Red Metal

CHAPTER 39

The first impact came before dawn and sounded like a soft thump in the darkness. Perhaps a door closing. Maybe a backfire from one of the many trucks that had been scurrying around the airfield toting ammunition out to the flight line in preparation for the companies that were assembling and prepping for takeoff.

A few combat vets stopped what they were doing and looked up, because while the sound seemed familiar, it made no sense, given their surroundings.

Lieutenant Thomas turned away from the work at his desk. His maintenance chief had stood up from his cubicle on the other side of the logistics office and was now gazing out the window.

“What’s up, boss?” he asked.

“Hang on a sec, sir,” came the response.

The next thump was closer now. Then a third, and then, in rapid succession and ever closer, a fourth and a fifth.

The maintenance chief spun away from the door now. “Incoming! Get down!”

By the time the sixth round landed, a siren in a distant part of the airfield began a low, angry wail.

A clatter of machine guns followed. First it came from the northeast; then more guns opened up, seemingly from the farms due east of the base.

Thomas was in disbelief.

His maintenance chief cautiously opened the second-floor steel door that had a clear line of sight to the flight line.

Two long rows of Russian Bumerangs raced into the artificial light around the air base; they had crashed through the outer-perimeter fence and were now storming toward the runway at an incredible speed, firing as they moved. Their 30mm main guns lit up the predawn sky as they mercilessly pounded away, and machine guns on the turrets spit lead across the field.

One after another, helicopter gunships went up in balls of fire in front of Thomas’s and his chief’s eyes. Fuel trucks exploded; ammo stores crackled off.

It all happened so fast.

Worry grew in the pit of Sandra “Glitter” Glisson’s stomach. She’d tried and tried, but had not been able to establish comms with Ansbach. She and her flight increased their speed and kept on the radio, and when she got within ten miles of the base, the morning light grew bright enough to make out the plumes of inky-black smoke in the distance.

“Jesse, look left. Is that Ansbach?”

Her pilot did not answer at first, but after a few seconds she could make out the glow of a distant fire.

Jesse said, “Oh shit.”

As they closed in, the familiar landmarks around Ansbach became unmistakable.

“Yeah,” Sandra said softly, still looking at the smoke and fire. “That’s us.”

She was mesmerized, transfixed by the idea that the enemy had somehow made it all the way here and attacked their base while they’d been out searching for them.

Jesse said, “What do you want to do?”

Sandra wanted to burst into tears, but she fought it. She was a warrior; immediately an overwhelming urge to fight, to kill, to destroy her enemy, welled up in her. She cleared her voice of any hint of sadness, fear, or indecision, and then she transmitted. “We pick up an echelon left, attack formation, and do a few pop-ups to see if we can catch them. Bastards can’t have gone far.”

“Roger, boss. I’m scanning with thermals.” Jesse switched to a wider scan through the gun camera, and Glitter could see the same view in one of her own multifunction displays.

As she raced south, indecision crept in. Where will I refuel? Who is hurt? Who is dead? She shook her head, clearing her tired mind. No, no time to think it over, trooper. We go. Now!

Glitter clicked over to her radio and called the other three aircraft in her platoon. “Okay, listen up. We have to find ourselves a safe airfield so we can stay in this fight.”

The condensation from the young lieutenant’s breath whirled around his face and between his gloves. His elbows dragged across the turret as he scanned through his binoculars, leaving marks in the snow accumulated there and exposing the bare steel below.

He had hard cheekbones and a small tuft of blond hair that stuck out from under the white Gore-Tex hood that covered his crew helmet, and his young face was the only part of his body that remained exposed to the elements. As the vehicle below him sat still and quiet, positioned on a rise over the distant city, steam rose from the Russian officer’s heavy winter coat.

He exhaled. His breathing was slow and heavy, his focus totally on scanning through the binoculars. He knew his job. In minutes they would begin the final assault. Their targets lay ahead, unaware of his presence or his motives.

I am an instrument of the rodina! He sang the lyrics from his unit’s song in his mind, one sung by the last Russians in uniform to invade Germany, some seventy-five years earlier.

Thundering with fire, glinting with steel. Victory, onward to victory. By the power of my gun turret. To my front, the enemies of my people. To my sides, the men whom I trust. Let the fire rage around us. We’ve lived through the harsh winter, now onward, to the sting of battle. Comrades, us all!

He squinted, then widened his eyes in order to better discern the objectives at a distance. His mind registered familiar landmarks. The binoculars, still warm from being inside the heated vehicle, quickly fogged over.

Below him, inside the turret of the Bumerang attack vehicle, his sergeant picked out the skyline through his gunner’s sight, and the vehicle’s turret turned slowly. The gunner scanned the sparse trees, the four-times magnification allowing him to see details of the city. Rolling hills, smoke rising from chimneys, snowcapped rooftops…

He called through his headset, “Lieutenant, sir? I can see the Fernsehturm.”

The reply came quickly. “I see it, too, Serzhánt. Our objective is about twenty degrees to the left of that TV tower. You can’t see through the intervening terrain, but once we get on Route Eight and begin heading west, we’ll run right into it.”

He pulled his binoculars back to his chest and tried to rub them on a dry spot on his heavy winter gloves. He failed — his wet gloves left streaks, but that was better than fog. Heat from the vehicle crew heaters blasted up around him and out of the turret hatch. It will be better once we’re back on the move, he thought.

Onward, comrades of the rodina, onward!

The song in his head stopped instantly as the radio crackled to life.

“Strike One, Strike Two. Begin your attack.”

Still holding the binoculars in his right hand, the lieutenant keyed his microphone with his left. “Roger.” He then clicked a switch on a control panel attached to his coat and transmitted his next call to his platoon of APCs. “Strike One, I lead. Column out and follow me.”

Eight Bumerang engines roared to life as one. The small hillock adjacent to the road was suddenly alive as the few men who had dismounted to smoke or piss raced back and scrambled aboard their vehicles.

The young Russian lieutenant clicked over to the intercom again. “Save your ammo until we make it to Kelley Barracks. Doubt there will be much resistance here. Driver, forward, onto the highway. Speed: sixty kilometers until we are all up and on the move; then take it to one hundred.” His body warmed, he gripped the hatch while the Bumerang’s eight wheels bounced steadily over the snow-covered grass.

In less than a minute they were accelerating on the autobahn.

Even though the door to the office was open, the watch officer knocked on it, then stood silently, waiting to be acknowledged. He looked in and found the general typing on his computer. Even without Internet, there were still reports to be written and filed.

Behind him were draped the three stars of his appointment as deputy commander of European Command.

The general looked up from his work after a few seconds. “Captain.”

“Sir, I have a new report for you.” He waited until the general motioned him inside.

“Whatcha got, Bennie?” The general looked dead tired after twenty-four hours of dealing with bad comms and bad intelligence, along with the strain of knowing the Russians had conducted some sort of attack on Poland the day before that had moved all the way into Germany near Dresden.

The watch officer said, “The airfield at Ansbach was hit. No real details yet; we just got pieces the Army AH-64 unit operations officer was able to relay through a German landline that got cut off. The word is that we had the majority of our forces destroyed by ground assault.”

The general stood up slowly, his eyes wide. “Ansbach? Ground assault?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do we think that’s accurate? Any idea of the size? Composition? This can’t be a full frontage; must be a smaller unit that probed through. A recon force, maybe?”

But the captain had no more information.

The general said, “Get all leadership in. Get the war council over to the war room and, for Chrissakes, find me a working line back to the Pentagon!”

No one driving along the autobahn this morning was too surprised to see a military convoy rolling southwest on Germany’s Highway 313. There were a lot of rumors about an attack in Poland, but the widespread communications problems around the continent had left most people in Germany in the dark. The 313 was one of Germany’s many roads marked with few or no speed limits, and traffic, even on this snowy December winter’s morning, was brisk.

The far right lanes of the 313 were designated for military traffic, so the civilian vehicles on the road, in typical German compliance and efficiency, pulled to the left, the same practice Germans had followed since the Second World War.

The wheeled and turreted combat vehicles, some forty in all, raced along the autobahn at one hundred kilometers per hour. They were speckled white and reddish brown, not the digital pattern of the German Bundeswehr or the U.S. Army, but no civilians even noticed.

The convoy slowed and turned off the 313, heading west into Stuttgart. A few motorists cursed from inside the warmth of their heated cars as the military equipment jammed the exit ramp.

Soon ten vehicles broke away from the column and turned south to the Frankfurt airport. The remaining thirty turned north onto Filderhauptstrasse and into Plieningen, a small suburb of Stuttgart. The town was mostly empty, as the students of the University of Hohenheim were away enjoying their Christmas break.

The fields surrounding Plieningen were bare, having been plowed down like razor stubble in the preceding months. A resident farmer on the northern edge of town, hearing the noise of heavy engines, came out to look at the vehicles as they left the roadway in front of his home and began churning directly across his field. The man glared, his tobacco pipe flaring red, smoke billowing around him as he stood on his porch in his pajamas.

Right before his eyes the heavy military vehicles left their traveling column formation and spread out in a neat fan, leaving massive furrows across his neatly laid-to-rest strawberry fields.

It must be those goddamned Americans again. They have no respect. He watched until the vehicles all passed his house and he could he could hear only their engine noises; then he closed the old wooden door with a thud and puffed his pipe angrily as he returned to the warmth of his fireplace.

From a distance the waves of machine-gun fire sounded like someone ripping a blanket. Loud and continuous, it echoed around the buildings of the American outpost that housed the headquarters for all American activity in Europe. One of the USAF men on watch in the combat information center turned to one of the soldiers and asked if there was something wrong with the HVAC system.

The first true indication of real trouble was when bullets impacted the brick wall outside the headquarters. Heavy rounds hit with an unmistakable violent, smacking sound.

The explosive 30mm rounds came next. They penetrated the headquarters building, showering the eastern-facing office spaces with sparks, brick dust, and bursts of small shards of metal shrapnel. Merciless, constant, concussive waves ripped through the headquarters. Those not killed in the first blasts were knocked off their feet.

A female Army warrant officer raced down the hall and dove through a doorway and into a briefing room in an attempt to escape the rounds tearing apart the building. There she crawled under the heavy wooden conference table, joining a small group who had been caught by surprise in the middle of a meeting. She saw a two-star general in the group tucked tight against a chair and desperately trying to take hold of a telephone lying on the floor just out of reach.

The warrant officer was there with a team to work on the phones, so she knew his efforts would be in vain. No calls were getting in or out right now.

More blasts outside, followed by the sounds of supersonic metal zipping through the air. The long fluorescent lights flickered and one broke loose, crashing to the ground by the table as another fusillade slammed into the wall and through the ceiling above them. Uniformed men and women dashed down the hallway outside the door.

The warrant officer was considering making a run for it, when the general turned away from the phone.

“Listen up! On my command, we’re going to get up, and move toward the—”

The first main tank gun round slammed into the HQ building, shaking the room, dropping anyone up on their knees and elbows back down flat.

The next cacophonous explosion ripped a huge hole in an adjacent room. Wires, soundproof panels, and chunks of insulation rained down onto and around the table. The sound of countless steel fragments ricocheting off the concrete floors and walls added to the din.

The third round blew another hole in the roof directly above the group under the table, exposing the building to the gray daylight. Steel support beams collapsed, followed by roofing material and accumulated ice and snow. The table split under the weight of a girder, crushing the general and two others. The rest of the group, their breath knocked out of them by the shock wave like a gut punch, looked at one another, struck dumb by the hopeless devastation all around. A man stumbled in from the open door clutching his head, blood pouring from an open wound over his eye. His mouth appeared to be screaming, but no one under the destroyed table could hear a sound, since their ears all rang from the last tank round.

The young female warrant officer squinted into the thickening smoke. Through the hole that had opened into the adjacent room, she saw two men lying in pools of blood, dust and debris cascading down on them still. The floor shook again from a strike on some other part of the building, and then another; she was aware of the blasts, but she still couldn’t hear anything, her senses were so dull and slowed.

With a reserve of adrenaline, she tried to rise up and crawl.

Somewhere else. Anywhere else.

Then the floor shook again, and she felt a sharp blow against her chest. She sat back and looked down to see a small red spot the size of a quarter on her dress green uniform next to her military ribbons. It expanded rapidly as she watched, but her brain could just not make sense of what it was.

She turned to a soldier squatting next to her and managed to mouth the words “I think I’ve been hit” while pointing to the growing red spot. The man stared back at her blankly, uncomprehending; he was numb from the chaos and carnage and suffering his own shock and disorientation from the tank main gun blasts.

In seconds the warrant officer’s sleeve and chest turned an ugly black-red. The thick, ink-colored stain felt wet against her chest and arm. She experienced a brief and odd moment of anger: her uniform and the hard-earned ribbons would have to be tossed. Blood poured out of her sleeve like a faucet turned full force, gushing over her knees and onto the concrete floor.

The young warrant officer’s face turned gray, her eyes rolled back into her head, and she fell back among the others lying amid the heavy debris as the Russian tanks continued their pounding, punishing attack.

“Son of a bitch!” said the U.S. Air Force police officer to his German Bundeswehr partner at the front gate. “The hell is that?”

A glow followed by a rumble came out of nowhere in the gray morning. They watched through light snowfall for a moment as a plume of smoke rose in the distance.

“Looks like a car crash on the other side of the base,” the German finally responded.

But when nothing came immediately over the radio, they waved through a few more vehicles from the line waiting to have IDs checked.

Then came the gunfire. The low, cyclic rumbling of machine guns. Then something heavier.

The steady stream of morning traffic through the gate had been a cavalcade of officers recalled from leave. The traffic had been constant in the past twelve hours, and the men at the front gate had been told that, with the crisis erupting in Poland, they had to speed the top brass onto the base quickly.

Something was brewing way up north, and from the urgency of everyone on the various staffs coming back from leave, the gate guards speculated that Poland was having one hell of a time.

But no one knew anything about Russians anywhere near Stuttgart.

Both MPs drew their pistols as they cocked their heads at the distant noise.

“Better call it in,” said the American to his partner.

The German Feldwebel reached for his radio, his eyes still on the distant smoke.