Gordunov raged at the thought of the bridge falling back into enemy hands so easily. It seemed as though the air assault force defenses had simply melted away. No one returned the fire of the tanks.
Gordunov cut around the corner of a building, screaming orders at his men not to fire at him. Lieutenant Svirkin rose to meet him, his face blank.
“Where’s the nearest antitank grenadier?” Gordunov demanded. “Have you got anybody close by?”
Svirkin thought for a moment, infuriating Gordunov with his slowness. “I think… there’s a launcher back down the street.”
Gordunov seized the lieutenant’s arm. “Where? Show me.”
The lieutenant obediently led the way. Rushing across intersections, the two officers fired blindly in the direction of the tanks. Beyond a pair of dead civilians, they found two soldiers lying flat behind a wave of rubble. One of them had an antitank grenade launcher.
Gordunov could hear the tanks firing. It sounded as though they were very close to the bridge.
“Get up,” he ordered the soldiers. “Come with me. You, too, Lieutenant.”
He led them in a rush down behind the post-office building. Whatever Karchenko was doing in his company command post, it wasn’t stopping tanks. Gordunov felt a sickening sense of collapse. His instincts told him that this section of the defense had gone wrong, that Karchenko simply had not had it in him as a company commander to handle the mission. Gordunov regretted that he had not relieved him the night before when he had failed to bring back the body of the battalion chief of staff.
Gordunov waved them all down. The soldiers fell flat in the street, weapons ready. But no targets were visible.
“They’re up around the next corner,” Gordunov told them. The whirring and grinding of the tanks as they worked through the wreckage in the streets was unmistakable. Then a quick pair of explosions, followed by bursts of Soviet fire, signaled that somebody was fighting back.
“You.” Gordunov singled out the grenadier. “Come with me. Svirkin, you stay here and make damned sure we don’t get cut off.”
The lieutenant nodded. But Gordunov had no confidence in him now. He was familiar with the pattern from Afghanistan. Men who had performed reasonably well suddenly reached their limit, triggered into a near-stasis either by an unexpected, demoralizing event or simply by nervous exhaustion. No one was completely predictable. And few were consistently brave.
Gordunov expected to get shots into the rear of the tanks. But as soon as he and the grenadier reached the target intersection, a third tank appeared, bringing up the rear. The two men were caught in between the lead tanks and the trail vehicle.
The grenadier knelt, shaking. He balanced the weapon on his shoulder and fired. The round struck just below the mantlet of the gun, near the turret ring. But the huge trail tank kept coming, firing its machine guns.
The grenadier jerked up from his knees, then collapsed. The machine-gun fire kicked his body backward, rolling it over.
Gordunov pressed himself as flat as he could against a covering wall. As the tank passed him, impossibly loud, it concentrated its fire down the side street up which Gordunov and the grenadier had come. But the vehicle had its hatches sealed, and its field of vision did not include the spot in which Gordunov lay. As the tank rumbled past he dashed for the grenade launcher, scrambling the last few meters on knees and elbows. He ripped at the dead boy’s pack, from which the trails of two more antitank rounds jutted. Each moment, he expected gunfire to strike him. But he managed to work the pack off the heavy, bloody body. He slung it over one shoulder and rolled back toward the slight cover available. It was foolish to commit tanks into a built-up area without infantry support, and Gordunov was determined to make the enemy pay for it.
He thought he remembered how to work the device, how to sight it. He loaded a round, snapping it into the launcher with a reassuring click. He remembered that the logical order of the hands had to be reversed for a proper hold and balance. He slung his rifle around crossways on his back so that he could pull it quickly into a firing stance. Then he rose and ran for the intersection again, moving as swiftly as his crippled leg would carry him.
The rear of the tank that had killed the grenadier was completely exposed. Beyond it in the distance, Gordunov could see that the lead tank was smoking. The scene elated him. His men were still fighting. Someone had killed the lead tank. Gordunov shouldered the launcher, aimed for the back of the trail tank’s engine compartment, and fired.
The target was so close that he could feel the shock of the impact through his body. As a minimum, he figured that he had gotten a mobility kill. And the tank did, indeed, lurch to a halt, smoke rising from its rear deck. Gordunov scuttled to a nearby doorway, laying down the launcher and tugging his assault rifle around into his arms. He took aim, waiting for the crew members to emerge.
The crew appeared reluctant to abandon the tank. They attempted to traverse the gun to the rear. But the narrowness of the street would not permit it, even with the gun at maximum elevation. Gordunov grew so involved with the spectacle of the turret’s attempts to turn on him that he almost missed the movement beneath the tank as the crew slipped out of an escape door in the bottom of the hull.
Gordunov waited for a second man to drop to the street. When no other crew members appeared, he swept the area between the tank’s tracks with his assault rifle. He could see the reaction of the trapped, stricken men, like nervous puppets. He emptied an entire magazine into them, then reloaded. When the bodies remained still, he reloaded the antitank grenade launcher.
The middle tank in the column continued to fire wildly, aware that it had been trapped. Gordunov approached in bounds, closing to where he could get a clear shot. They had tried to take his bridge. But it was not going to be that easy. He felt wonderfully capable again, unbeatable.
He positioned himself behind the cover of the flank of the vehicle he had just killed, angling the grenade launcher for another shot. In the moment of aiming, his location in time and space blurred. He was back on the road to Kandahar, and fighting his way out of mountain ambushes, and soldiering in a thousand places he could not recognize. There was only the enemy, a timeless thing, waiting. Gordunov tightened his finger on the trigger.
A surviving crewman from the wrecked tank shot him in the back with a pistol.
Eighteen
A blackened man with no forearms walked straight toward the front commander’s son, fanning the air with his stumps like a medieval beggar giving a performance, possessed eyes hunting the beyond. Anton instinctively backed against his command car. It seemed impossible to him that the man could be alive and walking at speed, trailing burned strings of his uniform in the bonfire heat.
The casualty half strutted, half staggered past his brigade commander, admitted to a different reality. Anton Malinsky, guards colonel and commander of the Third Brigade of the premier Forty-ninth Unified Army Corps, looked about helplessly. The few whole men on the scene appeared as separate and incapable as Anton felt himself to be. He sensed he should be giving orders, dramatically organizing the disaster and alleviating its effects. But it was simply too big, and there was no one to whom to turn.
Fools had done it, Anton told himself. Unpardonable fools. Behind a row of gutted hulks, a fresh fuel explosion stirred the metallic air. Anton hunched behind the flank of his vehicle, but the blast was too far away to reach him. He understood intellectually that he had just lost an entire combined arms battalion that had yet to see the combat for which it had been so finely organized and equipped and for which it so long had trained. Gone, in moments. Yet he could not quite get at the totality of the event.
He felt the pulpy wastes building up pressure in his intestines again. Since the previous evening, he had come down with diarrhea so severe that he had not been able to ride in his command track but had had to remain in his range car during the road march so that he could pull off suddenly without interrupting the entire flow of traffic. During a helicopter liaison visit to Major General Anseev’s corps mobile headquarters, he had almost soiled himself. He felt increasingly weak. The brigade surgeon had given him pills but had sufficiently doubted their potency that he’d recommended that Anton chew a bit of charcoal as well. Anton had taken the man’s advice, forcing down the
