Red Army

Yes, he thought, the great socialist experiment has been a failure for some of us. May we never annihilate the past? My father came out of the camps without reproach or even a question, to join the struggle as though he had only been on sick leave. And his father's father had played cat and mouse with the Okhrana, the czarist secret police, plotting the future by smoky lamps in back rooms in the near-medieval Ukraine. His grandfather had manned the barricades, fighting fanatically to bring a new 278

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world to birth. In the years of the troubles, he had withheld food from the starving, from his own people by any definition, to shorten the long and agonizing labor. Every weapon had been justified. The final result was to absolve all guilt.

But there never was a final result. The golden age receded again and again. Next year in Jerusalem, Chibisov thought sarcastically.

Why did we believe? Why us, out of all of them? The Russians and Ukrainians, wretched in their superstition and drunkenness . . . it was easy to understand their blindness, their madness. But how were we so deceived?

We deceived ourselves, of course. Because we, of all the peoples of this earth, wanted most passionately to believe. Religious natures, with a weakness for mysticism. And the new religion of the revolution, of shining, benevolent socialism, the ideology of an unprecedented dispensation, of a new holiness . . . that was the new Jerusalem. New heavens and, above all, a new earth. It was, Chibisov thought, as though history had painstakingly set us up to be the fools.

And yet, we had to believe. What else was there except belief? Belief in any religion. Even the religion of war. Am I of the blood of David, of Joshua and Gideon? Or the crouched asthmatic son of willing fools?

Chibisov knocked lightly at the door to Malinsky's private office. The old man had returned exhausted from visiting the front and army forward command posts, and despite the compounding successes of the day, he had ripped through the staff, unusually biting in his comments as he demanded key pieces of information. Chibisov had been relieved when he finally managed to steer the old man off for a bit of sleep.

Now, all too soon, he had to disturb Malinsky. This was not a matter he felt he could address by himself. It was, potentially at least, far too big.

The one great variable.

Chibisov wondered to what extent Trimenko's death had upset Malinsky. Of course, any flying would be hopelessly nerve-wracking after that. No. The old man would not have worried about the personal danger. But the unanticipated loss of Trimenko had been a blow to them all. If Starukhin was a wild bull who could break down the stoutest fences, Trimenko had been the front's cat, always able to find a quick and clever way around the most formidable obstacles. Chibisov sensed that, with Trimenko's loss, some intangible yet important balance had been upset within the front. Oh, his deputy commander would do well enough.

This was a powerful new generation of leaders, and the situation in the north met all of the objective conditions for success, with the Germans encircled and Soviet forward detachments on the west bank of the Weser 279

Ralph Peters —

at Verden and Nienburg. The Dutch forces who had not been pushed out of the way and trapped against the North Sea on the Cuxhaven peninsula were dying piecemeal. But the loss of Trimenko was somehow greater than its purely operational significance.

Perhaps that's only my view, Chibisov thought. My unjustifiable emotional prejudice. Because Trimenko was like me in his methods and in his fondness for numbers and machines that emulate the more dependable aspects of human thought. Perhaps I merely feel a bit more alone.

Chibisov knocked again. But there was still no response from within Malinsky's office. He wished he could let the old man sleep. But there was important intelligence from the Western High Command of Forces, laden with rumors of political movement. And, internal to the front, the situation was growing troublesome in new respects. As NATO's deep attacks destroyed more and more intelligence-collection systems Dudorov's splendid picture of the battlefield was rapidly deteriorating. The loss of intelligence platforms and the resultant clouding of the battlefield left Chibisov with the sensation of a man going helplessly, relentlessly blind.