Red Army (30 page)

Leonid felt his fingers burn, and he let the lighter go out. He halted abruptly.

“What’s the matter?”

“It got too hot,” Leonid whispered. “Just wait a minute.”

The two boys stood in the middle of the stairs, balancing in the darkness. The sound of his own breath seemed like the winter wind to Leonid. As soon as he judged it possible, he ignited the lighter again.

Something moved.

Leonid fired his weapon in the direction of the movement, stumbling down the last few stairs, tripping, falling face down. He scrambled and rolled out of the way, firing haphazardly, until he found a wall against which he could huddle. The noise of the shots fired in the enclosed space echoed and rang in his ears. He felt as though he had been slapped hard on both sides of the head.

Seryosha brought the machine gun to bear. It sounded like a cannon firing. Leonid fired again, emptying his magazine in what he hoped was the right direction.

Someone screamed. Another voice shouted foreign words. Seryosha swept the machine gun through the darkness. But no one fired back. Streaks of light zigzagged crazily in the darkness, pinging and sparking off the walls.

“Stop it,”
Leonid shouted, “stop firing.” He had suddenly realized that the ricochets were as likely to kill them as were any enemy actions.

Seryosha ceased firing.

“Surrender,”
Leonid screamed at their phantom opponents.

A female voice shrieked in response, rising over the low notes of male groans.

“Surrender,” Leonid shouted, confused, his voice cracking. “Surrender.”

A female voice soared hideously in a strange language, babbling.

“What the hell is going on?” Seryosha said. His voice sounded near panic.

Leonid lifted himself from the floor, all bruised knees and elbows and the burning feel of scraped skin. He lunged toward the foreign voice.

“Surrender,” he ordered, his mind wild with fragments of thoughts that would not connect. He clicked on the lighter.

A heavyset girl stood with her back pressed against the wall, hands clutched to her face. She screamed in an animal fear that Leonid could not understand. It had never occurred to him that anyone might be afraid of him.

A few feet away from the girl, two bodies lay -- a crumpled man and the thick form of a woman. The moans had stopped now, and the bodies lay remarkably still, with the man hunched over the woman as though he were shielding her.

It struck Leonid that the broken tapes in his pockets probably belonged to this girl, and he suddenly felt ashamed, as though he had been discovered as a thief.

The girl’s screams wheezed down into sobs. Leonid let the lighter go out, shaking his singed fingers to soothe them. Seryosha clicked on his own lighter. And the girl howled again. She rubbed herself from side to side against the cinderblock wall, as though she wanted to grind herself into it.

“Oh, no,” Leonid said suddenly, as the situation began to come clear to him. “No ... I didn’t mean it . . .” He wished he could make the girl understand. He looked at her, gesturing thoughtlessly with his reeking weapon. “I didn’t mean it,” he repeated. “It was all an accident.”

The girl’s voice welled up again.

Seryosha stepped forward, slapping the girl with the hand that held the lighter. When it went out, Leonid took his turn again, working the flint with his sore fingers.

“Shut up,” Seryosha ordered. “You just shut up.” He slapped the girl again. There was a totally unfamiliar tone in Seryosha’s voice now.

The girl hushed slightly, as though she understood. But Leonid knew she didn’t understand at all.

“I’m sorry,” he told her again, anyway.

“You bet you’re sorry,” Seryosha told him angrily. Then he punched the girl. “Shut
up.”

“Stop it,”
Leonid told him.

“What do you mean, stop it?” Seryosha asked.
“Who are you?
You just
killed
them. Do you realize what’s going to happen to us if somebody hears her and comes down here? They’ll kill
us.”

Such a possibility had not occurred to Leonid. Now it reached him in its fullness, stopping him with its power.

The girl sobbed against the wall, bleeding driblets from her lower lip. She had gone beyond words now, and she merely cried, face turned to one side. Her sounds were those of a weakening animal.

Seryosha thrust with the machine gun, jamming its muzzle hard into her chest like a spear. Then he brought the heavy stock around and smashed it into her face. Leonid watched in wonder. With clumsy speed, Seryosha beat the girl to the ground, hitting her so hard with the machine gun that she could not meaningfully resist. She waved a pudgy hand at the descending blows, then toppled to the side, crumpling in on herself. Seryosha brought the butt of the weapon down on her skull with all of his weight behind it. Then he hit her again. And again.

Finally, the boy straightened, gasping for breath.

“Now she won’t tell anybody,” he said.

Starukhin smashed his fist down onto the map table. “Don’t sing me a song, you little bastard.
Fix
it.”

“Comrade Army Commander,” the shattered chief of signals said, “the communications complex is a complete loss. A direct hit. It will take some time to restore -- ”

“I don’t
have
time, you shit. I should send you down with the motorized rifle troops and let you see what war’s really like. How can I run an army when I can’t talk to anybody?”

“Comrade Army Commander, we can still communicate using manual Morse. And the auxiliary radios will be off the trucks and set up in no time. It’s just the multiplexing that will take a little time.”

“I don’t
have
time.
Time
is the one thing I
don’t
have,” Starukhin shouted. “You should’ve had all of the auxiliary systems set up and ready to operate. You’re a moron, a disgrace.” He looked around the headquarters. “You’re all a damned disgrace.”

The chief of signals almost replied that, since they had just shifted locations, it was unreasonable, even impossible, to expect that all of the backup systems would be fully prepared for operations. They had still been having trouble with the microwave connections even before the enemy strike. But he realized that it was hopeless to argue. All you could do was let the army commander blow over you like a storm, then pick up whatever was left.

Starukhin suddenly turned away. He began to pace back and forth like a powerful caged cat. Without warning, he smashed a hanging chart full of figures from the wall.

“I need to
talk.
”

Colonel Shtein watched the artfully crude film of the destruction of Lueneburg on the television monitor. As he watched, the same images were being broadcast over the highest-powered emitters in the German Democratic Republic. Shtein had no doubt that the film would be monitored in the West. It would soon gather the expected attention to itself. Even if the chaotic interference in the air completely blocked a successful broadcast into the heart of West Germany, the NATO elements hanging on in Berlin would monitor it. One way or another, the message would get through. Even the satellite television broadcasts from Moscow carried the report on the regular channels.

. . . Senseless destruction . . . precipitated and carried out by the aggressive NATO forces who are bent on destroying the cities and towns of the Federal Republic of Germany . . . perhaps even turning West Germany into a proving ground for their insane theories of tactical nuclear war ... in the opinion of experts, a nuclear war restricted to West German soil would cause . . .

And the voice-over was merely ornamentation. The powerful images of toppling medieval buildings, of women and children dashing, falling, cowering, of civilians twisted into the frozen acrobatics of death, and of the Dutch forces firing indiscriminately, were irresistible. Shtein was well aware of how far the skills of Soviet media specialists had come over the years.

Shtein was convinced that this was a war-winner. At least the overall approach. Modern war was hardly a matter of beating each other over the head with a club. Shtein saw it as a highly articulated, challengingly complex conflict of intellects and wills.
Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung.
He laughed to himself, remembering his student days. He loved the Germans. They were so absolutely right, and so thoroughly unable to act upon the correctness of their conclusions.

We will beat them with cameras, Shtein thought. With video technology. With their own wonderful tools. He could not understand how the West could neglect so totally its vast array of technology that could potentially be used for propaganda purposes. War was, after all, a matter of perceptions. Even the most dull-witted historian could tell you that being physically beaten was not nearly as important as being convinced that you had been defeated. Shtein believed that he was one of the pioneers, one of the soldiers of the future.

He admired the wrenching conclusion of the film once again. It would be broadcast again in an hour, then every hour on the hour. It would be supplemented by other clips as the war progressed, shifting the concentration of the propaganda effort as necessary. Fighting for the invisible, for the intangible, for the ultimately vital, Shtein thought. And he smiled.

Yes. The world as will and idea.

Major General Duzov, commander of the Tenth Guards Tank Division, watched the attack from the forward observation post established by the assaulting regiment. He recognized that his presence troubled the regiment’s commander. But Duzov didn’t care. In an earlier assault, he had lost a regiment of tanks in two hours, in a swirling British counterattack that had ruined both the Soviet force and its antagonist. And he had not been on the scene to control the situation. Now, if his division was going to take any more catastrophic losses, he at least intended to be present.

Lieutenant General Starukhin, his superior, had been as explicit as he could be. Punch the hole, Duzov. They’re worn down. Punch the hole, or don’t let me see your face alive.

He had two more chances. This attack, then the commitment of the trailing regiment. Duzov would have preferred to wait until he could strike with both regiments simultaneously, as well as throwing back in the battered motorized rifle regiment that had been working the broken ground to the south and the pathetic remains of the shattered tank regiment. Duzov believed in concentrated blows. And he knew he had one of the very best divisions in the Soviet Army. He hated to see it squandered piecemeal. It went against the grain of everything he had been taught, against all his beliefs.

But Starukhin had been adamant, rising to fury.
Hit them.
Just hit them again and again. This isn’t the General Staff Academy. Drive over them, Duzov. Save your maxims and elegant solutions for your memoirs.

Perhaps Starukhin was right. Keep up the pressure. Don’t allow the enemy breathing space.

The earth twitched beneath his feet. The artillery preparation had begun, concentrating all available fires on the known or estimated British positions. The broad, low valley filled with light, as though a bizarre morning had arrived ahead of schedule. Shells crashed and sputtered, ripping into the horizon by the thousands. Duzov could not understand how men survived such shelling. Yet he knew that some of them always did. It was, at times, amazingly difficult to kill the human animal.

The streaking dazzle of a multiple rocket launcher barrage rose from the left of the observation post. Then the canopy of scheduled illumination began to unfold, with lines of illumination bursting in crooked ranks, four to six hundred meters apart. The British had a significant gunnery advantage in the dark, so all local units had been ordered to fire a high percentage of illumination, while the heavier rear guns concentrated their efforts on target destruction.

The attacking regiment had been well-drilled, and now, tired from the march, going into battle for the first time, struggling with the unfamiliar terrain, the subunits nonetheless appeared in good order, flooding over the near crests in company columns that soon drilled out into columns of platoons, all the while making good combat speed. Duzov admired his troops and the power of the overall spectacle. On the valley floor, the platoons fanned out and the combat vehicles came on line. Duzov could easily pick out the positions of the company and battalion commanders, of the staggered ranks of tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, and the air-defense weaponry trailing to the rear. On the trail of the maneuver battalions, the lean-barreled self-propelled guns snooped along, ready to provide immediate fire support to the assault. Then, at the very rear, odd support vehicles and little clusters of ambulances followed. It was one of the most complete maneuvers Duzov had ever seen, and it suddenly translated into timelessness for him. It had never struck him before, but now he saw in the surging lines the perfect modern version of the old Imperial armies marching out in their ready ranks, the men of Suvorov or Kutuzov. The only difference was that today the rank and file wore layers of technology, armor, and mechanization in place of the colorful uniforms of old. In a moment of skepticism and refusal, he told himself that there was really no comparison between these squat, ugly steel bugs beetling across the valley floor and the antique brilliance of hussars and grenadiers. But it
was
the same. He could not deny it now. It was exactly the same, and the revealed truth of it burned into Duzov. What ever changed about war? he asked himself.

The British gunners and tank crews began to find targets, even with the Soviet artillery still crashing upon them. Duzov had to admire the British. He doubted that many men, especially those who had not previously known war, would even briefly attempt to stand their ground in the face of such an onslaught. Here and there, one of Duzov’s vehicles convulsed into a tiny bonfire or fell, crippled, from the advancing ranks. Duzov returned to his insistent vision. It was all so much the same he could hardly believe it. The way you pictured men falling away at the first enemy musket volleys. Only now the men had been made a part of fighting systems.