Command Authority Read Online Free

end.
    Edgar Nõlvak did not know much about military things, but he was sure that at the pace they were moving, the Russians would be in the city of Tartu, to the north of his village, by midafternoon.
    A sound like paper tearing filled the air. He’d been listening to this sound for an hour, and he knew it meant incoming fire. He pressed his face back into the cold mud.
    Boom!
    Behind him, a direct hit on the gymnasium of the high school. The aluminum-and-cinder-block walls blew out ahead of a billowing cloud; the wood flooring of the basketball court rained down in splinters over Edgar.
    He looked again over the edge of the ditch. The tanks were only a thousand meters to the east.
    “Where the
fuck
is NATO?”
    —
    O ne thousand meters away, Captain Arkady Lapranov stood in the open hatch of his tank, Storm Zero One, and shouted, “Where the
fuck
is my air cover?”
    It was a rhetorical question; the commanders of the five other tanks he controlled heard it but did not respond, and the two men in his vehicle, the driver and the gunner, waited silently for orders. They knew there were helicopter gunships they could call forward if any air threats appeared, but so far they’d seen no sign of Estonian aircraft, nor had the Russian airborne warning and control system detected any aircraft in the area on radar.
    The skies were clear.
    This was a good day. A tanker’s dream.
    A thousand meters away the cloud of dust and smoke over the gymnasium settled enough so that Lapranov could see behind it. Into his mike he said, “I want more rounds in that building beyond the previous target. HE-FRAG. Without proper air support I am not moving forward on that road until I can see what’s to the right of the intersection.”
    “Yes, sir!” Lapranov’s gunner shouted from below.
    The gunner pressed a button, and the autoloader computer chose a high-explosive-fragmentation round from the magazine, and its mechanical arm chambered it. The gunner used his video-viewing device to find the building, then put his forehead against the rubber pad on the sight panel and aimed his crosshairs on target. He pushed the fire button on the control panel, and then, with a violent lurch, the 125-millimeter smoothbore gun launched a shell through the blue sky, across the fallow field in front of them, and directly into the building.
    “Hit,” said the gunner.
    They had been proceeding like this all morning. So far they had moved through four villages, shelling big targets with their 125-millimeter gun and raking small targets with their coaxial machine guns.
    Lapranov had expected more resistance, but he was starting to allow for the fact that Russia’s president, Valeri Volodin, had been right. Volodin had told his nation NATO would have no stomach to fight for Estonia.
    In his headset, Lapranov heard a transmission from one of the tanks under his command.
    “Storm Zero Four to Storm Zero One.”
    “Go, Zero Four.”
    “Captain, I have movement in a ditch in front of the last target. Range one thousand. I see multiple dismounts.”
    Lapranov looked through his binoculars, scanning slowly across the ditch.
    There.
Heads popped up out of the mud, then disappeared again. “I see them. Small-arms position. Don’t waste a one-twenty-five. We’ll clean them up with the coax when we get closer.”
    “Roger.”
    Another salvo was fired into the buildings on a low hill beyond the intersection, and Lapranov scanned through his optics. The town was deathly quiet; there was virtually no resistance.
    “Keep firing,” he ordered, then he knelt back down into his commander’s station to get a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. “Wipe this place off the map.”
    Seconds later, another transmission came through his headset: “Storm Zero Two to Storm Zero One.”
    “Go,” Lapranov said as he lit his smoke.
    “Movement to the south of the hospital. I . . . I think it is a vehicle.”
    Lapranov dropped his lighter back inside and looked through