Kozlov instinctively headed straight for Taylor. The Soviet had become something of a bad joke among the American officers, despite his obvious abilities. The man had spectacularly rotten teeth and breath as powerful as it was unforgettable. Taylor had already upbraided one of his staff captains for making fun of Kozlov. In a voice louder than customary, Taylor had lectured the embarrassed young officer on the Soviet's skills and contributions to the combined U.S.-Soviet effort. Now Taylor himself dreaded the Soviet officer's impending assault.
Kozlov threw a salute into the darkness, his gloved hand a night bird in flight. He came up very close to the object of his attention.
"Colonel Taylor, sir," the Soviet began, his voice infectiously distraught, "we have a great problem. The Kokchetav sector. A great problem. The enemy has broken through."
6
Major Babryshkin carefully fitted the last fresh filter into his protective mask, listening to the sounds of disaster. Chugging, overloaded civilian cars and trucks struggled to work their way northward without turning on their lights, while the mass of bundled refugees on foot trudged along, unwilling to keep to the side of the road. Apart from an occasional staccato of curses, the ragged parade rarely wasted energy on words. Black against the deep blue of the night, the mob shed sounds uniquely its own: a vast rustling and plodding, the grumble and wheeze of the overburdened vehicles, and the special silence of fear. Thousands behind thousands, the heavily dressed men, women, and children moved on booted feet, slapping gloved hands, shifting parcels, nudged along by the frustrated drivers of automobiles or trucks commandeered from an abandoned state enterprise. Now and again, a dark form simply collapsed by the roadside, a faint disturbance in the night, almost imperceptible. Others broke away to beg the soldiers for food. But the majority kept marching, driven by the memory of death witnessed, closely avoided, rumored. Startling in the darkness, a driven animal would suddenly bleat or bray, sensing the mortal fear of its owner. Then the big silence would return, the huge silence of the Kazakh steppes, an emptiness that drank in the sounds of dozens of battles, a hundred engagements. Only the sputtering horizon acknowledged the ceaseless combat. It was a bigness that trivialized death.
The sharp metallic sounds of the shovels biting into cold soil and the mechanical grunting of engineer equipment marked the positions of Babryshkin's command, deployed on both sides of the endless dirt road that served as a highway, occupying a long reverse-slope position on a decline so slight it was almost imperceptible even in the daylight. You made do.
There wasn't enough food. Babryshkin had been forced to order his men not to hand out any more of their rations to the refugees — the exodus of ethnic Russian and other non-Asian citizens of the Socialist Republic of Kazakhstan. The last precious issues of rations were fuel for the fight now, the same as petrol, as important as the dwindling stocks of ammunition. Without food, the men could not bear the sleeplessness of battle, the heavy duty of digging into the freezing steppes, the energy-robbing chill of the autumn nights. Babryshkin himself hated to get too near the column of his homeless countrymen. He shrank inside at the need to march by their pleas for a bit of food, which, when ignored or denied, so often drew forth insults about an "overfed" army, or, more painful still, about that army's failure.
There wasn't enough food. Nor was there enough medicine. Doctors sought to tend the wounded, injured, or sick by the side of the road, attempting to adapt modem knowledge and techniques to the physical conditions of earlier centuries. There were not enough combat systems or soldiers left, and there was insufficient ammunition for those who remained. The communications did not work. There was never enough time. And there were no answers.
The retreat had gone on for well over a thousand kilometers, punctuated by repeated attempts to dig in and halt the enemy and by successive failures. Combat was a nightmare, a hammering confusion in which each side's systems slammed against each other until the surviving Soviet forces were, inevitably, forced back yet again. Short, sharp exchanges, often a matter of minutes, highlighted days or weeks of nervous skirmishing and endless repositionings. Actual battles were characterized by their brevity and destructiveness. Six weeks before, Babryshkin had begun as a combined-arms battalion commander. Now he commanded the remnants of his brigade, which, except for attachments such as engineers and air defense troops, now fielded a combat force smaller than the battalion Babryshkin had initially led into combat. Staff officers crewed tanks, and cooks found themselves behind machine guns. No one had even formally ordered Babryshkin to assume command of the crippled unit. He had simply been the senior combat-arms officer left alive.
He struggled to maintain control of his force, to continue to deliver some resistance to the enemy, however feeble, to delay the end, to cover the human rivers meandering northward, to cling to this soil made Russian by the armies of the czars so many centuries before.
The worst of it was the chemical attacks. Time and again, the enemy delivered massive chemical weapons strikes against the Soviets, forcing the soldiers to live in their suffocating protective suits and the masks that shriveled then lacerated the skin of the face and neck. No doubt, another chemical attack would hit them soon. There was never any warning now — the entire system seemed to have broken down — and he had not received any messages from corps for days, save one stray broadcast reminding all officers that losses had to be documented on the proper forms.
Babryshkin was glad for this bit of fresh night air, this slight respite between batterings and sudden chemical hells. He had even taken a few moments to scribble a note to Valya, although he had no idea when he might be able to mail it, or if the mails still functioned. According to the last information he had, there had been no attacks on population centers deep in the Russian heartland. The war, brutal though it was, was oddly mannered, localized in the Central Asian republics, the Caucasian republics, and the Kuban. That meant that Valya was safe.
Still, it was far too easy to picture her trudging along in this mass, on legs not made for such labor. He had made his peace with his mental image of Valya now. He knew she had been unfaithful to him at least once in the past. She was foolish. And selfish. But he was a man, mature, perhaps matured beyond what was truly desirable now, and he was responsible for her. Lovely, unreliable Valya, his wife. In the wake of combat action after combat action, he had grown to appreciate his happiness, and it seemed to him that his life would be a very fine thing if only he might live to get on with it.
The cold air felt wonderful on his cut, chapped face, just cold enough to deaden the discomfort. He had allowed his men to strip off their protective suits to facilitate the process of digging positions. He knew it was unwise in a sense, since chemical rounds or bombs might descend upon them at any moment. But he knew they needed a rest, a chance to feel the living air again. Later, he would order them back into the old-fashioned rubberized suits. But it was increasingly a formality. Living and fighting in the costumes had pricked and tom them until they offered dozens of entry points to chemical agents. And there were no replacements.
Still, he reasoned, his men were far better off than the civilians. Chemical strikes against the unprotected refugee columns produced up to one hundred percent casualties. And there was nothing to be done.