Gordunov knew helicopter pilots, and he knew their machines. He knew the fliers who never thought of themselves as anything but fliers, the amateur killers, and he knew the warriors who just happened to be aviators. Far too few of the latter. And he knew the warning sounds that came into a pilot’s voice, requiring firm commands through the intercom. In Afghanistan, the troopships sagged through the air, swollen birds who had eaten too rich a diet of men. The mountains were too high, the air too thin, and the missiles came up at you like bright modern arrows. You learned early to command from a gunship that carried a light enough load to permit hasty maneuvers. You swallowed your pride and hid in the midst of the formation. If you were a good airborne officer, you learned a great deal about killing. If you had no aptitude for the work, or if you were not hard enough on yourself and your men, you learned about dying.
Gordunov forced his thoughts back to the present. The valley road beneath the bellies of the aircraft intersected the rail line. They were very close now. Gordunov knew the route along Highway 1 from the ground; he had traveled it just months before on mission training, disguised as a civilian assistant driver on an international transport route truck. The highways and roads leading to Hameln had impressed him with their quality and capacities, and by the swift orderliness of the traffic flow. Now those same roads were in chaos.
Intermittent NATO support columns heading east struggled against a creeping flood of refugee traffic. At key intersections, military policemen sought desperately to assert control, waving their arms in the dull rain. As the helicopters carrying the air assault battalion passed overhead soldier and citizen looked up in astonishment, shocked by this new dimension of trouble. Some of the more disciplined soldiers along the road opened fire at the waves of aircraft, but the small-arms fire had no effect beyond exciting the pilots. The aircraft returned the fire, nervous pilots devastating the mixed traffic with bursts from their Gatlings.
Gordunov let them go. As long as they didn’t overdo it. Terror was a magnificent weapon. Gordunov had learned his lessons from Afghanistan. War was only about winning. Killing the other one before he killed you. They killed one of your kind, or perhaps just made the attempt, and you responded by killing a dozen, or a hundred, of them.
Olive-painted transport trucks and fine, brightly colored German automobiles exploded into wild gasoline fires. Drivers turned into fields or steered desperately over embankments. Others smashed into one another. Gordunov’s rain-drenched face never changed expression.
He knew the garrison slang terms that sought to degrade, to cut him and those like him down to size. “Afghanistan mentality. Blood drinker. Crazy Afgantsy.” Name-calling that in the end only betrayed the nervousness, the awe and even fear of those who had not gone.
The destruction on the roads had a purpose. Purposes. Create panic. Convince the enemy that he is defeated. Convince him that further resistance is pointless and too expensive to be tolerable. And tie up the roads. Immobilize the enemy. It cut both ways, of course. But with any luck, the British or the Germans would clear the roads just in time for the Soviet armored formations that would be on their way to cross Gordunov’s bridges over the Weser.
Your men died. You could not let the fate of individuals weaken you. It was imperative to learn to regard them as resources, to be conserved whenever possible, but to be applied as necessary. In Afghanistan, and now in Germany, the missiles and the heavy machine-gun fire traced skyward, and the ships burst orange and yellow in a froth of black smoke. No passenger ever survived the fireball.
But it was all right now. Gordunov had been prepared for the loss of up to fifty percent of his battalion going in. But the air defenses had been depleted along the penetration corridor. He could not be entirely certain, but from what he had personally observed, and from the pilot chatter, he believed he would get on the ground with over seventy-five percent of his force. Now it all depended on the air defenses at Hameln and what happened on the landing sites.
The rail tracks below the helicopter paralleled the main road, Highway 1, down into the sudden clutter of the town. Crammed into the valley on both sides of the Weser River. Suddenly, they were over the first buildings.
“Falcon, what do you have up there?” Gordunov spoke into the headset mike, switching the control to broadcast. He wanted a report from his battalion chief of staff, who was tucked into the first wave, just behind the advance party.
Pilot confusion bothered the net, with one transmission spoiling another.
“Eagle, this is Hawk,” the aircraft commander called him. “The rail yards are packed. You want us to hit the rolling stock?”
Gordunov could just make out the funnel-shaped expansion of the rail yards.
“This is Eagle,” he said. “Only strike combat-related activities. If there’s any vehicle off-loading, hit them.”
“Zero observed. But I’ve got heavies. I’m taking heavy machine-gun fire.”
Without waiting for his orders, the pilot and copilot-navigator of Gordunov’s aircraft began to bank the big gunship away from the rail line.
“Damn it,” Gordunov told them, “just go straight in. That’s nothing. Don’t break the formation.”
The pilots corrected back onto course. But the formation had grown ragged.
The chief of staff, Major Dukhonin, finally came up on the net. “One heavy on the northern bridge, Eagle. Clearing him now. Scattered lights. It’s manageable.”
Good. All right. Just put them down on the far bank, Gordunov thought.
“Eagle, Falcon,” Dukhonin called again. “Tanks further north. Poor visibility, but I count five… maybe six. Heading east. Crossing tactical bridges down in the water.”
“Get the bumblebees working on them,” Gordunov ordered, using the old Afghanistan slang for the dedicated gunships. “Hawk, did you monitor my transmission?”
“Working them now, we’re working them.”
“Falcon, can they range the landing zone?”
“Not mine. Not without maneuvering back. Shit. Beautiful. We’re hitting.”
“Get the troop ships down.”
Even with the headset cups over his ears, Gordunov could hear ordnance cracking, and dull thumps.
“We’re hitting. Got one tank dead in the middle of the river, burning like a campfire. Two on the banks. We’re all right.”
Immediately to the right of his aircraft, Gordunov watched a troop transport fly directly into the side of a high-rise building, as though the pilot had done it on purpose. Another story that will never be told, Gordunov thought. He was used to occurrences that seemed to make no outward sense during air-assault operations. Pilots misjudged, or briefly lost control, and aircraft smashed into mountainsides. The blast wave from this latest crash felt as though it stripped the rain from his face.
Fewer tools to do the job. Seize and hold the northern bridge at all costs. Seize and hold the southern bridge, if possible. Tactical crossing sites to be destroyed if they could not be controlled.
The command gunship pulled to the right, entering its assault approach. “Don’t shoot up the traffic on the main bridges,” Gordunov ordered. “I want them clean.”
“This is Falcon. We’re on the west bank. Lead elements en route to the northern bridge,” Major Dukhonin reported. “I’m going in myself.”