Arc Light (69 page)

In a few seconds the fire had consumed all of the highly flammable propellant and explosives, and the rattle of heavy machine guns fired from nearby tanks filled the relative silence left by the slowly burning remnants of tank number twenty-three.

“O-o-o-h, God!”
Chandler heard, and he sat up to look at the smoldering, unmoving body of Adams.
“Oh my God! Oh my Go-o-od!”
It was the lieutenant, and the company commander was no longer holding him down. He sat up next to him, wrapping his arm around the young officer whose face was buried in his hands. The heavy drumbeat of .50-caliber fire from the other tanks died down, and Chandler quickly scanned the treeline. A small column of smoke rose from the woods about half the distance from where the helicopter had hovered, the helicopter crew guiding a second missile's flight obviously having been driven off by the machine guns.

Chandler rose to sit on the heels of his boots, his legs underneath him and his hands grasping his thighs.
All dead,
he thought looking at the three men visible on or around the tank.
All four of those men, dead.
He knew it from the furor of the blast he had felt at almost sixty yards but in which they had been standing. It didn't seem real. They were just there, alive. At that distance it was as if all he had to do was yell, “Everybody up!” like in their recently completed live-fire exercises and they would all rise up, brushing the dust from their clothes.

Adams's body still smoked, and none of the tank's crew showed any signs that they would ever move again. As other men began to run up from the widely spaced vehicles, Chandler rose to his feet and walked toward the tank. It got hotter the closer he got. It grew more real as the mortal wounds suffered by the men became increasingly visible.

Chandler watched as his first tank crossed the bridge. It was the bridge spanning the Goryn River, a huge hole opened in one lane from a bomb, but the other lane passable even by the wide tanks. Chandler realized that his boots were unlaced, and as he knelt to tie them he saw in confusion that they were not boots at all but were the black wingtips that he wore to work.

He looked up to see the entire bridge bumper to bumper with traffic, with every tank and armored fighting vehicle and truck in his battalion jammed onto the bridge from one end to the other.

“One at a time!” Chandler shouted, repeating the words of the MP on the opposite side.

As if on cue, Chandler's fears materialized before his eyes as a flight of Russian jets roared over and geysers of black water shot up from the base of the bridge. In agonizingly slow motion, the span collapsed and the entire battalion sank toward the water. “No!” Chandler shouted, as one of the men whose voice he did not recognize said, “Major Chandler,” not comprehending his coming fate as he fell through the air.

“No!” Chandler yelled.

“Wake up, sir!” Barnes said, and the late evening sky that appeared as he opened his eyes immediately gave Chandler his bearings. “Bad dream, sir?”

Chandler puffed out his cheeks and let out a sigh. The cold sweat under his several-day-old uniform made him uncomfortable, and he wiped his brow and neck with his sleeve.

Barnes looked off over the clumps of camouflage netting under which Chandler's vehicles were parked and said, “You'll do okay, sir. Everybody's tight, but it'll pass once we get a scrape under our belt.”

Chandler stared down the hill toward the treeline. The smell of the charred tank was still with him. It was on his clothes, in his hair, up his nostrils. And there it was, a blackened monument to the senselessness of it all, a huge recovery vehicle hoisting one end up as a trailer slipped under it, winching it slowly up onto its carrier.

“It's amazing,” Barnes said, watching also. “They'll pro'bly have that thing back to us in a coupla days.” He shook his head. “Here's those files you asked for, sir.”

Chandler sat up and took the folders, and Barnes left him alone.

He opened the first folder. It was Adams's personnel file. Flipping pages, he skimmed the man's last few performance evaluations and recommendations for promotion to sergeant and before that corporal and private first class. He was above average. Everybody liked him.

Next was his application for financial aid for college. It was stamped “Approved.” “July 1st,” written in Adams's own hand on the form, caught his eye. He was due to get out of the army ten days ago and go to college in the fall. Chandler heaved a deep sigh, laying his head back against the hard metal of one of his tank's road wheels and closing his eyes. After a few moments, he forced his eyes open, pulled out his clipboard, and laid it on his lap as a writing surface.

“Dear Mr. and Mrs. Adams: It is with deepest regrets and sympathy that I write this letter to inform you of the death of your son”—he looked down at the file—“William. Although I did not have much of a chance to get to know him, I met with William just
moments before his”—he looked up at the darkening sky and thought about what to write:
being burned alive, screaming, gruesome agony
—“passing,” he wrote. “His tank was hit by a missile as we were stopped for routine maintenance”—
because there's not enough fuel to keep us going
—“and he and his three buddies”—he went through the other folders, writing down the full names of each of the other men—“were killed.” He toyed with writing the word “instantly,” but it was not true for poor Adams, so he saved the word for the other three letters that he would have to write next.

“I cannot tell you that I know the depth of your pain on hearing this news, which probably will have come already by wire or visit. I can, however, tell you that . . . ”
Tell them what?
he thought. He had written the words, but he looked down at the paper and then at the files and could find nothing that would fill the blank space awaiting his pen. He looked around as the dusk settled in on the quiet countryside of Ukraine, a country about which he had known nothing before and knew little more now.

Why am I here?
Chandler suddenly thought.
My wife and the child whom I have never seen are at home in a war-ravaged country, and I am here.
It didn't make sense anymore, not any of it.

The words on the page beckoned. “I can, however, tell you that”—his pen hovered over the white paper before continuing—“there are good men and women here, decent people like your son. They each have a life, an identity, an existence stretched back over all those years during which their parents raised them. For some it ends, in the most profound of tragedies, in the care of someone whom you do not know and have never met. Although I feel in my heart that there was truly nothing that could have been done to save your boy, I will bear for the rest of my life the burden of having lost what was for you, I know, the most precious thing in the world. But please know one thing. You did your job. Although I am certain it was not your design to raise a young boy to be sacrificed in service to his country, you raised a fine son who became an able soldier. He should have been with us on this earth for longer, but you may thank God or fate that he visited at all.”

He looked down at the charred, inert tank being carted away slowly on the low-slung trailer. It would be repaired and returned to service good as new. But it would not be the same tank, because the crew would be different. It was the crew inside that brought the tank to life.

“With my deepest sympathies”—he paused, the next line written with a solemnity he was certain he would not have appreciated just a few days before—“David W. Chandler, Major, 2/415 Armor, Commanding.”

“A third crossing of the Dnepr has been reported,” Filipov said. “Two kilometers to the north of the last. They're armored cavalry units, but heavy armor formations are staging on the west bank to follow. They have at least six pontoon-bridges operational, with three more bridging operations under way, one opposed.”

Razov just nodded.

“Sir,” Filipov said, continuing plaintively as if Razov had missed the significance of his report, “we've already confirmed the crossing of one entire armored cavalry regiment to the south. Crossing the
Dnepr!”
Filipov said, as if Razov was unaware that the river was the last major water obstacle before Moscow. “The appearance of a second at a different location would tend to corroborate intelligence assessments that—”

“That they've succeeded in moving their V Corps up to join their VII Corps,” Razov completed his sentence. “Thomas is a classicist. He's ‘reinforcing success' by merging the two prongs of his advance into the one northern, more successful one.”

“But they have two cavalry regiments and a couple of armored brigades across,” Filipov said shaking his head. “How can they move their logistical train so quickly?”

“These aren't the Chinese!” Razov snapped. “I want at least two of their heavy divisions across plus whatever separate elements they have attached to them. We've got to catch as much of their combat strength as possible in the Dnepr-Sozh Triangle or we won't hit
their
flanks,
they'll
hit ours.”

As Filipov went to work at his desk, Razov looked at the map. It was a delicate game. Letting an enemy take ground cheaply in order to put them in the position that you wanted was one thing. Letting them cross a major natural barrier, the last before your capital city, was a true gambit.
But it's a barrier in both directions,
Razov thought.
Once over, we'll sever their crossings, launch tactical counterattacks to pocket them on the defensive, and then . . . the “right hook.”
He drew the phrase not from his favored game of chess but instead from the less subtle sport of boxing.

The broad, dashed arrows on the map showed Razov's forces sweeping boldly to the north past the American spearhead. The Americans' advance was a narrow one, along just one highway. Initially intended, it appeared, to be a broader but slower two-pronged and mutually supporting advance, Thomas and his field commanders had abandoned the safer approach in favor of a dagger straight at the heart of Russia. The rate of advance had been phenomenal,
far outpacing Razov's ability to react, especially given loss of control of the air over the front.

But there were risks. The American advance was all neck and no shoulders. And Razov had marshaled the remaining bulk of his mobile forces undetected to the north of the American line of advance. Once the tip of the American spear crossed the Dnepr, General Mishin's strike aircraft would cut them off, and a holding force would delay them in between the Dnepr and Sozh rivers. At the same time, Razov's forces would themselves cross the Dnepr to the north in the opposite direction and mount their own narrow advance alongside the American penetration. Wheeling into the Americans' northern flank, they would slice cleanly through the thin “neck” defended by Polish troops and pocket the bulk of the American and British heavy combat forces just short of the Russian border. By cutting off the steady stream of supplies on which the Americans and British depended, they would halve their combat strength. In the stalemate that would follow, peace talks could ensue.

The risk? The risk was the same as that of the Americans. Razov was putting his own “neck” on the line. Like the Americans, his line of advance would of necessity be narrow. Like the Americans, it too could be severed. It was a ballet of delicate moves and finesse, at this level at least. Razov knew that at the lowest level it was nothing like ballet, or chess, or anything that most humans had ever seen before.

There was a meek knock at his door. It was a woman, the first he had seen in several days. She was a private, her presence a recent concession to the war. She wanted to enter his office but hesitated uncertainly at the door.

“Come in,” Razov said, half stuck between sitting and rising on her entering. He restrained himself, awkwardly sitting with his back away from the hard wood of the chair. Instead of approaching his working area she went to the map and began to wipe away old markings with her rag and draw on the map with a blue grease pencil.

Razov looked back at the papers; their last satellite had been reduced to a pile of junk by another American intercept. He felt completely blind now. The woman turned to leave, glancing timidly over at Razov before she walked toward the door. Razov looked up and saw the map. “Just a minute,” he said, getting up and walking over to the map. “What's this?” he asked, looking at the American unit symbols she had drawn, all east of the Dnepr, and the new frontier of the enemy advance that they represented.

She looked down at the sheet of paper from which she had copied the data onto the map, stricken with fear. “New position reports—from . . . from Operational Intelligence—Fifth Directorate
of the GRU,” she said. “I . . . I copied it exactly from the big map in the Operations Room.”

“When did this come in?” Razov asked.

“Uhm . . . just a few minutes ago, I think, sir,” she answered in a quivering voice.

Razov felt suddenly energized. A broad smile broke over his face. He looked down at the young woman—pretty but a little too soft.

She smiled back but then looked away.

“Wonderful!” Razov said. “Excellent!” His mind spun with plans and timetables. “Pavel, come look. The American 4th Mechanized Infantry Division is crossing here, and the two brigades we saw earlier were from the 1st Armored Cavalry. It's time. Send the order.”

Filipov ran to the door as Razov was pressing the ruler onto the map, estimating distances and writing on the map the times of day by which each objective so measured—towns, road junctions, rivers—should be taken. Razov had one hand gingerly holding the ruler on the map and the other making tick marks and writing deadlines along the projected line of advance.