Red Metal

CHAPTER 63

The four massive Vericor Power Systems ETF40B gas turbines shrieked as they came alive on the landing craft in the Boxer’s well deck. Called an LCAC, it was a flat hovercraft that rode the waves to the beach on a cushion of air. They had already made two trips ashore and back, dropping off a platoon of four tanks and an infantry company — nearly 140 Marines.

Pretty solid work, thought Connolly as he looked at the long line of Marines filing down the Boxer’s gangway behind him as another company prepared to go ashore along with the vehicle crewmen for four light-armored vehicles. All the Marines wore eighty-pound rucksacks and body armor and each carried either a rifle, a carbine, or a machine gun. The clatter of their boots was drowned out as the LCAC’s turbines became the only noise anyone could hear. As with jet engines, the blast of hot exhaust from the adjustable propulsion systems filled the air, knocking any unwary Marine back a step.

The ship’s crew chief beckoned Connolly and his small contingent of 5th Marines regimental headquarters personnel to board the craft. The wood planks of the Boxer’s well deck were slippery with seawater from the LCAC’s second return from the beach, as well as with oil and grease. Connolly had spent plenty of time aboard U.S. Navy amphibs and was able to keep his feet as he moved along, but he and the men climbing aboard all watched as two headquarters guys slipped and fell, skidding toward the deck of the landing craft with the rolling of the ship, landing in a heap next to a cluster of nineteen- and twenty-year-old radio operators.

Connolly was extra careful, because given the laughs and catcalls the young men gave to the two junior officers who fell in front of him, he gathered these Marines would just love to see a lieutenant colonel take a spill, too.

On board the hovercraft he made his way past the two Humvees and over to the LAVs. The light-armored vehicle was the smaller and faster Marine equivalent of a Russian BTR or Bumerang. It had eight wheels, and the LAV-25s on the deck each had a 25mm cannon and carried six scouts in back trained in battlefield reconnaissance.

Since Connolly was to ride near Colonel Caster as one of the staff, he’d be in a LAV–C2, the command-and-control variant. These vehicles were beefed up with a ton of communications equipment: they had satellite and three types of radio bands necessary to speak to the rest of the task force, along with long-range communication back to the Navy ships or to USMC aircraft overhead, and computer assets tied into the NATO global communications grid to provide them with the basic satellite uplink with classified Internet.

Connolly found his ride, attached his pack on the side of the vehicle with a heavy steel shackle, and climbed aboard. He pushed past all the gear and tackle inside and took his seat.

The back steel hatches closed and the LCAC’s engine shrieked to an even louder pitch. He picked up his crew helmet, pulled the built-in earphones over his ears, and settled in for the short trip to shore.

Exhaust blasted through every crack in the hatches of the LAV. There was no way to avoid the fumes, and soon everyone inside fought nausea.

After ten minutes the massive hovercraft began rising and falling dramatically, presumably as it rode the large waves of the shoal waters. Confirming this assumption, blasts of sand mixed with sea air came blowing through Connolly’s LAV as the landing craft crossed from the surf zone and onto Bakhresa Beach, just south of the Dar es Salaam port facility.

There was a whoosh and one last great cloud of sand inside the LAV, and then the LCAC came to a halt.

Connolly stuck his head up and out of the hatch. Bright light off the sandy beach filled his vision. Just beyond the yellow sand he saw thick palm trees, and farther inland he could make out the edge of Dar es Salaam’s urban sprawl.

The beach was already packed with Marine Corps equipment and men. A large staging area contained row upon row of seven-ton trucks and aluminum pallets of supplies.

The back hatch of the LAV opened and one of the sergeants motioned him off. “Sir, you need to head over there and grab your supplies.”

Connolly lined up with the other Marines and picked up his MREs, enough water to fill his CamelBak, and six boxes of 5.56mm ammunition. He put it all in his pack, except for the ammo, which he took back to the LAV and loaded into his M4 carbine magazines.

Connolly watched the sergeants in the vehicle with him as they looked over their new windfall in ammunition, cataloging it like it was Halloween candy. AT-4 anti-tank rockets, M72 LAW light anti-tank rockets, Mk 153 SMAW bunker-busting rockets, 40mm under-rifle grenades, M67 hand grenades, and lots and lots of machine-gun ammo.

A Marine sergeant handed Connolly three grenades. Connolly took them and stuffed them in his pouch.

“You need a refresher course on how to make it go boom, sir?”

Connolly chuckled. “I know how to throw a grenade, Devil Dog.”

“Check, sir. Figured you’d been behind a desk for a while.”

Connolly sighed. It wasn’t as if he’d never been teased by the smart-alecky and headstrong sergeants the Marine Corps was famous for, but the man’s comment was a little too close to the truth these days.

“What’s your name again, Marine?”

“Casillas, sir. Sergeant Casillas.”

“All right, Casillas, let’s make a deal. If I have to throw a grenade, you promise to lay down a really heavy base of fire so I get a good toss and don’t catch a round through the running lights. Deal?”

“Sir, if you finally get me and the boys into a firefight like that, you won’t have to ask. I’ll have the hammer down so hard, the only thing you’ll have to worry about is the next paper cut you’ll get back in your office.”

Connolly laughed. “Damn, Casillas, you got a thing for officers?”

“No, sir, I just know who does the real work in the regiment.”

Marine sergeants had a way of squaring up to their bosses and getting away with it. They obeyed every legal order down to the letter; it was just their way of testing their bosses to see if they could hack it, assessing their leaders for any possible weakness.

Connolly watched a forklift shimmy down the gangplank, its operator driving a pallet over to a pool of waiting vehicles. On the side of the box was stenciled block lettering reading:

Connolly had put the word up the Pentagon, and they’d authorized the regiment to break into the LFORM. This was short for “landing force operational reserve material,” a war stock for the Marines on board in the bottom of the naval amphibious ship’s holds that no one was allowed to touch without approval from the secretary of defense. There was definitely a “Break glass in case of war” aura around this ammunition. To the officers of the regiment, Connolly had already paid his dues when he placed a call back to the Pentagon to shorten the approval chain to use the ammo and equipment.

Now he just needed to earn the respect of the men.

Connolly and the rest of the 5th Marines began rolling to the north. He, Lieutenant Colonel McHale, and a unit of Force Recon would race ahead of the slower-moving equipment and meet the Russians in combat.

These Marines were loaded for bear and, for the first time in any of their lives, they were up against the Russian bear.

Colonel General Eduard Sabaneyev stood outside in the snow, next to the engine of his Bumerang command-and-control vehicle to keep him warm. Standing with him was Colonel Danilo Dryagin, his assault force commander. The two men had not seen each other since before the raid into Western Europe began four days earlier, but in all the chaos of the last day the colonel and the general found themselves close enough to each other’s locations to arrange a face-to-face meeting.

It was midmorning now, the temp was below freezing, and it looked like the low gray clouds would drop sleet or snow at any moment.

“This column of yours is a fucking mess, Dryagin,” said the general.

“Admittedly, sir. My units exited the urban center of Wrocław via fourteen different routes. Some of them drove right into PLF dug in along the highway, and this split them into even more groups. I fully agree with your orders to keep the convoy split up to reduce NATO’s ability to fix us to one position, but hundreds of vehicles separated by a hundred kilometers means that coordinating an effective response to each attack has become… a challenge.”

“What percentage of the original attacking force has been eliminated?”

“Forty-four percent is the latest estimation from my XO. But it is a fluid battle space, as you clearly know.”

Sabaneyev and the company of vehicles surrounding him had been pounded by jets just an hour earlier. None of the armor had been destroyed, but some troops riding on the hull of a T-14 had been killed and a scout car was damaged and left behind along with the wounded troops riding in it.

Sabaneyev replied with sarcasm. “Yes… I have noticed that our enemy continues to engage.”

Dryagin said, “Did you receive an update about what happened to Red Blizzard 3?”

The general rubbed the back of his neck, a show of stress, but only for a moment, and only in front of Dryagin.

“Fucking Borbikov’s hot-shit Spetsnaz boys were supposed to send the train to the southwest. Instead, the tracks never got switched, so it rolled on to the northwest. It traveled forty kilometers before they realized what happened. Forty kilometers closer to Warsaw. They tried to stop, to reverse, and to go back to the switching station, but in that time Polish tanks arrived and destroyed the train.”

Dryagin nodded slowly without revealing emotion to his general. “We are growing short on munitions. We had counted on the cargo train delivering us supplies, troops, and armor, and we had counted on being together to receive and disseminate them. As it is now, Comrade General, we are like sixty or seventy roving bands of marauders, plus however many Spetsnaz teams Borbikov has kept in theater. It makes things more difficult from a logistical standpoint.”

The general said, “So we press on. Hard. No stopping now. Not even to lick our wounds. The Poles might be arrayed at the border in numbers to threaten small groups of our vehicles. They might not know where we all are right now, but they certainly know where we are all going. Tighten everyone up and we’ll punch through the border together. Mow down everything in your path. No remorse, Colonel. Do you understand? No remorse!”

Dryagin straightened up and nodded. “Da, Comrade General, but that means the forward units will have to pause for the rear elements to catch up. Could be a delay of another twenty-four hours.”

Sabaneyev was surprised by this. “That long?”

“There is fighting to the west. Our forces there have to push through or go around. This will take time.”

Sabaneyev looked around. “This forest is decent protection. We have plenty of antiair to keep the enemy aircraft reticent about mounting any large-scale attack. We will stay in the woods and have our scouts keeping an eye out for those American tanks that have been bedeviling us for days. When we get our force together, we’ll continue.”

Sabaneyev thought about being stuck yet even longer in Poland, and anger welled inside him. “I want air defense on full alert at all times. Tell your men.”

“Of course, Comrade General.”

Captain Raymond “Shank” Vance rubbed the cast on his left hand and thought about ripping it off to scratch the maddening itch that had been growing by the hour. But the dressings were tight and there was no way he could slide a finger through to get to the source of the discomfort.

The one time he had been able to catch his reflection in a window on the way to the hospital, he saw his left eye swollen shut and the left side of his face pockmarked by three deep lacerations and innumerable smaller cuts from canopy glass turned to shrapnel by an Su-57’s cannon.

His left hand was in the worst shape. It was broken and the doctors thought a fragment of a cannon round must have pierced it completely, but when they took him into surgery to remove shrapnel and set the bones, the surgeon said a visual inspection of the nerves around the damaged areas made him optimistic that Shank would regain full use of the hand.

For the time being, however, it hurt like hell.

His head ached behind his swollen eye now, but it wasn’t as bad as the itching or the pain in his hand.

He could tell he was receiving special treatment here at this aid station set up by the Territorial Defense Force. Even with the Polish Land Forces moving out of the area a couple hours earlier, he continued to receive good medical care from doctors working with the militia. He didn’t speak a word of Polish, but enough of them spoke English to make things work. Most referred to him simply as “Mr. Pilot,” which he didn’t mind.

He picked up from some of their discussions around him that the militia had watched as he destroyed the Russian train, only to see him get shot down by a Russian Sukhoi on his egress. A few dirty, war-ragged militia members, looking more like World War II anti-Nazi partisans than any modern-day military force, had come to the clinic to meet him in person. Some of the older Poles’ English was nonexistent, but they seemed happy to just pat him on the head and offer him sips of vodka or some other, unusual-smelling liquor.

Shank was lying alone with his thoughts now, his mind addled by painkillers and booze but still wondering about the fate of Nooner and the rest of the pilots in his squadron, when a young girl with dirty-blond hair stepped into the room full of wounded men on hospital beds. She wore a militia uniform with mud-caked knees, an AK-47 over her shoulder and a black knit cap on her head. Her face was smudged with smoke but pink from the cold and her youth.

Shank thought she looked both like a kid who might pour him a latte at Starbucks and also like a battle-hardened soldier.

Shank tracked her as she looked around at the two dozen or so patients, then stepped over to a middle-aged man with his foot in a cast suspended over his bed. She talked to him a moment, rubbing a cast on her left forearm as she did so. She then scanned the room until, surprisingly to Shank, she locked eyes with him. She walked to him, picking her way around the other wounded and moaning men lying on mattresses, bed frames, cots, chairs, and any other furniture the Polish orderlies had dragged into the room to turn this small office supply store into a makeshift hospital.

The blonde stepped up to his full-sized hospital bed. There was no smile, no pat on the head. No greeting at all. “You are the American pilot?”

Shank had spent years in and out of combat zones, and he sized the young woman up instantly by her intense eyes. This kid’s been in the shit for the past few days, and she’s lost friends.

He smiled at her a little. “Yes, ma’am. I’m the Hog driver who got shot down,” he said.

She was confused. “Hogs? Hogs… like pigs?”

“No… it’s my plane. We call it the Hog.”

“Yes. Your plane crash. It fly like pig.”

Shank laughed and winced with fresh pain. “Right.” He smiled, extended his right hand. “I’m Ray. People call me Shank.”

She took his hand but did not return the smile. “Tobiasz.”

“You got a first name?”

“Of course. Doctor says you walk, yes?”

“Yeah, I can walk,” Shank confirmed. He’d used the bedpan a couple of times, but just a few minutes earlier he’d walked across the room to the bathroom and had managed to put one foot in front of the other with a limp off his sore right ankle.

She looked over his swollen eye, the bandages on his cheek, and the cast on his hand and wrist. “You know to talk to the airplanes?” She shook her head quickly, clearly knowing her English was failing her. “You understand? You can talk to American planes in sky?”

“Not without a radio. A U.S. radio.”

“Wolniej… slower, please,” she said.

Shank pushed himself up in the bed with his right hand and spoke more slowly. “Yes, I can talk to American planes. But I would need the right radio.”

“I have American radio. Come with me. You talk to planes. Kill more Russians.”

Shank was confused. “There’s still fighting? Shit, I figured the Russians would be back in Belarus by now.”

“No. Russians not gone. Russians are all over south of Poland now, from Radom and Kraków to Belarus border. Polish Land Forces and militia follow Russians. Kill them. Push them from Poland. You understand?” She spoke slowly, but clearly she had paid attention in school; her vocabulary wasn’t bad.

“Yes, I understand.”

“You come now. We fight Russians. You talk to American planes for to help us. Is okay?”

Shank wanted to get back with his unit, but he knew this was a fluid situation, and the girl was insistent. He figured he could help them establish comms with NATO forces flying overhead, and then whoever he spoke with could alert his squadron of his location.

She told him to meet her outside; then she walked out of the room without looking behind her to see if he was even going to make it to his feet.

He pushed himself off the bed and rolled clumsily to his right side. He winced in pain, his left arm getting caught under him as he tried to sit. He pulled it up abruptly to hook it back into its sling. Shank threw off his blanket, climbed to his feet, and began getting dressed.

A few minutes later he headed for the door, leaning on the railing by the wooden steps to support his injured leg. The Polish field doctors watched him casually as he left; one caught up to him and handed him a crutch. Judging by the amount of dried blood Shank saw on it, he’d guessed the previous owner no longer needed it. Shank ran his right hand over his flight suit, an unthinking gesture to neaten his torn, filthy uniform, and, using the crutch, walked out into the winter air and blinding white landscape.

Shank had watched a lot of the landscape passing below him, but now that he had a chance to view it properly, he saw how picturesque it was. He doubted anyone in a thirty-mile radius had stopped to look at the snow-covered pine forests as a thing of beauty in a while — they would all be more preoccupied with the invasion of their nation — but to Shank it was so peaceful and serene. Even though he was wounded, the smell of fresh air reminded him how close he’d come to death and how lucky he was to be alive.

He hobbled over toward the militia members, about fourteen of them, all hanging out next to the mix of military and commandeered civilian vehicles.

None offered him a hand as he approached them. Trying to maintain his balance was a challenge, but he persisted, and arrived at the group. Clearly the stroll from the makeshift hospital to the vehicles constituted a sort of test. When he made it, one offered him a cigarette, which he declined.

Paulina reached into the back of a small cargo van and pulled out a white down coat. It looked like it had been used as a pillow for someone dying from a head wound, but the blood was now dry, and Shank had nothing else to keep him safe from the subfreezing temperature.

She held it out to him, and he took it.

“A friend of yours?”

Paulina shook her head. “No. A civilian.” She looked out to the adjoining field. “We stripped the dead in Wrocław. We are the TDF; we don’t have much equipment.”

A man in his forties and dressed completely in civilian attire spoke up in perfectly fluent English. “Hey, man, glad to have you on our team. You know, some of us watched you strafing that train.” He smiled and took a long drag from his cigarette, then did his impression of the sound made by the GAU cannon on Shank’s aircraft.

Others started laughing.

Paulina did not laugh. She spoke rapidly in Polish to the man, and he looked up to Shank now. “We need to mount up. She wants us to get to a spot near Radom. The Reds have been doing a pretty good job sticking to the side roads and traveling in small clusters. We think they know that NATO airplanes are hunting for them, so they have changed their tactics and are moving in smaller groups.”

Shank nodded. “Smart. I’ll need a UHF radio if I am going to talk to NATO airplanes.”

“No problem.”

The man motioned Shank into the front passenger seat of a cargo van, and shut the door behind him after the American struggled to get his crutch inside. When the man climbed behind the wheel, Shank said, “The girl — she’s in charge?”

The man just nodded as he fired up the van. “Paulina Tobiasz. She’s our leader.”

Shank saw her climbing into another vehicle. He couldn’t get over how young she looked. “She’s, like, a lieutenant or something?”

“A what?” the man asked, momentarily confused by an English word he didn’t know. “Oh, like an officer. Good question.” He asked another of the Polish militia members something, and when he answered, the English speaker said, “We don’t know her rank in the militia. She’s just our leader. She’s famous. She has the… What’s the word? The odwaga. Courage, I think.”

“You don’t know her rank? How did she get to be in charge?”

“She’s a hero. There is a picture of her everywhere in Warsaw that shows her battling Russians on the first morning of the war. I think she killed, like, ten of them or something. The only thing she thinks about is killing Russians. That’s all,” the man said, then took a last drag and flicked the cigarette out the window as he started the truck and put it into gear.