Red Army

Vera surrounded by clouds of black smoke.

"Sounds as if this one had an interesting day," one of the orderlies said in amusement.

"It just gets on your nerves after a while," the other replied.

Halfway between the improvised helipad and the concealed forward command post of the Third Shock Army, the range car carrying Lieutenant General Starukhin down the muddy trail backfired once, shook, and sank to a stop. The sudden absence of mechanical noise startled the general. The world seemed to stop inside the big perceived silence, despite the vigor of the rain and the dull, distant sound of the war like a hangover in the ears. Each rustle of uniforms and wet leather straps 123

Ralph Peters

seemed amplified, and the sour smell of tired men in damp uniforms grew unaccountably sharper.

Overcoming his initial bewilderment and horror, the junior sergeant behind the steering wheel clumsily tried to restart the vehicle, but the engine would not come to life. Instead of waiting for the dispatch of his own vehicle from the headquarters, Starukhin had hurriedly comman-deered the immediately available range car, unwilling to lose the extra ten or fifteen minutes. Now he sat heavily in the little vehicle, with no means of communication, still several kilometers from his command post, mocked by the barrage of rain on the canvas roof.

The young driver carefully avoided looking around, fixing his eyes on the dashboard as though his stare might bully the machine back to life.

The two aides accompanying Starukhin remained carefully silent.

Starukhin listened to the boy's fumbling for as long as he could bear it, then shouted:

"You can't coax it to start, you drizzle ass. Get out and look at the engine."

The boy shot out of the vehicle, banging against the door frame with bruising haste. Beyond the rain-smeared windshield, Starukhin could see him fumbling with the engine cover. In the blurred background, the rain seemed to have scoured all of the color out of the sky and landscape.

"And you two," Starukhin bellowed, turning on his aides. "Get out there and help him. What's the matter with you jackasses?"

The aides moved with the panic of men caught in a terrible crime. One of them, a lieutenant colonel, jostled wildly against Starukhin in his anxiety, and the army commander gave him a hard shove toward the door. Soon the two aides stood glum-faced beside the driver in the steady rain.

They were hopeless. All of them. Starukhin sat back, squaring his shoulders, convinced that he had to carry the entire army on his back. All of his life, he thought, he had had to drive his will head-on into the ponderous complacency characteristic of the system into which he had been born. Every day was a struggle. When something broke, those responsible would sheepishly sit down and wait to be told to fix it. Then they would take their own good time about the task. Unless you drove them. And Starukhin had learned how to drive men. But now, during the great test of his lifetime, he feared his inability to move the men under his command.

More than anything, he feared failure. He feared it because he believed it would reveal some secret incompetence hidden within him. Deep within his soul, where no other human being had ever been allowed to 124

RED ARMY

penetrate, Starukhin doubted himself, and nothing seemed more important to him than the preservation of his pride.

The damned whoring British would not break. It seemed incredible to him that he could not simply will his way through them, hammering them to nothing with his personal determination and the tank-heavy army under his command. He drifted back and forth between his bobbing doubts and waves of immeasurable energy. Now, as he envisioned the defending British, he sensed that it would be impossible for them to resist.

Yet the British were resisting, fighting bitterly for every road and water obstacle, seemingly for every worthless little village and godforsaken hill.

While to the north, that bastard Trimenko was breaking through.

Starukhin knew that Trimenko's Second Guards Tank Army was already ahead of schedule, splitting the seam between the Germans and the Dutch. While he, Starukhin, had to butt head-on against the British.