Rage of Battle

was never calculated in terms of pain, of lives lost, because already the human face had become obscured beneath the wrap of high technology. Modern technology, contrary to public opinion, had not made killing any less barbaric, the twisted metal of modern munitions wreaking as much hacking and butchering as any of the barbaric wars of old. One of the “advances” in technology was bullets so heavy, yet so small — made of depleted uranium — and of such velocity that upon impact, they could vaporize a man’s head in the way a piece of shell might have in the great artillery barrages of the First and Second World Wars.

For the HQ computer staffs, however, divisions were rectangles moved about on the computer screens, not a torso torn asunder, where arms and legs or stomachs simply disappeared and where carrion crows grew fat on the spilt innards of soldiers. Nor did the statisticians deal with the effect on morale of supersonic fighter attacks, or laser-guided antitank rockets, of the unimaginable nightmare of a cluster bomb bursting, bombs within bombs within bombs, releasing needle-sharp shrapnel. Nor did the statisticians deal with the overwhelming sweet stench of dead flesh that greased the treads of the tanks and APCs as men drove until they were exhausted or their fuel had been expended, many of them becoming nothing more than whimpering shadows of their former selves, their eyes bright with madness from high-tech stress levels beyond bearing.

In the Berlin bunkers, where the state had long held precedence over the individual, the Soviet military statisticians, many of them women, saw none of this — their job to coldly, dispassionately, estimate Allied losses and a timetable for Allied resupply. Bad weather to them was neutral; perhaps it would make the convoy safer, harder to find by visual means — on the other hand, the low mist and rolling fog banks of late fall could impede attack and aid defense on the land. For now, it was the matter of the convoys that Supreme Soviet Commander Marshal Leonid Kroptkin was concentrating upon. So long as the NATO fighter screen held over Western Europe, NATO supply lines through France and through Austria, if Vienna threw in its lot with the NATO forces, would sustain the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket. And if supplies kept coming, the pocket could expand into counterattack. And so the top priority for Moscow and Berlin was to stop the convoys now heading for the French ports, from Dunkirk to Calais in the north to as far southwest as Dieppe, Saint-Malo, and Cherbourg.

“As long as this situation holds,” the Soviet Western Theater of Operations C in C reported, “we have not won the war.” It was not only the Allied submarine-escorted convoys that the marshal worried about, but the Allied capacity to airdrop supplies into the pocket if the NATO convoys succeeded in bringing in enough men and materiel to the ports. What the Russian commander wanted was massive reinforcements from the East preceded by an awesome artillery barrage of a thousand guns of the kind that had finally destroyed the Wermacht and swallowed up Berlin over fifty years ago. His losses had been staggering, the Allies exacting a terrible price, over 130,000 Russians killed while punching the hole through the Fulda Gap, and almost 200,000 Soviet troops wounded.

“There is talk of reserves coming up from Yugoslavia, Marshal,” his aide, a colonel, reminded him, pointing on the wall to the alpine border between northern Yugoslavia and southern Austria. “Through the Ljubljana Gap and —”

“Yes, there is talk,” said the marshal. “There is always a lot of talk, Colonel. And what if Austria does not come over to us and permit the Yugoslavs to pass through?”

“I think they will.”

“Yes, now,” said the marshal. “If it looks as if we are winning.” He turned to the huge, three-dimensional contour table map, his hand sweeping down over southern Germany to Austria. “No, my friend — the Austrians are stuffing themselves full of pastries, eyes darting like parrots west to east, waiting. Their friends are whoever wins. No one can wait for the Austrians.”

“The Yugoslavs could simply push their way through. Whether Austria liked it or not,” proffered the aide.

The marshal was bending over the contour map, his finger tracing the long fold of the Danube valley eastward to the conjunction of Czechoslovakia and Austria. “I thought you went to officers’ school. You should know better than to indulge in such speculation. If the Yugoslavs come in, they will first have to get through the Ljubljana Gap if they are to be any use to us.”

A dispatch rider, goggles and uniform splattered in mud, came in, saluted, and handed the marshal a list of the latest positions of the retreating Dutch forces in Westphalia, north of the Ruhr. The marshal nodded and told the rider to give the report to his logistics aide. The colonel, though distracted for a moment by the sight of the dispatch rider in a room buzzing and crackling with state-of-the-art electronic communications, returned to the subject of possible reinforcements confronting NATO’s southern flank. “Even if the Italians attacked on our southern flank, I doubt whether they could stop the Yugoslavs, Marshal,” the ambitious colonel pressed on.

“Perhaps not,” replied the marshal, his right hand alternately opening and closing to a fist, leaving a finger pointing at the Ljubljana pass. “But the Yugoslavs might stop themselves. With Serbs versus Croats. In any case, Colonel, by the time the Yugoslavs reach southern Germany, the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket could have expanded. No — what we need are more troops. And quickly — so that we can annihilate NATO.” His arms swept across the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket. “Before they can catch their breath. We need to destroy their convoys — and we need more men.”

“You’re thinking,” proffered the colonel, “of the Far East divisions.”

The marshall nodded. In the Far Eastern military theater, the Soviet Union, ever wary of the long-standing and often bitter border disputes with China’s one point four billion and India’s eight hundred million, maintained over fifty divisions, almost a million men, fifteen thousand tanks, sixteen thousand artillery and mortar pieces, and more than fifteen hundred tactical aircraft.

“I have already requested them,” said the marshal. “Whether I get them is another matter.”

“I’m sure you’ll get what you need, Marshal,” said the colonel optimistically.

“Why is it,” the marshal asked no one in particular, running thick, stubby hands through thinning white hair as he looked at the red-flagged bulge on the wall map that marked the disposition of the Soviet armies’ deep penetration of Germany, “that the young are so incurably optimistic?”

A soldier brought the marshal’s tea. “Is it,” continued the marshal, picking up the hard cube of sugar, “because they have no history? Or is it because they have not seen the defeats?” He raised the glass of tea, sucking the hot, steaming liquid through the cube of sugar until it disintegrated in a crunch of tobacco-stained teeth. “I think it is because they have not smelled war,” the marshal answered himself.

Until this moment the colonel had thought he had very much been in the war, but the marshal’s voice, utterly devoid of sentimentality, hard in its every estimate, conveyed to him the sudden truth that up till now, what he had thought was war had only been war behind the front lines, in the relative comfort of albeit makeshift headquarters in the ancient German capitals. Suddenly the colonel felt he needed the comfort of knowing that more men were coming. That thousands would come to aid them — so as to crush the British, American, and Germans in one decisive stroke. To bury all uncertainty.

“Marshal?”

“Yes?”

“Sir — this is meant as no criticism, but I was wondering if it might not be more efficient if we carried out all disposition-of-forces information by radio phone rather than by dispatch rider.”

“You’re worried about our gasoline supply for the armor, eh? Well, so am I. Our supply line is overextended, and I realized that every drop—”

“No, sir. I meant, wouldn’t it be faster — better — to rely on our electronics rather than—”

“Faster,” said the marshal, “of course. But better?” He grimaced, but there was also the hint of a smile. “I don’t think so.”

The colonel was flabbergasted. Had the marshal not attended officers’ school? But the colonel would later remember the incident as the turning point of his military career — the point at which the marshal had dragged him out of the twentieth century into the new age.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Four thousand miles away, it was late afternoon, a stiff easterly clearing New York of its pollution haze, the twin towers of the World Trade Center reflecting the turquoise sky like two enormous slabs of green ice towering above the skyline. But the high wisps of cirrus cloud and the vibrant color of the sky went unnoticed by Adm. John Brentwood. The only reason he noticed the high winds was because of their baleful howling by his New York Port