zone in the northeastern sector of the pocket, were caught by a sudden shift in the crosswind, which swept most of them beyond the perimeter into the very barrage of the British and German batteries that were supposed to have given them covering fire.
Though David Brentwood didn’t know it then, over 270 men had been lost in the first three minutes of landing, caught in the deadly cross fire of a Polish motorized company. The irony was too grim to bear — the drop zone having been selected because intelligence overflights had confirmed that this sector, in the northeasternmost bulge of the pocket, no more than five miles across, was up against the Polish Sixth Motorized Rifle Division. The intelligence experts pointed out that the Poles, though supposedly once loyal members of the old Warsaw Pact, were, in the main, staunchly Catholic, detested the Russians, and would either desert “en masse” or at the very worst offer only token resistance and quickly surrender to Allied forces.
Such intelligence estimates proved disastrously wrong on two counts. No matter what the Poles thought, no matter how Catholic they were, how much they liked America and Americans, they and their cities were being pounded by the NATO bombers that had managed to penetrate the Soviet defense line, which now ran like a jagged cut bisecting Western Germany, swinging off to the southwest where the Soviet advance along the Danube and north to Munich had been the deepest. And no one had to tell David Brentwood after his stint in General Freeman’s celebrated raid on the capital of North Korea barely two months before that when you are being bombed and strafed, you make no distinction between friendly and hostile fire.
In addition to this, Western intelligence did not know that the Sixth Polish MR division, quite apart from wanting to protect its own skin from the Allied bombers’ counterattacks, had another much stronger incentive: the Soviet military police, who shot deserters or malingerers on the spot. It was a policy that the Russians had prepared years ago, during the
This was called
If the Polish and other Eastern European civilian workers — the Hungarians were the worst, in Moscow’s view-sabotaged anything, then the GRU simply reversed the policy and shot their kin who were serving in the armed forces. On the advice of Brig. Kiril Marchenko, adviser to the STAVKA, general headquarters of the VGK — the Soviet Supreme High Command — as well as to the Politburo, the next of kin in the armed forces selected to be punished were taken from administrative divisions wherever possible and not from the frontline spearheads.
It was a policy, however, that was not working well in Lithuania, Latvia, or Estonia, the three Baltic states where the populations were so small that hostages could not be sent back to Russia proper without severely weakening the already overextended civilian labor force, most of whom were forced to work in the shipyards and munitions factories of Riga and Tallinn.
But David Brentwood knew none of the politics behind the Polish motorized division and indeed had never heard of General Kiril Marchenko or his tactics. All he knew, and was grateful for, was a soft landing in what felt like a marsh, his knees and right thigh sodden as he rose.
Quickly unclicking the harness and going into the prone position, he tucked his chin in close to the V of his Kevlar flak jacket beneath the Kevlar helmet, his web harness distributing the weight about his torso, unlike his World War II forebears, who had so often found themselves weighed down below the waist by their packs of ammunition, grenades, canteen, entrenching tool, and sidearm.
Pulling the squad automatic weapon, or SAW, back along his right side, he felt for the plastic protector at the end of the barrel, and instinctively checked with his right elbow whether his sidearm was in position. It was a ritual he had followed ever since Korea, when he had seen one man’s mud-impacted weapon blow up in his face, inflicting wounds that were worse than those suffered by his brother Ray during the North Korean missile boat’s attack on the
Waiting for the next flare, to get his bearings, he tried to listen through the crescendo of noise for the clinking sound of any of his buddies landing nearby. There was a burst of fire off somewhere to his right, sounding like the tearing of linoleum — a light machine gun. But Allied or Soviet, there was no way of telling. It was all so UFU — unbelievably fucked up. Then he heard the pop, like a champagne cork, a flare climbing unhurriedly to its apogee, its harsh, metallic glare casting a ghostly, flickering light a hundred yards across. From experience, he avoided watching the dark, serrated perimeter, where the flickering light could resemble the shapes of everything from a tank to a charging platoon to a machine-gun nest — when there wasn’t anything there. Instead, careful not to move, he froze in the prone position, watching the center of the ever-decreasing circle of light now that the flare was falling, and saw, with fright, a patch of greasy brown only six feet from him, a wriggle of barbed wire across it: a body, American or Russian — perhaps British.
The rolling thunder of approaching artillery shells told him that he was in the line of a creeping barrage. His throat was bone-dry, and he’d already urinated from fear. Now he quickly looked about for any sign of his company and friend Thelman, who had gone through Parris Island and Camp Lejeune with him. There was no sign of them — only the dark mush he’d seen seconds earlier and which he now knew had been a man’s face, the uniform that of a Russian SPETS commando, the outfit that had already been in place throughout Western Europe and had played havoc with the NATO depots the moment war had broken out. He saw what looked like the man’s finger a couple of feet away, but the hands seemed intact — all the fingers still there. Then he realized what the finger was. Jesus… Jesus…
He thought he saw something move between the man’s legs — or what was left of them — where an ooze of intestine had spread over where the man’s testicles had been. The movement Brentwood had seen was a cluster of leeches so fat, they seemed like slugs in the flare’s dying light.
“Yank?”
He swung the squad weapon around to his right, could see nothing, and then could feel the rain of hot earth coming down on him as the American 105-millimeter high-explosive barrage kept coming. He heard a man scream nearby but was too busy huddling beside the corpse, using it as protection, to know where the voice had come from, aware only that if someone didn’t quickly stop the American shelling, he’d be as dead as the maggot-infested corpse filling his nostrils with the putrefaction of death. The scream he’d heard seemed not far away, but it was impossible to tell in the barrage, and David drew himself up into the fetal position, not wishing to see anything, the next barrage so close, he could feel the earth leaping about him, and he wondered if both he and the voice he had heard would be killed — or, if they survived, who would kill whom.
The falling dirt was so thick now, it drummed down on his helmet and cascaded like hot sand over his bronze goggles, which were designed to protect him from harmful ultraviolet rays. “Like we’re going for a fucking suntan!” his buddy Thelman had said when they had been in training at Parris Island and then at jump school at Camp Lejeune. Where the hell was Thelman anyhow? David was getting mad at him — Thelman had only been two in front of him.
“Oh, Melissa…” he murmured, clutching the squad weapon, calling to his girl back home, wondering if he’d ever see her again.
Despite the rubberized earplugs, his ears were ringing so loudly from the shelling, he couldn’t tell whether it had ceased or not. But no earth was falling. Thank God someone had gotten through to the U.S. artillery unit firing the howitzers.
Then the star shells started. Flares with parachutes lit up an area a quarter mile wide, but all David could see was the pockmarked field, as desolate as the moon’s surface. He couldn’t tell from which direction the star shells had been fired — from Polish or American artillery. He thought he heard something scrabbling behind him. It slowed to a crawl. David swung quietly away from the corpse but found he’d slithered down a slight depression, slippery
