The Russian Deception

CHAPTER 48

Colonel Dimitri Brusilov sat with his crew inside the armored capsule of his tank and studied the terrain in front of him. Condensation from the heat of their bodies ran down the cold steel walls. Resistance along the way had been intermittent and easily overcome and now his tanks were on the outskirts of Riga. Two rows of three-story apartment buildings and a small park lay directly in his path. A rusted swing set and a child's merry-go-round in faded colors of blue and yellow and red sat in the center of the park. Beyond the park a tall church spire painted white thrust upward into a gray-black afternoon sky.

Latvian artillery was targeting his tanks from somewhere a few kilometers away. Rounds were landing close by, too close for comfort. Dimitri had no confirmed target. The Afghanit system that was supposed to intercept the shells and pin down the location of the battery for a counter strike was acting up. The electronic gremlins that had plagued the tank in the past were back. Dimitri swore at the thinking that threw untested weapons systems into combat before they were ready. Testing systems on the factory proving grounds was one thing. Having those systems prove reliable under combat conditions was something entirely different.

Part of the system worked just fine. Alarms on Dimitri's console let him know an artillery shell was coming straight for them.

"Incoming," he said into his microphone. "Hold on."

Now we'll see just how good this armor is, he thought.

The Afghanit system on the T-14 was designed to intercept incoming missiles and artillery rounds with guided missiles targeted by radar and fired by the computer. But the electronic problems interfered. The computer failed to intercept the round. The shell exploded a few yards away from the tank and blew off the tread on the left side. The tank skewed to the left and stopped. Inside, the crew was shaken up but unharmed.

The computer on the Armata was programmed to determine the nature of external threats and take countermeasures against them. It had the capability to correct what it interpreted as errors on the part of the crew. The artillery round had further damaged the erratic electronic system. The computer analyzed the situation, determined that the crew was not responding to threats and decided to fire a missile.

On Sergei's weapons board half the lights were out. He looked at what was still functioning. A cold fear swept over him.

"Commander. The Sprinter tactical missile is being loaded."

"Shut it down! Now!"

Sergei's voice was full of fear. "I can't. The board is not working."

The turret still functioned. The long barrel of the cannon swiveled and rose to its maximum elevation. Dimitri listened to gears meshing as the autoloader chose the missile and fed it into the cannon. The magazine and mechanism were outside the armored crew compartment, behind layers of hardened steel and ceramic plates, inaccessible. With the board out of commission, Dimitri was helpless to stop the sequence. He watched the screen on his console that showed him the outside world.

The missile left the cannon, trailing white smoke behind it, picking up speed as it rose into the air. It carried a one kiloton nuclear warhead that would destroy everything within a half mile radius. No one would survive. The blast wave would continue outward destroying structures as it went. Ground shock would cause major damage to critical infrastructure over a much wider area, as if a large earthquake had struck the region.

Maybe it will fail, Dimitri thought.

He hadn't prayed since he was a boy but he found himself praying now.

Please, let it fail.

His prayers were not answered. The missile turned and twisted high in the air as the damaged computer sought for a target. It reached its maximum height and turned back toward the ground. Dimitri had time to see the outer world vanish in a burst of white light before the blast wave picked up his tank and hurled it through the air like a toy.

In Washington and in Moscow, in every Western capital and in every intelligence agency in the world with the capability to oversee the battlefield in Latvia, the reaction was the same when their instruments registered the explosion.

Shock, followed by fear and anger. For the first time since World War II a nuclear weapon had been used in combat.

The genie was out of the bottle.