Alekseyev watched his troops advancing toward the first bridge.
South of him, the commander of the lead regiment swore at his losses. More than half his tanks and assault vehicles had been destroyed. Victory was within his grasp, and now his troops had been stopped again by impassable streets and murderous fire. He saw the NATO tanks pulling slowly back, and, enraged that they were escaping, called in for artillery.
Alekseyev was surprised when the artillery fire shifted from the center of the town to the riverfront. He was shocked when he realized that it was not tube artillery fire, but rockets. As he watched, explosions appeared at random over the riverfront. Then rounds began exploding in the river in rapid succession. The rate of fire increased as more and more launchers were trained on the target, and it was already too late for him to stop them. The farthest bridge went first. Three rockets landed at once, and it came apart. Alekseyev watched in horror as over a hundred civilians fell into the churning water. His horror was not for the loss of life-he needed that bridge! Two more rockets landed on the center bridge. It did not collapse, but the damage it took was serious enough to prevent tanks from using it. The fools! Who was responsible for this? He turned to Sergetov.
“Call up the engineers. Get bridging units and assault boats to the front. They have absolute priority. Next, I want every surface-to-air missile and antiair gun battery you can find. Anyone who gets in their way will be shot. Make sure the traffic-control officers know this. Go!”
The Soviet tanks and infantry had reached the only surviving bridge. Three infantry vehicles raced to the far side and were taken under fire by the Belgians and Americans as they raced to cover. A tank followed. The T-80 rumbled across, got to the far side and exploded from an impacting missile. Another followed, then a third. Both reached the west bank. Then a British Chieftain emerged from behind a building and followed the Soviet tanks across. Alekseyev watched in amazement as it ran right between the two Soviet vehicles, neither of which saw it. An American missile ran just behind it and plowed into the ground, raising a cloud of dirt and dust. Two more Chieftains emerged at the bridgehead. One exploded from a point-blank shot by a T-80, the other fired back, killing the Russian tank a second later. Alekseyev remembered a tale from his boyhood of a brave peasant on a bridge as the British tank engaged and killed two more Soviet tanks before succumbing to a barrage of direct fire. Five more Soviet vehicles raced across the bridge.
The General lifted his headset and dialed up 8th Guards Army Headquarters. “This is Alekseyev. I have a company of troops across the Leine. I need support. We have broken through. Repeat: we have broken through the German front! I want air support and helicopters to engage NATO units north and south of Bridge 439. 1 need two regiments of infantry to assist with the river crossing. Get me support and I might have my division across by midnight.”
“You’ll get everything I have. My bridging units are on the way.”
Alekseyev leaned against the side of his BMP. He unbuckled his canteen and took a long drink as he watched his infantry climb the hills under fire. Two complete companies were across now. Allied fire was now attempting to destroy the remaining bridge. He had to get at least a full battalion across if he wanted to hold this bridgehead for more than a few hours. “I’ll get the bastard,” he promised himself, “who fired on my bridges.”
“Boats and bridges are en route, Comrade General,” Sergetov reported. “They have first priority, and the sector traffic-control officers have been informed. Two SAM batteries are starting this way, and I found three mobile AA guns three kilometers off. They said they can be here in fifteen minutes.”
“Good.” Alekseyev trained his binoculars on the far bank.
“Comrade General, our infantry carriers are amphibious. Why don’t we swim them across?”
“Look at the riverbank, Vanya.” The General handed his glasses over. As far as he could see, the far side was all set with stone and concrete to prevent erosion. It would be difficult if not impossible for the tracked vehicles to climb that. Damn the Germans for that! “Besides, I wouldn’t want to try that in anything less than regimental strength. That bridge is all we have, and it can’t last very long. With the best of luck we won’t have any assault bridges in place for several hours. The troops on the far side are on their own for at least that long. We’ll run as many troops and vehicles across the bridge as we can, then reinforce with infantry assault boats as soon as they arrive. The book calls for this sort of crossing to be made in assault boats, under cover of darkness or smoke. I don’t want to wait for night, and I need the guns to fire live shells, not harmless ones. We must break the rules, Vanya. Fortunately the book allows for that also. You have performed well, Ivan Mikhailovich. You are now a major. Don’t thank me-you’ve earned it.”
STORNOWAY, SCOTLAND
“We didn’t miss ’em by much. If we’d seen them five minutes sooner, we could have taken a few out. As it was-” The Tomcat pilot shrugged.
Toland nodded. The fighters had orders to remain outside Soviet radar coverage.
“You know, it’s a funny thing. There were three of them flying a nice tight formation. I had them on my TV system from fifty miles away. No way in hell they could tell we were there. If we had better range, we could follow them all the way home. Like that game the Germans played on us once upon a time-send a bird right behind a returning raid and drop a few bombs right after they landed.”
“We’d never get anything through their IFF,” Toland replied.
“True, but we’d know their arrival time at their bases to within, oh, ten minutes. That’s gotta be useful to somebody.”
Commander Toland set his cup down. “Yeah, you’re right.” He decided he’d put that idea on the printer to Commander, Eastern Atlantic.
LAMMERSDORF, FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY
There was no mistaking it. NATO lines had been decisively broken south of Hannover. Two brigades were taken from the perilously thin NATO ground reserve and sent toward Alfeld. Unless this hole was plugged, Hannover would be lost, and with it all of Germany east of the Weser.
29 – Remedies
ALFELD, FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY
As predicted, the bridge lasted less than an hour. In that time Alekseyev had gotten a full battalion of mechanized infantry across, and though the NATO troops launched a pair of vicious counterattacks on his bridgehead, the tanks he’d placed on the east bank had been able to break them up with direct fire. Now NATO had caught its breath, and was assembling artillery. Heavy guns pounded his bridgehead and the tanks on the Soviet side of the river, and to make matters worse, the assault boats had been held up by incredible traffic snarls on the road between Sack and Alfeld. German heavy guns were littering the road and surrounding land with artillery-deployed mines, each powerful enough to knock the tread off a tank or the wheel off a truck. Sappers swept the roads continuously, using heavy machine guns to detonate the mines, but every one took time, and not all were seen before they exploded under a heavily loaded vehicle. The loss of the individual trucks and tanks was bad enough; worse still were the traffic tieups that resulted from each disabled vehicle.
Alekseyev’s headquarters were in a camera shop overlooking the river. The plate-glass window had long since been blown away, and his boots crackled with every step. He surveyed the far bank through his binoculars and anguished for his men as they tried to fight back at the men and tanks on the hills above them. A few kilometers away, every mobile gun in 8th Guards Army was racing forward to provide fire support for his tank division, and he and Sergetov set them to counterbattery the NATO guns.
“Enemy aircraft!” a lieutenant shouted.
Alekseyev craned his neck and saw a dot to the south, which grew rapidly into a German F-104 fighter. Yellow tracer lines reached out from his AA guns and blotted it from the sky before it could release, but instantly another appeared, this one firing its own cannon at the gun vehicle and exploding it. Alekseyev swore as the single-engine fighter bored in, dropped two bombs on the far side of the river, and streaked away. The bombs fell slowly, retarded by small parachutes, then, twenty meters over the ground, appeared to fill the air with fog-Alekseyev dove to the floor of the shop as the cloud of explosive vapor detonated from the fuel-air-explosive bombs. The shock wave was fearful, and above his head a display case shattered, dropping broken glass all over him.