Red Metal

CHAPTER 49

Lieutenant Colonel Tom Grant had fallen asleep in the turret of his M1A2 Abrams, but only for a few minutes. His driver braked abruptly to avoid a Porsche 911 whipping off an on-ramp onto the autobahn, and Grant popped his head up and looked around.

The commander wiped sleep from his eyes and had just reached for his canteen, when he heard Captain Spillane over his headset.

“Hey, sir? Good news for a change. We got GPS back!”

“Hot damn!” Grant said. “You’re sure it’s working?”

“Yes, sir. The Blue Force Tracker is showing our position accurately.”

“It’s a Christmas miracle,” Grant joked.

To this Anderson said over the intercom, “Uh… I think it’s the twenty-seventh, sir. Time flies when you’re havin’ fun, huh?”

Grant smiled a little and keyed his mic. “Brad, we’re going to stop at the next exit. We’ll keep the rear of the Russian column in sight, then catch up. Radio to the HQ section and tell them I’ll need them to throw up a satellite net. Let’s see if we can actually get comms.”

Ten minutes later Lieutenant Colonel Grant stood in the middle of a small circle of Humvees. A few black satellite antennas stuck up from the vehicles. They each looked like a combination spiderweb and three-foot-high ray gun, but they functioned to talk to another tiny object, a DSCS III satellite 22,000 miles in space. As he approached, the communications sergeant raised the flap in the rear of the high-back Humvee.

“Hey, sir, I have a familiar voice for you on SATCOM.”

Grant picked up the handset. “This is Courage Six.”

The response sounded distant, but the voice was clear enough. “I’m pretty sure this is not Courage Six, because this is Courage Six actual.”

It was the true commander of the regiment, Colonel James Fenton. Grant said, “Damn, sir! Can’t tell you how good it is to hear your voice!”

“Likewise, Tom. Me and the XO are headed your way. Heard you guys have been in quite the fight.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You still following the Russians?”

“Affirmative.”

“They playing nice?”

“So far, but I’m hoping one of them tosses some litter on the road so we can blow their asses to hell.”

The colonel laughed into the radio. “Not sure that’s covered in your ROEs. Just hang close to them; we’ll be there in about two hours and you can brief me then. The XO and me are both sorry to have missed all the action. Nothing left to do now but follow those fuckers back to the Belarusian border.”

“Escort duty isn’t as cush as it sounds, sir. Especially when you’ve seen what these bastards did on the way in. Killed a lot of good men.”

“Roger that, Tom. You’ve done a helluva job. No one could have been fully ready for this. And loss of life is one of the burdens of command.”

“Copy, sir. See you in a couple of hours.”

Paulina and the five militia members assigned to her arrived at their prearranged point, the third-floor offices of a bank across the street and half a block down from the town hall, in Wrocław’s Market Square. She and her team found an RPG-7 leaning against the wall near the window for them, and two canvas rucksacks each holding three PG-7VR anti-armor rockets for the launcher. This, along with the rifles of the six militia members, was the full extent of the firepower at this position.

She hefted the weapon, ignored the stinging pain in her left forearm, and settled it down on her right shoulder. Aiming the unloaded weapon down at the street, she found herself comforted by the familiar weight and feel of it.

Paulina had been here in the center of the Old Town once on a school field trip when she was twelve, and she remembered walking around on the streets below. Her impression at the time was that it wasn’t as nice as Warsaw, but now she found the center of Wrocław to be idyllic and quaint.

As she peered through the sighting mechanism of the launcher, everything looked so normal out there in the crystal clear morning, but she knew there would be militia and possibly special forces preparing in all the buildings in sight, and this area would become a war zone if the Russians decided to roll down the street down below.

She’d been told to expect some Russian forces passing through the city on their way to the several bridges spanning the Oder River, and this did not surprise her. Unlike many of the militia she’d encountered today, she’d come here fully expecting a battle. But this didn’t mean she was any less scared. Considering what she’d already seen, she was, in fact, more terrified than those around her. She and her little team would comprise just one fireteam of many, but as far as she was concerned, the Russians were coming here, now, just for her.

She put the weapon back down, turned to her little group, and nodded toward a big kid who appeared to be about nineteen. He wasn’t particularly strong looking, but he seemed to be the fittest of the bunch. “Have you fired an RPG?”

“Yes. I am trained as an assistant RPG grenadier for the TDF in Kraków. I fired eight rounds last summer.”

That was more than Paulina herself had fired, during both training and combat, but she wasn’t going to let anyone else operate the RPG. She would be shooting rockets at the Russians today; there was no way she would delegate that.

Paulina looked over the rest of her squad. Two were women; one appeared to be thirtyish and the other was about Paulina’s age, a pretty brunette who reminded her instantly of Urszula, except she was much shorter. Paulina asked her, “What do you do?”

“I just joined last Monday. I haven’t really done anything.”

Paulina sighed.

The other team members — two rather overweight men — said they had been trained as riflemen, but neither seemed terribly confident in their abilities.

She looked back at the big young man. “You will be the assistant grenadier. I’m the grenadier.” To the others she said, “You will use your rifles to defend us from any dismounted troops, and you will shoot at Russians exposed through the open hatches of their tanks and APCs. When he and I fall, you will pick up the launcher and continue firing.”

Eyes widened at this, but the group remained silent.

She showed the women and the two older men how to operate the RPG-7, but she didn’t lift it again to do so. Her shoulder and arm were still complaining about hefting the metal tube earlier.

When she finished, she told her small team of amateurs to move a cluster of file cabinets to the windows to create some measure of protection; then she knelt down, pulled the six rockets from the canvas bags, and began positioning them next to her RPG-7 by the window.

There was a tremor in her heart, and just as she noticed it, a voice behind her said, “I’m so fucking scared. How do you do it?”

Paulina looked up. It was the pretty young girl on her team; she didn’t know her name and she didn’t want to know. The girl wore jeans and a University of Kraków sweatshirt. She didn’t look like a fighter, but she had an old SKS rifle on her back and a small bandolier with extra magazines on her shoulder.

Paulina shrugged. “It’s easier for me. I should have died two days ago. I’ll die today probably — we all will — but I got two days that I had no right to.”

This only made the other young woman more terrified; she waited for more explanation, but none came. Paulina just turned away and began loading the launcher.

She wasn’t going to make friends with this girl. That would just make this horrible situation even worse, and it would only give Paulina more pain if she somehow managed to survive again.

Normally she carried a cheap radio — most everyone in the Territorial Defense Force did — but the officers had gone around and collected them on the train before they arrived in Wrocław. The rank-and-file militia couldn’t be trusted not to use them. The radio silence meant the Russians wouldn’t pick up transmissions that could tip them off to the trap closing around them, but it also meant no one in the militia had a clear picture of the tactical situation right now.

She felt a low rumble in the bottoms of her feet, and then it passed up to her ankles, her knees, and then the rest of her body. She knew she was scared, possibly shaking a little from fear, but this wasn’t the reason her knees quivered.

Russian armor was approaching from the west.

“Everyone to your positions,” she said, doing her best to sound detached and unafraid.

The young man whom she’d chosen to help with the weapon spoke to her now. “My aunt lives four blocks from here.”

Without looking up she said, “Well, pray for her when you’re done praying for us.”

Just then, a young uniformed PLF lieutenant leaned into the little corner office. “I need a volunteer. Someone not in uniform.”

No one in Paulina’s group wore a uniform now, but no one volunteered, either. One of the two fat men said, “What for?”

This regular army officer wasn’t used to working around militia, so he bristled at the way he was being spoken to, but only for an instant. “I need somebody to take some RPGs across the street to the town hall. There’s a position there with a launcher but no rockets.”

The other of the two older militiamen asked, “Who the fuck sets up an emplacement and forgets to bring any ammo?”

“Polish SF has spent six hours building fighting positions for themselves and the militia in the dark. They couldn’t even use flashlights. Give them a break.”

They could all hear the distant rumble and grinding of the armor now. It sounded like it was coming right up the street outside.

“I’ll go.” It was Paulina. She turned to her team and looked to the tall boy. “You are the grenadier now. Pick one of these guys to assist. Good luck.”

“Wait,” said the younger girl. “You are our leader.”

Paulina shook her head. “You’re probably safer without me.” She pointed to the boy. “He is your leader now. Just shoot at the Russians when the shooting starts, and if you die today… well, congratulations, because the war is over for you.” And with that, she followed the lieutenant out of the room.

The runway at the 31st Tactical Air Base at Poznań, two hundred kilometers due north of Wrocław, had been cratered by Russian bombs, and it remained unusable. The taxiway had been hit as well, although it had been repaired the previous evening and would have been able to accommodate aircraft heading to the runway if there had been a runway to take off from.

There had been next to no activity anywhere outside the hangars of the base for the entire morning, but slowly the massive doors on two large hangars on the southeastern edge of the airfield slid open simultaneously, both under the power of several men.

And then, one by one, eight F-16s rolled out into the early-morning light. The sound of their engines grew, rumbling low across the flat ground.

The Russians had the airfield under constant observation by UAVs, and within seconds of the nose of the first F-16 appearing, calls went out on the Russian tactical air network.

The sergeants watching the UAV feeds wondered if the Poles were going to test the runway with a takeoff attempt, and the young men made quick bets with one another whether the aircraft would crash in the first crater, 500 meters down the runway, or the larger one some 250 meters farther.

But the first Fighting Falcon in the row did not head toward the damaged runway. Instead, it oriented itself in the center of the narrow taxiway, and then a five-meter plume of flame shot from its single engine and the aircraft lurched forward. The sergeants realized at the same time that the pilot was attempting to take off by using the repaired taxiway as a runway.

Five seconds after the first craft went to full afterburner, a second F-16 shot flame and launched up the taxiway behind the flight lead.

The rest of the flight followed suit.

Four of the eight aircraft were loaded with air-to-air missiles, both radar and infrared, as well as pairs of five-hundred-pound Mk 82 bombs.

The other four F-16s each had one air-to-ground munition on its center axis pylon.

It was the JASSM, the joint air-to-surface standoff missile.

GPS satellites over Europe had been operational for only a couple of hours, but it was enough time for the Poles to take the “dumb” iron bombs off their weapons pylons and replace them with these sat-guided standoff munitions. The JASSMs could strike from much farther away than the bombs, increasing the chances for both the success of the mission and the survival of the crew.

At the same time eight F-16s took off from Poznań, ten identical model F-16s rolled out of three partially damaged hangars at the 32nd Tactical Air Base at Łask, two hundred kilometers to the southeast of Poznań, and less than that northeast of Wrocław.

Four of these aircraft had JASSMs, and the other six were equipped to fight off Russian attack aircraft with air-to-air missiles.

The Łask Air Base flight of multirole tactical fighters was not forced to use the taxiway as a runway, although the one runway at the airfield was still damaged. They’d determined beforehand that they could safely take off in single file by using the northern lip of the runway, using the runway edge marking line as the center strip. It was a dangerous tactic, but one by one and in as quick succession as the flight from Poznań, the Polish pilots pushed their throttles past the full power indent and sent their engines to afterburner. All ten aircraft raced down the runway, their tires missing deep holes by less than a meter, and they rocketed into the air, one after another, soon after.

From the moment the first aircraft in Poznań appeared to enemy drones until the last of the F-16s at Łask went wheels up, only 151 seconds passed.

All eighteen F-16s immediately banked toward Wrocław on their afterburners.

Eduard Sabaneyev showered and shaved, then headed back up toward the command car in a positive mood. Still, the general expected another two hours of mild tension as Dryagin’s force moved through Wrocław.

The last report he’d received, just before stepping into the shower, was that so far not a single round had been fired in anger from either side. There were reports about police cars swerving out of the line of advancing armor, shocked citizens staring in horror, and some chaos at busy intersections, but it seemed to be going better than either he or Dryagin had imagined.

Soon enough he knew he’d get the call that his lead elements had reached the few militia barricades and made short work of the weekend warriors manning them. He caught himself hoping the militia would put up something of a fight, still thinking about his memoirs and how he could characterize his return from Stuttgart as some sort of a perilous journey where success or failure hung in the balance.

As he entered the command car, his communications officer looked up from his console. “Sir! Air defense reports multiple fighters taking off from Łask and Poznań simultaneously.”

Sabaneyev raised an eyebrow. “How many?”

The young man conferred over the radio a moment, then said, “Ten at Poznań, eight at Łask. All appear to be F-16s. We have Su-30s and MiG-29s closing to engage now, sir.”

“Very well.” He turned and addressed Colonel Smirnov. “Our fighters will be on them in minutes. The Poles got word we’re moving into Wrocław, and they are going to posture a little because they know we’ve slipped their ambush.”

Sabaneyev was correct that the MiGs and Sukhois in the Russian arsenal would close on the Polish F-16s quickly, but he did not yet realize that the ground-attack portion of these two flights wouldn’t need much time in the air before fulfilling their mission.

The F-16s were in the air less than four minutes when the order came to release the JASSMs.

Soon the big GPS-guided weapons raced across the sky to the south, from both the aircraft from Poznań and the others flying out of Łask. Some of the pilots crossed themselves, knowing they had likely just condemned fellow Poles to death by their actions, but they understood their mission, which was to say they understood the ramifications of doing nothing and letting Russia traverse Poland with impunity.

And within moments of launching his munition, the first F-16 pilot received a warning in his headset telling him that air-to-air missiles had been fired at his aircraft.

Paulina Tobiasz pushed a baby carriage down the sidewalk, away from the incredible sound coming from the multitude of vehicles approaching from the west.

There was no child in the carriage, only three long, fat RPG high-explosive anti-tank rounds covered by a blanket. She wore a bright green puffy coat, a white knit cap with a tassel, and thick mittens, and she kept her gaze ahead of her, not on the Russian armored personnel carriers rumbling closer and closer behind her as they moved into Market Square.

The RPG rounds weighed twenty pounds each, so Paulina struggled to push the carriage through the fresh snowfall on the sidewalk, and her left arm hurt like hell, but she did her best to appear relaxed lest the Russians grow suspicious that she wasn’t pushing a baby.

Paulina kept trudging along until she found herself across the street from her destination. By now the cacophony of engines was painful. She looked to cross and realized the lead vehicle in a group of five was rumbling closer. It was a Bumerang, the same type of armored personnel carrier that overran her position two days earlier. She knew there was little chance this was the same vehicle, loaded with the same troops, that she had encountered on the low hill near Radom, but that made it no less psychologically damaging to see it here. It was thirty meters away when she pushed the carriage in front of it, heading toward the main entrance of the town hall.

She looked to her left, eyeing the approaching vehicle as she crossed the street. A man about her age wearing goggles and a helmet looked down at her from the open hatch. He gave her a smile.

She forced a smile back, then looked away, pushing the carriage to the other side. The Bumerang rolled on toward the town square, obviously heading to one of the bridges that crossed the Oder, three blocks east.

The second of five vehicles passed by just as Paulina entered the town hall through the front door, and there she was met by two militiamen, who quickly hefted the rockets out of the carriage and started for the stairs.

“What about me?” she asked.

One of the men turned back to her. “Can you fire the launcher?”

“Yes.”

“Then come on. Hurry!”