“Not that I—”
“Baseball, football, of course. Golf — God, he even liked tennis.”
“I like tennis, General.”
“You do?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, can’t be helped. Never took to it myself. Son of a bitch sitting on that high chair, yelling out every shot. ‘Course, my father wouldn’t have it any other way. And dress code— that’s what I’m getting at, Al. Uniform instils pride in a man. First thing you learn in basic training. Now, that padre, you see, he thinks he’ll get closer to the men more laid-back, more slovenly he appears. Doesn’t work.”
“It was only a very small piece of egg, General.”
Freeman ignored the captain’s comment. “You play baseball?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I notice you’re a sou’ paw — left-hander.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. We’ll make a good team, Al.”
The captain was nonplussed. Freeman stepped out into the cold night air, the blackness all around them like a great velvet blanket; not a light could be seen. “You on my left, me on the right. It’s my intention to be in the first chopper. I don’t want anyone saying Freeman freeloaded — took the last chopper in.”
“I don’t think anyone would, General.”
“I’ve got enemies, Al. Say I’m too flamboyant. Too full of myself. Waiting for me to take a fall. You think that? — I’m a windbag?”
“No, sir-I-”
“Yes you do, you son of a bitch. Well, Al, tomorrow at cockcrow we’ll find out.”
Above them they could hear a faint squeaking as the concave dish on the main radar mast passed through a 180-degree sweep, its signal pulsing out into the darkness toward the enemy’s shore.
Inside the hangar, in the long line of soldiers approaching the padre, who had now commandeered a second helmet, a private, first class, a helo side gunner, who, like most of the soldiers in the hangar, had never been in combat before, was veering between sheer fright and the bravado instilled by the general’s speech, asking his comrades imploringly whether a packet of nasal decongestant capsules qualified as a pill he should surrender.
“What’s it do to you?” asked a corporal from one of the
The worried private nipped over the packet. “… Says might cause drowsiness, not to operate machinery.”
“Aw, shit,” said the medic, “take the fucking lot. Any luck, you’ll sleep through it all.”
“What’s your helo number?” asked a marine.
“Twenty-six. Why?”
“Good number to stay away from,” the marine said.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
In Germany, the British Army of the Rhine was fighting for its life in the fifty-five-mile-wide pocket between Bielefeld and Dortmund, where swarms of Sukhoi-24 Fencer ground-attack fighters were wreaking havoc on the British tanks.
The Sukhois, chosen in part for the relatively narrow swept wing width, and painted in green-brown blotch camouflage, had been crated by rail through Poland and the GDR weeks before, reassembled, parked and maintained in the vast Nordhausen tunnel complex in the eastern part of the Harz Mountains, where Hitler had made his V–Is and V-2s out of range of Allied bombers. Rising swiftly, behind a semicircular screen of SAM sites in the Harz foothills between Nordhausen and what had been the West German frontier, the Fencers streamed northeast over Stolberg. Swooping down through cloud over the tranquil bluish green of the Harz, they reached the British army’s defensive position a hundred miles west along the Bielefeld-Dortmund line in less than nine seconds, their terrain-avoidance radar and laser target-seekers cutting through the battlefield’s smoke cover, setting the Challenger tanks ablaze.
When the Challengers fired, their aim was deadly, and they fought hard, even as they fell back northward behind the Weser and Mittelland Canal. The British were taking terrible punishment as well on their southern flank, where East German motorized shock troops were now crossing in force, so that in the depression between Bielefeld and Dortmund, what had been a fifty-five-mile-wide defense base now shrank to thirty-five miles.
As the Russian Fighter/Interceptors streaked down, pouring a deadly hail from twin-barreled twenty-three- millimeter cannons, a British commander watched his battalion of forty tanks and support infantry being systematically destroyed. Here, unlike Fulda, where American and Russian tanks were too close, the Soviets’ gasoline bombs tumbled down — and with such apparent aimlessness, it seemed they could do no harm. Then the big silver “jelly beans” would burst, the saffron fireballs rolling over the velvet green hills. To the men inside the Challenger tanks, whose reactive armor had worked so efficiently in blowing up the Soviets’ earlier high-explosive antitank bullets, the napalm was an agony worse than any gunfire, their bodies becoming torches, all but impossible to extinguish. As one man would try to smother a comrade to snuff out the flame, the jellied gasoline would fly onto the would-be rescuer, the droplets of red-hot mercury sticking to flesh and clothing — often as not, killing two men instead of one. On many occasions British infantry caught by the napalm not only died a screaming death themselves, but proved deadly to comrades as the heat from their burning bodies set off their own ammunition.
The Soviet Fencers supporting the GDR advance did not have it all their own way as the NATO air forces rose to meet them. But the overwhelming numbers of Soviet and Warsaw Pact fighters meant that the NATO fighters trying to contain breakthroughs on the Northern Plain, in the center along the Fulda axis and in the south on the alluvial flats of the Danube, were stretched too thinly, the NATO commander not knowing where the twenty Russian divisions held in reserve would be thrown in, therefore unable to concentrate wholly on any one sector.
It was a Soviet-Warsaw Pact strategy designed for the quick win, to push NATO so far, so quickly, that in the case of a ceasefire
The NATO pilots were exacting a high price, but against all the other intangibles of battle was the stark mathematical fact, known for years before the war, that NATO could not outlast sheer quantity, even with a kill ratio in the air of two to one in the first seventy-six hours.
On the ground the situation was worse, the tank commanders facing Sergei Marchenko and the other ten thousand Soviet tanks having had to maintain a four-to-one kill ratio merely to hold ground.
In the wake of the Soviet-Warsaw Pact three-pronged attack, the old confident air among NATO commanders about Western quality versus Russian quantity took on a decidedly hollow ring.
Leading three other F-16s, one of the NATO pilots, Colonel Delcorte, his F-16 still climbing though getting low on fuel, was in his fourth sortie within seven hours. Based in Hahn with the U.S. Tenth Tactical Wing, Delcorte now had only fourteen of his twenty-six-plane squadron left. Ten were downed outright; two had managed to return to Hahn but were badly shot up.
Of the ten downed planes, three reported bailouts: one’s chute was seen high above Fulda Gap, presumably drifting down over East Germany, the other two pilots picked up southwest of the Bielefeld-Dortmund basin in a heavily wooded section serving as revetment areas for the battered Chieftains. The British-made battle tanks, which, though first-rate and well armed with 120-millimeter cannons and assisted by crack British infantry regiments from the Army of the Rhine, were doomed because of their slower speed compared to the Russian T-90 A’s seventy-five kilometers per hour. Had the Chieftains more time to dig in, it might have been a different story, for
