Red Army

by Ralph Peters

  The unit had been quickly rerouted over an alternate bridge. But the incident felt like a warning — and a personal challenge to Bezarin. Then, in the growing darkness and confusion, they had been diverted well to the south as the attack up ahead bogged down again. The fatal crossing had been unnecessary. Now he and his tanks waited on a sunken road at the edge of a wood in Germany. Bezarin had not expected too much of Lieutenant Colonel Tarashvili, the regiment’s commander. But it seemed outrageous that he had sent no word, no information on the situation whatsoever.

  A compact figure vaulted up onto the deck of Bezarin’s tank, almost slipping on the clutter of newly added reactive armor. The movement took Bezarin by surprise, isolated as he was in his thoughts and his padded tanker’s helmet. But he quickly sensed a familiar presence. He canted his helmet back so he could hear.

  The visitor was Senior Lieutenant Roshchin, commander of the Fifth Company, Second Battalion — Bezarin’s youngest and least-experienced company commander. Bezarin had kept close to Roshchin’s company during the deployment and march, nursing him along. Yet there was something about the boyish lieutenant that brought out Bezarin’s temper. He found himself barking at Roshchin over small oversights or inconsequential misunderstandings, and his own lack of self-control only made him angrier still. Through it all, Roshchin reacted with servility and a few mumbled excuses. The boy had the feel of a spaniel addicted to his master’s beatings.

  Even now, Bezarin almost shouted at the lieutenant to get back to his company. But he captured the words while they were still forming on his lips. Roshchin, he realized clearly, would be nervous, frightened, unsure. Universal human emotions, as Anna would have called them.

  “Comrade Commander,” Roshchin said, “any word?”

  The simple question seemed unforgivably inane to Bezarin, but he was determined to be decent toward the boy.

  “Nothing. How’s your company doing?”

  “Oh, the same, thank you, Comrade Commander. Most of the men are sleeping. Always one crew member on lookout, though, just like the regulations say.” He huddled closer to Bezarin, who could smell the night staleness of the boy’s breath now. “The march was exhausting; you’re all shaken to bits by the time you stop.” Bezarin could feel the lieutenant searching through the darkness for a sign of human solidarity, but he could not find the right words to soothe the boy. “I couldn’t sleep, myself,” Roshchin went on. “I really want to do everything right. I’ve been going over my lessons in my head.”

  A number of sharp retorts bolted through Bezarin’s mind. Roshchin was a graduate of the Kasan tank school, renowned for the poor quality of its alumni. Bezarin painted in the lieutenant’s features from memory. Short, like virtually every tanker. A blond saw blade of hair across the forehead, and the small sculpted nose you saw on certain women with Polish blood. There was neither crispness nor presence to Roshchin, and Bezarin worried over how the lieutenant would perform in combat.

  “The war must be going well,” the lieutenant said, his voice clearly asking for confirmation.

  It was as though Roshchin studied to say things that permitted no reasonable reply, as though his every utterance demanded that Bezarin make a fool of him.

  “Of course it’s going well,” Bezarin responded, forcing the words out, sounding stilted to himself, a bad actor with a poor script.

  “I wish I could have a cigarette. One smoke,” Roshchin said.

  “When it’s light.”

  “Do you think we’ll be able to send letters soon?”

  Anna. And the letters unwritten, the words unsaid. A remembrance impossibly foreign to the moment.

  “Soon, I’m sure,” Bezarin said.

  “I’ve written four already,” Roshchin said. “Natalya loves to get letters. I’ve numbered them on the envelopes so that she’ll know what order to read them in, even if they all arrive at once.”

  Bezarin wanted to ask the lieutenant when on earth he had had time to write love letters. But he kept to his resolve to behave decently. It suddenly occurred to him that this boy might not be alive for more than a few hours. And that he had a young wife who meant as much to him as… Bezarin switched mental tracks, recalling Roshchin’s pride in displaying the stupid-faced bridal snapshot taken by some hung-over staff photographer in a cavernous wedding palace, where marriages were matters of scheduling and norms as surely as were military operations. The stiff, unknowing smiles in the snapshot had made Bezarin unreasonably jealous as the lieutenant insisted on showing them to his new commander.

  “I suppose… that you miss her,” Bezarin said, measuring out the words.

  “How could I not miss her?” Roshchin answered. “She’s a wonderful girl. The best.” There was new life in the lieutenant’s voice now.

  “And… how does she like army life?”

  “Oh, she’ll get used to it,” Roshchin said cheerfully. “It takes time, you know. Really, you should marry, Comrade Commander. It’s a wonderful state of affairs.”

  Advice from this naive, clumsy lieutenant was almost too much for Bezarin to bear. But he let it roll off.

  “You should go and get a little sleep,” Bezarin told the boy. “I don’t want you to be exhausted. We’ll get into the fight today.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  If we’re not caught in this stinkhole of a forest, lined up like perfect targets on a damned road, Bezarin thought.

  “I’m sure of it. And I want you at your best.”

  “I won’t let you down, Comrade Commander. I wouldn’t want Natalya to be ashamed of me.”

  Leave me, Bezarin thought. Get out of here, you son of a bitch.

  “You’ll do fine,” Bezarin said. “Now get back to your company.”

  The first morning light had crept up on the two officers during their talk. To Bezarin, the mist wrapping loosely around the trees resembled dirty bandages.

  “Go on,” Bezarin repeated with forced affability. “I’ll wake you in plenty of time.”

  The lieutenant saluted. Something in the alacrity of it made Bezarin feel as though the boy were saluting a grizzled old general, or his father. Well, I’m not that old, Bezarin thought. Not quite. Thirty-one isn’t old enough to be the father of a senior lieutenant.

  For an instant, the terrible responsibility he had for the lives of his men glimmered in front of Bezarin. Then the vision evaporated into more conditioned and customary forms of thought. But the morning felt suddenly damp, and his head ached. He repositioned his tanker’s helmet. They said that the close-fitting headgear made you go bald, if the war went on too long. What would Anna think of him with a bald pate? And what did she think of him, anyway? Did she think of him at all now? He remembered how she had liked to touch his hair. With one specific, unchanging gesture. No, a bald head would not do. My captain, she said. My fierce warrior captain. But he was a major now, and she was part of history.

  Anna liked the birches when their small leaves went the color of old copper. One by one, the leaves deserted as the northern wind probed and gathered force. Then a gusting assault tore them away by the hundreds, revealing the silver-white fragility of the limbs. He remembered the feel of the buttons on a woman’s dress. And if I see her again. If ever I see her again…

  Bezarin smiled mockingly at himself. You can tell her you were supposed to be commanding a tank battalion on the edge of a battle and you thought of laying her ass down in some borrowed apartment.

  But his practiced cynicism did not work to its full potential now. He attempted to turn his thoughts back to his duty. Yet he knew that she would be there now, just beyond the edge of his vision. That one time in his life he had been truly afraid. Terrified to ask a thin, laughing girl with hair the color of pouring brandy if she would marry him. Because she laughed so easily when they were alone, and he knew he loved her helplessly and that he could bear losing her more easily than he could have borne her laughter in that unarmed instant. In the subtle light he could see the broad steel shoulders of hi
s tanks taking shape up along the road, and it struck him as absurd that he should be allowed to command such lethal machines when he could not bring himself to risk the wound of a girl’s decision.

  The radio spoke.

  Bezarin recognized the voice of the regiment’s commander, passing a brevity code. Bezarin scrambled to copy the message, then to break it out using the sheets he kept in his breast pocket.

  Movement. In ten minutes.

  The time was unreasonably short after so long a wait. Bezarin hoped he could wake everyone and get all of the engines started in time. It would have been better to warm the engines slowly, since they had been sitting for several hours. Bezarin thought that he would have been wiser to have been readying his force instead of indulging in reveries. But the past was unalterable, and he forced himself to concentrate on the present.

  Twenty-six tanks and a bedraggled motorized rifle company. Bezarin shouted at his crew to get their gear on and start up the tank, then he hoisted himself out of the commander’s hatch. It required an awkward maneuver to slip down over the jewel boxes of reactive armor that had been bolted onto the tank, and Bezarin hit the ground flat-footed, jolting himself fully awake. He ran along the column, shouting to the officers, nagged by a small, cranky worry over additional mechanical breakdowns. He found that the prospect of moving toward the battle did not bother him at all but filled him with unexpected and even unreasonable energy. He was delighted to find that he was not afraid when it mattered. Only scared of the girls, he decided.

  The regiment’s route, studded with traffic controllers, led them through the wreckage of earlier fighting. It was possible to reconstruct much of how the battle had gone from the position of the hulks. In one broad field, a Soviet tank company had been ambushed in battle formation. The burned-out wrecks formed an almost perfect line of battle. Bezarin felt certain that, somehow, he would never let that happen to his battalion, but he wondered simultaneously at the effect such a sight must have on his men as they rolled by with their hatches open.

  The enemy appeared to be exclusively British, which both surprised and disappointed Bezarin. He had always pictured himself fighting the Americans or the West Germans. Now he wondered if his unit had not been shunted into a secondary sector, a sideshow. He felt punished by the lack of information from higher headquarters.

  There were plenty of ruined British vehicles in evidence, even though visibility remained limited to a few hundred meters on either side of the road. But the obviously larger number of slaughtered vehicle carcasses from Soviet units annoyed Bezarin. The level of destruction appeared to have been terrible on both sides, but the losses were clearly not in balance. Bezarin soon stopped counting and comparing, consoling himself with the smoldering conviction that he would do better.

  The British had died mostly in defensive positions, although here and there you could tell that a specific element had waited too long to pull off its position and had been caught in the open. One chaotic intermingling told the story of a local counterattack. The residue of battle left a bitter taste, as though neither side had shown the least mercy.

  Bezarin blamed the superior quantitative performance of the British on technology. Of all the fears that intermittently gripped the Soviet officer corps, Bezarin knew that the greatest was of the technological edge the NATO armies possessed, all Party propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding. Often, the fear bordered on paranoia, with worries about secret weapons that NATO might have concealed for sudden employment on the first day of the war. Bezarin saw no evidence for wonder weapons now, but he cursed the mystifying superiority of the Western models of standard battlefield equipment.

  One curious aspect of the battlefield was how few bodies were in evidence. Occasionally, a cluster of dead sprawled in a burned fringe around a combat vehicle or lay half-crushed along the roadway. But the greater effect was as if the battle had been a contest of machines, a tournament of systems, with only a handful of human puppeteers. That was an illusion, Bezarin knew. A troubling percentage of the stricken Soviet tanks had their turrets blown completely off. The hulls lay about like decapitated beasts. No crew member could survive such a catastrophic effect. When they died, the great steel animals devoured their human contents, as if in a last act of vengeance.

  The last of the morning ground fog clung to the woodlines like decayed flesh slowly loosening from bones. The sky remained overcast, but the heaviness was gone, and the last gray would burn off as the sun climbed higher. Bezarin scanned the grayness. He could already hear the aircraft ripping by just above the visual ceiling. There was no way of telling whose aircraft these were, and Bezarin feared the impending clarity of the day. The march column moved swiftly, except for the odd accordion stop when a traffic controller faced a dilemma for which his orders had not prepared him. Yet Bezarin wanted them to go faster, to push the vehicles to the limit of their speed.

  You had to close fast. That was what the books said, and Bezarin had dutifully read the books. If you closed fast, the enemy could not bring his air power or indirect fires to bear, and you cheapened your opponent’s long-range antitank guided missiles. You had to close fast and get in among the enemy subunits, then you needed to keep going until you were behind him, to make it impossible for him to fight you according to his desires. It sounded very straightforward on the page. But Bezarin suspected that there was a bit more to it during the actual execution.

  A loud thump-thump-thump sounded off to the right. A stand of trees bowed toward the march column, bending away from lashing, half-hidden bursts of fire.

  The correct response was to button up, to seal the crews within the armor of the tanks and infantry fighting vehicles. But the prescribed action was impossible for the vehicle commanders. As long as they remained on radio listening silence, signal flags and then flares were the order of the day. The vehicle commanders had to remain exposed until the final battle deployment began. Bezarin unconsciously worked down lower in his turret, bracing his shoulder against his opened hatch. A flight of jets shrieked by so low that the noise cut sharply through the padded headgear.

  You couldn’t even see the damned things.

  A row of birches straggled along the road. Birches even in West Germany. Anna of the birches. Bezarin felt the grime of sleeplessness on his face, lacquered over the film of tank exhaust and sweat. Not a very romantic picture, Anna. No dashing officers here out of some ball in an old novel. We are the unwashed warriors.

  Up ahead, billows of smoke and dust suddenly engulfed the march column. Bezarin saw an antiaircraft piece swing its turret snappily about, its radar frantic. But the weapon did not fire. A bright burst, clearly an explosion, flared in the lead battalion’s trail company, which was separated from Bezarin’s unit by only a few tens of meters instead of the regulation number of kilometers. Everything seemed crammed, condensed in both time and space, crippled by haste and necessity.

  The column did not stop moving. A minute later, Bezarin’s command tank turned off the road to move around a pair of burning infantry fighting vehicles. He could feel a distinct difference as the tank’s tracks bit into the meadowland. The driver simply followed the vehicle to his front, and Bezarin inspected the vehicles that had been hit. The troop carriers burned in patches. There was no sign of life from within them. You could not even see what hit you, Bezarin thought. The spectacle made him want to close with the enemy immediately, to pay them back.

  Bezarin’s driver whipped the tank back onto the roadway. His driver had a habit of snapping the tank about, in a jaunty sort of movement that banged the occupants against the nearest inner wall. I’ll break him of that crap, Bezarin thought.

  The route passed a skeletal grove that had burned black. Orange veins still glowed amid the charred waste. The site appeared to have been a tactical command post. British. As soon as Bezarin realized that what he had thought to be soot-covered logs and limbs were shriveled corpses, he fixed his eyes resolutely back upon the road.

  Just past a battered
village, a crowd of Soviet maintenance vehicles and personnel had taken possession of the courtyard of a relatively intact farm. Lightly damaged vehicles awaited their turn in the adjacent fields, and a tactical crane held a big tank engine suspended in midair, as if torturing it. While a few of the soldiers were diligently at work, others sat about eating breakfast. They waved at the tankers hurrying to the front. It occurred to Bezarin that perhaps they were waving at the tanks themselves, convinced they would meet again shortly. Overall, the maintenance crews appeared unconcerned with the war that was perhaps a dozen kilometers away. Sitting on their recovery vehicles or on the fenders of their repair vans, they looked the way soldiers did during a lull in an exercise.

  The column came to an unannounced halt in the open, just at the edge of another village. The haze continued to thin, and the exposed nature of the position immediately began to torment Bezarin.

  A scout car emerged from the village and worked its way down the line. Bezarin leaned out of the turret in curiosity. The vehicle pulled up beside the command tank.

  “Major Bezarin?” a sergeant shouted over the throb of idling engines.

  Bezarin nodded. “Yes.”

  “You are to report to the regimental commander in the town square.”