Again, Babryshkin could feel the terrible strain in the tired voice from the outpost line. But he could not indulge Shabrin, any more than he could indulge himself.
"Keep your transmissions brief, Dnepr," Babryshkin radioed. "Just send factual data. Out."
He stared into his optics. The horizon dazzled with golden explosions and streams of light. He knew the central Asian rebel units very well. Ill-disciplined, apt to run out of control. That's right, he told himself as coldly as he could, that's right, you bastards. Shoot up your ammunition. Shoot it all up. And I'll be waiting for you.
Still the flashes that kept lifting the skirt of the darkness would not give him any peace. The display insisted that he acknowledge the level of human suffering it implied, and he could not suppress the mental images, no matter how hard he might try. He toyed with the idea of moving out in a broad turning maneuver, taking the unsuspecting rebels in the flank.
No, he told himself. Don't let your emotions take control. You have to wait.
"Dnepr," he called, "this is Volga. I need hard locations. Where are they now?" He realized how difficult the task of pinpointing the enemy was in the steppes, in the dead of night. Even laser-ranging equipment helped only so much — and Shabrin had been forbidden its use, so as not to reveal his position to the enemy's laser detectors. Now Babryshkin was asking a frantic boy to define the exact location of enemy vehicles in a fantastic environment of darkness and fire, while the enemy continued to move.
"How far out are they now?" he demanded. "Over."
"Under ten kilometers from your location," Shabrin responded. Good boy, Babryshkin said under his breath, good boy. Hold yourself together. "I've got them within top-attack missile range from your location," Shabrin continued. But now Babryshkin detected a dangerous wavering in the lieutenant's voice. And, inevitably, the breakdown followed. "It looks like they're driving right through the refugees, running over them… we've got to… to…"
"Dnepr, get yourself under control. Now, damnit." Babryshkin was afraid that the boy would do something rash, perhaps attacking with his handful of reconnaissance vehicles, compromising everything. It was critical to be patient, to wait, to spring the trap at the right moment. Even if he were to open up with his limited supply of top-attack missiles, it would only warn the bulk of the enemy force that there was trouble ahead. And he wanted to get them all, to destroy every last vehicle, every last rebel. He gave no thought to taking prisoners. His unit had not taken any since the war began, and neither, as far as he knew, had the enemy.
"… they're just killing them all," Shabrin reported, almost weeping. "It's a massacre…"
"Dnepr, this is Volga. You are to withdraw from your position at once and rejoin the main body. Move carefully; Do not let them see you. Do you understand me? Over."
"Understood." But the voice that spoke the single word bore a dangerous weight of emotion.
"Move now" Babryshkin said. "You'll get your chance to deal with those bastards. If you fire a single round, you'll just be warning them. Now get moving. Out."
Babryshkin dropped his eyes away from the cowl of his optics. He snorted, sourly amused. One officer wanted him to retreat a hundred kilometers, and five minutes later another one expected him to launch a hasty attack. While he himself was hoping that he could just get off the first rounds in the coming exchange, to hit first and very hard. Still he was glad he was not in Shabrin's position. He was not certain he would even be able to muster as much selfdiscipline as had the lieutenant.
"All stations," Babryshkin spit into the mike, change to combat instructions. Enemy force approximately battalion in size." He hesitated for a moment. They're rebels. No robotic vehicles in evidence. Automatic systems will be placed on fire-lock. No one opens fire until I give the order. I want to make damned sure we get as many of them as possible." He paused, worried about the length of his transmission, even though he knew to direction-finding equipment could locate a broadcast station in a split second, if any intercept systems happened to be in the area. "After Dnepr comes in, no vehicle is to move," he continued. "Any vehicle in movement will be fired upon." He said it forcefully, trying to sound as ruthless as possible to his subordinates. Considering that the rebel equipment was so similar to their own, a running battle would soon degenerate into hopeless confusion and fratricide. The only real difference between his equipment and that of the rebels, he consoled himself, was that theirs was apt to be in even worse condition. The central Asians were terrible at maintenance, and Babryshkin expected to have an advantage in functional automatic systems. We can win this one, he thought. "All stations acknowledge in sequence," he concluded.
One by one, the platoon-sized companies and company-sized battalions reported in. As he listened to the litany of call signs, Babryshkin peered out through his optics. He could not help but translate the spectacle of light in the middle distance into terms of human suffering, the destruction of his people, his tribe. Without fully understanding himself, he felt an urge not only to drive forward and kill the other men in uniform, but to continue southward, to kill their wives and children, responding to them in kind, pushing to its inevitable resolution this war between the children of Marx and Lenin.
Bogged down in their sport with the refugee column, the rebels were slow to advance. Babryshkin's men sat at the ready for hours, watching as the dazzling lines of unleashed weaponry simmered down into the steadier glow of the burning refugee vehicles. Babryshkin could sense the nerves prickling in each of his men. He could feel their torment through the steel walls of the vehicles, through the earthen battlements. They existed in a volatile no-man's-land between exhaustion and rage, aching to act, to do something, even if it proved to be a fatal gesture. They did not think about dying because they no longer thought about living. They hardly existed. But the enemy… the enemy existed more palpably than the frozen earth or the mottled steel hulls of the war machines. The enemy had become the center of the universe.
In the middle of the night, in the hours beyond the clear recognition of time, a furious banging started up on the exterior of Babryshkin's tank. The first thump was so startling in the stillness that Babryshkin thought they had been fired upon and hit. But the force of the blows was on a more human scale. Someone was hammering at the tank with an unidentifiable object, trying to get them to open up.
Cautiously, Babryshkin ordered the crew to sit tight. Then he swiftly flipped open the commander's hatch, pistol in hand.
By starlight, Babryshkin could see the posterior of a man's form kneeling on the steel deck. Then the man stopped his banging and turned toward Babryshkin, slowly, stiffly. He was sobbing.
The battle noises in the distance had faded to random small-arms fire now, and the stretch of road flowing between the wings of Babryshkin's unit was deserted.
The man was old. He panted, out of breath. When Babryshkin scanned him with his pocket lamp, he saw white hair, blue worker's coveralls, a forehead smeared with blood.
The old man searched for Babryshkin's face in the darkness, hunting for the soldier's eyes.
"Cowards" he shouted, weeping. "Cowards, cowards, cowards."
Babryshkin drowsed, reaching his physical limit. In an hour, the horizon would begin to pale, yet the rebel force remained out of direct fire range. They had clearly taken their time with the refugee column. Sated, Babryshkin told himself. A man can only take so much blood. They're drunk with it. Again, he considered launching a sweeping surprise attack, and, again, he suppressed the urge. Stick to the plan, stick to the plan. His heavy eyes settled over visions of earlier years. As a new lieutenant, he had had the hilariously bad luck to be assigned to Kushka, the notorious base at the southern extreme of Turkmenistan. His professors of military science had been embarrassed for him. Kushka was, after all, an assignment where officers were sent as punishment. Junior lieutenant and fresh graduate Babryshkin had been a top student, and he had no black marks on his disciplinary record. Yet, what could you do? The system needed a junior lieutenant at Kushka, where the summer temperatures soared above fifty degrees Celsius and poisonous snakes seemed to crowd as densely as Moscow subway passengers at peak hour. Meaning to console the boy, the professors could not help laughing.