Terri Tish, known by most of the company as Terri Toosh, responded by cranking up the Bradley. Despite the fact that she was small in stature, Wolf had known few drivers, including himself, who could make a Bradley perform like Terri. Though he still kidded her about women drivers, his comments, like those he made with Kozak, were lighthearted.
At the northern approach of the bridge, Second Lieutenant Elizabeth Matto stood next to the ancient M-113 armored personnel carrier that served as her command post track and ammo carrier. While the ton-and-a-half trailer attached to the personnel carrier restricted its maneuverability, the extra demolitions and barrier material she could carry in the trailer made it too important to be left behind.
In the distance she could see the sappers of her platoon going about their tasks. On the south end of the bridge, an M-9 armored combat engineer vehicle, called an ACE, was cutting a hasty anti-vehicle ditch on either side of the roadway leading up to the bridge, while a squad of her people finished emplacing a cratering charge on the roadway itself. On the bridge, another squad worked on placing demolition charges. She intended to drop two sets of the bridge's supports as well as three sections of roadway in order to create a gap too large for the Ukrainians to bridge with an armored assault bridge.
Though the work was taking longer than she had anticipated, it was progressing well and nearly completed when Matto heard the whine of Kozak's Bradley approaching. Turning to her platoon sergeant, Matto told him to make a quick check along the line and hurry the demo teams up while she stayed where she was and "entertained" the CO.
Kozak, however, wasn't interested in being entertained. After pulling up next to Matto's personnel carrier and dismounting, Kozak came up to Matto for a report on their progress.
Matto rendered her report while they both watched the engineers on the bridge. In the light of a pale moon that just barely cleared the high ground behind them, they could even see the M-9 ACE as it continued to laboriously hack away at the frozen ground. "Well, ma'am, it'll be another ten, maybe fifteen minutes until the highway bridge will be ready to be dropped. The cratering charge on the southern approach to the bridge is in place and ready, but the anti-tank ditch extended to the riverbank won't be finished for at least another half hour. I believe the railroad bridge upstream is ready to drop now."
Kozak listened to Matto's report in silence. When Matto was finished, she began issuing orders. It was, to Matto, almost as if she had already decided what she intended to do before hearing the status of the work. "Go ahead and stop the antitank ditch. We don't have a half hour. Use a very hasty minefield to close the gap if you can do it in ten minutes, which is all the time you have to finish the job on the bridge. I'm going to order the infantry platoon back now. The brigade's shifting a company of attack helicopters covering the advance on Mukacevo to a battle position just northwest of here to give us some support. Between them and the mines, we can do without the anti-tank ditch."
Not waiting for a response, Kozak began to turn to hurry back to her track when Matto stopped her. "Captain, we can't surface-lay the mines and then set off the cratering charge. The detonation and debris from that charge will set off most of the surface-laid mines. We'll have to set off the cratering charge, then go back and lay the mines."
Kozak looked at Matto, then at the bridge, and then back at Matto. "Okay. Forget the mines. We don't have that kind of time. Do whatever you need to do in order to blow everything in ten minutes."
Saluting, Matto turned and trotted off toward the bridge, calling out for her platoon sergeant as she went. Kozak watched and listened for a moment. Her voice, like Kozak's, came out as a screech whenever she tried to yell, which was why Kozak seldom yelled. It was, she had been told by one of her sergeants years ago, both irritating and at the same time a source of amusement to the men under her command. So Kozak had learned to give orders and direct her subordinates in a way that all but eliminated the need to yell and shout. When shouting was necessary, she had one of her male NCOs do it for her when possible. Although few people in her company knew why their young female captain with a slightly crooked nose seldom yelled at anyone, most of the men and women in her command preferred it that way. It showed, one senior sergeant once said, that she had respect for her people as well as for their eardrums.
When she reached her Bradley, Kozak stopped next to it and called for her gunner. Because of her accent, Kozak didn't emphasize the "1" in Sergeant Wolf's name, which resulted in her calling him Woof most of the time. As she stood there calling for Wolf to pop his head up while trying to keep from screaming, a young engineer fifty meters away stopped what he was doing and looked over to see who was going "Woof, woof." From where he stood, it looked as if Kozak was baying at the moon. That sight, in the middle of what had been a tense and exhausting night, caused the young engineer to burst out laughing. His squad leader, wondering what was so funny, stopped what he was doing. "Are you losing it, Havarty, or is it a private joke?"
Havarty continued to laugh as he pointed at Kozak, who was still calling to Sergeant Wolf. The squad leader snickered, then wiped the smile from his face. "So? What's so strange about that? What do ya expect? She's an officer and an infantryman. Insanity and strange habits go hand in hand when you mix those two. Now get back to work before I sic her on ya."
While they waited for the platoon sergeant of 2nd Platoon to arrive, Ilvanich checked out the radio that two men had pulled out from under a pile of wreckage. Even though he had made a point of watching how the radiotelephone operators performed their checks and used their equipment, Ilvanich soon found that it was impossible to put the radio into operation. The electromagnetic pulse that had preceded the nuclear detonation had fried every transistor in the radio.
Tapping him on his shoulder, Fitzhugh got Ilvanich's attention. Pushing the worthless radio away, Ilvanich turned to see why Fitzhugh interrupted him. "Major, we found Lieutenant Zack over by the tunnel. He's dead too."
Nodding, Ilvanich turned back to look at the radio. Unable to contact anyone, and realizing that they could not stay where they were, Ilvanich decided that he had to do something soon, before the Ukrainians recovered and came forward to investigate, or radiation levels exceeded permissible levels.
Standing up, Ilvanich looked at the remaining leadership of the ranger company gathering about him before he responded. Unlike Fitzhugh, Ilvanich doubted if the sergeants were sure about his taking over. In the pale moonlight, Ilvanich could see it in their eyes. Except for the scurry of men and medics tending to wounded about them, there was an eerie silence as he did so. While there was what he thought was a glimmer of doubt, Ilvanich also saw that they were there in response to the orders he had issued, through Fitzhugh. If there was one thing that he was sure of, it was that they were professionals and understood their situation. They understood what had happened, they understood that Fitzhugh wasn't ready to assume command under such circumstances, and they understood that if something wasn't done soon, none of them would make it out alive. Deciding that this moment was as good as any to find out how receptive the leadership of Company A was to him as their commander, Ilvanich began to issue his new orders. As he did so, he watched how the gathered sergeants reacted to him.
"The electromagnetic pulse has destroyed these radios. Unless there is another radio somewhere here that can reach battalion, we have no means of contacting them." Ilvanich paused to let that fact soak in. "The blast, I am sure, has also released radiation, some of which will be residual. That means we cannot stay here for very long. And no doubt once they get over their own shock, the Ukrainians will be back in force." Again Ilvanich paused. Now as he prepared for the moment of truth, he drew in a deep breath. "With the weapons which we came for destroyed or buried, there is no reason for us to remain in place and accumulate radiation. Follow-on forces will no doubt be diverted to the other weapons storage site by either the battalion commander or corps. While your battalion commander will no doubt organize a survey and monitoring team to come over here and check out the situation here, that will take time, time in which we will continue to be exposed to radiation and the danger of a counterattack. I do not believe it is a good idea to wait and depend on what others may or may not do. So we are going to move out from here."