WW III

tyranny, a tide given its force by those in Moscow who in their unshakable Communist determination wish to rule not only the Soviet Union but the rest of the world. I have asked Premier Suzlov several times this day through the offices of the Soviet Embassy to agree to a cease-fire by midnight tonight Washington time. Should I not receive the answer we want — that hostilities shall cease at that time, that both NATO and the Soviet-Warsaw Pact units will withdraw to the positions they occupied before hostilities began — then we must understand that a state of war exists between the United States and the Soviet Union and her allies.

“I ask you all to join with me, to pray for peace but to stand ready for war. We, like all our allies, hold our breath for all mankind, for all those on the edge of the abyss. But should it come to this, we are resolved to fight if we have to, with all the resources at our disposal. Let us be calm, but let us be firm, firm in the conviction of those Americans who have gone before us, for those Americans who went to do battle with the evils of Hitler and all those of his ilk who would make us slaves and extinguish the flame of freedom.

“Rest assured that the United States will do all in its power to bring the hostilities to a quick and peaceful end. But if our overtures of peace are rebuffed, then the fate of our children is at hand and will reside in our determination, as Americans, to stand up to a bully in the only way we know how: in the words of another American, ‘to give him a thrashing he’ll never forget.’ God bless you all.”

Trainor was stunned, as was a good part of the Congress, by born the brevity and starkness of the president’s oration. Suddenly the Congress erupted in applause as the president walked from the podium, surrounded by a standing ovation. The people, Trainor saw, had done what Americans had always done, rallied about the presidency in times of national peril.

The Secret Service contingent was unable to hold the members of Congress back as they crowded about to shake the president’s hand, but Mayne, his demeanor calm, his stride purposeful, walked up to Senator Leyland and extended his hand. For that moment in the nation’s history, following the speech, beamed all over America, time seemed to stand still and there were no Democrats or Republicans, blacks or whites, there were only Americans.

Trainor’s beaming smile was not simply that of a PR man’s victory but one of genuine affection for his boss; the Hemingway paraphrase about thrashing a bully was a master stroke, he thought — so long as no one pointed out that Hemingway had committed suicide.

* * *

By 4:17 a.m. the Fulda Gap was choked with armor, the destruction by the U.S. Fifth Army’s artillery so unabatedly concentrated that east of the Gap, the plain looked like some vast scrap-yard strewn with the steaming hulls of over a thousand Soviet-Warsaw Pact tanks, the majority of these being obsolete T-62s, of which the Russians alone had twenty-three thousand in reserve and which were unofficially known among the Moscow general staff as dryan— “fodder.” But the tanks had kept coming, and at times, with the air- ripping scream of wire-guided and fire-and-forget antitank missiles, blanket artillery fire and the cacophony of assorted small arms, barrels threatening to jam from unprecedented sustained action, U.S. and West German troops manning tank graders had to be called in to clear a way through as more and more NATO units arrived.

The A-10 Thunderbolts, or rather those who managed to penetrate the increasingly accurate Russian SAM screen, continued to buoy Meir’s spirit. Though his hearing had long gone in the deep fallback bunker at Alfa Two, he still managed to glimpse with awe the twin-engined jets screaming in just above tree level, their seven-barreled Avenger Gatling guns ripping into the oncoming S-WP armor, the stream of the thirty-millimeter cannon fire stuttering into the tanks at over seventy rounds a second, many of the tanks exploding, illuminating others nearby, which became the Thunderbolts’ next targets.

The antitank missiles were doing well, but it was the A-10s that, despite their losses, continued to be the best antitank weapon NATO had in the field, augmenting the fire of the hidden M-1s, whose 120-millimeters kept thumping away from the woods, although many of the American tanks, over 270, had been destroyed by the Soviet-Warsaw Pact onslaught.

As the carnage continued, the biggest surprise to the NATO generals was that the highly touted and sophisticated Swedish BILL antitank missile system, proven so effective at homing in above and destroying the thinner turret armor, was being foiled by the less-sophisticated Soviet T-72 tanks with reactive armor packs on the turret as well as around it and by foil-spewing ejectors that scrambled the incoming missiles’ homing radar. The BILL top-attack warheads, however, extracted a savage price in S-WP infantry — the Russian BMPs’, personnel carriers’, much thinner armor and tracks easily penetrated by the missiles. But still the Russians and East Germans kept coming, astonishing the forward infantry companies of U.S. Fifth Army by using infantry in several instances to clear a minefield before the tanks by running through it, an old Russian tactic from the days of Stalingrad.

Then at 5:00 a.m., 4:00 p.m. Washington time, Russia’s C in C of the western military theater, or TVD, Major General Agursky, received reports that brigades from West Germany’s First Armored and Second Mechanized Divisions were being diverted to reinforce the NATO semicircle of armor around Fulda Gap and that the British First Army, in position south of the Elbe, was moving farther south to shore up the areas depleted by the West Germans heading to Fulda. Agursky gave orders for the second phase of Operation Home Rule to begin.

The Soviet Ninth Armored Division, leading an attack of thirty Soviet-Warsaw Pact divisions, fifteen armored, fifteen mechanized infantry — over 450,000 troops in all — struck and broke through in the far northern sector of NATO’s front, twenty-four miles east of the Elbe, racing for Hamburg and Bremerhaven, the prime designated ports for U.S. resupply of NATO. NATO headquarters had never been sure of Denmark’s willingness to intervene against such a Russian-Warsaw Pact right hook south of Denmark’s border, and eventually NATO’s high command was proven correct, for while the West German Sixth Mechanized Division in Schleswig-Holstein attacked bravely and without hesitation, aided by elements of the eighty-four thousand First German Corps and northern elements of British First Army, the Danish Parliament debated the advisability of becoming involved. By the time they’d decided to send a stern note to Moscow, the Soviet-Warsaw Pact blitzkrieg, spearheaded by five thousand Soviet T-90s, was racing through the dawn toward the vital ports of Hamburg and Bremerhaven, the T-90s’ 135-millimeter laser- guided cannons blasting everything before them. The most strategic bridges over the Elbe were quickly in the hands of the Soviet 207th Airborne, who started a row at Soviet-WP HQ by taking all the glory for having secured the bridges when it was in fact SPETSNAZ, special force teams, already in place in the west, who had secured the bridge crossings by thwarting NATO demolition teams in the first place.

* * *

At Fulda Gap, one of the T-90 five-tank-platoon leaders was Lt. Sergei Marchenko, twenty-four, younger son of Kiril Marchenko and who, because fate had decreed that he be less than five feet six inches in height, had automatically been conscripted to the Soviet Tank Corps, the 2.10-meter-high T-90 being the lowest silhouette of any tank in the world. But what Sergei Marchenko had really wanted to do was fly. What his father wanted him to do was to obey orders so that in time, if he acquitted himself well as a tank commander, he might qualify for transfer. Right now, however, all that Marchenko was concerned about was staying alive — the inside of his T-90, devoid of the airconditioning of the American M-1s, extraordinarily hot due not only to the heat generated by the tank engine and the motors that moved the ten-ton turret but by the smoke and heat generated by the scores of other tanks in the 270-tank division moving toward the Gap. Many of the tanks were now more than fifty meters apart, violating the normal “twenty-five meter” rule of Russian armor. It was an on-the-spot decision by the corps commander to get his tanks as far from one another as possible in an effort to avoid the heavy punishment being meted out by the Thunderbolts and the legendary concentrated artillery fire of the Americans, many of whose guns, as in Fulda Gap, had long been pre-positioned to saturate grids within grids. Apart from the heat in the tank, Marchenko, after two hours of combat, found the noise of the turret grating and squeaking, the crash of the automatic loader, the high whine of electric motors, and above all the radio traffic, was so overwhelming in its disorientation, he removed his headset. It was a court-martial offense during full attack, but whoever wrote the rules in Moscow didn’t drive a tank.

Lowering his dust goggles, he stood up, one arm resting against the 12.70 machine gun, as he watched another wave of armor and armored personnel carriers barely visible forging through the dust and smoke, the whole division under orders that once they were through the Gap, they were to wheel south in an effort to engage American and German reinforcements on the Fulda front. What they needed now, thought Sergei, even more than air-conditioning, was for the Soviet MiGs to deal a death blow to the F-15s and F-16s and to clear the skies of damned American Apache helicopters that were so good at ducking down in gaps between the woods and ambushing two to three tanks at a time before they were blown out of the air. Unfortunately the Soviet Havoc