Caught up in the moment. Orlov's men did what came natural to them. Unlike many of their fellow soldiers, these commandos were tough, self-reliant, and aggressive professionals. Given the sort of missions they were routinely assigned, they needed to be. Yet these traits did have their drawbacks. Instead of pausing as their commander had done just moments before to sort things out. Orlov's crack troops saw no need to. Ivan Moshinsky and the men with him knew what was required of them. It was unnecessary to assess the situation or weigh their options. For them, the situation they faced was quite simple. Somewhere off to their left, their comrades in the first section were engaged in a desperate struggle. Those men were buying them lime and the freedom to outflank the NATO forces with their lives. The soldiers of the second and third sections did not have to be told by an officer that only the destruction of the NATO forces at the missile silo would bring an end to this mission and relief to their friends in the first section. With this in mind, they went forward, with or without their officers.
In silence. Orlov watched as the first of the soldiers who had made the rapid flanking march with him crested the ridgeline. Rather than pausing as an officer would have done, the soldier at the forefront of the advance continued over to the other side and toward the missile silo beyond. Without hesitation, his comrades followed suit, even in the face of gunfire that was now directed at them from the far side of the ridge.
Not having shared his conclusion with any of his officers that failure was their best option was proving to be a mistake, but one that was unavoidable. To have done so would have been a gamble, something that was anathema to a man raised in a system where betrayal and deception were seen as useful tools by both politicians and senior military men. Yet his failure to have made his intent known, or at least to have taken steps to ensure that they did not reach their objective in time, placed the Russian colonel in a difficult position. As had happened when the legionnaires had inadvertently followed Stanislaus Dombrowski and taken up the charge, the excitement of the moment had proven to be equally irresistible to the Russian commandos. With or without his blessing, Orlov's men had committed him to a direct assault on the NATO troops, who were doing their best to finish the destruction of Perimeter.
Slowly, Demetre Orlov picked his way forward at a measured pace, listening to the growing volume of gunfire from the ridge before him. Though he could see but a small slice of the battlefield, the sharp sounds that assaulted his ears told him that the engagement was growing and becoming quite heated. The spasmodic nature of those exchanges also indicated that the contest was still rather disjointed. Instead of a continuous exchange of fire, the give-and-take between his men and the NATO troops fluctuated wildly. This muddled trading of salvos was due to the manner in which his men were joining in. Inevitably, as they made they way up and over the crest as quickly as they could, they found themselves fired at. Those who managed to survive the first fusillade instinctively returned a burst of fire before seeking cover. Once having found a suitable spot offering protection, the newly arrived Russians would settle down and begin delivering a more controlled and sustainable rate of fire at carefully selected targets, while more of their comrades came forth and joined the growing fight.
Above the sharp reports of small-arms fire and the occasional explosion of a grenade, Orlov could make out the shrilled orders of section leaders and their NCO's. Drawing closer, he could see that those orders were having little effect on the men. Such a disjointed attack, the Russian colonel concluded as he finally neared the crest, could not possibly succeed against a well-organized defense manned by crack enemy troops. Though it pained him to think that he would lose a good number of his men, their sacrifice would be of some benefit. After all, how could anyone in Moscow question the loyalty of a man or a unit that has suffered staggering losses in battle.
Now, Orlov told himself as he glanced down at his watch, all he needed was for the NATO troops to do their part. That they were taking so long to set up their demolitions and execute their target was puzzling to the Russian colonel. If it had been his operation, he found himself thinking, it would have been over by now. For the first time in his military career, Colonel Demetre Orlov was angered by the apparent ineptitude of his enemy. Since it was not within his power to speed his foe along, he was left with the delicate task of slowing his own people down without making it look like that was what he was doing.
The sound of gunfire near at hand was also angering Stanislaus Dombrowski as he endeavored to reattach loose wires. His anger, however, was not directed at his foe, but at himself. As hard as he tried to maintain his focus on the task at hand, his mind was cluttered with self-recriminations. How in the name of God, he repeated again and again in Polish, could he have messed things up as badly as he had?
The explosive package before him was a simple device. Its main components consisted of high explosives packed around an inverted cone shaped like the front of a trumpet. This cone was more than a simple spacer. It was a device designed to hold the explosive back during primary detonation and precisely direct the full force of that explosion as it developed into a jet stream the width of a pencil. Made from a copper alloy that vaporized during the detonation process, the added weight of the copper molecules contributed to the terminal effectiveness of the charge. In this case, as the jet stream formed by the explosion displaced the molecules of the thin nose cone and payload area of the rocket below, some of the superheated cone's molecules would manage to make it all the way down to the missile's fuel tanks. Exerting well over 100,000 pounds of force per square inch, heated metal debris carried along in the jet stream from Dombrowski's charge would cause what is known as a "sympathetic detonation." Improperly ignited, the volatile rocket fuel would rupture its own containers and, confined by the tight concrete silo, create an eruption that would be truly spectacular.
All of this, however, would not occur if the shaped charge did not function properly. The sequence depended on primers located in the base of the explosives, centered on the tip of the cone. The wires running from those detonators would emerge from the explosive and, on this particular device, be routed in a bundle down the side of the package to a junction box just above one of the three legs that the shaped charge sat on. If the problem facing the Polish legionnaire had been on the outside, the fix would have been easy. Unfortunately, two wires had been pulled out of the primers. This meant that Dombrowski had to carefully burrow into the high explosive in order to uncover the ends of the primers. He then had to open the primers without disturbing their seating, reinsert the wires, then crimp the primers so as to hold the reinserted wires. Even under the best of circumstances, such a feat would be nerve-racking. Under fire, doubly so.
That the gunfire was wildly inaccurate was of little consequence. Dombrowski knew that the SAS and members of his own CRAP team would be able to keep the Russians at bay for only so long. Nor would the concealment provided by the smoke grenades popped by the American major last forever. Eventually, a Russian with a bit of initiative and tactical savvy would manage to find a spot from which he would be able to direct accurate fire at him. While he hoped to be finished before that happened, this thought only added to the distractions under which Dombrowski found himself laboring.