, Gordunov thought. They must need them very badly.

He helped his men gather up the electronics while shock waves made the walls quiver and sifted plaster and dust from the ceiling.

“Come on. Move.”

Gordunov grabbed the field phone and rang the net one last time. He tried to speak between blasts, waiting for the wires to go out at any second.

“This is the commander. I’m changing locations. The enemy has this site fixed. Each sector must be aware that there are enemy observers inside our perimeter. Men from the rearward positions are to sweep all buildings with good fields of observation. End.”

Gordunov disconnected the phone and threw it to the last of the communications specialists to leave the building. Outside, the troops huddled together in the alley, cowering at each blast, waiting for instructions.

“Follow me,” Gordunov commanded, although he was not completely certain where he was going. He did not want to move too far from the northern bridge, but there was a dangerous slice of open ground between the first buildings and the river. He led the men southward, attempting to work out from under the shell fire, rushing from one building to another.

The shelling lifted. Gordunov could hear the heavy throb of armored vehicles beyond the perimeter.

Armored vehicles — the noise of their engines — had become the modern equivalent of war drums, Gordunov decided. The rumbling chilled your guts.

He pointed across the boulevard that connected the two bridges on the western bank, indicating the German post-office building. “Set up your equipment in there. Report to Captain Karchenko, if you can locate his company command post. Try to get wired in again.” He looked at their faces. Children. Not the sun-scarred faces of the men with whom he had survived Afghanistan. He had not seen the communications officer for hours. Another worthless bastard, he decided. He selected the least frightened-looking soldier. “You’re in charge of the communications collective now. I’m appointing you to the rank of junior sergeant. Do your duty for the Soviet Union.”

Gordunov left them. He limped across the boulevard to the west toward the sound of the enemy armor. The brace on his leg helped, but each step still jarred him with pain. He had selected the brace himself at the hospital, and he had worked it onto his foot and calf, unwilling to surrender himself to any other man’s care.

The sound of small arms exchanges intensified behind his back, on Levin’s side of the river. On his side, the sound of the armored vehicles changed.

They were moving.

Gordunov came up behind Lieutenant Svirkin’s platoon. The lieutenant had a field phone that was still operational, and Gordunov called Levin.

A soldier answered. The comrade captain was up forward, in the fighting. But he had sent back the message that the attackers on the eastern bank were British regulars.

Levin would have his hands full, Gordunov thought.

Lieutenant Svirkin appeared confident, almost eager. He was new to the battalion, and Gordunov had not yet had a chance to take his measure.

“You understand? You must hold. There is no alternative. Our tanks are on the way.”

“Yes, Comrade Commander.”

Gordunov stumped off to check the next line platoon’s defenses.

Firing erupted ahead of him. The sound of the enemy vehicles suddenly seemed impossibly close.

As Gordunov watched, a direct-fire round smashed into a corner building. A moment later, two soldiers stumbled out with their hands over their heads.

His men. Giving up. Gordunov shot them down with his assault rifle.

The lead enemy tank had already reached the Soviet positions. Everything happened too swiftly to be managed. Gordunov watched in horror as the enormous vehicle, twice the size of a Soviet tank, rolled toward the bridge, spraying machine-gun fire to its flanks, apparently unstoppable. He rushed back toward the platoon he had just visited, going in short dashes on his hobbled leg. The enemy tank either did not see him or didn’t care about the lone man’s actions. Another tank appeared just behind the first, also heading for the key northern bridge.

Gordunov raged at the thought of the bridge falling back into enemy hands so easily. It seemed as though the air assault force defenses had simply melted away. No one returned the fire of the tanks.

Gordunov cut around the corner of a building, screaming orders at his men not to fire at him. Lieutenant Svirkin rose to meet him, his face blank.

“Where’s the nearest antitank grenadier?” Gordunov demanded. “Have you got anybody close by?”

Svirkin thought for a moment, infuriating Gordunov with his slowness. “I think… there’s a launcher back down the street.”

Gordunov seized the lieutenant’s arm. “Where? Show me.”

The lieutenant obediently led the way. Rushing across intersections, the two officers fired blindly in the direction of the tanks. Beyond a pair of dead civilians, they found two soldiers lying flat behind a wave of rubble. One of them had an antitank grenade launcher.

Gordunov could hear the tanks firing. It sounded as though they were very close to the bridge.

“Get up,” he ordered the soldiers. “Come with me. You, too, Lieutenant.”

He led them in a rush down behind the post-office building. Whatever Karchenko was doing in his company command post, it wasn’t stopping tanks. Gordunov felt a sickening sense of collapse. His instincts told him that this section of the defense had gone wrong, that Karchenko simply had not had it in him as a company commander to handle the mission. Gordunov regretted that he had not relieved him the night before when he had failed to bring back the body of the battalion chief of staff.

Gordunov waved them all down. The soldiers fell flat in the street, weapons ready. But no targets were visible.

“They’re up around the next corner,” Gordunov told them. The whirring and grinding of the tanks as they worked through the wreckage in the streets was unmistakable. Then a quick pair of explosions, followed by bursts of Soviet fire, signaled that somebody was fighting back.

“You.” Gordunov singled out the grenadier. “Come with me. Svirkin, you stay here and make damned sure we don’t get cut off.”

The lieutenant nodded. But Gordunov had no confidence in him now. He was familiar with the pattern from Afghanistan. Men who had performed reasonably well suddenly reached their limit, triggered into a near-stasis either by an unexpected, demoralizing event or simply by nervous exhaustion. No one was completely predictable. And few were consistently brave.

Gordunov expected to get shots into the rear of the tanks. But as soon as he and the grenadier reached the target intersection, a third tank appeared, bringing up the rear. The two men were caught in between the lead tanks and the trail vehicle.

“Shoot that one, get the bastard,” Gordunov screamed.

The grenadier knelt, shaking. He balanced the weapon on his shoulder and fired. The round struck just below the mantlet of the gun, near the turret ring. But the huge trail tank kept coming, firing its machine guns.

The grenadier jerked up from his knees, then collapsed. The machine-gun fire kicked his body backward, rolling it over.

Gordunov pressed himself as flat as he could against a covering wall. As the tank passed him, impossibly loud, it concentrated its fire down the side street up which Gordunov and the grenadier had come. But the vehicle had its hatches sealed, and its field of vision did not include the spot in which Gordunov lay. As the tank rumbled past he dashed for the grenade launcher, scrambling the last few meters on knees and elbows. He ripped at the dead boy’s pack, from which the trails of two more antitank rounds jutted. Each moment, he expected gunfire to strike him. But he managed to work the pack off the heavy, bloody body. He slung it over one shoulder and rolled back toward the slight cover available. It was foolish to commit tanks into a built-up area without infantry support, and Gordunov was determined to make the enemy pay for it.

He thought he remembered how to work the device, how to sight it. He loaded a round, snapping it into the launcher with a reassuring click. He remembered that the logical order of the hands had to be reversed for a proper hold and balance. He slung his rifle around crossways on his back so that he could pull it quickly into a firing stance. Then he rose and ran for the intersection again, moving as swiftly as his crippled leg would carry him.

The rear of the tank that had killed the grenadier was completely exposed. Beyond it in the distance, Gordunov could see that the lead tank was smoking. The scene elated him. His men were still fighting. Someone had killed the lead tank. Gordunov shouldered the launcher, aimed for the back of the trail tank’s engine compartment, and fired.

The target was so close that he could feel the shock of the impact through his body. As a minimum, he figured that he had gotten a mobility kill. And the tank did, indeed, lurch to a halt, smoke rising from its rear deck. Gordunov scuttled to a nearby doorway, laying down the launcher and tugging his assault rifle around into his arms. He took aim, waiting for the crew members to emerge.

The crew appeared reluctant to abandon the tank. They attempted to traverse the gun to the rear. But the narrowness of the street would not permit it, even with the gun at maximum elevation. Gordunov grew so involved with the spectacle of the turret’s attempts to turn on him that he almost missed the movement beneath the tank as the crew slipped out of an escape door in the bottom of the hull.

Gordunov waited for a second man to drop to the street. When no other crew members appeared, he swept the area between the tank’s tracks with his assault rifle. He could see the reaction of the trapped, stricken men, like nervous puppets. He emptied an entire magazine into them, then reloaded. When the bodies remained still, he reloaded the antitank grenade launcher.

The middle tank in the column continued to fire wildly, aware that it had been trapped. Gordunov approached in bounds, closing to where he could get a clear shot. They had tried to take his bridge. But it was not going to be that easy. He felt wonderfully capable again, unbeatable.

He positioned himself behind the cover of the flank of the vehicle he had just killed, angling the grenade launcher for another shot. In the moment of aiming, his location in time and space blurred. He was back on the road to Kandahar, and fighting his way out of mountain ambushes, and soldiering in a thousand places he could not recognize. There was only the enemy, a timeless thing, waiting. Gordunov tightened his finger on the trigger.

A surviving crewman from the wrecked tank shot him in the back with a pistol.