Off to Fretello's left, Adjutant Hector Allons found that he could not refrain from actively participating in the attack. After ensuring that each of his men had a sector of fire for which he was responsible, the adjutant sized up a target that he had been saving for himself. Allons never heard the American give the order to fire. It was the crack of the first rifle report that cued him. With greater care than one would have imagined given the circumstances, the Spaniard took up a good sighting and let fly with a burst of fire from his assault rifle. The smile that lit his face when he saw the man he had taken under fire crumple into a lifeless heap did not come from a ghoulish sense of pleasure. Rather, it was the pride he took in his work. It does an officer good to know that he is still as competent as the best of his men and is able to prove it to them, as well as to himself.
Situated not more than five meters from Allons, Stanislaus Dombrowski was not concerned about proving anything. He was madly firing away into the target area even when he did not have a suitable target in his sights. Instead of seeking satisfaction or simply doing what was expected, the Polish legionnaire was working off the anger and frustration that was still eating at him over his efforts to restore his precious demolition to a functional state.
Beside him was his ever-constant companion, the corporal who had turned his back on an idyllic home tucked away in a picturesque Austrian valley in order to march through the world's sewers and hell holes. Franz Ingelmann's expression stood in stark contrast to that of Dombrowski's. Where the Polish NCO's face was contorted by an all-consuming rage, Ingelmann's was as inexpressive and impassionate as one could manage at a time such as this. Like his fellow corporal in the SAS, James Cochran, Ingelmann was simply doing what he had been trained to do. Unlike his Polish colleague, the Austrian had no particular feelings one way or another as far as the Russians were concerned. While portions of Austria had experienced the boot of the Red Army during the Second World War, those memories belonged to Ingelmann's grandparents. To him, the soldiers he was shooting at were no different than the African insurgents who had the dubious privilege of being the first foe he had ever faced, or the Bosnian Serbs whom he had been forced to shoot in order to pacify them.
Not a single Russian soldier occupying the kill zone was concerned with the motivations of the men who were in the process of killing them. Few had much of an opportunity to think about anything before their lives were ended with an indifference that was both shocking and brutal. Those who did manage to survive the initial fusillade as a result of luck or of some arduous spadework on their part were now confronted with several choices, none of them good.
In the blink of an eye, they were faced with the choice of fighting or fleeing. The decision each man made was more instinctive than cognitive, since no one can truly purge behavioral patterns that are as much a part of an individual's nature and personality as is the color of his eyes. Training can go a long way toward modeling a person's conduct in combat so as to conform to a desired response. But until genetic engineers figure out how to rewire the brain, men who stare into the face of battle will continue to behave in ways that are at once erratic and predictable, courageous and cowardly, self-serving and sacrificial.
The manner in which Andrew Fretello had deployed his troops made the choice of flight unwise. The fire delivered by his men swept the entire area from multiple angles. An obstruction that protected a Russian from the legionnaires did that man little good against fire coming from the SAS. More often than not, the act of fleeing was itself a death warrant. Rather than a means of escape, the frantic efforts of the panicked soldier doing his best to find safety was a prescription for disaster. The very motion necessary to find a haven in this storm of fire tended to attract the attention of several NATO commandos at the same instant. Those soldiers who found themselves in the embarrassing position of not having a worthy target in their own sector welcomed this unintended invitation. There wasn't a single man in Fretello's command who had any qualms about deviating from the established fire plan in order to take advantage of a target of opportunity that suddenly popped up in another man's sector. The result was a quick death to any Russian attempting to escape death through flight.
The Russians who had resolved to stand and fight lasted longer, but not by much. The exposed positions these stalwart individuals occupied left them open to the same crossfire that was pelting their confused comrades. The act of popping up out of their holes and engaging the NATO commandos all too often triggered a return volley from two or three assailants. Against these odds, the Russians who managed to survive this fire quickly came to appreciate that their situation was well-nigh hopeless.
Since a successful defense was not possible; those who were at heart soldiers resolved to inflict as much damage as they could before they fell victim to the cruel mathematics of war. To some, this was little more than vengeance, the trading of one's own life for as many of his enemy's as circumstances would permit. Others who fought on were less sanguine. They did so because the other option, that of surrender, was unthinkable or, in their judgment, impractical. Surrender requires that the victorious party be open to the idea. The Russians defending the silo, raked by fire and surrounded by death, had no way of knowing just how motivated or how fanatical the enemy they were facing was. Any effort to give themselves up could be just as deadly as trying to flee across open ground, an act that the surviving Russians had come to realize by now was as foolish as it was fatal. So they soldiered on, side by side with their own fanatics.
Other Russians who came to the same conclusion concerning their circumstances sought to preserve life and limb by testing the clemency of their foe. Every now and then, Andrew Fretello caught sight of a Russian in the kill zone suddenly jump up with his hands over his head. These attempts to surrender proved to be futile as each of these wretched souls was struck down without fail as soon as he moved out from behind whatever cover had been protecting him.
In the confusion and heat of the moment, Fretello had no way of knowing which of his subordinate commands carried out what amounted to an execution. Odds were, he suspected, they all were guilty of this heinous infraction of the laws governing the conduct of land warfare. That included himself, since he, as their commander, was responsible for everything his men did, especially when it came to the commission of what some would call a war crime. But since the lawyers and politicians who found it easy to define the fine line between doing one's duty by shooting a foe in battle and outright murder were not present, and Fretello had no idea of what he would do with prisoners, he made no effort to rein in his men. Besides, even if he were inclined to do so, he was unsure of how, exactly, to go about the difficult task of sorting out from the foe those who wished to give themselves up and those committed to fighting on until the end.
In the midst of all this chaos and death, there was one group of defenders who survived simply by doing nothing. Either paralyzed by fear or anxious to ride out the storm in the hope that their attackers would be more charitable when the shooting stopped, some Russians sought safety in the depths of their foxholes. That was, after all, one of the primary reasons soldiers dug defensive positions. And this was the reason why each of the more advanced armies of the world developed weaponry that could nullify whatever advantage an industrious infantryman could gain by going deep. On this day, the countermeasure to the Russian defensive positions came in the form of the grenade launcher, a weapon normally mounted under the barrel of an assault rifle. Both the French and British found the American-made M203 grenade launcher well suited for this particular endeavor. That strange and somewhat awkward weapon allows the grenadier carrying it to engage his enemy with either the standard 5.56mm round or a variety of 40mm grenades without having to make any adjustments or modifications to his piece. Armed with this weapon, a well-trained soldier is able to place the baseball-size grenade through a window at ranges up to 150 meters. Since the distance from where the NATO commandos were situated and that of the Russian positions was considerably less than that, the grenadiers belonging to Patrick Hogg and Hector Allons had no problem in lobbing rounds into each of the pits to their front. Once the initial volley had taken its toll and all the easy targets had been eliminated, the grenadiers began the systematic process of chunking a 40mm round into each enemy position. In the confined space of a foxhole, the effect of even the smallest explosive is magnified, making every round that finds a live victim fatal.