In addition to the Quickfix, Cerro checked with the brigade's fire support coordination officer, or FSCO, to ensure that they were ready to provide counterbattery fires as well as defensive fires. An artilleryman, Major Salvador Salatinni, known as Big S, never missed an opportunity to promote his fellow red legs. Taking Cerro over to his map board in the brigade forward CP, Salatinni briefed him on the deployment and preparations of the two artillery battalions supporting the 1st Brigade. One battalion, he pointed out, which was deployed south of Uzhgorod, was in place and prepared to fire in support of Kozak. To counter enemy artillery, AN/TPQ-36 and AN/TPQ-37 Firefinder radars were deployed and oriented to the south.
Although Cerro understood the mission and capabilities of the Firefinder radars, Salatinni explained again, as he often did, that as soon as a single enemy artillery round was fired, the Firefinders would be able to detect the incoming enemy projectile and then, assisted by computers, determine the location of the gun firing that projectile before the projectile impacted. Cerro, seeing Salatinni caught up in his own briefing, let him continue as he explained that the information from the Firefinder radars would be fed directly into their artillery battalion's TACFIRE fire control computer system. The TACFIRE computer would then, according to the way division artillery had it programmed for this operation, automatically pass the information concerning the enemy artillery locations to a platoon of multiple launch rocket systems, or MLRSs, that were supporting the brigade. The MLRS platoon, with three launchers, would dump one pod's worth of rockets on each enemy artillery battery located. This, Salatinni emphasized, meant that a six-gun Ukrainian artillery battery would be attacked by twelve rockets. Since each rocket contained 644 submunitions, or bomblets, every enemy artillery battery would be attacked by 7,728 submunitions. Or, Salatinni said with a broad smile and dancing eyes, put another way, each enemy gun would be attacked by 1,288 submunitions.
Cerro, his mind dulled by lack of sleep and dealing with the usual unending parade of problems and concerns that operations officers deal with, merely nodded or grunted as Salatinni bombarded him with facts, figures, and explanations. It was amazing, Cerro thought as he listened, how artillerymen not only got so caught up in memorizing all those numbers and technical details, but took it upon themselves to educate those unable to repeat that data. When Salatinni was finally finished, Cerro looked Salatinni in the eye. "S, I appreciate the briefing. I would like to clarify one point, however."
A smile lit across Salatinni's face. "Sure, Hal. What is it?"
"Is the artillery ready?"
The efforts of Cerro and the 1st Brigade staff were, at that moment, completely unknown to Captain Nancy Kozak and Company C, 3rd of the 3rd Infantry. After having parked their Bradley in the lee of a stone barn, the crew of C60 settled in to watch and wait. Perched high in the open hatch of C60, her M-2 Bradley, there was little for Kozak to do but to watch and wait. Across the river she could see very little. The cold, pale moon, hanging low in the sky behind their positions, was reflected off the white snow, turning everything gray and creating deep, dark shadows. She could hear, however, what she couldn't see. From deep in those shadows, the sounds of tracked vehicles winding their way slowly and laboriously along forest trails drifted across the river. The crisp, cold night air seemed to magnify those sounds, making it difficult to accurately judge the precise location or size of the approaching enemy. With nothing to do but wait for the Ukrainians to show themselves, Kozak waited and watched. At that moment, she had the feeling that her company had been deployed on its own to defend the far side of the moon.
The rest of her crew shared her foreboding. After a night of furious activity and no sleep the lull and silence left each member of the crew to deal with his or her own fears, apprehensions, and natural desires to drift off to sleep as best they could. Wolf, peering through his thermal sight, slowly traversed the turret as he searched the tree lines across the river for the enemy. Here and there he could see indications of vehicle concentrations as the exhaust from those vehicles heated the trees they sat next to. The sap in those trees, heated by the vehicles' exhaust, spread that heat throughout the tree. As a result, some trees were warmer than those trees which were not near any vehicles. Wolf's thermal sight picked up this temperature difference and provided him with a good idea of where the enemy were. With a map in his lap, he kept himself occupied by trying to correlate his sightings through the thermal sight with their location on the map. Every few minutes, when he had some substantial change, he would pull on Kozak's pant leg. After Kozak bent down, Wolf would show her what he had. Making a mental note, Kozak would acknowledge his efforts, then return to her position in the open hatch from which she would study the areas Wolf had pointed out.
Both Tish, the driver, and Paden, the radioman, were less vigilant. Not that there was much for them to do. Though Kozak should have had one of them out on the ground to provide security, she didn't want to scatter her crew or expose them to the artillery barrage she expected to precede the Ukrainian attack. When it came, Kozak wanted to be able to move and move fast. People wandering about in the dark in the middle of an artillery barrage would handicap her just when she would need them the most. Besides, Kozak reasoned, she was in the middle of the tank platoon. Ellerbee's security measures, which weren't the best, at least provided her Bradley with some degree of local security. So Tish and Paden stayed put in their assigned positions, drifting in and out of fitful periods of sleep.
Thirty meters away, Second Lieutenant Ellerbee had no trouble staying awake. There was, of course, the incident earlier that morning that had given him the scare of his life. Every time he thought about it, he felt anger and embarrassment over the fact that he had not only been asleep during his first fight, he had fumbled the most basic of all leadership requirements, timely and accurate reporting. The consequences of that incident were immediate and embarrassing. The visit by the mech infantry company commander, during which he received a not so subtle lecture on what a platoon leader was expected to do in combat, was bad enough. That Ellerbee had expected. Even the relocating of the company commander's Bradley over to his position was not totally unexpected. Though it showed that she lacked confidence in his abilities to report to her in a timely and accurate manner, Ellerbee could have dealt with that slight too.
What really bothered Ellerbee, though, was the fact that he had failed in front of a woman. As a professional officer, such thoughts weren't supposed to even enter into the equation. He was, after all, an American soldier, an officer at that, serving in an organization that had been totally integrated for years, in which individuals were to be judged, as he had been taught, on their abilities, not their sex, color, or background.
That, Ellerbee had found, was far easier to discuss than it was to practice. He was, he knew, not a sexist. His mother and father had both provided him and his brother with what was considered to be the politically correct role models for an upper-middle-class American family. He enjoyed the company of women and had during his high school and college years never lacked for a date. Ellerbee was even able to accept the presence of females in his college ROTC detachment, although he, like the other members of that unit, found it hard to keep from snickering when new female cadets were learning to issue orders during drill and ceremony practices. The usual retort by the cadet detachment commander at such times, for the unfortunate female cadet to "bang 'em together like you had a pair," was always greeted with hoots and catcalls from the male cadets in the ranks.