Alekseyev and Sergetov got in the back. They found a solid mass of crates, but had enough room to sit on top of them.
The General swore. "Three wasted hours."
"It could have been worse."
"It's a major attack, sir. They just started moving on what looks like a eighty-kilometer front."
SACEUR looked at the map impassively. It wasn't as though they hadn't expected this. Intelligence had predicted it twelve hours earlier from Soviet traffic patterns. He had exactly four reserve brigades that he could use in this sector. Thank God, he thought, that I managed to persuade the Germans to shorten the line at Hannover. Half his reserves had come from that, and not a day too soon.
"Main axis of the attack?" the General asked his operations officer.
"None is apparent at the moment. It looks like a general attack-"
"Pushing hard to find a weak point," SACEUR finished the statement. "Where's their reserve force?"
"Sir, we've identified elements of three divisions here south of Folziehausen. They appear to be A units. The attack now under way appears to be mainly B formations."
"Have we hurt them that bad?" SACEUR asked rhetorically. His intelligence officers were working hard to establish just what enemy casualties were, and he got a report every evening. B-class reserve units had started appearing at the front five days before, which was puzzling. He knew the Soviets had at least six Category-A units in reserve in the southern Ukraine, but there were no indications they were moving. Why wasn't this force being committed to the German front? Why were they sending reservists instead? He'd been asking that question for several days, only to get shrugs from his intelligence chief. Not that I'm complaining, he thought. Those two field armies might have been enough to rupture his front entirely.
"Where's a good place to hit back?"
"Sir, we have these two German tank brigades at Springe. The Russian attack appears to have two reserve motor-rifle divisions, with a divisional border right here, ten kilometers from them. They've been off the line for two days now. I wouldn't call them well rested, but-"
"Yeah." SACEUR was given to cutting his officers off. "Get 'em moving-,"
O'Malley circled the frigate after a long morning's search for what turned out to be nothing. Three merchant ships had died in the past three hours, two to missiles that had leaked through the convoy's SAM defenses and one to a torpedo. Both submarines had been prosecuted, one sunk by Gallery's helo inside the convoy itself They were about to come within ground-based air coverage from the European mainland, and it seemed to the pilot that they'd won this battle. The convoy was getting across with acceptable losses. Thirty-six more hours to landfall.
The landing was routine, and after a trip to the head, O'Malley went into the wardroom for a drink and a sandwich. He found Calloway waiting for him. The pilot had met the reporter briefly but not really spoken with him.
"Is landing your helicopter on this little toy ship as dangerous as it looks?"
"A carrier has a slightly larger deck. You're not doing a story about me, are you?"
"Why not? You killed three submarines yesterday."
O'Malley shook his head. "Two ships, two helos, plus some help from the rest of the screening force. I just go where they send me. There's a lot to subhunting. All the parts have to work or the other guy wins."
"Is that what happened last night?"
"Sometimes the other guy does something right, too. I just spent four hours looking and came away empty. Maybe that was a sub, maybe not. Yesterday was pretty lucky all the way around."
"Does it bother you, sinking them?" Calloway asked.
"I've been in the Navy for seventeen years and I've never met anybody who likes killing people. We don't even call it that, except maybe when we're drunk. We sink ships and try to pretend that they're just ships-things without people in them. It's dishonest, but we do it anyway. Hell, this is the first time I've actually done what my main job is supposed to be. Until now all my combat experience has been search-and-rescue stuff. I never even dropped a war-shot on a real sub until yesterday. I haven't thought about it enough to know if I like it or not." He paused. "It's an awful sound. You hear rushing air. If you penetrate the hull at deep depth, the sudden pressure change inside the hull supposedly causes the air to ignite and everyone inside the boat incinerates. I don't know if it's true, but somebody told me that once. Anyway, you hear the rushing air, then you hear the screech-like a car throwing its brakes on hard. That's the bulkheads letting go. Then comes the noise of the hull collapsing, hollow boom, sort of. And that's it: a hundred people just died. No, I don't much like it.
