"Boats and bridges are en route, Comrade General," Sergetov reported. "They have first priority, and the sector traffic-control officers have been informed. Two SAM batteries are starting this way, and I found three mobile AA guns three kilometers off. They said they can be here in fifteen minutes."
"Good." Alekseyev trained his binoculars on the far bank.
"Comrade General, our infantry carriers are amphibious. Why don't we swim them across?"
"Look at the riverbank, Vanya." The General handed his glasses over. As far as he could see, the far side was all set with stone and concrete to prevent erosion. It would be difficult if not impossible for the tracked vehicles to climb that. Damn the Germans for that! "Besides, I wouldn't want to try that in anything less than regimental strength. That bridge is all we have, and it can't last very long. With the best of luck we won't have any assault bridges in place for several hours. The troops on the far side are on their own for at least that long. We'll run as many troops and vehicles across the bridge as we can, then reinforce with infantry assault boats as soon as they arrive. The book calls for this sort of crossing to be made in assault boats, under cover of darkness or smoke. I don't want to wait for night, and I need the guns to fire live shells, not harmless ones. We must break the rules, Vanya. Fortunately the book allows for that also. You have performed well, Ivan Mikhailovich. You are now a major. Don't thank me-you've earned it."
"We didn't miss 'em by much. If we'd seen them five minutes sooner, we could have taken a few out. As it was-" The Tomcat pilot shrugged.
Toland nodded. The fighters had orders to remain outside Soviet radar coverage.
"You know, it's a funny thing. There were three of them flying a nice tight formation. I had them on my TV system from fifty miles away. No way in hell they could tell we were there. If we had better range, we could follow them all the way home. Like that game the Germans played on us once upon a time-send a bird right behind a returning raid and drop a few bombs right after they landed."
"We'd never get anything through their IFF," Toland replied.
"True, but we'd know their arrival time at their bases to within, oh, ten minutes. That's gotta be useful to somebody."
Commander Toland set his cup down. "Yeah, you're right." He decided he'd put that idea on the printer to Commander, Eastern Atlantic.
There was no mistaking it. NATO lines had been decisively broken south of Hannover. Two brigades were taken from the perilously thin NATO ground reserve and sent toward Alfeld. Unless this hole was plugged, Hannover would be lost, and with it all of Germany east of the Weser.
As predicted, the bridge lasted less than an hour. In that time Alekseyev had gotten a full battalion of mechanized infantry across, and though the NATO troops launched a pair of vicious counterattacks on his bridgehead, the tanks he'd placed on the east bank had been able to break them up with direct fire. Now NATO had caught its breath, and was assembling artillery. Heavy guns pounded his bridgehead and the tanks on the Soviet side of the river, and to make matters worse, the assault boats had been held up by incredible traffic snarls on the road between Sack and Alfeld. German heavy guns were littering the road and surrounding land with artillery-deployed mines, each powerful enough to knock the tread off a tank or the wheel off a truck. Sappers swept the roads continuously, using heavy machine guns to detonate the mines, but every one took time, and not all were seen before they exploded under a heavily loaded vehicle. The loss of the individual trucks and tanks was bad enough; worse still were the traffic tieups that resulted from each disabled vehicle.
Alekseyev's headquarters were in a camera shop overlooking the river. The plate-glass window had long since been blown away, and his boots crackled with every step. He surveyed the far bank through his binoculars and anguished for his men as they tried to fight back at the men and tanks on the hills above them. A few kilometers away, every mobile gun in 8th Guards Army was racing forward to provide fire support for his tank division, and he and Sergetov set them to counterbattery the NATO guns.
"Enemy aircraft!" a lieutenant shouted.
