Red Army (12 page)

The pilot never really powered down. His copilot leapt from the settling aircraft and raced through the drizzle, bareheaded. Plinnikov jumped from his track, clutching the rolled maps and documents. The maps and some of the papers were stained with blood and the spillage of ripped bodies, and Plinnikov was anxious to be rid of them. He held them out to the aviator like a bouquet.

“Anything else?” the copilot shouted. The wash off the rotors half submerged his voice.

Plinnikov shook his head.

The smoke spread out in a shredded carpet across the green field. The enemy would see it, too, and there was no time to waste.

The copilot raced back to his helicopter. He hurriedly tossed the captured materials behind his seat, and the pilot began to lift off even before his partner was properly seated. The aircraft rose just enough to clear the trees, then shot off in a dogleg from its approach direction.

Plinnikov vaulted onto the deck of his vehicle, almost losing his balance on the slippery metal. He dropped into the turret.

“Let’s move. Back into the woods.”

The vehicle whined into life, rocking out across the furrows of the field until it could turn and nose back into the trail between the trees. Plinnikov studied his map again, searching for a good route deeper into the enemy’s rear. No obvious routes suggested themselves, and his calculations began to seem hopelessly complicated to him. In irritation, he ordered the driver to double back onto the trail that had proven so lucrative earlier, hoping a course would be easier to develop while working through the actual landscape than it was on the map.

At a trail crossing, he turned to the map for reference. It was a very high-quality map, with extensive military detail. But it almost seemed as though the trails in the German woods created themselves out of nothing, as though the forest were haunted.

He chose the trail that seemed to head west. At first, it was a fair dirt track. Then the forest began to close in. Plinnikov found himself pushing wet branches away from the vehicle. His uniform was already soaking and uncomfortable, and his spirits dropped suddenly, as though someone had pulled a cork.

“Depress the gun tube. It’s catching the branches. Driver, go slowly.”

Then Plinnikov’s fortunes seemed to change. The trees thinned again, and the terrain began to show slight undulations. A hollow off to his right discharged a small stream that then flowed parallel to the track. He checked his map again, hoping the feature and the trail, side by side, would allow him to orient himself. But he could not identify his location; the only possibilities on the map didn’t really seem to make sense in terms of the distance he estimated they had traveled. He needed a clear landmark, or an open view.

Through all of his trials, Plinnikov tried not to think of the dead enemy, to hold their creeping, insistent reality at a distance. He sought harmless thoughts, gleaning his memories of the military academy and the seemingly endless dilemmas of the lieutenancy that followed graduation. But all of the forced images faded into the vivid sights, sounds, and smells of the recent combat. He could not help refighting the action over and over again, scrutinizing his failures. The dead men died again and again, their reality already changing slightly, as though warping and mutating in his overheated memory.

Unexpectedly, the forest ended. The vehicle lay fully exposed where Plinnikov ordered it to halt. He shook off the last of his daydreams. A church spire rose above a copse of trees, dark against the low gray sky. He wiped the back of his fingers across his nose and reached down for his map.

He neither saw nor heard the round that killed him. It tore into the hull of the vehicle below the turret, ripping off his lower legs and mincing his hands as it exploded. The quick secondary blast shot his torso up through the commander’s hatch, breaking his neck against the hatch rim and shattering his back as the pressure compressed his body through the circular opening and blew it into the sky like a bundle of rags.

Kryshinin had never faced such a frustrating problem. As commander of the forward security element, it was his job to move fast, to locate the enemy and overrun him, if possible, or, otherwise, to fix the enemy until the advance guard came up, meanwhile searching for a bypass around the enemy position. Textbook stuff. Yet here the enemy had already pulled back. And his element was blocked by nothing more than a mined road crater and an unknown number of mines in the surrounding meadows.

He had no idea where the combat reconnaissance patrol had gone, or how they had gotten through. They should have warned him of this situation. Now Kryshinin was stuck. His engineers had become separated from his element in the confusion of initial contact and penetration of the enemy’s covering troops. He had no mine-clearing capability without them.

He judged that the advance guard was no more than twenty minutes behind, unless they had gotten bogged down in more fighting. Leading the Second Guards Tank Army attack, the division’s lead regiments had struck the thin enemy deployments so hard that it had been surprisingly easy to force a gap. Kryshinin had not lost a single vehicle in combat. He was only missing the wandering engineers. Until the lead infantry fighting vehicle attempted to work around the road crater. A mine had torn out its belly and butchered the crew.

Now Kryshinin’s element was static. Thirteen infantry fighting vehicles, three tanks, a battery of 122mm self-propelled guns, and over a dozen specialized vehicles with ground-to-air radios, artillery communications, antitank missiles, and light surface-to-air missiles were backed up along a single country road. It was a tough little combat package, well-suited to the mission and the terrain. But now, without engineers, it was helpless.

Kryshinin dismounted and began walking swiftly forward along the bunched column. But before he reached its head, he saw one of his lieutenants flush all of the soldiers out of their fighting vehicle. The lieutenant got into the driver’s compartment and, after a jerking start, edged slowly toward the blasted vehicle.

The lieutenant guided his vehicle behind the hulk and began pushing it. Kryshinin stood still for a moment in surprise. Then he began to shout at the motorized rifle troops who were standing around watching as casually as if this was a training demonstration. He came back to life now, as if awakening, stirred by his lieutenant’s example. He ordered the vehicles into a more tactical posture. He was suddenly ashamed of himself. He had allowed them all to back up on the road like perfect targets while he had waited for inspiration.

The lieutenant had not been able to push the destroyed vehicle in a straight line. Finally, he just edged it out of the way, crunching and grinding metal. The mine-struck vehicle had peeled off a track, and the hulk curled off to the left as its naked road wheels bit into the turf and sank.

The lieutenant drove slowly forward, seeking a safe path to the roadway on the far side of the crater. He was a new officer, and Kryshinin had had little sense of him. Another lieutenant. Now the boy had taken the lead when his superior had failed.

Kryshinin stood in the disheartening German rain, painfully conscious of his inadequacy. He regretted all of the opportunities he had let slip to better train himself and his officers, to get to know his lieutenants a little better.

The infantry fighting vehicle’s engine had a girlish sort of whine, even grinding forward in the lowest gear. Kryshinin watched, fists clenched, as the vehicle neared its destination.

The left side of the vehicle suddenly lifted into the air, lofted on a pillow of fire.

Kryshinin instinctively ducked against the nearest vehicle. When he looked up, the lieutenant’s vehicle stood in flames.

Without looking around, Kryshinin could feel the crushing disappointment in all of the soldiers. They had been united in their hopes for the lieutenant. Now expectation collapsed into a desolate emptiness.

As Kryshinin stood helplessly again a young sergeant ordered all of his soldiers out of their vehicle. And the sergeant drove slowly in the lieutenant’s traces until the prow of his track crunched against the flaming rear doors of the newly stricken vehicle. Then he applied power.

Before the sergeant finished working the burning vehicle out of the way, a tank pulled out of the column and carefully worked its way up along the shoulder of the road, ready to take its turn in case another probe vehicle was needed.

Kryshinin knew it was all right then. They would get through. He began to shout encouragement. Following his lead, his soldiers began to shout as well.

The flaming wreck veered out of the way, and the sergeant aimed at the roadway beyond the crater.

Kryshinin felt as though he could win the war with just a handful of men such as these. He was suddenly eager to get back on the move, to find the enemy.

“Could it be a deception?” Trimenko said, asking the question more of himself than of his audience. He reached into the leather tobacco pouch in which he carried his pistachios. Eating them was a habit he had picked up during his years in the Transcaucasus Military District. In Germany, his staff went to great lengths to keep him supplied. Often, he hardly tasted the nuts, but he found that peeling away the shells had a soothing influence on him, draining away nervousness the way worry beads worked for a Muslim.

“The documents appear to be genuine,” the army’s deputy chief of staff for operations said. “They were reportedly taken from a command post that was completely destroyed.”

“Have you seen the documents? Has anyone here seen them?”

“They’re on their way up from the division. We only know what the chief of reconnaissance reported from his initial exploitation. But it makes sense,” the operations chief said, pointing at the map. “It puts their corps boundary here, not far from where we had assessed it.”

“Far enough, though,” Trimenko said. “It makes a difference. We need to execute the option shifting Malyshev’s division onto the central tactical direction with Khrenov. The combat power has to converge.” He slipped the bared pistachio between his lips.

“Comrade Army Commander, that may slow the seizure of Lueneburg.”

At the mention of Lueneburg, Trimenko’s temper quickened. But his facial expression gave no indication of any change. He still chafed at the thought of the Lueneburg operation. He had not been allowed to explain its purpose to anyone else; as far as his staff knew, it was a serious undertaking with a military purpose. But it irritated Trimenko that none of them seemed to question it. To him, it was obviously a stupid diversion of combat power. Yet his officers accepted it without a murmur. He looked at his operations chief. The man’s mind was too slow; he was always too ready to state the self-evident. Trimenko felt disgustedly that he could think at least twice as fast and several times more clearly than any of his subordinates. He reached for another pistachio.

“If we rupture their corps boundary,” Trimenko said in a voice that was clearly unwilling to accept further discussion, “we’ll turn Lueneburg from the south at our convenience.” He felt as though he were lecturing cadets at one of the second-rate academies. “I’m going to split them like a melon under a cleaver.” He turned to his chief of staff. “Babryshkin, order Malyshev and Khrenov to execute the center option. Adjust the boundary accordingly.” Suddenly, he stood up, unwilling to trust the staff to work incisively and swiftly enough to meet the demands of the situation. “Put the boundary here. Just offset from Route 71. Get Malyshev moving. If he hasn’t made his preparations properly, I’ll relieve him. Has Khrenov reported on the status of his crossing?”

“Comrade Army Commander, the divisional crossing operation is underway at this time.”

Trimenko sensed that his operations officer didn’t know any further details. He almost lashed out at the officer but managed to control himself. His fingernails worked at the pistachio shell. “All right. Everyone get started. Babryshkin, get me the front commander on the line. If he’s not available, I’ll talk to General Chibisov. And get my helicopter ready. I’m going forward. Make sure my pilot has a good fix on Khrenov’s forward command post. If Khrenov isn’t there, I’ll take over his division myself.”

Trimenko felt a familiar fury. He could not make them move at the pace he believed appropriate to the occasion. But he realized that if he drove them any harder now, they would only grow sloppy in their haste. He kept his hand on the throttle of the staff, striving for the maximum effective control of his officers, for the highest possible levels of performance and efficiency. And when he paused to reflect, he realized that his was a good staff, as staffs went. But the human animal was simply too slow, too inconsistent for him. You had to drive it with a lash, applying pain skillfully so that it spurred the animal onward but did not cause permanent injury. Occasionally an animal was too weak, and it failed and had to be destroyed. Other animals learned to respond to the very sound. But the requirement for the lash never disappeared, although the form taken by the instrument might change.

Trimenko was determined to fulfill the front plan so well that Malinsky would be forced to change it, cutting back Starukhin’s role. He believed he would have an ally in Chibisov, Malinsky’s clever little Jew, whom he took pains to cultivate. Trimenko regarded Starukhin as grossly overrated, a holdover from another, more slovenly era. Trimenko didn’t believe modern war was for Cossacks. Not at the operational level. Now it was for computers. And until they had better computers -- computers that could replace the weaker type of men -- war belonged to the men who were as much like computers as possible: exact, devoid of sentiment, and very, very fast.

Captain Kryshinin finally heard from the missing combat reconnaissance patrol. They had run into enemy opposition and had slipped off further to the south of Bad Bevensen. On Kryshinin’s map, the patrol had moved outside of the unit’s assigned boundary. But the good news was that they had seized a crossing site on the Elbe-Seiten Canal.