Red Army (20 page)

Sobelev’s legs quivered as he stood on the concrete of the hangar floor, and his thighs felt spongy as he walked to the tunnel and collected his wingman. After a latrine stop, they reported to the mission room, deep underground. Muffled blasts sounded through the layers of earth, steel, and concrete. The enemy aircraft had returned.

As Sobelev and his wingman entered the mission room, the occupants went silent, and each face turned to see who had made it back. Several men offered greetings, but their voices were hollow with the knowledge that their survival might only be a temporary affair. Sobelev drew himself a cup of dark, steaming tea from the samovar. Conversations resumed, but the mood was serious, almost somber, unlike the swaggering tone of peacetime exercises. Now there was no question about who had passed and who had failed. Sobelev took a chair, listening to the patchwork dialogues of the other men and trying to calm his insides. His lieutenant took a seat close by, as though they were still in the air and he still required shepherding. There was one basic subject to which all of the talk returned.

“Sasha’s down over Guetersloh. I couldn’t see a chute.”

“It’s hard to see anything in this weather.”

“Has anybody seen Profirov?”

“Profirov went deep.”

“Vasaryan got clean, though. Good canopy opening.”

“He’ll come out all right. Luck of the Armenians.”

“Couldn’t even see what was shooting at us. The visibility was some of the worst I’ve ever flown in.”

“And this forward air controller was absolutely worthless. Couldn’t locate the enemy, couldn’t get a fix on me . . .”

Sobelev began to grow conscious of less dramatic physical sensations now. His flight suit felt greasy and cold on his skin, stinking with the sweat of fear. The strong tea burned his empty stomach.

“How many more sorties do you think we’ll run today?”

“They’re not going to try to do this at night, are they? With these planes? In this weather?”

“Is there anything to eat around here? Any biscuits?”

The entrance of a staff officer interrupted the pilots’ conversations. The outsider strode to the blackboard, positioned himself for authority, and began to call names. Several times, the selected names met no response, and Sobelev realized that the staff did not have a firm grasp on which pilots were available at this point.

At the end of the grim roll call, Sobelev, his wingman, and six other pilots were ordered to report to a special top-security briefing room. The major could not tell them anything about their mission, only that their aircraft were being prepared with the correct ordnance packages.

Sobelev led the way down the grimy corridor. He was seriously worried about his ability to keep going without making deadly mistakes. He could accept the fact that the enemy might get him even if he performed perfectly. But he did not want to die because of an error.

He looked at his wingman. The boy looked as though he had been sick for a week. “Feeling all right?”

The lieutenant nodded. “Was it ever this bad in Afghanistan?”

“Not even remotely. No comparison.”

They rang a bell for admittance at the oversized steel door. The special facility was identified only with a number. A lieutenant colonel from the intelligence services opened the door slightly, looked them over, then allowed them inside. Maps and aerial photographs, some of which were impressive blowups, covered the walls of the briefing chamber.

“Sit down, Comrades. I must ask you to remain in this room and only this room. If any of you need to visit the latrine, you’ll have to go back outside. This complex is restricted to intelligence personnel only. Now, can I offer you some tea?”

The pilots declined as a group.

“Well,” the briefer began, “you’re all in luck.” He glanced from face to face, an eager lieutenant colonel, conditioned to the paper reality of staff work. “This ought to be the easiest mission anyone’s had all day.” He turned to the map with his pointer. “This is the city of Lueneburg. Actually, more of a large town. The photos on the walls show the air approaches to the heart of the old town and various key features, such as the town square, the town hall, and so forth. Your mission consists of the destruction by aerial means of certain physical structures within the town. Each of the photographs on the far wall shows a specific target. They’re very clearly identified, as you can see. There are three targets, or target groups. Two planes to a target. The last pair of aircraft -- let’s see, that would be ... Bronchuk and Ignatov -- will take pictures.”

“Just a moment,” one pilot said. “What’s the military value of the target?”

The lieutenant colonel appeared surprised at the question. “The target,” he said, “is just the town itself. Don’t worry, we assess a minimal air defense threat in sector. You’ll be safe. Our own troops are already in the vicinity.”

“But what’s the military purpose? The enemy’s bombing the hell out of our air bases, and we’re attacking little towns nobody’s ever heard of?”

The staff officer’s last hesitant smile disappeared. The exchange was underscored by a series of blasts thudding dully up on the surface.

“You will do as you’re told,” the briefer said. “There is no time -- or allowance -- for argument. You will all do exactly as you’re told.”

Kryshinin lay on the canvas litter, waiting for the ambulance to begin moving again. He felt inexplicably weak now, tired beyond reason. He kept his eyes closed because it was so much easier. He could not understand why his wound did not hurt any worse. There was only a dull discomfort, an unwillingness on the part of his torso to move. He felt lightheaded, and he was no longer sure that he was conscious without interruption. Over and over again, the scenes of battle played back in his head, and he was vaguely aware of calling instructions, trying to warn his men. Bylov, the air controller, sat on the roof, and the world was in flames, and Bylov was eating his lunch as though unaware of the violence and waste around him.

“Vera,” Kryshinin said. “Vera, I have to explain.” He could not understand where Vera had gone. Only a moment ago, his wife had been beside him. Now he could not remember where she had gone.

His immediate surroundings returned. The grimy interior of a battlefield ambulance, waiting, sickening with exhaust fumes and the smells of ruined bodies. Two medical orderlies chatted with each other between the packed litters.

“This one’s gone.”

“Can’t be helped. Nothing to do. If they want to hold us up for everybody in the army to get past, we’ll lose them all. None of our doing.”

“Have a look. See if it’s still tanks going by.”

“You have a look if you want. I can tell by the sound that it’s tanks.”

“You’re closer to the door.”

They were stuck in a minefield, Kryshinin realized. They needed someone to lead them. He wanted to explain to them how it could be done, but they wouldn’t wait for him. He struggled to speak, muttering, but unable to get the words out in order.

“This one looks bad. He needs a transfusion quick,” an orderly said. “He’s white as snow.”

“Unless piss works, he’s out of luck.”

Kryshinin suddenly realized that they were talking about him. And he wanted to reply. But he did not know what to say, or how to say it now. And it seemed as though it would take an absurd, unreasonable amount of energy to speak.

“Well, to hell with them, anyway. At least they’re officers and they get to die in an ambulance.”

Vera. He knew he had seen her. She had been there a moment before, wearing her green dress that was growing a bit too tight. No.
No. Grip reality.
Vera is far away. Hold on to the actual. Don’t let go. ... But it was all so difficult.

He had not thought of Vera once during the battle. Perhaps that was a sign of how far apart they had grown. Nothing had worked out as planned. Nothing ever quite worked between them. They fought over trivial things, and he knew he drank too much at the officers’ canteen, but he did it anyway. And Vera carried her resentment in silence until it suddenly exploded into vicious, public anger, for all of the families in the officers’ quarters to hear.

But it could all be mended. Kryshinin felt the warmth of conviction. If only he could see her now, it could all be put right. It was all foolishness. And they must have children. When he found out that Vera had had two abortions without telling him, he had beaten her so badly that she could not go outside for almost two weeks.
Two
abortions. As if she wanted to kill every part of him that could have gotten inside of her.

“Get away from the window,”
Kryshinin shouted. “Get back.”

But the lieutenant failed to obey the command. He reached to catch an object hurtling through the air, and he burst apart as though his body were the climax of a fireworks display.

“I need support, can you hear me?
I need support.
We can’t hold. They’re all over us.
Please.”.

Vera surrounded by clouds of black smoke.

“Sounds as if this one had an interesting day,” one of the orderlies said in amusement.

“It just gets on your nerves after a while,” the other replied.

Halfway between the improvised helipad and the concealed forward command post of the Third Shock Army, the range car carrying Lieutenant General Starukhin down the muddy trail backfired once, shook, and sank to a stop. The sudden absence of mechanical noise startled the general. The world seemed to stop inside the big perceived silence, despite the vigor of the rain and the dull, distant sound of the war like a hangover in the ears. Each rustle of uniforms and wet leather straps seemed amplified, and the sour smell of tired men in damp uniforms grew unaccountably sharper.

Overcoming his initial bewilderment and horror, the junior sergeant behind the steering wheel clumsily tried to restart the vehicle, but the engine would not come to life. Instead of waiting for the dispatch of his own vehicle from the headquarters, Starukhin had hurriedly commandeered the immediately available range car, unwilling to lose the extra ten or fifteen minutes. Now he sat heavily in the little vehicle, with no means of communication, still several kilometers from his command post, mocked by the barrage of rain on the canvas roof.

The young driver carefully avoided looking around, fixing his eyes on the dashboard as though his stare might bully the machine back to life. The two aides accompanying Starukhin remained carefully silent. Starukhin listened to the boy’s fumbling for as long as he could bear it, then shouted:

“You can’t
coax
it to start, you drizzle ass. Get out and look at the engine.”

The boy shot out of the vehicle, banging against the door frame with bruising haste. Beyond the rain-smeared windshield, Starukhin could see him fumbling with the engine cover. In the blurred background, the rain seemed to have scoured all of the color out of the sky and landscape.

“And
you
two,” Starukhin bellowed, turning on his aides. “Get out there and help him. What’s the matter with you jackasses?”

The aides moved with the panic of men caught in a terrible crime. One of them, a lieutenant colonel, jostled wildly against Starukhin in his anxiety, and the army commander gave him a hard shove toward the door. Soon the two aides stood glum-faced beside the driver in the steady rain.

They were hopeless. All of them. Starukhin sat back, squaring his shoulders, convinced that he had to carry the entire army on his back. All of his life, he thought, he had had to drive his will head-on into the ponderous complacency characteristic of the system into which he had been born. Every day was a struggle. When something broke, those responsible would sheepishly sit down and wait to be told to fix it. Then they would take their own good time about the task. Unless you drove them. And Starukhin had learned how to drive men. But now, during the great test of his lifetime, he feared his inability to move the men under his command.

More than anything, he feared failure. He feared it because he believed it would reveal some secret incompetence hidden within him. Deep within his soul, where no other human being had ever been allowed to penetrate, Starukhin doubted himself, and nothing seemed more important to him than the preservation of his pride.

The damned whoring British would not break. It seemed incredible to him that he could not simply will his way through them, hammering them to nothing with his personal determination and the tank-heavy army under his command. He drifted back and forth between his bobbing doubts and waves of immeasurable energy. Now, as he envisioned the defending British, he sensed that it would be impossible for them to resist.

Yet the British were resisting, fighting bitterly for every road and water obstacle, seemingly for every worthless little village and godforsaken hill. While to the north, that bastard Trimenko was breaking through. Starukhin knew that Trimenko’s Second Guards Tank Army was already ahead of schedule, splitting the seam between the Germans and the Dutch. While he, Starukhin, had to butt head-on against the British.

That little Jewish shit Chibisov undoubtedly had a hand in it, Starukhin was convinced. He stared through the mud-speckled windshield at the soaking trio bent over the vehicle’s engine, feeling a strange pleasure at the thought of Chibisov. The hatred he felt was so intense, so pure and unexamined, that it was soothing. After the war ... the Chibisovs would be made to pay. The Motherland had to be purged yet again. It was time to settle accounts with the Jews and the Jew-loving writers, with the leeching minorities and false reformers. In the wordless clarity of the moment, Chibisov embodied everything foul in the Soviet Union, all responsibility for the failures of Starukhin’s own kind. And yet Starukhin recognized that he hated Chibisov not merely for his Jewish-ness, but for his easy, controlled brilliance as well. Everything came too easily to Chibisov. Malinsky’s staff Jew could perform offhandedly tasks that confronted Starukhin with agony and consternation.

Surely, Starukhin decided, Chibisov was sabotaging him, poisoning Malinsky against him and cleverly throwing the front’s support behind Trimenko. As he sat in the hard, low vehicle seat under canvas vibrant with rain Starukhin imputed to Chibisov every action that he would have taken in the other man’s place.