It was a long, tense wait. Two hours after the raid warning, a garbled transmission was heard, interpreted as a warning to a Backfire pilot approaching a tanker. The bearing was plotted, and the Nimrod turned east hoping for a cross bearing on the next such signal. None was detected. Without a firm fix, the fighters had only the slimmest hope of an intercept. They were kept on the ground. Next time, they decided, there'd be a pair of snoopers up.

USS CHICAGO

The QZB bell-ringer call arrived just after lunch. McCafferty brought his submarine to antenna depth and received orders to proceed to Faslane, the Royal Navy submarine base in Scotland. Since losing contact with the Russian surface force, they had not tracked a single positive contact. It was crazy. All the pre-war assessments told McCafferty to expect a "target-rich environment." So far he was rich only in frustration. The executive officer took them back down to a deep cruising depth while McCafferty began to write up his patrol report.

"You're pretty exposed here," the captain observed, crouching just behind the turret.

"True enough," Sergeant Mackall agreed. His M-1 Abrams tank was dug into the reverse slope of a hill, its gun barely clear of the ground behind a row of shrubs. Mackall looked down a shallow valley to a treeline fifteen hundred meters away. The Russians were in there, surveying the ridges with powerful field glasses, and he hoped that they could not make out the squat, ominous profile of the main battle tank. He was in one of three prepared firing positions, a sloped hole in the ground dug by the engineers' bulldozers, helped over the last few days by local German farmers who had taken to the task with a will. The bad news was that the next line of such positions required traversing five hundred meters of open fields. They'd been planted with something a bare six weeks before. Those crops would never amount to much, the sergeant knew.

"Ivan must love this weather," Mackall observed. There was an overcast at about thirteen hundred feet. Whatever air support he could expect would have a bare five seconds to acquire and engage their targets before having to break clear of the battlefield. "What can you give us, sir?"

"I can call four A-10s, maybe some German birds," the Air Force captain replied. He surveyed the terrain himself from a slightly different perspective. What was the best way to get the ground-attack fighters in and out? The first Russian attack on this position had been repulsed, but he could see the remains of two NATO aircraft that had died in the effort. "There should be three choppers, too."

That surprised Mackall-and worried him. Just what sort of attack were they expecting here?

"Okay." The captain stood and turned back to his armored command vehicle. "When you hear 'Zulu, Zulu, Zulu,' that means the air is less than five minutes out. If you see any SAM vehicles or antiair guns, for Christ's sake take them out. The Warthogs have been hit real hard, Sarge."

"You got it, Cap'n. You better get your ass outa here, it's gonna be showtime soon." One thing Mackall had learned was just how important a good forward air-control officer was, and this one had dug the sergeant's troop out of a really bad scrape three days before. He watched the officer sprint fifty yards to the waiting vehicle, its engine already turning. The rear door hadn't yet closed when the driver pulled out fast, zigzagging down the slope and across the plowed field toward the command post.

B Troop, 1st Squadron, 1lth Armored Cavalry Regiment had once been fourteen tanks. Five of the originals were gone, and there had been only two replacements. Of the rest, all had been damaged to one degree or another. His platoon leader had been killed on the second day of the war, leaving Mackall in command of the three-tank platoon, covering nearly a kilometer of front. Dug in between his tanks was a company of German infantry-men of the Landwehr, the local equivalent of the National Guard, farmers and shop owners for the most part, men fighting to defend not just their country, but their own homes. They, too, had taken serious losses. The "company" was no more than two platoons of effectives. Surely the Russians know just how thin we're spread, Mackall thought. Everyone was dug in-deep. The power of Russian artillery had come as a shock despite all the pre-war warnings they'd had.

"The Americans must love this." The colonel gestured at the low clouds. "Their damned airplanes come swooping in too low for our radar, and this way we have practically no chance to see them before they fire."

"How badly have they hurt you?"

"See for yourself." The colonel gestured at the battlefield. Fifteen tanks lay in view-the burned-out remains. "That American low-level fighter did this-the Thunderbolt. Our men call it the Devil's Cross."

"But you killed two aircraft yesterday," Sergetov objected.

"Yes, and only one of four gun vehicles survived the effort. The same vehicle got both-Senior Sergeant Lupenko. I recommended him for the Red Banner. It will be posthumous-the second aircraft crashed right on his vehicle. My best gunner," the colonel said bitterly. Two kilometers away, the wreckage of a German Alphajet was a charred garnish atop the remains of a ZSU-30 gun vehicle. No doubt it had been deliberate, the colonel thought, that German had wanted to kill just a few more Soviets before he died. A sergeant handed his colonel a radio headset. The officer listened for half a minute before speaking a few words that he punctuated with a quick nod.

"Five minutes, Comrades. My men are fully in place. Would you follow me, please?"

The command bunker had been hastily built of logs and earth, with a full meter of overhead cover. Twenty men were crammed into it, communications men for the two regiments in the assault. The division's third regiment waited to exploit the breakthrough and pave the way for the reserve armored division to break into the enemy's rear. If, Alekseyev reminded himself, everything went as planned.

No enemy troops or vehicles could be seen, of course. They would be in the woods atop the ridge less than two kilometers away, dug in deep. He watched the divisional commander nod to his artillery chief, who lifted a field phone and spoke two words:

"Commence firing."

It took several seconds for the sound to reach them. Every gun the division owned, with an additional battery from the tank division, spoke as one dreadful voice, and the thunder echoed across the countryside The shells arched overhead, at first striking short of the opposite ridgeline, then closing on it. What had once been a gentle hill covered with lush grass turned into a brown obscenity of bare earth and smoke.

"I think they're serious, Sarge," the loader said, pulling his hatch down tight.

Mackall adjusted his helmet and microphone as he peered out the view ports built into his commander's cupola. The thick armor plate kept most of the noise out, but when the ground shook beneath them, the shock came through the treads and suspension to rock the vehicle, and each crewman reflected to himself on the force needed to budge a sixty-ton tank. This was how the lieutenant had bought it-a one-in-a-thousand shot from a heavy gun had landed a round right on his turret, and it had burrowed through the thin overhead armor to explode the vehicle.

Left and right of Mackall's tank, the largely middle-aged German territorials cowered in their deep, narrow holes, their emotions oscillating between terror and rage at what was happening to them and their country-and their homes!