by FARMAN, ANDY
A day, which had started badly, was steadily getting worse for the deputy commander of Militia Sub-District 178. His boss had been slightly vocal when the men had not been in position and ready to go a half hour before dawn, rather vocal when the dawn came and no move was made, and screaming dire threats into radio microphones thirty minutes after that.
The trouble was, the thousand and twelve men they had were policemen, not soldiers, and lining them up twenty feet apart along the forest’s edge was not as easy as it sounded.
Shortly after they had stepped off, the real difficulties had become evident. Gaps appeared where men elected not to push through heavy brush, but rather to walk around. Men walked alongside friends chatting, and where the going was easy the line surged forward, leaving others struggling through underbrush far behind.
It was not happening as the sub district commander had envisaged, the evenly spaced line of his briefing was not going to sweep evenly along at three miles an hour, uncovering the killers as it flushed them from hiding, and apparently it was all his deputy’s fault.
The commander had been unwilling to listen to other opinions, which was nothing new; he was an arrogant individual at the best of times.
The deputy had put forward the possibility that the culprits could have put a lot of distance between themselves and the scene of their crime, which was why the search of farms and buildings in the region had come up empty, and why the reconnaissance helicopter the previous day had not uncovered any clusters of skulking humanity in the trees of the forest.
His opinions and theories carried little weight at the best of times, and these earned him a contemptuous rebuke.
The deputy had initially been in charge of the line of militiamen, then humiliated in front of the men by his superior when all did not go according to plan, he had been despatched instead with two BMP-1s to check on the men cordoning the forest.
It had taken an hour for the deputy to accept that he was better off away from the line of ‘beaters’ because things would only get even more fraught as time went on. His boss, the commander, was an idiot and what is more everyone knew he was an idiot, so what did it matter that he had treated his deputy like an imbecile in front of the lowest ranks? All he had to do was ensure there were no problems with the cordons, and generally keep his head down for the duration of the operation. It would take several days to comb through the forest so he would take the opportunity to enjoy the time away from the overbearing buffoon who held the next rank, savour the independence and autonomy whilst he had the chance.
The deputy commander directed the driver of his vehicle to head for the nearest roadblock, after that he would look at the map for the best way through the forest. An easily navigable route would cut time off the journey from one side to the other, and would serve to avoid crossing the commander’s path.
Gansu Province: China.
Those men engaged in the preparation of the Cadre’s ‘accommodation’ were stripped down to just their arctic white smocks, which were providing only camouflage, not warmth, in the sub-zero temperature. Despite the freezing air the men were warm from tunnelling into the snow, and had removed upper layers of clothing to prevent sweat forming.
Richard worked along with them, preparing the location for an indefinite stay, or at least until all the pieces were in place, and the attack could go ahead. The major knew nothing of the other elements involved, and had he been asked about Operation Equalizer or Operation Guillotine he would have shrugged his shoulders and asked in all truthfulness what they were. He wasn’t a fool though and knew that in all probability there had to be at least one other operation working toward achieving the mission’s ultimate aim. Logic dictated that there had to be an operation running to take out the PRCs other means of waging intercontinental nuclear war, that of the submarine threat. He had spent many hours aboard submarines during his career, but always as a passenger enroute to or from some covert operation or other, he had no idea how they would go about finding China’s vessels in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Driving submarines was a complete mystery to him, and yet some people were remarkably good at it, as testified by the blinking ‘message’ light he had just noticed on his communicator.
When Richard had been a boy of four his parents had bought him a Scotty, a Highland Terrier that Richard had named Jack. There hadn’t been anything particularly outstanding about the animal but it had been his first dog and therefore memorable to Richard alone. The message, once decompressed and decrypted comprised of a single word, the name of Richards very first pet. He was a little taken aback at having received the Go word so soon; it was after all just a few hours since the bulk of the force had departed for the extraction point. A few men rolled their eyes skywards, having come near to completing their snow holes only to be informed that they were now to ‘paste up, patch up and piss off’, but no one complained aloud. The entrenching tools were packed away and warm clothing was once more pulled on,
The batteries in the RERs and laser designators were almost brand new but Richard had them changed anyway, before he led the Cadre out, back along the ridge and abseiling down to the canyon floor at the avalanche site. There was nothing left to indicate that troops had been there, except of course the small holes in the rock wall where the pitons had been driven in. Once the snow thawed it would doubtless uncover the bodies of the two dead men, the smashed equipment and abandoned kit, but for now the still falling snow was covering over all signs that men had passed this way.
The Cadre crossed the canyon and scaled the face on the opposite side without a single appearance by PRC helicopter patrols. Richard wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth, if the PRC aircrew felt the weather was unsafe to fly in then that suited him just fine. He knew that the enemy now was time, getting clear of the area before the manhunt began in the wake of the, hopefully, successful attacks on the silos. Once they had cleared this particular ridge and the valley beyond then their chances of successful evasion were greatly increased. With luck Garfield’s men and the Mountain Troop contingent would already have gotten the injured men across this ridge and down to the valley floor. Richard was not about to break a radio silence maintained since setting foot in China, they would find out how well Garfield had done when they caught up with them. He wanted to be on the valley floor before midnight and across it before the dawn, which would mean some gruelling cross-country skiing. Passing the word that there would be no rest stops tonight; Richard led the men past the site where they had weathered the blizzard, and onwards toward the valley.
Germany.
Commanding 3rd Shock Army’s point Division was a fifty two year old Romanian from Piatra Neamt, in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. He had been a Lt Col commanding an artillery battalion during the last years under Ceausescu and had never envisaged reaching Staff rank; all those places had been earmarked years in advance for officers from Romania’s communist elite. With the fall of the tyrant however, the new government deemed him too lowly in rank to be tainted by association, and yet capable enough to handle the responsibility of a sudden elevation in rank, in order to help fill the vacuum created by the former general staff’s sudden retirement.
The division he led today was a different creature to the one he had brought over to the communist cause during the coup that had preceded this war; over a third of the original number had become casualties to NATO’s fierce defence by the time his division had reached the Spee. Originally the division had consisted of a reconnaissance regiment, a tank regiment and three MRRs, motor rifle regiments, each made up of three battalions; a rotary wing aviation battalion, an artillery regiment consisting of a heavy, a medium and air defence battalions, plus the usual engineering and logistic support units. All had been native Romanians, and a full two thirds had at least two years recent service under their belts. NATO had almost annihilated his reconnaissance regiment and all that had remained were two companies worth of men and vehicles, which had lately been reinforced and brought u
p to the size of a superannuated battalion. Shortly after reaching the Spee the division had been taken out of the line and sent to the rear to reconstitute, his three battered motor rifle regiments had amalgamated to become two, and the tank regiment now numbered two battalions instead of three. The arrival of a Czech and a Bulgarian MRR to bolster the division’s ranks had been a mixed blessing because it caused distinct communications problems, but they were already blooded and were therefore preferable to units consisting of green conscripts. Cold bloodedly, the division commander had assigned the Bulgarian’s the duty of walking point where NATO could dull its edge, and once the newcomers had become combat ineffective as a unit it would be broken up and absorbed by his Romanians whilst the Czechs took up point position and remained there until a similar fate befell them. It did not occur to him that the commander of 3rd Army had been thinking along exactly the same lines when he written his own orders, using the Romanian division as the expendable tip of a mainly Russian spear.
At a midnight O Group the division commander had deployed his Romanian MRRs, the 111th and 112th, on the left and right rear of the Czechs, who were to follow directly behind the Bulgarians. His tank regiment, the 93rd, was to follow on behind and in this fashion the tanks would be in position to exploit any breaches that might appear, passing through the lead units to either widen the breach or to punch deep into the enemy’s rear. The division’s axis of advance took them straight at a linear feature that lay like a natural barrier to the all-important Autobahns to the English Channel. According to his maps this feature was called Vormundberg, and according to intelligence it was occupied by a ragtag unit of British and Americans with a forward screen of French and British light troops, which he had described to his officers at the final O Group as, ‘hardly something to lose any sleep over’. It was therefore with a degree of optimism that the O Group had broken up and his officers had returned to their units to deliver their own orders. A large bite had been taken out of that optimism a few hours later, just as the division was about to jump off. NATO launched massed air raids on the Soviet armour west of the Elbe and for reasons unbeknownst to the division commander their own air cover had been conspicuously absent. As a result, all of the divisions units had taken casualties but the Bulgarians, being at the forward edge, had been hit particularly hard and had taken 70% casualties, including their regimental headquarters. Under threat of arrest from his own superior the divisional commander had been forced to abandon the casualties, policing up the remainder and revising his plans so that the Czech regiment lead the way.
After the first forty minutes of an unchallenged advance he had felt some of the earlier optimism restore itself. At the top of a rise he had dismounted from his command vehicle to look back along the way they had come and was moved by the awesome spectacle that met his gaze. His unit may have been under strength but it was still impressive for all that, and beyond his divisions vehicles he could see those of other units, but as moving dots against the landscape. Surely NATO had nothing left with which to deny them their march to the coast? But five minutes later Milan missiles and expertly called in air strikes had begun exploding his precious reconnaissance vehicles.
Reports from the roving troublemakers of 2REP, 2e Regiment Etranger de Parachutiste’s Anti-Tank Platoon, and the Anti-Tank Guided Weapons Troop of 40 Commando RM, had charted the progress of Third Shock Army’s lead elements as they advanced westwards away from the Elbe. The French Foreign Legion paratroopers and the Royal Marine Commandos had used every opportunity to inflict harm and delay upon the enemy. Wire guided anti-tank rounds and air strikes called in by the NATO troops shredded the reconnaissance screen that preceded the armoured units, forcing the enemy to deploy forward other fighting vehicles to plug the gaps in the screen. The larger fighting vehicles were no substitute for the smaller, quieter and more agile specialist reconnaissance vehicles and were easy prey to the Milans of the French and British. Battle tanks costing millions of roubles were left burning in the fields and roads, falling victim to soft skinned vehicles that cost mere thousands. To counter this, the Soviet’s called in helicopter gunships to ride shotgun and range ahead of the tanks, and where they caught the NATO troops in the open the helicopters 23mm cannons tore up both the un-armoured vehicles and crewmen alike. The next air battle began as a direct result, with the marines and paratroopers calling for CAPs to deal with the threat from the air and the Soviet rotary wing crews quickly doing likewise once air-to-air missiles began thinning them out.
Arndeker was listening to events taking place overhead but not getting involved in the dogfights. He was at 150 ft. and banking to the left to follow the contours of a hill whilst keeping an eye out for a chimney stack on the horizon. The chimney was a visual marker, once seen he would steer a few degrees to the right of it until he reached a disused and weed choked canal which he could follow, making use of the man-made defile’s cut for it through the low hills. It would bring himself and the four F-16s with him down the right flank of the enemy armoured thrust heading for the autobahn. The mission called for them to RV with two flights of three Swedish Gripen’s and following hot on the heels of a Wild Weasel sortie by French Armee de l’air Jaguar, Mirage F-1 and 2000Ds, they were to make as many sweeps of the armoured formations as Arndeker felt were advisable. Right now he felt a suitably safe and appropriate number was probably zero, but he wasn’t able to say what he felt, i.e., “I’m tired of this game and I don’t want to play anymore,” because he was the squadron commander, an officer in the armed forces of his country and the one who set the example for his subordinates to follow. It just wasn’t acceptable to announce that he vomited at the thought of going into combat again, that his nerve was close to being shot, or that it took five fingers of vodka just to get him off to sleep at night. It wasn’t acceptable in the eyes of his peers and it wasn’t acceptable in his own either. Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Arndeker, USAF, loving husband and proud father of two was racing toward burn out and he couldn’t see it, he couldn’t see it because to open his eyes to that possibility was not acceptable either.
This sortie was a maximum effort by his squadron, with all available airframes taking part, and Lt Col Arndeker who had decided to rest his pilots where possible between sorties had no option but to comply. The first mission of the day, intercepting the inbound strike against 4 Corps, had cost the squadron his wingman, and whilst he had been at the emergency field his Exec had led the remainder against a second strike. His Exec had not returned from that one, which left his squadron with exactly five operational airframes left out of the fifteen there had been at the outbreak of the war.
Quite apart from the slowed reactions induced by fatigue, Arndeker had witnessed for himself of late a phenomenon that he had read of in pilots during the First and Second World Wars, that of a recklessness in some of his pilots, as if they were resigned to an untimely end and therefore did little to avoid it, such as flying straight and level through ground fire when they should have been jinking to throw off the gunners aim.
The German hillside flashed past and then he saw the distant concrete column pointing heavenwards. The wings of Arndeker’s F-16 came level and he checked his aircraft were still with him, they were and in anticipation of a right turn to follow the old canal the five moved into an echelon left formation.
Arndeker almost missed the canal, so choked with weed was it that it almost merged with the undergrowth on the banks. He took the flight around in a hard turn to starboard and settled down to just seventy-five feet above it with four aircraft moving into trail behind him.
“Chain Gang lead, this is Lion Dog Zero Three?”
Lion Dog was the call sign of their controller for this gig.
“Go, Dog.”
“Gang, you got Steel Talon, a flight of four Gripens approaching from your 8 o’clock, fifteen miles out.”
“Roger Dog, they’re late and there was supposed to be two fights of three?”
“They got bounced, Gang.”
> It was a very clinical way of stating the fifth and sixth aircraft were spread across the countryside somewhere. “Roger Dog, have the French guys adjusted to compensate?”
“Negative Gang, their timetable is not variable so I suggest you continue as planned and on time, but it’s your call.”
The plan called for five different formations of aircraft to arrive over the battlefield at designated times in order to carry out a coordinated attack. The timing was important to maximise the shock effect of the layered defences being stripped away and leaving the enemy armour open to attack. First in were to be the Armee de l’air Mirage F-1s, engaging the Red Air Force Top CAP to allow the Jaguars and Mirage 2000Ds to destroy or force off the air the AAA radars, and by so doing opening the way for Arndeker’s F-16s and the Gripen’s to carry out attacks with Rockeye’s and Gator’s. The window of opportunity would be scarce minutes, in single figures, before the Soviet’s recovered.
Arndeker didn’t want to delay until the Gripen’s arrived and he didn’t want to leave the Swedish fliers to brave the Soviet’s anger on their lonesome either. He informed his flight and the AWAC he was switching frequencies.
“Steel Talon lead this is Chain Gang lead on TAC Six, over?”
After a moment’s delay the Gripens flight leader responded in accented English, and it took a second for Arndeker to realise he had spoken with the owner of that voice only a few hours before.
“Gang this is Talon, sorry for the delay, begin your run without us, we’ll be a couple of minutes late.”
“Talon this is Gang, we will hold for your arrival but we can only make a single pass over the target.”
“Roger Gang, I appreciate that…however, my higher has briefed us for a minimum of four passes.”
On his second radio Arndeker heard the French going in, and they lost an aircraft to ground fire almost immediately.
