Red Army

He had issued strict orders to cause no wanton damage. But the panic that flowed like a bow wave in front of the armor caused the refugees to harm themselves in their desperation, and collisions proved unavoidable. Bezarin clenched himself as tightly as possible, forcing his mind not to accept the implications of the string of small tragedies that marked the path of his tanks. He peered forward, unseeing, as his war machines rumbled to the west. He scanned the sky and the rising line of mountains that hid the Weser, shutting out everything but the mission of reaching 265

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and crossing the river. His tanks rode the berm of the highway or took short detours along parallel routes and across the fields wherever the debris and confusion of the human flood threatened to become overwhelming. Here and there, bombed-out enemy march columns blocked the way, blackened trucks steering into eternity, their drivers crude, shrunken figures carved from charcoal. Several times, enemy aircraft boomed overhead. But their rockets and bombs never sought Bezarin. He did not know whether or not they were even aware of his column, whether their ordnance was predestined for other, greater threats than the one his presence posed. He only knew the sudden intervals of terror, almost impossible to master, as the jets came screaming down along the highway, seemingly aimed straight for his tanks, only to blast on by to the east.

Intermittently, Bezarin's forward detachment surprised enemy soldiers in stray transport vehicles or perched along the side of the road, tasked to administer the rear area. Some attempted to fight it out.

Bezarin's vehicles cut them down. Others, astonished, simply raised their hands in surrender and went ignored. Bezarin refused to permit his tiny force to be diverted. He wondered what had become of Dagliev's advance element. When he tried to raise him on the radio, there was no answer. Neither was there any sign of his passage. Bezarin relegated the Dagliev problem to his list of lesser concerns so long as things were going well.

The column seemed to be touring the guts of the enemy formations now, the individually unimportant targets that joined in a great combination to make a modern army function. The Soviet tanks and infantry fighting vehicles merely raked the sites with machine-gun fire from the move. The only sharply focused efforts at destruction were directed against enemy vehicles with antennae in evidence. Bezarin did not intend to give the enemy any free intelligence on his location. When the path to the west led his tanks around a congested village and right through the middle of a British vehicle-repair site, Bezarin almost lost control of his force again. The target seemed too rich to be passed by, crowded with equipment and technicians, and officers and men took it upon themselves to destroy as much as possible. Bezarin screamed into his microphone, whipping his officers back into column formation with more curses and threats. Even as he shouted, he wondered how much longer he would be able to keep it up, how long his willpower would endure. Then he barked another command and forced his self-doubt down into a private dungeon. The unit pulled away from the support site, 266

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spraying suppressive light-weapons fire in its wake to prevent the British from employing any man-packed antitank weapons.

Bezarin felt certain that the enemy must know his location by now, and he pounded at the rim of his turret hatch when another clot of vehicles at a valley crossroads brought his tanks to a halt. Threats and warning shots failed to undo the great knot of vehicles, and Bezarin finally directed his driver to batter the civilian vehicles out of their path. The destruction seemed vicious and senseless and unavoidable to Bezarin. As if in punishment, one of Lasky's infantry fighting vehicles threw a track as it attempted to work its way up out of a field and across a lateral road.

There was no time to repair the vehicle, simple though the operation would have been, and Bezarin ordered that it be further disabled. Then the crew mounted up with their more fortunate comrades. Bezarin felt as though fate were chipping away at him, defying him to reach the river.

Yet there was good fortune, too. His tanks were obviously moving faster than the enemy could react, and none of the bridges over the tertiary streams had been blown. The passage of local water gaps, which might have held up the column, merely involved clearing off the refugee traffic.

And as Bezarin's vehicles raced past still more British support sites, it was apparent that none of them had been forewarned. The British were in a process of dissolution without even knowing it.