The crew snapped to attention. Shilko loved the small tribute, even as it always embarrassed him just a little.
“Sit down, Comrades, sit down.”
A sergeant bent to draw tea from the battered samovar, and Shilko knew the cup was for him. They were all good boys, a good team.
“Your tea, Comrade Battalion Commander.”
Shilko took the hot cup lovingly in both of his big hands. It was another of life’s small wonderful pleasures. Hot tea on a rainy night during maneuvers. The army couldn’t run without its tea.
He caught himself. It wasn’t a matter of maneuvers this time. He stepped into the fire direction center vehicle and bent over the gunnery officer’s work station, where a captain with a long wave of hair down in his eyes poked at the new automated fire-control system.
“And how are we progressing, Vladimir Semyonovitch?”
The captain looked up. His face had a friendly, trusting look. It was the sort of look that Shilko wanted every one of his officers to have when their commander approached. “Oh, it will all sort out, Comrade Commander. We’re just working out a few bugs in the line. The vehicles keep cutting our wires. But the battery centers are each functional individually.”
Shilko put his hand on the man’s shoulder. “I’m counting on you. You can’t expect an old bear like me to figure out all of this new equipment.” Although he said it in a bantering tone, Shilko was serious. He understood the concepts involved and what these new technical means theoretically offered. And he was willing to accept any help they could give, just as he was ready to lay them aside if they failed. But he was personally frightened by the thought of sitting down behind one of the forbidding little panels and attempting to call it to life. He suspected that he would only embarrass himself. So he gladly let the young men pursue the future, and when they performed well, he was grateful, and he encouraged them to go on attacking the problem.
He approached his battalion chief of staff. Romilinsky and a lieutenant sat bent over a field desk covered in manuals, charts, and loose papers. The lieutenant worked on a small East German-made pocket calculator that always seemed to be the most valuable piece of equipment in the battalion.
Romilinsky looked up. Shilko knew the man’s expressions well enough to know that, beneath the staff discipline, Romilinsky was frustrated.
“Comrade Battalion Commander,” Romilinsky said, “no matter how we do it, the numbers will not come out right. Look here. If we fired every mission assigned under the fire plan, as well as the projected number of response missions for the first day, we would not only have fired more units of fire than we have received under our three-day allocation, but we would not even have time to physically do it. The division’s expectations are unrealistic. They’re not used to working with our type of guns, and they think we can deliver the sun and the moon.”
“Well, Vassili Rodionovitch, we’ll do our best.”
“If we were to conform fully to the tables, if we used the normative number of rounds per hectare to attain the designated level of suppression or destruction for each mission they’ve assigned us, it just wouldn’t come out. The numbers refuse to compromise.”
“Everyone wants the big guns,” Shilko said. Then, in a more serious tone, he asked, “But we can meet each phase of the initial fire plan?”
Romilinsky nodded. “We’re all right through the scheduled fires.”
“And the rest,” Shilko said, “is merely a projection.”
“We’re looking at minimum projection figures.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll manage. If they keep dropping off ammunition the way they’ve been dumping it since yesterday, we may end up with too many rounds and not enough vehicles to move it when we displace.”
“But the matter of the physical inability to fire the missions within the time constraints?”
Shilko appreciated Romilinsky’s nervous enthusiasm. He liked to have a worrier as chief of staff. “I have confidence in you,” Shilko said. “You’ll make it work, Vassili Rodionovitch. Now tell me, has Davidov gotten his battery out of the mud yet?”
Romilinsky smiled. There was a slight rivalry between Romilinsky and Davidov, and Shilko knew that the chief of staff had been amused at Davidov’s embarrassment. He had delighted in helping the battery commander recover his bogged guns as publicly as possible.
“He’s out and in position. But he was in a heat. We teased him a little. You know, ‘Getting one gun stuck may be an accident, but getting an entire battery mired begins to look like a plan.’ He still hasn’t calmed down completely.”
Shilko stopped smiling for a moment. He truly did not like their fire positions. The terrain over which they had been deployed seemed like a German version of the Belorussian marshes. You had to go carefully, and there were areas where you absolutely could not get off the roads. The precious little islands and stretches of reasonably firm ground were absurdly overcrowded. His own guns were too close to one another, batteries well under a thousand meters apart. And still their position was not completely their own. A chemical defense unit, which, to Shilko’s relief, appeared utterly unconcerned about the war, and an engineer heavy bridging battalion had both been directed to the same low ground. There was so much steel out there in the darkness that it seemed to Shilko as though the woods and meadows should sink under the weight. He worried that they would all become hopelessly intermingled when it came time to move, and, more seriously still, that his ability to displace, due both to trafficability problems and the unavailability of alternate sites, would be dangerously restricted. The evening before, he and Romilinsky had conducted a reconnaissance, looking for alternate fire positions, but they had not found a single suitable piece of ground that was unoccupied. Now he was waiting for the division to whose divisional artillery group his battalion had been attached to designate alternate sites for his guns. In the meantime, he comforted himself with the thought that he was positioned in depth, thanks to the long range of his pieces, and that the worst initial counterfires would be directed against batteries much closer to the direct-fire battle than his own. But he still had difficulty maintaining an even temper when he imagined his battalion attempting to displace and sticking in the bogs and sodden byways of East Germany, unable even to make it across the border. He was certain of one thing — space on the roads was going to be at a premium.
On the other hand, the initial fire plan in support of the opening of the offensive was just fine with him. Romilinsky’s concerns notwithstanding, Shilko had been pleased when he reviewed the schedule of targets, his “gift list” to be sent to the enemy. The staff officers who had compiled it under the direction of the division commander and his chief of missile troops and artillery were clearly professionals. Shilko prided himself on the traditional professionalism of the Soviet and the earlier Russian artillery. This fire plan did it right, emphasizing concentrations of tremendous lethality at the anticipated points of decision, as well as on known and suspected enemy reserve and artillery concentrations and in support of what Shilko suspected were deception efforts. The concept for maneuvering fires in support of the attack had a good feel to it. Now it was a matter of executing a good plan.
“Anything else, then, before we all go to war?” Shilko asked. He tried his usual easy tone, but the word “war” did not come off with the intended lightness. The moment that would forever after punctuate their lives had drawn too close.
“Well, we received another delivery of the special smoke rounds,” Romilinsky said. “I still don’t see why we have to post so many guards on them. It’s a waste of manpower, and we’re short enough as it is.”