Red Army

As the hasty briefing session came to a close and the officers prepared to chase down their units in the dark Anton slipped away to the toilet, lighting his way through the dark house with a pocket lamp. Behind him, his staff officers were already stripping the maps from the walls, preparing to jump forward to maintain control of the brigade on the move.

Anton went slowly, careful in his weakness. Even in the narrow beam of light, it was evident that the house was gorgeously furnished. Very rich, even by the standards to which he, a high-ranking general's son, had become accustomed. It was the sort of house he wished he could provide for Zena. Fine, dark polished wood and brass. Oriental carpets of silken feel even through the heels of combat boots. There was a baby grand piano in one of the rooms through which he journeyed, and at any other time, he would have paused to touch the keys to life. But the oppression of the situation and his cramping bowels hurried him on.

As he crouched alone in the dark Anton thought of his father once again. The old man was pulling it off. He was beating them all. Anton felt gladness for the old man, but no pride. He could not summon up any pride in the achievement because it was all so thoroughly his father's triumph, echoing in the night with the son's lifelong inadequacy. He remembered how, when he was a child, his father had proudly, delighted-ly, taken him to military parades, reveling in the pageantry that his army and his nation staged so well that it temporarily redeemed a host of other failures. Anton remembered how he thrilled to the brilliant clanging of the music, enraptured more by the tonal spurs to the imagination than by the big metal reality of the parade. His father held him up to see the tanks and the big guns and the sleek new missiles, affirmations of might and capability, of the nation's greatness. But Anton had only been frightened by the stinking, growling monsters of steel. He watched them warily, anxious for them to be gone and for the wonderful music to come again.

General Malinsky's personal helicopter pilot had been with him since the hard days in Afghanistan. A major and a pilot-first-class, he had 295

Ralph Peters

developed the habit of calling Malinsky's attention to interesting features along the flight route. His younger eyes were far sharper than Malinsky's, and he had shown a knack for spotting details that other men would have flown by in ignorance in the stony mountain deserts of Afghanistan.

Now, however, the details were evident even to Malinsky's tired eyes.

The night flight took them through corridors of fire, where towns and cities burned like enormous lamps to mark their course.

"Hannover coming up on the right," the pilot declared. "That's the big group of fires at one o'clock."

Malinsky saw a demonic blur of light.

"You can see Hildesheim cooking if you look out the left side, Comrade General."

The pilot was terribly excited about it all. There seemed to be no human reality, no implied misery in it for him.

Well, Malinsky thought, perhaps that was to be preferred. If all soldiers, or even just the officers, fully perceived the human consequences of their actions, it would be impossible to make war with them.

No, it was probably better to have this stupid gleefulness, this naive awe, in the face of the destruction of an enemy's land.

As the city of Hannover drifted by on the right side of the aircraft Malinsky examined his handiwork. The blur began to be defined. He could see now that the conflagration actually consisted of a series of smaller fires. Not all of the city burned, and he sincerely regretted that any of it was ablaze. But you could not make war neatly. The Germans and some of the British had backed into the city, drawing the Soviets after them like steel filings to a magnet. He had ordered Starukhin not to close the encirclement too tightly. The front had neither the time nor the troops to get bogged down in a significant level of urban combat, and the city's primary value was as a hostage. But one of Starukhin's division commanders had let himself be drawn into a fight for an outlying district.

And the battle of Hannover had begun, taking on a life of its own against the will of either side. Soviet aircraft had gone in to pound the enemy positions. And the heavy guns had come up. Malinsky shifted in his seat, restrained by his safety belt. It was hard to destroy a city, especially a modern one. No doubt, when the smoke cleared, the damage would not be all that bad. But Malinsky knew that the city had not been officially evacuated, and he wondered what it was like for the remaining residents and the soldiers trapped in the inferno.

In the end, his vision did not move the soldier in him. He realized that it would be naive to imagine that war, given the modern technology of destruction and the timeless characteristics of the human animal, might 296

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