Ralph Peters (16 page)

Bogged down in their sport with the refugee column, the rebels were slow to advance. Babryshkin's men sat at the ready for hours, watching as the dazzling lines of unleashed weaponry simmered down into the steadier glow of the burning refugee vehicles. Babryshkin could sense the nerves prickling in each of his men. He could feel their torment through the steel walls of the vehicles, through the earthen battlements. They existed in a volatile no-man's-land between exhaustion and rage, aching to act, to do
some
thing
, even if it proved to be a fatal gesture. They did not think about dying because they no longer thought about living. They hardly existed. But the enemy . . . the enemy existed more palpably than the frozen earth or the mottled steel hulls of the war machines. The enemy had become the center of the universe.

In the middle of the night, in the hours beyond the clear recognition of time, a furious banging started up on the exterior of Babryshkin's tank. The first thump was so startling in the stillness that Babryshkin thought they had been fired upon and hit. But the force of the blows was on a more human scale. Someone was hammering at the tank with an unidentifiable object, trying to get them to open up.

Cautiously, Babryshkin ordered the crew to sit tight. Then he swiftly flipped open the commander's hatch, pistol in hand.

By starlight, Babryshkin could see the posterior of a man's form kneeling on the steel deck. Then the man stopped his banging and turned toward Babryshkin, slowly, stiffly. He was sobbing.

The battle noises in the distance had faded to random small-arms fire now, and the stretch of road flowing between the wings of Babryshkin's unit was deserted.

The man was old. He panted, out of breath. When Babryshkin scanned him with his pocket lamp, he saw white hair, blue worker's coveralls, a forehead smeared with blood.

The old man searched for Babryshkin's face in the darkness, hunting for the soldier's eyes.

"
Cowards
"
he shouted, weeping.
"
Cowards, cowards, cowards.
"

Babryshkin drowsed, reaching his physical limit. In an hour, the horizon would begin to pale, yet the rebel force remained out of direct fire range. They had clearly taken their time with the refugee column. Sated, Babryshkin told himself. A man can only take so much blood.
They're
drunk with it. Again, he considered launching a sweeping surprise attack, and, again, he suppressed the urge. Stick to the plan, stick to the plan. His heavy eyes settled over visions of earlier years. As a new lieutenant, he had had the hilariously bad luck to be assigned to Kushka, the notorious base at the southern extreme of Turkmenistan. His professors of military science had been embarrassed for him. Kushka was, after all, an assignment where officers were sent as punishment. Junior lieutenant and fresh graduate Babryshkin had been a top student, and he had no black marks on his disciplinary record. Yet, what could you do? The system needed a junior lieutenant at Kushka, where the summer temperatures soared above fifty degrees Celsius and poisonous snakes seemed to crowd as densely as Moscow subway passengers at peak hour. Meaning to console the boy, the professors could not help laughing.

Really, an assignment to Kushka was the stuff of which jokes were made—so long as you were not the assignee.

Kushka had been every bit as miserable as had been foretold, added to which the indigenous population was hostile to ethnic Russians—unless you had hard currency to spend or military goods to sell on the black market. But he had learned. How false so many of the teachings had been, how naive he had been himself. The locals felt far more kinship with their smuggling partners across the Afghan border in Toragundi, or with the not-so-distant Iranians. Even then, the lieutenant with the thin blond mustache had known that a change in borders, in formal allegiances, was inevitable. He had even told himself,
"
Let them have the godforsaken place.
"
Yet, he had naturally hoped that the upheaval would not come when he was on duty, that it might somehow be delayed until it was no longer an immediate concern of his. Let the deluge wait until tomorrow, he thought sarcastically, sitting in his tank almost a decade later. It was the national attitude—may the disasters wait until someone else is on shift, until other shoulders bear the responsibility. He was ashamed of himself now. But there was nothing to be done.

Except to wait for the enemy. And to fight.

A sudden crackling in his earphones startled him out of an unwilling doze.

"
Volga, this is Amur. Can you hear me?
"

"
I'm listening,
"
Babryshkin said.

"
I've got movement out to my front. Auto picked them up. I've got my main gun on fire-lock. But it wants to cut loose. Multiple targets. They're so bunched up I can't get visual separation on the screen. Over.
"

Good. That was how he wanted them. All shot out. Crowding. Unwary. Hungover with death and blood.

"
How many?
"
Babryshkin demanded.
"
Give me a rough idea.
"
He stared hard into the wasteland of his optics, but the enemy was still out of sight. He wished his on-board electronics were not broken. He wished he had had the determination and energy to transfer his command setup to a tank in better all-around condition.

"
This is Amur. Looks like at least thirty heavies. Maybe
more. They're moving like a pack of drunks. Nose to asshole. All jammed up.
"

"
All right. Range?
"

"
Lead vehicles at seventy-five hundred.

Closer than Babryshkin had expected.
"
All stations, all stations. Anticipate engagement at five thousand meters.

He wanted them in close. Theoretically, he could begin engaging now, with both missiles and the swift, oversize guns. But he made up his mind to risk the further wait. The hull defilade positions were good. If the enemy was not very, very alert, they would detect nothing before they reached the deadly five-kilometer line. Once they were that close, none of them would get away.
If
his unit got off the first shots.

"
This is Amur. I've got them under seven thousand. They're moving fast. It looks like their higher bit them on the ass
.
"

"
No sign of a combat deployment?
"
Babryshkin asked nervously.

"
No. They just look like a mob.

Babryshkin pushed his brows hard against the optics, aching to see with his own eyes. But the darkness the range, and the long, long reverse slope prevented him from locating the longed-for tanks and infantry fighting vehicles.

"
This is Amur. Six thousand meters. They don t even have flank guards out. No forward security.
"

It was too ideal. For a moment the thought flashed through Babryshkin's mind that it might be a trap.

No. He knew the rebels. He had gone to school with them, served with them, lived with them. And he knew that they had grown overconfident now.

Probably, he thought, the enemy had intercepted the directive to pull back to the north. Gurevich was likely correct—the message was genuine. And now this rebel unit glutted by a night of murder, had been ordered to get moving, to make up for lost time, to initiate a pursuit of the Soviet forces who were supposed to be pulling back.

Babryshkin grinned. The enemy had finally made a mistake. They had counted too heavily on the Russian tendency to obey orders, no matter what. They had forgotten that there would always be exceptions.

Now the bastards were going to pay for it.

"
Volga, this is Amur. Fifty-five hundred meters. Like shooting pigeons.
"

"
All stations, this is Volga. Hold your fire. Keep those auto
-
systems locked up. Let them come all the way in.
"
Yes, there it was. He could just see the first slight movement in his telescoping optics. The manual system was inadequate to fire effectively at this range. Still he knew that he would fire. Wasting ammunition. He would allow himself that one indulgence. While the tank commanders who had better performed their maintenance or who had had better luck would gain the kills.

"
Fifty-two hundred.
"

Babryshkin felt the tension gripping his men. Everyone wanted to feel the big guns going off. To destroy the other men rolling so clumsily, so unsuspectingly toward them.

"
Fifty-one hundred meters
.
"

At the Malinovsky Higher Tank Academy, Babryshkin had been assigned a Tadzhik study partner, along with orders to ensure that the central Asian passed the course, no matter what it took. The Tadzhik had clearly understood the system, and he had done as little work as possible. Babryshkin wrote papers for him and put together presentations, while the Tadzhik passed exams by cheating wildly. Anyway, there was a harder grading system for ethnic Europeans. Babryshkin had hated the system, hating the duplicity and dishonor of it all, the injustice. . . .

Now he was glad the system had been the way it was. He only hoped his Tadzhik study partner was commanding the approaching detachment.

"
Five thousand meters
.
"

"
Fire,
"
Babryshkin called into the mike.
"
Free
auto-systems
. All others, engage at will.
"
But his men heard nothing beyond the first word. They knew what to do. The huge, thumping sounds of the high-velocity guns penetrated the steel walls of his tank, the padding of his headset.

Explosions filled the lens of his optics. He tried to count the stricken targets in the distance. But they were bunched too closely. One tiny inferno blazed into the next. His headset buzzed with the mixture of elation and complaint he had come to know so well over the past weeks. It was
the special sound of men at war now that they fought in separate machines, unable to look at, to touch, to smell each other, reassuring themselves that they were not alone. Babryshkin had come to the conclusion that, even if the radio were not required for communications on the modern battlefield, it would be psychologically necessary so that men locked in combat could reach out to one another. Tell me that my brothers are with me.

"
Don, this is Volga,
"
he called to the fire support commander.
"
Fire deep illumination
now.
"
He could not hear the response of the combination guns, which were deployed well behind the zigzag of tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, but the sky above and just behind the enemy vehicles soon glared with a false dawn as the parachute flares ignited and began to drift.

The brassy light was just enough to allow Babryshkin to distinguish individual targets. Perhaps two-dozen enemy vehicles were already burning, but, to their credit, the rebels were attempting to organize themselves into battle order. Some of the enemy tanks returned fire, but none of Babryshkin's subunit commanders had reported any losses yet, and the enemy fire had a desperate, unaimed feel to it. For an instant, Babryshkin pictured the chaos, the terror, and the flashes of heroism in the enemy ranks. In that quick sensing, the rebels almost became human again.

"
Gunner,
"
Babryshkin called.
"
Target. . . forty-seven- hundred ... the guide tank on the far left.
"

"
I see him.
"

"
Fix?
"

"
It's a long way.
"

"
Goddamnit, have you got him in your sights.

"
Got him.
"

"
Fire.
"

The hull shivered with the only partially cushioned recoil. And Babryshkin counted the seconds.

The enemy tank kept moving. There was no explosion.

They had fired right past him.

"
Range,
"
Babryshkin called out in fury, forty-five hundred
...
"

"
Comrade Commander, he s too far out.
"

"
Do as you're told
,
damn you
. . . range, forty-four- fifty.
"

Suddenly, the enemy tank disappeared in a splash of fire. Someone else had made the kill.

For a moment, Babryshkin said nothing. He did not even scan for another target. The gunner was right. He knew it. It was foolish to waste the ammunition. God only knew when there would be any more of it. Better to let the tanks whose automatic acquire-and-fire systems were still operational do the killing. It was far more efficient.

It was only the matter of
wanting
to kill, to destroy. The feeling went far beyond the desire simply to contribute to the victory. It was far more intense, more personal than that, and Babryshkin could not help experiencing a feeling of disappointment, even of failure, as his brigade annihilated the enemy spread out across the steppes. He listened to the slow, cyclic fire of the
auto-systems
as they moved from target to target. The sound was almost hypnotic, with each loud report followed seconds later by the appearance of another distant bonfire.

He had not seen a single enemy vehicle putting out cyclic fire. Probably, he realized, they had not had a single operational automatic system. In a way, the war was even harder on the overbred machines than it was on their human masters.

A good thing, though, Babryshkin considered, that they were only rebels. He knew his tattered unit would not put up nearly so good a showing against the Arabs or the Iranians, with their magnificent Japanese war machines.

"
All stations,
"
he called,
"
this is Volga. Don't waste ammunition. All manual systems cease fire.
Auto-systems
. . . finish them off. Out.
"

When he looked very hard through his optics, he could still spot the occasional frantic movement as a rebel vehicle tried to get clear. But the
auto-systems
soon gunned down the last of them. The expanse of steppe looked as it might have looked almost a millennium before, dotted with the campfires of the Mongols.

Babryshkin waited for the familiar feeling of elation to come over him. But it was very slow in coming this time. At first, he wrote it off as due to his weariness. Yet, the adrenaline charge had always been enough to overcome any level of exhaustion.

They had destroyed the enemy force in its entirety. Without losing a single vehicle of their own. It was a significant achievement. They had gained time, saved lives. But Babryshkin felt as he might have after making love to a woman who repulsed him.

He surveyed the torchlit steppe. The sky had begun to pale There would be a new day, with new enemies. It had been the rebels' turn to misjudge, to take the wrong step. But next time? And the time after that? No one's luck lasted forever.

Well, Babryshkin told himself, we'll just take our bloodbaths one at a time, thanks.

The vehicle fires had already begun to bum out. Babryshkin smiled, as at the taste of bad liquor shared among friends. If nothing else, he considered, Soviet-built tanks were perfectly capable of destroying each other.