border at ...” He read off the coordinates. “We show people getting ready to fire some artillery at you, General.”
“How much?” Bondarenko asked.
“Most I’ve ever seen, upwards of a thousand guns total. I hope your people are hunkered down, buddy. The whole damned world’s about to land on ’em.”
“What can you do to help us?” Bondarenko asked.
“My orders are not to take action until they start shooting,” the American replied. “When that happens, I can start putting fighters up, but not much in the way of bombs. We hardly have any to drop,” Wallace reported. “I have an AWACS up now, supporting your fighters in the Chulman area, but that’s all for now. We have a C-130 ferrying you a downlink tomorrow so that we can get you some intelligence directly. Anyway, be warned, General, it looks here as though the Chinese are going to launch their attack momentarily.”
“Thank you, General Wallace.” Bondarenko hung up and looked at his staff. “He says it’s going to start at any moment.”
And so it did. Lieutenant Komanov saw it first. The line of hills his men called Rice Ridge was suddenly backlit by yellow flame that could only be the muzzle flashes of numerous field guns. Then came the upward-flying meteor shapes of artillery rockets.
“Here it comes,” he told his men. Unsurprisingly, he kept his head up so that he could see. His head, he reasoned, was a small target. Before the shells landed, he felt the impact of their firing; the rumble came through the ground like a distant earthquake, causing his loader to mutter, “Oh, shit,” probably the universal observation of men in their situation.
“Get me regiment,” Komanov ordered.
“Yes, Lieutenant,” the voice answered.
“We are under attack, Comrade Colonel, massive artillery fire to the south. Guns and rockets are coming our—”
Then the first impacts came, mainly near the river, well to his south. The exploding shells were not bright, but like little sparks of light that fountained dirt upward, followed by the noise. That did sound like an earthquake. Komanov had heard artillery fire before, and seen what the shells do at the far end, but this was as different from that as an exploding oil tank was from a cigarette lighter.
“Comrade Colonel, our country is at war,” Post Five Six Alfa reported to command. “I can’t see enemy troop movement yet, but they’re coming.”
“Do you have any targets?” regiment asked.
“No, none at this time.” He looked down into the bunker. His various positions could just give a direction to a target, and when another confirmed it and called in its own vector, they’d have a pre-plotted artillery target for the batteries in the rear—
—but those were being hit already. The Chinese rockets were targeted well behind him, and that’s what their targets had to be. He turned his head to see the flashes and hear the booms from ten kilometers back. A moment later, there was a fountaining explosion skyward. One of the first flight of Chinese rockets had gotten lucky and hit one of the artillery positions in the rear. Bad news for that gun crew, Komanov thought. The first casualties in this war. There would be many more ... perhaps including himself. Surprisingly, that thought was a distant one. Someone was attacking his country. It wasn’t a supposition or a possibility anymore. He could see it, and feel it. This was his country they were attacking. He’d grown up in this land. His parents lived here. His grandfather had fought the Germans here. His grandfather’s two brothers had, too, and both had died for their country, one west of Kiev and the other at Stalingrad. And now these Chink bastards were attacking his country, too? More than that, they were attacking him, Senior Lieutenant Valeriy Mikhailovich Komanov. These foreigners were trying to kill him, his men, and trying to steal part of his country.
Well, fuck that! he thought.
“Load HE!” he told his loader.
“Loaded!” the private announced. They all heard the breech clang shut.
“No target, Comrade Lieutenant,” the gunner observed.
“There will be, soon enough.”
“Post Five Nine, this is Five Six Alfa. What can you see?”
“We just spotted a boat, a rubber boat, coming out of the trees on the south bank ... more, more, more, many of them, maybe a hundred, maybe more.”
“Regiment, this is Fifty-six Alfa, fire mission!” Komanov called over the phone.
The gunners ten kilometers back were at their guns, despite the falling Chinese shells and rockets that had already claimed three of the fifteen gun crews. The