Red Metal

CHAPTER 28

Rounds ripped through the trees, red tracers making laserlike lines in the air as they zipped over and around Borbikov, forcing his head lower into the snow and rocks.

“Captain, you must shift fire to that wood line!”

“Yes, sir!” yelled the captain, who knew enough to shift his guns without being told, although he didn’t dare talk back to the colonel.

The team radioman shouted over the incoming and outgoing gunfire. “Colonel, Captain, I have our extraction team up on the net. They are en route; they report they are five minutes out. They want to know where it is safe to land.”

“Give me that radio,” demanded Borbikov, seizing the handset. “You are to land no more than one hundred meters away from our position! There is a logging trail to the south. You will put all three aircraft there.”

“Yes, sir!” came the response.

A battle between snipers had begun. Two Russian marksmen, using the open fifth floor of the stone tower and the crenellated walls, fired down on the French machine-gun forces two hundred meters away. In turn, three French snipers in the trees kept up slow but steady return fire, rushing the men in the tower and keeping them cautious and inaccurate.

Apollo and his portion of One Team used the cover of a low wall alongside the driveway. From this position, they were able to keep up a deadly cross fire on the Russian position in the woods.

“Hand me the hook.” Apollo reached up as the radioman inched around the stone wall to give him the radio handset.

“Three Team, stand by for polar fire mission for the mortars. Adjustments will follow.” Apollo used the tactical radio, not wanting to chance the mortar team being outside of squad radio range.

“Copy. Standing by,” came the swift reply.

He gave them a simple call for fire based on the flares they’d launched moments earlier. The mortar team would have to make a fuse adjustment to fire high explosives, but the ranges would all be tight.

Seconds later Apollo heard a soft crump as a high-explosive mortar crashed in the woods. The impact seemed well beyond and far to the left of the Russian machine-gun position, but the fire momentarily skipped a beat.

Good, Apollo thought. We’re inside their heads.

“Drop one hundred, right one hundred. Three rounds.” He hoped like hell this adjustment would put the next rounds on the sweet spot.

A moment later three mortars slammed, one after the other, just left of the Russian machine guns at the woods’ edge, spraying them with shrapnel, dirt, and debris.

Apollo keyed the mic again as he looked at the impact area in the distance. “Right fifty! Fire for effect.”

A sniper round passed just over Apollo’s head with an angry crack, and he ducked back down.

Inside the tower, Dariel and his men advanced through the rooms, clearing them one at a time. Three Russians had been killed in this manner before the French soldiers reached the tower’s wrought-iron spiral stairs.

At first Dariel didn’t know if the Russians up in the tower could tell they were coming, but when a grenade bounced down the stairs, slipping between the metal railings and then onto the floor at the bottom, he got his answer. He and his men dove out of the stairwell an instant before it exploded. Still, the echoes off the stone walls all but deafened the men.

Dariel and his men lobbed grenades of their own up the stairs, each time diving back out of the stairwell in case their throws were off.

After a minute of this there was no more response from the men in the tower, and soon blood began dripping through the ironwork of the stairway.

Apollo radioed 4th Escadrille and a minute later the Super Cougar lit up the wood line with withering 20mm cannon fire from six hundred meters. Quickly the Russian machine guns fell silent and Apollo signaled his men to advance, closing the distance rapidly, using every snow-covered rock they could find for cover.

Some small arms met their advance, but Three Team renewed heavy bursts from their light machine guns to provide suppression as Apollo and the others closed the distance, picking off targets as they did so.

With the French helicopter covering, they advanced on the wood line.

One of the corporals from One Team came over his squad radio: “There’s another helo… Behind their position, about three or four hundred meters.”

In the distance above the trees, Apollo could just make out one, two, then three helicopters.

Apollo called his helicopter. “Shift your fire onto those aircraft!” He then radioed Three Team. “I don’t want to get shot in the back by those Russian snipers. Make sure our snipers keep them off of us.”

Apollo and the men had all but closed the gap and were within meters of where the now-silenced Russian machine-gun nest had been positioned.

“Switch to grenades. Toss on the count of three. Then we’ll see what’s left and close in.”

Apollo pulled the pin on one of his own grenades and on the three count tossed it toward a clump of brush and felled logs. A few seconds later, eight high-explosive grenades blew clumps of frozen earth, snow, and debris, and destroyed the remainder of two Russian machine-gun positions. Apollo looked through the optic of his UMP45 SD. Crouching low, he advanced in a tactical shuffle. Through the smoke and flying debris he could see four figures running off into the forest.

There were several dead and wounded Russians lying around him now.

“Leave two men here to check and disarm the wounded. The rest of you, follow me. We’re not letting these assholes get away.”

Apollo didn’t wait. Trusting his orders were being obeyed, he took point, bounding over the remnants of Russian equipment, snapped tree limbs, and bodies.

They were still well behind the fleeing Russians, but in case the survivors were attempting to draw them into an ambush, Apollo slowed his advance as soon as he exited the clearing.

Soon he found footprints and a distinct trail of deep red blood that almost glowed against the white snow in the advancing moonlight.

“This way.” Apollo pointed to the blood and tracks. “They’ve left us a path.”

The men pushed through the trees. The snow was deep in drifts, slowing their progress, but they had the advantage of being able to pick their way through the woods more cautiously than the Russians.

Soon they neared the enemy helos. Apollo and his men had next to no visibility, such was the obscuration from the rotor downdraft. It seemed to him that the Russian pilots were purposely kicking up as much snow as possible to mask their departure by not letting off their collectives.

This would blind the pilots as well. A gutsy move, one only really ace fliers would attempt.

Apollo raced from tree to tree for cover. He could see only dark shapes and the faint blur from the enemy helicopters’ spinning blades.

Quickly he realized he was putting his small force in unnecessary danger. Into his radio he said, “Merde! Hold back, men. Grab some cover. He’s going to lift off and then rake the trees with whatever he’s got on board.” A few men rogered up on the throat mics but the rest likely couldn’t hear a thing, given the noise coming from the Russian aircraft.

In moments the aircraft’s engines changed pitch and the flying debris increased. The NVGs did nothing to cut through, so the men put their goggles back on to deal with the whipping snow and forest debris in the air. As soon as the helicopter rose ten meters, a burst of rifle and machine-gun fire from the aircraft lit up the whole forest. Most of it was spray and pray, but a good deal of it shredded the forest near One Team’s position. The Dragoons stayed down behind boulders and trees, pushing themselves flat against the frozen ground, and suffered what felt like an eternity of enemy gunfire until the helos were just above the treetops.

Then the French Super Cougar hanging back five hundred meters opened up with its 20mm.

The throaty thump-thump sound of the heavy cannon fire caused the Russians on the helo to concentrate all their fire on the other aircraft, realizing it was the greater threat. Once the Russians stopped peppering the woods, Apollo and his men rose from cover and fired every weapon they had.

Sparks and then flame shot out from the engine of one of the enemy birds. The aircraft pitched violently forward, then dipped sideways, tracing a wide upward and outward arc before finally slamming at speed into a rocky mountainside six hundred meters away from Apollo’s position.

The Dragoons slackened their fire, the flaming helo blinding them from acquiring the second and third aircraft, which had used the cover of the other helicopter’s death throes to escape the battlefield.

Apollo called his helicopter, which had closed to one hundred meters above his position now. “Can you see the enemy and pursue?”

“Negative. The downed bird flared our night and thermal vision. We are flying blind and trying to hold hover. We’ve taken hits. Leaking hydraulics. We’ll set down at the tower when we get our eyes back. See you at the objective site.”

“Copy.” And then to his team Apollo said, “Hold all fire, men. We’d be wasting ammo. Nothing survived that inferno. God help those sons of bitches,” he added as he made the sign of the cross.

The crunch of snow announced Sergent-Chef Dariel at Apollo’s side. “Boss, we need to get the wounded out ASAP. Me and the radio operators will handle it. SATCOM is down for some reason, but we’ll get the HF radios ready.” He paused, looking at his commander. “You should get back to the tower. You’ll never guess what Konstantine found.”

“Let me try: another one of those laser things.”

“Yes, sir. And this one is active. Konstantine says it’s pinging up and down a line to other lasers, just like that map at Zugspitze showed.”

“Laser navigation,” Apollo said. “You can bet those things are directing something or someone onto a target.”

“Guided missiles? Attack helos?”

Apollo didn’t answer. Thinking, he stared for a moment in the direction of the Russian helicopters, their engines still audible even though they’d dipped below a distant mountain. He then turned to Dariel. “We’re shutting that laser down, too. Get that long-haul radio up so I can report all this to HQ.”

Still looking into the frigid dark skies, he said, “Something bad is coming this way.”

The camouflaged assault train designated Red Blizzard 1 departed from Brest, Belarus, right on time. For all intents and purposes this was the civilian Strizh train, as it looked nearly identical and traveled through the exact same stations, keeping, at first, to the same timetable. Only it did not stop. This fact caused some initial confusion, needless to say. Travelers waiting early on the platform to head west for Christmas Day watched the train pass through the Brest station at a fast clip. With the unrest and general unreliability of the track, the weather, and even just the newness of this Strizh train service, the stranded passengers were easily placated by rail personnel and booked onto other trains. Even the Polish central rail control thought nothing was out of the ordinary. A message had been received about an hour before its transit that it had maintenance problems and would be bypassing several stops on its way to Germany. Besides, the main track engineers at the Terespol station on the Polish side of the border opposite Brest, Belarus, had signaled the okay.

Central Rail Control had no idea this was only because Spetsnaz Team P-6 had already paid them a visit.

At 3:50 a.m. the lead attack elements of General Sabaneyev’s spearhead, led by Colonel Danilo Dryagin, began crossing the bridge over the Bug River at Pto Kozlovichi. A platoon of T-14 Armatas approached the small border crossing station on the western side of the bridge, moving along at a brisk thirty-five kilometers per hour.

A platoon of PLF troops manned the crossing along with a pair of Polish PT-91 Twardy tanks. They had been placed there by the PLF, pulling holiday duty with orders to keep an eye on the border during the Russian winter exercises in Belarus.

Playing cards with the Polish border agents, sipping brandy passed around for this Christmas morning shift, the men were hardly expecting what came next.

“Vehicles approaching!” shouted one of the Polish sentries.

A veteran watch officer replied, “Just truckers returning to Poland. The idiots always forget where the border crossing station is. Hit them with the floodlights.” The watch officer turned back to his poker hand; he was on a straight draw, after all.

The floodlights came on but the headlights continued advancing.

A few seconds later one soldier said, “Hey, sir, I really don’t think these guys are stopping. They look like… like…”

The watch officer looked over his cards. He’d just picked up a straight on the turn. “Like what?” He put the cards down, let out a long sigh, and turned toward the road as the first two T-14s fired their main guns, blowing the Polish tanks to pieces before they even turned their engines over.

The cannon fire was instantly followed by coaxial machine guns as the lead Armatas shot out the spotlights.

“Raise the barricade!” yelled the border control agent. One of the men flipped a switch and raised a steel barricade while simultaneously a wooden swing arm lowered.

The lead Russian vehicle was a BREM-1M wrecker tank. It drove through the metal barricade and wooden swing arm like they weren’t even there, the thick metal tearing away and then flying like shrapnel through the air. The rest of the T-14s followed, each spraying machine-gun fire into the small border post and the burning PT-91 tanks.

The boys in the tanks laid down on their guns, so high was their adrenaline now that they were finally being given the chance to fight.

The surviving Polish troops had the good sense to run, through the snowy fields and into the nearby hamlet of Kukuryki. They were not pursued by the Bumerang assault vehicles or the GAZ Tigr all-terrain infantry mobility vehicles that rolled in directly behind the tanks, because the Russians didn’t give two shits about a half-dead platoon on the border.

The column had someplace else to be.

Colonel Danilo Dryagin sat in his Bumerang command-and-control vehicle, the sixteenth piece of Russian armor to cross into Poland. His position was carefully chosen for a man who wanted to see the battle, smell it, but not have to worry about the up-to-the-minute actions. Not too far forward to need to fire constantly at targets, and not too far back to be just a spectator. He remained constantly on the radio, giving orders and receiving situation reports as his vehicle raced past the checkpoint, small fires burning holes in the dark on both sides of the road.

He ordered the force to continue westward, demanding they make fifty kilometers an hour, because he had a very aggressive timetable to meet. Behind him, dozens and dozens more armored vehicles sped past the demolished checkpoint, under cover of both the darkness and a total blackout of the Western satellites above.

Thirty minutes later Red Blizzard 1 crossed the river bordering Belarus and Poland a few kilometers south of the armored column crossing point, rolling without contest through the Polish town of Terespol. Eduard Sabaneyev sat in his command railcar, communicating from time to time with Colonel Dryagin, and poring over his maps of the route ahead.

Things are moving exactly according to plan, he thought.