eventhorizonpg.com
AUTUMN, NEAR KSAVEROVKA, UKRAINE
The artillery shell passing overhead made a noise like tearing paper. It was a huge sound, the noise God might have made rending the sky in two.
“Major Shcheribitsky!” Lt. General Baranyk shouted, emerging from his BRDM scout just as the dun grass before him blossomed into fire. A heartbeat later, tardy as thunder to remote lightning, came the dull boom-booms of the strikes.
“Major Shcheribitsky! What is our position?”
But the major was already out of his tank, shouting into his radiophone.
The spread of Ukrainian vehicles, fragile dots on the ocean of grass, was caught in a tempest of red and black, a sudden fall hailstorm of flame and deep-throated sound.
No. This can’t be, Baranyk thought. Everything was out of position. The Arab National Army should be east of him someplace, sandwiched between his own regiment and General Ilschenko’s. Baranyk should be flanking the enemy, not riding directly into their line of fire.
Baranyk’s BTR-80 personnel carriers were still loaded, the majority of the infantry providing convenient cannon fodder. The armored BMPs traveling with them had loosed their Sagger missiles. White trails scratched the sky.
Above his head another errant enemy shell went over with a loud shurring sound, the tissue-paper noise of his battle plans ripping apart.
“Shcheribitsky!” Baranyk called, bringing his field glasses to his eyes.
Apocalypse rode the meadow. Most of his tanks had stopped to adjust their positions so they were face-front to the town on the horizon. Some were moving blind, crashing into each other in confusion, their commanders either under cover or dead. The personnel carriers and BMPs were lurching forward, angling in front of the two tank battalions and driving right into the defended opponent.
“Order the infantry to withdraw!” Baranyk lowered the glasses in time to see the stricken look on the major’s pitted face.
“I can’t get through to them, general,” he replied. ‘They have driven too far ahead and the Arabs are jamming.”
Too far ahead, Baranyk’s mind echoed numbly. Yes, too far ahead. His infantry had somehow got in front of his tanks. If they kept going as they were, they would not need to fear the enemy. Ukrainian shells would kill them.
Baranyk crawled up the deck of Shcheribitsky’s T-80 to the angular turret.
The wiry little major followed, snatching at him. “Get down, sir. They will have our range.”
Frantic, Baranyk twisted out of Shcheribitsky’s grip. He reached the closed hatch and stood, lifting the glasses to his eyes.
The Arabs had found the first tank battalion bunched, and now its funeral pyres littered the field. Like startled rabbits, the second battalion had frozen in place. They were at last firing back, and had loosed smoke from their baffles; but a whimsical wind whipped the smoke to and fro, obscuring the vision of the commanders behind as much as confusing the enemy.
If his tanks were blind, his infantry was deaf. Never hearing the order to retreat, the BMPs and personnel carriers rushed toward the enemy artillery.
Oh, Baranyk’s mind voiced in an eerie, graveyard hush.
So sad. The only order his regiment had heard was that morning’s Order of the Day: they were to attack that afternoon. In the midst of fire, they could not, would not, be flexible. Good Ukrainian soldiers, good mothers’ sons, they did what they were told.
Major Shcheribitsky climbed up next to him. “Sir? What are the orders?” he asked.
For once Baranyk had no answer. Carried on the fretful wind was the sour smell of autumn and the prickly scent of cordite. Through the glasses the general watched as his tanks stalled and his infantry hurried to oblivion.
There in the southern town of Grebonki the ANA lay hidden: Iranians, Iraqis, along with more familiar killers—Uzbeks, Azerbaijanis, and Muslim Cossacks. Those wayward children of the Red Army, his former comrades, were going to murder them all.
“Sir! Sir!” a corporal on the ground was shouting. Baranyk took his eyes from his glasses and glanced down. “Corporal Zgursky from Reconnaissance,” the man announced. “I was trying to tell my captain, but he wouldn’t listen, sir!”
“Not now!” Baranyk snapped. Zgursky blanched, and suddenly Baranyk forgot his rage. He noticed how young the corporal was, how smooth-cheeked and fresh-faced and innocent. What a good soldier Zgursky must be, Baranyk thought. So polite he was, a proud mother’s son. “Go ahead,” the general said, tempering his voice. “If it’s important, tell me.”
The corporal shifted his weight, uneasy under the combined gazes of Baranyk and the major. “Grebonki, sir. I’m from Grebonki. And I was trying to tell my captain the town to our south is Ksaverovka. We are seven kilometers from what the captain thought was our position.”
Baranyk whipped his head toward the battle. Even without the glasses he could tell it was a rout. Through his chest, through the soles of his feet, he could feel the hollow bass thuds of the shells. Smoke curled toward the cloudless bowl of blue sky: gray smoke from the tank baffles, black smoke from the burning T -80s.
“I can deploy the artillery,” Major Shcheribitsky said, his tone disheartened and unsure.
“No use,” Baranyk whispered, his words carried away by the ripping sound of a shell.
“What, sir?” the major asked, cupping a hand to his ear.
“No use!” Baranyk shouted, finding his voice. ‘‘They are still on their tractors, and it will take over thirty damned minutes to get them deployed! Move those tanks forward! Tell them to attack!”
Seven kilometers out of position, his infantry bare and unprotected as a baby’s ass. Seven kilometers and the maps were all wrong.
“Sir!” the major screamed over the noise. A shell hit uncomfortably near, making Shcheribitsky flinch. “Sir! Did you say attack?”
Baranyk turned so fast that the small major stumbled back, nearly losing his footing. “Yes! Attack!” Seeing the major’s incredulous expression, he screamed, “Don’t blame me! Blame the Russians! We plead for help and what do they give us? Outdated, erroneous Soviet maps!”
The major’s thin mouth tightened. A moment later he called down to the communications officer.
The general brought the glasses to his eyes again. What he saw in the binoculars confused him. At first he thought the ground itself must be moving. The brown earth, like a turgid sea, crested and rolled. When he realized what he was witness to, all hope left, even the thready hope of stalemate.
“Retreat!” Baranyk ordered, climbing off the tank. Shcheribitsky followed him. “Sir. Only the tanks can hear us. The others—”
Baranyk whirled. “It is a human wave! Retreat!”
The major’s tone was soft, doubtful. “But our infantry,” he said.
“I know.”
There was nothing Baranyk could do, nothing of use Shcheribitsky could tell him. Baranyk knew it all. He knew that his infantry was dead, that the battle was lost, that Pogrebnyak’s and Ilschenko’s divisions could not hold. The Arabs would roll into Kiev, all for a seven-kilometer mistake, all because a captain would not listen to a corporal.
“I order you to call a retreat,” Baranyk said. The tranquil aftermath of defeat surprised him. He should be sorrowful, he thought. There should be self-recriminations. Instead he felt peace descend, the peculiar serenity of despair. “Do it now, major, and do it fast.”
The major snapped his fingers, and a sergeant ran up with the radio. “Where do we retreat to, sir?”
“West,” Baranyk replied, not considering any particular location. There were n
o places to hide; only places they could run. After a pause he climbed onto the back deck of his BRDM and stepped through the cupola.
Standing on his seat, Baranyk watched what was left of his tanks begin to roll out of the fog a scant five kilometers ahead of the deadly human sea.
“Shcheribitsky?” Baranyk called just before he fled the battle.
The major glanced up from his field telephone. “Sir?”
“Tell them not to stop and pick up the wounded.”
As Baranyk watched, he saw Shcheribitsky’s gaze grow hollow, as though the little major were staring through the vacuous eyes of the dead. “But they take no prisoners, sir.”
“I know that,” Baranyk replied.
It was forty-five minutes later, well out of sight and sound of conflict, that Baranyk discovered how fleeting, how fragile defeat’s peace could be. Three mechanized rifle battalions, he thought. One tank battalion. Of the 2,250 men he’d taken into battle, at least 1,500 were gone.
His composure burst. From simple exhaustion, he didn’t try to suppress his tears. Out of respect for the dead, he refused to cover his face.
SPRING, CRAV COMMAND, TRÁS-OS-MONTES, PORTUGAL
Even though he had overslept that morning and had to be dressed in two minutes flat, Sergeant Gordon Means stopped dead on the porch of his barracks. Cocking his head, he listened to the low, angry rumbling from the south. He stood, his non-reg Nikes unlaced, his fatigue shirt tucked messily into his unbelted battle dress trousers, wondering if the base was under attack and whether he should go get his M-16 or hide under his cot.
Across the mist-shrouded, pine-scented yard ambled two Brit officers, one still chewing on a piece of toast. Gordon watched them pass.
Yoo-hoo, guys. We’re under fire, he wanted to call. Christ.
Hadn’t they heard it?
“ ... ball went right between the goalie’s feet,” the Brit captain said to the major, sounding as though he were not in a war at all but auditioning for the BBC.
The low thuds came again. Gordon fought the urge to dive for cover. Oh, he thought, recognizing the sound for what it was and feeling more than slightly stupid.
Thunder. Just thunder. The ratcheting of his heart began to slow.
When he felt steady enough to walk, he left the porch and trotted to the bunker. On its pad all Apache helicopter dripped condensation down its sleek, greenish hide. The sun, just under the eastern horizon, was backwashing the overcast sky with gray light. To the west, feather boas of fog caressed the shoulders of the mountains.
Glancing at his watch, he noticed it was past 0700. He was late for duty again.
Hurrying, he took the four flights of cement steps a pair at a time until he was deep in the fluorescent-lit guts of the bunker. He rushed down the olive-painted hall, past the other blast doors, and paused before the third from the end on the right. Performing his morning ritual, he took a skipstep, brought his right leg out hard, and kicked the ill-hung and often recalcitrant door under the knob. It popped open, colliding with a bang against the block wall.
Gordon landed in the entrance, crouched in his killer karate posture, and froze. Someone was sitting in his room. And not just any someone. Between Gordon’s upraised hands was framed the solemn, unsmiling figure of Colonel Pelham.
“As you were,” the colonel said.
Gordon automatically straightened. As he did, his pants slid to his bony hips. He caught them before they fell any farther.
‘They killed another satellite,” the colonel told him. Gordon glanced up from buckling his web belt. Pelham’s round face was the exact color of semisweet chocolate; at his temples was a dusting of sugar-white. Had his expression been kinder, he might have resembled a Hershey elf.
“We’ve tracked the laser pulse to the Pyrenees again,” Pelham went on. “You didn’t get all the cannon.”
“Oops. Sorry about that, sir. But begging the colonel’s pardon, if I had some backup, maybe the lasers would be easier to get.”
“Convince the French, sergeant,” Pelham said dryly. “You just go convince the French the Arabs are up there. They keep telling Centcom-West that the Arabs are firing from the Spanish side, not theirs.”
For a moment there was quiet. Gordon could hear the faint clack-clack of Stendhal’s unit from the other room.
He wondered where Stendhal’s CRAV was headed and if it would survive.
“Close the door,” Pelham said.
Gordon eased the door to and gave it a shove, jamming it more or less closed. When he turned, the colonel was eyeing him. Gordon wished he could hide his Nikes, wished he had made it to work a few minutes earlier. Wished he hadn’t come Kung-Fuing it through that door.
“Sit down,” the colonel ordered.
The only other place in the room to sit was at the controls of his CRAV. Gordon perched uneasily on the padded seat, his eyes darting away from the wire-basket gloves and the black plastic goggles.
Gordon hated people watching him work with the robot, even though, with the goggles on, he could see nothing but what the CRAV unit saw, could hear nothing but what its microphones picked up. Still, he figured, it was like sex: he could get deaf-and-blind involved in that, too, but wouldn’t want anyone making notes on his performance.
“Mitsubishi’s here. Their munitions product manager will be monitoring you.”
Gordon snapped his head toward the colonel.
Pelham must have caught the panic in his expression, Gordon thought, because the colonel smiled. It wasn’t much of a smile, but, then, the war was going so poorly that that was all Pelham could probably manage.
“Don’t sweat it,” the colonel told him. The man had a voice that mimicked the semisweet chocolate of his face: it was thick and dark and smooth. “Just the usual contractor curiosity. He wants to monitor all the operators. I told him, as far as performance was concerned, you were probably the best.”
Pelham, perhaps wisely, let the compliment lie. He sat, his hands clasped over his taut, camouflage-covered belly, and stared. He watched Gordon the way a psychiatrist watches a new patient.
When the silence between them grew uncomfortable, Gordon finally asked, “When’s he going to be monitoring, sir?”
“Beginning today. Answer any questions he asks. Treat him with the proper courtesy.” The colonel stood up, all lean six feet four of him. He was, as usual, ramrod straight, his bowed head the only concession to the low-ceilinged room. “I’ve downloaded the targeting to your computer. Lunch, of course, will be brought in. This is a Till-Kill mission.” Suddenly his face softened. “You’re late again. Get any breakfast?”
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. I didn’t feel like breakfast,” Gordon lied, not wanting to admit he hadn’t awakened in time to drop by the mess hall.
“Take out that laser, sergeant,” Pelham said, his gaze, heavy with allotted responsibility, settled on Gordon. “And do it fast. If they shoot down our last Super Keyhole and discover you’re still alive and kicking, they may put two and two together. They’ll fire on the civilian AT&T satellite, and you won’t have an operational CRAV anymore.”
On his way out, Pelham patted Gordon’s shoulder absently and fought with the door until it opened. When he was gone Gordon slipped his hands into the gloves of his Computerized Robotic Assault Vehicle and set the opaque goggles over his face. To boost his morale, he started to hum the CRAV corps song.
THE PYRENEES
It was like waking up for the second time that morning, or like God creating the world: first there was darkness; then Gordon jerked his head twice to the right, activating the unit.
He was deep in the forest. Somewhere to his right a lark trilled in the fog. He slipped his feet into the control shoes, finding them blind, and pressed down on the accelerator. The CRAV came to life, the hum of its nuclear motor so quiet that the bird
never stopped singing.
Tipping his head left, Gordon brought the Global Positioning System on line. The military satellite’s lime green map superimposed itself over the mist-bound forest. To the lower left of his vision field his own software noted that all weapons systems were functional.
So. Here he was. Yes, sir. Right in the mountains just below the town of Bagnères-de-Luchon. Like a caution light, a yellow dot blinked at the head of the valley. That’s where the pulse laser was presumed to be, along with a company of pissed-off Arabs.
Shuffling his feet, Gordon brought the piano-sized robot up out of the trench he’d dug for it the night before. The engine’s mosquito hum rose to a faint squeal. The bird stopped its singing mid-verse.
According to the engineers, CRAVs conveyed no sense of touch, but all the operators felt things anyway. They talked about it sometimes, but only among themselves. At that moment Gordon could feel the knobbed backbone of the mountain under the treads of the robot, could feel the belly-soft, pine-needled loess in between. He’d felt the artillery shell that killed his first CRAV. Sometimes it seemed to him he’d died right along with it.
Hey, hey, Ma, he’d written to his mother, who was living in a refugee camp somewhere in Arkansas. I died today.
Died not as he had thought he might two years ago, of hunger and thirst in the Nebraska desert the Greenhouse Effect had wrought. No. He’d died quick and hard, in a hot-air burst of shrapnel in the rain-soaked Pyrenees.
It had been weeks before he talked about the loss of the unit. After that, he joked about the experience with the other CRAV freaks, but only a little. Almost a year later, it still bothered him. The diamond vapor-plated CRAV was a heroic extension of his scrawny body, a Superman Doppelganger of titanium and steel. It was, in away, his better half.
Carefully, cautiously, he made his way down the mountain until he was in sight of the road. There he stopped, engine idling. Pressed into the narrow asphalt trail were the serrated prints of tanks.
Cold Allies Page 1
