Chen Ge released the PTT, swept his gaze across the K-soldiers in the room, gave a nod to Corn, who was in charge of this room, and stepped out to the room across the corridor.
Manhole Cover, Tombstone, and eight K-soldiers were sitting before the ammunition crates, assembling grenades. Seeing Chen Ge come in, the K-soldiers quickly rose to their feet, stood at attention, and greeted him, their manner deeply respectful.
That was because the veteran codenamed Night Cat had once again called Kuzma outside to lay mines.
From talking with Manhole Cover and Tombstone, they'd already learned that Night Cat and Manhole Cover were Chen Ge's brothers, and that every veteran in the building respected Chen Ge from the bottom of their hearts.
So it wasn't hard to reach a conclusion: provoke Chen Ge, and you'd end up as miserable as Kuzma.
"Good day, Commander!"
Chen Ge's eyes narrowed slightly. He was secretly delighted—he liked the title a great deal.
He was a commander now too, indirectly fulfilling his dream of becoming an officer.
As Lu Xun said, a soldier who doesn't want to be a general isn't a good soldier. Before he transmigrated, when he'd joined the army, he naturally had dreams of becoming an officer and a general as well.
Yeah—just dreams! Making them come true was far too hard.
Smiling, he waved a hand. "Get back to your work. No need to stand on ceremony!"
The K-soldiers obediently went back to their tasks—assembling grenades, grabbing shotgun shells to load magazines, and using the Lakov hand-crank loader to fill PKM belts.
Chen Ge unslung the Mk 48 machine gun from his shoulder, picked up an RPG-7, and loaded a tandem warhead into it.
"Get the HEAT warheads ready. The Ukrainian military is very likely to call in tank support!"
His mouth was as good as blessed—no sooner had he spoken than a report came through his headset from the drone attack platoon's operator.
"Sledgehammer, this is Flying Bird. Three Ukrainian T-64BM2 tanks spotted four kilometers to the southwest. Their target is likely to provide fire support for the Ukrainian forces attacking your Laboratory Building. We'll do our best to destroy them, but we can't guarantee we'll take out all of them. Please be prepared. Over!"
Chen Ge answered without the slightest hurry. "Flying Bird, has mud gotten into your brain? Can't you just call the artillery to take out those Ukrainian tanks? Let me give you a serious warning—if I see those three damn tanks at the Laboratory Building, once this mission is over, I'll kick your ass hard."
…
In the ruins of a building four kilometers to the northeast, Flying Bird shrank his neck and hurried to say, "Okay, I'll call the artillery right away. Oh, right—I've got some bad news for you. The Second Assault Group's 3rd Artillery Battalion just came under HIMARS rocket fire. The casualties were heavy, and seven guns were destroyed. Fortunately, the 5th Artillery Battalion—the one specifically tasked with providing fire support to our Peregrine Battalion—is unharmed."
HIMARS again?
Chen Ge turned to look at the window, thinking, Surely the Ukrainian military wouldn't use HIMARS to precisely strike the Asphalt Plant?
Yeah, they shouldn't.
Even if they really did fire HIMARS this way, they couldn't bring down this elite-grade Stalin-era building.
An elite-grade Stalin-era building—its solid red-brick load-bearing walls were thick and hard, extremely sturdy, nothing like those flimsy Khrushchev-era "tofu-dregs" buildings that crumbled at the slightest blow.
But to be safe, it was still best to stay off the second and third floors. If the Ukrainians used rockets with delayed-action fuses to punch through the roof and detonate inside, that would be a human tragedy.
"Alright, hurry up and call the artillery."
"Copy that!"
Manhole Cover tossed the RGO grenade in his hand and asked, "Hammer Brother, are the Ukrainian tanks really coming?"
"Yeah. Without tank support, unless the Ukrainian military can fly, there's no way they'll fight their way into this Laboratory Building."
Chen Ge sat down on an ammunition crate, then grabbed a pack of IRP compressed biscuits from the plastic box beside him, tore open the moisture-proof aluminum foil wrapper, and took a big bite.
The taste was so-so, the texture rather dry and hard. This was the main ration for Russian military and Wagner Group veterans on the battlefield.
The K-soldiers had it worse—theirs were bulk industrial compressed biscuits, low in fat and high in sugar, coarse and gritty in the mouth, crudely packaged. With no moisture-proof aluminum foil, they easily crumbled into powdery crumbs once they got damp.
Manhole Cover picked up a pack as well and chewed in big mouthfuls. As if struck by a thought, he chuckled. "Hammer Brother, have you noticed something really strange? Those disgusting Ukrainian drones have actually vanished."
Tombstone cut in. "We didn't run into any drones on the way here either. Before, we'd always come across one or two, more or less. They basically wouldn't go after low-value targets like ordinary infantry, but they were still scary. I kept dreaming about being chased down and bombed by FPVs—it's left me a bit of a nervous wreck. I feel like I'm about to lose my mind."
Chen Ge smiled, fully understanding how Tombstone felt. On the Russia-Ukraine battlefield, whether they were Russian military, Wagner, or Ukrainian military, who wasn't afraid of drones?
To say they turned pale at the mere mention of a drone was no exaggeration at all.
Strictly speaking, the war's current intensity wasn't actually that high yet. It was just that individual battles were brutal—like Bakhmut.
The truly bloody, merciless meat grinder would come next year, in 2023.
Right now, Russia and Ukraine had only just begun using drones against each other on a large scale. Once drone production skyrocketed next year, the era of full-scale saturation drone attacks would officially begin, and the overall intensity of the war would reach its peak.
"The cyber troops wiped out all the Ukrainian drone units in this industrial zone, so for now we don't have to worry about threats from the air."
Hearing this, Manhole Cover and Tombstone were both surprised and overjoyed, and the veteran K-soldiers beamed, every one of them looking as if they'd hit the jackpot, their spirits soaring.
Chen Ge wanted to throw cold water on them. Just because there was no drone threat, could they really rest easy?
The words reached his lips, and he stopped.
Never mind. Carefree and happy—double the joy.
…
Meanwhile, three and a half kilometers to the southwest, three T-64BM2 tanks rigged with "BBQ-grill" slat armor and draped in camouflage netting were racing forward at full speed.
The Ukrainian tank crews were like birds startled by a bowstring, hearts pounding with terror as they drove their tanks in a headlong charge. They just wanted to rush through, get their shots off, and run—every second they lingered brought them one step closer to hell.
Unfortunately for them, they'd already been marked by five Lancet-3s high overhead.
Flying Bird hadn't called the artillery. He planned to strike first with the Lancet-3s and call in the artillery only if that failed.
One Lancet found its angle and dove sharply, precisely striking the turret bustle at the rear of one T-64BM2. Its mounted KZ6 shaped-charge HEAT warhead detonated, the shaped jet punching through the thin armor and setting off the shells and propellant charges inside. Boom~ The turret was blasted clean off, spinning more than ten meters through the air before its gun barrel stabbed vertically into the mud.
Debris sprayed and scattered, and flames and smoke surged skyward. The sudden attack left the Ukrainian soldiers in the other two tanks shaking all over. They hastily turned and scattered in different directions, weaving through S-shaped evasive maneuvers.
They'd barely gone a hundred meters when the four remaining Lancet-3s split into pairs, each pair hurtling toward its target.
Boom, boom~ Of the two T-64BM2s, one was destroyed and one was critically damaged, thick smoke pouring from its rear. The crew threw open the hatches and clambered out in a fluster, bolted for the nearby woods, and reported to the command post.
At the Laboratory Building, inside the annex tunnel, Yaroslav received the terrible news from the command post and was left reeling.
All three tanks sent to support them were destroyed, and the command post would send no more. It demanded they launch their attack at once and seize the Laboratory Building within thirty minutes.
The mood was oppressively grim. Lynx cursed furiously, "Motherfucker, the Sakura Detachment already tested this! Without tanks to clear out the firing positions inside the building, charging in is suicide!"
Titan frowned. "Yaroslav, how do we attack?"
Yaroslav said nothing, his thoughts racing as he racked his brains for a way to take the Laboratory Building within thirty minutes.
In the end, he settled on the most effective—and most brutally simple—tactic: avoid the dense firing positions at the windows on the west side of the Laboratory Building, and attack from the north and south sides instead.
"Lynx, Titan, you flank around to the north side of the Laboratory Building. I'll take the south. We'll blow open the walls and storm the building at the same time…"
Chapter 63