Red Metal

CHAPTER 47

Tom Grant, his crew helmet on, sat on the top of the tank, tethered to the turret through the radio cable. His gunner was locked on the Russian armor staged on the far side of the river with the tank main gunsights.

“Hey, sir,” said Sergeant Anderson, his eyes still pressed up against the sight’s eyecup, “how long since you slept?”

“Couple of days, Anderson. Same as you. Same as all of us.”

“Yes, sir, but we aren’t the ones making the decisions.”

“You’d better be. You’d better have your sight on one of those enemy vics out there and you better have decided on your next five targets if it comes to that.”

“Hooah, sir. Those fucks deserve a few parting shots.”

Grant nodded imperceptibly. To the twenty-year-old African American from Pittsburgh he said, “You can think about it all you want, Sergeant. Just don’t do it. And keep your finger off the trigger while you’re thinking. We don’t want to be the ones starting this thing up again.”

Grant had said what he needed to say to the young man, but in truth there was no one in his regiment who wanted to open fire on these bastards more than he did.

The lieutenant colonel zeroed his binos in on a Russian Bumerang in the column. They were preparing to cross the bridge and resume their withdrawal from Poland. A Russian soldier in the back top hatch of the Bumerang leaned forward and dropped his pants, showing his bare ass, which he began to smack with his hands.

“Sir, you see that?” young Anderson shouted. “I have his ass cheeks right in my sights… Just give me the word.”

Grant sighed. Being in this position was bad, but being in this position surrounded by testosterone-filled twenty-year-old American heroes — men who had proven themselves over the past two days serving as the American bulwarks in this conflict — made it all better somehow. He’d been one of those kids once, fighting in Iraq, and he remembered the frustration with the rules of engagement then.

Not much had changed, he realized. He hated his ROEs now as well, and wanted to give Anderson and all the other gunners the command to start blowing up enemy armor again.

Instead he just keyed his mic. “Major Ott, bring your lead tanks up to the left of the crossroads.”

“Copy,” said the German commander.

The Russian vehicles began to move slowly to the bridge. As the first vehicle came alongside Lieutenant Colonel Grant, a Russian lieutenant stepped off a BTR-4. Late twenties, dirty-blond hair, he looked out of place, except that the snow-patterned uniform designated him a reconnaissance officer. Grant knew he was probably one of the assholes who reconned his fighting positions in Münchberg and likely Stuttgart, too. The officer arrogantly motioned to them and without any words made it clear Grant needed to move his tank off the road to give them more room.

Without looking back to get acknowledgment, the lieutenant mounted up on his GAZ Tigr and radioed something back; then the long column of Russian equipment rolled over the bridge. First a reconnaissance element of Bumerangs and mixed small vehicles, including the Tigrs and even some motorcycle scouts. Then a battalion’s worth of T-14 Russian main battle tanks.

The Russian vehicles and equipment looked mostly unscathed. A few Bumerangs showed some battle damage, but they were all moving under their own steam.

It was an hour later when Grant and his tank crew watched the last pack of rearguard Bumerangs cross the bridge. With their passage through his location, Grant would now follow the Russians over the bridge and into Poland. The plan, as he understood it through the relayed messages he’d received, was to stay behind the Russians and ensure that they didn’t resume hostilities.

“Courage main, this is Courage Six. You got the count?”

“Yes, sir, we have them. Forty-two Bumerangs, ten BTRs, and thirty-one tanks. All T-14s. I count an additional thirty-eight service and support vehicles. One hundred eleven total.”

Grant thought to himself. He’d be shepherding an enemy force much larger than his, even without taking the damn train, wherever the hell it was, into account.

As much as he wanted to heed the wishes of Sergeant Anderson, restarting hostilities would mean one hell of a nasty fight.

By late evening on 26 December, the massive array of PLF had begun to arrive in position north of Wrocław. Their reconnaissance and headquarters elements immediately drew their battle lines and set their quartering parties. Next, advance guardsmen began the grueling effort of digging through the rock-hard Polish dirt, building rushed camouflaged anti-tank emplacements.

Once again, the dark, hard, frozen earth, even in this modern age of technology, was the last refuge of the forlorn infantryman.

Any sound, any noise above a whisper, annoyed the senior men to no end. They assumed Russian observers were in the area, knew they would detect thousands of soldiers no matter how much or how little light they used and how much sound they made, but the Ministry of National Defense had directed this action. Keep it quiet, but know you will be observed at all times.

The top, “tier one,” unit of Polish special forces was called Group for Operational Maneuvering Response, the acronym GROM in Polish, which is also their word for thunder. The three squadrons of soldiers, A, B, and C, had been in Warsaw, but they flew into Wrocław just after ten p.m. They were driven in buses to several hotels along the Oder River, all in sight of the five bridges.

Other Polish special forces units arrived in the city over the next few hours, and by midnight more than four hundred GROM men were in Wrocław, all in civilian dress, having traveled in by truck, train, or helicopter.

Multiple individual units of the Territorial Defense Force, the civilian militia of Poland, began getting orders to reposition to Wrocław proper. They were not told why, and they brought only the equipment they had with them. Coaches, trains, and old army trucks delivered the units to their designated locations in the city throughout the night. They did not arrive as a single massive force but rather in company-sized elements.

A motor coach or two here, a convoy of three school buses there.

By two a.m. the special forces and militia in place had quietly begun erecting fighting positions along the anticipated path of the Russian troops. In apartment windows, in stores and offices and government buildings, anti-armor rocket launchers, machine guns, and even rifles and grenades were positioned.

Civilians all around the city asked what was going on, but they were told nothing more than that the forces were there purely for their protection.

It would be a long night of work, and those involved wondered if it would only end after a long morning of fighting a far superior and better-equipped force on the innocent and vulnerable city streets of their own nation.

Colonel General Eduard Sabaneyev woke in his private quarters in Red Blizzard 2. He sat up in his sleeping berth after a jolting ninety minutes of rest, looked at the real-time map on the notebook computer in front of him, and saw they were about to pass over the border into Poland.

The map indicated Dryagin and his column had crossed forty kilometers or so to the south and were already in Poland.

It was all going to plan.

The general entered the command car and reached for a thermos of tea offered by Colonel Smirnov, when a flash intelligence report came over the radio. A headset was passed over to him.

“Sabaneyev.”

“Colonel General”—it was Major Orlov, his intelligence officer—“I’m sending some files to you right now, sir.” A map flashed up on the display above Sabaneyev’s workstation. It was the southern Polish landscape, with thermal heat registers clustered north of the city of Wrocław.

“What is it?”

The colonel spent five minutes relaying all the information he had on the rapid Polish military buildup under cover of darkness along the column’s route.

Sabaneyev confirmed the details with Orlov. “Two mech brigades, an armored brigade, and a recon regiment?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Any change to their air posture?”

“Negative, sir, but they know at our present speed we won’t reach their location until eight hundred hours tomorrow. They appear to be trying to set up an ambush of some sort.”

Sabaneyev found himself surprised. He’d actually doubted the Poles would want another fight after the thrashing they got from his force on the way in.

But now it looked like that was just exactly what the Polish president was instigating.

“Fucking fool.”

Colonel Orlov hesitated, then spoke over the command net. “Sir?”

“Zielinski. Wanting to stand and fight. Idiot.”

“Yes, sir.”

Smirnov leaned over Sabaneyev to look at the display. He had a headset on himself, so he’d heard Orlov’s warning. “We can defeat a force of Poles three times that size.”

The general shrugged, sipped the hot tea. “With time, yes. But just moving the column into fighting position will take more time than I want to spend in the flatlands of western Poland.” Sabaneyev then addressed Orlov through the radio. “What’s going on inside Wrocław?”

“We have a pair of Spetsnaz teams on the ground: one up near the A8 Motorway positioning to monitor this new Polish troop concentration, and the other in cover near the A4 and A8 junction, which is to the west of the city.”

“I want to know what’s happening inside the city.”

The intelligence officer replied, “A UAV flight a half hour ago showed nothing irregular, sir. A normal night. Activity on the highways but nothing that looks like troop movements inside Wrocław. There are some militia in the city, but they aren’t in well-fortified positions.”

Sabaneyev turned to his XO. “Smirnov, bring up the plans for a movement through Wrocław.”

Colonel Smirnov spun back to his computer, and soon pages of text alongside maps appeared on the center display screen.

The idea that the Poles would set up a blocking force on the egress route had been considered by the Russians, of course, and a number of contingencies had been planned. If there was a large force on the A8 Motorway in the vicinity of Wrocław, one of the possible alternatives was to drive right through the city.

But while the Wrocław contingency had been drawn up, Sabaneyev hadn’t expected to utilize it.

He sighed now. This would slow him down a few hours no matter what he did. But then a new thought occurred to him. If he did go through the city, there was no doubt but he would face the Polish militia. The poorly trained Territorial Defense Force wouldn’t be disciplined enough to hold their fire, and there would certainly be clashes along the route.

The Russian general was already thinking of his memoirs; in truth he’d been thinking of them since that day in the Kremlin when he and Lazar received their orders. Any fight in a NATO nation on his return to Belarus would be another feather in his cap. Even if it was nothing but a few skirmishes between his scouts and the militia, if it happened in a major city, the “battle” could be dressed up with literary flair to provide an exciting last act to the story of his heroic actions during Red Metal.

Sabaneyev suddenly liked the idea of moving through the city, but he wasn’t a fool. To Smirnov he said, “Push a reconnaissance force ahead of the column. Send them into Wrocław. Support them with two… no, three mechanized companies held just to the west. Have the recon element locate any militia strongholds along our path. Order them to find the most open routes to the bridges over the Oder. Send the Spetsnaz units already in the city to the bridges, have them get under them, and make certain they aren’t wired.”

He shrugged. “If we can get our equipment through, and there’s no funny business from the Poles, we’ll move around the PLF on the A8 by going straight through downtown Wrocław.” He smiled. “We rule this country now — we can do whatever the hell we want.”