Arc Light (70 page)

“Get me a one-to-ten-thousand scale map of the Dnepr-Sozh region,” he said without looking up as the woman turned to leave. “Fill it in with latest unit locations and TOEs. We don't have much experience with the 4th Infantry,” he muttered to no one in particular, although the woman stayed and listened, “and I don't want to take the threat they pose to our flanks lightly. And I want all position updates up here
immediately
—no delays! And have General Mishin report to me as soon as the first strikes hit the Dnepr bridgeheads. I'll even take pilot reports. I don't want to wait on poststrike recon.”

“Sir?” the private said in a high-pitched voice.

“Oh,” Razov said, looking up and shaking his head. “Never mind that last part. Just get me the map and make sure, make absolutely certain, that this map on this table is updated without fail and as quickly as the new position data come in, is that understood?”

“Yes, sir,” the woman said, and Razov worried for a moment from the look on her face before she left that he had been too harsh with her, but then he returned to his map.

He was in his element. No more paperwork. No more internal security matters. No nuclear or chemical warfare concerns. Just armies, tanks and infantry and artillery, clashing in a titanic battle in the field.
And we're stepping off undetected,
Razov marveled.
With all the Americans' satellite and aerial and electronic intelligence assets, a few weeks of lying low under several thousand camouflage
nets and “Hel-l-lo
.” “Andrusha, my friend,” he said aloud and in English, “I've caught you with your pants down.”

“Murphy's Law,”
he thought again, smiling.

The railroad bed was elevated a good four feet the entire length of the line to their left, Chandler saw with satisfaction. High enough to cover up the top of the armored skirts of the M-1s, fully half the height of the low-slung tanks.

The rumble of explosions was clearly audible over the idling engine and the drone of the precombat checklist read out over the intercom by his gunner. Bailey's M-3s were climbing the ramps that the engineers had scraped up to the railbed, returning from a scout mission on the opposite ridge to add their firepower to Chandler's infantry company. Both the battalion and brigade nets had fallen silent after Bailey's report of a regimental-size Russian tank force pursuing a company-size American armored cavalry unit.

Everything seemed set, but Chandler fidgeted. From the tone of Colonel Harkness's voice on the brigade net and the black smoke belching high into the sky at their backs from around where the bridging equipment they had just crossed was, something bad was happening. Chandler twisted to look to his rear. Their assigned support elements—medical, maintenance, and supply units—were digging in behind the low hills about three quarters of a mile away. They would be bracing for the coming clash just as frantically as his men up at the railbed were. If the Russians broke through Chandler's task force, the support elements would become the new front line, however briefly. There would be dozens of women, prohibited from serving in “ground combat units,” in those support elements, Chandler knew, who lay now in foxholes with M-16s pressed to their shoulders.

Chandler's plans were simple. The railroad track would not be the logical place from which to mount a defense. The treeline behind them, or the stream that ran through the woods behind it, or up ahead at the ridge across the open farmland in front, but not the train tracks. Their maps wouldn't show the critical advantage it offered: the four-foot elevation of packed earth. That meant the Russian artillery plots would “prepare” one of those other terrain features that the instructors and manuals advised him to avoid, or so Chandler
hoped. In the end, he would not let his patchwork unit get fixed in their first engagement, so all three maneuvers he had worked out were “retrograde operations”—retreats.

A double boom followed by a jetlike howl of main gun rounds cooking off from inside a destroyed tank redirected his attention to the front. The geyser of flame was barely visible over the ridge, yellow and white sparks shooting high into the air. Chandler looked up and down the rail embankment as he felt jittery all of the sudden. The tanks were spaced very close for combat: every 150 meters or so along the line instead of up to 400 meters apart in wide open terrain. Chandler had concentrated here for two reasons: first, hoping to guess right and give the Russians a strong blow before withdrawing, second, wanting to keep things tight to prevent the unit from unraveling in the shock of action. They had arrived with just enough time to dismount and pull their camouflage netting out of the bustle racks, staking them out with support poles and spreaders to make the tanks appear from a distance to be a shapeless bulge.

The inaction gnawed at him. He looked down the barrel of his massive machine gun, loaded and in the
FIRE
position. Beneath it, the thick barrel of his tank's M-256 German Rheinmetall 120-mm gun pointed toward the onrushing Russians.

“Let's load the big bullets up,” Chandler said to Jefferson in the hatch next to him, swallowing the foul taste of acid that had boiled up from his now nauseous stomach. Jefferson dropped into the crew cabin. “Gunner, stand by to engage,” Chandler said over the intercom. “Loader,” he continued, “load sabot.”

Looking down through his tank commander's hatch, Chandler saw the gunner's back as he sat at his sights. To the gunner's left, Jefferson hit the large button at the rear wall of the cabin with his knee. The door to the ammo locker slid open immediately with a bang.

The gunner turned the switch on his gun panel to
SABOT
and then pressed his face to the padded blinders of his gunsight to ensure that it indicated the same on the imaging screen. Accidentally inputting the wrong type of round would cause the light, high-velocity tungsten dart of the sabot round to sail several meters over or plow into the ground short of the target, the gun's computer having loaded the wrong ballistics into its aiming computation.

Slapping the steel-plated base of the sabot round with the flat of his hand to make it pop out slightly, Jefferson grabbed the lip of the baseplate and pulled the heavy round out into his free hand. The strange-looking burnished metal penetrator dart made of dense depleted uranium protruded from the front of the shell, and Jefferson slid it into the breech. He then slapped the padded breech handle closed and backhanded the large button to close the armored door
to the ammo locker in a long-drilled routine. The main gun's “big bullet” was loaded.

“Up!” Jefferson said over the intercom.

“Gunner, stand by,” Chandler said. He looked down through the hatch to see that the man's eyes were on his sight. The gunner's hand rested on the “pistol grip” joystick that turned the turret and elevated or depressed the main gun and its co-axial machine gun.

A growl from behind Chandler caused him to flinch. Half a dozen American helicopters flashed by low overhead in two lines toward the melee ahead—four AH-64 Apaches in front and two OH-58 Kiowa Scouts behind. The helicopters settled even lower as they passed the railbed and rushed across the flat ground in front, the wheels of the Apaches only three or four feet off the ground despite their high speed. The Kiowa Scouts, scanning for the enemy ahead with optics and thermal imagers contained in large orbs mounted on masts atop their rotors, flew along behind at an altitude of about twenty feet.

As the Apaches approached the ridge, the Kiowas dropped their tails in unison, their main rotors throwing up billowing clouds of dust in front. The scout helicopters shot skyward as their forward progress halted. The Apache gunships nosed up and began to slow as they tracked the rise of the ridge ahead, one so low, Chandler saw from a puff of dust, that it bounced its rear wheel off the ground. By the time they were at the crest, they were at a low hover with only their rotors and cockpits peeking over the top.

With the Kiowas now high in the sky above and bobbing and weaving through the air—nervously moving about to make themselves more difficult targets while exposed at altitude—the Apaches suddenly popped up about ten feet over the crest of the ridge, and jets of smoke began erupting from their wing pylons.
Hellfire missiles,
Chandler thought as the
who-o-oshing
sounds reached his ears. Each helicopter was armed with sixteen of the tank-killing missiles, and they unloaded them as rapidly as they could. A chill swept over Chandler as he realized how many targets they had found.

Suddenly, the Kiowa Scouts hovering high over the valley in front fired first one and then two missiles each. Chandler watched as the large missiles quickly accelerated and sped off beyond the ridge. The Kiowas, as best Chandler remembered, were armed only with Sidewinder air-to-air missiles, so . . . The Apaches at the ridge ahead scattered, and Russian Mi-28 Havoc gunships, seven of them, Chandler counted, stormed over the ridge with their chin guns blazing. Shells exploded on the flat floor of the valley in long rips as the Havocs' guns missed the agile Apaches.

The Kiowas high above began spitting brilliant white flares
from their bellies and spun and dived to race back toward Chandler's line. Two missiles rose up from beyond the ridge, their wiggling white trails of smoke seeking out the scouts. Chandler twisted in his hatch to the left to see one missile dive at a falling flare and explode harmlessly behind the helicopter high above the railbed, a rain of shrapnel pelting the soil beneath it. A sharp BOOM, however, from behind caused Chandler to turn in time to see the wreckage of the second Kiowa falling from the sky. The slowly spiraling Plexiglas-enclosed cockpit was sickeningly intact. It enclosed, Chandler knew, two men for their long and helpless ride to earth. Chandler closed his eyes just before it smashed into the ground with a great rending and crunching sound not two hundred meters away. A moment later, he opened his eyes and watched as the helicopter burst into flame with a whump.

The Apaches and Mi-28s were now wheeling in a dogfight, climbing ever higher into the air as their engines and the chop of their rotors produced a cacophony of sound. The Apaches' 30-mm chin-mounted guns pivoted wildly and spit flame in short bursts as their targets flashed briefly within the wide angle of their fire. After several seconds of battle, Chandler saw the tail boom of one Russian Havoc kick violently to the side. The Apache behind it pulled up and streaked by the helicopter, which went into a full spin and edged over onto its side. It finally turned completely upside down and plunged into the ground with a thunderous explosion.

The Apaches began disengaging and whirling free of the “fur ball” to speed back toward friendly lines. The slower Russian helicopters turned to give chase in disorganized fashion—a course that drew them toward Chandler's men sitting immobile under their netting.
Blobs of green at regular intervals along a straight line,
Chandler thought in horror as he imagined for the first time not how they might look not from the ground, but from the air.

“Juliet Lima One, this is November Mike Two,” a voice came over the brigade net, the sound of the helicopter's engine over the radio almost completely drowning out the pilot's words, “do you read, over?”

“November Mike Two,” Chandler replied woodenly, “affirmative, over.”

“You got at least a tank regiment headed your way,” the pilot said. “We've done everything we can. They're all yours. Watch out for the friendlies in front. Good luck, out.”

Chandler watched as the American helicopters sped over their heads, the Russians still hot on their heels. Closer and closer the Russians came.
Surely they can see the tanks by now,
Chandler thought in a daze. He stared at them frozen as they approached. Suddenly,
the slower Russian helicopters broke off their futile chase and began to turn, not to attack Chandler's men but to return toward the battle raging now beyond the ridge.

Chandler sensed movement and glanced over to the right. Off in the distance, one of the Stinger crewmen protruded from a hatch in his Bradley, the missile's sight to his eye.

“No!”
Chandler yelled, but the missile shot out of its tube and its motor ignited. Chandler toggled his radio back to the battalion net but froze as another missile popped out of its launcher and sped toward the Russian helicopters.

“Shit!”
Chandler shouted. His mind reeled with the enormity of the disaster that awaited them now that their positions were revealed.
“Goddamn!”
he shouted again as he slammed his hand down onto the turret. Chandler noticed the upturned faces of the gunner and loader staring at him through his hatch. He grabbed the handles to his M-2 heavy machine gun, his tank's only means of air defense.
Ninety-five percent invulnerable,
Chandler thought as he watched the two Stingers home in on two unsuspecting Havocs.
They're completely invulnerable to 7.62-mm rounds, and ninety-five percent invulnerable to 12.7-mm rounds.
Chandler's M-2 was .50 caliber—12.7-mm on the metric scale.
And the Havocs have—what?—a 30-mm cannon, forty unguided rockets, and sixteen AT-6 Spiral antitank missiles on their wing pylons.
The Russian helicopters were now banking radically.

First one and then a second helicopter burst into flames and plummeted to the ground. Chandler watched as the other helicopters turned suddenly . . . and raced away. After a moment's elation, however, Chandler realized that the damage was done. The element of surprise was lost, and he began to consider withdrawal.

Almost unheard over the din of battle and low whine of his M-1's engine, Chandler's mind registered a faint whistling sound overhead. His heart skipped a beat as he dropped into the turret, scraping his back painfully along the hatch. Thunderous explosions erupted outside the tank, and Chandler looked up through the open hatch at the sounds. In the pause after the first volley, he climbed back up and peered cautiously over the top of the hatch. The hatches of his tanks and Bradleys were dropping shut as his crews buttoned up. Another crashing wave of explosions caused him to duck back down, but when no shrapnel struck the tank he rose up to look toward the sounds of the explosions. He had guessed right. The Russian artillery was now pummeling the empty woods behind them. That, however, would change when the helicopters reported in.