Cold Allies

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AUTUMN, NEAR KSAVEROVKA, UKRAINE

The artillery shell passing overhead made a noise like tearing paper. It was a huge sound, the noise God might have made rending the sky in two.

“Major Shcheribitsky!” Lt. General Baranyk shouted, emerging from his BRDM scout just as the dun grass before him blossomed into fire. A heartbeat later, tardy as thunder to remote lightning, came the dull boom-booms of the strikes.

“Major Shcheribitsky! What is our position?”

But the major was already out of his tank, shouting into his radiophone.

The spread of Ukrainian vehicles, fragile dots on the ocean of grass, was caught in a tempest of red and black, a sudden fall hailstorm of flame and deep-throated sound.

No. This can’t be,
Baranyk thought. Everything was out of position. The Arab National Army should be east of him someplace, sandwiched between his own regiment and General Ilschenko’s. Baranyk should be flanking the enemy, not riding directly into their line of fire.

Baranyk’s BTR-80 personnel carriers were still loaded, the majority of the infantry providing convenient cannon fodder. The armored BMPs traveling with them had loosed their Sagger missiles. White trails scratched the sky.

Above his head another errant enemy shell went over with a loud shurring sound, the tissue-paper noise of his battle plans ripping apart.

“Shcheribitsky!” Baranyk called, bringing his field glasses to his eyes.

Apocalypse rode the meadow. Most of his tanks had stopped to adjust their positions so they were face-front to the town on the horizon. Some were moving blind, crashing into each other in confusion, their commanders either under cover or dead. The personnel carriers and BMPs were lurching forward, angling in front of the two tank battalions and driving right into the defended opponent.

“Order the infantry to withdraw!” Baranyk lowered the glasses in time to see the stricken look on the major’s pitted face.

“I can’t get through to them, general,” he replied. ‘They have driven too far ahead and the Arabs are jamming.”

Too far ahead,
Baranyk’s mind echoed numbly. Yes, too far ahead. His infantry had somehow got in front of his tanks. If they kept going as they were, they would not need to fear the enemy. Ukrainian shells would kill them.

Baranyk crawled up the deck of Shcheribitsky’s T-80 to the angular turret.

The wiry little major followed, snatching at him. “Get down, sir. They will have our range.”

Frantic, Baranyk twisted out of Shcheribitsky’s grip. He reached the closed hatch and stood, lifting the glasses to his eyes.

The Arabs had found the first tank battalion bunched, and now its funeral pyres littered the field. Like startled rabbits, the second battalion had frozen in place. They were at last firing back, and had loosed smoke from their baffles; but a whimsical wind whipped the smoke to and fro, obscuring the vision of the commanders behind as much as confusing the enemy.

If his tanks were blind, his infantry was deaf. Never hearing the order to retreat, the BMPs and personnel carriers rushed toward the enemy artillery.

Oh,
Baranyk’s mind voiced in an eerie, graveyard hush.

So sad.
The only order his regiment had heard was that morning’s Order of the Day: they were to attack that afternoon. In the midst of fire, they could not, would not, be flexible. Good Ukrainian soldiers, good mothers’ sons, they did what they were told.

Major Shcheribitsky climbed up next to him. “Sir? What are the orders?” he asked.

For once Baranyk had no answer. Carried on the fretful wind was the sour smell of autumn and the prickly scent of cordite. Through the glasses the general watched as his tanks stalled and his infantry hurried to oblivion.

There in the southern town of Grebonki the ANA lay hidden: Iranians, Iraqis, along with more familiar killers—Uzbeks, Azerbaijanis, and Muslim Cossacks. Those wayward children of the Red Army, his former comrades, were going to murder them all.

“Sir! Sir!” a corporal on the ground was shouting. Baranyk took his eyes from his glasses and glanced down. “Corporal Zgursky from Reconnaissance,” the man announced. “I was trying to tell my captain, but he wouldn’t listen, sir!”

“Not now!” Baranyk snapped. Zgursky blanched, and suddenly Baranyk forgot his rage. He noticed how young the corporal was, how smooth-cheeked and fresh-faced and innocent.
What a good soldier Zgursky must be,
Baranyk thought. So polite he was, a proud mother’s son. “Go ahead,” the general said, tempering his voice. “If it’s important, tell me.”

The corporal shifted his weight, uneasy under the combined gazes of Baranyk and the major. “Grebonki, sir. I’m from Grebonki. And I was trying to tell my captain the town to our south is Ksaverovka. We are seven kilometers from what the captain thought was our position.”

Baranyk whipped his head toward the battle. Even without the glasses he could tell it was a rout. Through his chest, through the soles of his feet, he could feel the hollow bass thuds of the shells. Smoke curled toward the cloudless bowl of blue sky: gray smoke from the tank baffles, black smoke from the burning T -80s.

“I can deploy the artillery,” Major Shcheribitsky said, his tone disheartened and unsure.

“No use,” Baranyk whispered, his words carried away by the ripping sound of a shell.

“What, sir?” the major asked, cupping a hand to his ear.

“No use!” Baranyk shouted, finding his voice. ‘‘They are still on their tractors, and it will take over thirty damned minutes to get them deployed! Move those tanks forward! Tell them to attack!”

Seven kilometers out of position, his infantry bare and unprotected as a baby’s ass. Seven kilometers and the maps were all wrong.

“Sir!” the major screamed over the noise. A shell hit uncomfortably near, making Shcheribitsky flinch. “Sir! Did you say attack?”

Baranyk turned so fast that the small major stumbled back, nearly losing his footing. “Yes! Attack!” Seeing the major’s incredulous expression, he screamed, “Don’t blame me! Blame the Russians! We plead for help and what do they give us? Outdated, erroneous Soviet maps!”

The major’s thin mouth tightened. A moment later he called down to the communications officer.

The general brought the glasses to his eyes again. What he saw in the binoculars confused him. At first he thought the ground itself must be moving. The brown earth, like a turgid sea, crested and rolled. When he realized what he was witness to, all hope left, even the thready hope of stalemate.

“Retreat!” Baranyk ordered, climbing off the tank. Shcheribitsky followed him. “Sir. Only the tanks can hear us. The others—”

Baranyk whirled. “It is a human wave! Retreat!”

The major’s tone was soft, doubtful. “But our infantry,” he said.

“I know.”

There was nothing Baranyk could do, nothing of use Shcheribitsky could tell him. Baranyk knew it all. He knew that his infantry was dead, that the battle was lost, that Pogrebnyak’s and Ilschenko’s divisions could not hold. The Arabs would roll into Kiev, all for a seven-kilometer mistake, all because a captain would not listen to a corporal.

“I order you to call a retreat,” Baranyk said. The tranquil aftermath of defeat surprised him. He should be sorrowful, he thought. There should be self-recriminations. Instead he felt peace descend, the peculiar serenity of despair. “Do it now, major, and do it fast.”

The major snapped his fingers, and a sergeant ran up with the radio. “Where do we retreat to, sir?”

“West,” Baranyk replied, not considering any particular location. There were no places to hide; only places they could run. After a pause he climbed onto the back deck of his BRDM and stepped through the cupola.

Standing on his seat, Baranyk watched what was left of his tanks begin to roll out of the fog a scant five kilometers ahead of the deadly human sea.

“Shcheribitsky?” Baranyk called just before he fled the battle.

The major glanced up from his field telephone. “Sir?”

“Tell them not to stop and pick up the wounded.”

As Baranyk watched, he saw Shcheribitsky’s gaze grow hollow, as though the little major were staring through the vacuous eyes of the dead. “But they take no prisoners, sir.”

“I know that,” Baranyk replied.

It was forty-five minutes later, well out of sight and sound of conflict, that Baranyk discovered how fleeting, how fragile defeat’s peace could be. Three mechanized rifle battalions, he thought. One tank battalion. Of the 2,250 men he’d taken into battle, at least 1,500 were gone.

His composure burst. From simple exhaustion, he didn’t try to suppress his tears. Out of respect for the dead, he refused to cover his face.