. . . and within range of his big DshKM machine gun. Komanov stood on his firing stand and yanked back hard on the charging handle, leveling the gun and sighting carefully. His big tank gun could do this, but so could he …
So, you want to kill Sergeant Ivanov? his mind asked. Then he thumbed the trigger lever, and the big gun shook in his hands. His first burst was about thirty meters short, but his second was right on, and three men fell. He kept firing to make sure he’d destroyed their rocket launcher. He realized a moment later that the brilliant green tracers had just announced his location for all to see—tracers work in both directions. That became clear in two minutes, when the first artillery shells began landing around Position Five six Alfa. He only needed one close explosion to drop down and slam his hatch. The hatch was the weakest part of his position’s protection, with only a fifth of the protective thickness of the rest—else he’d be unable to open it, of course—and if a shell hit that, he and his crew would all be dead. The enemy knew their location now, and there was no sense in hiding.
“Sergeant,” he told his gunner. “Fire at will.”
“Yes, Comrade Lieutenant!” And with that, the sergeant loosed his first high-explosive round at a machine-gun crew eight hundred meters away. The shell hit the gun itself and vaporized the infantrymen operating it. “There’s three good Chinks!” he exulted. “Load me another!” The turret started turning, and the gunner started hunting.
“Getting some resistance now,” Wa told Peng. “There are Russian positions on the southern slope of the second ridge. We’re hitting them now with artillery.”
“Losses?”
“Light,” the operations officer reported, listening in on the tactical radio.
“Good,” said General Peng. His attention was almost entirely on the river. The first bridge was about a third complete now.
“Those bridging engineers are pretty good,” General Wallace thought, watching the “take” from Marilyn Monroe.
“Yes, sir, hut it might as well be a peacetime exercise. They’re not taking any fire,” the junior officer observed, watching another section being tied off. “And it’s a very efficient bridge design.”
“Russian?”
The major nodded. “Yes, sir. We copied it, too.”
“How long?”
“The rate they’re going? About an hour, maybe an hour ten.”
“Back to the gunfight,” Wallace ordered.
“Sergeant, let’s go back to the ridge,” the officer told the NCO who was piloting the UAC. Thirty seconds later, the screen showed what looked like a tank sunk in the mud surrounded by a bunch of infantrymen.
“Jesus, that looks like real fun,” Wallace thought. A fighter pilot by profession, the idea of fighting in the dirt appealed to him about as much as anal sex.
“They’re not going to last much longer,” the major said. “Look here. The gomers are behind some of the bunkers now.”
“And look at all that artillery.”
A total of a hundred heavy field guns were now pounding Komanov’s immobile platoon. That amounted to a full battery fixed on each of them, and heavy as his buried concrete box was, it was shaking now, and the air inside filled with cement dust, as Komanov and his crew struggled to keep up with all the targets.
“This is getting exciting, Comrade Lieutenant,” the gunner observed, as he loosed his fifteenth main-gun shot.
Komanov was in his commander’s cupola, looking around and seeing, rather to his surprise, that his bunker and all the others under his command could not deal with the attackers. It was a case of intellectual knowledge finally catching up with what his brain had long proclaimed as evident common sense. He actually was not invincible here. Despite his big tank gun and his two heavy machine guns, he could not deal with all these insects buzzing about him. It was like swatting flies with an icepick. He reckoned that he and his crew had personally killed or wounded a hundred or so attackers—but no tanks. Where were the tanks he yearned to kill? He could do that job well. But to deal with infantry, he needed supporting artillery fire, plus foot soldiers of his own. Without them, he was like a big rock on the sea coast, indestructible, but the waves could just wash around him. And they were doing that now, and then Komanov remembered that all the rocks by the sea were worn down by the waves, and eventually toppled by them. His war had lasted three hours, not even that much, and he was fully surrounded, and if he wanted to survive, it would soon be time to leave.
The thought enraged him. Desert his post? Run away? But then he remembered that he had orders allowing him to do so, if and when his post became untenable. He’d received the orders with a confident chuckle. Run away from an impregnable mini-fortress? What nonsense. But now he was alone. Each of his posts was alone. And—
—the turret rang like an off-tone bell with a direct impact of a heavy shell, and then—
—”Shit!” The gunner screamed. “Shit! My guns damaged!”
Komanov looked out of one of his vision slits, and yes, he could see it. The gun tube was scorched and . . . and actually bent. Was that possible? A gun barrel was the sturdiest structure men could make—but it was slightly bent. And so it was no longer a gun barrel at all, but just an unwieldy steel club. It had fired thirty-four rounds, but it would fire no more. With that gone, he’d never kill a Chinese tank. Komanov took a deep breath to collect himself and his thoughts. Yes, it was time.
“Prepare the post for destruction!” he ordered.
“Now?” the gunner asked incredulously.
“Now!” the lieutenant ordered. “Set it up!”
There was a drill for this, and they’d practiced it. The loader took a demolition charge and set it among the racked shells. The electrical cable was in a spool, which he played out. The gunner ignored this, cranking the turret right to fire his coaxial machine gun at some approaching soldiers, then turning rapidly the other way to strike at those who’d used his reaction to the others’ movement for cover to move themselves. Komanov stepped down from the cupola seat and looked around. There was his bed, and the table at which they’d all eaten their food, and the toilet room and the shower. This bunker had become home, a place of both comfort and work, but now they had to surrender it to the Chinese. It was almost inconceivable, but it could not be denied. In the movies, they’d fight to the death here, but fighting to the death was a lot more comfortable for actors who could start a new film the next week.
“Come on, Sergeant,” he ordered his gunner, who took one last long burst before stepping down and heading toward the escape tunnel.
Komanov counted off the men as they went, then headed out. He realized he hadn’t phoned his intentions back to Regiment, and he hesitated, but, no, there wasn’t time for that now. He’d radio his action from the moving BTR.
The tunnel was low enough that they had to run bent over, but it was also lit, and there was the outer door. When the reserve gunner opened it, they were greeted by the much louder sound of falling shells.
“You fucking took long enough,” a thirtyish sergeant snarled at them. “Come on!” he urged, waving them to his BTR-60.
“Wait.” Komanov took the twist-detonator and attached the wire ends to the terminals. He sheltered behind the concrete abutment that contained the steel door and twisted the handle once.
The demolition charge was ten kilograms of TNT. It and the stored shells created an explosion that roared out of the escape tunnel with a sound like the end of the world, and on the far side of the hill the heavy turret of the never-finished JS-3 tank rocketed skyward, to the amazed pleasure of the Chinese infantrymen. And with that, Komanov’s job was done. He turned and followed his men to board the eight-wheeled armored personnel carrier. It was ensconced on a concrete pad under a grass-covered concrete roof that had prevented anyone from seeing it, and now it raced down the hill to the north and safety.
“Bugging out,” the sergeant told the major, tapping the TV screen taking the feed from Marilyn Monroe. “This bunch just blew up their gun turret. That’s the third one to call it a day.”
“Surprised they lasted this long,” General Wallace said. Sitting still in a combat zone was an idea entirely foreign to him. He’d never done fighting while moving slower than four hundred knots, and he considered that speed to be practically standing still.
“I bet the Russians will be disappointed,” the major said. “When do we get the downlink to Chabarsovil?”
“Before lunch, sir. We’re sending a team down to show them how to use it.”