Arc Light (67 page)

Chandler put his bulky Combat Vehicle Crewman's helmet on, plugged in the commo cables and hit the intercom. Pressing the
PUSH-TO-TALK
button in the remote box at the tank commander's position in the hatch, he asked, “Driver, you read me?”

“Five by five, sir,” came the tinny response.

“Gunner?”

“Five by, sir.”

“Loader?”

“Sir!”

Chandler heard the whine of the turret motor as the gunner raised and lowered the main gun and then slewed the turret left and right and back to the center. From his hatch Chandler could see Barnes walking from vehicle to vehicle to make sure they didn't take another wrong turn.
Five hours behind schedule
, Chandler thought as he flicked on his feeds to the two radios. One radio was tuned to the brigade net above him and fed into his left earphone. The other radio was on his own battalion net below him and fed into his right earphone. Both were silent. He nodded at Specialist 4th Class Jefferson, his loader who sat in his hatch next to him, and told him that he was back on net, relieving him of his monitoring duties.

Bailey, his battalion's Scout Platoon leader, and his six M-3 Bradley Armored Fighting Vehicles sat poised at the head of his battalion's re-forming column, their 25-mm cannon angled out forty-five degrees to the side in proper alternating fashion. The vehicle commanders, Bailey included, protruded from hatches atop their vehicles' turrets warily eyeing the crowd that had gathered along the side of the street ahead.

Despite the fact that Ukraine and Byelarus had declared themselves
noncombatants and withdrawn their forces from the field, the crowd made Chandler nervous. The last briefing at brigade had said that a five-thousand-man Special Forces Group organized into hundreds of “A” Teams had been dropped behind Russian lines in eastern Ukraine in the early hours of the war. The
PSYOPS
people of the Green Berets—Psychological Operations forces—were organizing very effective resistance, they had been told, among the anti-Russian Ukrainians living to the east. There was no reason, Chandler reasoned, that the Russian Spetsnaz could not do the same in the western Ukraine among the millions of ethnic Russians who had intermixed with the Ukrainians in the days of the old Soviet Union.

He decided to load the .50-caliber heavy machine gun in front of his hatch. Safety in fire position. Pull back charging handle on right, opening chamber. Safety in “safe” position. Open ammo box cover and remove ammo belt. Raise feed tray on top of gun, place belt in chamber, feeling for first round.

The .50-caliber bullets felt huge, heavy. Once the lead round was seated nicely in the open chamber, he placed the safety on fire and eased the charging handle forward, moving a bullet into the chamber and closing the bolt. There was a heavy, clacking sound as the mechanism worked smoothly. He closed the gun's feed tray and the ammo box cover, and the machine gun was ready to fire. One hundred armor-piercing rounds, ten per second, spewing out the end of the ninety-pound gun. It could knock down a helicopter at a mile, Chandler knew, if you could hit it.

He safed the gun. Jefferson was arming his smaller M-60 machine gun in front of his hatch on the left, and Chandler could hear the gunner from inside the tank taking his cue and loading the coax, the machine gun mounted to fire parallel with the main gun. Chandler and the gunner could fire their two machine guns while “buttoned up” inside the tank with Chandler's M-2 locked to its ring mount.

“Juliet Lima One, this is Sierra Alpha One, do you read me, over?” Chandler heard through his right ear.

Chandler rolled his eyes. Bailey, playing with the radio again.

Chandler hit the
PUSH-TO-TALK
button on his CVC helmet, waiting a fraction of a second as the whirring fan of the radio activated and the radio powered up. “Sierra Alpha One, this is Juliet Lima One, I read you, over.”

“Radio check.”

“Loud and clear,” Chandler said as briskly as possible to get off the radio. He looked up at Bailey and noticed that the battalion was bunched up behind Bailey's Bradleys. He knew he could risk the column formation this far behind friendly lines and with general air superiority,
but the vehicles were still too close. Chandler keyed the radio and said, “Sierra Alpha One, move forward three hundred, over.”

“Say again, over.”

“I say again, move forward three hundred, over.”

“Wilco, out.”

Beside Chandler's tank he caught sight of Master Sergeant Barnes. Barnes shouted, “Ready to try it again, sir?”

“All right!” Chandler replied. “Let's do it!” He raised his right arm, circled it in the air, and pumped his fist down three times. Chandler radioed Bailey—the only unit commander in front of him, who might not, therefore, have seen his arm and hand signals or had it passed along to him—and ordered him to proceed slowly.

From behind, the vehicles' engines began to turn over, the growl filling the hard canyons of the city street with a solid, deep rumble, only to settle into the loud whine of the tanks' turbines.
I hope we don't have any dead batteries like at the rail yard
, Chandler thought. Slaving off the helpless hulks had been embarrassing. The supply troops on the railcars had gotten a good laugh at the dashing tankers as their tanks maneuvered awkwardly to run cables across to their cousins' dead batteries. From then on, Chandler had randomly asked tank commanders on stops how long since he last ran his engine to recharge. Twenty minutes every two hours, that was the rule in combat.

What's next?
he wondered, sighing deeply and shaking his head. He winced when he remembered his latest mistake, forgetting the night before to ensure that the company commanders put out OP/LPs, Observation Posts/Listening Posts.
Mistakes now are counted in lives,
he thought.

He looked around. His tank was parked on the curb, or what used to be the old stone curb before his treads crushed it to chips and dust. The engines of the tanks on the street strained, and the procession began. First came Alpha Company—fourteen M-1A1 Abrams Main Battle Tanks like the one atop which Chandler sat, their 120-mm smooth-bore turret-stabilized main guns slewed alternately from left to right in fashion similar to the much smaller guns on Bailey's M-3s. Each had the new millimeter-wave IFF (Identify Friend or Foe) transceivers that automatically alerted lazing gunners that they had an American tank in their sights, and strips of dully refractive tape in inverted Vs on the rear and sides like hunters' vests, intended to be seen and therefore not shot by those units without the IFF electronics.
More worried about friendly fire than Russian fire
, Chandler thought.
That's a good sign.

The vehicles rolled by, their commanders and loaders sitting at perches with their torsos and heads extending from their hatches.
Chandler returned the salute of the Alpha Company commander as his tank passed, and the commander of the next tank, having seen his CO, saluted also. Thus began the parade: each vehicle passing in review, each vehicle's commander saluting. It quickly grew stylized, the crewmen at attention in their hatches, turning their torsos in unison “eyes left,” and saluting on whispered command with a snap of their arms. Chandler felt like an idiot, terribly self-conscious each time he saluted but forced to salute with a flourish to acknowledge the men's formality. As the civilians watched the procession from the doors and windows of the buildings, however, he began to feel exposed. Chandler made a mental note to give to Barnes, who was his acting command sergeant major: no more saluting in the field. No sense giving the Russians a target—the commanding officer.

Next came Delta Company, his battalion's only infantry. Having “traded” a tank company with one of the brigade's infantry battalions for one of its infantry companies, the two battalions became, in army parlance, “task forces”—no longer battalions of pure armor or infantry. “Battalion-strength task forces”—Chandler's being Task Force 2/415 Armor. Lieutenant Colonel Honig, the commander of the infantry battalion, now commanded Task Force 3/415 Infantry.

The infantry's M-2 Bradleys streamed by. Chandler tried to break the parade-like “pass in review” by intentionally not returning the salute of the first vehicle's commander, but when the second vehicle's crew saluted, he relented. On they came. Larger than armor companies' sixty-two men, the 111 officers and men of the infantry company rode in thirteen M-2 Bradleys. Nine of the Bradleys held infantry squads of nine men each, and the other four held the three platoon and the one company headquarters sections.

The Bradleys bristled with weapons. In addition to the stabilized M-242 25-mm chain gun and M-240C 7.62-mm co-axial machine gun fired from the small turret atop the Bradley, Chandler saw that the crews had raised the twin TOW-2 antitank missile launchers on the left of the turret into their firing positions. Then, protruding like bristles from a porcupine, two on each side and two from the rear of the Bradley, were six ball-jointed M-231 5.56-mm assault rifles that the infantrymen could pivot and fire from inside the Bradley on the move. Atop three of the thirteen Bradleys, the gunners held FIM-92A shoulder-fired Stinger antiaircraft missiles at the ready. Finally, Chandler knew, added to all of that were the hidden contents of each of the vehicles that would be taken with the men when dismounting: an M-60 machine gun, a SAW, two 40-mm grenade launchers, four M-16s, a Dragon antitank missile launcher, and two smaller AT-4 antitank missiles.

When the last of the Bradleys passed, the fourteen sixty-ton
M-1A1 tanks of Bravo Company followed, dwarfing, Chandler noticed, the smaller Bradleys.

Then came the 331 men of Headquarters Company, itself more than twice the size of an entire Russian tank battalion, riding in a variety of vehicles including special command, ambulance, recovery and maintenance variants of M-113 armored personnel carriers and Bradleys, tankers filled with fuel, two-and-a-half-ton supply trucks—“deuce and a quarters” they were called—and Humvees. The thirty men and six M-3 Bradleys of Bailey's scout platoon, which were up at the head of the column, were a part of the Headquarters Company, as were the six 4.2-inch self-propelled heavy mortars that paraded by—Chandler's personal “artillery.”

Finally came Charlie Company: fourteen more M-1A1 tanks, the last three of which had their guns slewed to the rear—to the left, right, and straight back—covering their tails.

As the last of the vehicles passed, through Chandler's mind flashed the fleeting image of the legendary Jason, as told by a B-grade movie he had watched as a child. Monsters in skeletal form had arisen from the ground where their bones had been strewn. In this instance, the monsters had been disgorged from flatbed railcars and were made of steel. Ten days ago they had sat inert, in packing crates and under tarpaulins, but now they at least looked like a part of a living, breathing armored fighting team.

Chandler rode atop his own monster and looked down the road at his battalion as his driver sped to take his place in the middle of the procession. Chandler was suddenly able to appreciate just for an instant some small measure of the consummate horror that would be felt by those who might meet his tanks, most with puny weapons that could never hope to penetrate their flat, honeycombed sheets of Chobham armor layered with steel, aluminum, and ceramics. Chandler committed that feeling to memory for use later on the battlefield: the terror of infantrymen left alone to oppose the enemy's monsters.
I can't let that happen to my infantry
, Chandler thought,
but I've got to make it happen to theirs.
For tanks—Chandler's forty-four M-1s and the Russians' T-72s and T-80s—were indeed monsters. They were also the keys to the kingdom that lay ahead.

The delegation from the Federal Reserve Board of Governors sat waiting for the President in the ornate paneled conference room.
Lambert followed the President in, uncertain as to why his presence at such a meeting had at the last second been requested. The Governors rose and shook the President's hand, and then shook hands with or nodded at the Secretaries of Commerce and Labor, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, the chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, and Lambert. All of the President's men looked somber, and the representative from the Congressional Budget Office who stood and introduced himself from where he sat at the end of the table as an observer could barely manage to look anyone in the eye. Something was up, and Lambert wasn't in on it yet.

As soon as everyone took his seat, the President said, “Okay, gentlemen. You've got my attention. What is this about an economic catastrophe?”

The chairman of the Federal Reserve's board said, “I appreciate your attention to this matter, Mr. President, and I understand you have a busy schedule these days so I'll be brief. As you know, we haven't had any reliable broad indicators on the economy since the nuclear exchange, and we won't have any for several more weeks. In order to guide us in formulating our monetary policy, therefore, we have had to conduct a poll of our regional Federal Reserve Banks. We asked them to compile estimates for their districts of measures such as Gross Domestic Product and wholesale and retail prices, and then we generated a very rough Index of Leading Economic Indicators. What we learned, sir”—the elder man, a noted economist and academic, sat upright in his chair as he drew a deep breath—“is that we are heading for an economic depression of unprecedented magnitude.”