“… Observation Station Six reporting! Position 1437 at twelve o’clock sees thirty-seven M1A2s averaging sixty meters apart, forty-one Bradley IFVs five hundred meters behind the M1A2s’ vanguard; twenty-four M1A2s and eight Leclercs currently flanking Position 1633, already past the border of 1437. Positions 1437, 1633, and 1752, prepare to engage the enemy!”

Kalina forced back shivers from cold and fear, so that the horizon line steadied in her binoculars. She saw blurry masses of snow spray, edging the horizon with fuzzy trim.

That was when Kalina heard the rumble of engines behind her. A row of Russian tanks passed her position as they charged the enemy, more T-90 tanks leaving the highway behind them. Kalina heard a different rumble: enemy helicopters were appearing in the sky ahead in neat array, a black lattice in the ghastly white sky of dawn. The exhaust pipes of the tanks around Kalina kicked into action with low splutters, cloaking the battleground in white fog. Through its crevices she could also see Russian helicopters passing low overhead.

The tanks’ 120 mm guns stormed and thundered, and the white fog became a wildly flashing pink light display. Almost simultaneously, the first enemy shells fell, the pink light replaced by the blue-white lightning of their explosion. Kalina, lying on her stomach at the bottom of the bomb crater, felt the ground reverberate with the intense percussion like a drumhead. Nearby dirt and rock flew into the air and landed all over her back. Amid the explosions, she could dimly hear the whinny of anti-tank missiles. Kalina felt as if her viscera were tearing apart in the cacophony, and all the universe, the pieces falling toward an endless abyss—

Just as her mind teetered on the breaking point, the tank battle ended. It had lasted only thirty seconds.

When the smoke cleared, Kalina saw that the snowy ground in front of her was scattered with destroyed Russian tanks, heaps of raging flames crowned with black smoke. She looked farther; even without binoculars, she could see a similar swath of destroyed NATO tanks in the distance, appearing as black smoking specks on the snow. But more enemy tanks were rushing past the wreckage, wreathed in the snow spray churned up by their treads. Now and then the Abramses’ ferocious broad wedge heads emerged from the spray like snapping turtles launching themselves out of the waves, their smooth-bore muzzles flashing sporadically like eyes. Just above, the helicopters were still embroiled in their melee. Kalina saw an Apache explode in midair not far away. A Mi-28 wobbled low overhead, trailing fuel from a leak. It hit the ground a few dozen meters away and exploded into a fireball. Short-range air-to-air missiles slashed countless parallel white lines low in the air—