The Red Line

Eleven minutes after the A-10s pounced, one hundred Russian vehicles lay burning outside Ramstein. Four hundred paratroopers were dead. And the twisted wreckage of every A-10 was smoldering in the snows. Six rescue helicopters attempted to follow up on the Warthogs’ successes. Yet just as at Spangdahlem, they were brushed from the sky without a second thought.

One hundred and fifty combat vehicles moved toward their objective.

• • •

To Rios’s right, two primary bunkers were wiped out at nearly the same instant. A pair of .50-caliber machine guns were gone. Two hundred yards of chain link was wide open. The Russians rushed forward. They broke through the wire in front of the defeated positions. Thirty parachutists were quickly inside. They fanned out, determined to crush the final pockets of resistance on the eastern fence.

Mortar shells rained down upon the remaining Americans. Wide craters pockmarked the eastern end of the runway. Velasquez never heard the round that landed inside his bunker.

Now there were just four.

CHAPTER 32

January 29—9:05 a.m.

102nd Parachute Regiment

The Rhine River Valley

The Rhine River valley is some of the most beautiful country on the planet. Covered in a black forest of evergreens thicker than found anywhere in America, deep mountain gorges cut by the proud river run for hundreds of miles as the lazy waters meander from Switzerland to the Atlantic Ocean. In the south, the river separates France and Germany. In the north, it runs through Germany’s largest cities on its scenic journey to the sea.

The six thousand four hundred men of the 102nd Parachute Division weren’t nearly enough to take and hold the bridges in the heavily populated areas to the north. They weren’t even going to try. They had a single task: cut the broad bridges in the south, separating France and Germany. In all, there were twenty bridges between the two countries. Six major expanses were absolutely critical to the parachutists’ plan.

They would do whatever was necessary to seize the six bridges. Once they were within their grasp, at the first sign of trouble, all six would be destroyed. The division would also take and hold as many of the smaller bridges as they could. Those they couldn’t ensnare would be damaged to the point where they’d be of no further use to the enemy.

The Russians anticipated stiff resistance from the Germans on the eastern side of the spans and from the French on the western ends. But in the first confusing hours of the war, even the most valuable of the bridges was being guarded by a handful of lightly armed German provisional guards.

The parachutists swooped down into the Rhine valley like the Mongol hordes. Six hundred attacked each of the major bridges, overwhelming the outmanned guards. In minutes, the Russians eliminated the German defenders. They controlled the eastern approaches to each of the major spans. The parachutists started working their way across the wide bridges. They had no idea what they’d find waiting for them on the French side. Cautiously, the Russians moved forward.

Leapfrogging from position to position, the blue berets neared the far ends.

The western sides had been abandoned. The three customs agents at each border checkpoint had fled at the first sound of gunfire. The Russians started preparing fortified positions on both ends. Demolition teams rushed to ready each for destruction at the first sign of trouble.

Groups of two hundred attacked the fourteen smaller spans. Within a half hour, twelve were in Russian hands. The final two had been destroyed.

Ninety minutes after their arrival on German soil, the parachutists held the southern half of the Rhine River. The fortification of their positions was rapidly undertaken. One way or another, the French would never be allowed to set foot on any of the bridges. And the Germans would never be allowed to take any of them back.

After little more than ten hours of war, a direct attack east by the French army was an impossibility.

Five powerful French armored divisions would arrive at the great river as the sun soared high on the war’s first full day. Rather than attacking the Russians holding the spans or heading north to cross into Germany in areas still in Allied hands, the French also began digging in, creating immense defensive positions on the western side of the Rhine. It was quite apparent that the French had little taste for the monumental fight unfolding to the east. Defending Germany, especially a Nazi Germany, wasn’t something over which they truly cared to spend even a single drop of their young men’s blood.

Despite the fervent pleas and unrelenting political pressure applied by the British and Americans, they would never join in the fight.

• • •

A parachutist grimaced in anguish as a trio of machine-gun bullets ripped into his upper body. Rios’s eighth kill of the morning fell into the snows.

The number of invaders inside the fence was continuing to swell. Half of the sixty airmen assigned to protect the eastern perimeter were dead. In the center of the fence line, a single American machine gun remained. A score of parachutists concentrated their fire on Rios’s position, pinning the Americans down. The blue berets worked their way across the runways, intent on surrounding the last real opposition.

“Rios, they’re getting around behind us!” Goodman yelled.

“Keep firing into the woods. I’ll do what I can to stop the ones inside the fence.”

Rios grabbed the heavy machine gun. Cradling the weapon’s smoking barrel in his arms, he picked it up and swung it around so he could fire upon the enemy advancing on the right. The red-hot barrel burned through Rios’s clothing. The nerves on his forearms screamed as his skin began to fry. He slammed the gun down in its new position.

BMDs rammed through Ramstein’s northern and western gates at the same instant. The air police focused everything they had on stopping the enemy before they could gain access to the base.

LAW missiles ripped through the air. Machine-gun fire tore into the parachutists. A chorus of explosions filled the morning. And as at Spangdahlem, the American defenses weren’t nearly enough. The Russians never hesitated. They continued to apply wave after wave of intense pressure on the air police.

Within eight horrific minutes, the resistance at both gates had crumpled. The parachutists poured onto Ramstein.

A grenade landed at Wright’s feet as he fought on alone in t

he sandbags to Rios’s right.

Then there were only three.

• • •

At the same moment that their countrymen moved to destroy the NATO air bases, a few miles outside Kaiserslautern another parachute regiment advanced on the last of America’s critical assets.

Two divisions of armored equipment sat in endless rows inside a giant supply depot. More than five hundred M-1 tanks and an equal number of Bradley Fighting Vehicles waited to be claimed by American units arriving from the States. There were a thousand Humvees armed with machine guns or TOW missiles and endless formations of trucks. One hundred and forty-four Apache helicopters sat in the snows, along with twice as many Black Hawks and Kiowas. Artillery pieces and air-defense weapons also were positioned in lengthy lines, poised for the Americans to come and take them. Each piece of equipment had been superbly maintained. Each was armed and battle-ready.

A company of military police, a little less than two hundred men, guarded the depot. As the confident parachute regiment poured down from the early-morning sky, that was all they expected to encounter. Intelligence had confirmed those facts five hours earlier. What the regiment had no way of knowing was that minutes after their departure from the Ukraine, a battalion of soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division, accompanied by two companies from the 24th Infantry Division, had arrived at the depot to outfit themselves for battle. The Americans, having endured an eight-hour flight across the Atlantic and an additional three to make their way the sixty miles from Rhein-Main to Kaiserslautern, were in an extremely foul state of mind and more than ready to take it out on anything that crossed their path.

Seventeen hundred marauders were advancing on the pre-positioned supplies. They believed they’d find a small, determined force of MPs fighting with nothing larger than Humvees. What they were going to encounter, however, were two hundred MPs, eleven hundred American airborne soldiers armed with TOW missiles and machine guns, along with nearly four hundred soldiers from the 24th Infantry in the Bradley Fighting Vehicles they’d drawn from the depot.