Red Army

Twenty-one

The brigade’s operations maps decorated the wall of the German living room. Battery-powered lamps shone their harsh, flattening light about the crowded room, striking Anton’s eyes as he moved from officer to officer, checking, correcting, struggling to remain lucid despite his building fever.

At midnight, he had led his wounded brigade across the big bridge at Bad Oeynhausen. He had dismounted to empty his bowels yet again and to watch the progression of bristling war machines on the march, their spiky outlines silhouetted by fires burning out of control in the town. The bridgehead had been in a chaotic state, guarded by a crust of air-defense batteries, hastily dug-in antitank positions, grubby air-assault troops, and a battered assortment of scarred-up tanks and infantry fighting vehicles. Major General Anseev, the corps commander, had flown down in a light liaison helicopter, a brave act given the density of nervous gunners packed into the bridgehead. He hastened to brief Anton on a possible change in the situation. Indicators were building of a possible counterattack by U.S. Army forces coming up from the south. The information only consisted of bits and pieces, and the corps commander even acknowledged that there might be nothing to it, just the imaginings of overwrought staff officers. But Anton had to rush his force through one designated pass across the Teutoburg forest ridge, a distance of more than fifty kilometers on a network of secondary roads, then to prepare for a possible wheel to the south. If an American grouping did appear, it was imperative to hold them west of the Teutoburg and south of the Paderborn-Soest-Dortmund line. Anton was to prepare contingency measures for a meeting engagement opened from the march, as well as for a hasty defense, as dictated by the developing situation. The corps’ attack helicopters would forward base west of the Weser by first light. Since he was marching on the southern flank of the corps, Anton would have first call on the aircraft. Further, he would receive heavy multiple rocket launchers and additional tube artillery from the corps artillery brigade.

Images fuzzed in Anton’s head. He understood what the corps commander said, but it only sounded hopelessly difficult, an unreasonable burden. He would have to pull in his commanders and hastily reorganize, without sufficient time for even the most rudimentary staff procedures. The additional assets made available by the corps commander only sounded like additional headaches. It all seemed so nightmarishly hard to manage, impossible to keep under control.

“The front is making every effort to locate the American grouping, if such a force is actually out there,” the corps commander said. “If anything critical comes up, I’ll personally open the long-range net. You may, of course, open up the net upon initial contact. But I don’t think there will be a problem before daylight, at the earliest. The Americans couldn’t move that fast.” The corps commander stroked his mustache. “In the meantime, go like the wind. Speed is the best security.”

Anton nodded. A part of him hoped with the hope of a child that the corps commander would see how ill he was and relieve him of his responsibilities on the spot. But the corps commander seemed totally immersed in the military problem.

Anton braced himself. He told himself that his diarrhea was slackening, although he knew he was running a high fever. How would it do, he asked himself, for the son of General Malinsky, the privileged son of the great General Malinsky, to miss the war because he had a case of the shits? But the sarcasm did not work. And Anton knew that he would keep on going until his body physically quit on him, paying the price of his father’s terrible love.

Anton cared less and less for his personal pride now. But he could not imagine letting the old man down. Not without absolute physical failure. Or death, Anton thought, before dismissing the notion as the morbidity of illness.

He wished he were home, in bed, with Zena caring for him. He could lie propped up in his bed, drinking tea, and Zena could read to him. Perhaps a lesser tale by one of the giants whose pens had swept across the Russian earth before the Revolution. And he could draw Zena close to him, until her straight thick red hair blazed on the white of the bedclothing.

I’ll do this for my father, Anton thought, growing undisciplined in his mental processes. I’ll do this for him. Then that’s the end. Then it will be my life, the days will belong to me… and to Zena. But he refused to trace his fantasy through its practical dilemmas.

The corps commander flew off into the clear night. Anton dispatched his couriers, then he remounted to leap along the column with the core of his staff. They erected a temporary command post in an abandoned German house that stood by yet another crossroads. Anton felt magnetized by the inevitability, the irony of that. It was as though the war were all about roads, and no matter the obvious vulnerability, crossroads determined all events of significance.

His officers, as they filtered in, appeared both tired and anxious. Yet there was a reassuring readiness in them, a clumsy energy that was largely nerves, and the determination to get into the fight. Anton wondered if any of the rest of them were ill. He had had his share of experiences in training areas and on maneuvers with diarrhea, even dysentery and hepatitis. But somehow, he had assumed that those were peacetime problems, and that the seriousness of war would make them go away. Now he wondered if he alone was suffering, or if other men were similarly weakened by sickness.

Anton had always been fastidiously clean, with scrubbed nails and well-fitted uniforms. Now he sensed that he must stink of his own waste as he moved about the room full of officers, and he felt as though this, too, made him smaller and less capable.

His officers wanted to get back to their units, to prepare for combat. They had felt cheated in their waiting impotence, remaining in the rear as their comrades died and the war raced on without them. These were largely picked men, the best the Soviet army could offer. There was a bit of nervousness about the Americans, since they were, after all, the great, almost mythical enemy behind all of the other enemies. But there was a willingness, too, even a desire, to get right to the heart of the issue with the ultimate opponent. The thing that most bothered them was the restriction on employing radio communications prior to contact with the enemy. They felt, as a body, that here in the enemy’s heartland, west of the Weser River, speed alone could provide sufficient security. They complained of columns breaking up and units lost on the wrong routes.

Anton disagreed. He reiterated his position, backed as it was by the corps commander, that radio transmissions were not allowed prior to contact with fresh enemy forces of at least battalion strength. Anton knew that some of his subordinates had already broken the rules in the confusion of minor skirmishes, but he ignored the violations. He, too, missed the ease of coordinating through the airwaves. But he still wanted to take every possible measure to conceal the brigade. To hide, he told himself frankly, no matter how hopeless the attempt might be. To hide against the terrible magic deaths of a new age.

As the hasty briefing session came to a close and the officers prepared to chase down their units in the dark Anton slipped away to the toilet, lighting his way through the dark house with a pocket lamp. Behind him, his staff officers were already stripping the maps from the walls, preparing to jump forward to maintain control of the brigade on the move. Anton went slowly, careful in his weakness. Even in the narrow beam of light, it was evident that the house was gorgeously furnished. Very rich, even by the standards to which he, a high-ranking general’s son, had become accustomed. It was the sort of house he wished he could provide for Zena. Fine, dark polished wood and brass. Oriental carpets of silken feel even through the heels of combat boots. There was a baby grand piano in one of the rooms through which he journeyed, and at any other time, he would have paused to touch the keys to life. But the oppression of the situation and his cramping bowels hurried him on.

As he crouched alone in the dark Anton thought of his father once again. The old man was pulling it off. He was beating them all. Anton felt gladness for the old man, but no pride. He could not summon up any pride in the achievement because it was all so thoroughly his father’s triumph, echoing in the night with the son’s lifelong inadequacy. He remembered how, when he was a child, his father had proudly, delightedly, taken him to military parades, reveling in the pageantry that his army and his nation staged so well that it temporarily redeemed a host of other failures. Anton remembered how he thrilled to the brilliant clanging of the music, enraptured more by the tonal spurs to the imagination than by the big metal reality of the parade. His father held him up to see the tanks and the big guns and the sleek new missiles, affirmations of might and capability, of the nation’s greatness. But Anton had only been frightened by the stinking, growling monsters of steel. He watched them warily, anxious for them to be gone and for the wonderful music to come again.

General Malinsky’s personal helicopter pilot had been with him since the hard days in Afghanistan. A major and a pilot-first-class, he had developed the habit of calling Malinsky’s attention to interesting features along the flight route. His younger eyes were far sharper than Malinsky’s, and he had shown a knack for spotting details that other men would have flown by in ignorance in the stony mountain deserts of Afghanistan.

Now, however, the details were evident even to Malinsky’s tired eyes. The night flight took them through corridors of fire, where towns and cities burned like enormous lamps to mark their course.

“Hannover coming up on the right,” the pilot declared. “That’s the big group of fires at one o’clock.”

Malinsky saw a demonic blur of light.

“You can see Hildesheim cooking if you look out the left side, Comrade General.”

The pilot was terribly excited about it all. There seemed to be no human reality, no implied misery in it for him.

Well, Malinsky thought, perhaps that was to be preferred. If all soldiers, or even just the officers, fully perceived the human consequences of their actions, it would be impossible to make war with them. No, it was probably better to have this stupid gleefulness, this naive awe, in the face of the destruction of an enemy’s land.

As the city of Hannover drifted by on the right side of the aircraft Malinsky examined his handiwork. The blur began to be defined. He could see now that the conflagration actually consisted of a series of smaller fires. Not all of the city burned, and he sincerely regretted that any of it was ablaze. But you could not make war neatly. The Germans and some of the British had backed into the city, drawing the Soviets after them like steel filings to a magnet. He had ordered Starukhin not to close the encirclement too tightly. The front had neither the time nor the troops to get bogged down in a significant level of urban combat, and the city’s primary value was as a hostage. But one of Starukhin’s division commanders had let himself be drawn into a fight for an outlying district. And the battle of Hannover had begun, taking on a life of its own against the will of either side. Soviet aircraft had gone in to pound the enemy positions. And the heavy guns had come up. Malinsky shifted in his seat, restrained by his safety belt. It was hard to destroy a city, especially a modern one. No doubt, when the smoke cleared, the damage would not be all that bad. But Malinsky knew that the city had not been officially evacuated, and he wondered what it was like for the remaining residents and the soldiers trapped in the inferno.

In the end, his vision did not move the soldier in him. He realized that it would be naive to imagine that war, given the modern technology of destruction and the timeless characteristics of the human animal, might have grown any nicer. And in the end, it was better for German citizens to die than to lose Russians. After all, hadn’t the Germans begun this themselves almost a century before? Malinsky had long believed that future historians would stand back and look at the twentieth century only to marvel that its inhabitants could not see its fatal continuities. It was, in a sense, the century of the German problem, and its wars, so neatly packaged as distinct world wars in prologue to this encounter, really constituted one long struggle, a new hundred years’ war, with Germany at the center of it all.

Below the helicopter windows, strings and stars of miniature fires marked the residue of smaller actions. Vehicles in catastrophe marked the highway lines like poorly spaced flares. Malinsky had received reports of engagements fought amid refugee columns getting out of hand, and of isolated units committing atrocities. But even as the thought of needlessly killing civilians revolted Malinsky as unsoldierly, he nonetheless realized that such tragedies were unavoidable. He had issued strict orders stating that unit and formation commanders would be held personally responsible for instances of indiscipline committed by their subordinates, and they would be charged under the provisions of the Law on Criminal Responsibility for Military Crimes. But he recognized that restraint could only be a matter of degree. He was, in fact, relieved that the situation had not degenerated further and on a broader scale. The conditions of warfare that brought some men to sacrifice and great heroism turned others into beasts. War was the great catalyst for the terrible chemistries dormant inside humanity.

Malinsky shut his mind to the collateral destruction issue. In a tired blankness, he listened to the throb of the helicopter, feeling its heartbeat through his seat. He had refused to modify his methods of leadership, his habit of going forward to visit critical sectors, despite Trimenko’s death. He even wondered now why the army commander’s death had come as such a shock to them all. It was inevitable that helicopters would be lost, some to friendly fire. Malinsky pictured a nervous boy with a powerful weapon on his shoulder, dizzily searching the sky, or another young man blind to all realities except that portrayed on his radar screen. Missiles and shells did not discriminate between ranks or search out the less essential beings. Generals could die as easily as privates. The thought brought Malinsky an odd, unexpected comfort.

He had talked with Starukhin over secure means prior to lifting off, bringing the Third Shock Army commander up to date on the developing situation. Dudorov had been right. The Americans were coming, although difficulties remained in fixing their exact location and targeting them. Too many intelligence-gathering systems had been lost, and those that remained were straining at the limits of their serviceability and survivability. The situation had proven too dynamic for human intelligence, agents and special operations teams, to have the expected effectiveness. Dudorov estimated, working against a curtain of darkness, that the Americans could have diverted combat power equivalent to one heavy corps, which would have the approximate combat coefficients of a Soviet army-level formation. Malinsky felt it in his belly now that the Americans were indeed coming, and that they would come hard. The question was how fast they could move. By daylight, he would be favorably deployed to meet them.

The situation remained extremely favorable along the front’s operational-strategic direction. Powerful thrusts had been successfully developed in each of the subsidiary operational directions. The Weser River line had been breached across a broad front now, with multiple crossings in the sectors of the Second Guards Tank Army, the Third Shock Army, and the Twentieth Guards Army. Remnants of the enemy’s Northern Army Group clung desperately to a last few bridgeheads, but those pockets would soon become traps.

Malinsky thought briefly of the Hameln operation. There had been no contact with the Soviet air-assault force for several hours, and he had to assume that the enemy had retaken the town. The deception plan and the diversionary attack had worked almost perfectly, and the British Army and the German Territorial Forces had squandered combat power in their efforts to dislodge a few air-assault forces, losing all perspective on the greater situation. Still, Malinsky could not help thinking of his men who had been sacrificed at Hameln. They certainly had not known that they were part of a deception operation. And they had bravely played out their roles. In sacrifice. The idea of sacrificing his soldiers, of ordering them quite literally to their deaths, repelled Malinsky. It was not a course of action to be taken lightly. Yet he had done it. Twice in Afghanistan, on a much smaller scale. And now here. Sacrifice. The word held no splendor for him. It was only another word for death.

But the river line was open now. The Forty-ninth Corps, functioning as an operational maneuver group directly under the front’s control, had passed three of its four maneuver brigades to the west. The hastily reorganizing divisions of Starukhin’s army were readying themselves to follow in force. The first follow-on army was approaching the border, hurrying along the cluttered, broken roads, despite the desperation of NATO’s air attacks.

Trimenko’s army had reported… Malinsky stopped himself. It was no longer Trimenko’s army. Trimenko was dead, replaced by his deputy commander. Nonetheless, the Second Guards Tank Army had reported a lone forward detachment approaching the Dutch border with no opposition, while a reconnaissance patrol mounted in wheeled carriers claimed it had reached the banks of the Rhine across from Xanten on the western side. The advance party of an airborne division that had been subordinated to the front had struck the Dusseldorf civilian airport, although the outcome of that operation had yet to be decided. Due to the heavy transport losses going in, Malinsky had decided to hold back the heavy lifts. He counted on the Forty-ninth Corps moving quickly. One of the leading brigades was in position to reach Dusseldorf within twelve hours, unless the Americans put in an early appearance.

The business with the Americans gnawed at Malinsky. He realized that he was behaving in a less-than-scientific manner, counting on his luck to hold just a little longer. The battlefield, for all of the front’s fine successes, had become quite a fragile thing. The first-echelon armies were out of breath, and even a beast like Starukhin could only whip a horse back up onto its legs so many times before the animal gave out. The Forty-ninth Corps would have to carry the initiative for the front until the initial follow-on army came up. The front had moved so far, so fast, and had suffered such losses, that the units and even formations were disorganized. There was a lack of control out there that Malinsky could sense through the darkness, a battlefield on the edge of anarchy. If it materialized, the American attack would need to be dealt with swiftly and violently, before it could discover and exploit the front’s weakness.

He expected the Americans to attempt to sweep north across the Paderborn plain. Theoretically, an attack into the base of the operational penetration would be more desirable, but it was impractical at this point. The Americans would be desperate to blunt the penetration before substantial Soviet forces reached and crossed the Rhine. And if the Americans did attack in the Paderborn direction, the trail brigades of the Forty-ninth would have the mission of stopping them. His son’s brigade would be directly in the line of attack. Malinsky recognized the danger but refused to think about it in any more depth. Such were the fortunes of war, and his son would fight well, he had no doubt.

If the corps alone could not break the American attack, Starukhin would have to do it. His divisions were badly disorganized and intermingled, but there was still substantial combat power available, and Starukhin would just have to sort it all out. If they couldn’t hold the Americans west of the high ridge of the Teutoburg, they could always shape them into a pocket between the ridge and the Weser. And the Second Guards Tank Army could close the trap behind them, from the north.

The material logic was correct. And the follow-on forces were closing as fast as they could. But Malinsky worried about the psychological aspects of the coming fight. He might, at least temporarily, be forced onto the defensive, until the next echelon came up. And Malinsky did not trust the defensive at all, after what he had seen his forces do to the Northern Army Group over the past two days. He made a mental note to call the Second Guards Tank Army main command post and stress that they must further increase the tempo of the drive to the Rhine. Sheer movement carried the initiative now. He considered bringing the mechanized regiments of the airborne division into holding areas close behind the Third Shock Army’s spearheads and giving them to Starukhin to employ as a light armored reserve. The Twentieth Guards Army to the south would be of little help now, since they were spread thin with the task of blocking any Central Army Group counterattacks against the base of the penetration, closer to the East-West German border.

Malinsky tried to keep it all in precise order in his head. But he could feel the effects of stress and sleeplessness beginning to tell on him. Small details had begun to elude him for long moments, and he wondered how much longer he could go on without becoming a menace to his men.

The helicopter started losing altitude. Malinsky saw discreet guide lights directing them onto the landing area. He was anxious to get out and hear the latest on the situation from Starukhin. And, he admitted to himself in a moment of weakness, he desperately wanted to know what was happening to his son’s brigade.

Major Barak enjoyed the clean feel of the night air on his face as his tank cruised down from the mountain. His battalion constituted the advance guard of the Third Brigade, and he had worried as his column approached the Teutoburg Forest, then began the climb along the tree-lined mountain road. It was inconceivable to him that such a perfect choke point would go undefended. But no one had fired a shot. Now it was an enormous relief to emerge from the narrow pass, running down through the tight corridor of a village and out onto an open highway. His tanks were headed west for the Ruhr, and for the Rhine beyond.

The rumble of the armored column penetrated the roar of his own vehicle, piercing the padded headset and filling Barak with a sense of irresistible power. If the Americans showed up, they would have the devil beaten out of them. And if they failed to appear, Barak intended to see the Rhine before sunset.

Barak enjoyed leading the way this time, despite the obvious risk. He worried about the brigade commander. Colonel Malinsky had been visibly ill at the hurried meeting a few hours before, and, when questioned, the brigade staff admitted that the colonel had a bad case of the shits. The situation made Barak uncomfortable. He did not care much for Malinsky, in any case. The colonel was far too remote, too self-involved for Barak, who liked noisier, more sociable commanders who did not mind sharing a drink with their subordinates. Drinking with his superiors had long been a successful practice for Barak, and he resented Malinsky’s aloofness, telling himself that the elegant young colonel had simply ridden on his father’s coattails.

Malinsky was too much of an intellectual, as well. Barak distrusted the bookish sort of officers, the ones who could always tell you what Gareyev or Reznichenko or some other theorist had to say about an issue. Barak was convinced that all of the restructuring nonsense was ruining the army. How could anybody who was afraid to knock back a few drinks be any good in a fight? Barak suspected that the deep thinkers were the ones who had almost ruined the army in Afghanistan. He doubted the brigade commander would be much of a fighter, even without the runs.

Distant points of light on the southern horizon caught Barak’s eye! It was an odd little display, and he could not determine what caused it. Then he saw more points of light. Some of them seemed to be moving. But the night beyond the roar of the column felt silent, dead.

Without further warning, Barak’s vehicles began to erupt. Instantaneous clangs and blasts underscored spurts and billows of fire. Dark shapes careened through the air as burning tanks spun off the highway into ditches and fields, fuel tanks blazing.

Barak dropped into his turret. He could not decide what to do. He ordered his driver to find a building, anything, to hide behind.

He could not remember the call sign for the air-defense troops. He had never spoken to them in the past, regarding them as second-class soldiers. He broke open the radio net.

“Air-defense commander, air-defense commander, this is the battalion commander. Do you hear me?”

No response.

A lurching motion smacked Barak against the inside of the turret. Attempting to steer the vehicle off the road, the driver had misjudged the angle of an embankment. The tank began to slide to its left.

Now that Barak had opened the net, everyone tried to speak at once.

“Everybody clear the net,” he shouted, as though raising his voice would empower the transmission. “Clear the net. Air-defense commander, where are you?”

“This is the air-defense commander.”

“Enemy helicopters. Why aren’t you firing? What good are you?”

“We are firing. The targets are out of range. We can’t even pick them up on radar.”

Barak clung to the inside of the turret. The driver fought the slide of the tank and seemed to have arrested it. Barak tried to understand how he could be attacked by something at which he could not strike back. How could the enemy be out of range, or invisible? What were the air-defense troops for, after all?

“They can’t be out of range,” Barak insisted. “Fire at them.”

Abruptly, the tank resumed its slide. The sickening motion felt tentative at first, then it gained in velocity. Barak stared wildly down into the hull. The tank stopped with a jerk that banged Barak down against the gunner. The big vehicle had come to rest at a forty-five-degree angle.

“We’re in the mud,” the driver said matter-of-factly, as though it were something to be routinely expected.

“Get it out,” Barak ordered. “I don’t care what you do, but get us out of here.” He switched from the intercom back onto the radio net. “All vehicles clear the road. Get in among buildings or trees. All vehicles take cover.”

Barak’s tank growled and shook, then powered back down. The driver tried again, filling the compartment with fumes. The efforts only seemed to grind them deeper into the mud. Barak knew from experience that they would need to be towed out.

He switched over to the long-range radio, calling brigade headquarters. Again, he received no response. The airwaves buzzed with static and surrealistic tones. The enemy were jamming everything. He sent his message anyway, hoping that someone would copy it, reporting that he was under heavy attack by enemy antitank helicopters. Finished with the transmission, he began to climb out of the tank, intending to take over a vehicle that remained mobile.

The sight of his battalion stopped him. Dozens of vehicles stood ablaze, marking the long trail of the battalion in the darkness. There were more fires than he could count, stretching down the road as far as he could see. It seemed impossible, a joke. It had been minutes, seconds. Here and there, an untouched vehicle moved against the fiery backdrop like a stray dog scavenging. One of the roaming vehicles exploded just as Barak turned his eyes to it. Then another went up. It was as if some godlike enemy were out there, patiently exterminating them all. Barak almost jumped to the ground and fled. But he took command of himself, unwilling to be a coward, no matter how hopeless the situation. He slipped back into the hold to order his crew to evacuate the helpless vehicle with him. A noise enormous beyond imagination stopped him.

The brigade’s senior officer of transportation troops watched helplessly as his supply column began to explode. He had pulled off the road on a hilltop, positioning his vehicle so that he could count the trucks of the materiel support battalion as they passed, wondering how many had fallen out. And without warning, the faint dawn blew up. Enemy tanks, sleek, with flat, angular turrets, emerged from the murk across the valley, bristling into small-unit formations as they rolled north. They used their main armaments sparingly, raking the column of trucks with machine-gun fire. The steel phantoms seemed to float over the terrain, enhancing the ghostly effect of their unexpected appearance east of the Teutoburg forest. The transportation officer’s concern with lone lost vehicles quickly disappeared.

A motorized rifle subunit assigned to protect the convoy tried to deploy and return fire. The transport officer watched with a surge of hope as sparks flew off an enemy turret. But the tank kept coming, impervious to the weapons of the infantry fighting vehicles.

The tanks opened up with their main guns to engage the guardian combat vehicles, destroying each with the first shot.

The transportation officer ordered his assistant and driver to take cover in the trees, where he joined them after securing his classified materials. The trio hunkered in the brush, watching the panorama of destruction. There had been no warning, except a casual mention of stray pockets of enemy resistance. But there was nothing feeble about this attack. It was determined, and big. The ammunition carriers and fuelers threw such spectacular fireworks into the air as they were hit that the enemy slowed, then briefly halted. At an unheard signal, the tanks opened volley fire on the precious transports, then backed off slightly, shying away from the secondary blasts, reorienting the angle of their attack before resuming movement.

The transport officer’s abandoned vehicle lifted off the ground on a cushion of flames. The driver, lying nearby in the brush, screamed in pain, caught by a random fragment of steel.

The enemy tanks swept up over the hill, passing within a hundred meters of the transport officer’s hiding place. Large, boxy infantry fighting vehicles trailed the tanks. The transport officer tried to get a count, but too many of the vehicles were hidden by folds in the terrain or blurred in the bad light. Phantomlike, the war machines disappeared back into the darkness, headed north. They seemed marvelously, almost supernaturally, controlled in their strange open formations. The transport officer knew they were not supposed to be this far north, that this was critical information. But his vehicle, carrying his radio, was a smoldering pile of junk.

After the whine of the engines subsided, he ordered his assistant to see to the driver. Then he started down into the burning valley on foot, cautious about the continuing blasts as ammunition cooked off and streaked across the lightening sky. Even though the enemy had passed, it sounded as though a great battle was still raging.

A radio, he thought. If they only left me a radio.