Red Metal

CHAPTER 61

Forty-five minutes after the utter destruction of Red Blizzard 2, the wreckage continued to burn and smolder in the darkness, a long ribbon of stationary twisted metal, fire, and death that wound around desolate snowy farmland outside the Polish city of Jelenia Góra.

Thick black smoke raged from windows and jagged holes in the aluminum-shelled train cars and rose into the early-morning sky, disappearing into impossibly low gray cloud cover.

A column of Russian armor had appeared at the site just minutes after the attack, and by now it had arrayed itself in a defensive perimeter around what remained of the long train, their medium and heavy weapons all pointed skyward, ready to unleash a hail of gunfire if the Yankee aircraft returned. Troops had spilled out of the train, many wounded, and they joined their arriving compatriots, sought aid, picked through the wreckage for dead comrades, and smoked cigarettes uneasily, their weapons at the ready.

The number of Russian vehicles increased even more when a company of Bumerangs arrived from the west. They pulled up to the command car and its back hatches began to open. A dozen armed men leapt from the vehicles and adopted their own security barrier; many more carrying shoulder-fired antiair weapons fanned out and peered into the night sky; and then a man emerged from the rear of one of the armored vehicles.

Colonel General Eduard Sabaneyev climbed out in a crouch but quickly rose to his full height in order to survey the wreckage. He wore his heavy boot-length coat and a thick fur hat. He was surrounded by Colonel Smirnov and several other subordinates.

He turned to Smirnov now. “Go back and check on the prisoners. Give the generals a chance to get out and stretch their legs, too.”

Smirnov began walking back to a cluster of APCs farther back in the line.

Sabaneyev and the others had left the train just twenty-five minutes before the attack from the air. It had been at Smirnov’s urging that Sabaneyev agreed to move himself, a portion of his command force, and the prisoners into armored command vehicles heading east, under the assumption the train’s chances for survival declined every hour it remained in NATO territory.

Western GPS satellites were back online; by now surely the Poles had figured out antiair missiles were being fired from someplace other than the main column, and if they hadn’t already known that the Russians were using a modified train to egress through their territory, they certainly would have figured this out during the twelve-hour delay caused by Dryagin getting his armor out of Wrocław and heading back in the right direction.

The general had depended on the train as long as he dared, then acquiesced to Smirnov’s urging.

And not a moment too soon.

Sabaneyev was shaken, but he was hiding it. Since the beginning of the attack in Wrocław he’d been in a state of fury and near disbelief, but he’d let nothing show other than confidence tinged with anger that his men weren’t executing tactically in accordance with the strategic decisions he made.

Wrocław had been devastating to his forces: the Poles destroyed fully 21 percent of his armor, killed or severely wounded 335 of his men, and, even more critically, significantly slowed his exodus from Poland, because the once-organized column was now just dozens of groups of armor vehicles fending for themselves in small packs, often traveling overland, and the speedy highway travel had turned to a slow crawl over frozen fields. His thousands of men and hundreds of vehicles were scattered all over south-central Poland now, with some units engaged in combat at this very moment, and all his forces under danger from the air.

This had allowed American and German forces to flank them north of Wrocław and forced Sabaneyev and his still shell-shocked troops to engage with the Abrams and Leopard 2 tanks the moment they escaped from the death trap of the city.

It was total war here in southern Poland now. The cease-fire that Moscow had set up to ensure Sabaneyev’s safe return was nowhere in sight.

“A fucking disaster,” he said to himself. He’d planned to be crossing the border to Belarus about now, but the way the fight was going, he suspected he wouldn’t see the Bug River, which formed part of the border between the two nations, until late the next evening.

He still possessed sufficient armor and ammo to fight his way to Belarus, but the delay meant there would be more coordinated attacks from the enemy, because they would have more time to find and fix the Russian forces. Already he’d been told that Russian fighters were battling NATO aircraft trying to make their way into the area, and he had no doubt that NATO’s response would only increase by daylight tomorrow.

He’d radioed Moscow and demanded that Red Blizzard 3, the support train, be rushed this way. It had all the air defenses, tanks, troops, fuel, and ammunition to more than make up for Sabaneyev’s losses in the past half day, but it would be leaving Minsk only now, and it wouldn’t arrive in the area for several hours.

His triumphant mission for Russia had turned into something less triumphant, but, he told himself, he’d soldier on, destroy every bit of NATO personnel and weaponry he encountered, and make his way across the Bug River and into Belarus in less than twenty-four hours.

He’d still return to Moscow a hero of the rodina.

He looked up after being lost in these thoughts and found Colonel Smirnov standing there.

“We must leave, General,” Smirnov said. “Your command-and-control Bumerang will give you everything you need. Certainly not all the visibility you had on the train, but the radio access crucial to coordinate the withdrawal.”

Sabaneyev knew this, of course. He said, “I want our forces pressing east in company- and platoon-sized elements. We won’t have to face a large frontage on our route, only harassing attacks from the air, a few PLF hits, and the occasional strike from those damned tanks that won’t leave us be. Better we don’t give the enemy long highways full of targets. Keep individual movements small: back roads and overland when able. I want everyone to the border by midnight tomorrow, and pass the word that the only excuse I will entertain for failure will be death.”

“Yes, sir.” Smirnov hesitated a moment, then said, “To your command vehicle, sir?”

The good-looking Russian general took one last look at the detritus of his once-beautiful train, then turned on his heels and headed back to his APC.

Today was NATO’s day. But Red Blizzard 3 will meet us soon, and tomorrow will be Russia’s day.

Paulina looked the new arrivals over with the help of her flashlight. The two pickups that just ground to a halt in the gravel meant her squad had grown in size but not necessarily in experience. Every one of the eight new members in her tiny unit looked as though they had just left their day jobs. Three of them were not even in uniform. She’d get an excuse from each of them: they had lost them; they were at the cleaners when they were called up; they didn’t fit.

Most of the eight appeared terrified. She’d been told they had come straight in from Warsaw, so none of them had seen the fighting that had been going on here for the last several days, but on their way they would have passed some of the destruction in the wake of the Russian column: burned-out civilian vehicles on the side of the road, corpses of militia or PDF soldiers in body bags or left contorted in death along the snowy fields that lined the highway… They surely saw the glowing fires in the distance to the west, and now that they were out of their vehicles and standing on the gravel road, they could make out the distant booming of tank rounds and bombs dropping and even the chatter of heavy machine guns.

Paulina had heard on the radio that the Russians were all over the place now, in small groups, dozens of cells, all heading generally east but in a seemingly uncoordinated fashion. Their disciplined column had been stirred up on leaving Wrocław, and they had clearly decided they’d go wide with their formation to keep NATO aircraft guessing their locations.

This confusion meant Paulina could expect action at any time, so she concentrated on getting these new people folded into her unit quickly.

One of them, a youngish man, pulled Paulina aside as he got off the truck. “Hey, Sergeant… or whatever you are. I don’t think I’m supposed to be here. I had, like, a college deferment. So… can I leave?”

“No. Get in line with the others,” Paulina said impatiently.

“But I can show you—”

“In line!” Paulina shouted, surprising the young man. He was more surprised when she lifted her AK-47 and, using her rifle’s butt, pushed him over to the sloppy line of militia forming next to her more orderly group of four, all veterans of Wrocław.

One of the new militia members was a youngish girl. Her shtick seemed to be pretending to be bored; she constantly checked her cell phone even though Paulina knew the service was still out. Paulina could see through her façade and sensed she was actually scared out of her wits. There was also an older man, somewhere in his fifties, in the group, and he looked as lost as the kids around him.

She had already begun to worry over which of them would be able to take orders, which would be the most likely to stick around should they find themselves in another fight, and which were most likely to flee in panic and get shot in the process.

The girl, thought Paulina. Her bored façade was masking her true horror over her new lot in life.

Funny how I now no longer take the time to learn people’s names, she noted to herself.

She decided it was time to get their minds onto the task and convince them they could survive this if they’d just follow her orders.

She spoke with intensity, the edges of anger creeping into her voice.

“If you fail to listen to me or fail to look out for the man or woman to your left and right, you are going to die the first time we make contact with the Russians.”

No one spoke. Their fear and dread only grew.

I’m no officer, Paulina thought, but she kept talking, forcing some authority into her voice even though she hadn’t yet even made shift leader at her coffee shop.

And probably never would now.

“I and the rest of the squad must be able to count on you. We will rely on one another, or your families will bury you like many others I’ve served with over the past week. Complaining will not help you. Running will get you killed. Only determination and a resolve to work together will keep you alive. If you do what I say, I promise you that I will look out for you. Do you understand?”

Everyone nodded.

Paulina took a call on her radio and received an order to follow one of the train lines to the east and stop at every switching station she could find. She didn’t really know why, but earlier in the day she heard someone say they heard that the enemy had rolled a train straight into Germany, so she figured she would be looking for anybody working with the Russians along the line. It seemed like a routine and boring mission; the Russian forces were still to the west, and she was being sent east.

But she and her fifteen squad members climbed into three pickup trucks, their rifles on their shoulders, and headed out.

The highways and side roads were barren, almost eerily so. Everyone had been ordered indoors. Houses had even doused their lights or blacked out their windows in an almost World War II throwback to prevent Russian bombing. Paulina was pretty certain that was overkill, but she knew the citizens were terrified. Invasion from the east had been Poland’s national nightmare for a very long time.

In the first two hours they made stops at three different train-switching stations. Each time Paulina had her small force climb out of the trucks and patrol around. She critiqued them on how they walked and held their rifles at every opportunity. Each stop was a chance to teach them the few things she’d learned, both from Lieutenant Nowicki, the PLF officer who’d trained her before dying that first morning of the war, and from Paulina’s own combat against Russians since that time.

She taught them to drive without headlights; to stop a few hundred meters away from their destination and go on foot; to make regular security halts, take a knee, listen, and look.

She switched up the boys and men in the point position regularly. She’d learned that from a war movie her brother and dad liked, but it seemed to work and made sense. She stayed in the middle of their formation and kept everyone equidistant from one another.

It was nearly two a.m. now, and they walked a dark, snowy path along the tracks toward their fourth location of the night.

This station stood just south of a town called Łuków. The switching stations were all small brick buildings, more or less colocated with the train stations along the tracks. The switches themselves were outside the switching stations, next to the tracks. Pulling a lever would physically move the track, the rails sliding laterally to another track so an incoming train could be sent over to another line to continue its journey.

When they were still half a kilometer away from Łuków, bright lights turned on ahead of them, surprising everyone. Paulina whistled and the loose column stopped and knelt down. She moved to the front, took a knee, and pulled out her map.

This switching station building at Łuków was about one hundred meters southeast of the actual civilian train station. Unlike those at the other stations the squad had been to that morning, and unlike those at the blacked-out houses nearby, the lights of the entire rail yard in Łuków shone now. Green and yellow bulbs blinked by the track.

The Łuków rail yard looked open for business.

Paulina shifted her rifle up, putting the wooden stock at the ready against her shoulder and peering toward the flickering lights.

She said, “We’re going to check it out. Everyone keep silent.” Paulina waved for everyone to move out.

She found it surreal to be patrolling a Polish neighborhood, walking through gardens, across driveways, and on the quiet streets.

At one hundred meters from the switching station building, she halted her squad and pulled everyone in closer. She had them all kneel in a semicircle down behind a billboard for a local ballroom dance studio.

Flickering light from the rail station and switching station made shadows dance eerily. “I’m going ahead to check it out. You stay here and I’ll see what I can see.”

Paulina crept off, moving forward a few steps at a time. At fifty meters from the switching station building she slipped into a private yard so she wouldn’t be as exposed to anyone looking out windows. She continued through back gardens, nearing her objective, then knelt down behind a wooden fence.

Now she saw movement inside the switching station shack. The outline of a man in the bright lights.

Paulina edged closer, now crawling on her right hand and knees, still favoring her wounded left arm and shoulder as she struggled to push her rifle through the snowfall in front of her. She found a place under a bush, right at the edge of the station grounds, and focused again on the man. He was young, somewhere in his twenties, and physically fit. After a few moments she noticed he wore the cap of an employee of PKP, the main railway operator here in Poland.

Relieved, she stood up and started to walk over to the building to tell him to turn his lights off and go home.

But as she began around the side of the shack, still in the darkness, she stopped cold. Four men with rifles stood there in front of the shack, lit up by the red and green lights flashing above them. They looked off intently in the opposite direction from her, to the east; otherwise they would have seen her.

They wore military uniforms of some kind. She wondered if they were another militia unit who’d been sent here to check the station.

Frozen, she watched and listened carefully. In the crisp winter night sound traveled clearly. A radio beeped. One of the men took a handset off another man, who wore a backpack radio.

Her militia unit didn’t have anything like that.

Then the man answered the radio, and she could clearly hear him speaking Russian.

“Gówno,” she breathed out, finally exhaling.

The door to the shack opened and the man in the PKP hat stepped out. She could see the AK-47 in his hand now, and he began talking to the others.

She backed away slowly, her eyes locked on the men bathed in the green and red lights; then, when she was back in the neighbor’s garden, she turned around and ran.

Back with her squad, Paulina motioned for all of them to come in tightly to her. They obeyed.

She spoke in a quiet whisper. “Do not make a sound.” They all nodded. “Russians,” she said, and everyone’s eyes grew wide, visible even in the darkness. “Five of them.” She paused. “We’re going to kill them all,” she announced. “We will crawl into the yard adjacent to the switching station. Then I will assign each of you a target.”

One of the men asked, “What if… what if they surrender?”

“We are going to shoot them. There will be no one surrendering.”

That sank in a moment.

The men and women looked terrified, but there were nods all around. “Good. I will assign multiple shooters for each target; that way we cannot fail.”

She motioned for all of them to rise and put their rifles to their shoulders. She led the squad to the far side of the yard, and then they dispersed under the snow-covered bushes.

The Russians were still there, peering to the east.

Paulina crawled to each person, verifying their target and making sure their safeties were off on their AKs. Four of the Russians would be targeted by three militia members apiece, and her two remaining “veterans” would shoot the fifth man.

Then, like the chief executioner of a firing squad, she sat up on her haunches, lifted her own weapon, and yelled, “Fire!”

Fourteen rifle shots rang out almost as one. Paulina watched five men fall, knocked back by the force of multiple impacts. The men and women kept shooting till all the Russians lay still.

“Reload,” she said, and looked down the rail yard toward the station, half expecting more enemy to materialize out of the darkness or to hear the horrifying sound of the Russian machine gun or 30mm cannon she had learned to dread.

After a time she stood and motioned for the rest to follow. She walked forward, her weapon scanning in front of her, until she made it up to the dead men in front of the track. She kicked them all, checking for any signs of life.

There were none.

She went inside the shack now, looked over the dead man there, then came back outside.

She waved the rest forward, then ordered everyone to stay alert.

“What were they doing?” asked one of the new members of her squad.

“Waiting for something, I guess.”

“They were here at the switching station. Do you suppose they were going to switch the tracks?”

Paulina looked at the waterproof panel outside the shack. It looked like the cover of the panel had been pried off. On it were five thick buttons. Three were unlit, black, but the other two were red and green, obviously corresponding to the lights above the station.

“Maybe,” she said, “but there has been no rail traffic. I would say if they wanted to switch the track, they would have already done it. Why wait?”

Paulina rifled through the men’s packs. Food, civilian clothing, ammunition, a few maps and radio booklets. In the red and green light Paulina went through it all. None of it made much sense to her.

Then she felt the rumble in her knees on the cold ground. Vibrations growing by the second.

“A train is coming from the east,” she said.

She stood back up and looked at the blinking lights next to the station. If green is go and red is stop, maybe we just switch the order, she thought, looking up at the two solid red and two blinking green lights.

She wondered if reversing whatever the Russians had likely done would be better than keeping things as they were.

“Hey,” said one of the new members. “Whatever we’re doin’, we have to do it and get out of here.”

The sounds of the train were clearly audible now. It seemed huge and fast, and it was obviously running without lights.

She said, “Screw it. I’m switching this thing.”

She pressed the green button, which began flashing yellow. She pressed the red button next; it, too, flashed yellow.

Suddenly she heard a loud whir and a clank a few meters down the rail yard. She watched the tracks move to their new alignment and slam into place.

The train closed at high speed.

“Everyone off the tracks! Grab the Russians and drag them away. Then get into the hedges or over here with me inside the switching shack.” They did as instructed, and Paulina and the older man propped one of the dead Russians up against the wall of the shack, then hefted him, dropping him in the switch master’s stool.

The train appeared in the station lights, barreling through at over one hundred kilometers an hour. The onrushing wave of cold air became a wall of wind just as Paulina shut the small metal door to the shack. The three militia members in there with her peered out the window as the train rushed by. Paulina watched, trying to count the cars. She gave up after forty. Heavy machinery, engineering equipment, tanks, armored personnel, rows and rows of troop cars. She could even make out the faces of Russian soldiers in the windows. There were heavy antiaircraft machine guns on each car, the crew manning them bundled for the frigid temperatures and staring out into the night.

When the train was gone, Paulina and the others with her waited a few more moments, then emerged from the shack. The others came over from their hiding positions adjacent to the tracks and huddled together, all looking to Paulina for direction.

“Prepare to load back up. We will report this but continue our mission.”

“Do we know where they are going now?”

“No,” Paulina answered. “But if we’re lucky, neither do they.”

The young, waifish girl spoke up now. “Sergeant, is it okay if we take the dead guys’ guns?”

Paulina smiled. This girl was getting the hang of it. “Hell yes, it is. They are nice ones.”