29 - Remedies

As predicted, the bridge lasted less than an hour. In that time Alekseyev had gotten a full battalion of mechanized infantry across, and though the NATO troops launched a pair of vicious counterattacks on his bridgehead, the tanks he'd placed on the east bank had been able to break them up with direct fire. Now NATO had caught its breath, and was assembling artillery. Heavy guns pounded his bridgehead and the tanks on the Soviet side of the river, and to make matters worse, the assault boats had been held up by incredible traffic snarls on the road between Sack and Alfeld. German heavy guns were littering the road and surrounding land with artillery-deployed mines, each powerful enough to knock the tread off a tank or the wheel off a truck. Sappers swept the roads continuously, using heavy machine guns to detonate the mines, but every one took time, and not all were seen before they exploded under a heavily loaded vehicle. The loss of the individual trucks and tanks was bad enough; worse still were the traffic tieups that resulted from each disabled vehicle.

Alekseyev's headquarters were in a camera shop overlooking the river. The plate-glass window had long since been blown away, and his boots crackled with every step. He surveyed the far bank through his binoculars and anguished for his men as they tried to fight back at the men and tanks on the hills above them. A few kilometers away, every mobile gun in 8th Guards Army was racing forward to provide fire support for his tank division, and he and Sergetov set them to counterbattery the NATO guns.

"Enemy aircraft!" a lieutenant shouted.

Alekseyev craned his neck and saw a dot to the south, which grew rapidly into a German F-104 fighter. Yellow tracer lines reached out from his AA guns and blotted it from the sky before it could release, but instantly another appeared, this one firing its own cannon at the gun vehicle and exploding it. Alekseyev swore as the single-engine fighter bored in, dropped two bombs on the far side of the river, and streaked away. The bombs fell slowly, retarded by small parachutes, then, twenty meters over the ground, appeared to fill the air with fog-Alekseyev dove to the floor of the shop as the cloud of explosive vapor detonated from the fuel-air-explosive bombs. The shock wave was fearful, and above his head a display case shattered, dropping broken glass all over him.

"What the hell was that?" Sergetov yelled, deafened by the blast, then, looking up, "You're hit, Comrade General!"

Alekseyev ran his hand over his face. It came away red. His eyes stung, and he poured the contents of his canteen over his face to clear them of the blood. Major Sergetov slapped a bandage on his general's forehead with only one hand, Alekseyev noticed.

"What happened to you?"

"I fell on some of this damned glass! Stay still, Comrade General, you're bleeding like a slaughtered cow." A lieutenant general showed up. Alekseyev recognized him as Viktor Beregovoy, 8th Guards Army's second in command.

"Comrade General, you have orders to return to headquarters. I am here to relieve you."

"The hell you say!" Alekseyev bellowed.

"The orders come from Commander-in-Chief West, Comrade. I am a general of tank troops. I can carry on here. If you will permit me to say so, you have performed brilliantly. But you are needed elsewhere."

"Not until I'm finished!"

"Comrade General, if you want this crossing to succeed, we need more support here. Who can better arrange that support, you or I?" Beregovoy asked reasonably.

Alekseyev let out a long angry breath. The man was right-but for the first time Pavel Leonidovich Alekseyev had led-really led-men in combat, and he had done well. Alekseyev knew it-he had done well!

"There is no time to argue. You have your task and I have mine," the man said.

"You know the situation?"

"Fully. There is a vehicle in the back to return you to headquarters."

Alekseyev held the bandage to his head-Sergetov hadn't tied it properly-and walked out the back of the shop. Where the door had once been, he found a gaping hole. A BMD infantry carrier was there, its motor running. Alekseyev got in and found a medical orderly who clucked over the General and went immediately to work. As the carrier pulled off, Alekseyev listened to the noise of combat diminish. It was the saddest sound he had ever heard.

LANGLEY AIR FORCE BASE, VIRGINIA

There was nothing like a Distinguished Flying Cross to make a person happy about flying, and she wondered if she might be the first female Air Force pilot to have one. If not, Major Nakamura decided, what the hell? She had a gun-camera videotape of all three of her Badgers, and a Navy pilot she'd met in Brittany before catching a flight Stateside had called her one damned fine pilot, for an Air Force puke. After which she had reminded him that if the dumbass Navy pilots had listened to her, maybe their air base wouldn't be in a body and fender shop. Game, set, and match, she grinned, to Major Amelia Nakamura, USAF.

All the F-l5s that could be ferried across the Atlantic had been ferried, and now she had another job. Only four of the 48th Fighter Interceptor Squadron's Eagles were still at Langley. The rest were scattered up and down the East Coast, including the two pilots who were qualified for the ASAT antisatellite missiles. As soon as she'd heard that, she had made a phone call and informed Space Command that she was the Eagle driver who had worked out the ASAT flight profile, and why take a combat pilot off the line when she could handle the mission very well, thank you.

She checked to make sure the ugly missile was properly attached to the airframe. It had been taken out of secure storage and reexamined by a team of experts. Buns shook her head. There had only been one real test of the system before a moratorium had been slapped on the project. A successful test, to be sure, but only one. She hoped it would work. The Navy really needed help from the Air Force pukes. Besides, that A-6 driver was cute.

The major finished her walkaround, taking her time-her target wasn't over the Indian Ocean yet-then strapped herself into her Eagle, ran her eyes and hands over the gauges and handles, adjusted the seat, and finally input the numbers painted on the wall of the aircraft shelter into the aircraft's inertial navigation system so that the fighter would know where it was. Finished, she began to fire up her engines. Her flight helmet protected her from the shriek of the two Pratt and Whitney engines. The needles on her engine gauges rotated into proper position. Below her, the crew chief gave the aircraft a careful examination, then waved to her to taxi the aircraft into the open. Six people were out there, standing behind the red warning line to protect their ears from the noise. Always nice to have an audience, she thought, ignoring them.

"Eagle One-Zero-Four ready to taxi," she told the tower.

"One-Zero-Four, roger. You are cleared to taxi," the tower controller replied. "Wind is two-five-three at twelve knots."

"Roger that, One-Zero-Four is rolling."

Buns brought her canopy down. The crew chief snapped to attention and gave the major a perfect salute. Nakamura answered it with panache, advanced her throttles slightly, and the Eagle fighter moved off to the runway like a crippled stork. A minute later, she was in the air, a silky smooth feeling of pure power enveloping her as she pointed her Eagle at the sky.

Kosmos 1801 was just completing its southbound leg, bending around the Straits of Magellan to head north over the Atlantic. The orbital pass would take it two hundred miles off the American coast. At the ground-control station, technicians prepared to switch on the powerful sea-surveillance radar. They were sure an American carrier battle group was at sea, but had been unable to locate it. Three regiments of Backfires were waiting for information that would allow them to repeat the feat accomplished on the second day of the war.