Red Army

"Target," Bezarin said, dropping into position behind his optics.

"Range, six hundred meters."

"Six hundred meters."

"Correct to six-fifty. Selecting sabot."

"Six-fifty. Sabot loaded."

"Fire."

Bezarin's tank rocked back, and an instant later an enemy tank jerked to a stop, lifting slightly, like a man punched hard in the lower belly. The enemy tank failed to explode, but smoke began to fluster from its vents.

Bezarin was in a killing mood.

"Repeat target," he said. "Six-fifty."

"Target fixed."

"Sabot."

"Ready."

"Fire."

Bezarin's tank rocked again and, before it settled, the enemy tank dazzled with sparks. A moment later its deck blew skyward. Magazine strike, Bezarin thought. And he scanned the fields for another target.

His optics found a changed scene. Most of the civilians had dropped into the high grass, caught in the middle of the battle. Then Bezarin saw one running group jerk into contorted positions and fall. Someone had intentionally gunned them down.

"Comrade Commander, target."

Bezarin saw the tank. Lumbering down, as if to rescue the survivors, its long gun fired above the bodies prostrate in the grass. It looked like a 260

RED ARMY

defiant, protective lioness. Bezarin understood, even sympathized with the commander of the enemy vehicle. The maneuver was brave, and suicidal. Bezarin fixed the target in his rangefinder.

The headset had grown chaotic with a litany of calls. Bezarin tuned them out until he had fired on the lone, brave enemy tank. Two other tanks also fired on it in quick succession, and they managed a catastrophic kill. The enemy vehicle burned its wounded crew alive.

The surviving enemy vehicles had pulled back into the distant treeline, and Bezarin's supporting battery pounded their positions, forcing them back yet again. The firing of tank guns subsided very quickly. It had been a swift engagement, determined by the single factor of Bezarin's tanks beating the enemy to the highway by less than a minute. Bezarin searched the horizon for any last targets. But all of the visible enemy vehicles remained stationary, either blazing or smoking heavenward. Bezarin watched as a lone civilian rose and ran up the hillside, only to be tossed about by a burst of automatic-weapons fire. Bezarin watched as though the action were occurring on a movie screen. Then he snapped back to his senses.

"Cease fire, cease fire," he shouted into the mike. "I will personally shoot the next man who fires on a civilian."

He opened his turret, climbing up into open air only to be greeted by choking black smoke. At first, he thought his tank was on fire, that it had been hit and that they had not even realized it. Then he located the true source of the smoke. A burning automobile stood just to one side of the tank. The heat seared Bezarin's cheeks. His vehicle, already battered, wore a cloak of black soot down the side.

The continuing volume of small-arms fire alarmed Bezarin. There was nothing left to shoot at. And there were too many shouts, screams.

He dropped back into the turret, ordering his driver to back up out of the grasp of the fire and smoke. Then he called his subordinates and ordered them to get their men under control, to halt all firing immediately. In a rage, he stripped off his headset and drew his personal weapon. He climbed out of the turret and jumped down from the tank, trotting through the smoke in the direction of the greatest density of noise.

Countless automobiles had taken fire, or had been wrecked in their last desperate attempts at flight. Between the drifting curtains of smoke, islands of clarity revealed dead and badly wounded drivers and passengers, slumped over steering wheels or spilling from opened doors. Dead civilians lay scattered about the roadway, some of them crushed. A heavily built middle-aged woman's flowered skirt lofted on the wind, dropping high up on the back of her sprawled legs.

261

Ralph Peters

Beyond the next drape of smoke, Bezarin surprised a group of motorized rifle troops with a girl. They had stripped off her skirt and underpants, leaving her clad only in a sweater, and they were teasing her, driving her screaming from one man to another. The girl wailed in mortal terror, and his men laughed. Whether or not she could ever be pretty, her fear had wrought her young face into a mask of revolting ugliness. Her eyes were those of an animal beaten almost to death, but with just enough spark of life remaining to want desperately to live.

The girl shrieked in a foreign language, and one of the soldiers grabbed her sweater, tearing it as she tried to break out of the circle.

Bezarin fired at the ground, putting the round very close to the girl's tormentor.