The army commander looked at the staff colonel. “And if it doesn’t work? If they simply ignore it? Or if they fight all the harder because of it?”
“They won’t,” Shtein said. “But no matter if they did respond that way initially. We have similar film for Hameln. And we may actually be required to strike one mid-sized city very hard, say Bremen or Hannover. But in the end, the General Staff is convinced that this approach will help bring the war to a rapid conclusion, and on very favorable terms.”
Trimenko turned to Chibisov. “I don’t like it. It’s unsoldierly. We mustn’t divert any assets from the true points of decision.”
Chibisov noted a change in Trimenko’s voice. The army commander was no longer as adamant in tone, despite his choice of words. He would accept his responsibility, as Chibisov had accepted his own. Now it just required another push, for form’s sake.
Chibisov turned to Dudorov, the chief of intelligence. “Yuri, what do you think of all this? You understand the West Germans better than any of us.” Dudorov always preferred to be called by his first name without the patronymic, another of his Western tastes.
Dudorov looked at Chibisov and the army commander with all of the solemnity his chubby face could manage. And he was unusually slow in speaking. “Comrade Generals… I think this is absolutely brilliant.”
Chibisov wandered down to the operations center after seeing Trimenko off. The local air controller did not want to clear Trimenko’s helicopter for takeoff, due to expected traffic. The air controller did not know that the traffic would be the beginning of the air offensive, only that he had been ordered to keep the skies cleared beginning one hour before military dawn for priority air movements. The clearance had required Chibisov’s personal involvement, and the delay further contributed to Trimenko’s bad mood. He needed to be at his army command post now. Shortly, the skies would be very crowded indeed, as aircraft shot to the west, their flights cross-timed with the launch of short-range missiles and artillery blasting corridors through the enemy’s air defenses. Then the entire front would erupt.
The operations center was calmer, quieter than Chibisov expected. The calm before the storm, he thought to himself. Malinsky was still napping, and Chibisov let him sleep. Tomorrow, Malinsky would move forward to be with the army commanders during critical periods and to direct operations from the front’s forward command post closer to the West German border. He needed all the rest he could get. Chibisov required less sleep than the front commander, and they had an unspoken arrangement between them on that, too.
An officer-clerk moved to the big map now and then, while other officers took information over telephones. The bank of control radios remained quiet, except for routine administrative traffic that the enemy would be expecting. Out in the darkness, formations and units were sending just enough routine transmissions, usually from bogus locations, to lull the enemy into a sense of normalcy. But the critical war nets still slumbered.
Seven minutes, and the first plane would take off from an airfield in Poland. Then the other aircraft between Poland and the great dividing line would come up in sequence, a metal blanket lifting into the sky. Chibisov agreed with Malinsky. The air offensive was critical.
Chibisov walked around a bank of data processors to the second row of desks back from the master situation map. He stopped at the position of the front’s radio electronic combat duty officer. He put his hand on the shoulder of the lieutenant colonel, signaling him to remain at his screen.
“Everything all right?”
“Yes, Comrade General.”
“No surprises?”
“Not yet. We won’t know for at least half an hour, maybe longer if it gets really bad. Nothing on this scale has ever been attempted before.”
Chibisov was aware of the potential problems. When you attempted to employ these weapons of the new age, attacking the enemy’s communications complexes and radars, there was always the worry that you would strike your own critical networks — that, somehow, key aspects had been overlooked or inadequately tested. There was so much that was about to happen for the first time. Chibisov pictured the electromagnetic spectrum as crowded with an almost visible flood of power. The manipulation of nature itself, Chibisov thought, of natural laws and properties, more of the deadly wonders of technology. Yet he knew that there were men out there, waiting to blast and fill and tear at the border barriers, waiting at the literal edge of war, who were as frightened as their earliest ancestors had been when they came out of their caves to do battle.
Chibisov moved on to check the latest returns on fuel consumption.
Three
Nobody wanted to touch the body. The soldiers stood around the corpse in the drizzling rain, staring. The rain tapped at the open, upturned eyes and rinsed the slack mouth under the glare of the lantern. Bibulov, the warrant officer who had been left in charge of the vehicle trans-loading, tried to remember the soldier’s name. He recalled that the boy was a Tadzhik. But the elusive Asian consonance of his name escaped him, teasing just beyond his mental grasp. The boy had come to the unit unable to speak any Russian beyond the primitive sounds necessary for survival. And all of the prissy, well-intentioned efforts of the language skills collective had not brought him to proper speech. The boy had done as ordered, imitating when he did not understand, and had waited as mutely as a resting animal between jobs. It seemed to Bibulov as though the boy had set his mind to endure the two years in uniform required of him with the minimum of personal engagement. To do as he was made to do, uncomplainingly, until it came time to return to his distant home. Now he was dead, and the war had not even begun.
Bibulov believed that there would, indeed, be a war, and that it would come soon. But now there was only the frantic shifting of cargoes in the middle of a rainy night. The guns had not yet begun to squander their accounts of ammunition. Yet the boy was absurdly dead, as though fate could not wait a few more hours or another day. Bibulov shook his head, attempting to select the correct response, the course of action that would result in the least trouble.
Somehow, it was in the natural order of things. If not this, then something else. The premature death accorded with Bibulov’s view of the world and of his own place in it. What more could reasonably be expected?
And what did they expect, when exhausted soldiers were detailed to trans-load the unwieldy crates of artillery charges and rounds in the rain with their bare hands, without even the most rudimentary tools? It seemed to Bibulov as though nothing of significance had changed in a hundred, perhaps a thousand years. Oh, there were the trucks, of course. The big trucks from the army materiel support brigade brought the cargo from the army’s forward supply base to the transshipment point at division. Then brute strength — wet, splinter-riddled hands — shifted and hoisted and lugged the stone-heavy boxes through the mud to the smaller trucks of the artillery regiment or to the shuttling division carryalls. The trucks were fine. But between the full and empty trucks lay a pool of timelessness, where animal labor continued to dominate.
Bibulov had watched helplessly in the muted glow of the safety lights as the unbalanced crate began to slip. It started with a fatal shift on the shoulders of weary boys. Then it proceeded relentlessly, a dance of silhouettes, as the crate slowly edged forward, quickening, then dropping very fast as the struggling boys abandoned it one after the other in a swift chain reaction. At the climax of the brief drama, the Tadzhik was a last tiny shape, twisting in a moment’s terror and sprawling backward under the weight, padding its fall with his chest. By the time they heaved the crate off to the side, the boy was dead.