Red Metal

CHAPTER 20

Captain Apollo Arc-Blanchette stood in the cold morning and watched as the two French special forces H225M Super Cougar helicopters taxied toward him and his ad hoc squad of soldiers.

He was glad to get the newer French Eurocopters today. They had a much better range and could carry more weight than the older and more common AS532 Cougars.

The skies were gloomy and gray, as were some of his men’s looks. They were all fresh off leave, and there had been a promise of no alerts, since the German KSK commandos were already “in the hopper” to take over the NATO Very High Readiness Joint Task Force. But Apollo had thought this Russian sat phone intriguing enough to check it out for himself and to ask for volunteers from his unit to join him.

Virtually his entire second squad had mustered, and this made him proud as hell.

“You’ve gotta love ’em,” said Apollo to the leader of his second squad, Sergent-Chef Lucien Dariel.

Dariel adjusted a strap on the backpack resting at his feet. “Good men,” he agreed.

Ten minutes later, the twenty-three men of the 2nd Squad, 1st Platoon, 2nd Squadron, of the 13th Parachute Dragoon Regiment were loosely assembled under the helos.

Apollo said, “Listen, boys — it’s Christmas Eve, and I know you’d all rather be enjoying your leave, but we have some intel tidbits we need to go check out. And since our German colleagues in the KSK are not fully up to speed, I asked our buddies over in the 4th Helo Regiment to lend us some lift today.

“We’re going into the German Alps on a recon mission. The good news is, if this turns out to be a wild-goose chase, I’ll ask the pilots to take us somewhere near the target site to do some skiing.”

The men let out a cheer and Apollo couldn’t help but smile, but soon he got serious. “NATO has tracked a suspicious cell phone to this area.”

Apollo signaled for the intel officer. The intelligence lieutenant laid out acetate maps on the ground that showed two peaks marked with red crosses.

“First we’ll fly over near Zurich and land at Dübendorf Air Base. The ops center is getting clearance for that layover and refuel now. Then we’ll get back in the air. Our ultimate destination, and today’s objective, is right here”—Apollo pointed to the German mountain peak called Zugspitze—“the highest point in the German Alps.”

Within minutes the rotors were spinning, and the twenty-four men and their gear were on board. The helos lifted off into the gray sky, and Apollo told himself that, whether or not they found a Russian soldier with a sat phone on a mountaintop, at least this Christmas Eve wouldn’t be boring.

General Boris Lazar looked out across the open desert. The vast sands south of the Zagros Mountain range greeted his gaze in every direction except back north from where he had come.

He was from Leningrad, which was now St. Petersburg, and he missed the salty Baltic air from time to time, but he was here now, by this brown river instead of his beautiful Baltic coastal streets. What is the name of this dirty thing again? He looked at his battle map and oriented himself: the Aras River. A shit little stream, he thought.

The ocean would be a welcome sight soon enough.

He looked over to see Colonel Dmitry Kir, his right-hand man, chief of staff, and the de facto chief of plans for his brigade task force. Lazar grinned his big, dirty, coffee-and-smoke-stained teeth at Dmitry, who was too busy talking on the radio to notice. General Lazar hadn’t trained the colonel; he didn’t have the skill to teach a man like Dmitry Kir. But he did have enough street smarts to recognize a spark in Captain Kir twelve years earlier that hinted at his work ethic and his ability to plan down to the minutest detail. General Lazar immediately sent the young captain off to the best schools and, more important, protected him and hid him from others, never mentioning the man’s obvious talents to his superiors or his fellow generals lest Kir be stolen away.

Lazar had kept and cultivated Kir like a prized possession.

Throughout his career Lazar had always known he didn’t possess the intelligence necessary to plan the really important operations, but he had surrounded himself with the best men and then bullied and politicked to keep them in his ranks. And now General Lazar had one of the most finely tuned military units in the Russian army, and he had Colonel Kir and his other staff to thank for it.

He sat down heavily in the wooden folding chair and raised his feet onto an empty green plastic case that had housed three 125mm shells in foam. The shells had already been loaded into one of Lazar’s T-90 tanks.

Colonel Kir looked up from the radio and back toward his boss. The general liked that Kir always had an honest demeanor. The general mistrusted almost everyone he met, including all of these Iranian fucks around him, but Colonel Kir was as trustworthy a man as lived anywhere on earth, Lazar was certain.

Kir said, “General, the men are ready to move out; the Iranian Guards Armor are lined up to provide the escort down Route 12 all the way to the border. We are at your command.”

“Fine. Put your boots up for a moment and have a Turkish coffee with me. You’ve worked hard, friend. Relax a moment before we go back to work.”

Colonel Kir sighed a little on the inside, but he didn’t let it show. Instead he just nodded and sat in a wooden folding chair that was covered with a colorful local woven rug. He took one of the small cups of thick, sludgelike Turkish coffee that, in Kir’s estimation, looked more like pudding and tasted more like a lump of coal.

He didn’t have time for this shit, not even for Lazar, the Lion of Dagestan. He had units to organize for the next big phase: Colonel Klava never filled his tanks with fuel when he was ordered to do so, and he was sure to stop the column halfway through the journey. Colonel Glatsky always had stupid questions just before they began their road marches, which delayed his departure. Colonel Nishkin never said anything but needed the latest maps and data spoon-fed to him or he would just start making shit up once they drove off.

Colonel Kir would have to admonish them all on the radio, as usual.

But the host of concerns vanished as he looked across the makeshift table at his boss.

The general already looked the part. His bald head and pronounced chin were features that struck Kir as old-school Soviet. Lazar had already localized a bit: his heavy Russian greatcoat was augmented by an Azerbaijani animal-skin undercoat he’d bought in one of the markets up north. His new thick boots were a replacement for the thin fake-leather Russian issue and were much more practical for the cold desert winds they had all come to know so well. It whipped through a person, the air caked with brown sand that whirled around them and got into everything.

Lazar stared back at him as he sipped his Turkish coffee.

His boss was always at ease. The general loved to say, “I cause great stress, but I have none personally.” Kir seemed to bear the brunt of his boss’s stress, and it was at times like this he wished the general would show some, just a little, at least to demonstrate that he had a clear understanding of the multitude of uncertainties that lay ahead.

But Lazar showed nothing but supreme calm, so Kir was reduced to sitting here and pretending to be relaxed.

Dmitry Kir drank his coffee, burning his lips as he gulped it too hastily, eager to get back to work and out from under his boss’s grim gaze.

Finally, Lazar turned to his colonel. “Give the order, Dmitry. Let’s go to war.”