Someone screamed. Another voice shouted foreign words. Seryosha swept the machine gun through the darkness. But no one fired back. Streaks of light zigzagged crazily in the darkness, pinging and sparking off the walls.
“Stop it,” Leonid shouted, “stop firing.” He had suddenly realized that the ricochets were as likely to kill them as were any enemy actions.
Seryosha ceased firing.
“Surrender,” Leonid screamed at their phantom opponents.
A female voice shrieked in response, rising over the low notes of male groans.
“Surrender,” Leonid shouted, confused, his voice cracking. “Surrender.”
A female voice soared hideously in a strange language, babbling.
“What the hell is going on?” Seryosha said. His voice sounded near panic.
Leonid lifted himself from the floor, all bruised knees and elbows and the burning feel of scraped skin. He lunged toward the foreign voice.
“Surrender,” he ordered, his mind wild with fragments of thoughts that would not connect. He clicked on the lighter.
A heavyset girl stood with her back pressed against the wall, hands clutched to her face. She screamed in an animal fear that Leonid could not understand. It had never occurred to him that anyone might be afraid of him.
A few feet away from the girl, two bodies lay — a crumpled man and the thick form of a woman. The moans had stopped now, and the bodies lay remarkably still, with the man hunched over the woman as though he were shielding her.
It struck Leonid that the broken tapes in his pockets probably belonged to this girl, and he suddenly felt ashamed, as though he had been discovered as a thief.
The girl’s screams wheezed down into sobs. Leonid let the lighter go out, shaking his singed fingers to soothe them. Seryosha clicked on his own lighter. And the girl howled again. She rubbed herself from side to side against the cinderblock wall, as though she wanted to grind herself into it.
“Oh, no,” Leonid said suddenly, as the situation began to come clear to him. “No… I didn’t mean it…” He wished he could make the girl understand. He looked at her, gesturing thoughtlessly with his reeking weapon. “I didn’t mean it,” he repeated. “It was all an accident.”
The girl’s voice welled up again.
Seryosha stepped forward, slapping the girl with the hand that held the lighter. When it went out, Leonid took his turn again, working the flint with his sore fingers.
“Shut up,” Seryosha ordered. “You just shut up.” He slapped the girl again. There was a totally unfamiliar tone in Seryosha’s voice now.
The girl hushed slightly, as though she understood. But Leonid knew she didn’t understand at all.
“I’m sorry,” he told her again, anyway.
“You bet you’re sorry,” Seryosha told him angrily. Then he punched the girl. “Shut up.”
“Stop it,” Leonid told him.
“What do you mean, stop it?” Seryosha asked. “Who are you? You just killed them. Do you realize what’s going to happen to us if somebody hears her and comes down here? They’ll kill us.”
Such a possibility had not occurred to Leonid. Now it reached him in its fullness, stopping him with its power.
The girl sobbed against the wall, bleeding driblets from her lower lip. She had gone beyond words now, and she merely cried, face turned to one side. Her sounds were those of a weakening animal.
Seryosha thrust with the machine gun, jamming its muzzle hard into her chest like a spear. Then he brought the heavy stock around and smashed it into her face. Leonid watched in wonder. With clumsy speed, Seryosha beat the girl to the ground, hitting her so hard with the machine gun that she could not meaningfully resist. She waved a pudgy hand at the descending blows, then toppled to the side, crumpling in on herself. Seryosha brought the butt of the weapon down on her skull with all of his weight behind it. Then he hit her again. And again.
Finally, the boy straightened, gasping for breath.
“Now she won’t tell anybody,” he said.
Fourteen
Starukhin smashed his fist down onto the map table. “Don’t sing me a song, you little bastard. Fix it.”
“Comrade Army Commander,” the shattered chief of signals said, “the communications complex is a complete loss. A direct hit. It will take some time to restore — ”
“I don’t have time, you shit. I should send you down with the motorized rifle troops and let you see what war’s really like. How can I run an army when I can’t talk to anybody?”
“Comrade Army Commander, we can still communicate using manual Morse. And the auxiliary radios will be off the trucks and set up in no time. It’s just the multiplexing that will take a little time.”
“I don’t have time. Time is the one thing I don’t have,” Starukhin shouted. “You should’ve had all of the auxiliary systems set up and ready to operate. You’re a moron, a disgrace.” He looked around the headquarters. “You’re all a damned disgrace.”
The chief of signals almost replied that, since they had just shifted locations, it was unreasonable, even impossible, to expect that all of the backup systems would be fully prepared for operations. They had still been having trouble with the microwave connections even before the enemy strike. But he realized that it was hopeless to argue. All you could do was let the army commander blow over you like a storm, then pick up whatever was left.
Starukhin suddenly turned away. He began to pace back and forth like a powerful caged cat. Without warning, he smashed a hanging chart full of figures from the wall.
“I need to talk.”
Colonel Shtein watched the artfully crude film of the destruction of Lueneburg on the television monitor. As he watched, the same images were being broadcast over the highest-powered emitters in the German Democratic Republic. Shtein had no doubt that the film would be monitored in the West. It would soon gather the expected attention to itself. Even if the chaotic interference in the air completely blocked a successful broadcast into the heart of West Germany, the NATO elements hanging on in Berlin would monitor it. One way or another, the message would get through. Even the satellite television broadcasts from Moscow carried the report on the regular channels.
… Senseless destruction… precipitated and carried out by the aggressive NATO forces who are bent on destroying the cities and towns of the Federal Republic of Germany… perhaps even turning West Germany into a proving ground for their insane theories of tactical nuclear war… in the opinion of experts, a nuclear war restricted to West German soil would cause…
And the voice-over was merely ornamentation. The powerful images of toppling medieval buildings, of women and children dashing, falling, cowering, of civilians twisted into the frozen acrobatics of death, and of the Dutch forces firing indiscriminately, were irresistible. Shtein was well aware of how far the skills of Soviet media specialists had come over the years.
Shtein was convinced that this was a war-winner. At least the overall approach. Modern war was hardly a matter of beating each other over the head with a club. Shtein saw it as a highly articulated, challengingly complex conflict of intellects and wills. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. He laughed to himself, remembering his student days. He loved the Germans. They were so absolutely right, and so thoroughly unable to act upon the correctness of their conclusions.