with you.”
The red light over the ramp winked on. The sergeant major worked the controls and the ramp in the back of the plane yawned open. Grisha stepped forward and snapped his cord onto the cable at the front of the growing line.
He grinned around at the serious young faces. “I got the most rank, so I get to go first.”
They laughed and roared their approval.
The green light snapped on with a buzz.
“Go!” shouted the sergeant major.
Grisha ran the few meters to the end of the ramp and threw himself into space. The parachute snapped open with a loud crack and the harness jerked him upward, the straps cinched tighter on his thighs. Relief rushed through him.
The damn thing really opened.
He had never liked the idea of parachutes.
He looked around. Chutes blossomed above him in increasing numbers. Off to his right and left flew two of their companion aircraft. Men poured out the ends of both filling the air like giant dandelion seeds in a stiff breeze.
Something snitted past his face and he looked down on a scene of chaos. A firefight raged at close quarters at the front of the tree line. Russian tanks fired at pockets of soldiers who weakly returned fire.
Destroyed armor littered the meadow. From the woods around the battlefield small-arms fire winked up at the paratroopers.
Grisha unlimbered his AR-15 and returned fire. The ground rushed up at him.
83
Sergeant Rudi Cermanivich rubbed blood out of his eyes and peered at the tank again. His body throbbed with pain and every time he swallowed he tasted blood.
Where was the damned flier?
If he hadn’t had to blink the blood from his eyes he would have nailed the bastard with the second shot. He wondered how long he had to live, if the horrific fall down the valley would claim his life later or sooner.
Things had happened so quickly. As the road gave way under their tank it flipped, throwing him and Colonel Lazarev out of the hatch. Cermanivich had been tossed wide of the tank’s path of death and fell into the scant tree line.
The first tree he hit slowed him but took off half his scalp in the process. The next time he hit the branches caught him and he fell grabbing, cursing, shrieking down through them, unable to defy gravity. The tree bordered a scree pile and he landed in it with crushing force that gave no mercy or pause.
Down he tumbled in the loose, jagged rock, tearing and cutting his hands, feet, legs, ass, face, knees. He bounced into one of the large boulders scattered throughout this barbarous valley and slammed shoulderfirst into the loose rock. When he could move again he wiped away the blood streaming down his face.
He saw one of the Velikoff rifles they carried in the tanks, not three meters from him. It looked completely unharmed.
Moving created more anguish than he thought possible or reasonable. But he must see to his comrades, it was the tanker way. Using the rifle for a crutch, he slowly made his way over to the once proud command tank hull and peered inside.
Corporal Ivanivich’s uniform held what was left, but most of him coated the steel walls. No sign of the colonel or Kalkoski, the gun server. Sergeant Cermanivich hobbled over to the turret and found no trace of his commander or subordinates.
He surveyed the devastation around him, realized that most of the column lay before him and he was the sole survivor. Without hesitating or caring for his injuries, he started up the grim path left by the tank avalanche. After a hundred meters the pain became unbearable and he sat on a rock, promising himself he would just take a short respite. While he sat there trying to ignore the pain, he saw movement down by the river.
Slowly he eased off the rock and positioned himself behind a slightly larger boulder. He wiped his sleeve across his eyes to clear the incessantly seeping blood from his vision. Focusing on the man, thank the saints it wasn’t a bear, he realized it was an enemy aviator.
Who was the enemy? he wondered. The Dena didn’t have an air force that he was aware of. And the air attack was nothing if not professional. U.S.A.? C.S.A.? Kalifornia?
“They were good enough to wipe us out,” he muttered.
An intense hatred for the downed flyer suffused his being and he laid the rifle on the rock in front of him. As quietly as possible he chambered a round and took aim.
He decided to wait for the man to stop and rest, or else get much nearer. Between the seeping blood and the other injuries he had endured, he didn’t trust his ability to take the target on the wing, as it were. He chuckled silently.
“As it were,” he whispered. An old friend used to say that so often that when he said anything, at least half the people listening would intone together: “As it were.” Harris had been an English deserter who wound up in the Czar’s tank corps. Harris died in Afghanistan a year ago, instantly, when he stepped on an antipersonnel mine.
Sergeant Cermanivich shook his head angrily and immediately regretted the action. His head all but burst with the pain of a dozen hangovers smashed into one. He held himself very still as the wave of anguish washed over him and slowly receded.
The flyer, an officer, he suddenly realized with a smile, peered into the command tank hull before looking away and vomiting. Cermanivich grinned, happy to discover his enemy was weaker than himself.
The pilot-officer walked to the turret and stared inside again without hesitation. Well, he didn’t lack guts, the sergeant decided. Then the flier leaned back against the turret and sank to his butt.
Sergeant Cermanivich quickly steadied the rifle across the rock, took careful aim between the man’s eyes. He took a deep breath and held it, the muzzle didn’t waver a millimeter, and squeezed the trigger—just as the flier dropped his head over and down between his knees.
Cermanivich, cursing the fates, the bolt action of the rifle, and goddamn pilots in general, chambered another round, took quick aim as fresh blood obscured his vision and fired. Hands remembering what brain had forgotten, he instantly chambered another round and fired. And missed again.
His quarry went to ground. But the man must be unarmed else he would have returned fire, no? So the obvious solution was to wait for him to break cover and then nail him once and for all.
Cermanivich eased his aching butt back up onto the larger rock, wiped blood from his eyes, and waited with his rifle across his lap.
84
Like everyone in sight of the contest, Wing watched Malagni battle the huge Russian. Even before the quicksilver blade of the
Soldiers from both sides watched the titanic struggle, ignoring their enemies and shouted orders from those not in line of sight, totally mesmerized by two men fighting it out hand to hand on the battlefield with naught but steel between them.
Then the first fatal blow, and Malagni jerked back and with all his remaining strength and might, swung his
