no matter what it takes, before somebody thinks clearly enough to start fixing charges. I’ve got a good view up here, but I can’t cover the entire span. Kick Karchenko in the ass. And let the tanks into town. It’s easier to work them among the buildings. Especially at night.”
“Right. Moving now.”
“Vulture, this is Eagle.”
“This is Vulture,” Captain Anureyev, the ranking officer of the southern landing party, answered. “You’re coming in weak.”
“Just tell me what you have on the ground down there.”
“No combat action. A bit of sniping. I have about a combat company, and half of the mortars. I think they put the antitank platoon down across the river by mistake.”
“Battalion support?”
“They just kicked out cases of ammunition. We’re sorting it out now. Half of them broke open. I think the handlers went down.”
“Leave a detail to sort that out. You get onto the southern bridge as quickly as you can. Be prepared to reinforce the northern bridgehead. And I want an accurate account of who made it in with you. Get everybody under control before it’s too dark.”
“We’re missing at least a company’s worth of troops. And the air defenders.”
“Engineers?”
“I haven’t seen them. They might be over with the antitank platoon.”
“Sort it out. And move fast.”
A tank fired in the distance. Across the river. Dukhonin was probably right. Reservists. There was nothing to fire a tank main gun at. It was the machine guns that did the work in close. Unless they cornered you in a building.
Branch scrambled in close. “Transmission passed and acknowledged. Higher send their congratulations, Comrade Commander.”
“They can save it. Round up your boys and find a good site on the top floor. We can’t all stay up here. And I don’t want to lose the radios.”
Bronch moved out. Gordunov respected the communications specialist. The boy was a radio buff from his school days, when he had been active in DOSAAF, the organization for imparting military skills to the nation’s youth. He could make an antenna out of anything but ground meat. Bronch’s radios worked dependably — something that was not always the case in Gordunov’s career-long experience.
Gordunov undid the clasps and wet laces of his right boot. Then he pulled the laces in so tight that the discomfort of the constriction vied with the pain of the injured ankle. It was time to move. Gordunov sensed things bogging down. And they were so close. It made him furious that his men were not on both bridges already.
Gordunov gave instructions to the sergeant in charge of the remaining assault squad. Cover the approach road and the bridge. Then he started down the steps of the service stairwell, bracing hard on the hand railing as soon as he was out of sight of the soldiers. The pain was an unanticipated, unwelcome enemy.
Inside the hospital, there was another, separate world. A nurse cried hysterically. And, despite the growing darkness, the corridors remained well-lit. The air was warm and dry. A few nurses and doctors stood defensively in the hallways beside litter patients. A glance revealed that the hospital was overflowing with military casualties.
The crying nurse erupted into a scream. Gordunov turned on the oldest of the doctors, assuming he would be in charge. “Shut your little whore up,” he told the man in Russian. “And turn the damned lights out.”
The doctor did not understand. He touched Gordunov’s sleeve, jabbering in incomprehensible German. Gordunov pushed past him and, when the doctor persisted, Gordunov shoved the muzzle of his assault rifle into the man’s face. Then he turned the weapon on the overhead lighting panels and let go a burst.
“Understand?” Gordunov asked him. He shot out another sequence of lights. The other doctors and nurses threw themselves down on the floor. Gordunov yelled at one of his soldiers who stood idly by. “You. Get all of these people out of the hallway. And see that they turn out the lights in the entire building.”
A machine gunner and a rifleman covered the main entrance on the ground floor. Gordunov ordered the rifleman to follow him, as much because he did not know how much longer he could manage the pain in his ankle as to have a runner for communications.
Automatic weapons fire chased them between automobiles in the parking lot. The bridge was very close, but there was an open square just off of the main feeder road that had to be crossed to get to it. An enemy fire team positioned on the far side of the main route covered the direct approach. The street itself had cleared of traffic now, except for a few burning or abandoned automobiles and the smoldering wreck of the infantry fighting vehicle that had been destroyed by the gunships.
There was no sign of Levin or the squad he had taken with him. “I’ll kill the bastard,” Gordunov promised himself, wondering where the political officer had gone. Gordunov was sorry now that he had not put more men down on the roof of the hospital. It had seemed too great a risk, and he had not even told his superiors about that small detail of the plan. Too many officers assigned to airborne and air-assault units and formations still had not been to Afghanistan. Too many of them were soft, and weak-willed, like Levin, and they might have objected to even the most limited use of the hospital. Gordunov felt as though he had enemies to overcome in both camps.
“You go back,” Gordunov told his rifleman companion. “Get up on the roof.” Gordunov pointed to the southwest corner of the hospital building. “Up there. Tell Sergeant Dubrov I said to put suppressive fires on the far side of the street.”
Before the rifleman could sprint off, a ripple of grenade blasts dazzled along the far side of the street, shattering the glass in the last intact storefront windows. Hard after the blasts, rushing forms took the enemy position from behind. In a matter of seconds, automatic rifle bursts cut in and out of the buildings, and enemy soldiers stumbled out of the shadows with their hands in the air, calling out in a foreign language.
The near end of the bridge was clear.
Captain Levin had taken the assault squad well around behind the enemy position. Gordunov understood at once, feeling simultaneous relief that an immediate problem was out of the way and a peculiar sort of embarrassment that the political officer had performed so well.
Gordunov caught the rifleman by the arm. “Forget what I told you before. Just go up to the top floor and tell Sergeant Bronchevitch to bring the battalion command radio down to me. Do you understand?”
The soldier nodded. There was fear in the boy’s face. How much of it was fear of battle and how much was fear of the commander, Gordunov could not tell.
As the rifleman scrambled back toward the hospital, Gordunov raised himself for a dash across the street, weaving behind the partial protection of wrecked cars in case any enemy troops remained on the scene. Each step on his bad ankle meant punishment.
Levin had already sent a team forward onto the bridge. The action continued on the far bank, but there was no more firing on Gordunov’s side of the river. Levin was excited, elated. His delight in his accomplishment made him look like a teenager.
“Comrade Battalion Commander, we have prisoners.”
“I see that.”
“No. I mean
The night had grown full around them. But the hot light shed by the burning vehicles revealed a string of eight more men in strange uniforms, all of them thirtyish or older, and some of them clearly not in shape for combat.
“They were up the road,” Levin said. “I think they were trying to decide what to do. We just came up on them. And we helped them decide.”
“You know all the uniforms. These are Germans?”
“Yes, Comrade Battalion Commander. Enlisted soldiers. This one is equivalent to a senior sergeant.”
The prisoners looked pathetic. In Afghanistan, when you managed to take the enemy alive, he showed one of two faces. Either the prisoner was sullenly defiant, or he blanked all expression from his face, as though already dead. Which he soon would be. But these men looked frightened, surprised, sheepish. They didn’t look like soldiers at all, really.
