Red Army

more blithely of resuming the offensive than did those who had gotten a good taste of the battlefield. The most worrisome estimate making the rounds prophesied that the Americans did not regard the war as finished but were preparing to strike elsewhere. And there were clouds on the eastern horizon. Would the war enter an Asian or Pacific phase?

Personally, Chibisov hoped it was over. He hoped the Americans would have the good sense to turn their backs on a Europe that took their lives and money and gave them nothing in return. He could not quite believe the Americans would find any of this worth fighting over any more. But he wondered. The Americans remained an enigma.

Intellectually, Chibisov appreciated that the Soviet way of war was scientifically correct, integrating the military and political elements into one overwhelming program. Unity of effort at the highest levels. But in the end, it was not so much the Soviet tanks that had defeated NATO, but NATO's own foolishness. Watching the progress of the war from his unique perspective convinced Chibisov that the issue could very easily have gone the other way. For instance, the surrounded German operational grouping northeast of Hannover was currently being disarmed, with its soldiers and limited support equipment allowed to move west of the Rhine. But the Germans might easily have been the captors. NATO

had the combat power but lacked unity of purpose and strength of will.

On a practical level, their lack of a cogent and unified military doctrine had destroyed them. The tools and the workers had been available, but everyone had insisted on using his own blueprint. Chibisov was grateful.

A black bird settled into a splintered tree, and Chibisov thought of Malinsky's son. The remnants of his brigade reported that Guards Colonel Malinsky had been killed by an air strike. But no body had been recovered, and the old man refused to accept his son's death. The general went forward in person to conduct the search.

Chibisov felt deeply sorry for his protector and comrade. It seemed stupidly ironic that he, of all men, should lose so much at such an hour.

Chibisov did not know the young colonel well enough to feel much sorrow for the fallen officer. The elder Malinsky drew all of his emotion.

In a way, he knew, the loss of his son would be harder for Malinsky to bear than defeat on the battlefield would have been.

Of course, plenty of sons had died. Chibisov tried to rationalize the old man's misfortune away. But the image of Malinsky would not leave him.

He pictured the old man stepping over the blackened waste that had once been a forest, peering into the gutted shells of command vehicles.

Blinking his eyes to control any sign of the intensity of his feelings, 327

Ralph Peters

Chibisov realized, helplessly, how much he loved the old man. How much better if an asthmatic renegade Jew, who could not find a home in any camp, had died in place of the cherished son.

Chibisov remembered his mother. His father, a determined communist, had tolerated no mention of religion in their home. But his mother had wrapped her child in the wonder of fairy tales and remembrances.

Chibisov had not realized until much later that some of the fairy tales had been stories from the Old Testament. He smiled the smile of middle age at this bit of maternal deviousness, recalling how he had been terrified by the story of Abraham and Isaac. As a boy, Chibisov had had no doubt that his father would have sacrificed him, had the modern gods demanded it.

His thoughts returned to Malinsky and his son. A perverse twist on an old tale, in which God does not relent, or forgive, or show mercy. A god for the world as it is, rather than as it was supposed to be.

Of course, it did no good to romanticize death. Chibisov looked up at the crow on the broken limb. The bird immediately spread its wings and rose skyward, as though Chibisov's gaze made it uncomfortable.

Chibisov took a deep breath, filling his withered lungs. And he turned back to the bunker to sort out the combat statistics.

"They cut us off," Seryosha told the little crowd of soldiers gathered around his bunk. "We were entirely cut off. Enemy tanks everywhere.

You can't imagine it. But we held out. We held our assigned position for two days, and we killed every German soldier who came near us."

Leonid accepted the tale. Seryosha had told it so many times now that it had acquired a truth of its own. He and Seryosha never exchanged a word about the incident in the basement in the little German town.

When they left the house, it was as if they had signed a compact never to speak of it. And really, there was nothing to say that would change anything. They had simply hidden in a barn until Soviet forces returned.