The building on which his men across the rails were positioned held most of that fuel, and all of them were determined to defend it. The townspeople had seen four tanks approaching this end of Suschenko; two had gone after the engine, one was bringing up the rear. Fedorin didn’t see the fourth, but he was sure it would be along any minute now. Still, he was getting a little bored.

  He signaled his comrades on the other roof and picked up one of his RPGs. Taking careful aim, he fired at the forward glacis plate of the tank. The rocket went straight into the ground ahead of the tank and detonated, tearing up the side of the roadbed, doing little damage to the ties and rails but sending gravel flying everywhere.

  Fedorin frowned. Potent little devil, he thought. He threw away the empty firing tube and picked up the second RPG. Below him the tank’s turret swiveled to point its gun at the building his comrades were sitting on, the building holding the rest of Suschenko’s fuel.

  Fedorin pressed the firing button at the same time as his fellow reservists; three rockets lanced downward, just as the tank’s main gun fired.

  The tank was killed three times over, but its own damage had been done. The building beneath Fedorin’s men erupted, rising dozens of feet into the air to disintegrate in a ball of orange fire. Debris showered down on him, and a monstrous column of black smoke and flame climbed skyward. Horrified, Fedorin tried to convince himself his men never knew what hit them.

  Christus, Rostov breathed. What in the name of God was that? He had just seen a small building take off like a rocket. What are these tanks carrying for ammunition?

  Two more explosions, closer but less severe, followed in quick succession. Rostov’s radio signal chimed again, and he held it tight against his ear, shouting in response.

  “Rostov here, come in.”

  “Dyatlov, Captain. Two tanks closest to train knocked out. Rail Security on the roofs just took out a third with RPGs.” Dyatlov couldn’t keep the admiration from his voice.

  “Continue sweep. See if those reservists got a count of enemy vehicles at that end of town.”

  “Already done, sir. Reservists reported four vehicles sighted that end, leaving one unaccounted for.”

  “Find that tank, Dyatlov. Sweep to the left of the train.” Rostov’s voice was grim. “And find out what the hell that explosion was a minute ago. It sounded like somebody hit an ammo dump.”

  “Yes, sir. Dyatlov out.”

  Rostov saw movement between two buildings. The train was picking up speed, and the engine itself had only a few more buildings to pass before exiting the town. Rostov watched, waiting for another gap between buildings, then saw it. The fourth tank was pacing the locomotive, its turret trained toward where the engine must soon appear, waiting only for a clear shot.

  It was to the right side of them, and he’d just sent Dyatlov and his men to the left.

  Without another thought, Rostov jumped down to the loading platform, his momentum carrying him through the alley.

  He keyed the handset microphone as he ran, signaling Zorin or Dyatlov. There was no reply; the buildings or the train might be blocking the signal, and in any case they probably had their hands full already.

  Rostov saw the tank swing wide to avoid a well-housing, then turn in toward the buildings again. The maneuver allowed him to gain a few yards on it, and by the time the tank had reached the buildings again, he was alongside.

  Rostov ducked into a shadow as the tank approached, then jumped onto the back plates over the engine. He recalled that the top surfaces of the light tanks were composed almost entirely of fiberglass. With no enemy airpower to concern them, the designers had been able to make certain reasonable sacrifices. But the metal exhaust grates were still hot enough to fry eggs on, and Rostov remembered that these tanks were powered by alcohol-fired steam engines with a lot of venting requirements.

  Apparently the crew inside had not heard him as he scrambled for a grip on the smooth surface. He looked out over the turret, and could see two more tanks burning in the fields outside of town. Those were Zorin’s concern, however. Right now he had problems of his own.

  Rostov got to one knee and pulled himself halfway up onto the turret top. The vision cupola around the hatch showed blurry movement within; he found himself staring at the back of someone’s head.

  The next moment the tank lurched to a halt, sending Rostov sliding away from the cupola, grasping frantically at the access rungs bolted to the turret’s rear. He saw the bulk of the locomotive clear the buildings, exposed, unmissable.

  I have lost the race after all, he thought. Then the tank’s main gun went off.

  Drachev’s rage at the supposed bandits had disappeared, replaced by a cold fury at that bastard, Grishin; and Revenant, and Major-Bloody-Steinmann, and PRG One and all of Novaya Moskva as well. There were too many Army uniforms for them all to have been stolen. He and his men were fighting—killing and being killed by—soldiers of the Red Army. Countrymen! He might almost have surrendered, but he was in a killing mood.

  Grishin had apparently managed to get his entire force wiped out. Drachev himself had only his own and one other tank left, and his support infantry were being chewed up by enemies in the grasses around them.

  To hell with this, he thought grimly. He had had quite enough. He began firing smoke rounds from the point defense mortars on the outside of the turret to cover the infantry’s retreat. Once regrouped with the BMPs, he could get them all out of here.

  As to what the penalty for his failure might be, Drachev did not even need to guess. At least his own life might purchase survival for the rest of the men in his command.

  “What’s in the breech?” he asked his gunner.

  “Incendiary.” The man was squinting into the sights of the coaxial machine gun, firing controlled five-round bursts meant to keep the unseen attackers’ heads down. He couldn’t know it, but it was working very well, indeed.

  “Get rid of it. Put it into those first boxcars; that will slow the bastards down. They won’t fight us if they have to save their transport.” I hope, he added silently.

  The gunner took ten seconds to adjust the light tank’s gun, then fired. The shell arched out over the grasses, hitting the first boxcar dead center.

  “Christus!” Drachev grunted, watching the shot through the turret periscope. “Hell of a hip shot, Gunner.”

  “Spaceeba, Captain Drachev.”

  “Reload with high explosive. Depress the gun and get an angle on the railbed; I want to tear up these tracks. Driver, get us out of here.” Drachev switched channels and issued the fallback order, scanning with the turret periscope as he did so, searching the tall grass in vain for the enemy. An enemy who wore a uniform almost identical to his own.

  “Sir,” the driver asked, “we’re breaking off the attack?” He was very young, Drachev remembered, and had spent a great deal of time around Grishin in the last week. Too much time, evidently. The Captain responded almost kindly.

  “No, lad. We’re running away. Now move, quickly. Skorei!” The driver engaged the clutch, and the tank began to pick up speed.

  Zorin and his men heard the tank’s machine gun fall silent. If it’s a feint, we’re dead, he thought. But seconds later, the main gun fired, and immediately the tank began backing up, the turret shifting position once more, the main gun lowering. Zorin seized the chance. “Close assault, move!”

  The tank was beginning to outrun them when suddenly it fired on the move; Zorin’s men instinctively dropped to the ground. Gouts of rich, black Russian soil flew into the air, pelting Zorin and his men with clods of the dark chernozam, and smoke from the explosion obscuring the tank.

  A bar of black metal fifteen centimeters long plopped into the dirt directly in front of him, and Zorin reached out through the smoke to pick it up. He brought it close to his eyes and cursed when he found himself looking at a railroad spike.

  “Get that tank, knock it out, now.” Zorin scrambled to his feet and led the assault.

  The first of the Combat Engineers with Zorin reached the tank as the main gun fired again. The shock wave rattled the man’s teeth, but he dropped into a kneeling position and fired the RPG even as the tank began to move again. The tall grasses were rising to obscure the tank as it moved away from him, and the rocket motor of the antitank round burned a smoking trail through the brown sheaves.

  The rocket hit the right front quarter and detonated, blowing the track off the drive wheel, opening the engine compartment, and igniting the interior. The tank made a half-turn on the momentum of its remaining track and stopped, hissing and shrieking like a dying horse.

  Zorin closed with the tank, leaping over a section of track it had destroyed with its two point-blank shots of high explosive. The railbed was demolished for ten meters. Cursing, he reached the burning AFV in time to see both the turret hatch and a front escape hatch open simultaneously. He was ready to shoot the man exiting the turret, but the one from the hull got out first.

  The man’s clothes burned fiercely, engulfing him, and trailing flames as he leapt from the tank to run aimlessly through grass that ignited with his passing. He stopped moving for a moment, trying perhaps to get his bearings, although he didn’t stop screaming. Zorin took careful aim and shot him through the head. That ended the screams, but wouldn’t put out the fire, and he sent two men to beat it out with their coats.

  By then the commander was out of the turret hatch, trying to pull a third crewman after him.

  The man straddling the turret hatch was dark and strong-looking, his bearded face and tattered uniform covered with blood. He was shouting encouragement to the man beneath him as he tried to pull him out. Zorin, like his men, stood aiming at the tanker, but none of them could bring himself to fire.

  Finally, with a tremendous effort, the tanker heaved his gunner’s body out of the hatch. There was nothing left of the man below the hips, and he was obviously quite dead. The tank commander felt over backward onto the front of his vehicle, and Zorin walked around the side to finish him.

  Captain Drachev saw the big man in the Army greatcoat standing a few feet away, aiming a rifle at him. Drachev pushed himself up to one knee, feeling for his sidearm. He had blood in his eyes, and had to paw the holster flap several times before he got it open. The big man watched him over his rifle’s sights.

  Drachev got the pistol out of the holster and pulled the slide back with blood-slick fingers. Before he could raise it to fire, he fell off the tank into the tall grass.

  Zorin kicked the pistol away and turned the man over with his boot. The trooper who’d killed the tank approached him, still holding the empty rocket tube.

  “Sergeant—I mean Lieutenant, there is still one more tank, and all those infantry are still about.”

  “Throw that thing away”—Zorin pointed to the rocket launcher in the soldier’s hand—“and help me move him away from the tank so his men can find him.”

  “I thought he was dead.”

  Zorin looked down at the soldier; likely it was a very good man lying at his feet. He was glad he didn’t have to shoot him.

  “No. Not yet. That will come after he reports what happened here today. Come on, grab his feet, that tank’s ammo might cook off any second.” He looked back toward the town to see what damage the train had suffered.

  “Christus.” The train was on fire.

  Rostov’s wound was bleeding merrily, but he held his grip. He saw a puff of smoke on the fields, then a boxcar was engulfed in flames. A moment later there was an explosion in the field as a third tank was killed, and Rostov saw another beating a hasty retreat from the tracks.

  That’s the fourth tank out there; this is the last one! He would be a lot happier once he thought of something to do with that knowledge. The shot just fired by this tank seemed to have had no effect. He could hear the commander inside shouting orders to his crew, preparing to fire again. Pulling himself back up to the turret, Rostov knelt on the exhaust grating, the threadbare knees of his trousers offering little protection from the heat. He freed the sidearm and one grenade from his weapons belt, and seeing the gun begin to shift, he summoned his remaining strength and pushed himself up to the vision cupola.

  Rostov put his face up to the ten-centimeter-square viewplate and found himself looking at the commander’s profile. The glass was meant to be too small a target to hit, or at best serve as some protection against shrapnel. He didn’t think it was bulletproof; he put the barrel of his own Makarov against it and fired.

  He was right. The 9mm round pierced the glass and continued through the commander’s cheeks, taking most of his back teeth with it and shattering his jaw.

  The wound alone wasn’t fatal, but the commander’s next action was. The man popped the hatch and stood up, waving his own sidearm and roaring in pain. Rostov shot him in the chest, the impact of the heavy slug carrying the tanker out of the turret and over the side. Within the tank, the gunner and the driver scrambled respectively for a weapon and an escape hatch. Ignoring the grenade he still held, Rostov aimed and fired twice at each man, feeling uneasily as if he were shooting at fish in a barrel.

  A few more shots were heard from the plain, but except for the crackling of the burning boxcar, it had suddenly become very quiet. Then Rostov heard the cheering.

  He looked up to see Dyatlov and his squad, most grinning incredulously, stabbing their rifles into the air. One man cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled: “Ourrah! Ourrah pobieda! Ourrah, llya Muromets!”

  At the name of the dragon-slaying folk hero, Rostov felt ridiculous. It was just a tank, he thought stupidly. Then he grinned and waved a bloody arm.

  “We’ve a fire on our hands, Dyatlov. There’s a boxcar that needs dousing, let’s get to it.”

  Dyatlov stepped up to the tank to help him down. Rostov passed out before his feet hit the ground.

  Rostov opened his eyes to see Blaustein and Wrenn standing over him. He realized he was pinned to the desk in the command car while the surgeon inspected the wound in his arm.

  Blaustein was speaking to Wrenn about his handiwork. “Clean wound. Moderate-sized round, jacketed; passed through the meaty part of the triceps—here, see?” He tapped the skin around the bullet hole, ignoring Rostov’s undiluted howl. “Good thing it wasn’t a lead slug. Those are messy. Likely would have taken the arm right off.”

  Rostov caught his breath and began roundly cursing Blaustein, who ignored him as he finished dressing the wound with a fresh bandage. When he was done, he helped Rostov to sit up.

  “Get up, Captain. I’m not an osteopath, and I don’t want you sleeping on this desk. Bullet holes, I can fix, but bad backs, you are on your own. And now I have to see to some other patients.” The surgeon gathered up the sheet he’d thrown over Rostov’s desk and left the command car.

  “What’s going on? How long have I been asleep?”

  “You weren’t asleep, you were unconscious,” Wrenn told him. “About four hours. The fires are out, and it looks like the bad guys are gone for now. Zorin has scouts trailing them; they’ve got a dozen or so APCs and one tank left. They’re heading northeast and they aren’t slowing down.”

  Rostov nodded, fumbling with his canteen. “I should be out there…”

  Wrenn helped him with the canteen, holding it to Rostov’s lips for three all too brief swallows. “Yes, well, you were doing such a good job of bleeding to death that we didn’t see any point in interrupting you.”

  “How badly were we hit?”

  Wrenn capped the canteen. “Nine men wounded, two more blinded from being too close to a spotter round when it went off; Blaustein isn’t sure if it’s permanent or not. And two dead, including Corporal Ulyarin. About a dozen of the townspeople killed and twice that many wounded when a fléchette round hit the platform–” He caught the look in Rostov’s eyes and quickly added: “Not your babushka, nor her granddaughter, either.”

  Rostov wanted to laugh and weep at the same time, and he was afraid he was far too tired to control his emotions for much longer. He changed the subject. “All right. It could have been much worse. Materials?”

  “We lost a boxcar full of lumber to fire. Gyrich says with a little work, we’ll have a new flatcar. Then there’s the track. Zorin says the last tank out in the fields tore up a lot of it with a couple of high-explosive rounds. We won’t be going out of Suschenko the way we came in.”

  Rostov could accept that; the KGB was probably swarming up that line by now, anyway.

  Wrenn paused a moment before going on. “But the real problem isn’t anything that’s happened to us.”

  “How is that again?”

  Wrenn took a deep breath before answering. “You’d better see this for yourself.’’

  Colonel Fedorin sat at the edge of the platform, his hands draped over his knees, staring at the smoldering remains of a building. He looked up as Rostov and Zorin approached him; Wrenn had begged off meeting the Rail Security Colonel, claiming Blaustein needed him to help with first aid.

  “Ah. Hello, Captain Rostov.”

  “Colonel Fedorin. I don’t know what to say; we had no wish to bring our misfortune down on you and your people.”

  Fedorin shrugged. “Every stick has two ends. You needed help; you gave it in return. Before you came, we had not counted on being able to use the fuel, anyway.” His voice trailed off.

  Rostov looked around at the town of Suschenko, until this morning relatively unscathed by the war. Even now, only one building had been lost. But it was the one building the people had needed most. Except perhaps for the church, he thought.

  “Lieutenant Zorin. Fetch Aliyev and Dyatlov. Have them get their men to work unloading the fuel we took on board.”

  Zorin only raised an eyebrow, then nodded. “At once, sir.”

  Fedorin stared up at him, shaking his head. “You can’t, Captain. Those were KGB tanks; it’s obvious that you are running from them for some reason. They will stop at nothing to capture you, and you have lost a great deal of time already.” The old reservist got to his feet.

  “We can use old petrol,” Fedorin insisted. “Even contaminated, it will burn after a fashion. Not to run engines, but we can make cooking fires, boil water. Please, Captain, keep the fuel. Without it they will catch you and kill you, all of you.”

 

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