It was strange crossing the Soviet ribbon bridge-it was strange to be moving east at all! Mackall thought-and his driver was nervous, crossing the narrow, flimsy-looking structure at five miles per hour. Once across, they moved north along the river, swinging around the town. It was raining lightly, with fog and low-hanging clouds, typical European summer weather that cut visibility to under a thousand yards. He was met by troops who guided the arriving tanks to selected defensive positions. The Soviets had helped for once. In their constant efforts to clear the roads of rubble, they’d given the Americans neat piles of brick and stone about two meters high, almost exactly the right size for tanks to hide behind. The lieutenant dismounted from his vehicle to check the placement of his four tanks, then conferred with the commander of the infantry company he was detailed to support. There were two battalions of infantry dug in deep and hard on the outskirts of Alfeld, supported by a squadron of tanks. He heard the overhead whistling of artillery shells, the new kind that dropped mines on the fog-shrouded battlefield ahead of him. The whistling changed as he mounted his tank. Incoming.
STENDAL, GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC
“It’s taken too long to get them moving,” Alekseyev growled to his operations officer.
“It’s still three divisions, and they are moving now.”
“But how many reinforcements have arrived?”
The operations man had warned Alekseyev against trying to coordinate a two-pronged attack, but the General had stuck to the plan. Beregovoy’s A tank division was now in place to strike from the west, while the three C reserve divisions hit from the east. The regular tank force had no artillery-they’d had to move too fast to bring it-but three hundred tanks and six hundred personnel carriers were a formidable force all by themselves, the General thought . . . but what were they up against, and how many vehicles had been destroyed or damaged by air attack on the approach march?
Sergetov arrived. His class-A uniform was rumpled from his traveling.
“And how was Moscow?” Alekseyev asked.
“Dark, Comrade General. The attack, how did it go?”
“Just starting now.”
“Oh?” The major was surprised at the delay. He looked rather closely at the Theater Operations Officer, who hovered over the map table, frowning at the dispositions while the plotting officers prepared to mark the progress of the attack.
“I have a message from high command for you, Comrade General.” Sergetov handed over an official-looking form. Alekseyev scanned it-and stopped reading. His fingers went taut on the paper briefly before he regained self-control.
“Come to my office.” The General said nothing more until the door was closed. “Are you sure of this?”
“I was told by Director Kosov himself.”
Alekseyev sat on the edge of his desk. He lit a match and burned the message form, watching the flame march across the paper almost to his fingertips as he twisted it in his hand.
“That fucking weasel. Stukach!” An informer on my own staff! “What else?”
Sergetov related the other information he’d learned. The General was silent for a minute, computing his fuel requirements against fuel reserves.
“If today’s attack fails . . . we’ve-” He turned away, unwilling, unable, to make himself say it aloud. I have not trained my whole life to fail! He remembered the first notice he’d had of the campaign against NATO. I told them to attack at once. I told them that we needed strategic surprise, and that we’d have difficulty achieving it if we waited so long. I told them that we’d have to close the North Atlantic to prevent resupply of the NATO forces. So. Now that we’ve accomplished none of these, my friend is in a KGB prison and my own life is in jeopardy because I may fail to do what I told them we could not do-because I was right all along!
Come now, Pasha. Why should the Politburo listen to its soldiers when it can just as easily shoot them?
The Theater Operations Officer stuck his head through the door. “The troops are moving.”
“Thank you, Yevgeny Ilych,” Alekseyev answered amiably. He rose from the desk. “Come, Major, let’s see how quickly we can smash through the NATO lines!”
ALFELD, FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY
“Bar fight,” Woody said from his gunner’s position.
“Looks like it,” Mackall agreed.
They’d been told to expect two or three Soviet reserve divisions. Together they had perhaps the artillery strength of two regular units, and they were firing at both sides of the river. The miserable visibility hurt both sides. The Russians could not direct their artillery fire well, and the NATO troops would have minimal air support. As usual, the worst part of the preliminary bombardment was the rockets, which lasted two minutes, the unguided missiles falling like hail. Though men died and vehicles exploded, the defending force was well prepared and casualties were light.
Woody switched on his thermal-imaging sights. It allowed him to see roughly a thousand yards, double the visual range. On the left side of the turret, the loader sat nervously, his foot resting lightly on the pedal that controlled the doors to the ammo compartment. The driver in his coffin sized box under the main gun drummed his fingers on the control bar.
“Heads up. Friendlies coming in,” Mackall told his crew. “Movement reported to the east.”
“I see ’em,” Woody acknowledged. Just a few infantrymen were returning from their forward listening posts. Not as many as there should have been, Mackall thought. So many casualties over the past-
“Target tank, twelve o’clock,” Woody said. He squeezed the triggers on his yoke, and the tank seemed to leap from its first shot.
The spent round ejected from the breech. The loader stomped his foot on the pedal. The door slid clear of the ammo compartment and he pulled out another sabot round, turning it in a narrow circle to slain it in the breech.
“Ready!”
Woody already had another target. He was largely on his own while Mackall watched out for the whole platoon’s front. The troop commander was calling in artillery fire. Immediately behind the first row of tanks, they saw dismounted infantrymen running to keep up with the tanks. Eight-wheeled infantry carriers were mixed in as well. The Bradleys engaged them with their 25mm guns as proximity-fused artillery rounds began to detonate twenty feet off the ground, showering the infantrymen with fragments.
They couldn’t miss. The Russian tanks advanced at half the normal hundred-yard interval, concentrating on a narrow front. They were old T-55s, Woody saw, with obsolete 100mm guns. He killed three before they could even see the NATO positions. One shell landed in the stone pile ahead of their tank, sending a mix of steel fragments and stone chips over the vehicle. Woody dispatched that tank with a HEAT round. Smoke rounds began failing-they didn’t help the Russians at all. The electronic sights on the NATO vehicles saw right through it. More artillery fire landed on the Cav now that the Russians could see well enough to direct fire in on their positions, and that began an artillery duel as NATO guns searched for the Russian batteries.
“Antenna tank! Sabot!” The gunner locked his sights on the T-55 and fired. The round missed this time and they reloaded another round. The second shot blew the turret into the sky. The thermal sight showed the bright dots of antitank missiles running downrange, and the fountaining explosions of the vehicles they hit. Suddenly the Russians stopped. Most of the vehicles died in place, but some turned and ran off.
“Cease fire, cease fire!” Mackall told his platoon. “Report in.”
“Three-two has a track blown off,” one replied. The others were intact, protected by their stone revetments.
“Nine rounds fired, boss,” Woody said. Mackall and the loader opened their hatches to vent the acrid propellant smell out of the turret. The gunner pulled off his leather helmet and shook his head. His sandy hair was filthy. “You know, there’s one thing I miss from the M-60.”
“What’s that, Woody?”
“We ain’t got no hatch in the bottom. Nice to be able to take a piss without climbing outside.”
“Did you have to say that!” the driver moaned.
Mackall laughed. It was a moment before he realized why. For the first time they’d stopped Ivan cold, without having to pull back at all-a good thing since their current position didn’t allow for that possibility! And how did the crew react? They were making jokes.
USS REUBEN JAMES
O’Malley lifted off again. He was averaging ten flight hours per day. Three ships had been torpedoed, two more hit by submarine-launched missiles in the past four days, but the Russians had paid dearly for that. They’d sent perhaps as many as twenty submarines into Icelandic waters. Eight had died trying to get through the picket line of submarines that was the fleet’s outer defense. More had fallen to the line of towed-array ships whose helicopters were now backed up by those of HMS Illustrious, A bold Tango skipper had actually penetrated one of the carrier groups and put a fish into America’s tough hide, only to be pounced on and sunk by the destroyer Caron. The carrier could now make only twenty-five knots, barely enough to conduct flight operations, but she was still there.