Red Metal

by Mark Greaney

  • • •

  Sabaneyev could hear the action five kilometers to the east from where he stood in the command car of his parked train. He looked through his binos out the window at smoke pillars rising over the city in the icy but sunny morning.

  Behind him Smirnov said, “Sir, I’m getting reports that Anna Company is being engaged from ground positions near the Grunwald Bridge.”

  “The bridge? That’s not near the known militia positions.”

  Colonel Smirnov said, “This is an ambush. In flagrant violation of the NATO cease-fire!”

  The general brushed his comment away. “Calm down. We aren’t the only ones who can play dirty. I was expecting this.”

  He was expecting some action from Poland, true, but he had not been expecting it here. His brigade thick in a city coming under fire from multiple positions was the last thing he wanted or needed.

  “Tell the lead elements to blast their way through. Get over the damned river; I don’t give a damn how!”

  * * *

  • • •

  MARKET SQUARE

  WROCŁAW, POLAND

  27 DECEMBER

  Paulina stood in the window of a municipal office next door to the town hall, shouldered the RPG-7 launcher, and felt the arm of one of the two militiamen with her on her back.

  The explosions on the river, half a kilometer off her left shoulder, had been her signal to open fire. Even before she aimed her weapon she heard the chattering of machine guns, the whooshes and booms of RPG launchers, and other rockets firing onto the Russian columns, both below here in Market Square and on other, parallel streets leading toward the Oder.

  But she pushed it all out of her mind, along with the searing pain in her left arm, and she concentrated on her task.

  “Backblast, clear!” her assistant shouted over the sound of gunfire.

  She aimed the weapon’s sight on a Bumerang one hundred meters to the east. There were other Russian vehicles much closer to her position, and a GAZ Tigr armored car was directly below her window, but she’d picked this Bumerang because she could hit it at a vulnerable point, the lower rear.

  She squeezed the trigger, the weapon lurched, and the backblast sent a wave of warmth behind her. The rocket raced from the window, shot over three other Russian vehicles, and slammed into the rear portside tire of the Bumerang at the northern end of the square.

  The explosion wasn’t impressive to Paulina; there was a small flash and black smoke and debris. No fireball, no secondary detonations.

  But the Bumerang APC immediately veered to the right and impacted a brick wall, and there it stopped.

  As the smoke cleared she saw that two of the four big black tires on the port side of the big armored carrier were gone, and smoke poured from a third.

  A mobility kill. Good enough, thought Paulina.

  The rear hatch opened and troops began to climb out, but a Polish machine gun hidden in a car rental agency farther west in Market Square raked the area, dropping most of the men before they made it more than a few meters.

  Paulina spun out of the window and knelt to reload her weapon with the help of her assistant gunner, and then heavy machine-gun rounds tore into the room right above her head. A man next to her had been churning the street below with his Kalashnikov; he was lifted off his feet as he tried to turn his weapon toward incoming fire, and he was dead before his eviscerated body slammed down onto the floor.

  Paulina lay flat and shoved the second HEAT round into the hot launcher while all around her bullets pocked the walls and ceiling. Burning bits of office debris blew around her, ignited by her backblast, but she ignored all the danger and prepared to rise back up and fire again.

  But clearly the gunner of a GAZ Tigr below had seen the smoke trail of her rocket leading away from her window, and its auto cannon kept up withering fire on her position.

  She tried to crawl out of the room with the RPG to get a new position down the hall, but her shoulder and arm wouldn’t allow it. She grabbed the man closest to her and pulled his face to hers so she could be heard over the incredible noise. “Carry the RPG! We’re moving!”

  She dragged herself along the tiles with her right forearm, her tennis shoes grabbing the flooring as she used her feet to push her along, low and flat.

  * * *

  • • •

  Four of the bridges over the Oder were down, but both JASSMs fired at Milenijny Bridge missed their target. One fell a thousand meters short, impacting a row of unoccupied warehouses, and the other plowed into the roof of an apartment building fifty meters beyond the bridge and detonated, blowing out the top three floors of the structure.

  Junior Sergeant Bogdan Nozdrin, commander of Bumerang Roman One-Four, had been informed on the battlenet that all the nearby bridges save one had been knocked out and that his mission was still to get across the Oder as fast as possible. He sat buttoned up in his commander’s station at the rear of his vehicle, watching the screen in front of him as he swept the camera around outside, looking both for targets and for a way out of the kill box he had been ordered into by his commanders.

  The armor of his APC took continuous hits from small arms, which would do nothing more than scratch off some paint, but all around him he could hear the sounds of streaking rockets and exploding ordnance, and he knew a well-placed anti-tank round could either disable the vehicle or kill him, the other two crew members, and the nine infantry troops in the back of the vehicle with him.

  He saw on his moving map display that his Bumerang was just coming to the end of Plac Uniwersytecki, and he ordered his driver to turn left. A block later they were on Grodzka Street, which ran along the western bank of the Oder, and here he got his first look both at the narrow frozen river down a slight concrete embankment and at Uniwersytecki Bridge, which had been severed in two places by what he gathered to be a pair of Polish-fired missiles.

  There was one bridge left undamaged, but it was the farthest away from Roman One-Four, and the realization that the Poles were blowing up their own damn bridges made Nozdrin disinclined to drive onto it.

  The 7.62mm machine gun on his vehicle began firing long bursts; his gunner had identified a target on the far bank of the river that apparently didn’t warrant rounds from the 30mm auto cannon. This meant it was likely a soft-skinned vehicle or even troops in the open.

  A new sound erupted from outside the vehicle: heavy explosions, impacting both the street and the walls of a building nearby.

  The driver called over the intercom, his voice nearly wild from panic, “Mortars!” A massive detonation rang Nozdrin’s ears, and then: “Direct hit on one of our Tigrs. Blew it to hell!”

  Shit! Shit! Shit! Nozdrin thought. The fucking Poles are dropping mortars on their own city now? He was exposed to all the buildings up and down the opposite bank of the river, the enemy was shelling his position, and he had nearly a kilometer of this to endure before he even had a chance of crossing the lone remaining bridge.

  “Okay,” he said into his mic. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”

  Seconds later Roman One-Four broke ranks with the other three Bumerangs and the three remaining Tigrs from his scout column, turned to the right, and rolled off Grodzka Street and up onto the sidewalk. It then crashed into the railing alongside the riverbank, bending the ironwork like soft clay as it rolled over it. The lumbering beast tipped down, dropped onto the icy white surface of the Oder River, and cracked it easily.

  The massive green armored vehicle crashed into the river through the ice and snow.

  Once all eight tires had disappeared below the surface, the Bumerang’s two massive hydro jets turned on, and the APC pushed forward, high against the twenty-centimeter-thick ice sheet over the Oder. The vehicle moved slowly and with great effort, but Roman One-Four did advance as it churned up the hard river surface and motored like an icebreaker toward the other si
de.

  The 30mm automatic cannon chattered now, tearing up a building on the opposite bank where the smoke trail of an RPG had been spotted by Nozdrin’s gunner.

  The steel hull shattered the ice in front of it as it moved along, and in the thickest parts of the frozen river the front tires even rolled out of the water and up onto the white expanse, only to crack through and crash back into the dark, icy water. This Roman One-Four did, over and over, as it clawed its way across the frozen river.

  Two more Bumerangs followed the first, and as Nozdrin scanned behind him through his camera for additional threats, he saw dozens of dismounted Russian troops racing from the museum, crossing through the smoke and haze hanging over Grodzka, and leaping over the railing. These men tumbled down snowbanks and onto the frozen river, where they began pouring fire on the northern bank and moving over the ice as they crossed on foot.

  In seconds, mortars began raining down on the river, blasting foamy water, ice, and snow high into the air.

  Nozdrin called his superiors to let them know Bumerangs were making their way across the Oder, and soon the order came from other APC companies to follow suit.

  He alternately yelled at his driver to make the crossing faster and at his gunner to keep pouring fire on anything he saw, while he rotated his camera around looking for new targets. He was just panning across the Hotel HP Park Plaza on the northern bank when he saw a flash and then the smoke trail of a large rocket fired from a top-floor bedroom. The round raced over the footbridge to Słodowa Island and slammed into Roman One-Three, just to the left and slightly behind Roman One-Four, which was now halfway across the Oder.

  Nozdrin was almost knocked out of his seat by the nearby explosion. He panned over to check the vehicle and saw that an 84mm high-explosive round had hit the underbelly of the Bumerang just as its front wheels rose out of the water and onto the ice, detonating against the thinner armor under the engine.

  The front-engine design of the Bumering protected the vehicle’s crew from the explosion of the rocket itself, but the engine was torn to pieces, and the vehicle stopped moving forward. It smoked from multiple points as it slowly sank back into the water in the center of the river.

  As Nozdrin watched, the men inside One-Three began pouring out of the rear exit, falling through the broken ice and into the water.

  The river was only five meters deep, but it was easy for a man wearing steel body armor to drown in the icy water. Those who did scramble out and found the hard ice to the left and right of the vehicle’s trail faced automatic fire from multiple weapons on the northern bank and Słodowa Island, which chased the men as they tried to find some cover.

  Russian soldiers caught in the open ran to their left, searching for a place to hide near the wreckage of the shattered University Bridge, just fifty meters away.

  Nozdrin keyed his intercom mic again, calling to his driver. “Faster! Get us across, damn you!”

  CHAPTER 51

  WROCŁAW, POLAND

  27 DECEMBER

  Paulina had found a new shooting position, a few offices down on the third floor of the municipal building. The window there had been shattered, either by gunfire from the street or else by the vibrations of the explosions all around, so she didn’t have to break it out before standing and leveling her sights on the rear of a Tigr scout car, the last Russian vehicle still moving within her line of sight. She watched it spraying 30mm grenades from the remote control launcher on its top turret as it moved, but she couldn’t see what the vehicle was firing at.

  “Backblast is clear!” shouted the man beside her, and she began to press her finger against the trigger; but just as she did so, a grenade from another Tigr slammed into the wall right below her perch in the window an instant before the distant Tigr suffered a catastrophic kill.

  The RPG-7 on Paulina’s shoulder discharged, but she was falling back on her heels as it did, and the rocket raced over the Tigr and exploded against the wall of a bank up the street.

  The twenty-year-old blonde found herself on her back, the room filled with gray dust and choking black smoke. The men with her coughed somewhere nearby, which told her they were alive. The ceiling had partially caved in around her, and the twisted wreckage of aluminum ceiling beams hung low.

  She fought her way back to her feet, lifted the now-empty launcher, and stumbled back up to the demolished window. Looking out into the street, she saw death, destruction, the chaos of frantic civilians, vehicles raging with fire and smoke, and Polish militia and soldiers running toward the river.

  But she saw no more targets.

  Two disabled Bumerangs littered the road below her, both with their rear hatches open, which meant the crews or infantry had disembarked. Along with this, three GAZ Tigr scout cars were utterly destroyed.

  Mangled bodies lay around all the vehicles in sight.

  The fight continued raging over by the river; this was plain to hear. Paulina turned to the men in the room with her as the dust and smoke cleared, and she found both to be unhurt and only now getting back to their feet.

  “We will reset in another window. They might come back, or other vehicles in the column could pass this way.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Ten minutes earlier and fifteen kilometers west, Tom Grant dug into a cold beef patty from an MRE pouch, shoveling it into his mouth as he looked up toward the cloudy sky. He had spent the morning following the Russian column to the east with his regiment, but he’d sent a company of Leopard 2 tanks to take the lead so he could halt to meet his commander at the helicopter LZ set up for him in a large, broad field on the northern outskirts of the town of Jawor. This halt by the headquarters section spread his force out on the highway a little more than he liked, but this escort duty was supposed to be nothing more than rolling along behind the enemy anyway; so whether he was personally one kilometer behind them or ten kilometers, he could close the distance at will if necessary.

  Interestingly, a platoon of Russian BTR-82 armored personnel carriers was lagging far behind the Russian exodus out of Poland. The Russians had explained in the cease-fire talks that their unarmed medical train would be departing Germany and Poland behind their main assault element, and the BTRs were therefore needed near it for its defense.

  It was obvious to Grant that this was a bullshit story. The Russian train was armed, it was likely their rolling headquarters, and the BTRs were back here because they’d been ordered to try to keep the Americans away from the main Russian column, assuming with a little muscle they could force the U.S. forces to simply bring up the rear behind them.

  But Grant wasn’t falling for that. He’d sent his tanks on beyond the BTRs so that they could be within striking distance of the main body of the Russian force if the Russians broke the cease-fire. The BTRs still lagged behind the main column, just ahead of the headquarters section of Grant’s regiment, but they’d caused no trouble, and right now they were over a kilometer away and out of sight beyond a nearby forest.

  He was glad his colonel was due back any minute: Grant was exhausted from the constant requirements of command during combat. He wasn’t sure how long it had been since he’d gotten any real sleep, though it felt like a month.

  He climbed out of his Humvee and stood with Major Ott and Captain Spillane. A security team of soldiers fanned out into the field and faced away from the landing zone, most taking a knee, hoisting their weapons to the ready.

  Within moments helos could be heard overhead.

  As the men looked up into the gray sky to try to spot the helicopters, the radioman sitting in the Humvee spoke up in a rushed voice. “Lieutenant Colonel Grant? Forward scouting elements report sounds of tank fire coming from the vicinity of the Russian column near the city of Wrocław.”

  Grant looked to Ott. “How far are our tanks from the Russians?”

  Ott replied, “I have a company of Leopards abo
ut five kilometers west of the rear of the main body.”

  Ott’s radioman spoke to him in German now, and he looked up at the American commander. “Our Leopards are seeing aircraft overhead. Hearing the tank fire, too. Explosions seem to be coming from inside the city itself.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Grant said. “Either the Poles or the Russians violated the cease-fire.”

  Ott added, “And it doesn’t matter who at this point, because our forces are close enough to get stuck in the middle of it.”

  Grant asked Spillane, “How far is that trail column of BTRs from us now?”

  “They are just up the road, sir.” Without being asked, Spillane got on his own radio and ordered all units to be on guard for potential enemy action.

  Now Grant looked up at the sky again. The two Chinooks ferrying the colonel and the rest of the command staff of the regiment were in sight, approaching from the northwest.

  “Shit! Wave them off. This LZ is too close. We’ll move back west ten klicks where we are out of—”

  Suddenly the sound of gunfire erupted on the other side of the field. Assuming they were the targets of the fire, Grant, Ott, and the others outside their Humvees hit the dirt, burying their faces in the cold, hard ground. They lay flat and tried to look for the source of the shooting. The zing of a few stray rounds passed overhead, but to the men’s newly trained ears they were likely not the targets. The section of BTRs that had been detached from the main group of Russians was exchanging fire with someone else.

  “What the hell?” Grant shouted, and then he saw the Russians. The BTRs drove fast, out of the woods, turrets reversed and firing in the direction from which they were coming.

  Grant yelled to Ott, “Something’s chased the Russians out of the forest!”

  Ott said, “It’s not us. Must be the Poles.”

  There was precious little they could do in the middle of the field but watch. The BTR crews had obviously seen something other than small arms that had spooked them. As they drove over the bumpy plowed fields, blazing away as they went, several streaks of fire and smoke came out of the wood line.