Red Metal

by Mark Greaney

  The train lurched a few times and began to slow. They would arrive at the station soon.

  She removed the sling, and this hurt her arm. She moved it around slowly. Pain pulsed into her shoulder, but her range of motion was fair.

  She looked again out the frosted window glass as the faint glow of morning appeared.

  She wondered why they were being sent here to Wrocław. Everyone on the train was militia, and all they talked about was fighting, about wanting to get into combat.

  Idiots, she thought. They had no idea what they were asking for.

  Almost none of those on the train had faced any combat during Russia’s strike through Poland, and she didn’t think her combat experience made her in any way more competent than the others. She wondered if they were just being sent to escort old ladies crossing the street or to set up some rudimentary barricades.

  A male militia soldier who appeared to be in his thirties sat across from her. He’d been looking her way for the past ten minutes, and she’d been trying to pretend she didn’t notice. Finally, as the train came to a stop, he said, “You’re the one that got shot in Radom the other day.”

  “About a hundred of us got shot. I’m just one of the few that survived.”

  “I saw your picture. Thousands have been printed out. They are up all over the place in Warsaw. In cafés, on lampposts. You were awesome. You fought bravely.”

  She did not reply.

  He nodded appreciatively. Pointing at her injured left arm, he said, “You don’t have to be here today.”

  Paulina looked out the window at the platform as the train stopped. “Actually . . . I do.”

  She tossed the sling on the floor and stood, pulled her small purple backpack off the shelf above her with her right hand, and then slung her rifle across her shoulders. Around her in the car, forty more men and women, all in civilian clothing, began making their way to the exits, and she moved along with the group.

  * * *

  • • •

  A team of eight Spetsnaz watched as the Polish militia disembarked from the train. A quick check of the timetables told them this was not a scheduled stop, and they all moved discreetly into positions to observe. Their suspicions confirmed, they watched the mismatched-uniformed Polish defense personnel exiting the train. They counted each man and woman.

  They watched as the militia leaders struggled just to take count of their forces. A few had to go back onto the train and collect the rifles they’d accidentally left behind.

  The covert Spetsnaz team took photos. Surveyed closely the militia’s weapons and equipment, then sent back their report:

  -POLISH MILITIA ARRIVING NOW. WROCŁAW CENTRAL TRAIN STATION.

  -COMPANY-SIZED ELEMENT.

  -BASIC INFANTRY GEAR AND EQUIPMENT.

  -1ST GENERATION. NO/LIMITED ANTI-ARMOR EQUIPMENT.

  -FORCE IS ILL EQUIPPED AND LOOKS UNPREPARED, UNTRAINED AND POORLY LED.

  -ASSESSMENT: LIMITED TO NO THREAT.

  -P-8 FORCE REPORTING

  * * *

  • • •

  Just two kilometers to the east, the Oder River snaked north to south through Wrocław, rimming the eastern side of the medieval Old Town. It had frozen over several weeks prior and remained that way, and now it was covered in day-old snowfall.

  Hundreds of footprints visible in the snow revealed where kids, ice fishermen, and other strollers had walked along and across the surface of the river, and the tracks of some hearty cross-country skiers who’d passed earlier in the morning ran under the Pokoju Bridge and disappeared to the north in the early-morning fog.

  Just to the south, the Grunwald Bridge was the only one of the five main river crossing points in the city that had any automobile traffic at all this early. With twenty-meter-high double-brick pylons on each side holding up a steel-supported span, it was connected to a major east-west thoroughfare through Wrocław, unlike the bridges to the north that supported smaller roads.

  A blue four-door Daewoo pickup truck pulled to the sidewalk on the southern side of the bridge, near where a brick pylon disappeared into the western bank. Three men in their thirties climbed out, zipped their heavy coats up to their chins, and raised their fur hoods. The men walked to the railing and peered over. Soon they took the concrete steps down to a footpath that ran along the Oder and looked up under the steel bridge, shining flashlights briefly because the light down there was still poor.

  They piled back into their car and drove to the other side of the bridge, repeated their check of the structure, and radioed in to their superiors that the way was clear.

  Back in their Daewoo, one of the men twisted the wires under the dash of the hot-wired vehicle, and they drove off to the north to check the next bridge.

  Ten minutes later Sergeant Anton Mikhailov climbed out of his warm pickup and stepped up to the Pokoju Bridge.

  He looked it over, then walked back to the truck and climbed into the front passenger seat. He pulled a device from his pack, and texted a message on an encrypted tactical data device: The Peace Bridge is clear. No explosives or obstructions noted.

  He waited for the response and then turned to his officer in the back of the truck. “They want to know what civilian traffic looks like.”

  Mikhailov looked around. Even though it was a frosty six thirty a.m., a few people were about, heading to early shifts.

  The Russian sergeant got out and looked around some more, taking note of the cold, fresh air. He lit a cigarette and peered back inside at his officer. “Looks like a boring town. There’s not much going on here. They don’t have a clue the Russian army is on the way.”

  The captain climbed out of the back, took the radio from Mikhailov, and reported that there was no irregular civilian traffic in the Old Town area.

  As he finished his transmission, a taxi pulled up next to the Russians standing around the Daewoo.

  The balding, overweight cabbie rolled down his window and shouted to the three men.

  “Hey! You can’t just stop here in the middle of the road.” The man said it in Polish, and the junior officer being addressed did not understand. Instead he angrily waved the cabbie along, not wanting to speak and reveal himself as a foreigner.

  It was early and the cabbie had not had a fare and was in a bad mood. He put his Honda in park and shouted again. He switched to English. Again no one responded; they just waved at him and gave him the fist gesture, the European sign for “Fuck you.”

  The grumpy cabbie had had enough of the younger generation always trying to make up their own rules on the streets. He reached into his coat and pulled out his mobile phone.

  Sergeant Mikhailov reached into his coat as well, but he withdrew his silenced 9mm GSh-18 pistol. He shot the cabbie point-blank three times at three meters’ distance. The man’s face exploded, coating the back of his car seat with skull fragments and brain matter; blood gushed from the open cranial wounds.

  The captain’s eyes went wide. “Mikhailov! Are you fucking insane? Get that body out of here. You senseless peasant. I’ll charge you with every rule under the sun if you endanger the whole fucking mission because of a nosy taxi driver!”

  Two men moved the dead cabbie into the backseat of the cab and one of them climbed behind the wheel and drove it to the other side of the bridge, with the Daewoo rolling behind them.

  They parked the cab in a vacant space and the soldiers climbed out as the captain continued to chew Sergeant Mikhailov out in the back of the truck.

  * * *

  • • •

  75 KILOMETERS WEST OF WROCŁAW

  27 DECEMBER

  Sabaneyev made his final decision just twenty-five minutes before the front of the column was to take the off-ramp for Highway A8 north around the city.

  He gave the order via radio to Dryagin, who was at that moment standing in the top hatch of his Bumer
ang command vehicle, looking out to the east as a hazy dawn broke. He and the column were stopped just west of Wrocław, but all the engines had been running as Dryagin’s force waited on his command.

  The colonel acknowledged his general’s order, then climbed back down into the hatch. Inside, in addition to his radio officer, were his company commanders as well as the Spetsnaz major serving as the liaison between the armored force and the special forces. They’d climbed aboard for instructions, pushing Dryagin’s other headquarters officers out, and now looked at him intently in the glowing red lights of the cramped space.

  Dryagin didn’t like his general’s decision but did his best to hide it. With a confident voice he said, “All right, it is to be Wrocław. We will have a clear advance through the city. We rush through just as we did in Stuttgart. The local militia will have no idea what is going on and we’ll have a clear path across the Oder. The Bumerangs will divide on four routes through town to cover the column’s flanks. I want all the tanks in the center. We drive through at full speed with the Bumerangs opening up the highway like they are traffic cops. Anyone gets in our way—militia or regular troops or police or something—we destroy them and keep moving.”

  One of his company commanders asked, “Sir, what do we make of these reports of militia arriving?”

  “Polish factory workers with guns. Doubt they have any idea which side of the stick goes boom. We pushed them aside on the way in. We push them aside again on the way out.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The Spetsnaz major asked, “Should we wait for more of my teams to report in? The partisans could pull up the train tracks, mine the routes.”

  “If there were two divisions of militia in Wrocław, we could still take the city route with little difficulty.”

  Dryagin looked at the side hatch, where his intelligence officer had been poking his head through. “Razvedchik, what’s the report on enemy air? Still nothing in either Łask, Poznań, or Kraków?”

  “Negative, sir. And we are monitoring everything they have in the sky. Spetsnaz are watching the airfields. NATO air remains out of Poland per the peace agreement. The PAF has birds up near the Belarusian border east of Warsaw, and they are running sorties in the northern part of the country, just circling. It appears they do not have a firm idea where we are, or else they just don’t want to come close enough to get fucked up.” He cleared his throat, realizing what he’d said. “Sir.”

  “Very well,” Dryagin replied. “Advance elements will move out immediately.”

  CHAPTER 49

  WESTERN POLAND

  27 DECEMBER

  Lieutenant Colonel Tom Grant had fallen asleep in the turret of his M1A2 Abrams, but only for a few minutes. His driver braked abruptly to avoid a Porsche 911 whipping off an on-ramp onto the autobahn, and Grant popped his head up and looked around.

  The commander wiped sleep from his eyes and had just reached for his canteen, when he heard Captain Spillane over his headset.

  “Hey, sir? Good news for a change. We got GPS back!”

  “Hot damn!” Grant said. “You’re sure it’s working?”

  “Yes, sir. The Blue Force Tracker is showing our position accurately.”

  “It’s a Christmas miracle,” Grant joked.

  To this Anderson said over the intercom, “Uh . . . I think it’s the twenty-seventh, sir. Time flies when you’re havin’ fun, huh?”

  Grant smiled a little and keyed his mic. “Brad, we’re going to stop at the next exit. We’ll keep the rear of the Russian column in sight, then catch up. Radio to the HQ section and tell them I’ll need them to throw up a satellite net. Let’s see if we can actually get comms.”

  Ten minutes later Lieutenant Colonel Grant stood in the middle of a small circle of Humvees. A few black satellite antennas stuck up from the vehicles. They each looked like a combination spiderweb and three-foot-high ray gun, but they functioned to talk to another tiny object, a DSCS III satellite 22,000 miles in space. As he approached, the communications sergeant raised the flap in the rear of the high-back Humvee.

  “Hey, sir, I have a familiar voice for you on SATCOM.”

  Grant picked up the handset. “This is Courage Six.”

  The response sounded distant, but the voice was clear enough. “I’m pretty sure this is not Courage Six, because this is Courage Six actual.”

  It was the true commander of the regiment, Colonel James Fenton. Grant said, “Damn, sir! Can’t tell you how good it is to hear your voice!”

  “Likewise, Tom. Me and the XO are headed your way. Heard you guys have been in quite the fight.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You still following the Russians?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “They playing nice?”

  “So far, but I’m hoping one of them tosses some litter on the road so we can blow their asses to hell.”

  The colonel laughed into the radio. “Not sure that’s covered in your ROEs. Just hang close to them; we’ll be there in about two hours and you can brief me then. The XO and me are both sorry to have missed all the action. Nothing left to do now but follow those fuckers back to the Belarusian border.”

  “Escort duty isn’t as cush as it sounds, sir. Especially when you’ve seen what these bastards did on the way in. Killed a lot of good men.”

  “Roger that, Tom. You’ve done a helluva job. No one could have been fully ready for this. And loss of life is one of the burdens of command.”

  “Copy, sir. See you in a couple of hours.”

  * * *

  • • •

  WROCŁAW, POLAND

  27 DECEMBER

  Paulina and the five militia members assigned to her arrived at their prearranged point, the third-floor offices of a bank across the street and half a block down from the town hall, in Wrocław’s Market Square. She and her team found an RPG-7 leaning against the wall near the window for them, and two canvas rucksacks each holding three PG-7VR anti-armor rockets for the launcher. This, along with the rifles of the six militia members, was the full extent of the firepower at this position.

  She hefted the weapon, ignored the stinging pain in her left forearm, and settled it down on her right shoulder. Aiming the unloaded weapon down at the street, she found herself comforted by the familiar weight and feel of it.

  Paulina had been here in the center of the Old Town once on a school field trip when she was twelve, and she remembered walking around on the streets below. Her impression at the time was that it wasn’t as nice as Warsaw, but now she found the center of Wrocław to be idyllic and quaint.

  As she peered through the sighting mechanism of the launcher, everything looked so normal out there in the crystal clear morning, but she knew there would be militia and possibly special forces preparing in all the buildings in sight, and this area would become a war zone if the Russians decided to roll down the street down below.

  She’d been told to expect some Russian forces passing through the city on their way to the several bridges spanning the Oder River, and this did not surprise her. Unlike many of the militia she’d encountered today, she’d come here fully expecting a battle. But this didn’t mean she was any less scared. Considering what she’d already seen, she was, in fact, more terrified than those around her. She and her little team would comprise just one fireteam of many, but as far as she was concerned, the Russians were coming here, now, just for her.

  She put the weapon back down, turned to her little group, and nodded toward a big kid who appeared to be about nineteen. He wasn’t particularly strong looking, but he seemed to be the fittest of the bunch. “Have you fired an RPG?”

  “Yes. I am trained as an assistant RPG grenadier for the TDF in Kraków. I fired eight rounds last summer.”

  That was more than Paulina herself had fired, during both training and combat, but she wasn’t going to let anyone else operate
the RPG. She would be shooting rockets at the Russians today; there was no way she would delegate that.

  Paulina looked over the rest of her squad. Two were women; one appeared to be thirtyish and the other was about Paulina’s age, a pretty brunette who reminded her instantly of Urszula, except she was much shorter. Paulina asked her, “What do you do?”

  “I just joined last Monday. I haven’t really done anything.”

  Paulina sighed.

  The other team members—two rather overweight men—said they had been trained as riflemen, but neither seemed terribly confident in their abilities.

  She looked back at the big young man. “You will be the assistant grenadier. I’m the grenadier.” To the others she said, “You will use your rifles to defend us from any dismounted troops, and you will shoot at Russians exposed through the open hatches of their tanks and APCs. When he and I fall, you will pick up the launcher and continue firing.”

  Eyes widened at this, but the group remained silent.

  She showed the women and the two older men how to operate the RPG-7, but she didn’t lift it again to do so. Her shoulder and arm were still complaining about hefting the metal tube earlier.

  When she finished, she told her small team of amateurs to move a cluster of file cabinets to the windows to create some measure of protection; then she knelt down, pulled the six rockets from the canvas bags, and began positioning them next to her RPG-7 by the window.

  There was a tremor in her heart, and just as she noticed it, a voice behind her said, “I’m so fucking scared. How do you do it?”

  Paulina looked up. It was the pretty young girl on her team; she didn’t know her name and she didn’t want to know. The girl wore jeans and a University of Kraków sweatshirt. She didn’t look like a fighter, but she had an old SKS rifle on her back and a small bandolier with extra magazines on her shoulder.