The Best Defense

by Todd A. Stone

  “A whole bunch?” Cruz said, reaching for the radio to send the report. “Sergeant Major’s gonna be real happy with a spot report that specific.”

  “You’re right. Tell him there’s a shitload of them.”

  “That’s better.”

  With one hand Cruz keyed the handmike, and with the other reached for his plate.

  ~*~

  Val glanced over her shoulder as Specialist Scott Hite crawled up and settled in five feet behind and to her right. Thirty seconds later Private Carrie Elmore scooted up next to Hite on Val’s left. From behind the sandbags on the second floor of Building 15, Val had a good view of the main gate and entrance to the depot.

  “We could use the window for a few minutes if you want to, Ma’am,” Elmore offered. “Until the shooting starts.”

  “No, thanks,” Val replied as she looked out the hole they’d knocked in the wall. “The teams should have the target silhouettes up in the windows any minute now, and I don’t want the Russians to mistake us for them.”

  Two buildings back from the entrance, Val’s forward command post offered her good protection from the enemy—anything coming her way would have to pass through the two structures in front of her. But she had only a partial, though satisfactory, view of the entrance. That part of the area was blocked off was the price she paid for protection. But then, she thought, the other positions were set up the same way. Constructed three or four feet back from the buildings’ outer walls, and where they could be sited behind corners and reinforced with sandbags, the soldiers’ fighting positions had very narrow, but overlapping, fields of view. Just like me, she thought, they can’t see all of what’s going on. They have to rely on their buddies to do their jobs and cover their flanks.

  She thought of Denight, who after positioning four of the seven M60 machine guns the garrison owned, now waited with the Hornets for orders on which way to move. And Tampier, who with an overstrength squad that was short on numbers but heavy in firepower, was working her way toward what Denight and she had determined to be the Russians’ secondary effort.

  Val’s radio squawked to life. “This is Watchdog One-One. I can see down the main road in. There’s heavy movement, but they’re just inside the woods on both sides of the road. There’s a long line of troops, though. They go back further than I can see, and as they get closer they break off into the woods.”

  “This is Alpha One. I monitored and will pull Watchdog One-Three to provide additional coverage so we can see better.”

  It was the same with the section chiefs, Val realized. They couldn’t see all of their sectors either, not the way they’d built the positions. They had a series of troops out in front, sensing and reporting which way the Russians moved, then shuffling and concentrating soldiers and fires to counter the threat. Information goes up and down the chain of command, Val thought, causing action and reaction.

  Not a chain, she told herself. It’s not a hierarchy. All her elements worked on one radio frequency, the price they had to pay for Sgt. Stoinevy making all the radios compatible. She wasn’t sure how, but through some very unauthorized tinkering the sergeant had rigged the electronics so that now the MPs’ civilian two-way radios—like the one in a holster on her belt, the heavy military PRC-77 in the ruck on her back, and the squad radios her section chiefs carried—all meshed electronically.

  There were enough for every OP and every leader. So everybody knows everything, she told herself. It’s not a pyramid, with one part isolated from the other. It’s more like a…a web. Yes, that was it, a web. It’d give and take—a pull in one area would get a response in another—but it wouldn’t break. Information, orders, ideas, they all went back and forth, left and right. Thin, elastic, but for its size and thickness, incredibly strong. And interdependent. Any one part just as strong or as weak as the others.

  She again looked back at Elmore and Hite, her runners in case the lattice of electronic information failed. Like her, the two soldiers were positioned at the web’s center. She realized that they would know the most and be the least bothered by details.

  In the final moments before combat, moments that stretch endlessly and evaporate instantly, Val paused to considered her own importance. The commander, she thought, one who commands, who orders it to be so. If they knew what orders to give, Hite and Elmore could give them as well as I could. They might have to.

  “Hite, Elmore,” Val called, not taking her eyes from the entrance area, “come up here where you can see.”

  Her radios came alive and the tension grew. “This is Watchdog One-Three. I’ve got major movement of the enemy forward in area yellow.”

  “This is Watchdog Two-Three. Same in area red.”

  “This is Mike One, same here.”

  Val heard it in the distance, first one, then four more quick “thumps” of 40mm M203 grenades leaving their tubes. Slung under the barrels of modified M16s, the M203 grenade launcher gave the individual soldier the equivalent of her own personal mortar, and with it the ability to put a fist-size fragmentation, armor piercing, or smoke round on a target up to four hundred meters away.

  Tampier’s group carried five 203s, Val remembered. That would be her people.

  “This is Lightfoot. Engaging advancing company-size element in sector blue.”

  That’s it, thought Val. Here we go.

  “Pay attention, you two,” Val said, reaching for the radio. “This is how a spider eats a fly. I hope.”

  Forest Infernesk

  “Colonel,” Dimonokov’s radioman said, putting the microphone down, “Second Company reports engaging the enemy.”

  Two kilometers from the depot’s entrance, just off the main road and just inside the Forest Infernesk, Dimonokov sat in his command vehicle and sipped a cup of hot coffee, one thoroughly laced with vodka.

  “Instruct Third and Fourth Companies to advance.” He took another sip, pleased with himself. In the first wave he had five companies of Special Security infantry, all filled to over a hundred twenty percent strength. Although First Company was mauled in the previous night’s action, replacements—pulled from the Special Security class now in training—would arrive later that day. Stanev’s company, too, waited in reserve near Infernesk. They will surely not be needed, thought Dimonokov. Third and Fourth Companies will make short work of these washerwomen. He glanced at a report from a forward observation post, then shook his head sadly. The women had strung some barbed wire inside their gate. Pitiful, he thought, pitiful.

  “Third Company commander is advancing, Colonel.”

  “Very well. Driver, pay attention to your watch. In precisely ten minutes time I want you to move within sight of the Americans’ main gate. I want to watch this slaughter.”

  Infernesk Munitions Depot

  “In any operation or campaign,” Christine heard echoes of her West Point Military History instructor’s voice ring in her head, “there will be some unit that is assigned an economy of force mission. Having personally participated in such operations in Viet Nam, I can tell you, cadets, that economy of force was one of my most extremely challenging missions.”

  Major Ecanston ain’t got shit on me now, Christine decided as she tracked the Russians’ advance. She turned to the M203 gunner beside her and pointed. “The left platoon’s command group is all clustered up over there, range about three-seven-five. You see ‘em?”

  “That’s pretty long.”

  “Give them a minute or two to get a little closer, then nail ‘em.”

  Christine, her runner, and the fifteen other women and men in her group lay watching the Russian company carefully pick its way between the bunkers. Outnumbered ten to one, Christine hoped to make up in firepower what she lacked in numbers. Her overstrength squad consisted of three teams of four soldiers each. Each team carried an M203, two light machine guns called Squad Automatic Weapons—SAWs—and was under the control of a sergeant or corporal with an M16. Except for the M60 machine gunner, who had enough to do to wrestle around her twent
y-three-pound weapon, each soldier also carried two LAWs, or light antitank weapons. Unable to penetrate the armor of modern tanks, the LAWs were long since obsolete. Several hundred of the single-shot, three-foot long rockets, encased in fiberglass tubes that served both as launcher and carrying case, had found their way to the Infernesk Depot to await return to the United States.

  Christine deployed her teams in an extended “V” formation, its open end toward the enemy. She located her command group about halfway up the left leg of the “V”. With its attached M60 machine gun, assistant gunner toting an M16, her runner with an M203, and a second grenadier, the command group was a fighting force in its own right. From the top floor of a building about five hundred meters to Christine’s rear, Watchdog Three-One looked down on the advancing Russians and Christine’s thin defense, and called the play-by-play.

  “Lightfoot, Watchdog Three-One. The flank platoons are drifting in. Keep on them—hit the right one a little more.”

  Christine spoke into the microphone “Team Two, Team Three, concentrate on that right platoon. Team One, keep at it.”

  “Got it.” Two M203 rounds popped up and arced lazily toward the Russians’ right-flank platoon.

  “Team Three, wilco.” Two more grenades sailed up.

  “This is One, still hammering.” Christine heard the soft “thumps” as the M203 did its work.

  From her vantagepoint on the crest of Bunker 230, Christine watched small, angry black puffs of smoke mark where 40mm grenades bit into the Russians. There were five rows of bunkers next to the fence line, then an access road, then five more rows. The arrangement repeated itself two more times before the bunkers butted up against the Depot’s buildings.

  “One, Two, Three, this is Lightfoot. Keep at it.”

  “Lightfoot, Watchdog Three-One. Affirmative, you’re hurting them. I see casualties strung out all the way back to the fence.”

  To get the enemy in range, she had let them breach the fence and advance unmolested through the first two rows of bunkers. But the Russians had also come in a “V”, two platoons up and two back, and spread out over a lateral distance of about eight hundred meters. That was too great a distance for Christine, who wanted all four of the Special Security company’s platoons in her weapons’ crossfire. So it was necessary to persuade them, Christine told herself, and to let them have a little ground to be persuaded on.

  Two, three rows of bunkers, I had to give that many away, she ceded. But they don’t get any more that cheaply.

  “Teams, this is Lightfoot. Get the SAWs going when they hit the next row.”

  ~*~

  The operation ended for Special Security Captain Burian Guchma before it began. The blast from a shell—unseen, like the many others the Americans were firing at his company—perforated his right arm and leg. The commander of Second Company went down, as did the first and second platoon leaders and five squad leaders, not more than two hundred meters after they made it through the Americans’ wire. The phantom bombs continued to rain down on his flank platoons, and propped up in the grass alongside an ammunition bunker, Guchma sensed that his men were bunching up towards the center too much. But there was little he could do. Too weak to do more than mutter and worry, Guchma faded in and out of consciousness.

  His 2IC immediately took charge, pressing the company forward as per their plan and stopping only to hastily put a dressing on the worst of his commander’s many wounds.

  The fire on the flanks must be deliberate, Guchma thought hazily, they want us in the center. We must spread out—the 2IC must spread them out. Burian Guchma lapsed into an unconsciousness from which he would not awaken, not knowing that only a hundred meters in front of him his 2IC was also bleeding to death.

  ~*~

  From their training and their classes, they should have known it was coming. But the rattle of heavy machine guns spitting out bullets and the noise of those bullets as they riddled the guard towers and chewed up the front of the buildings that faced the depot entrance—especially the lower floors of the building they were in—still made both Eddie Cruz and Ann Shapiro cringe.

  In the windows that had not been boarded up or screened over, the OP teams—including Shapiro and Cruz—had placed cardboard personnel target silhouettes, and from a distance the cutouts looked exactly like the head and shoulders of a careless soldier looking out a window. Cruz had gone so far as to draw crude faces on some, and Ann Shapiro had written the name “Robert” on one particularly obvious target. Cruz had screwed up his face in curiosity until Shapiro said simply, “My ex.”

  Below their fighting position, Cruz’s artwork and Shapiro’s military version of a voodoo doll were suffering mightily under a hail of Russian machine gun fire. Protected by layers of sandbags and intervening buildings, and with the Russians’ attention and fire concentrated on the obvious targets, the flesh and blood American defenders suffered only a little.

  Cruz and Shapiro each laid out two full thirty-round magazines where they would be in easy reach. Both soldiers shifted the sandbag props for their weapons until they thought they had more comfortable support. Both took one last glance around the green walls of their position, set back to hide their weapons’ muzzle flashes. Thick sandbag walls and heavy timbers both protected them from small arms fire and reinforced the thinner walls and flooring around them. Then both peered out their firing ports at the oncoming Russians.

  There was little to say, and between the downpour of the bullets against the building and the earplugs they wore to keep the sound of their own weapons from deafening them, they couldn’t have carried on much of a conversation anyway. Instinctively, Cruz reached out his left arm. Shapiro had done the same with her right. There were no words, just a brief squeeze of hands and hasty half-smiles of bravado that silently said, “I’ll be strong if you will.” Then they let go and wrapped their fingers around their rifles’ triggers.

  If Cruz had been an introspective man, he might have thought about how the enforced absence of words had led to the intimacy of touch, and how ironic it was to find that kind of intimacy in the final seconds before a firefight. But Cruz was not thinking about intimacy. He thought only that the Russian soldier centered in his sights had about four steps to go before he hit the “commence fire” line.

  ~*~

  As the American machine gun’s bullets cut down their two point men, the lead squad of First platoon, Second Company, dropped into the tall grass between the bunkers. The next burst of 5.56mm bullets passed just over the flattened Russian Special Security soldiers. Then the fire lifted momentarily, only to be followed by the impact of two 40mm grenades less than five meters behind the squad, the shrapnel biting into two more soldiers. Their sergeant yelled to advance, and three soldiers rose, trying to go forward to get out of the fire. They made it about five steps before the American gun fired again, killing one and wounding another. The Russians again dove for cover, having taken all of seven meters of ground. An enraged soldier stood and sprayed bullets at his unseen enemy, then literally disappeared as an M203 shell detonated directly on his chest.

  Christine rolled over to look down the access lane between the next rows of bunkers. Peering over the curved earthen top of the ammo storage bunker she’d selected as her command post, she saw the far left Special Security platoon going through the same motions: a short advance, a dive for cover as her teams’ heavier weapons engaged, attempts to spread out—only to be thwarted by her M203 gunners—then the cycle repeating itself. Even at a distance Christine could sense the Russians’ mounting frustration. Her people were doing all the moving and shooting, dodging back and forth between covered positions while the Russians hugged the ground, firing whenever the enemy rose to advance. It was wearing on her just watching. It has to be really wearing on them, she thought. Good. Let it.

  “Lightfoot, Watchdog One-Three. They’re all on line out there, and you’ve got all three platoons on three lanes. Just a couple of stragglers on the outside, and they’re not going anyplac
e very fast.”

  “One-Three this is Lightfoot, roger.”

  Now, thought Christine, this is where we see if they take the bait.

  “Teams, this is Lightfoot. I want you to backpedal until they get within one row of the access road. Set up there in the positions we talked about. One of your people needs to get on the decoys and spring them on my order.”

  She got three quick, if out of breath, “wilcos.” Christine turned to the soldiers next to her.

  “Let’s go. It won’t take the Russians long to get up a head of steam once we let up on them.”

  The group of five rolled off the bunker top. Then, hugging the sides of the huge ammunition storage structures, they jogged forward.

  ~*~

  Like the other Special Security soldiers in the assault platoons on his right and left, Danya Dutsenko had risen from his unit’s attack position at the forest’s edge and dashed forward, careful to keep on line with his comrades. That they had come through the depot’s gate without casualties seemed miraculous, although in his run toward the American buildings Dutsenko had not stopped to contemplate either his luck or the good fortune that the gate had been left unlocked.

  Now he knew only that the lieutenant was screaming at the sergeants to get the men in line, that each sergeant was screaming at his squad to get in line, and that the loose rolls of American wire, even as men grabbed them and shoved them aside, were interfering with controlling the formation as much as the noise of the company’s supporting weapons was interfering with his ability to hear his superiors. Ahead of him, not a hundred meters, a long wire obstacle stretched at an angle. Dutsenko did have the presence of mind to wonder why it was stretched at such an angle and not directly perpendicular to his company’s line of advance, and to note that no one had briefed him on it when the assault order was issued. He did not, however, notice when his left foot passed a shiny tin can that had been half-buried in the ground.