"Comrade Commander, you're tired. You're not thinking like a true Communist."
Babryshkin almost laughed out loud in his exasperation and weariness. Valya would have said the same thing as Gurevich, he knew. Only she would have put it into different words: You fool, you're throwing away your chances, our chances. You've got to learn to give them what they want.
Valya. He wondered what she was doing at that instant. In Moscow.
"No," Babryshkin said, digging himself in deeper, relishing it, "Comrade Major Political Officer Gurevich, the problem is that I am thinking like a true Communist. You see, the problem is that it's easy to speak like a Communist, and for a hundred years we've all spoken like good Communists. The problem… is with the way we've acted" Babryshkin found himself foolishly waving his protective mask, posturing on the steel soapbox of a tank fender. He caught a glimpse of the absurdity of it all. This was no time for debate. Anyway, Communism meant nothing, and had meant nothing for a generation. It was an empty form, like the rituals of the Byzantine court. At the end of the Gorbachev period, the vocabulary had been revived, to try to fill the frightening emptiness. But the words had no living content.
Babryshkin carefully stuffed the mask into its carrier. "You may try to reach higher headquarters, if you wish, Fyodor Semyonich. But I will not give the order to move until I receive a confirmation."
Suddenly, the southern horizon lit up with flashes far closer than either of them expected. The sound of battle was slow to follow across the steppes, but Babryshkin realized that the enemy had almost reached his outpost line. Perhaps the outposts were already engaged. Or the enemy had caught up with the tail of the refugee column.
The enemy's presence was almost a relief to Babryshkin. After all the waiting. And the false dilemmas of words. Now there was only one thing left to do: fight.
Even before the booming and pocking noises reached the refugees, the display of light quickened the column. Women screamed. A vehicle accelerated, and Babryshkin realized that a driver was attempting to plow right through the mass.
Babryshkin had learned the temper of the crowds over the weeks. Far from reaching safety, the panicked driver would be dragged from his vehicle and beaten to death.
"Let's go," Babryshkin shouted. "Everyone in position." He raced back to the command tank, a battered T-94 All of the combat vehicles had been dug into the steppe at right angles to the road. Only their weapons showed above the shorn earth. Babryshkin nearly stumbled as he leapt from the collar of soil onto the deck of his vehicle, and he reached out to steady himself on the dark line of the main gun. A moment later he sat, knees skinned, down in the hull. The basic T-94 design, introduced more than two decades earlier, consisted of a tank hull traditional in appearance, but instead of an old-fashioned turret there was merely an elevated gun mount. The tank commander, gunner, and driver all sat in a compartment in the forward hull, scanning through optics and sensors packed into the gun mount. The design allowed for a much smaller target signature, especially in hull defilade, but tank commanders always missed the visual command of the situation their perches up in the old-fashioned turrets had allowed. The situation was especially difficult now since Babryshkin's electro-optics only worked erratically, and Babryshkin was sometimes forced to rely on an old-fashioned periscope. He had meant to swap vehicles, but the work required to remount the command communications sets into a standard tank involved extensive rewiring, and Babryshkin had always found more pressing matters to which to attend. Now he regretted his omission.
Even the acquire-and-fire system, which identified a target and automatically attacked it if the correct parameters were met, had broken down on the command tank. Babryshkin and his gunner were forced to identify targets and fire on them the way tankers had done it more than a generation before. Only a few of the complex acquire-and-fire systems still functioned correctly in the brigade, and Babryshkin had ordered that they be reprogrammed to attack the robot reconnaissance vehicles that always preceded the attacks of the best-equipped enemy forces, such as the Iranians or the Arab Legion. The Japanese-built robotic scouts could steer themselves across the terrain, extracting themselves from all but the worst terrain problems into which they might blunder and providing the enemy with a view of his opponent's positions that allowed him to direct his fires with deadly precision. The recon robotics had to be destroyed, even when it meant ignoring the enemy's actual combat vehicles. Babryshkin felt as though he were waging war with broken toys against technological giants.
"All stations," Babryshkin called into the radio mike, wrenching the set up to full power to cut through any local interference, "all stations, this is Volga. Anticipate chemical strike," he said, hoping he was wrong, that they would be spared that horror this time at least. He knew how the road teeming with refugees would look after the engagement if chemicals came into play. Stray rounds did enough damage. "Amur," he continued, "scan for the robot scouts. Lena, all acquire-and-fire systems that remain operational will fight on auto. All other stations, you have the authority to engage as targets are identified. Watch for Dnepr coming in. Don't shoot him up. Dnepr, can you hear me?" he called to the reconnaissance detachment on the outpost line. "What's out there?"
Babryshkin waited. The airwaves hissed and scratched. He did not know very much about the communications equipment in foreign armies, but he doubted that they were still using such old-fashioned radios. Except for the similarly equipped rebel forces, he never heard inadvertent enemy transmissions on his net. The confused, stray voices that occasionally appeared in his headset were almost invariably Russian.
"Volga, this is Dnepr," Senior Lieutenant Shabrin reported in. He was the only reconnaissance officer still alive in the brigade. "Looks like a rebel outfit. No Japanese equipment. No robotics. A mix of T-92s and 94s. Old BMP-5s. Possible forward detachment structure, feeling their way. The firing isn't directed at me. They're shooting up the vehicles in the refugee column."
Shabrin's voice betrayed more than the lieutenant might have hoped. Babryshkin could feel the boy struggling to control his emotions, to do his job as a recon officer. But the unmistakable tension in the voice conjured up images of the rebel forces savaging the helpless civilians.
Fury rose from under Babryshkin's weariness. Rebels. Men who still wore the same cut of uniform as his own, who had sworn the same oath. Who now believed that ethnic differences were sufficient reason to butcher the defenseless.
Babryshkin wanted to move forward, to attack the attackers. But he knew it would be a foolish move. He had no assets to squander on gallantry. In a running fight his men would divert themselves trying not to harm the refugees — while the rebels could devote their full attention to destroying Babryshkin's handful of vehicles. No, the correct action was to wait in the position his men had so laboriously prepared, to block out the suffering, to sacrifice some for the good of the many — was Gurevich right after all? — and to allow the enemy to close the last kilometers, hopefully without detecting his force, coming on until they became visible to the target acquisition systems, until they were silhouetted on the low rolling steppe. Be patient, Babryshkin told himself. Don't think too much.
"Volga, this is Dnepr. Looks like a reinforced battalion. Hard to tell for sure. I'm getting some obscuration from the column, and they're deploying on an oblique. Listen— I don't think they're just taking random shots as they roll along. They seem to be going after the refugees with a purpose. It's hard to see, but I think there are some infantry vehicles in among them already."