After fifteen minutes' discussion with his Air Chief, SACEUR changed all that.
STENDAL, GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC
"I can't do both things," Alekseyev whispered to himself He'd spent the last twelve hours trying to find a way, but it wasn't there. It was a marvel what it meant finally to be in command himself, no longer the aggressive subordinate. He was now responsible for success or failure. A mistake was his mistake. A failure was his failure. It had been much more comfortable the other way. Like his predecessor, Alekseyev had to mark his orders, even though his orders were impossible. He had to maintain the salient and continue the advance. He had the resources to do one or the other, but not both. You will advance northwest from the Weser, cutting off the forces on the right-flank of the advancing troops and preparing the way for a decisive attack into the Ruhr Valley. Whoever issued the orders either didn't know or didn't care that this was impossible.
But NATO knew. Their air power had smashed convoys on every road between R?hle and Alfeld. The two B tank divisions guarding Beregovoy's northern flank had been caught off-balance and routed. Battalion-sized blocking forces occupied the major crossroads while the NATO commanders reinforced the regiment at Alfeld. Probably two full tank divisions lurked in the forests north of R?hle, but for the present they had not attacked Beregovoy. Instead their inaction both dared him to cross and invited him to counterattack north.
Alekseyev remembered an important lesson from the Frunze Academy: the Kharkov Offensive of 1942. The Germans had allowed the advancing Red Army forces to penetrate deep-then cut them off and chewed them up. High Command [meaning Stalin] ignored the objective realities of the situation (hence violating the Second Law of Armed Combat), concentrating instead on subjective perceptions of apparent progress that unfortunately proved false, the lesson concluded. The General wondered if this battle would be an object lesson for some future class of captains and majors who would then write their test answers and essays in bluebooks, pointing out what an ass General Colonel Pavel Leonidovich Alekseyev was!
Or he could pull them back... and admit defeat, and perhaps be shot, and then be remembered, if at all, as a traitor to the Motherland. It was so fitting. After sending so many thousands of boys into fire, now he faced death as well, though from an unexpected direction.
"Major Sergetov, I want you to go back to Moscow to tell them in person what I am. up to. I am going to detach one division from Beregovoy and drive it east to open the way at Alfeld again. The attack on Alfeld will be from two directions, and after it succeeds, we will be able to continue the Weser crossing without fear of having our spearhead cut off."
"A skillful compromise," the major said hopefully.
That's just the thing I need to hear!
BITBURG, FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY
Twelve Frisbees were left. Twice they'd been pulled out of action briefly to determine what new tactics would lessen the hazards-with some success, Colonel Ellington told himself A few of the Soviet systems had proved to have unsuspected capabilities, but half of his losses were unexplained. Were they the kind of accidents that accompanied flying heavily loaded aircraft at minimum altitude or simply the laws of probability catching up with everyone? A pilot might think a 1-percent chance of being shot down on a given mission acceptable, then realize that fifty such missions made it a 40 percent chance.
His flight crews were unnaturally quiet. The elite Frisbee squadron was a tight family of men, a third of whom were gone. The professionalism that allowed them to shut this out and do their weeping in private had its limits. That limit had been passed. Mission performance was down. But combat requirements were not, and Ellington knew that sentiment's place in the great military scheme of things fell below the need to hit targets.
He rotated the aircraft off the pavement and headed east alone. Tonight he carried no weapons save Sidewinders and antiradar missiles for self-defense. His F-19A was burdened with fuel tanks instead of bombs. He settled to an initial flight altitude of three thousand feet and checked his instruments, making a slight adjustment in the aircraft's trim before starting a slow descent to five hundred feet. That was his altitude on crossing the Weser.
"Got some activity on the ground, Duke," Eisly reported. "Looks like a column of tanks and troop carriers heading northeast on Highway 64."
"Report it in." In this sector, everything that moved was a target. A minute later, they crossed the Leine north of Alfeld. They could see the distant flashes of artillery, and Ellington banked left to keep clear. A six-inch shell in its ballistic arc didn't care if the Frisbee was invisible or not.
This ought to be safer than a strike mission, Ellington told himself. They flew east, two miles from a secondary road that Eisly kept under surveillance with their nose-mounted television camera. The threat-warning receiver was lit up from SAM radars sweeping the sky for intruders.
"Tanks," he said quietly. "Lots of 'em."
"Moving?"
"Don't think so. Looks like they're sitting alongside the road near the treeline. Wait-missile-launch warning! SAM three o'clock!"
Ellington pushed the stick down and to the left. In a matter of seconds he had to dive his aircraft one way, turn his head the other to see the incoming missile, then turn back to make sure he didn't plow a furrow in the dirt with his fifty-million-dollar aircraft. All he saw of the SAM was a yellow-white gout of flame, and it was heading for him. As soon as he leveled out, he wrenched the Frisbee into a hard right turn. In the back Eisly had his eyes on the missile.
"Veering off, Duke-yeah!" The missile leveled out at the treetops behind the F19, then dipped and exploded in the woods. "The instruments say that was a SA-6. The search radar is one o'clock and very close."
"Okay," Ellington said. He activated a single Sidearm antiradar missile and fired it at the transmitter from a range of four miles. The Russians were slow to detect it. Ellington saw the detonation. Take that, Darth Vader!
"I think you're right on how they're getting us, Duke."
"Yeah." The Frisbee was designed to defeat overhead radars. Something looking up had a much better chance of detecting them. They could defeat that by flying very low, but then they couldn't see as well as they wanted to see. He turned for another look at the tanks. "How many you think, Don?"
"Lots, over a hundred."
"Tell 'em." Ellington turned back north while Major Eisly made his report. In minutes some German Phantom jets would visit the tank assembly point. That many tanks sitting still probably meant a fueling point, he thought. Either the fuel trucks were already there or they were en route. Fuel trucks were now his primary targets, a surprising change after weeks of going for supply dumps and moving columns... What's that?
"Trucks dead ahead!" The Duke watched the enhanced view on his Head-Up Display. A long line of... fuel trucks, traveling in a tight column, blacked out and moving fast. The curved metal tops made the identification easy. He turned the fighter again to circle two miles from the road. Eisly's infrared picture showed the glow of engines and exhaust piping, hotter than the cool night air. It was like a procession of ghosts down the tree-lined road.
"I count fifty or so, Duke, and they're heading for that tank park."
Five thousand gallons per truck, Ellington thought. Two hundred fifty thousand gallons of diesel fuel... enough to fill every tank in two Soviet divisions. Eisly called that one in also.