In the command car the comms officer spoke above the din of conversation. “Sir! Air defense reports multiple missile launches from the Polish F-16s!”
“Air-to-air?” General Sabaneyev asked.
“Negative. Too slow.” After a pause he said, “They appear to be JASSM 158 cruise missiles.”
“Cruise missiles?” He looked around the command-and-control vehicle. “Launched at what possible targets? We’re on the move; there is no sane reason to fire a cruise missile at a target that won’t be where it was when you launched.”
The comms officer said, “I… I don’t know the targets, sir.”
Now the fifty-two-year-old general let his concern show. “Those are GPS guided. Should have kept the European satellites knocked out for a bit longer. Well… I trust we’re going to shoot them down.”
Colonel Smirnov said, “Da, General.”
The communications officer added, “Current course has the first missiles arriving in vicinity of Wrocław in two minutes twelve seconds, if they don’t terminate before.”
This was not much time to knock them out of the sky before impact.
The general looked around at the command car; baffled faces looked back at him. After several seconds the general shouted, “Halt the train!”
An order was given, but before the train began to slow the general said, “Tell Dryagin to disperse his elements from formation and get off their routes until I put them back on. The Poles might be trying to get their cruise missiles to hit the train and the column.”
Now the train slowed quickly, and the order was passed to Colonel Dryagin.
Sabaneyev sat quietly thinking for several seconds, still trying to figure out what was going on. Then it hit him. He realized suddenly these missiles had not been fired by Poland at him. No, they’d been fired by Poland at Poland.
As the colonel began relaying the order to disperse over the radio, Sabaneyev grabbed the communications officer by the arm. “The bridges! They are going to blow the fucking bridges over the Oder!”
He took the radio from the man and repeated this to Dryagin. The colonel’s reply came over the net quickly. “That’s madness, sir. We’ll wipe out their militia positions in minutes. Why would they want us stuck in the middle of their city?”
Sabaneyev barked back. “We’ve missed something! This is a trap!”
“What are your orders, sir?”
Sabaneyev looked at the plotting board on the wall, indicating the location of both the train and Dryagin’s force. He keyed the mic. “We can’t back the column out of the city; you’re in too deep already. You must advance! We need armor on the eastern side of the Oder—now, to protect a river crossing!”
Junior Sergeant Bogdan Nozdrin ordered his driver to floor his Bumerang APC toward the nearest bridge over the Oder River, following the order that had just been passed on to the forward elements of the column to get armor over the bridges as fast as possible.
He was five back from the lead vehicle, having just passed through Market Square in front of the town hall and trailing two more Bumerangs and two GAZ Tigrs. Behind him were another four APCs and two more reconnaissance utility vehicles.
This small convoy was on the left flank of the main column passing through Wrocław just to the southwest, but Nozdrin and his section had been sent ahead to scout the bridges before the tanks arrived. This put them closest to the Oder when the call came, so Nozdrin’s driver was pushing his heavy vehicle forward to stay close to the big green hulks in front of them.
Just as Bumerang Roman One-Four reached Swietego Ducha, a street only a block from the river, an explosion in the distance shattered glass out of the buildings around Nozdrin, rocking him hard onto his heels and sending him ducking for cover back down under the lip of his hatch.
His headset came off as he crashed down into his station, so he rushed to put it back on. As he did this he heard another explosion, smaller but much closer. He called his driver, five meters away up a narrow crawl-through, past the vehicle’s engine and at the front of the Bumerang. “What’s happening?”
“RPGs, sir! Roman One-Three took a turret hit right in front of me, but he’s still moving.”
“The first explosion sounded like—”
Another impact rocked Nozdrin’s vehicle from behind. “Shit!” he said, scanning with his camera to try to orient himself. “Gunner, return that fire!”
There were more loud booms to the northeast, and Nozdrin just scanned on his camera, desperately trying to find information about what the fuck they were driving into.
An instant later the turret in front of Nozdrin’s station swiveled to the left, and 12.7mm cannon fire began pulsating from it, a painful sound even down here inside the armor covering the vehicle.
Over the radio he heard from the lead vehicle in his column. “This is Ambal One-Two. We’re at the river, but the bridge has been destroyed! Part of it is in the water and smoking. We will turn left to cross at the—” A few seconds later: “Two! Two bridges are down!”
“Three bridges left standing?”
There was no answer.
“Ambal One-Two, how do you copy?”
“Ambal One-Two. A third bridge has been hit. Assessing damage.” A pause. “It’s partially down. I can’t see the other two from here. We’ll have to get closer to—”
Nozdrin heard the explosion through the microphone. Seconds later he heard the same boom outside his vehicle as the sound waves reached him from Ambal One-Two’s position.
Over the mic a voice said, “This is Ivan One-One. Ambal One-Two is hit. Anti-tank rocket fired from across the river. Vehicle destroyed. Nobody could have survived that!”
Nozdrin ordered his driver to continue to the Oder, although it was the last place in the world he wanted to be right now.
Sabaneyev could hear the action five kilometers to the east from where he stood in the command car of his parked train. He looked through his binos out the window at smoke pillars rising over the city in the icy but sunny morning.
Behind him Smirnov said, “Sir, I’m getting reports that Anna Company is being engaged from ground positions near the Grunwald Bridge.”
“The bridge? That’s not near the known militia positions.”
Colonel Smirnov said, “This is an ambush. In flagrant violation of the NATO cease-fire!”
The general brushed his comment away. “Calm down. We aren’t the only ones who can play dirty. I was expecting this.”
He was expecting some action from Poland, true, but he had not been expecting it here. His brigade thick in a city coming under fire from multiple positions was the last thing he wanted or needed.
“Tell the lead elements to blast their way through. Get over the damned river; I don’t give a damn how!”
Paulina stood in the window of a municipal office next door to the town hall, shouldered the RPG-7 launcher, and felt the arm of one of the two militiamen with her on her back.
The explosions on the river, half a kilometer off her left shoulder, had been her signal to open fire. Even before she aimed her weapon she heard the chattering of machine guns, the whooshes and booms of RPG launchers, and other rockets firing onto the Russian columns, both below here in Market Square and on other, parallel streets leading toward the Oder.
But she pushed it all out of her mind, along with the searing pain in her left arm, and she concentrated on her task.
“Backblast, clear!” her assistant shouted over the sound of gunfire.
She aimed the weapon’s sight on a Bumerang one hundred meters to the east. There were other Russian vehicles much closer to her position, and a GAZ Tigr armored car was directly below her window, but she’d picked this Bumerang because she could hit it at a vulnerable point, the lower rear.
She squeezed the trigger, the weapon lurched, and the backblast sent a wave of warmth behind her. The rocket raced from the window, shot over three other Russian vehicles, and slammed into the rear portside tire of the Bumerang at the northern end of the square.
The explosion wasn’t impressive to Paulina; there was a small flash and black smoke and debris. No fireball, no secondary detonations.
But the Bumerang APC immediately veered to the right and impacted a brick wall, and there it stopped.
As the smoke cleared she saw that two of the four big black tires on the port side of the big armored carrier were gone, and smoke poured from a third.
A mobility kill. Good enough, thought Paulina.
The rear hatch opened and troops began to climb out, but a Polish machine gun hidden in a car rental agency farther west in Market Square raked the area, dropping most of the men before they made it more than a few meters.
Paulina spun out of the window and knelt to reload her weapon with the help of her assistant gunner, and then heavy machine-gun rounds tore into the room right above her head. A man next to her had been churning the street below with his Kalashnikov; he was lifted off his feet as he tried to turn his weapon toward incoming fire, and he was dead before his eviscerated body slammed down onto the floor.
Paulina lay flat and shoved the second HEAT round into the hot launcher while all around her bullets pocked the walls and ceiling. Burning bits of office debris blew around her, ignited by her backblast, but she ignored all the danger and prepared to rise back up and fire again.
But clearly the gunner of a GAZ Tigr below had seen the smoke trail of her rocket leading away from her window, and its auto cannon kept up withering fire on her position.
She tried to crawl out of the room with the RPG to get a new position down the hall, but her shoulder and arm wouldn’t allow it. She grabbed the man closest to her and pulled his face to hers so she could be heard over the incredible noise. “Carry the RPG! We’re moving!”
She dragged herself along the tiles with her right forearm, her tennis shoes grabbing the flooring as she used her feet to push her along, low and flat.
Four of the bridges over the Oder were down, but both JASSMs fired at Milenijny Bridge missed their target. One fell a thousand meters short, impacting a row of unoccupied warehouses, and the other plowed into the roof of an apartment building fifty meters beyond the bridge and detonated, blowing out the top three floors of the structure.
Junior Sergeant Bogdan Nozdrin, commander of Bumerang Roman One-Four, had been informed on the battlenet that all the nearby bridges save one had been knocked out and that his mission was still to get across the Oder as fast as possible. He sat buttoned up in his commander’s station at the rear of his vehicle, watching the screen in front of him as he swept the camera around outside, looking both for targets and for a way out of the kill box he had been ordered into by his commanders.
The armor of his APC took continuous hits from small arms, which would do nothing more than scratch off some paint, but all around him he could hear the sounds of streaking rockets and exploding ordnance, and he knew a well-placed anti-tank round could either disable the vehicle or kill him, the other two crew members, and the nine infantry troops in the back of the vehicle with him.
He saw on his moving map display that his Bumerang was just coming to the end of Plac Uniwersytecki, and he ordered his driver to turn left. A block later they were on Grodzka Street, which ran along the western bank of the Oder, and here he got his first look both at the narrow frozen river down a slight concrete embankment and at Uniwersytecki Bridge, which had been severed in two places by what he gathered to be a pair of Polish-fired missiles.
There was one bridge left undamaged, but it was the farthest away from Roman One-Four, and the realization that the Poles were blowing up their own damn bridges made Nozdrin disinclined to drive onto it.
The 7.62mm machine gun on his vehicle began firing long bursts; his gunner had identified a target on the far bank of the river that apparently didn’t warrant rounds from the 30mm auto cannon. This meant it was likely a soft-skinned vehicle or even troops in the open.
A new sound erupted from outside the vehicle: heavy explosions, impacting both the street and the walls of a building nearby.
The driver called over the intercom, his voice nearly wild from panic, “Mortars!” A massive detonation rang Nozdrin’s ears, and then: “Direct hit on one of our Tigrs. Blew it to hell!”
Shit! Shit! Shit! Nozdrin thought. The fucking Poles are dropping mortars on their own city now? He was exposed to all the buildings up and down the opposite bank of the river, the enemy was shelling his position, and he had nearly a kilometer of this to endure before he even had a chance of crossing the lone remaining bridge.
“Okay,” he said into his mic. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”
Seconds later Roman One-Four broke ranks with the other three Bumerangs and the three remaining Tigrs from his scout column, turned to the right, and rolled off Grodzka Street and up onto the sidewalk. It then crashed into the railing alongside the riverbank, bending the ironwork like soft clay as it rolled over it. The lumbering beast tipped down, dropped onto the icy white surface of the Oder River, and cracked it easily.
The massive green armored vehicle crashed into the river through the ice and snow.
Once all eight tires had disappeared below the surface, the Bumerang’s two massive hydro jets turned on, and the APC pushed forward, high against the twenty-centimeter-thick ice sheet over the Oder. The vehicle moved slowly and with great effort, but Roman One-Four did advance as it churned up the hard river surface and motored like an icebreaker toward the other side.
The 30mm automatic cannon chattered now, tearing up a building on the opposite bank where the smoke trail of an RPG had been spotted by Nozdrin’s gunner.
The steel hull shattered the ice in front of it as it moved along, and in the thickest parts of the frozen river the front tires even rolled out of the water and up onto the white expanse, only to crack through and crash back into the dark, icy water. This Roman One-Four did, over and over, as it clawed its way across the frozen river.
Two more Bumerangs followed the first, and as Nozdrin scanned behind him through his camera for additional threats, he saw dozens of dismounted Russian troops racing from the museum, crossing through the smoke and haze hanging over Grodzka, and leaping over the railing. These men tumbled down snowbanks and onto the frozen river, where they began pouring fire on the northern bank and moving over the ice as they crossed on foot.
In seconds, mortars began raining down on the river, blasting foamy water, ice, and snow high into the air.
Nozdrin called his superiors to let them know Bumerangs were making their way across the Oder, and soon the order came from other APC companies to follow suit.
He alternately yelled at his driver to make the crossing faster and at his gunner to keep pouring fire on anything he saw, while he rotated his camera around looking for new targets. He was just panning across the Hotel HP Park Plaza on the northern bank when he saw a flash and then the smoke trail of a large rocket fired from a top-floor bedroom. The round raced over the footbridge to Słodowa Island and slammed into Roman One-Three, just to the left and slightly behind Roman One-Four, which was now halfway across the Oder.
Nozdrin was almost knocked out of his seat by the nearby explosion. He panned over to check the vehicle and saw that an 84mm high-explosive round had hit the underbelly of the Bumerang just as its front wheels rose out of the water and onto the ice, detonating against the thinner armor under the engine.
The front-engine design of the Bumering protected the vehicle’s crew from the explosion of the rocket itself, but the engine was torn to pieces, and the vehicle stopped moving forward. It smoked from multiple points as it slowly sank back into the water in the center of the river.
As Nozdrin watched, the men inside One-Three began pouring out of the rear exit, falling through the broken ice and into the water.
The river was only five meters deep, but it was easy for a man wearing steel body armor to drown in the icy water. Those who did scramble out and found the hard ice to the left and right of the vehicle’s trail faced automatic fire from multiple weapons on the northern bank and Słodowa Island, which chased the men as they tried to find some cover.
Russian soldiers caught in the open ran to their left, searching for a place to hide near the wreckage of the shattered University Bridge, just fifty meters away.
Nozdrin keyed his intercom mic again, calling to his driver. “Faster! Get us across, damn you!”