The Red Line

The sounds of the battle so near Camp Kinney created an even greater sense of urgency in the dispensary’s activities.

“We’ve got to get the wounded out of here,” the doctor said.

“We’ve still got one medevac chopper and four ambulances,” the senior medic said.

“Then let’s get moving right now. If we wait any longer, it’s going to be too late.”

The PA continued to work on Jensen.

“What about this one?” he said. “You think he’ll survive the helicopter ride to Wurzburg?”

“What’s his status?” the doctor asked.

“I’ve got the bleeding stopped. And I’ve bandaged his foot and leg. But his head wound’s very serious.”

“If we don’t have room on the medevac for everyone who needs to be on it, leave him here.”

In three wars, the senior medic had never left a wounded countryman behind. And he wasn’t about to start now.

“We’ll have room for him,” the medic said.

You’re damn right you will, Ramirez told himself. Even if I’ve got to crawl outside to get the machine gun off the Humvee and kill me a doctor, Sergeant Jensen’s going on that helicopter.

• • •

The medics carried the most serious cases out to the waiting medevac. Robert Jensen, still unconscious, with IVs attached to both arms, was loaded onto the twenty-year-old Black Hawk.

The wounded in less need of immediate attention were placed in the ambulances. The instant the last patients were loaded, the ambulance drivers tore out the front gate.

With Steele’s help, Ramirez slowly walked to the helicopter. The two stood looking at each other for what seemed a long time. Neither knew what to say. Finally, the medic signaled that Ramirez needed to board. With his good arm, he patted Steele on the shoulder. Ramirez reached out, and the medic pulled him onto the helicopter. He gave Steele a thumbs-up. The medevac lifted off the ground. It spun around and headed west toward the Army hospital at Wurzburg. Steele gave a halfhearted wave as it soared overhead in the darkness.

The squadron commander watched the medevac take to the skies. The time had come to organize the last of his forces. The two hundred men were given everything left in the squadron’s arsenal—M-4s, grenades, machine guns, and twenty-four shoulder-mounted light antitank weapons. Nothing that would stop so powerful an enemy. But that had never been their job. They’d always been here to trade their lives for precious minutes of time.

While this final element prepared to leave camp, a messenger arrived. The Apaches and Bradleys sent south had failed to stem the tide. All had been destroyed. Nuremberg, and its five hundred thousand citizens, had fallen to the Russians. In all, over five million Germans were already behind enemy lines.

• • •

The last two hundred men rolled out of Camp Kinney. They headed east, hoping to slow the enemy just a little more. The squadron commander rode in a Humvee that had served its country well. Next to him, his driver sat in a seat with a large bloodstain on its upper right corner. Standing behind the squadron commander, Steele waited with his machine gun at the ready. In a few minutes, the two—the African-American private with the haunting baby face and the ancient look in his eyes, and the disheartened squadron commander—would die together on a blustery winter night.

The soldiers of the border would never see the light of the glorious morning that dawned two hours later. By 6:00 a.m., of the fifteen hundred men of 1st Squadron, fifty-nine were still living. Only two dozen of those weren’t wounded.

The proud cavalry squadron was no more.

With their lives, they’d bought the West six hours to prepare to meet the challenge.

In the spring, the apples would bloom again on the scarred trees of the ancient orchard. But the soldiers of 2nd Platoon wouldn’t be there to see them.

• • •

The Black Hawk would cover the 120 miles in under an hour. At a little before eight, with his life hanging by a thread, Sergeant First Class Robert Jensen was rushed into surgery. At that exact moment, 4,500 miles away, the 767 with the frightening eagle on its tail landed in Charleston, South Carolina. Half-asleep, the exhausted Jensen women walked down the ramp and into the Charleston Air Base Military Airlift Command Terminal.

When she entered the warm terminal, Linda handed a third set of computer cards to an Air Force sergeant. Not a single passenger was yet aware that eight hours earlier, their husbands and fathers had begun fighting and dying in the bloody snows of Germany.

CHAPTER 25

January 29—6:00 a.m.

United States Army Air Field

Stuttgart

A green bus with U.S. ARMY on its sides stopped near the C-17 transport. The large aircraft’s four engines were already running. The passengers began exiting the bus and walking up the C-17’s rear ramp. George O’Neill was the last to leave the tired bus. He reluctantly trailed the other five members of his agency as they trudged toward the waiting plane.

O’Neill tossed his suitcase into the jumbled pile in the back of the aircraft. He dropped into the seat between Denny Doyle and Major Siebman. The forty members of the European Command backup team quickly settled in. The cargo aircraft was soon roaring down the runway. It disappeared into the darkness.

O’Neill slumped farther into his seat. The flying time to England would be under two hours. In 120 minutes, he would be five hundred miles from Kathy and Christopher.

• • •

Circling high over the Rhine, the Airborne Warning and Control System’s AirLand Battle controllers noted the takeoff of the plane from Stuttgart. Inside America’s prize command and control system, the AWACS computers instantly processed the data on the departing aircraft.

The AWACS was carrying its maximum crew of twenty-nine, both officers and enlisted. Twenty-three of them, including the aircraft’s tactical director, were women. For the past six hours, the AWACS controllers had been waiting for the MiGs to appear in the east.

Yet for six tedious hours, the skies had remained quiet. They knew a Russian air attack was inevitable. At this point, the battle controllers didn’t understand why it hadn’t occurred hours earlier. Why the Russians were waiting made no sense at all. The longer they waited, the more time the Americans had to prepare for the coming battle. Inside the AWACS, the controllers were edgy and tense. They sensed that even though there had been no sign of the enemy, the attack would undoubtedly be launched before the sun rose.

The Boeing E-3 Sentry sat well back of the battlefield. Its radar searched the eastern sky. It would report the moment the first enemy aircraft was spotted. Using its pinpoint guidance, the Allied fighters and air-defense systems would then attack and destroy. Because of the AWACS, the Americans firmly believed they could overcome the Warsaw Pact air forces’ numerical superiority.

Despite the three-to-one odds against them, with the AWACS, the West could dominate the skies. Without it, America’s plan for a precisely integrated AirLand Battle would be unworkable.

• • •

Seventy miles north of London, three airmen departed an aging English taxi at the front gate to Mildenhall Air Base. The airmen briefly held up their identification cards for an air policeman to see. They were just three of many entering the American base in the darkness and fog of an English winter.

The main gate’s air policemen had watched a steady stream of airmen arrive at the base in the hours since midnight, as units located their members and ordered their recall.

By 6:00 a.m., the air policeman who passed the trio through had grown tired and a little lazy. If it had been daylight, or he’d been at all suspicious, he would’ve noticed that the pictures on the identification cards and the faces into which he made a cursory shine of his flashlight weren’t the same. The air policeman would’ve also noticed that the three were wearing fatigue uniforms whose necks were splatte

red with fresh blood.

A mile back down the narrow country lane leading to the air base, the bodies of the airmen whose faces matched the identification cards lay in a rock-strewn field a few hundred yards from the asphalt. They were clad in only their underwear. Their throats had been slit from ear to ear.

It had been an expert job.