moved swiftly, except for the odd accordion stop when a traffic controller faced a dilemma for which his orders had not prepared him. Yet Bezarin wanted them to go faster, to push the vehicles to the limit of their speed.
You had to close fast. That was what the books said, and Bezarin had dutifully read the books. If you closed fast, the enemy could not bring his air power or indirect fires to bear, and you cheapened your opponent’s long- range antitank guided missiles. You had to close fast and get in among the enemy subunits, then you needed to keep going until you were behind him, to make it impossible for him to fight you according to his desires. It sounded very straightforward on the page. But Bezarin suspected that there was a bit more to it during the actual execution.
A loud thump-thump-thump sounded off to the right. A stand of trees bowed toward the march column, bending away from lashing, half-hidden bursts of fire.
The correct response was to button up, to seal the crews within the armor of the tanks and infantry fighting vehicles. But the prescribed action was impossible for the vehicle commanders. As long as they remained on radio listening silence, signal flags and then flares were the order of the day. The vehicle commanders had to remain exposed until the final battle deployment began. Bezarin unconsciously worked down lower in his turret, bracing his shoulder against his opened hatch. A flight of jets shrieked by so low that the noise cut sharply through the padded headgear.
You couldn’t even see the damned things.
A row of birches straggled along the road. Birches even in West Germany. Anna of the birches. Bezarin felt the grime of sleeplessness on his face, lacquered over the film of tank exhaust and sweat. Not a very romantic picture, Anna. No dashing officers here out of some ball in an old novel. We are the unwashed warriors.
Up ahead, billows of smoke and dust suddenly engulfed the march column. Bezarin saw an antiaircraft piece swing its turret snappily about, its radar frantic. But the weapon did not fire. A bright burst, clearly an explosion, flared in the lead battalion’s trail company, which was separated from Bezarin’s unit by only a few tens of meters instead of the regulation number of kilometers. Everything seemed crammed, condensed in both time and space, crippled by haste and necessity.
The column did not stop moving. A minute later, Bezarin’s command tank turned off the road to move around a pair of burning infantry fighting vehicles. He could feel a distinct difference as the tank’s tracks bit into the meadowland. The driver simply followed the vehicle to his front, and Bezarin inspected the vehicles that had been hit. The troop carriers burned in patches. There was no sign of life from within them. You could not even see what hit you, Bezarin thought. The spectacle made him want to close with the enemy immediately, to pay them back.
Bezarin’s driver whipped the tank back onto the roadway. His driver had a habit of snapping the tank about, in a jaunty sort of movement that banged the occupants against the nearest inner wall. I’ll break him of that crap, Bezarin thought.
The route passed a skeletal grove that had burned black. Orange veins still glowed amid the charred waste. The site appeared to have been a tactical command post. British. As soon as Bezarin realized that what he had thought to be soot-covered logs and limbs were shriveled corpses, he fixed his eyes resolutely back upon the road.
Just past a battered village, a crowd of Soviet maintenance vehicles and personnel had taken possession of the courtyard of a relatively intact farm. Lightly damaged vehicles awaited their turn in the adjacent fields, and a tactical crane held a big tank engine suspended in midair, as if torturing it. While a few of the soldiers were diligently at work, others sat about eating breakfast. They waved at the tankers hurrying to the front. It occurred to Bezarin that perhaps they were waving at the tanks themselves, convinced they would meet again shortly. Overall, the maintenance crews appeared unconcerned with the war that was perhaps a dozen kilometers away. Sitting on their recovery vehicles or on the fenders of their repair vans, they looked the way soldiers did during a lull in an exercise.
The column came to an unannounced halt in the open, just at the edge of another village. The haze continued to thin, and the exposed nature of the position immediately began to torment Bezarin.
A scout car emerged from the village and worked its way down the line. Bezarin leaned out of the turret in curiosity. The vehicle pulled up beside the command tank.
“Major Bezarin?” a sergeant shouted over the throb of idling engines.
Bezarin nodded. “Yes.”
“You are to report to the regimental commander in the town square.”
At last, Bezarin thought. The scout car continued on its journey, searching for the next commander in the column. Bezarin ordered his driver to work their vehicle out of the line.
Bezarin navigated the tank into the little town. There appeared to be less damage here, as though it had been surrendered without contest, or as if the battle had passed it by or forgotten it. There were no civilians to be seen, though. Only soldiers in Soviet uniforms. A company-sized refueling point had been set up in the town square, just in front of the church. The vehicle density was such that Bezarin directed his tank into a side street and dismounted to search for the commander.
Bezarin stepped over the hoses with the skill of an accomplished soccer player. It struck him that these smells of fuel and exhaust were the real smells associated with a career in the tank troops. The reek of expended ordnance provided occasional perfume, but the requirement to nourish the machine and the stink of its digestion were constants. As he skirted the rear of one of his own leading tanks the uneven sound of its idle warned him that the engine was in poor shape. But there was no time to investigate under the engine compartment panels. He could only hope that the vehicle would make it into battle. Every fighting vehicle was valuable now.
Bezarin made a note of the vehicle number, intending to return to the matter if there was time. A nearby tank crewman offered him a cautious salute. Bezarin knew he had a reputation as a hard man with little patience. While his soldiers worked willingly enough for him in their way, he did not believe they liked him very much. Assignment to Bezarin’s battalion meant higher standards and harder work than did a position in any of the regiment’s other battalions. Bezarin always tried to do things correctly. He realized that there was something in the Russian spirit that sought the path of least resistance, and he revolted against the shoddy work and low standards that too often resulted from the desire to simply get by from one crisis to another. When his soldiers were scheduled for training, he made certain that they trained. When it came time to perform maintenance tasks, no matter how simple and seemingly trivial, Bezarin stayed with his men to make sure that they did not simply doze off inside their tanks.
The penalty for all of this was that Bezarin had no close friends in the regiment. The other officers regarded him with a mix of jealousy and suspicion, and it was clear that he made them nervous. He knew that the regimental commander did not like him personally. But Bezarin performed so well on training exercises, and he so raised the unit’s statistical performance, that Lieutenant Colonel Tarashvili tolerated him and allowed him to run his own battalion. Rumor had it that the regimental commander was involved in black-market activities. Whether such accusations were true or not, Bezarin had little respect for the man. He did not believe that Tarashvili really understood military matters, except for those garrison duties that kept everyone out of trouble. Bezarin did not even believe that his regimental commander cared for his profession at all.
Now they were at war, and Bezarin had waited all through the night for the least scrap of information on the situation. His respect for his commander had deteriorated still further.
Bezarin spotted a group of officers working over a map spread on the hood of a range car. As Bezarin closed on the group Tarashvili looked up and smiled.
Lieutenant Colonel Tarashvili was a dark, handsome Georgian with a rich mustache and a beautiful southern wife. He was also an excellent military politician, capable of talking circles around political officers and Party officials. Now he touched his mustache with his thumb and index finger, a habit Bezarin recognized from the tensest moments in peacetime exercises.
“Well,” Tarashvili said, still smiling, “Comrade Major Bezarin has arrived. That makes all but one.”
A few of the gathered officers muttered or gestured greetings to Bezarin. He recognized the key members of the regimental staff and the commander of the lead battalion. The regimental chief of staff was missing, however. Bezarin figured he had been sent to the rear to sort out one problem or another. Additionally, there was an air force officer present whom Bezarin did not know.
Bezarin drew out his own map and worked his way into the group. He could already see that the colored lines and arrows of axes and control measures were completely new. Bezarin hurried to copy down as much of the information as possible. Before he could finish, the last battalion commander appeared.
