Red Army

Your men died. You could not let the fate of individuals weaken you. It was imperative to learn to regard them as resources, to be conserved whenever possible, but to be applied as necessary. In Afghanistan, and 129

Ralph Peters

now in Germany, the missiles and the heavy machine-gun fire traced skyward, and the ships burst orange and yellow in a froth of black smoke.

No passenger ever survived the fireball.

But it was all right now. Gordunov had been prepared for the loss of up to fifty percent of his battalion going in. But the air defenses had been depleted along the penetration corridor. He could not be entirely certain, but from what he had personally observed, and from the pilot chatter, he believed he would get on the ground with over seventy-five percent of his force. Now it all depended on the air defenses at Hameln and what happened on the landing sites.

The rail tracks below the helicopter paralleled the main road, Highway 1, down into the sudden clutter of the town. Crammed into the valley on both sides of the Weser River. Suddenly, they were over the first buildings.

"Falcon, what do you have up there?" Gordunov spoke into the headset mike, switching the control to broadcast. He wanted a report from his battalion chief of staff, who was tucked into the first wave, just behind the advance party.

Pilot confusion bothered the net, with one transmission spoiling another.

"Eagle, this is Hawk," the aircraft commander called him. "The rail yards are packed. You want us to hit the rolling stock?"

Gordunov could just make out the funnel-shaped expansion of the rail yards.

"This is Eagle," he said. "Only strike combat-related activities. If there's any vehicle off-loading, hit them."

"Zero observed. But I've got heavies. I'm taking heavy machine-gun fire."

Without waiting for his orders, the pilot and copilot-navigator of Gordunov's aircraft began to bank the big gunship away from the rail line.

"Damn it," Gordunov told them, "just go straight in. That's nothing.

Don't break the formation."

The pilots corrected back onto course. But the formation had grown ragged.

The chief of staff, Major Dukhonin, finally came up on the net. "One heavy on the northern bridge, Eagle. Clearing him now. Scattered lights.

It's manageable."

Good. All right. Just put them down on the far bank, Gordunov thought.

"Eagle, Falcon," Dukhonin called again. "Tanks further north. Poor 130

RED ARMY

visibility, but I count five . . . maybe six. Heading east. Crossing tactical bridges down in the water."

"Get the bumblebees working on them," Gordunov ordered, using the old Afghanistan slang for the dedicated gunships. "Hawk, did you monitor my transmission?"

"Working them now, we're working them."

"Falcon, can they range the landing zone?"

"Not mine. Not without maneuvering back. Shit. Beautiful. We're hitting."

"Get the troop ships down."

Even with the headset cups over his ears, Gordunov could hear ordnance cracking, and dull thumps.

"We're hitting. Got one tank dead in the middle of the river, burning like a campfire. Two on the banks. We're all right."

Immediately to the right of his aircraft, Gordunov watched a troop transport fly directly into the side of a high-rise building, as though the pilot had done it on purpose. Another story that will never be told, Gordunov thought. He was used to occurrences that seemed to make no outward sense during air-assault operations. Pilots misjudged, or briefly lost control, and aircraft smashed into mountainsides. The blast wave from this latest crash felt as though it stripped the rain from his face.

Fewer tools to do the job. Seize and hold the northern bridge at all costs. Seize and hold the southern bridge, if possible. Tactical crossing sites to be destroyed if they could not be controlled.

The command gunship pulled to the right, entering its assault approach. "Don't shoot up the traffic on the main bridges," Gordunov ordered. "I want them clean."

"This is Falcon. We're on the west bank. Lead elements en route to the northern bridge," Major Dukhonin reported. "I'm going in myself."