The brassy light was just enough to allow Babryshkin to distinguish individual targets. Perhaps two-dozen enemy vehicles were already burning, but, to their credit, the rebels were attempting to organize themselves into battle order. Some of the enemy tanks returned fire, but none of Babryshkin's subunit commanders had reported any losses yet, and the enemy fire had a desperate, unaimed feel to it. For an instant, Babryshkin pictured the chaos, the terror, and the flashes of heroism in the enemy ranks. In that quick sensing, the rebels almost became human again.
"Gunner," Babryshkin called. "Target… forty-seven- hundred… the guide tank on the far left."
"I see him."
"Fix?"
"It's a long way."
"Goddamnit, have you got him in your sights.
"Got him."
"Fire."
The hull shivered with the only partially cushioned recoil. And Babryshkin counted the seconds.
The enemy tank kept moving. There was no explosion.
They had fired right past him.
"Range," Babryshkin called out in fury, forty-five hundred…"
"Comrade Commander, he s too far out."
"Do as you're told, damn you… range, forty-four- fifty."
Suddenly, the enemy tank disappeared in a splash of fire. Someone else had made the kill.
For a moment, Babryshkin said nothing. He did not even scan for another target. The gunner was right. He knew it. It was foolish to waste the ammunition. God only knew when there would be any more of it. Better to let the tanks whose automatic acquire-and-fire systems were still operational do the killing. It was far more efficient.
It was only the matter of wanting to kill, to destroy. The feeling went far beyond the desire simply to contribute to the victory. It was far more intense, more personal than that, and Babryshkin could not help experiencing a feeling of disappointment, even of failure, as his brigade annihilated the enemy spread out across the steppes. He listened to the slow, cyclic fire of the auto-systems as they moved from target to target. The sound was almost hypnotic, with each loud report followed seconds later by the appearance of another distant bonfire.
He had not seen a single enemy vehicle putting out cyclic fire. Probably, he realized, they had not had a single operational automatic system. In a way, the war was even harder on the overbred machines than it was on their human masters.
A good thing, though, Babryshkin considered, that they were only rebels. He knew his tattered unit would not put up nearly so good a showing against the Arabs or the Iranians, with their magnificent Japanese war machines.
"All stations," he called, "this is Volga. Don't waste ammunition. All manual systems cease fire. Auto-systems… finish them off. Out."
When he looked very hard through his optics, he could still spot the occasional frantic movement as a rebel vehicle tried to get clear. But the auto-systems soon gunned down the last of them. The expanse of steppe looked as it might have looked almost a millennium before, dotted with the campfires of the Mongols.
Babryshkin waited for the familiar feeling of elation to come over him. But it was very slow in coming this time. At first, he wrote it off as due to his weariness. Yet, the adrenaline charge had always been enough to overcome any level of exhaustion.
They had destroyed the enemy force in its entirety. Without losing a single vehicle of their own. It was a significant achievement. They had gained time, saved lives. But Babryshkin felt as he might have after making love to a woman who repulsed him.
He surveyed the torchlit steppe. The sky had begun to pale There would be a new day, with new enemies. It had been the rebels' turn to misjudge, to take the wrong step. But next time? And the time after that? No one's luck lasted forever.
Well, Babryshkin told himself, we'll just take our bloodbaths one at a time, thanks.
The vehicle fires had already begun to bum out. Babryshkin smiled, as at the taste of bad liquor shared among friends. If nothing else, he considered, Soviet-built tanks were perfectly capable of destroying each other.
The morning light revealed a sea of frost around the battle-warm islands where Babryshkin s tanks were entrenched. He decided to spare Shabrin, the reconnaissance officer, this round of horrors, and he led the security party forward himself: a smattering of infantry fighting vehicles, followed by empty utility trucks to salvage any useful supplies and load up any wounded survivors from the segment of refugees the rebels had attacked. The ambulances remained behind, already filled with military casualties from several days of fighting. A single platoon of tanks moved off to the flank, guarding the searchers, while the remainder of the brigade prepared for movement to the north.
When they closed sufficiently to make sure that every single enemy vehicle had been hit, Babryshkin ordered the tanks to cease their forward movement. Every liter of fuel was critical now.
The infantry fighting vehicles made trails through the frost. It would be even easier to track them now, easier still to find them when the snows came. If they survived that long.
The motorized rifle troops rode with their deck hatches open, making a sport of hunting down any surviving rebels.
Only the enemy soldiers who appeared very seriously wounded went ignored. They weren't worth a bullet, and it gave the motorized riflemen more satisfaction to think of them dying slowly, unattended. Babryshkin made no effort to stop the small massacre, even though he had been taught that such actions were criminal and subject to severe penalties. He sensed that such niceties no longer mattered now. This was a different kind of war.
When the snorting war machines finally reached the point of collision between the rebel armor and the refugees, Babryshkin received still another lesson in the varieties of combat experience. He had truly believed that he had seen the worst of the worst, that nothing else would shock him or even move him very deeply, but the sight of the calculated butchery along the dirt track taught him differently. Even the victims of the massive chemical attacks farther south had been impersonally chosen, struck coldly by systems that stood at a distance — aircraft, missiles, or long-range artillery. But many of the bodies along the road had been killed by men who stood before them, close enough to sense them as human beings, to hear the varieties of fear in their voices.
The women had received the worst treatment. The men had merely been killed. But the corpses of the women, either naked or with winter coats and skirts bunched about their waists or pushed over their heads, looked particularly pained, especially cold. All around them the litter of their belongings rustled in the random stirrings of the air. Vehicles had been looted and burned, suitcases emptied beside the corpses of their owners. One of the women, especially vain, had attempted to carry her perfumes with her to safety, and the voluptuous scent from the smashed bottles jarred Babryshkin as he walked between the stench of cordite and the odor of torn bowels. The perfume reminded him of Valya, who always wore too much.
In his wonder at the spectacle of so much very personal death, it took Babryshkin a long time to realize that some of the scattered bodies still had life in them. The silence was deceptive. No one screamed. And you had to listen very closely to hear the rasp of injured lungs or the sobbing beyond hope or fear or any sense at all. The silence of it all frightened him in a way that the prospect of battle had never done.
Then the first scream came. From the mouth of a hemorrhaging girl, who thought that the Soviet soldier bending to help her was simply another rebel back for a bit more fun. Shrieking and slapping at the senior sergeant, she resisted his efforts to cover her and lift her in his arms. Finally the sergeant backed off, giving up. Other casualties were anxious for help. The fate of a single individual had become almost irrelevant, in any case. They left the child in the middle of the roadway, sobbing and clutching a headless doll.