Red Metal

CHAPTER 37

Parked on the tarmac just outside her ready room just after one a.m., Sandra clicked through the navigation systems on her Apache but found nothing but blank screens.

Into her mic she said, “Still no GPS, Jesse.”

“Roger. That blows.”

She cycled through the electronic maps, none of which could sync up, then finally pulled out old paper maps from the flight case next to her. She quickly penned in map checkpoints of known friendly and enemy positions, then triple-checked the grid coordinates, trying to stem the fog entering her mind now that it was momentarily at rest.

Pausing in her task, she looked out the left side of her aircraft as the ground crew pumped fuel into her tank. Despite the chill night’s gloom, she could see some of the young troopers’ faces. They looked utterly focused on the job at hand. The crew chiefs had kept the men up to date on Sandra and her men’s exploits, no doubt, and these boys knew how important their usually mundane duties of refueling and rearming were tonight.

She watched two boys racking missiles on her wing pylon hardpoints. In the strobe lights they looked like characters in an old black-and-white movie.

Not boys — men, she corrected herself.

Old enough to do their duty for God and country.

Old enough to die. How many young men have died on the battlefield tonight already?

She didn’t know, but she did know for certain she had sent some Russian boys to their graves.

Fiery, smoke-choking, burning deaths.

That’s enough of that, she thought. The Russians chose their fate when they crossed the border. And there was the life of her captain — her commander — and his second seater, and many more in the U.S. and German tanks to consider.

Her absentminded musing was shattered as Lieutenant Thomas’s unmistakable shape came up on her right, climbing up the rungs to her cockpit, then knocking on the windscreen. She opened the hatch and pushed back her flight visor.

“Jesus, Glitter. I heard you guys were in the shit! The major wants an update and your recommendations on where he should send Echo Company once they’re all assembled. About a third of them are in now. They’re with the major in the ready room getting briefed on your contacts. He says he’ll talk to you on the radio as soon as he can break free but to get airborne immediately. He says you are in command of Delta Company now.”

Sandra just nodded absently, looking down at her maps.

Thomas continued. “Anyway, the men are gonna paint three kills on the side of your bird. How ’bout that?”

Now Sandra reached up to her windscreen hatch. “It’s five… bitch!” she said, then closed the hatch abruptly and turned back to plotting waypoints on her paper map.

Glitter updated the Brigade S3 and flew away from her base at Ansbach, heading northeast toward Nuremberg. She clicked over to UHF and began briefing her three wingmen.

“We need to link up with our armor on the ground. We fly recce as long as we can and help them pick off any targets of note. If able, I want to identify enemy numbers. Once the rest of our squadron can get some more platoons up here, they can go help out the tankers to hit whatever main body might be coming through next.”

She was quiet for a few seconds, then said, “Still doesn’t make any sense to me why they’re going south and not up toward Berlin. That’s the pattern of attack we always studied back in school. If the Russians went into Poland, they would be heading for Berlin…” Glitter trailed off, trying to remember Russian Cold War tactics.

She didn’t know this enemy nearly as well as the one she’d expected to fight in Afghanistan, and that, she recognized, was a problem.

Colonel Dryagin looked at his map and ticked off the most recent checkpoints with a jittery hand due to the high speed his command vehicle traveled along the German autobahn. He stood in the open top hatch, a stiff, icy breeze blowing around him and down into the vehicle. His command and operations personnel were used to the cold wind; the colonel believed it kept everyone awake, and he liked to look out frequently to get a better idea of the terrain, the weather, and his forces in action.

The ops personnel below him listening to the incoming radio traffic moved the pins on the analog map board in front of them, updating the position of the lead Bumerang in the column.

Dryagin noted the lead elements were about thirty kilometers ahead of schedule and just south and west of Nuremberg.

“Hey, Viktor?” said the colonel, lowering his torso back inside the command chassis. He took off his goggles and pulled the ice-vapor-encrusted white face mask down to his neck to speak more clearly, his face windblown and red. “Besides the next target set, now we know there is at least one tank battalion out in the woods. Our egress will not be as easy as the ingress. I know the predictions, but now we know for certain who is out there. This enemy tank commander will not sit idle. He was trying to pin us down into a direct fight. I want you to work with the general on planning to take alternate route C back. Start making calculations on fuel consumption and determine where we must intersect with the assault train to refuel after the raid on Stuttgart.”

“Yes, Colonel.”

“And make sure you’re on top of mechanical issues for my whole raid force. I want to be able to resupply from the support train down to every last vehicle. Understood?”

“Yes, Colonel.”

“Good. Template that American tank battalion. I had a thought,” he said, drumming his gloved fingers on the metal hull. “I expect them to go back to Grafenwöhr to pick up supplies. I want to intersect them. Take out one of their supply columns.”

“Yes, Col—”

“And request permission from the general to pull a section of BTRs from the support train immediately.”

“Yes, Colonel.”

Dryagin stood up again, scanned the frosty morning distance for threats, just as he knew the eyes of another two hundred vehicle commanders and gunners were doing.

The colonel and his assault force didn’t want any surprises, because this Russian force itself intended to be the surprise this morning.

Tom Grant and Blaz Ott stood in shin-deep snow in front of Grant’s Humvee. It was three a.m., and they’d been frantically loading and maneuvering, and even more frantically fighting for over six hours straight. The American and German officers stared at the map laid out in front of them on the hood and tried to figure out just what the hell they were in the middle of.

Grant knew the tankers and maintenance men of the 37th Composite just didn’t have the skill to mount a dogged pursuit of the Russians. With Russian doctrine in the forefront of their minds, and absolutely zero incoming battlefield intelligence, he was under the assumption that the regiment-sized force they’d encountered was an advance guard for a larger Russian force that had not yet been identified. With no higher headquarters feeding them information, that was the most likely explanation.

Grant said, “If the enemy is fighting the way we expect them to, the next attack will be a massive wall of Russian armor. They will have identified our locations and our strength through their reconnaissance in force, and will hit us from some flank if we are not working actively to get a step ahead.”

Major Blaz Ott looked out over the rolling, moonlit German winter landscape. “I agree… but something else is going on.”

“Yeah, I get that feeling, too. They had a purpose. They didn’t probe our ambush positions or even try to find our flanks. There was some objective more important than destroying our armor.”

“Ja,” said Ott. “They had orders to get past us and continue on to the west.”

“But… where are they heading?” Grant asked.

“No idea,” the German captain admitted.

“I want to pursue them, but we don’t know what else may be barreling toward us. And we’re not going to get very far with just the two refueling trucks. The last slant report from both our units wasn’t good. We’ve fired more than eighty percent of our ammo.” He sighed. “We can’t attack anybody right now. We’ll stay here, improve our defensive positions, and go to fifty percent manning so the men can get a few hours rest while we wait for resupply.”

“Alles klar,” Ott said. “When do we expect more ammo and fuel?”

“Chandler is on his way to Grafenwöhr now to pick up a supply convoy. I’m waiting to hear that he’s heading back. We need everything.” Grant stared out into the dark, cold distance.

“Sir? Something wrong?”

“I still can’t shake my suspicion that the Russians have something else up their sleeves.”

The twenty-five support vehicles had already been loaded by the time Lieutenant Chandler arrived back at Grafenwöhr, so he immediately got the vehicles on the road toward Münchberg.

Virtually everyone stationed at the base had rushed in to help with loading, even if they normally worked in some other support position. Post exchange clerks, administrative personnel, even food service — all had gotten involved.

Without satellite radio, long-distance comms were suffering terribly, but a few men remembered how to use the old Vietnam-vintage HF radios, which employed a technology that dated back to World War II. Too many units had fallen in love with the ease of push-button and uninterrupted satellite comms and didn’t train with HF frequencies anymore, so the men who could operate the HF sets became instant hot commodities.

An hour into the return trip the mixed convoy of German and U.S. supply and support vehicles stopped at a crossroads north of Bayreuth so Chandler and some of the lead drivers could confer about the best route forward. As the men formed up on the hood of a truck and laid out a paper map, a sudden series of rapid explosions ripped through their middle, catching them utterly by surprise.

Boom — boom — boom!

Lieutenant Chandler and the others dropped flat to the highway.

Boom — boom — boom!

A burst of heavy automatic-weapons fire blasted up the road behind them.

Chandler looked back and saw four Russian Bumerangs racing up the long line of his vehicles on Highway 9, firing as they went.

A German ammo truck was the first to go up. A direct hit — hard for anyone to miss at that range. It high-order detonated, blasting everything in its area, including two adjacent fuel trucks. Chandler felt the wave of heat wash over him, the snow in their area vaporized into water, and the men closest to the blast were ripped apart, then cooked by the bath of flaming fuel.

Chandler ran to his M88 recovery tank and hastily scrambled on top of the vehicle, his bare hands sticking to the cold armor and metal rungs as he climbed. He jumped into the commander’s hatch and swung the .50-caliber machine gun around to face the advancing Russian vehicles. He pumped rounds furiously at the armored personnel carriers as they came into view.

Amid the explosions, smoke, and fire, he trained the heavy gun on the lead Russian vehicle and he didn’t let off the gun as it approached. Forty meters, thirty meters, twenty meters. He unloaded all two hundred rounds in the machine gun’s ready box.

In the darkness, several of Lieutenant Chandler’s column of support vehicles burned. The rounds shot in the direction of the passing Russian vehicles simply bounced off thick armor, while the Russians continued to rip shells into the unarmored trucks.

Chandler knew there was no hope. He and his column had been caught unawares and unprotected by a superior force. There was only one thing to do.

Die fighting.

He reloaded his machine gun and resumed firing, watched the tracers and white-hot rounds slam into the lead vehicle over and over. It looked like some of his rounds penetrated the heavy front ballistic windshield. The lead Bumerang slowed from its breakneck assault pace. The driver of the Bumerang, obviously dead or wounded, lost control and nosed into one of the burning fuel trucks, pushing it off the road and into the woods.

Instantly, the APC was engulfed in flames as fuel spilled out of the burning truck and down onto the Bumerang.

Undeterred, the rest of the Russian vehicles bypassed their downed comrade and continued to pound their cannon fire at everything in their path. Lieutenant Chandler watched as another Russian APC took the lead and spun its turret, training its deadly 30mm cannon right at him.

His brain hardly had time to register the danger before the cannon fired, and Lieutenant Chandler’s torso was cleaved in two at the chest, his fingers still clutching the .50 as he died fighting.