under his knees, and it was staring at her like a one-eyed snake, and she knew that directly above them was her grandson.
“You want it, don’t you?” he asked. It was part of the game. He knew she didn’t. How could anyone think she wanted to?
“Yes,” she said.
“Say ‘I can’t wait.’ “
“I can’t wait.”
He handed her the small, opened can of honey. “Put some on me.”
She dipped her finger in the honey — trembling. She could not have him here another day. Edouard was probably right— his look had told her he believed his parents had been executed by the Viru Gate. And she knew that even when the troops left the Mustamae apartments, the corporal would not stop “calling” on her. Edouard would always be a hostage to the corporal. How many other women was he doing this to? She put the honey on him.
“All round the top,” he instructed her, guiding her hand, groaning with pleasure. She made her decision. She would be especially nice to him, then ask him to take her to Kadriorg Park, and put an end to it.
“Now,” he said. “Be a good bear, eh?”
She smiled quizzically at him. “A bear?”
“Lick your honey,” he explained.
Tossing her head to one side with an abandon the corporal had not seen in her before, Malle pinned her hair back so as to keep it out of the way, then, her tongue moistening her lips, her eyes closed, she lowered herself to him. She would make it the best he’d had.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Before the war, the kill ratio on the NATO books was six to one — that is, six Soviet combatants had to be killed for every NATO combatant if NATO was to hold. Within four hours of the Fulda Gap, becoming the Fulda “Gash,” the ratio changed dramatically to ten to one, the armored spearheads of the Soviet divisions, a half million men in all, first crossing the Polish plain with a speed that surprised even General Marchenko. He had long held that the “fatal flaw” in NATO’s armor would be the West’s bourgeois reluctance to engage “other elements,” by which he meant the West’s reluctance to kill civilians. And he believed it would work in the Soviets’ favor.
He was right. The army of refugees fleeing west of Fulda, and indeed, all along the north-south axis that had been NATO’s central front, impeded NATO tank reinforcements. No matter how “hard-nosed,” as the Americans called it, NATO’s troops had been trained to be, most British, American, and particularly Dutch tank regiments found it unacceptable to fire point-blank into the human tide of refugees that clogged the roads. Some of the Allied tanks, seeing a blur of red, the treads of Russian T-90s mercilessly rushing and chopping through the screaming columns of refugees, did open fire. The belch of the M-1s and Leopards, their 120- and 105-millimeter guns sending white-hot, dartlike armor-piercing tungsten through the tightly packed refugees in efforts to stop the Russian T-90s, only added to the carnage. The air sleeve alone surrounding the armor-piercing needle, traveling and discarding its sabot, or shoe, at over forty-five hundred feet a second, was so hot that it alone seared people for distances up to two or three meters from the trajectory path. Even so, the molten discarding sabot rounds and the HESH — high- explosive squash heads — of molten metal that were deadly as tank killers, effective on both sloped as well as flat armor, were not the rounds that caused the major casualties among the refugees. This dubious honor was left to the high-explosive antipersonnel rounds which were favored by both sides, as much to destroy supporting infantry as the tanks that spearheaded them.
In the first twenty-four hours following the Soviet break-through to a megaphone-shaped two-hundred- square-mile area west of Fulda, there were over seventeen thousand civilian casualties, most of these women and children. In the raging cacophony of the battle, involving five thousand NATO and Soviet tanks, the inability of NATO Medevac choppers to get through the dust, smoke, and cross fire meant that many wounded civilians and combatants perished who would otherwise have survived had they been treated at MASH units within the first two critical hours of having been hit. This was particularly the case among the elderly, many of them disoriented — some gone mad from the sight and smells of bodies blown apart and from the ear-shattering screams of shellfire and the gut-punching sound of earth exploding all about them. Utterly confused in the tumult of the highly mobile battle, positions of friend and foe shifting rapidly from one moment to the next, and dazed by indiscriminate artillery and mortar fire, some of the elderly were separated from loved ones, and wandered about, dazed, blinded by dust and smoke, suffocating in gasoline-drenched air and then crunched beneath the advancing Soviet and defending NATO tanks.
The breaching of the gap by the Russian army divisions had come much faster than expected, not only because bad weather over the Polish plain hampered Allied air attacks, but because of a single piece of equipment, vastly underestimated by the Allies.
As reports came through to Allied HQ in Brussels, it quickly became evident that the T-90s, having been fitted with thermal imagers of a quality underestimated by NATO intelligence, had created havoc during nighttime battles. In addition to mixtures of expensive laser and Stad R stereo coincidence and optical range finders, neither of which was proving as good in actual battle conditions as in maneuvers, when the cost of real shells had precluded thorough testing, the Russian T-90s and T-80s had a thermal sight. Originally made under contract in South Korea, and later copied in East Germany, it proved remarkably resilient, whereas the other, more sophisticated, laser imagers used by NATO had run into unexpected trouble after the sustained shock of actual combat.
Although Maj. Kiril Marchenko had played only a relatively minor role in advocating the thermal sight, he nevertheless managed to take a lion’s share of the credit. And it was true that the purchase of the much less expensive thermal imagers did fit with his advocacy of the
In turn, a quick war meant that not only must sabotage be ruthlessly stamped out in the republics, as General Brodsky in Tallinn had finally realized, but armored columns had to be trained to fight as well at night as in the daylight. Accordingly, at Marchenko’s urging — a very unpopular move at the time — T-90 and T-80 tank regiments had been trained on the vast Russian steppes
One advantage the NATO tanks did possess was a gun depression of nine and ten degrees, twice that of the Russian tanks, so that whenever NATO armor was given the chance to withdraw to defensive, hunkered down defilade firing positions, they exacted a deadly price for any S-WP advance. Still, the sheer numbers of the Russian tanks that had poured through the Fulda Gap, a ratio of four to one, had overwhelmed and continued to overwhelm NATO. And this despite the carnage visited upon the massed Russian armor by the high-tail-engined American Thunderbolts. Once thousands of tanks were joined in close battle, often at ranges of less than a thousand yards, the deadly hail of the American Thunderbolts’ armor-piercing twenty-millimeter cannon fire was lost, for in the confusion of night battles particularly, where a T-90 and an M-l became indistinguishable on the pilot’s infrared, NATO’s air superiority in ground attack aircraft ceased to count.
Out of the melee a report, initially lost or simply disregarded in the avalanche of incoming signals, reached an Allied intelligence officer in Heidelberg. It would forever change the nature of war, and strike down the prejudice of renowned tank commanders like Gen. Douglas Freeman.
Recovered from his hospitalization and riding high on his Korean exploits, Freeman, over the objections of most of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had been ordered by the president to take over command of the Dortmund- Bielefeld pocket. Freeman, known to even the European troops as “George C. Scott” after his successful attack on
