Arc Light (90 page)

“What's it like out there?” he shouted at the driver, who was twisted around in his seat looking back at the dead Jefferson. He looked around to his front through vision blocks and then turned to say, “The trench is about sixty meters ahead!” Looking back he said, “There's a Bradley up there that's been hit!”

Chandler thought for a second, then said, “Okay,” reaching for his gear and rifle. The driver popped his own hatch, and as Chandler climbed up to his position the gunner rose up from the dead tank to Jefferson's. The rear of the tank was blackened and smoking from the open and burned-out ammo and fuel compartments.

“You get on the fifty!” Chandler ordered as he slid down to the ground, mindful not to tear or pull out of place any of his chemical protective gear. They had sent the orders down from brigade. MOPP IV—full chemical protective gear—for the assault into the city. It was the first such order from on high of the war.

The gunner reappeared from the tank at Chandler's hatch and swung the .50-caliber machine gun toward the trenches. He quickly released the handles and then gingerly grasped them again—they were obviously hot to the touch.

The last few tanks from his battalion were disappearing up the highway and through the thinly wooded hills just behind the bare dirt cut in their path ahead: the trenches of the Moscow Line. The overturned Bradley lay just short of the line. Looking back around, the crackle of small-arms fire and
pum-pum-pum
of Bradleys' 25-mm cannon could be heard over the low hill behind them as the second echelon of infantry engaged targets bypassed by Chandler's speeding tanks. The battlefield was still very dangerous. He flicked the
M-16's selector switch to “Burst” and raised the assault rifle to his armpit, walking slowly down his tank's treads toward the M-3 and the men inside. His men.

The driver was lying flat on the ground with his M-16 pointed at the bunker and ready. Chandler eyed the burned patch of ground ahead where the engineer's “snake,” a long hose filled with explosives and shot forward to detonate the land mines in their path, scorched a path twenty meters wide for them to follow.

“Come on!” Chandler yelled to the driver, and they spread out for their walk up toward the trenches. Chandler placed each step carefully even though the snake had burned a path. Twice he saw unexploded land mines partially unearthed by the engineers' blast. With each step, he tensed in anticipation. The sounds of tank cannon were now nearly a mile ahead as they sprinted through breaches in the Russian lines. The gray sky above was crisscrossed with helicopters. The occasional fighter-bomber dived down through the ceiling of gathering dark clouds to release the black cargoes under their wings and then pull back up into the protective overcast sky. First one and then two smoke trails from antiaircraft missiles shot up into the sky and clouds ahead. A strobe lit one patch of clouds from inside for an instant.

He returned his attention to the trench and blackened bunker. The huge holes punched into the wall of the bunker by his M-2 machine gun attested to the damage it would have done to the bunker's occupants, none of whom were visible. Chandler and the driver neared the Bradley at a crouch now, their rifles raised to firing positions on their shoulders and Chandler's finger pulling firmly against the trigger.

Two bodies in chemical protective gear lay sprawled in front of their hatches, and smoke poured through a grapefruit-size hole in the vehicle's side armor. As Chandler's driver crawled halfway into the hatch to peer inside, Chandler inspected the two men on the ground.

The first was legless and dead. Chandler lifted his hood up. He was a soldier Chandler recognized from the Scout Platoon. He retrieved one of the man's dog tags and inserted the other into the dead man's mouth. He moved on to the other man. His legs were also mangled. Both men's lower bodies had been in the inferno inside the vehicle while their torsos stuck out of the hatch; he had seen the same before.
The gunner and the vehicle commander.
Fire had raged however briefly to leave the suit of the dead man below Chandler still smoldering.

“Oh, man,” the driver said, backing out of the overturned Bradley, his flashlight shaking as he plopped to the ground on his
rear. He said nothing, sitting there motionless as his chest rose and fell in panted breaths. He had found the rest of the cavalrymen still inside the Bradley.

Chandler pulled back the protective suit. The man inside was burned badly. He reached inside his tattered blouse with gloved hands but could not find the dog tags. He glanced nervously back up at the trench and saw no one. He would confirm this man's identity and move on; the others inside the vehicle would have to wait.

A piece of paper, scorched along its edges, protruded from a ragged tear seared through his breast pocket. Chandler pulled the paper through the tear. It was folded neatly into a square, but its surface was crinkled with a hundred creases. He looked down at the hooded face of the dead soldier before slowly unfolding the paper. He already knew what he would find.

Woven into the swirl of vines and red roses atop the pink stationery was the name and address of Jennifer from Dallas.

Chandler refolded the sheet and replaced it in Lieutenant Bailey's pocket. He rose. Before him lay the trench. The battlefield was not safe if there were still Russians there. He motioned for the driver to get to his feet and looked back to ensure that the gunner still covered them from the .50 caliber. Chandler and the driver raised their rifles to their shoulders and approached the dark brown cut in the soil, advancing in a crouch.

As they neared the trench, they dropped to the ground to crawl up the slight slope to its lip. Slowly, tentatively, Chandler raised his head and rifle up over the slightly elevated wall. Bodies lined the trench floor where they had poured out of the bunker, the bunker's opening waist-high with corpses. None showed the slightest sign of life.

Chandler and the driver both slowly rose, first to their knees, then to their feet. Spread out up and down the trench in ones and twos and at various other places on the dirt road behind were dead Russian Provisionals. They were contorted, twisted in odd positions. Their hands ripped at the neck of their shirts or grabbed their throats as if they had choked themselves to death. None showed any signs of wounds, the only characteristic common to all being their eyes. They bulged as if straining at the sockets, wide open in the peculiar agony of death by gas. There were hundreds, thousands of them in a thick line of death stretching over the hills and out of sight to both sides.

The driver sank to the ground again, dropping his rifle and burying his masked face in the dirt in front before rolling onto his side and hugging his knees to his chest. He rocked slowly from side to side. He had seen enough for one war.

Chandler stood there, safe and secure on this still lethal patch of earth inside his thin charcoal suit, memorizing without realizing it sights that would remain with him for all his days. They were sights that would forever frustrate the efforts of his son Matthew when he asked the inevitable questions a young boy asks of a father who had been to war.

In the confusion of helicopter gunship and fighter-bomber attacks all across the center of Moscow, the column of BTR-80s drove straight through the gates of the Kremlin. The vehicle commander and a soldier with an SA-7 antiaircraft missile on his shoulder dropped down into the armored vehicle in front of Razov and Lambert and pulled the armored hatch closed on top of them, dampening the rattle of the guns and the whoosh and quick boom of helicopters' aerial rockets that had knocked out one of their convoy's armored vehicles already.

The lieutenant on the bench just ahead of Lambert shouted something that Lambert did not understand, but all of the soldiers in the vehicle suddenly began to load their assault rifles. Razov did likewise, and Lambert fumbled with a pouch mounted on the webbing he wore to extract a magazine heavy with thirty rounds of 5.56-mm ammunition, the new Russian standard.

As Lambert rammed the magazine home in the rocking vehicle, he felt Razov's hands loosening his chin strap, which cut tightly into his chin to hold it on. “It is better this way,” he said. “In case it is hit, it . . . ” He made a sweeping gesture with his hand to indicate the helmet flying off his head and then reached for Lambert's rifle to ensure the safety was on.

By the time the engine noise from their BTR died down, the rapid-fire cracks of small arms fire could already be heard up ahead.

“You stay back with me,” Razov said as the side hatches opened and the BTR's occupants poured out onto the smooth, rounded cobblestones of the ancient Kremlin street. Lambert lay flat on the ground, watching as paratroopers rushed a nondescript structure ahead that sat amid all the ornate, brightly colored Kremlin buildings.
They entered the smoky doorway, their rifles blazing.

“Let's go!” Razov said, rising to run toward the doorway along the column of vehicles now staggered on either side of the street. The whine of a jet engine caused everyone to dive to the pavement, and Lambert scraped his knees and elbows in the dive, ripping his suit as he felt a stabbing pain from his hipbone against the stone. He rolled onto his side to see a U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile banking lazily to the left, the tracers of Russian antiaircraft guns streaking up into the sky all around the stubby-winged pilotless jet. When it reappeared in the distance from behind the gold “onion dome” cupolas of an old monastery on the Kremlin grounds it was nearly completing its turn. Lambert imagined the radar and television images being processed for matches in the sophisticated computer brain of the missile's
TERCOM
, its Terrain Contour Matching guidance system. All watched in silent fascination as the missile's jet engine powered it slowly in, the engine's sound falling to an idle whine. All of the sudden it waggled its wings and the engine roared to life. Its cruising descent signaled that a match had been found. It was coming in. Lower and lower the accelerating missile came, and the thought suddenly occurred to Lambert:
Nuclear or conventional?

It sped past him not sixty yards away at treetop level, much larger than he had imagined it to be. The missile angled down sharply just after passing the last building and headed straight through the double doors of the Congress of People's Deputies across the large open square.

It crashed through the doors, and at first Lambert thought it was a dud, but suddenly three floors of windows lit up with a flash and the facade of the beautiful old building shattered onto the few cars parked in front. The explosion echoed from the buildings enclosing the large central square of the Kremlin grounds. As the smoke quickly dissipated, a four-story hole split the building open—rooms of each floor cleaved open and strangely dissected for the naked eye to see.

Razov, the lieutenant, and their men rose quickly and sprinted toward the open door to the building which their comrades had just assaulted. Lambert followed. All along the skyline to the south and west rose a black curtain of fires, and the sky was alive with darting, weaving specks of distant aircraft. When the men reached the door, the strange, hollow sounds of gunfire from somewhere deep in the building could be heard. Paratroopers dug holes in the manicured lawn just outside the building's door. Lambert followed Razov and the others in. The soldiers ahead rushed past a receptionist's desk and through a set of double doors. Lambert and Razov were right behind, and they stepped out onto a darkened metal stairwell. The
sound of fighting rose up the shaft from deep in the earth below.

Down the metal stairs ran Razov, Lambert, and his escort. Smoke and the metallic smell of spent gunpowder wafted up as they passed bodies ripped open and bloody on the stairs, some being tended by medics, others lying alone, dead. A bullet clattered up the shaft, sending sparks off the concrete walls and clanging into the metal staircase above. It had passed too quickly, too unexpectedly for Lambert to react. The staircase seemed to go on forever, and the deeper they went the louder the booming rips of gunfire and occasional deafening explosion of a hand grenade sounded. Lambert's ears popped and he grew short of breath as he, Razov, and the half dozen soldiers in their party rapidly descended the stairs.