Red Metal

CHAPTER 48

Eight GAZ Tigr all-terrain infantry mobility vehicles rolled outside Wrocław just after five a.m. They parked along a trail barely wide enough for one vehicle but remote enough to remain hidden. After thirty minutes of gathering brush and shoveling snow atop their vehicles, their crews took an accurate map reading and confirmed it using the still-working Russian laser system placed on hills and mountains to the south; then they moved out on foot toward Wrocław, the lights of which twinkled in the distance. At eight men per vehicle, there was a total of forty-eight soldiers and officers, all from the 45th Guards Detached Spetsnaz Brigade.

Dressed in civilian clothes, they carried heavy packs containing communications gear, weapons, and rations. The eight-man sections worked as groups using devices that looked like civilian smartphones but actually contained sophisticated military software.

All moved as teams to different parts of the city and to different, vital infrastructure. Bridges, key road intersections, larger highways, and especially rail bridges.

One by one they sent their reports over HF radios; all appeared to be normal. There was an exceedingly light defensive presence from the Polish military — some built-up militia positions, nothing more. The entire city seemed completely clueless to the fact the Russian army was probing its streets.

One team rode through and around the Old Town on tram cars in the early morning. Efficient and visible, the team was the perfect form of reconnaissance. They arrived at the Oder, crossed the bridges, and continued east. They reported no unusual activity around any of the five critical bridges.

Another team had the central train station as their zone of reconnaissance. They reported back that light commuter trains were coming and going through the early-morning hours. A few buses were parked in front of local hotels around the Old Town, a normal enough occurrence, not an unexpectedly large amount of civilian traffic for predawn in a European city.

After less than an hour and a half they’d successfully navigated across all parts of Wrocław that Sabaneyev’s planners had listed as key terrain.

The way looked clear to send the column.

Nearly one hundred kilometers to the west, digital reports were coming in one after another to the support train Red Blizzard 2’s command operations center. The computers processed the data and plotted points of interest. The central digital map screen was now zoomed in to Wrocław.

Sabaneyev looked over his operations officer’s shoulder and read the raw reports from the Spetsnaz reconnaissance men as they came in. Some of the men were verbose, others brief and to the point, but in their entirety the first reconnaissance reports revealed nothing to indicate any real danger. The colonel general began to weigh his options.

“I want to know for sure before turning south,” he said. “If we continue on our course, we run right into what reconnaissance says is a growing Polish defensive belt. What say you, Ops-O?”

“Sir, maybe it’s time to ditch the support train. It’s done its job, just like the assault train. We have our armor off-loaded and the column is full up on fuel and ammo. Plus, we can count on full resupply nearer the center of Poland from Red Blizzard 3. At this stage, we should consider evolving back into assault formations. Quicker, more decisive, and adaptable to whatever the Poles try to toss at us.”

General Sabaneyev looked over the map. “We have not seen all of the NATO air, or even Polish air, they might throw against us, and I want the train to help mitigate that.

“And keep the special teams in Wrocław watching for military activity. And one more reconnaissance at first light to check those bridges to make sure they’re clear. If I am right, the Poles will put something on the outskirts of Wrocław to let us know we shouldn’t go that way, but they’ll also believe we’d be mad to attempt to take an armored column through a city.”

“Sir, even if they do get forces in town, they won’t have enough time to get much in the way of defenses up and established,” said the assistant operations officer, drawing a scowl from the operations officer for speaking out of turn and above his pay grade.

“Yes… I like the way you are thinking, Lieutenant Colonel.”

The operations officer, Colonel Feliks Smirnov, sat down hard in the metal chair in front of his maps. Sabaneyev loved playing his officers against one another. It worked to keep them in line, and it worked as they tried to outdo one another to find solutions, he believed.

Paulina Tobiasz sat in a second-class compartment as her train slowed in Wrocław’s central train station. She looked down at the white sling holding her left arm up and felt the tight bandages on her forearm. She scratched at her wrist because she couldn’t scratch under the bandage.

I’ll have a wicked scar, she thought. Then she caught a glimpse of her reflection in the window. Her eyes looked tired, sad.

She wasn’t a young girl anymore.

But what was she? A toughened warrior? More like a scared little wretch. She had always glamorized female warriors in legends. Tough ladies who persevered and showed the world what women could do. Maybe they weren’t real, either. Maybe they just got lucky, just like her. And maybe it was universal; perhaps male warriors relied on nothing more than luck as well.

The train lurched a few times and began to slow. They would arrive at the station soon.

She removed the sling, and this hurt her arm. She moved it around slowly. Pain pulsed into her shoulder, but her range of motion was fair.

She looked again out the frosted window glass as the faint glow of morning appeared.

She wondered why they were being sent here to Wrocław. Everyone on the train was militia, and all they talked about was fighting, about wanting to get into combat.

Idiots, she thought. They had no idea what they were asking for.

Almost none of those on the train had faced any combat during Russia’s strike through Poland, and she didn’t think her combat experience made her in any way more competent than the others. She wondered if they were just being sent to escort old ladies crossing the street or to set up some rudimentary barricades.

A male militia soldier who appeared to be in his thirties sat across from her. He’d been looking her way for the past ten minutes, and she’d been trying to pretend she didn’t notice. Finally, as the train came to a stop, he said, “You’re the one that got shot in Radom the other day.”

“About a hundred of us got shot. I’m just one of the few that survived.”

“I saw your picture. Thousands have been printed out. They are up all over the place in Warsaw. In cafés, on lampposts. You were awesome. You fought bravely.”

She did not reply.

He nodded appreciatively. Pointing at her injured left arm, he said, “You don’t have to be here today.”

Paulina looked out the window at the platform as the train stopped. “Actually… I do.”

She tossed the sling on the floor and stood, pulled her small purple backpack off the shelf above her with her right hand, and then slung her rifle across her shoulders. Around her in the car, forty more men and women, all in civilian clothing, began making their way to the exits, and she moved along with the group.

A team of eight Spetsnaz watched as the Polish militia disembarked from the train. A quick check of the timetables told them this was not a scheduled stop, and they all moved discreetly into positions to observe. Their suspicions confirmed, they watched the mismatched-uniformed Polish defense personnel exiting the train. They counted each man and woman.

They watched as the militia leaders struggled just to take count of their forces. A few had to go back onto the train and collect the rifles they’d accidentally left behind.

The covert Spetsnaz team took photos. Surveyed closely the militia’s weapons and equipment, then sent back their report:

Just two kilometers to the east, the Oder River snaked north to south through Wrocław, rimming the eastern side of the medieval Old Town. It had frozen over several weeks prior and remained that way, and now it was covered in day-old snowfall.

Hundreds of footprints visible in the snow revealed where kids, ice fishermen, and other strollers had walked along and across the surface of the river, and the tracks of some hearty cross-country skiers who’d passed earlier in the morning ran under the Pokoju Bridge and disappeared to the north in the early-morning fog.

Just to the south, the Grunwald Bridge was the only one of the five main river crossing points in the city that had any automobile traffic at all this early. With twenty-meter-high double-brick pylons on each side holding up a steel-supported span, it was connected to a major east-west thoroughfare through Wrocław, unlike the bridges to the north that supported smaller roads.

A blue four-door Daewoo pickup truck pulled to the sidewalk on the southern side of the bridge, near where a brick pylon disappeared into the western bank. Three men in their thirties climbed out, zipped their heavy coats up to their chins, and raised their fur hoods. The men walked to the railing and peered over. Soon they took the concrete steps down to a footpath that ran along the Oder and looked up under the steel bridge, shining flashlights briefly because the light down there was still poor.

They piled back into their car and drove to the other side of the bridge, repeated their check of the structure, and radioed in to their superiors that the way was clear.

Back in their Daewoo, one of the men twisted the wires under the dash of the hot-wired vehicle, and they drove off to the north to check the next bridge.

Ten minutes later Sergeant Anton Mikhailov climbed out of his warm pickup and stepped up to the Pokoju Bridge.

He looked it over, then walked back to the truck and climbed into the front passenger seat. He pulled a device from his pack, and texted a message on an encrypted tactical data device: The Peace Bridge is clear. No explosives or obstructions noted.

He waited for the response and then turned to his officer in the back of the truck. “They want to know what civilian traffic looks like.”

Mikhailov looked around. Even though it was a frosty six thirty a.m., a few people were about, heading to early shifts.

The Russian sergeant got out and looked around some more, taking note of the cold, fresh air. He lit a cigarette and peered back inside at his officer. “Looks like a boring town. There’s not much going on here. They don’t have a clue the Russian army is on the way.”

The captain climbed out of the back, took the radio from Mikhailov, and reported that there was no irregular civilian traffic in the Old Town area.

As he finished his transmission, a taxi pulled up next to the Russians standing around the Daewoo.

The balding, overweight cabbie rolled down his window and shouted to the three men.

“Hey! You can’t just stop here in the middle of the road.” The man said it in Polish, and the junior officer being addressed did not understand. Instead he angrily waved the cabbie along, not wanting to speak and reveal himself as a foreigner.

It was early and the cabbie had not had a fare and was in a bad mood. He put his Honda in park and shouted again. He switched to English. Again no one responded; they just waved at him and gave him the fist gesture, the European sign for “Fuck you.”

The grumpy cabbie had had enough of the younger generation always trying to make up their own rules on the streets. He reached into his coat and pulled out his mobile phone.

Sergeant Mikhailov reached into his coat as well, but he withdrew his silenced 9mm GSh-18 pistol. He shot the cabbie point-blank three times at three meters’ distance. The man’s face exploded, coating the back of his car seat with skull fragments and brain matter; blood gushed from the open cranial wounds.

The captain’s eyes went wide. “Mikhailov! Are you fucking insane? Get that body out of here. You senseless peasant. I’ll charge you with every rule under the sun if you endanger the whole fucking mission because of a nosy taxi driver!”

Two men moved the dead cabbie into the backseat of the cab and one of them climbed behind the wheel and drove it to the other side of the bridge, with the Daewoo rolling behind them.

They parked the cab in a vacant space and the soldiers climbed out as the captain continued to chew Sergeant Mikhailov out in the back of the truck.

Sabaneyev made his final decision just twenty-five minutes before the front of the column was to take the off-ramp for Highway A8 north around the city.

He gave the order via radio to Dryagin, who was at that moment standing in the top hatch of his Bumerang command vehicle, looking out to the east as a hazy dawn broke. He and the column were stopped just west of Wrocław, but all the engines had been running as Dryagin’s force waited on his command.

The colonel acknowledged his general’s order, then climbed back down into the hatch. Inside, in addition to his radio officer, were his company commanders as well as the Spetsnaz major serving as the liaison between the armored force and the special forces. They’d climbed aboard for instructions, pushing Dryagin’s other headquarters officers out, and now looked at him intently in the glowing red lights of the cramped space.

Dryagin didn’t like his general’s decision but did his best to hide it. With a confident voice he said, “All right, it is to be Wrocław. We will have a clear advance through the city. We rush through just as we did in Stuttgart. The local militia will have no idea what is going on and we’ll have a clear path across the Oder. The Bumerangs will divide on four routes through town to cover the column’s flanks. I want all the tanks in the center. We drive through at full speed with the Bumerangs opening up the highway like they are traffic cops. Anyone gets in our way — militia or regular troops or police or something — we destroy them and keep moving.”

One of his company commanders asked, “Sir, what do we make of these reports of militia arriving?”

“Polish factory workers with guns. Doubt they have any idea which side of the stick goes boom. We pushed them aside on the way in. We push them aside again on the way out.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Spetsnaz major asked, “Should we wait for more of my teams to report in? The partisans could pull up the train tracks, mine the routes.”

“If there were two divisions of militia in Wrocław, we could still take the city route with little difficulty.”

Dryagin looked at the side hatch, where his intelligence officer had been poking his head through. “Razvedchik, what’s the report on enemy air? Still nothing in either Łask, Poznań, or Kraków?”

“Negative, sir. And we are monitoring everything they have in the sky. Spetsnaz are watching the airfields. NATO air remains out of Poland per the peace agreement. The PAF has birds up near the Belarusian border east of Warsaw, and they are running sorties in the northern part of the country, just circling. It appears they do not have a firm idea where we are, or else they just don’t want to come close enough to get fucked up.” He cleared his throat, realizing what he’d said. “Sir.”

“Very well,” Dryagin replied. “Advance elements will move out immediately.”