Red Army

Shilko was drinking a cup of tea when disaster struck. Enemy rounds landed on top of one of his gun platoons with artistic precision. Shilko hurried down to the battery position even before the secondary explosions had subsided, outraged that anyone could have hurt his boys and his guns. As he left the fire direction center he screamed at Romilinsky to prepare to displace.

The gun platoon was finished. One gun lay on its side like a fallen horse, nuzzling its long tube into the dirt. The last of the resupply trucks 248

RED ARMY

had been caught just as they were about to depart. The support soldiers had lingered to watch the big guns at work. Now a soldier's corpse, still physically intact, waved limp paws down at Shilko from the branches of a tree, while other corpses smoldered with tiny patches of fire. There were many wounded men; not one soldier in the immediate area had escaped untouched.

The platoon commander, who was doubling as senior battery officer, lay open-eyed on his back, gasping as though he were trying to swallow the entire sky. The lieutenant was the sort of officer who excelled at everything, yet who had a guilelessness and natural generosity about him that prevented his peers from growing jealous. He was, above all, a wonderfully likable young man, seemingly immune to life's inevitable indecencies and indiscretions. He appeared relatively unharmed, only scratched here and there, and sooty-faced. But the boy's eyes were lucid and quick with the intelligence of mortality.

"Damn it," Shilko shouted at the medical orderly leaning dumbly over the lieutenant, "he can't breathe. Open the airway, man."

But the orderly appeared desperate to pretend that he did not hear or did not understand. He only called to a companion who knelt, wiping cotton over another sufferer. The second medic came over and stared down at the lieutenant, mimicking the first orderly.

The lieutenant's chest shook with his efforts to breathe. Up close, Shilko could see that his jaw was strangely out of line with the rest of his skull, and there was, indeed, blood sliming out over the grimy skin.

"The trachea," Shilko told the orderlies, "you've got to open his trachea." He could not understand their inaction. He would have knelt and done the operation himself, but he did not know how.

The second orderly obediently drew a medical knife from his kit. His hand shivered, and he had to steady it by grasping himself under the wrist. He punched the blade into the lieutenant's neck, but the windpipe seemed to jerk out of the way. Blood poured out. The orderly gripped the lieutenant's neck, trying to hold it still as he stabbed him a second time.

The lieutenant rasped at the sky, eyes huge. The boy was trying to scream.

Shilko smashed the orderly aside with an oversized fist. He knelt in the mud and placed his left hand firmly on the boy's scalp, feeling the matted hair flatten under his callused fingers. He desperately wanted to repair the incompetent damage to the boy's neck, to rescue him for other, better days, to see him promoted and married and moved to a better assignment than this. But he had no idea where to touch, or how.

249

Ralph Peters

A fountain of blood played into the air, then fell back. Another crimson plume followed, then another, matching the dying boy's pulse.

The lieutenant was crying, tears sparkling in the soot-rubbed corners of his eyes and streaming down his temples to catch at his ears. Shilko realized that the boy knew with certainty that he was about to die.

The first battery sent another volley toward the enemy. The kick of the big guns shook the earth under Shilko's knees. Then a second volley followed the first, firing one last mission before moving.

"It's all right," Shilko said. "It's all right, son." And he kept on repeating himself until the last life settled out of the boy and his eyes fixed upon the fresh blue sky.