"Very well. I"ll call STAVKA for permission."
Alekseyev leaned back and closed his eyes. The Soviet command structure: to deviate from the Plan, even a Theater commander had to get permission! It took over an hour while the staff geniuses in Moscow examined the maps. The lead regiment of 30th Guards was released and ordered to join the motor-rifle division in the next attack. But they were late, and the attack was delayed ninety minutes.
Second Lieutenant Terry Mackall-he still wore his stripes and was too tired to care about his change in rank-wondered how seriously Command was taking this little tank battle. Two battalions of German regulars arrived in tracked vehicles, relieving the exhausted Landwehr men, who moved back to prepare defensive positions in and around the village to their rear. A company of Leopard tanks and two platoons of M-1s reinforced the position, with a German colonel in overall command. He arrived by helicopter and surveyed all the defensive positions. A tough-looking little b.a.s.t.a.r.d, Mackall thought, with some bandages on his face and a tight unsmiling mouth. Mackall remembered that if Ivan broke through here, he just might be able to flank the German and British forces that had stopped the Russians" deepest penetration at the suburbs of Hannover. That made the battle important to the Germans.
The German Leopards took the frontal positions, relieving the Americans. It was a full troop now, back to fourteen vehicles. The troop commander split the force into two parts, with Mackall commanding the southern group. They found the last line of dug shelters, just southeast of the village. Mackall arrayed his newly a.s.signed command with care, checking each position on foot and conferring with each tank commander. The Germans were thorough enough. Any position that did not already have natural shrubbery in place had had it transplanted in. Nearly all of the civilians who lived here had been evacuated, but a handful of people were unwilling to desert the homes they"d built. One of them brought some of the tankers hot food. Mackall"s crew didn"t have time to eat it. The gunner repaired two loose connectors and reset the balky fire-control computer. The loader and driver worked on a loose tread. Artillery was falling around them before they finished.
Alekseyev wanted to be there. He had a telephone link with the division, and listened in on the division command circuit. The colonel-Alekseyev wanted to make him a general if the attack succeeded-complained that they had been forced to wait too long. He"d asked for and gotten a reconnaissance mission over enemy lines. One of the aircraft had vanished. The other"s pilot reported movement, but could not provide a strength estimate, so busy had he been dodging surface-to-air missiles. The colonel feared there had been an increase in enemy strength, but without hard evidence could not justify either a further delay or further reinforcements.
Mackall also watched from a distance. The last row of hills was a mile away, across what had been a farm but was now covered mostly with small trees, as though the soil had been exhausted. His forces were organized in two three-tank platoons. As commander, his job was to lie back and direct them by radio.
Twenty minutes after the radio reported a strong Russian advance, he began to see movement. German personnel carriers began streaming down the hill, toward the village. Some Soviet helicopters appeared to the north, but this time a Roland battery hidden in the village engaged them, exploding three before they retreated out of sight. Next came the German Leopard tanks. Mackall counted and came up three short. NATO artillery pounded the hilltops, and Soviet guns dropped sh.e.l.ls in the fields around the American tanks. Then the Russians appeared.
"Buffalo, all units hold fire. Repeat, everyone hold fire," the troop commander said over the radio.
Mackall saw that the retreating Germans were pa.s.sing through the village. So, that"s what that little Kraut b.a.s.t.a.r.d has planned, he thought. Beautiful . . .
"We have them on the run!" the colonel told Alekseyev over the command circuit. On the map table in front of the General, counters were moved and plotting officers made marks with grease pencils. They penciled in a red gap in the German lines.
The leading Soviet tanks were now five hundred meters from the village, racing down the two-kilometer gap between B-Troop"s tanks. The German colonel gave his order to the American troop commander.
"Buffalo, this is Six-take "em!" Twelve tanks fired at once and hit nine targets.
"Woody, look for antennas," Mackall ordered his gunner. He used his viewing prisms to keep an eye on his subordinates as the gunner traversed right and searched the rear Soviet ranks.
"There"s one! Load a HEAT round! Target tank. Range twenty-six hundred-" The tank lurched sideways. The gunner watched the tracer on the sh.e.l.l arc through the air on its two-mile path . . . "Hit!"
The second volley from the M-1s killed eight tanks, then others began to explode from ant.i.tank missiles launched out of the village. The Russians had defiladed tanks on their flanks, and in front of them was a village bristling with ant.i.tank missiles: the German colonel had set a moving ambush, and the pursuing Russians had fallen into it. Already the Leopards were sweeping around left and right from behind the village to catch the Russians in the open. The air-control officer brought his fighter-bombers in on the Soviet artillery positions yet again. Soviet fighters engaged them, but while doing that they could not interfere with the land battle, and now a squadron of German Gazelle missile-armed choppers added their fire into the killing ground. The Soviet tanks fired off smoke and desperately tried to engage their enemies, but the Americans were dug in deep, and the German missileers in the village skillfully changed firing points after every shot.
Mackall s.h.i.+fted one platoon right and the other left. His own gunner located and killed a second command tank, then the Germans enveloped the Russian formation from north and south. Still outnumbered, the Germans nevertheless caught the Russians off balance, raking the tank column with their big 120mm gun tubes. The Soviet commander ordered his helicopters back in to blast open an escape route. They surprised and killed three German tanks before missiles began to drop them from the sky yet again. Suddenly it became too much. As Mackall watched, the Soviet force wheeled and retreated toward the hills, with the Germans in pursuit. The counterattack was pressed to the limit, and Mackall knew that n.o.body did that as well as the Krauts. By the time he had orders to move, the initial defense position was back in friendly hands. The battle had lasted barely over an hour. Two Soviet motor-rifle divisions had now been decimated on the road to Bieben.
The crewmen opened their hatches to let fresh air into the stifling turret. Fifteen empty cases rattled about on the floor. The fire-control computer was out again, but Woody had killed another four tanks, two of them belonging to Soviet officers. The troop commander came over to him in a jeep.
"Three tanks damaged," Mackall reported. "Have to drag them clear for repairs." His face split into a wide grin: "They ain"t never gonna take this town away from us!"
"Those Bundeswehr regulars made the difference." The lieutenant nodded. "Okay, start getting your people reloaded."
"Oh, yeah. Last time I came back five rounds short."
"They"re thinning out the ammo issue. It"s not getting across to us as quick as we thought."
Mackall thought that one over and didn"t like what he came up with. "Have somebody tell those Navy pukes that we can stop these b.a.s.t.a.r.ds if they get their s.h.i.+t together!"
USS PHARRIS.
Morris had never seen Hampton Roads so crowded. At least sixty merchantmen were swinging at anchor, with a beefed-up escort force preparing to take them to sea. Saratoga was in also, her mainmast gone and a replacement being fabricated on the quay while repairs were under way for less visible damage from her near-miss. Numerous aircraft circled overhead, and several s.h.i.+ps had their search radars on lest a Soviet submarine sneak close insh.o.r.e and launch cruise missiles into the ma.s.s of s.h.i.+pping.
Pharris was tied to the fueling pier, taking on fuel oil for her boilers and jet fuel for her helicopter. The single ASROC she"d expended had already been replaced, as had the six chaff rockets. Aside from that, the only thing that needed to be taken aboard was food. Ed Morris handed his patrol report to a messenger who would deliver it to his squadron commander. He would have gone himself, but there was no time. They were scheduled to sail in another twelve hours. This was another twenty-knot convoy, bound for the French ports of LeHavre and Brest with heavy equipment and munitions.
Morris had been given the fleet intelligence report. If anything, matters had gotten worse. Twenty NATO submarines were now staked out in the G-I-UK gap, trying to make up for the loss of the SOSUS line. They reported killing a sizable number of Soviet submarines, but they also reported that some had gotten through, and for each known leaker, Morris was sure that there were four or five unknowns. The first convoy had gotten virtually a free ride. Those few Soviet submarines in the Atlantic at the time had been spread thin, and were forced to race noisily to their convoy targets. No longer. About sixty were thought to be in the Atlantic now, at least half of them nuclear-powered. Morris thought over the numbers, what the Soviet inventory was, how many kills NATO claimed, and wondered if sixty was an optimistic a.s.sessment.
Then there were the Backfires. The convoy would be taking a southerly routing, adding two full days to the crossing time but forcing the Soviet bombers to stretch to the limit of their fuel. Also, thirty minutes before each satellite pa.s.s, the convoy would reverse course to a westerly heading in the hope that the Soviets would then vector their bombers and submarines to the wrong point. A pair of carrier battle groups was at sea and would offer support if possible. Clearly they wanted to spring a trap on the Backfires. The carrier groups would be steaming an evasive path, trying to avoid satellite detection entirely. Morris knew this was possible, an exercise in geometry, but it placed serious limits on the carriers" freedom of action-and having the carrier groups at sea would take up some of the antisubmarine patrol aircraft that the convoys depended on. A compromise, but then all life, and certainly any war operation, was a collection of compromises. Morris lit an unfiltered cigarette. He"d broken the habit years before, but halfway through the outbound leg of his first war cruise he"d found himself at the s.h.i.+p"s store purchasing a carton of tax-free "at sea" smokes. The added hazard to his health, he judged, was no more than incidental. Already nine destroyers and frigates had been sunk, two with all hands.
ICELAND.
Edwards had learned to hate the rust-colored contour lines on his maps. Each one announced a change of twenty meters. He tried to work it out in his head, but got no further than sixty-five-point-six feet for every one of the G.o.dd.a.m.ned red-brown lines. Sometimes the lines were spread apart by as much as an eighth of an inch. Other times they were packed together tightly enough that the lieutenant half expected to find a sheer wall. He remembered the one visit he"d had to Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., and the time he and his father had scornfully walked past the tourists lined up to wait for an elevator ride to the top of the Was.h.i.+ngton Monument, preferring to walk the five hundred feet up the square-spiral staircase to the observation deck. They"d arrived at the top tired but proud. He was now making that same climb about every ninety minutes, except this time there were no smooth, even steps, and no elevator awaited them at the top for a more relaxing trip down . . . and no taxi to the hotel.
They climbed ten contour lines-two hundred meters, or six hundred fifty-six feet-three hours after breaking camp; crossing, the map said, from the Skorradalshreppur second-order administrative division to the Lundarreykjadashreppur second-order administrative division. There was no green highway sign to announce this, the Icelanders being bright enough to know that anyone who traveled out here lived here and needed no directions. They were rewarded with two kilometers of fairly level terrain as they walked between a pair of marshes. It was littered with rock and ash from what seemed to be an extinct volcano about four miles away.
"Take a break," Edwards said. He sat down next to a three-foot rock so that he"d have something to lean against, and was surprised when Vigdis came over. She sat down three feet away, facing him.
"How are you today?" he asked. There was life in her eyes now, Mike saw. Perhaps the demons that had awakened her the previous day were now gone? No, he thought, they"d never be completely gone-but you had to be alive to have nightmares, and they would probably fade in time. With time you could recover from anything, except murder.
"I have not thank you for my life."
"We could not stand by and let them kill you," he said, wondering if it was a lie. If the Russians had simply killed all three people in the house, would he have attacked them or would he have waited and simply looted the house after they"d left? It was a time for the truth.
"I didn"t do it for you, not only for you."
"I do not understand."
Edwards took his wallet from a back pocket and opened it to a five-year-old photograph. "That"s Sandy, Sandra Miller. We grew up on the same block, all the way through school. Maybe we would have gotten married someday," he said quietly. And maybe not, he admitted to himself. People change. "I went to the Air Force Academy, she went to the University of Connecticut in Hartford. October of her second year, she disappeared. She was raped and murdered. They found her a week later in a ditch. The guy who did it-they never proved he killed Sandy, but he raped two other girls at the school-well, he"s in a mental hospital now. They said he was crazy, wasn"t really responsible. So someday the docs"ll say he"s cured, and they"ll let him out, and Sandy"ll still be dead." Edwards looked down at the rocks.
"I couldn"t do anything about that. I"m not a cop, I was two thousand miles away. But not this time." His voice showed no emotion at all. "This time was different."
"You love Sandy?" Vigdis asked.
How to answer that one? Mike wondered. It sure did seem like that, five years ago, didn"t it? But would it have worked out? You haven"t exactly been celibate these last few years, have you? But it hasn"t been the same, either, has it? He looked at the photograph taken three days before Sandy had been killed. It had arrived in his box at Colorado Springs after her death, though he hadn"t known it at the time. Her dark, shoulder-length hair, the tilt of the head, the impish smile that went with an infectious laugh . . . all gone.
"Yes." There was emotion in his voice now.
"You do for her then, yes?"
"Yes," Edwards lied. I did it for me.
"I do not know your name."
"Mike, Michael Edwards."
"You do this for me, Michael. Thank you for my life." There were the first beginnings of a smile. She placed her hand on his. It was soft and warm.
27.
Casualties
KEFLAVIK, ICELAND.
"At first we thought that they simply drove off the cliff road. We found this in the vehicle." The major of field police held up the top of a broken bottle of vodka. "But the medical corpsman who collected their personal effects found this."
The major pulled the rubberized sheet off the one body that had been thrown clear when the vehicle hit the rocks. The stab wound in the chest was unmistakable.
"And you said that the Icelanders were as peaceful as sheep, Comrade General," the KGB colonel observed sardonically.
The major continued, "It is difficult to reconstruct exactly what happened. There was a farm a short distance away whose house was burned to the ground. We found two bodies in the wreckage. Both had been shot."
"Who were they?" General Andreyev asked.
"Impossible to identify the bodies. The only way we knew they were shot was the bullet hole in the sternum, so that was likely done at very close range. I had one of our surgeons look at them. A man and a woman, probably in their middle years. According to a local government official, the farm was occupied by a married couple with one daughter, age"-the major checked his notes-"twenty. The daughter has not been found."
"What of the patrol?"
"They were southbound on the coast road when they disappeared-"
"No one spotted the fires?" the KGB colonel asked sharply.
"There was heavy rain that night. Both the burning vehicle and the farmhouse were below the horizon for the neighboring observation patrols. As you know, the road conditions here have upset our patrol schedules, and the mountains interfere with radio performance. So when the patrol was late getting in, no particular note was made of it. You can"t see the vehicle from the road, and as a result they were not spotted until the helicopter flew over it."
"The other bodies, how did they die?" the General wanted to know.
"When the vehicle burned, the soldiers" hand grenades cooked off, with the obvious results. Except for the sergeant here, there is no telling how they died. So far as we can tell, no weapons were taken. All the rifles were there, but some items are unaccounted for: a map case and some other minor things. Possibly they were blown clear of the vehicle by the explosions and fell into the sea, but I doubt this."
"Conclusions?"
"Comrade General, there is not a great deal to go on, but I surmise that the patrol visited the farmhouse, "liberated" this bottle of vodka, probably shot and killed the two people who lived there, and burned the house. The daughter is missing. We are searching the area for her body. At some time after this happened, the patrol was surprised and killed by an armed party which then tried to make their deaths look like a vehicle accident. We should a.s.sume that there is at least one band of resistance fighters at large."
"I disagree," the KGB colonel announced. "Not all the enemy troops have been accounted for. I think that your "resistance fighters" are probably NATO personnel who escaped when we took Keflavik. They ambushed our troops, then murdered the farm people in the hope of stirring the local population against us."
General Andreyev shared a furtive look with his major of field police. It had been a KGB lieutenant commanding the patrol. The chekisti had insisted that some of their people accompany the roving patrols. Just what he needed, the General thought. Bad enough that his crack paratroopers were consigned to garrison duty-always destructive to unit morale and discipline-but now they were jailers, too, and in some cases commanded by jailers. So the arrogant young KGB officer-he"d never met a humble one-had thought to have himself some fun. Where was the daughter? The answer to this mystery certainly lay with her. But the mystery wasn"t the important thing, was it?
"I think we should interrogate the local inhabitants to see what they know," the KGB officer announced.
"There are no "local inhabitants," Comrade," the major answered. "Look at your map. This is an isolated farm. The nearest neighbor is seven kilometers away."
"But-"
"Who killed these unfortunates, and why, is unimportant. We have armed enemies out there," Andreyev said. "This is a military matter, not something for our colleagues in the KGB. I"ll have a helicopter search the area around the farm. If we find this resistance group, or whatever it is, we will deal with it as with any band of armed enemies. You may interrogate any prisoners we manage to capture, Comrade Colonel. Also, for the moment any KGB officer who accompanies our security patrols will be an observer, not a commander. We cannot risk your men in combat situations for which they have not been fully trained. So. Let me talk to my operations officer to see how we will handle the search. Comrades, you did well to bring this to our attention. Dismissed." The chekist wanted to stay, but KGB or not, he was only a colonel, and the General was exercising his legitimate prerogatives as commander on the scene.
An hour later, a Mi-24 attack helicopter lifted off to check the area around the burned farm.
STORNOWAY, SCOTLAND.
"Again?" Toland asked.
"Not a bank holiday, Commander," the group captain replied. "Two regiments of Backfires departed their bases twenty minutes ago. If we want to catch their tankers, we must move smartly."
Within minutes, two EA-6B Prowlers, designed to find and jam enemy radar and radio signals, were climbing to alt.i.tude on a northwest heading. Known with backhanded affection as the Queer, the EA-6B"s most striking characteristic was its canopies, inlaid with real gold to protect sensitive on-board instruments against electromagnetic radiation. As the planes climbed, their pilots and electronics officers were already working in their gilt cages.
Two hours later they spotted their prey, radioed back the signal bearings-and four Tomcats rolled down the runway of Stornoway.
NORWEGIAN SEA.
Cruising at an alt.i.tude of thirty-six thousand feet the Tomcats flew racetrack-shaped patterns north and south of the predicted course for the Soviet tankers. Their powerful search/missile-guidance radars were shut down. Instead, they swept the skies with a built-in TV camera that could identify aircraft as far as forty miles away. Conditions were ideal, a clear sky with only a few high cirrus clouds; the fighters left no contrails that might warn another aircraft of their presence. The pilots curved their fighters around the sky, their eyes s.h.i.+fting out to check the horizon, then in to check engine instruments, a cycle repeated every ten seconds.