Red Army

Plinnikov studied his map again, searching for a good route deeper into the enemy's rear. No obvious routes suggested themselves, and his calculations began to seem hopelessly complicated to him. In irritation, he ordered the driver to double back onto the trail that had proven so lucrative earlier, hoping a course would be easier to develop while working through the actual landscape than it was on the map.

At a trail crossing, he turned to the map for reference. It was a very high-quality map, with extensive military detail. But it almost seemed as though the trails in the German woods created themselves out of nothing, as though the forest were haunted.

He chose the trail that seemed to head west. At first, it was a fair dirt track. Then the forest began to close in. Plinnikov found himself pushing wet branches away from the vehicle. His uniform was already soaking and uncomfortable, and his spirits dropped suddenly, as though someone had pulled a cork.

"Depress the gun tube. It's catching the branches. Driver, go slowly."

Then Plinnikov's fortunes seemed to change. The trees thinned again, and the terrain began to show slight undulations. A hollow off to his right discharged a small stream that then flowed parallel to the track. He RED ARMY

checked his map again, hoping the feature and the trail, side by side, would allow him to orient himself. But he could not identify his location; the only possibilities on the map didn't really seem to make sense in terms of the distance he estimated they had traveled. He needed a clear landmark, or an open view.

Through all of his trials, Plinnikov tried not to think of the dead enemy, to hold their creeping, insistent reality at a distance. He sought harmless thoughts, gleaning his memories of the military academy and the seemingly endless dilemmas of the lieutenancy that followed gradua-tion. But all of the forced images faded into the vivid sights, sounds, and smells of the recent combat. He could not help refighting the action over and over again, scrutinizing his failures. The dead men died again and again, their reality already changing slightly, as though warping and mutating in his overheated memory.

Unexpectedly, the forest ended. The vehicle lay fully exposed where Plinnikov ordered it to halt. He shook off the last of his daydreams. A church spire rose above a copse of trees, dark against the low gray sky. He wiped the back of his fingers across his nose and reached down for his map.

He neither saw nor heard the round that killed him. It tore into the hull of the vehicle below the turret, ripping off his lower legs and mincing his hands as it exploded. The quick secondary blast shot his torso up through the commander's hatch, breaking his neck against the hatch rim and shattering his back as the pressure compressed his body through the circular opening and blew it into the sky like a bundle of rags.

69

FIVE

Captain Kryshinin had never faced such a frustrating problem. As commander of the forward security element, it was his job to move fast, to locate the enemy and overrun him, if possible, or, otherwise, to fix the enemy until the advance guard came up, meanwhile searching for a bypass around the enemy position. Textbook stuff. Yet here the enemy had already pulled back. And his element was blocked by nothing more than a mined road crater and an unknown number of mines in the surrounding meadows.

He had no idea where the combat reconnaissance patrol had gone, or how they had gotten through. They should have warned him of this situation. Now Kryshinin was stuck. His engineers had become separated from his element in the confusion of initial contact and penetration of the enemy's covering troops. He had no mine-clearing capability without them.

He judged that the advance guard was no more than twenty minutes behind, unless they had gotten bogged down in more fighting. Leading the Second Guards Tank Army attack, the division's lead regiments had struck the thin enemy deployments so hard that it had been surprisingly easy to force a gap. Kryshinin had not lost a single vehicle in combat. He was only missing the wandering engineers. Until the lead infantry 70

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fighting vehicle attempted to work around the road crater. A mine had torn out its belly and butchered the crew.

Now Kryshinin's element was static. Thirteen infantry fighting vehicles, three tanks, a battery of 122mm self-propelled guns, and over a dozen specialized vehicles with ground-to-air radios, artillery communications, antitank missiles, and light surface-to-air missiles were backed up along a single country road. It was a tough little combat package, well-suited to the mission and the terrain. But now, without engineers, it was helpless.