Red Army (39 page)

Gordunov left them. He limped across the boulevard to the west toward the sound of the enemy armor. The brace on his leg helped, but each step still jarred him with pain. He had selected the brace himself at the hospital, and he had worked it onto his foot and calf, unwilling to surrender himself to any other man’s care.

The sound of small arms exchanges intensified behind his back, on Levin’s side of the river. On his side, the sound of the armored vehicles changed.

They were moving.

Gordunov came up behind Lieutenant Svirkin’s platoon. The lieutenant had a field phone that was still operational, and Gordunov called Levin.

A soldier answered. The comrade captain was up forward, in the fighting. But he had sent back the message that the attackers on the eastern bank were British regulars.

Levin would have his hands full, Gordunov thought.

Lieutenant Svirkin appeared confident, almost eager. He was new to the battalion, and Gordunov had not yet had a chance to take his measure.

“You understand? You
must hold.
There is no alternative. Our tanks are on the way.”

“Yes, Comrade Commander.”

Gordunov stumped off to check the next line platoon’s defenses.

Firing erupted ahead of him. The sound of the enemy vehicles suddenly seemed impossibly close.

As Gordunov watched, a direct-fire round smashed into a corner building. A moment later, two soldiers stumbled out with their hands over their heads.

His men. Giving up. Gordunov shot them down with his assault rifle.

The lead enemy tank had already reached the Soviet positions. Everything happened too swiftly to be managed. Gordunov watched in horror as the enormous vehicle, twice the size of a Soviet tank, rolled toward the bridge, spraying machine-gun fire to its flanks, apparently unstoppable. He rushed back toward the platoon he had just visited, going in short dashes on his hobbled leg. The enemy tank either did not see him or didn’t care about the lone man’s actions. Another tank appeared just behind the first, also heading for the key northern bridge.

Gordunov raged at the thought of the bridge falling back into enemy hands so easily. It seemed as though the air assault force defenses had simply melted away. No one returned the fire of the tanks.

Gordunov cut around the corner of a building, screaming orders at his men not to fire at him. Lieutenant Svirkin rose to meet him, his face blank.

“Where’s the nearest antitank grenadier?” Gordunov demanded. “Have you got anybody close by?”

Svirkin thought for a moment, infuriating Gordunov with his slowness. “I think . . . there’s a launcher back down the street.”

Gordunov seized the lieutenant’s arm. “Where? Show me.”

The lieutenant obediently led the way. Rushing across intersections, the two officers fired blindly in the direction of the tanks. Beyond a pair of dead civilians, they found two soldiers lying flat behind a wave of rubble. One of them had an antitank grenade launcher.

Gordunov could hear the tanks firing. It sounded as though they were very close to the bridge.

“Get up,” he ordered the soldiers. “Come with me. You, too, Lieutenant.”

He led them in a rush down behind the post-office building. Whatever Karchenko was doing in his company command post, it wasn’t stopping tanks. Gordunov felt a sickening sense of collapse. His instincts told him that this section of the defense had gone wrong, that Karchenko simply had not had it in him as a company commander to handle the mission. Gordunov regretted that he had not relieved him the night before when he had failed to bring back the body of the battalion chief of staff.

Gordunov waved them all down. The soldiers fell flat in the street, weapons ready. But no targets were visible.

“They’re up around the next corner,” Gordunov told them. The whirring and grinding of the tanks as they worked through the wreckage in the streets was unmistakable. Then a quick pair of explosions, followed by bursts of Soviet fire, signaled that somebody was fighting back.

“You.” Gordunov singled out the grenadier. “Come with me. Svirkin, you stay here and make damned sure we don’t get cut off.”

The lieutenant nodded. But Gordunov had no confidence in him now. He was familiar with the pattern from Afghanistan. Men who had performed reasonably well suddenly reached their limit, triggered into a near-stasis either by an unexpected, demoralizing event or simply by nervous exhaustion. No one was completely predictable. And few were consistently brave.

Gordunov expected to get shots into the rear of the tanks. But as soon as he and the grenadier reached the target intersection, a third tank appeared, bringing up the rear. The two men were caught in between the lead tanks and the trail vehicle.

“Shoot that one, get the bastard,”
Gordunov screamed.

The grenadier knelt, shaking. He balanced the weapon on his shoulder and fired. The round struck just below the mantlet of the gun, near the turret ring. But the huge trail tank kept coming, firing its machine guns.

The grenadier jerked up from his knees, then collapsed. The machine-gun fire kicked his body backward, rolling it over.

Gordunov pressed himself as flat as he could against a covering wall. As the tank passed him, impossibly loud, it concentrated its fire down the side street up which Gordunov and the grenadier had come. But the vehicle had its hatches sealed, and its field of vision did not include the spot in which Gordunov lay. As the tank rumbled past he dashed for the grenade launcher, scrambling the last few meters on knees and elbows. He ripped at the dead boy’s pack, from which the trails of two more antitank rounds jutted. Each moment, he expected gunfire to strike him. But he managed to work the pack off the heavy, bloody body. He slung it over one shoulder and rolled back toward the slight cover available. It was foolish to commit tanks into a built-up area without infantry support, and Gordunov was determined to make the enemy pay for it.

He thought he remembered how to work the device, how to sight it. He loaded a round, snapping it into the launcher with a reassuring click. He remembered that the logical order of the hands had to be reversed for a proper hold and balance. He slung his rifle around crossways on his back so that he could pull it quickly into a firing stance. Then he rose and ran for the intersection again, moving as swiftly as his crippled leg would carry him.

The rear of the tank that had killed the grenadier was completely exposed. Beyond it in the distance, Gordunov could see that the lead tank was smoking. The scene elated him. His men were still fighting. Someone had killed the lead tank. Gordunov shouldered the launcher, aimed for the back of the trail tank’s engine compartment, and fired.

The target was so close that he could feel the shock of the impact through his body. As a minimum, he figured that he had gotten a mobility kill. And the tank did, indeed, lurch to a halt, smoke rising from its rear deck. Gordunov scuttled to a nearby doorway, laying down the launcher and tugging his assault rifle around into his arms. He took aim, waiting for the crew members to emerge.

The crew appeared reluctant to abandon the tank. They attempted to traverse the gun to the rear. But the narrowness of the street would not permit it, even with the gun at maximum elevation. Gordunov grew so involved with the spectacle of the turret’s attempts to turn on him that he almost missed the movement beneath the tank as the crew slipped out of an escape door in the bottom of the hull.

Gordunov waited for a second man to drop to the street. When no other crew members appeared, he swept the area between the tank’s tracks with his assault rifle. He could see the reaction of the trapped, stricken men, like nervous puppets. He emptied an entire magazine into them, then reloaded. When the bodies remained still, he reloaded the antitank grenade launcher.

The middle tank in the column continued to fire wildly, aware that it had been trapped. Gordunov approached in bounds, closing to where he could get a clear shot. They had tried to take his bridge. But it was not going to be that easy. He felt wonderfully capable again, unbeatable.

He positioned himself behind the cover of the flank of the vehicle he had just killed, angling the grenade launcher for another shot. In the moment of aiming, his location in time and space blurred. He was back on the road to Kandahar, and fighting his way out of mountain ambushes, and soldiering in a thousand places he could not recognize. There was only the enemy, a timeless thing, waiting. Gordunov tightened his finger on the trigger.

A surviving crewman from the wrecked tank shot him in the back with a pistol.

A blackened man with no forearms walked straight toward the front commander’s son, fanning the air with his stumps like a medieval beggar giving a performance, possessed eyes hunting the beyond. Anton instinctively backed against his command car. It seemed impossible to him that the man could be alive and walking at speed, trailing burned strings of his uniform in the bonfire heat.

The casualty half strutted, half staggered past his brigade commander, admitted to a different reality. Anton Malinsky, guards colonel and commander of the Third Brigade of the premier Forty-ninth Unified Army Corps, looked about helplessly. The few whole men on the scene appeared as separate and incapable as Anton felt himself to be. He sensed he should be giving orders, dramatically organizing the disaster and alleviating its effects. But it was simply too big, and there was no one to whom to turn.

Fools had done it, Anton told himself. Unpardonable fools. Behind a row of gutted hulks, a fresh fuel explosion stirred the metallic air. Anton hunched behind the flank of his vehicle, but the blast was too far away to reach him. He understood intellectually that he had just lost an entire combined arms battalion that had yet to see the combat for which it had been so finely organized and equipped and for which it so long had trained. Gone, in moments. Yet he could not quite get at the totality of the event.

He felt the pulpy wastes building up pressure in his intestines again. Since the previous evening, he had come down with diarrhea so severe that he had not been able to ride in his command track but had had to remain in his range car during the road march so that he could pull off suddenly without interrupting the entire flow of traffic. During a helicopter liaison visit to Major General Anseev’s corps mobile headquarters, he had almost soiled himself. He felt increasingly weak. The brigade surgeon had given him pills but had sufficiently doubted their potency that he’d recommended that Anton chew a bit of charcoal as well. Anton had taken the man’s advice, forcing down the grit in his desperation to overcome the terribly timed illness. But now, at the sight of the burning alive of perhaps a thousand human beings, he doubted he could manage any more of the charcoal.

He fought the need to go off into the smoldering woods, struggling to hold out until one of his staff officers or a subordinate commander made his way forward. It was forbidden, even for a brigade commander, to employ radio communications during the march. The commitment of the corps was to have been a sudden shock, its stealthy momentum propelling it deep into the enemy’s rear area. There was an intricate system of heliborne and road couriers, of predesignated rest, provisioning, and information points, structured to move the entire corps without resort to the electromagnetic spectrum. Yet how, Anton asked himself, could anyone have expected to hide such an enormous organization during a hasty daylight march on the exposed road network between the Letzlinger Heide and Hannover? There were too many obvious bottlenecks and water obstacles, and the border crossing sites were huge naked gashes on the countryside. It was well known that the enemy had sophisticated technical means of reconnaissance. The dialectic had shifted, perhaps decisively, and men refused to face up to the consequences. How could his own father have permitted such a thing to happen?

Even as he tentatively oriented the blame for his loss toward the enormous image he carried of his father, Anton realized that the old man had reached so grand a position of authority over his fellow man that the loss of this battalion was levels removed from his concern. No, this was not his father’s doing. This was the work of a chain of lackadaisical staff officers and of commanders intoxicated by the confusion and pace of the operation. It was, finally, his own work.

Still, it infuriated him that all of the rules had been so readily discarded. Of course, even darkness was no longer much of a shield against modern intelligence systems. Yet there was a margin of advantage. Or was it nothing more than the psychological security the darkness brought to the man with something to hide? Anton could not think the problem through now. He began to feel slightly faint. His bowels pressed outward, swelling in him, a body in mutiny.

He stopped attempting to analyze and relaxed back into his initial anger. The foolishness, the collective idiocy, that had created so perfect a target seemed beyond belief. On an open and obvious high-speed route, the last common sense and measure of security had been sacrificed for speed. Company-sized refueling stations had been clustered about an intersection with a network of feeder roads in such a manner as to allow an entire reinforced battalion to refuel simultaneously. Then the site had taken on a life of its own, obeying the secret law that a nucleus of military hardware inevitably attracts more hardware. It did not require sophisticated detective work to recognize the types of tactical sites in the burned-over wasteland. The burst sausages of the reserve fuel trucks had been parked in the disorder endemic to rear-services troops. And the stricken companies, his companies, unlucky in their timing, lay slaughtered where they had been calmly sucking at their fuel tits. Quite near the intersection itself, the commandant’s service had marked off its own little fief. And some technical-services officer, spotting an opportunity, had put in tracked- and wheeled-vehicle repair sites, running the two functions close together at a location where they could troubleshoot vehicles pulled over to refuel. Clever peacetime efficiency had turned deadly in war. Amid the blasted repair vans, stranded assemblies and major components lay strewn about in the chaos that Soviet soldiers achieved at the least opportunity. But perhaps worst of all, field hospital tentage had been set up against the treeline. The tents had blown down during the attack, burning their smothering occupants alive. All of the rules of dispersal had been ignored in the natural human tendency to crowd. And death had come in an instant, from a source that remained unknown.