Red Army

Seven

Colonel Tkachenko, the Second Guards Tank Army’s chief of engineers, watched the assault crossing operation from the lead regiment’s combat observation post. Intermittently, he could see as far as the canal line through the periscope. He had studied this canal for a long time, and he knew it well. There were sectors where it was elevated above the landscape, with tunnels passing beneath it, and other sectors, like this one, where the waterway was only a flat, dull trace along the valley floor. This sector had been carefully chosen, partly because of its suitability for an assault crossing, but largely because it was a point at which the enemy would not expect a major crossing effort, since the connectivity to the high-speed roads was marginal. Surprise was the most important single factor in such an operation, and the local trails and farm roads would be good enough to allow them to punch out and roll up the enemy. Then there would be better sites, with better connectivity, at a much lower cost. Tkachenko refocused the optics, looking at the sole bridge where it lay broken-backed in the water. A few hundred meters beyond, the smokescreen blotted out the horizon. Under its cover, the air assault troops had gone in by helicopter to secure the far bank, and now the assault engineers on the near bank appeared as tiny toys rushing forward with their rafts and demolitions. Beyond the smoke-cordoned arena, the fires of dozens of batteries of artillery blocked the far approaches to any enemy reserves.

A flight of helicopters shuttled additional security troops, with portable antitank weapons, to the far bank. Yet the action appeared very different now than it looked in the demonstration exercises in the training area crossing sites. The only order seemed to be in the overall direction of the activity, and the noise level, even from a distance, cut painfully into the ears. There was no well-rehearsed feel to this crossing, only the desperation of men hurrying to accomplish dangerous tasks, with random death teasing them. The banks of the canal were steep and reinforced with steel. There were no easy points of entry for amphibious vehicles. Everything had to be prepared. Ingress, egress. With the enemy’s searching fires crashing down.

The enemy artillery shot blindly at the banks of the canal. The Soviet smokescreen had been fired in along a ten-kilometer-long stretch of the waterway, and the enemy gunners were forced to guess the exact location of the crossing activities. Despite the difficulties, occasional shells found their mark, shredding tiny figures, hurling them about on waves of mud, and setting unlucky vehicles ablaze.

A flight of two Soviet gunships passed overhead, flying echelon right. Another pair followed the first, then a third couple came by. They flew heavily across a sky the color of dishwater, then disappeared into the smoke.

Gutsy pilots, Tkachenko thought. Not a good day to be an aviator.

Along the canal line, a ragged series of demolitions began. The explosions on the near bank were soon followed by blasts from the western bank. Tkachenko tried to keep count. At least eight points of entry.

More low blasts punctuated the horizon.

Tkachenko felt pride in the courage of the engineers down on the water. At New Year’s, 1814, bridging trains from the Imperial Russian Army had supported the Prussian crossing of the Rhine. Only the Russian engineers had had the equipment and the skill to force the great river. Now Tkachenko intended to repeat the earlier event, and he wondered how many days it would take to fight all the way to the Rhine. The engineers would have plenty of practice on the way, given the dense drainage pattern of northern Germany.

Tkachenko turned to the motorized rifle regiment commander, a major.

“You can get a company of infantry fighting vehicles across now. No promises on the quality of the egress cuts, but we’ll winch them out if we have to. As soon as you get your first wave across, we’ll put in the assault bridges.”

The enemy artillery barrage intensified again, as if they sensed the progress along the canal. The blasts and smoke made it difficult to see. But Tkachenko soon made out a column of infantry fighting vehicles, prepared for swimming. They emerged from a hide position several hundred meters back from the bank, then began to deploy on line, searching for their markers and guides.

Tkachenko left the periscope. Time to go forward. He waved his hand at the commander of the engineer assault bridging battalion.

“It’s time. Let’s get them in the water.”

Together, the two engineers slogged through the mud, past the local security troops with their machine guns and shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles. Tkachenko began to climb laboriously into the younger commander’s control vehicle.

“Comrade Colonel?”

Tkachenko looked around at the handsome young Estonian. Fit. The new breed. Tkachenko knew he was getting too old for all of this. It was time for a good teaching position, where you slept in a soft, warm bed every night and there were no real risks to be taken.

“I’m going with you,” Tkachenko told the younger man. “You don’t begrudge a grandfather a little fun, do you?”

The younger officer looked confused. Tkachenko continued to work his bulky way into the cramped armored vehicle. Of course, the battalion commander would not particularly want the chief of engineers looking over his shoulder. But that was just too bad, Tkachenko told himself. He didn’t want to miss the actual crossing. All of his military career, he had been waiting to use his skills for a serious purpose. Now it was his duty to be down there with them all, putting in the bridges and running the ferries.

The Estonian battalion commander yanked the hatch shut behind them and tugged on his headset. Tkachenko relaxed as best he could in the cramped interior, hunkering against a shelf of radios. It was up to the younger man to deliver them to the crossing site. Tkachenko figured there was nothing he could do to protect them from bad luck or to deflect an enemy round. Content, he sat and waited.

Once before, he had thought that he was to have an opportunity to put his skills to practical use. He had been selected for a posting as an adviser to the Angolans. The assignment had brought him the greatest disillusionment of his life. He had hated the Angolans. They were greedy and subhuman to him. Filthy. Inhuman to each other. And the Cubans, in their clever, degenerate way, had been worse. None of them had even once shown the appropriate level of respect for the Soviet Union or for Soviet officers. It was all lip service, meaningless agreement, and lies. He had spent most of his tour drinking Western liquor and building barracks and bridges to house and carry the future of the developing world. He had even gone into combat once, when the situation in the south had deteriorated to the point that the Soviets themselves had been required to stabilize the front. Yet how could you call those worthless grasslands or the deadly junglelike forests a front? It was a place where men scarcely dignified by ragtag uniforms murdered each other in horrible ways, torturing prisoners gleefully, like children tormenting small animals just to hear them scream. It wasn’t even really a matter of interrogation. They flayed men alive. Or cut them up a piece at a time. And there were no particular efforts to spare the women. They were all counterrevolutionaries, of course. Africa, Tkachenko thought, with the same sort of disgust another man might feel at the word syphilis. It was a pit of disease, bad water, and poisonous creatures, all wrong for a Russian.

Tkachenko chuckled at a turn in his memories. Wrapped in his headset, eyes fixed to his optics, the younger officer had no sense of the old colonel behind him. Tkachenko remembered that he had had visions of tropical cities in the moonlight, of native women who were somehow clean and cheaply willing, and of serving a worthy cause as well. His illusions had not lasted one week in-country. They had hardly lasted a day.

In an odd way, the cumulative effect of the system of bribery had been even worse than the violence, against which Tkachenko had normally been shielded. It had been a never-ending frustration, and not a matter of little gifts to get your name moved up on the waiting list for a television set like back home. The Angolan officials looked for big bribes before they would allow you to do things for their people. Tkachenko often suspected the Cubans and Angolans of collusion to milk every last drop from the Soviet cow. A Soviet officer could not touch certain Soviet materiel that had been off-loaded at Luanda. A gift from the Soviet people, the materiel had become Angolan property. The Soviets in the military assistance group then had to barter to obtain key supplies in order to accomplish their assigned tasks in support of the Angolans, who controlled the materiel. And the whoring Cubans had been in the middle of it all. Tkachenko had watched the Cubans go to pieces in Angola.

Perhaps there had been a few good ones, a few believers. But most of them had exploited the situation to their own advantage in every possible respect. Tkachenko himself had returned from Angola with a bad liver, a persistent skin disease, and a hatred for everything that was not Soviet from west of the Urals, everything that was not Greater Russian. In Luanda, Western businessmen had commanded more respect and courtesy than a Soviet officer. That wasn’t socialism. Africa was a swamp of insatiable greed and corruption. The corruption of the spirit and of the flesh. Tkachenko had come home convinced that the Soviet Union had nothing to gain in Africa.

Nearby blasts rocked the vehicle, snapping Tkachenko back to the present. The vehicle turned off the road and bumped across broken ground. Tkachenko gripped at a metal brace, holding on. He told himself again that he was getting too old for this.

The Estonian ripped off his headset and grabbed his helmet.

“We’re here.”

The bridgehead appeared hopelessly confused at first. A column of tanks had come up too soon, and the big truck-launched bridge sections had to be worked around them. Vehicles backed antitank guns toward temporary positions, and a ditcher bit at the muck, beginning to prepare bridgehead fortifications. Engineers and commandant service troops, whose mission it was to control traffic, waved arms and flags, and another wave of amphibious infantry fighting vehicles skidded down through blasted mud into the water of the canal. The vehicles began swimming awkwardly, struggling to gain control, like limbless ducks. As Tkachenko watched, one vehicle took a chance direct hit, exploding into the water, resurfacing in shreds, then sinking finally beneath the surface, carrying its occupants down with it. Another vehicle hit trouble at the far bank, unable to find enough purchase to haul itself out of the water.

A huge blast clubbed Tkachenko’s ears, and he threw himself on the ground. Only the presence of one of the misdirected tanks saved him from the flying debris. Men screamed in agony, or in the fear of agony, and other voices called for medical orderlies.

The Estonian battalion commander shouted orders and waved his arms, reminding Tkachenko of an old joke which insisted that whenever engineers were at a loss, they started waving their arms as though signaling something important.

Tkachenko reset his helmet and scraped the worst of the mud off the front of his uniform with his hands. He headed for the canal on foot, puffing resolutely along. At the edge, he took over the supervision of the first bridging column, irritated by the slowness now and secretly glad to be able to take charge. He even guided individual trucks as they angled back to release their cargoes of pontoons into the water.

Tkachenko didn’t mind the splashing. He was already soaked. When the first half dozen bridging sections were floating in the canal, he leapt out onto a bridge deck where engineer troops strained at stabilizing the sections and linking them to one another.

“Down.”

Tkachenko fell flat on the bobbing deck as a flight of jets tore overhead. Antiaircraft guns opened fire, and missiles hissed skyward. Then came the blast of the aircraft-delivered ordnance.

“Work,” Tkachenko shouted, “unless you want to die right here, you bastards.” He seized a tool from one of the clumsier soldiers.

Down along the canal, more entry points underwent preparation, and more and more bridging sections slithered into the water from the backs of their trucks. The battalion commander had already gotten two tactical ferries into operation, and the first tanks crossed the water obstacle on their decks. Tkachenko, studying the engineering plans on the canal, had insisted adamantly that no tanks should attempt snorkeling. The banks were much too steep, and he doubted the tankers could find their points of egress once submerged. He suspected the tankers had been relieved by the recommendation.

Power boats half circled out into the canal. The engineers on the pontoons shoved the long bridge off from the bank with staves, allowing the boats to work in along the side. Shrapnel plunked in the dirty water like especially large raindrops. Tkachenko stood upright on the deck, wiping the broth of sweat and rain from his forehead.

The bridge slowly turned perpendicular to the near bank, buoying out into the waterway, reaching across the canal under the guidance of the power boats. Tkachenko watched more ferry sections maneuvering in the water, readying themselves for heavy cargo. The first ferries headed back to load more tanks.

Half an hour, Tkachenko thought. If they don’t counterattack hard with ground forces, with tanks, in half an hour, it’ll be too late. They’ll never close the bridgehead on us. He listened carefully to the dueling artillery. It sounded as though the Soviet guns dominated the exchange. Attacking the enemy batteries, and throwing a protective curtain of steel down between the bridgehead and the enemy.

The end of the pontoon bridge found the far bank, sending a shock along the deck and through Tkachenko’s knees. The ramp slapped into the mud. They were going to need matting, Tkachenko thought. And the guides had to go up. He began shouting again, happy as a child.

Leonid worried about drowning. It seemed absurd to him to be in the middle of a battle, trapped inside a bobbing steel box. The infantry fighting vehicle’s propulsion system seemed to have no thrust at all. Leonid felt as though they were trying to cross an ocean. His head ached from the exhaust fumes, and the view out of the troop periscopes along the side of the vehicle only confirmed that the water level was perilously close to the vehicle’s deck. More than anything, Leonid just wanted to push open the roof hatch and see the sky.

But he was afraid. Afraid of being punished. Afraid of swamping the vehicle. Afraid of the artillery fire. Driblets and thin trickles of water snaked through the vehicle’s seals. And when the gunner fired at some distant, unseen target, the vehicle rocked as though it was bound to capsize.

Leonid prayed. He did not know if he believed in a god or in much of anything. But his mother had never given up her little peasant shrine and her timid, warbling prayers. Leonid clutched his rifle tightly against himself and closed his eyes. He prayed as best he could, trying to imagine what kind of approach you would need to take to convince a neglected god you were really sincere at the moment. It seemed a little like coaxing a solemn, avoided teacher to believe that you had honestly intended to do your homework.

The vehicle thunked against something solid, knocking the crammed soldiers against one another. The engine whined and strained. The spinning of the tracks buzzed through the metal walls.

Suddenly, miraculously, the vehicle found enough traction to surge up onto the bank. The solid, jouncing throb of tracks on gravel seemed like a blessed event without precedent in Leonid’s life.

The vehicle leveled out and changed gears, rushing forward. Leonid could hear thundering noises around them now, and the main gun pumped out rounds, filling the poorly vented troop compartment with gases. The broken terrain tossed the soldiers about, smacking them against one another or drawing them toward the sharpest bits of metal in the vehicle’s structure. The soldiers complained and cursed one another, but it felt as though their souls were not present in the voices, as though every man had retreated into a private world of anticipation.

The order came to lay down suppressive fire through the firing ports. Leonid twisted around and did as he had been told, glad to have something to do, to occupy his hands. He couldn’t see any targets through the clouded periscope, but he quickly emptied magazine after magazine, adding to the acidic stink inside the troop compartment.

The vehicle jerked, almost stopped, then cruised forward slowly.

“Dismount,” the squad leader, Junior Sergeant Kassabian, yelled.

The vehicle’s rear doors swung open. The soldiers tumbled out in a clumsy imitation of their endlessly repeated drill. Leonid’s legs cramped, but he forced them to go. He banged his shoulder in his haste to exit the vehicle, and he stumbled, almost falling over Seryosha, catching a strong vinegar smell on the machine gunner. Seryosha didn’t appear to feel the impact, or to be aware of anything at all. He moved like a very fast sleepwalker.

“This way, this way.”

The air clotted gray and thick, twinkling with quick points of color, like red and yellow holiday lights. The noise engulfed Leonid’s body, a physical presence. He ran laterally through the rain, trying to find his position in the dismounted line.

Ali ran by him, screaming unintelligibly, wielding his antitank grenade launcher over his shoulder like a spear. There were no targets in sight, only a close line — much closer than in the rehearsed battle drills — of Soviet combat vehicles, peppering away into the smoke.

Leonid trotted forward, vaguely conscious of Seryosha off to his left. Seryosha’s muscular presence, trotting forward with the machine gun, seemed protective. Leonid shouted as loud as he could, letting the sounds come randomly. He squeezed the trigger on his assault rifle, firing into the vacant grayness ahead of him, frantic to effect something, to gain some sort of control over his fate. He quickly ran out of rounds in the first magazine and slowed to change it.

He dropped the full magazine. As he bent to retrieve it from the mud an infantry fighting vehicle almost ran over him. It seemed to be out of line with the others. But glancing around, Leonid realized he was no longer certain exactly how the line faced. Hot lights teased out of the smoke, then disappeared. All around him, the small-arms fire continued without a discernible focus.

Another vehicle snorted past him. Leonid followed in its wake, mud sucking at his boots. He had no idea where his squad mates had gone so quickly.

He saw his first casualty. A strange Russian boy, pawing at the sky as though reaching for the bottom rungs of a ladder hanging just beyond his reach. The boy strained his arms, calling for his mother through a bloody hole of a mouth, a bloody face under bloody blond hair. The boy gargled the single word, “Mother,” over and over again, clawing at the sky and slapping the back of his head in the mud.

Leonid rushed by in horror. He fired his weapon in the general direction of his progress, clearing his own way, hopelessly disoriented.

An infantry fighting vehicle exploded off to the side, shooting brilliant colorations through the murk. Leonid found himself sitting down, baffled by how he had left his feet.

Where was the enemy? He couldn’t see anything except running shadows and huge black vehicles that grumbled unexpectedly out of the smoke only to disappear again. If he was going to die… if he was going to die… he realized he did not even know what country he was in. They had driven so long. Was this still the German Democratic Republic? Or had they counterattacked to the west? Who was winning? How could you ever tell?

A ripple of artillery shells nearly deafened him, their force tearing at his uniform like a brazen girl. He kept his footing and trotted vacantly forward, out of tune with the danger of the exploding rounds. He passed a vividly burning vehicle around which blackened bodies lay. A voice barked in an Asiatic language, and a collection of small arms rattled in the mist.

Leonid discovered a machine gunner lying behind a low mound. For a moment, he lit with hope: Seryosha!

No. It was a stranger. Leonid flopped down beside him anyway, glad for any companionship. He began to fire his weapon in the same direction as the machine gunner.

An officer appeared, shrieking at them for their stupidity. The wild, red-faced captain waved his pistol and ordered them to go forward. Leonid and his companion lifted themselves off the wet grass and moved cautiously in the direction the officer had indicated.

Dead men. Dead men. Uniforms peeled back. Blood and bone and the strewn offal of slaughtered pigs. Vehicle bonfires. And still no sight of the enemy.

Vehicle engines screamed at the side of a hill. Leonid tried to follow the sound. Then he heard tank guns, quite near, easily recognizable to anyone who had ever camped on a training range.

Trees. Leonid headed for the dark trunks, still keeping pace with his anonymous companion, neither of them consciously leading the way. Leonid wanted to get out of the paths of the careening vehicles.

Small-arms fire erupted close by. Leonid stood, out of breath, remaining upright for several seconds before he realized that the muzzle flashes were aimed in his direction. His companion had already dropped behind a log, sweeping the wet woods with his squad machine gun, drawing magazines mechanically from a pouch.

“Over there,” he shouted to Leonid. “In the brush.”

Leonid tried to fire, but he had let his magazine go empty again. He hurried to change it, fingers refusing to behave with any discipline. He could not understand how anyone could tell friend from enemy. Perhaps everyone was simply shooting at everyone else. Leonid fired into the maze of trees.

Light. Heat. Painful noise. Leonid saw the machine gunner’s body coming up from the side of his field of vision. The boy rose off the ground as though jolted by electricity, then his body seemed to hover for an instant before coming apart. He was a lifeless ruin as he flopped onto Leonid, covering him with waste.

Leonid screamed. He pushed and slapped at the body, trying to drive it away. He did not want to touch it. Yet he frantically wanted to scour the mess off of himself.

Dark figures bounded through the mist. Leonid pawed at his weapon, hands greased with another man’s death. But the figures vanished like phantoms.

Leonid crawled in close behind a pile of weathered stones and matted leaves. Time had gotten out of control; the rhythm was all skewed. From beyond the edge of the trees, he heard a rising shout from many voices, a middle pitch between the high notes of rounds in flight and the bass of armor at war. He struggled to his feet, relieved to find his own body intact. As fast as he could run, he went toward the sounds of battle. He did not think even briefly of rejoining the fight. He simply wanted to be close to other living men.