Red Army

Bibulov believed that there would, indeed, be a war, and that it would come soon. But now there was only the frantic shifting of cargoes in the middle of a rainy night. The guns had not yet begun to squander their accounts of ammunition. Yet the boy was absurdly dead, as though fate could not wait a few more hours or another day. Bibulov shook his head, 44

RED ARMY

attempting to select the correct response, the course of action that would result in the least trouble.

Somehow, it was in the natural order of things. If not this, then something else. The premature death accorded with Bibulov's view of the world and of his own place in it. What more could reasonably be expected?

And what did they expect, when exhausted soldiers were detailed to trans-load the unwieldy crates of artillery charges and rounds in the rain with their bare hands, without even the most rudimentary tools? It seemed to Bibulov as though nothing of significance had changed in a hundred, perhaps a thousand years. Oh, there were the trucks, of course.

The big trucks from the army materiel support brigade brought the cargo from the army's forward supply base to the transshipment point at division. Then brute strength—wet, splinter-riddled hands—shifted and hoisted and lugged the stone-heavy boxes through the mud to the smaller trucks of the artillery regiment or to the shuttling division carryalls. The trucks were fine. But between the full and empty trucks lay a pool of timelessness, where animal labor continued to dominate.

Bibulov had watched helplessly in the muted glow of the safety lights as the unbalanced crate began to slip. It started with a fatal shift on the shoulders of weary boys. Then it proceeded relentlessly, a dance of silhouettes, as the crate slowly edged forward, quickening, then dropping very fast as the struggling boys abandoned it one after the other in a swift chain reaction. At the climax of the brief drama, the Tadzhik was a last tiny shape, twisting in a moment's terror and sprawling backward under the weight, padding its fall with his chest. By the time they heaved the crate off to the side, the boy was dead.

Bibulov tried to get the thing in perspective. The rain licked at the back of his neck. How big an event was the boy's death now? In a training exercise, everything in the unit would have come to a halt. But events had moved fatally beyond training exercises. The inevitability of war had come home to him the evening before, when the responsible officers had suddenly stopped demanding signatures of receipt on their delivery inventories. Bibulov had never known such a thing to happen, and it jarred him profoundly. At the same time, the grinding pace of the past few days had increased to an inhuman tempo.

Bibulov decided that, although the boy's death was undoubtedly a very significant event to somebody, somewhere, there was nothing to be done about it here and now. And the cargo had to be transferred.

He stared down, tidying up his conscience with quick last respects. The corpse appeared ridiculous and small, an ill-dressed doll. The flat Asian 45

Ralph Peters

face shone in the cast of the lantern as though the rain had polished it with wax.

"Pick him up," Bibulov ordered. "We're wasting time."

When the soldiers responded merely by shifting their positions, milling a little closer as each one waited for another to begin, Bibulov hardened his voice.

"Pick him up, you bastards. Let's go."

It was always like this, Bibulov consoled himself. The big men decide.

And there's nothing to be done but obey, hoping you're not the one who gets crushed in the mud.

Shilko woke abruptly in response to the careful hand on his shoulder.

"Has it started?" he asked, with the urgency of disorientation.

Before Captain Romilinsky could respond, Shilko had gained sufficient mastery of himself to realize that everything was still as it should be, and that his big guns had not yet begun their work. The only sounds were the dotting of rain on the roof of his range car and the background noise of vehicles in movement that had not ceased for days. The local area had its own little well of rain quiet. The battalion was ready.

Waiting.

"Sleep well, Comrade Commander?" Romilinsky asked. Shilko liked his battalion chief of staff. Romilinsky was wonderfully earnest, an officer of excellent staff culture. It had been no plum for him to be assigned to a battalion whose commander obviously was not soaring through the ranks like a rocket. Lieutenant Colonel Shilko was easily the oldest battalion commander in the high-powered artillery brigade, perhaps in the entire Second Guards Tank Army. He was, in fact, older than the new-breed brigade commander. But if Romilinsky felt any disappointment at his assignment, he never let it show. The captain was a good officer and a fine young man. Shilko wished that his daughters had chosen husbands more like Romilinsky.