The Red Line

The Apaches struck. The calamitous conflict’s thunder roared once more.

In a little more than a hurried breath, six Russian tanks were burning in a field that had yielded a bountiful harvest of red cabbage and beets five months earlier. The lethal black spiders had popped up in perfect unison. Each had fired a single Hellfire missile, guided it to the target, and faded back into the protective trees. Six tanks were nothing more than twisted, burning wreckage in the middle of the snowbound field. The assault had been so quick and so destructive that only two of the surviving tank crews had determined its source.

While the pair of T-80s blindly fired their antiaircraft machine guns into the treetops, each of the Apaches slid fifty yards to the right. The helicopters reappeared. They fired a second missile. The final six tanks fell prey to Hellfires.

In fifteen seconds, a company of T-80s had vanished from the battlefield.

“All right, Warrior Flight, let’s move out.”

None of the Apaches had suffered a single scratch. They disappeared over the evergreens. Skimming the highest branches, they moved to spin their web once again. The next group of unsuspecting flies would soon be along.

• • •

It was combat like nothing the soldiers of the Second World War had experienced on these same bloodstained fields. It wasn’t even a form of battle they’d have recognized. With both sides’ remarkable weapons of mass destruction, the only defense was to provide no massed targets. As the winter sun peaked high on the first day and slowly continued its inexorable movement toward the western horizon, neither side could dare gather too many soldiers or pieces of equipment together. Any Russian attempt to do so would result in a swift and fatal response by B-2 and B-52 bombers or the Army’s Multiple Launch Rocket Systems.

Gone forever were the days when immense armies would slug it out in the mud to determine the outcome of a war. As it was, by massing huge amounts of armor at the border, the Russians had risked it all in the previous night’s attack. They’d taken a calculated gamble. They’d been forced to endure such a risk for the first eight hours of the war in order to gain a large enough area in Germany within which to operate. To General Yovanovich’s relief, his gamble had worked. He’d rolled the dice. And the dice had so far come up sevens. Had the Russians’ surprise not succeeded and the Americans been waiting, the result would have been certain annihilation.

This war would be fought by no group larger than battalion size—and even then, only rarely. It would be a war of company against company, platoon against platoon, squad against squad, and soldier against soldier.

It was a form of warfare at which the Americans excelled—and with which the Russian soldier was ill prepared to deal. The resourceful American private made up his own battle plan as he went. If the general’s orders didn’t work, or he found himself faced with an unanticipated situation, the American simply changed things on the spot. He’d then go about accomplishing the task he’d been assigned. The creative, freethinking American was in his element.

His opponent had no such ability. The Russian soldier was given an order, and he obeyed it without question. Throughout the coming days, when cut off from his unit or faced with unusual circumstances, the Russian would continue to follow the last order he’d been given. Many times it was a useless order two or three days old. A rigid, unthinking society had produced a rigid, unthinking soldier. That soldier was being called upon to fight a thinking man’s war.

The individual advantage was strongly with the Americans. The question still to be answered, however, was whether that tactical advantage would be enough to overcome the daunting ten-to-one odds the Americans faced.

• • •

The all-powerful tank of sixty years ago had become an ordinary weapon of the battlefield. The Russian attack involved fifty thousand tanks. The defenders had only four thousand with which to meet them. Yet there was still a chance of an American victory. In this world of extraordinary technology, the tank was a valuable weapon. It was, however, no longer king. Its place in the pecking order of the battlefield fell somewhere in the middle. The tank remained a strong destroyer. Nevertheless, the things that could destroy it were now many.

Despite their setbacks in the initial twelve hours of the war, America didn’t find itself holding an empty hand. For in its arsenal of cards to play on the killing fields of Germany, it held four aces. America had four weapons so deadly that, without help, the Russian armor was powerless to defeat.

The Apache Attack Helicopter was one of the greatest killers of armor in the world. Still, it was not America’s only ace. For there were three weapons in the American arsenal as strong or stronger.

CHAPTER 37

January 29—2:30 p.m.

1st Platoon, Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion, 69th Armor, 3rd Heavy Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division

At the Crossroads of Highway 19 and Autobahn A7

Thirty minutes after the drones and Apaches crossed Richardson’s position, two strange creatures passed so low over the evergreens that the snow from the highest branches tumbled down upon the hidden tanks. The small aircraft had been scouring the woods for quite some time, and they were low on fuel. But they decided to make one more run at the Russians while the runways at Ramstein were being repaired. They hurried forward, cautiously picking their way through the trees until they spotted their feast.

The A-10s slammed into a platoon of BMPs. The BMPs never had a chance. From a mile away, the first Warthog pilot made his run. The other stood back to protect him. In a two-second burst, the A-10’s seven-barrel cannon fired one hundred armor-piercing rounds into the personnel carriers. The pilot hurried forward. He dropped two five-hundred-pound bombs on the crippled BMPs. The Warthog’s lethal ordnance ripped the enemy apart.

When the first ended his run, the second came forward. He wanted to make sure they’d completed the job. Like a pair of relentless hyenas finishing off a wounded quarry, the A-10s went about the task of disemboweling the BMPs. It was over in a few baneful seconds. Inside the mangled armored personnel carriers, forty soldiers were dead.

The Warthog was undisputedly the ugliest ace in the American armor-killing arsenal. Its ugly name and ugly disposition matched it perfectly. Incredibly slow, it was scarcely more than a flying cannon. It was invulnerable to the 12.7mm antiaircraft machine guns the Russian tanks and BMPs carried. The A-10 pilots simply ignored the efforts of the armored vehicles to defend themselves and blew the enemy straight into the next world.

One of the Americans’ favorite tricks was to combine the Apaches and Warthogs into a pack of ruthless killers. The strength of both predators could then be played in harmony to destroy whatever strayed into their path. Working in unison, these hyenas and jackals were the scourge of the German forest. Watching for the enemy to show any weakness, they’d attack without mercy to drag their victim down and rip him to pieces. All over southern Germany, these packs of wild dogs were picking the Russian armored bones clean.

Nevertheless, like everything on the battlefield the Warthog was vulnerable. If a MiG found this slow mover, he could kill him with relative ease. And as had happened in the skies over Ramstein and Spangdahlem, Russian air-defense missiles were quite capable of knocking the little Warthog out of the sky forever.

For that reason, the Warthogs’ trip home to Ramstein would be made at something less than one hundred feet above the ground. The aircraft would never be in a straight, stable position for more than four seconds at a time.

Or else the nasty little hunter would all too soon find himself the quarry.

• • •

Two hundred miles north, another colossal battle had commenced. Rather than being content to defend the German soil still free from the stain of the Slavic invader, four German divisions were attacking the Russians with everything they had. It was an all-out effort to recapture the eastern portion of the country.

The noose had been placed around the East German neck, but it hadn’t yet been tightened. The Russians’ hold on the East German border was paper-thin. Using everything they had, the German armored divisions rammed into the defenders. The Russian line collapsed in the first hour. By two, it was a rout. A pair of German divisions raced fifty miles into East Germany. They were halfway to Berlin. Another division recaptured Leipzig. The final one wreaked havoc in the far north, freeing Rostock and moving on.

The Russians waited. At just the right moment, they came up in force from the area around the town of Selb. They swarmed in behind the Germans. Ten armored divisions sprung the trap closed. The Germans were cut off. Twenty Russian divisions raced from their hiding place in far eastern Germany. They hit the Germans head-on. The slaughter of half the German army had begun.

By midnight, the four German divisions would be no more. And East Germany would be firmly within Russian hands.

• • •

The fast-arriving sunset was only an hour away. Frustrated by his inability to break through the 1st Armor Division’s spirited defenses, a Russian brigade commander made a fatal mistake. He brought his three thousand men together to smash the American line. A lazily circling reconnaissance drone spotted the Russian’s error.

Richardson watched four Multiple Launch Rocket Systems on modified Bradley chassis tearing down Highway 19. One of the greatest aces of the American armor killers stopped in the open area between the hidden tanks and the crowded Autobahn. A pair of the huge rocket launchers was quickly positioned on a knoll a half mile below the tanks. The other launchers were placed in a wide field a hundred yards west of the Autobahn. Two shoulder-mounted Stinger gunners readied themselves to protect the rocket systems. Each three-man rocket-launcher crew prepared to open fire.

The MLRS platoon leader verified the coordinates for the attack. The launcher commanders inputted the firing data into their computers. All four signaled their readiness.

“Fire!” the lieutenant screamed.