In the Laboratory Building, Chen Ge heard Lynx and Titan talking, the corner of his mouth lifting slightly. He issued an order over the manpack radio: “All units, stay away from the windows. Open your mouths, cover your ears, and prepare for the shockwave.”
Upstairs and downstairs, the veterans and K-soldiers all slipped into the rooms opposite the stairwell, crouched against the walls, covered their ears, and opened their mouths.
They couldn’t stay in the corridor; a long, narrow space would funnel the blast and amplify the shockwave many times over.
Once everyone was ready, Chen Ge withdrew to the corner by the stairwell, crouched down on one knee, whispered “Take care,” and pressed the handle.
In the age of modern weapons, killing was this efficient.
A single press of a finger sent a high-voltage pulse current through the red-and-blue intertwined cable wires straight to the electric detonators inside the explosives crates, instantly erasing every life within a hundred-meter blast radius.
Boom! Twenty kilograms of TNT detonated. A blinding flash erupted, the ground shook and the building swayed, and the steel fragments, steel balls, bricks, and chunks of concrete packed over the explosives crates blasted outward, violently tearing apart anything in their path.
The people were torn apart too—and quite thoroughly. Those closest to the center of the blast had their flesh and blood vaporized, while shattered bones, weapons, and equipment were blown away by the shockwave, scattering here and there.
The bomb on the south side detonated almost simultaneously with the one on the north. More than a hundred Ukrainian troops vanished in the blink of an eye; only those farther from the center were left with barely intact bodies.
The Laboratory Building shook violently. The rebar inside twisted and deformed, bricks and concrete rained down, the red bricks on the north and south walls burst outward, leaving a huge dent, and cobweb-like cracks ran through the walls across all three floors.
But the walls still didn’t collapse—proof of how sturdy Stalin-era buildings were.
Siren was cunning. He hadn’t led the charge himself; instead, he had hidden in the ruins of the raw material warehouse three hundred meters to the southwest and directed the attack from there, narrowly escaping with his life.
His eyes nearly splitting with rage, he stared at the black smoke billowing ahead, rapidly dispersing in the rain. His blue-purple lips quivered several times, his vision went black, and he toppled backward, stiff and straight.
“Sir!!!”
...
The Laboratory Building.
Chen Ge tossed aside the detonator, ran through the north corridor to the room in the northwest corner, climbed out the window, crouched in a shell crater, and peered out to assess the situation.
Where the explosives crates had been buried, a crater six or seven meters across and two or three meters deep had been blasted out.
The ground on the north side was strewn with human remains. Looking out from a distance, there was hardly a body whose face could be recognized; all had been riddled by steel balls, metal fragments, and brick and stone, torn to shreds. Even their own mothers probably wouldn’t recognize them.
Looking at the horrific scene, Chen Ge recalled a line from Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.
All that so-called glory and sacrifice was no different from livestock being processed in a slaughterhouse—the only difference was that the bodies were buried where they fell.
Buried?
Sorry, he didn’t have the energy to gather up these fragments and dig pits to bury them. Let them return to nature!
“Sledgehammer, what are you guys doing? Damn it, I was this close to getting a steel ball through my carotid artery.”
Hailstone’s complaint came through the headset. Chen Ge reached down and picked up a Marathon GSAR tactical watch stuck in the mud in front of him.
The case was deformed, the crystal shattered. Chen Ge flipped it away and, pressing the PTT, replied: “I buried two roadside bombs and killed over two hundred Ukrainian troops. How’s that for results?”
At the second-floor window of the mixing plant, Hailstone looked toward the Laboratory Building and happened to see Chen Ge crouched in a crater. Naturally, he also saw the scene of mangled corpses on the north side of the building.
“Uh... impressive. How many Ukrainian troops have you killed? Can you hold the Laboratory Building?”
“Of course I can hold it. There should be about three hundred and fifty Ukrainian troops dead around the Laboratory Building now, more than half of them foreign volunteer fighters. Octopus, whom Crimea sent to support us, even captured a Ukrainian captain who commanded a company. Do you need support? I can send some people over!”
Hailstone was shocked. Chen Ge’s kill count was higher than their entire battalion’s.
“No need for your support. Holding the Laboratory Building is the greatest help you can give us. The Ukrainian troops inside the mixing plant can be wiped out within an hour at most. You’d better move the people on the third floor down to the first. The Ukrainians have started using HIMARS for precision strikes on our artillery, and they’ll likely shell the Asphalt Plant next.”
Chen Ge looked up at the gray sky, raised a hand to catch some rainwater, wiped his goggles, and said seriously, “All right. You guys give it your all. I’ll hold the Laboratory Building to the death and won’t let a single Ukrainian through.”
“Yeah. We all believe in you.”
After saying that, Hailstone continued leading the troops in mopping up the Ukrainian forces.
Chen Ge returned to the Laboratory Building and ordered a few veterans on the second and third floors to remain on watch, while everyone else went downstairs and spread out among the rooms to await the third Ukrainian assault.
...
Chasiv Yar, not far from Bakhmut.
A large civil-defense complex buried more than a hundred meters down served as the general headquarters of the Ukrainian military’s Eastern Operational Group.
It was also the central brain of the entire Bakhmut–Soledar defense line on the eastern Donbas front.
The command post lay beneath a hundred meters of rock. Built out and reinforced around abandoned mine tunnels, its reinforced-concrete walls were 1.4 meters thick, with an additional buffer layer of soil and rock on the outside. It could withstand direct hits from Russian heavy artillery and cruise missiles.
In the spacious hall, the air was thick with the oily exhaust of diesel generators, the scorched-metal smell of machinery shedding heat, cigarette smoke, sweat, and disinfectant. The atmosphere was grave and oppressive.
In the center stood rows of command tables welded from steel pipes and steel plates. Dozens of military terminals, laptops, and shortwave radios were arrayed there, their screens flickering rapidly as they refreshed real-time data sent from the front via Starlink: remaining troop strength of each unit, ammunition reserves, casualty counts, and drone reconnaissance feeds.
More than a hundred officers and signal troops, wearing noise-canceling headsets, issued orders using encrypted callsigns in Russian and Ukrainian.
Major General Moskalyev, the Ukrainian front-line commander, stood before the wall on the left, which was covered with huge laminated military maps, listening to a staff officer’s report with his brows tightly furrowed.
“General, Wagner’s Peregrine Battalion is highly capable. The troops currently defending the mixing plant, the northern silo, and the finished-goods warehouse have already taken over fifty percent casualties. The reinforcements sent from the champagne factory were driven back by Wagner forces. Major Nazar has called for reinforcements for the fourth time. If we cannot retake the Laboratory Building and reinforce the mixing plant within one hour, the eastern sector of the Asphalt Plant will fall.”
After the staff officer finished reporting, Moskalyev asked, “What about Siren? Is the attack on the Laboratory Building going smoothly?”
“Three minutes ago, the 8th Assault Battalion was ambushed by Wagner forces. A large amount of explosives had been planted on the north and south sides of the building. Except for Siren and four soldiers... all were killed!”
When Moskalyev heard that Siren wasn’t dead, the weight on his heart finally lifted, and his brows slowly relaxed.
Few people knew that Siren Yaroslav was the nephew of General Selsky, commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Ground Forces. If Siren died at the Asphalt Plant, Selsky would not openly vent his anger at him, but he would certainly make things difficult for him.
This damned Siren really was a menace. He just had to go play hero at the front. Couldn’t he have stayed in the city as part of the reserve?
Chapter 66