"Identified!" exclaimed Sergeant Cox. He had already found an enemy tank and placed the red targeting dot on it.
Specialist Mann tapped the loader's door lever with his knee, opening it up. He reached in the ammo well and grabbed another sabot round, slamming it into the breech of the cannon and pulling up on the arming handle. “Up!” he yelled.
"Fire!" screamed Diss. It felt like they could be blown up at any given second, and he was not about to waste time.
"On the way!" screamed Sergeant Cox.
He depressed the firing button. Boom! The cannon fired, recoiling back inside the turret. The more rounds they fired, the more the cabin filled with the sulfuric fumes of battle.
Continuing to press their attack, the Mustangs were now less than a thousand meters from the Russians as the enemy pushed their own assault.
Clang, clang, clang.
Three 30mm autocannon rounds from the BMPs bounced harmlessly off the turret of their tank. While the enemy rounds couldn’t penetrate their armor, it was still nerve-racking to realize their tank was taking multiple hits from the enemy.
While the Mustangs continued to charge the enemy formation, several of their brigade’s Apache helicopters let loose a string of hellfire missiles at the remaining enemy vehicles, destroying most of them. The helicopters then flew directly over their tanks, using their 30mm chain gun on the remaining armored vehicles as Captain Diss’s tanks continued to press home their attack.
Seeing a swarm of infantry disembarking the BTRs and BMPs, Captain Diss yelled to his gunner, “Keep firing the main gun!”
He needed to get up in the commander’s hatch and deal with the infantry. Swarms of infantry carrying RPGs were just as dangerous as an enemy tank if left unattended. Flipping the hatch open, Diss climbed up to his perch, unlocked the M2 .50 machine gun from its locking mount and trained the heavy weapon on a cluster of infantry soldiers maybe 800 meters to his front.
Depressing the butterfly button, he launched streams of .50-caliber rounds at the enemy soldiers, shredding many of them in seconds. One of the enemy soldiers had managed to set up an antitank missile with the help of one of his comrades — Diss sighted in on them and fired a short burst of fire in their direction. Afterward, all he saw was a red splattering of flesh and blood erupting, and then the missile they were trying to set up also exploded, adding its own shrapnel to the mix.
While his tank continued to charge forward, the main gun boomed nearly every eight seconds and they continued to nail enemy vehicles. As they got closer to the enemy soldiers, more bullets flew in his direction, many of them hitting the tank’s armor but not far away from hitting him in his perch. Captain Diss knew he needed to get back inside the tank, but he couldn’t resist the adrenaline high he was experiencing as his tank charged forward and he stood in the commander’s hatch, firing away on the infantry with his .50-caliber machine gun. He felt like a god swatting away all that stood before him. However, when the gun ran out of ammo, he loaded another box in its place and then dropped down into the turret again, closing the hatch behind him.
Five more minutes went by as they finished off the remaining enemy vehicles and passed through the Russian lines, using their machine guns to finish off whatever infantry they came across. Captain Diss was under strict orders to press home their attack and keep going. Follow-on units moving behind them would clean up any stragglers or fortified positions they felt they had to bypass.
Once they traversed through the enemy lines, Diss called in a crew report to find out how bad their losses were. By the time his platoons had reported in, he discovered they had one tank destroyed to enemy artillery, two tanks disabled from the enemy artillery, three tanks destroyed by antitank missiles, and two tanks destroyed by the most recent enemy action with another tank disabled. His company had effectively lost fifty percent of their tanks, making them combat ineffective.
“Dear God — and we’ve only reached waypoint Bravo,” he thought. Captain Diss shook his head in disappointment and sorrow at the loss of his men. He radioed in their losses to battalion, who ordered Charlie Company forward to take their place. For the time being, Delta Company was out of the fight until their disabled vehicles could get repaired and they could return to the battle.
Humpty Dumpty
President Petrov looked at the latest battle report from the front lines. He was not happy with what he was reading. “How could things be unraveling so quickly?” he thought. A year ago, the Americans and Europeans had been in their final death throes, and now it felt like the walls of the war were rapidly closing in on him. He wasn’t sure Russia could still win without using nuclear weapons.
Sighing, Petrov depressed the intercom button on his desk. “Send them in,” he said to his secretary, whose desk was directly outside his office.
In walked General Boris Egorkin, the head of the Russian Army, Alexei Semenov, the Minister of Defense, General Kuznetsov, the head of the Russian Air Force, and Admiral Anatoly Petrukhin. He’d wanted this meeting to be small and secretive for the time being. When the outer door closed, Petrov signaled to his Head of Security that he didn’t want anyone to disturb them. The agent nodded and made sure the outer guards knew not to let anyone in, no matter who they were.
Blowing air out of the side of his mouth in frustration, Petrov began, “Generals, it’s only the five of us in this room, so I need honest answers. I need to know how long we have left.”
The other men in the room almost visibly deflated in their chairs. Perhaps they had believed their own lies, or the half-truths their subordinates had told them, but in that moment, they realized Petrov knew the jig was up. Defeat was all but assured at this point. It was just a matter of how and when, not if anymore.
General Kuznetsov was the first to speak. “Mr. President, I am not confident our air forces are going to be able to prevent the Allies from eventually dominating the skies. More than seventy percent of our fighter and ground-attack planes have been destroyed. We still have most of our strategic bombers, but I’m not sure how long that will last. We have to rotate their bases every couple of days to prevent the Allies from locating and destroying them.”
He paused for a second, as if he was debating whether or not he should say what he wanted to say next. “Over the last couple of months, the Americans have used a new weapon to counter the advantage our S-400 had given us over the Allies up to this point. When they launch an attack on our integrated air-defense pockets, they send in multiple aircraft that launch a series of AGM-158 joint air-to-surface standoff missiles. These missiles have been specifically equipped with sophisticated jamming and electronic spoofing equipment. On radar, the aircraft appears to be an enemy fighter, which our SAMs rightly move to engage. While this is happening, the Americans release a series of small-diameter precision-guided glide bombs at our radar and missiles sites. These are small but effective little bombs they’ve come up with.”
The general paused for a second and sighed. “This new attack strategy is proving to be incredibly effective, Mr. President. The Allies have managed to destroy more of our SAM sites in the last three months than they had in the previous twelve months. These are not sustainable losses. It’s already having a hugely negative effect on our ability to protect our ground forces, as I’m sure General Egorkin can attest. We are working on figuring out how to counter this, but short of us completely disabling the world’s entire satellite network, which I might add would obliterate our own satellite capability, there just isn’t too much we can do.”