As Bezarin remounted his own tank the gunner told him that Nevsky Ten had been calling.
Bezarin was horrified. “Why didn’t you come and get me?”
The gunner shrugged. He was a gunner. Command communications were not part of his responsibilities.
Bezarin hastily pulled on his headpiece. “Nevsky Ten, this is Ladoga Five.”
Major General Duzov responded quickly. “This is Nevsky Ten. What’s your situation?”
“We’ve cleared the ridge. I’ve formed a grouping by combining my battalion with the remnants of First Battalion. Overall strength, battalion-minus of tanks, with one motorized rifle company attached and a battery of guns moving to join us. We are prepared to act as a forward detachment. I’ve already dispatched a reinforced tank company to clear the approach route in the Hildesheim tactical direction.”
Bezarin’s body tensed in anticipation. He wanted this mission. He wanted to lead. He had tasted blood, and he liked it. He felt as though he could take on anything the British had to offer. His battalion had earned the right to be the first to reach the Weser River.
“This is Nevsky Ten. Do you have a clear understanding of the mission? Do not respond with details in the clear. Just yes or no.”
“Yes. I understand. We’re ready.” Bezarin knew this was a slight exaggeration. It would be at least ten to fifteen minutes before he could get everyone back aboard their vehicles and organized into march order.
“All right. Do you have any long-range means of communications with you?”
Bezarin thought hard. What he needed was a regimental command tank or vehicle.
“This is Ladoga Five. I have a special artillery vehicle with me. I can use the artillery long-range set, if necessary.”
“Good. Get your vehicles on the road. And whatever you do, keep moving. We will all be behind you.”
The gravity in the commander’s voice, and his simple choice of words, moved Bezarin. He switched over to his battalion radio net, anxious to send out the words that would set them all in motion. He knew that his tanks needed more time to resupply, that the stray vehicles had not been sufficiently integrated into the grouping to do much beyond merely following the vehicle to their immediate front. But he knew that now, with a great hole punched through the last line of the enemy’s defense, time was the dominant factor. He felt simultaneously elated and half-wild with small, cloying frustrations. He worked his radio in a fierce, uncompromising voice that had matured in the space of a morning. Major Bezarin wanted to move.
The morning mist floated off the Weser, blending with the slow-moving darker smoke from the burning buildings. Gordunov sat concealed on the bank, alone, allowing himself a brief rest, fighting against his body to maintain the strength to lead. He had expected an assault at first light, but the dirty air had been growing paler for an hour, and still the only sign of hostility was the occasional rattle of a spooked rifleman or machine gunner in an outlying position. Communications checks with the network of observation posts returned only reports of vehicle noises back in the hills. Gordunov could not understand the delay. The reduced visibility provided by the mist and smoke offered perfect cover for an attacker. Later, after the mist burned off, an assault would have a much tougher time of it. Gordunov could feel the change in the weather. The last of the rain had sputtered out during the night, and the day would be warm and clear.
He was certain of one other thing, too. There would be little mercy shown on either side. As he’d made his tour of the perimeter in the first light he had been startled by the number of dead civilians in the Hameln streets. House fires had obviously driven them from their hiding places right into the midst of the fighting. In the night, they would have been impossible to distinguish from combatants. Dark running forms. A foreign language. Both sides would have shot them down. But Gordunov understood the psychology of the situation. The blame would fall solely on his men. When the enemy returned, they would see only the victims. They would not pause to consider that their own fires might have been as much at fault as Soviet weapons. And they would not be inclined to take prisoners. His men would get the message quickly enough.
So be it.
In many ways, so many ways, this was a totally different war from the lost war in Afghanistan. You rarely had such a heavy morning damp, or such thick mist off slow rivers. In high Asia, the air was thin, and the mountain torrents plunged through impassable gorges down into ruined valleys. You did not have so sturdy an urban area as this outside of Kabul itself. But haunting similarities remained. As a brand-new, unblooded officer, just off the troop rotation plane with the first windblown grit in his eyes and teeth, he had been garrisoned at Bagram, where the new airborne leaders learned the ropes. A priority then had been reopening the road to Kandahar. The Afghan forces failed, as always, and Soviet forces received the order to do the job. Gordunov commanded a company in a battalion equipped with airborne-variant infantry fighting vehicles. They road-marched south, a small part of a much larger operation, nervously awaiting an ambush that failed to materialize. Gordunov had not tasted combat directly that time. But he got his first look at war up close.
The column halted in a ruined village, whose dirt streets were littered with fly-covered carcasses. At first, he had only recognized the dead animals, large and obvious. Then he realized that the clumps of rags lying about were human bodies. Scavengers circled overhead, like gunships awaiting targets. The column idled in the stench and the heat, anxious for orders that would call them to support a combat operation ongoing in the next valley. But vehicles began to cook over, and still no word came. Gordunov dismounted to relieve himself, and he walked a few meters away from the column, hunting a place where the flies would not hurry off a nearby corpse and attack him before he could finish his business. He turned into an alley between two ruptured mud buildings. And he faced a carpet of human bodies, butchered until they were stacked three corpses high. The alley was at least fifteen meters long and perhaps a meter and a half wide. It ended bluntly against a masonry wall. The natives had been driven into the enclosure, then methodically murdered. Now they lay turning to leather in the sun. A few pillaging birds lazily lifted away at the sight of Gordunov, unsure of what he portended but too bloated to hasten. A fly pinched Gordunov’s cheek. He batted wildly at his face, gagging at the thought of some strange and hopeless infection. He struggled to master his insides just as a hand seized his slung weapon from behind.
It was a special-operations major, grinning. “Interesting, don’t you think, Captain?”
Proud, Gordunov struggled to mask his emotions. But it was useless. He still had many things to master.
“We
. . . we
certainly . . . didn’t do this,” Gordunov said.
The special-ops major laughed, releasing Gordunov’s weapon. The major’s skin had cooked a dark brown, almost as brown as the exposed, dehydrated corpses. He looked as though he lived in these mountains.
“Of course not,” the major said. “This village was loyal to the government.” And he paused, smirking, allowing Gordunov time to settle himself a bit. Then he continued, “We only do this sort of thing in villages that support the dushman. But get yourself an eyeful. And buy yourself a nice little camera in the bazaar. You’ll see plenty more, if you don’t go home in a tin box first. And you’ll want pictures to help you describe the glorious successes of our efforts at international solidarity.” And he walked away. Gordunov hurried back to the stalled column, seeking shelter in its vigor and familiarity. He pissed against the road wheels of his track, thinking about the special-operations officer, trying to understand him. He had failed in his efforts that day. But later on, he came to understand the man very well, indeed. Death became more trivial than a spilled drink.
Gordunov remembered standing there in the stink of death and shit and diesel fumes, wondering how the veterans could sit in their turrets spreading tinned meat on bread and eating it. In six months, he, too, had learned the art of not seeing.
Now he waited, exhausted, in a damp uniform, with the remnants of his battalion. He was a lieutenant colonel, fighting a civilized enemy half a world away from the land where he had first gotten to know himself. But as he walked through the litter of charred, or ripped, or fractured bodies in the streets of Hameln he knew it was going to be the same.
He placed his hand on the fender of a burned and blasted tank. A faint warmth lingered under the slick of the morning dew. He stared up calmly at the tank commander whose body had been caught halfway out of his hatch. In the fire, the body had shriveled so that it resembled a blackened monkey.
There was no point in trying to understand it all. The point was simply to win, to outlive the other bastard.
Gordunov limped back to the building near the northern bridge where a communications detachment had rigged an antenna. He sat down on the edge of a table, taking the weight off his hurt leg, and slowly worked out a coded message to send back to headquarters. “Bridges secured. Forty-five percent strength. Holding.”
He checked the code groups, then passed the message to a communications specialist he didn’t recognize, but who had taken charge of the long-range set. If they couldn’t communicate from this station, Gordunov was prepared to try again from Levin’s east side of the river, where the remainder of the staff and communications platoon had set up headquarters.
“Make sure you do it right. Get an acknowledgment.”
“Yes, Comrade Battalion Commander.”
Gordunov stepped back out into the chilly dampness, restless. He felt exhausted, but unable to calm down. He worried that he had almost reached the point where men made bad decisions. Bad luck about the leg, he thought. The pain had taken a lot out of him. Then he heard the first ripple of organized fire.
The initial assault was coming against Levin’s side of the river. Gordunov had not expected that. The deep reserves should have been on the western bank. Perhaps the enemy was having difficulty organizing his assault in the west. Perhaps only ill-trained reservists remained, grandfathers and pot-bellied family men. Perhaps they had even lost their will to fight. Gordunov wondered how the rest of the war was going. Where was the Soviet armor? How long would it take to arrive?
He ducked back inside the communications station. Picking up a field telephone, he rang the circuit. As the answers came he told everyone but Levin to drop off.
“Can you assess your situation yet?”
“The enemy is at the outpost line,” Levin said. His voice, too, sounded weary, its present excitement nothing but raw nerves. “No sign of them on the ring boulevard yet, but they’ll be down here as soon as they realize how little we have out front. The damned problem is all the little alleys. I’m afraid they’ll infiltrate the defense. I have a few men up on the rooftops, spotting, but nobody in the sewers. If they come that way, we’ll just have to fight them where they turn up.”
“Just get one or two men down in the sewers. Establish listening posts, so you at least have a bit of warning. Otherwise, you’ve made the correct decision. You can’t waste any firepower. The rooftops are more important.”
Another station cut into the line.
“Command, this is Outpost Four. There are vehicles moving in the treeline at the base of the hill.”
Outpost Four lay on Gordunov’s side of the river. The enemy would be coming from both sides.
Before Gordunov could respond, artillery rounds began to strike close by. Gordunov hit the floor, just before a blast smashed open the door.
The shocks continued, shaking the building and shattering the last surviving bits of glass. Between impacts, Gordunov could hear shouting. The rounds were falling too close to the command post to be a random volley.
“Everybody out of here. Out the back.”
The bastards had an observer in the town. It was the only possible explanation. Still, Gordunov was surprised at the intensity of the shelling. This was their town, these were their people.
The bridges, Gordunov thought. They must need them very badly.
He helped his men gather up the electronics while shock waves made the walls quiver and sifted plaster and dust from the ceiling.
“Come
on.
Move.”
Gordunov grabbed the field phone and rang the net one last time. He tried to speak between blasts, waiting for the wires to go out at any second.
“This is the commander. I’m changing locations. The enemy has this site fixed. Each sector must be aware that there are enemy observers inside our perimeter. Men from the rearward positions are to sweep all buildings with good fields of observation. End.”
Gordunov disconnected the phone and threw it to the last of the communications specialists to leave the building. Outside, the troops huddled together in the alley, cowering at each blast, waiting for instructions.
“Follow me,” Gordunov commanded, although he was not completely certain where he was going. He did not want to move too far from the northern bridge, but there was a dangerous slice of open ground between the first buildings and the river. He led the men southward, attempting to work out from under the shell fire, rushing from one building to another.
The shelling lifted. Gordunov could hear the heavy throb of armored vehicles beyond the perimeter.
Armored vehicles -- the noise of their engines -- had become the modern equivalent of war drums, Gordunov decided. The rumbling chilled your guts.
He pointed across the boulevard that connected the two bridges on the western bank, indicating the German post-office building. “Set up your equipment in there. Report to Captain Karchenko, if you can locate his company command post. Try to get wired in again.” He looked at their faces. Children. Not the sun-scarred faces of the men with whom he had survived Afghanistan. He had not seen the communications officer for hours. Another worthless bastard, he decided. He selected the least frightened-looking soldier. “You’re in charge of the communications collective now. I’m appointing you to the rank of junior sergeant. Do your duty for the Soviet Union.”