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  “And how are we progressing, Vladimir Semyonovitch?”

  The captain looked up. His face had a friendly, trusting look. It was the sort of look that Shilko wanted every one of his officers to have when their commander approached. “Oh, it will all sort out, Comrade Commander. We’re just working out a few bugs in the line. The vehicles keep cutting our wires. But the battery centers are each functional individually.”

  Shilko put his hand on the man’s shoulder. “I’m counting on you. You can’t expect an old bear like me to figure out all of this new equipment.” Although he said it in a bantering tone, Shilko was serious. He understood the concepts involved and what these new technical means theoretically offered. And he was willing to accept any help they could give, just as he was ready to lay them aside if they failed. But he was personally frightened by the thought of sitting down behind one of the forbidding little panels and attempting to call it to life. He suspected that he would only embarrass himself. So he gladly let the young men pursue the future, and when they performed well, he was grateful, and he encouraged them to go on attacking the problem.

  He approached his battalion chief of staff. Romilinsky and a lieutenant sat bent over a field desk covered in manuals, charts, and loose papers. The lieutenant worked on a small East German-made pocket calculator that always seemed to be the most valuable piece of equipment in the battalion.

  Romilinsky looked up. Shilko knew the man’s expressions well enough to know that, beneath the staff discipline, Romilinsky was frustrated.

  “Comrade Battalion Commander,” Romilinsky said, “no matter how we do it, the numbers will not come out right. Look here. If we fired every mission assigned under the fire plan, as well as the projected number of response missions for the first day, we would not only have fired more units of fire than we have received under our three-day allocation, but we would not even have time to physically do it. The division’s expectations are unrealistic. They’re not used to working with our type of guns, and they think we can deliver the sun and the moon.”

  “Well, Vassili Rodionovitch, we’ll do our best.”

  “If we were to conform fully to the tables, if we used the normative number of rounds per hectare to attain the designated level of suppression or destruction for each mission they’ve assigned us, it just wouldn’t come out. The numbers refuse to compromise.”

  “Everyone wants the big guns,” Shilko said. Then, in a more serious tone, he asked, “But we can meet each phase of the initial fire plan?”

  Romilinsky nodded. “We’re all right through the scheduled fires.”

  “And the rest,” Shilko said, “is merely a projection.”

  “We’re looking at minimum projection figures.”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll manage. If they keep dropping off ammunition the way they’ve been dumping it since yesterday, we may end up with too many rounds and not enough vehicles to move it when we displace.”

  “But the matter of the physical inability to fire the missions within the time constraints?”

  Shilko appreciated Romilinsky’s nervous enthusiasm. He liked to have a worrier as chief of staff. “I have confidence in you,” Shilko said. “You’ll make it work, Vassili Rodionovitch. Now tell me, has Davidov gotten his battery out of the mud yet?”

  Romilinsky smiled. There was a slight rivalry between Romilinsky and Davidov, and Shilko knew that the chief of staff had been amused at Davidov’s embarrassment. He had delighted in helping the battery commander recover his bogged guns as publicly as possible.

  “He’s out and in position. But he was in a heat. We teased him a little. You know, ‘Getting one gun stuck may be an accident, but getting an entire battery mired begins to look like a plan.’ He still hasn’t calmed down completely.”

  Shilko stopped smiling for a moment. He truly did not like their fire positions. The terrain over which they had been deployed seemed like a German version of the Belorussian marshes. You had to go carefully, and there were areas where you absolutely could not get off the roads. The precious little islands and stretches of reasonably firm ground were absurdly overcrowded. His own guns were too close to one another, batteries well under a thousand meters apart. And still their position was not completely their own. A chemical defense unit, which, to Shilko’s relief, appeared utterly unconcerned about the war, and an engineer heavy bridging battalion had both been directed to the same low ground. There was so much steel out there in the darkness that it seemed to Shilko as though the woods and meadows should sink under the weight. He worried that they would all become hopelessly intermingled when it came time to move, and, more seriously still, that his ability to displace, due both to trafficability problems and the unavailability of alternate sites, would be dangerously restricted. The evening before, he and Romilinsky had conducted a reconnaissance, looking for alternate fire positions, but they had not found a single suitable piece of ground that was unoccupied. Now he was waiting for the division to whose divisional artillery group his battalion had been attached to designate alternate sites for his guns. In the meantime, he comforted himself with the thought that he was positioned in depth, thanks to the long range of his pieces, and that the worst initial counterfires would be directed against batteries much closer to the direct-fire battle than his own. But he still had difficulty maintaining an even temper when he imagined his battalion attempting to displace and sticking in the bogs and sodden byways of East Germany, unable even to make it across the border. He was certain of one thing — space on the roads was going to be at a premium.

  On the other hand, the initial fire plan in support of the opening of the offensive was just fine with him. Romilinsky’s concerns notwithstanding, Shilko had been pleased when he reviewed the schedule of targets, his “gift list” to be sent to the enemy. The staff officers who had compiled it under the direction of the division commander and his chief of missile troops and artillery were clearly professionals. Shilko prided himself on the traditional professionalism of the Soviet and the earlier Russian artillery. This fire plan did it right, emphasizing concentrations of tremendous lethality at the anticipated points of decision, as well as on known and suspected enemy reserve and artillery concentrations and in support of what Shilko suspected were deception efforts. The concept for maneuvering fires in support of the attack had a good feel to it. Now it was a matter of executing a good plan.

  “Anything else, then, before we all go to war?” Shilko asked. He tried his usual easy tone, but the word “war” did not come off with the intended lightness. The moment that would forever after punctuate their lives had drawn too close.

  “Well, we received another delivery of the special smoke rounds,” Romilinsky said. “I still don’t see why we have to post so many guards on them. It’s a waste of manpower, and we’re short enough as it is.”

  Romilinsky was speaking of the new obscurant rounds that had been compounded to attenuate the capabilities of enemy observation and target designation equipment. The existence and purpose of the rounds were well known, but the security personnel still insisted that they be handled as though they were vital state secrets.

  “Be patient,” Shilko said. “We’ll fire them up tomorrow, and then we won’t have to guard them.” He had learned long ago not to argue security issues. “Have all of the troops been fed?”

  Romilinsky nodded. He had an exaggerated manner of nodding, like a trained horse determined to please his master. “I’m not certain it was the finest meal we ever served, but it was hot.”

  Shilko was glad. He tried to feed his battalion as though they were all his own children, although it was very hard. Now he didn’t want them going to war on empty stomachs. The food in the Soviet military was of legendarily poor quality, but his battalion’s garrison farm was one of the finest in the command. Shilko himself came from peasant stock, and he was proud of it. In the past year, his battalion had been able to raise so many chickens that they not only exceeded the official meat allocation per soldier but wer
e able to sell chickens to other units for almost five thousand rubles. His soldiers were better fed than those in any other battalion of which Shilko was aware, yet he used only six soldiers full-time in the agricultural collective… although each boy had been carefully selected because of his background and expertise. The brigade had gotten quite a bit of mileage out of the accomplishments of Shilko’s “gardeners,” and their achievements had even been featured in a military newspaper as an example to be emulated by all. It had been Shilko’s finest hour with the high military authorities and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

  Shilko slipped into one of his old peasant attitudes. The Party. He was in the habit of occasionally going down and working a bit with the soldiers in the garrison garden and poultry sheds. He had realized too late how much he loved the land and animals and the sense of growing things, and he suspected that he really had been born to be a farmer, like his forefathers. But, as a young man, he had viewed life on the collective farm as hopelessly drab and unsatisfying. Now, when he dug, the political officer got nervous. Publicly, Shilko received praise for his spirit of proletarian unity and his vigorous conformity to the essential principles of the Party. In fact, however, he knew very well that it made the full-time Party boys very nervous when lieutenant colonels took up shovels and hoes. Afraid they might have to do a little proletarian duty themselves. Shilko had half expected to be denounced as a Maoist, and, while he had in fact been a full member of the Party for twenty years, he had never taken that membership too seriously. It was something you did because you had to do it, like wearing the correct uniform for the occasion. But all of the theory had been a bit too much for him. He liked things he could do with his hands.

  His son was another matter. Pasha had a better mind than his father; he was clever and quick. Although he had been an enthusiastic Young Pioneer and a good Komsomolist, Pasha had never immersed himself in the theoretical aspects of Marxism-Leninism to any unusual extent. He had simply accepted the Party as a fact of life, as did most young men of reasonable ambition. Then he had come back, legless, from Afghanistan, to find himself last on the list for everything. No salutes for the boy without legs. And Shilko had watched his son turn from a loving, open youth into an extraordinarily dedicated member of the Party. The Party accepted Pasha the invalid, seeking to exploit him even as they genuinely sought to help him. But Pasha had turned the full weight of his talents and his anger to exploiting the Party. Shilko knew from experience that that was the kind of ambition on which the Party thrived. At first, upon his son’s return, Shilko had worried about the practical aspects of his well-being. Then he had watched the legless boy develop himself into a man with long arms.

  Pasha was doing very well within the Party apparatus. He seemed to have developed a taste for manipulation, and Shilko had no doubt that his son would become a powerful man, that he would long ride the ribbons he had been given to compensate for his missing legs. Shilko no longer needed to worry about the mundane aspects of his son’s welfare. Pasha would have a fine ground-floor apartment, or an apartment in a building where the elevator worked. But the simple, loving father in Shilko worried now about other aspects of his son’s future.

  And in a matter of minutes, there would be a war. It still seemed unreal to Shilko, as though this could not possibly be a rational decision. But there was no mistaking the level of preparation, the intensity, the inevitability of it all. Shilko wondered if the decision to begin this war had been made by the kind of men his son was coming to resemble. The men who knew best, for each and every living creature.

  Well, Shilko thought, it didn’t matter. He and his boys would fight and fight well, no matter who made the decisions. The event was infinitely greater than the men caught up in it.

  The mood in the fire control post had begun to change. The frantic action tapered off. Officers began to sit down. Men looked up at the master clock above the communications bank.

  It would not be long now. Shilko looked at his watch, even though he had just glanced at the clock. He went to the samovar and tipped himself another cup of tea. Then he took his chair near the situation map, proofing the schedule of fires one last time.

  The radios were silent. Romilinsky sat down beside Shilko and nervously patted the handle of the field telephone, the wires of which led directly to the gun batteries. Soon it would be time to pick it up and say the single word that would unleash the storm.

  Shilko was almost as proud of the big guns with which he had been entrusted as he was of his men. When he had entered the service, his first unit had been equipped with field pieces designed before the Great Patriotic War, towed by Studebaker trucks from the war years. Now the enormous self-propelled pieces in his battalion made those little towed weapons seem like toys. Shilko felt that he had seen enormous progress in his lifetime.

  “Comrade Battalion Commander,” Romilinsky said, “you seem admirably relaxed.”

  “The sleep did me good,” Shilko said, content to wait and think through these last minutes.

  But the chief of staff wanted to talk. “I believe we are as ready as possible.”

  Shilko accepted that the needs of other men were different from his own. If his chief of staff needed to talk away the final minutes of peace, Shilko was willing to oblige him.

  “I’m confident that we’re ready, Vassili Rodionovitch. This is a good battalion. I have great faith.”

  “I can’t help thinking, though, of things we should have done, of training that should have received more stress…”

  Shilko waved the comment away. “No one is ever as prepared as they should be. You know the dialectic. A constant state of flux.”

  “Five minutes,” a voice announced.

  Shilko looked up at the clock. Then he sat back. “You know,” he began in his most personable voice, “when I was a junior lieutenant, I was horrified by the conditions I found upon arrival at my first unit. Nothing seemed to be as we had been promised at the academy. Nothing was as precise, or as rigorous, or even as clean. I was very disturbed by what I viewed as a betrayal of the high standards of the Soviet military. Oh, I wasn’t especially ambitious. I never expected to change the world. But this unit didn’t seem as though it could go to war against a pack of dance-hall girls. Half of the equipment didn’t work. The situation seemed intolerable to a brand-new lieutenant who had been coached to go up against the capitalist aggressors at a moment’s notice. Anyway, my commander was a wise man — a veteran, of course, in those days. He watched my struggles with some amusement, I think. Then, one day, he called me into his office. I was worried. It wasn’t so common for a battalion commander to speak to a lieutenant in those days. And it usually didn’t happen because the lieutenant had done something to be proud of. So I went to his office in quite a state. I couldn’t think of anything I’d done incorrectly. But you never knew. Anyway, he asked me how I enjoyed being in the army, and how I liked the unit. He was teasing me, although I didn’t realize it then. I talked around my real feelings. Finally, he just smiled, and he called me closer. Very close to his desk. And he said he was going to reveal to me the one military truth, and that if only I remembered it, I would do very well in my military career.”

  Shilko looked around. Everyone was listening to him, despite the unmistakable tension. The clock showed two minutes to go.

  Shilko grinned. “You know what he said to me? He leaned over that desk, so close I could see the old scars on his cheek, and he half whispered, ‘Shilko, wars are not won by the most competent army — they are won by the least incompetent army.’ “

  His audience responded with pleasant laughter. But the undercurrent of anticipation had grown so intense now that no man could fully master it. The tension seemed almost like a physical wave, rising to sweep them all away.

  Romilinsky gripped the field telephone, ready.

  Less than one minute to go.

  In the distance, a number of guns sounded, startling in the perfect stillness. Someone had fired early,
either because of a bad clock or through nervousness.

  Shilko looked at the clock one final time. Other batteries and full battalions took up the challenge of the first lone battery, rising to a vast orchestra of calibers. Shilko turned to Romilinsky, utterly serious now.

  “Give the order to open fire.”

  Four

  Junior Lieutenant Plinnikov wiped at his nose with his fingers and ordered his driver forward. The view through the vehicle commander’s optics allowed no meaningful orientation. Rapid flashes dazzled in the periscope’s lens, leaving a deep gray veil of smoke in their wake. The view was further disrupted by raindrops that found their way under the external cowl of the lens block. Plinnikov felt as though he were guiding his reconnaissance track through hell at the bottom of the sea.

  The shudder of the powerful artillery bursts reached through the metal walls of the vehicle. Suddenly, the armor seemed hopelessly thin, the tracks too weak to hold, and the automatic cannon little more than a toy. Occasionally, a tinny sprinkling of debris struck the vehicle, faintly audible through Plinnikov’s headset and over the engine whine. He could feel the engine pulling, straining to move the tracks through the mud of the farm trail.

  “Comrade Lieutenant, we’re very close to the barrage,” his driver told him.

  Plinnikov understood that the driver meant too close. But the lieutenant was determined to outperform every other reconnaissance platoon leader in the battalion, if not in the entire Second Guards Tank Army.

  “Keep moving,” Plinnikov commanded, “just keep moving. Head straight through the smoke.”

  The driver obeyed, but Plinnikov could feel his unwillingness through the metal frame that separated them. For a moment, Plinnikov took his eyes away from the periscope and looked to the side, checking on his gunner. But Belonov was all right, eyes locked to his own periscope. Three men in a rolling steel box. There was no margin of safety in personnel now; everyone had to do his job without fail. Plinnikov had never received the additional soldiers required to fill out his reconnaissance platoon for war, and he had no extra meat, no dismount strength in his own vehicle. As it was, he could barely man the essential positions in each of his three vehicles.