by Andy Farman
The Romanian armour was another matter though, as for one thing he had no accurate tally of the numbers involved and JSTARS guestimate was between one company and a battalion. Ten tanks or thirty, they had not acted according to standard Soviet doctrine, they had not immediately turned about and set-to in securing and widening the breach for follow-on forces.
War gaming, the fighting of battles on large table tops by enthusiasts moving models around is known simply and logically as ‘war gaming’. Apparently someone believed the professionals required several degrees of separation from the hobbyist’s pastime and an acronym was urgently required. It is entirely possible that somewhere in the process a tender was put out and a parliamentary committee formed to select the ablest PLC of bright and thrusting young graduates who would receive a big bung of tax payer’s money for completing the awesome task of thinking up a title. However it came about though, the professional soldiers were not consulted and stubbornly refuse to say ‘tactical exercise without troops’ when they see the word ‘TEWT’ printed on a training roster, using instead the term ‘table top exercise’ as they have always done.
SACEUR leaned forward and rested his hands on the edge of the map table, staring at the unit symbols, already knowing each units current strength and equipment, he mentally conducted several table top exercises as he decided who, if anyone, he could detach to intercept the Romanian tanks before they could seize the autobahn junction, if in fact that is where it was heading.
There was no ‘Eureka moment’ during his contemplation, merely a resigned sigh as he finally decided upon whom to send as yet another Forlorn Hope.
Flechtinger Forest, Germany: 6 miles southwest of the Vormundberg.
The rain beat down without mercy anointing scarred and splintered tree trunks with its thin salve. It soaked the underclothing of a soldier via a rent in his Gortex combat smock as he made his way cautiously through what remained of Flechtinger Höhenzug, the forested ridge southwest of Magdeburg. A low profile fabric panel attached to a breast pocket fastener depicted two woven stars above a crown, showing his rank as that of Tenente Colonnello, a Lieutenant Colonel, but it was hard to see even in good light ever since a Russian sniper had narrowly missed killing him with an intended head shot, perforating the waterproof material two inches from his neck and killing a young soldier behind him instead. Although he rarely drank, a large glass of Grappa had restored his equilibrium far more ably than surgical sticking plaster had thus far achieved in restoring the smocks waterproof integrity. As to the rank panel, well that was now even more low profile than originally specified by the army board of uniform standards, owing to a palm full of camouflage cream that had been applied to the material with a shaky hand, pre-restorative Grappa.
The lieutenant colonel was now accompanied by a half section of infantrymen and the brigade adjutant, also a lieutenant colonel but one who was junior in grade. Together they made their way parallel to the top of the ridge, but remaining carefully on the reverse slope, out of the enemy’s sights.
The colonel’s nose wrinkled with distaste as he neared one of his brigade’s eight wheeled B1 Centauro tank destroyers, the barrel of its 105mm main armament was drooping at an angle, fire scarred and blackened. Not even the rain could cool the blistered paintwork of the vehicles bodywork, but instead hissed and spat as it struck the hot metal. It was dug-in, hull down in a once well camouflaged position, but the luck of both vehicle and crew had run out. Only lack of ammunition had prevented a catastrophic explosion though the flames consumed it instead, feeding off combustibles where the rain could not reach. 120mm rounds for the main battle tanks were in ready supply, thanks to the latest convoy’s arrival, but the brigades tank destroyers had been reduced to the role of mobile hardpoints in the anti-infantry role, using their exposed external 7.62mm machine guns for the previous two days.
The colonel ducked as small arms ammunition suddenly cooked off in the flames inside, the ball and tracer rounds ricocheting about the interior with the odd round escaping with a whine, whirring away into the night from out of the open commander’s hatch. The stench that was issuing was that of the electrical insulation and the still smouldering rubber of the tyres, but it was combined with something else too.
He doubted he could ever eat pork again.
Fifty minutes of negotiating his way, with the occasional pause at fighting positions to speak to the troops, finally brought him to the M113 APC he was using as a command vehicle.
Entering the rear of the track and pushing through the heavy blackout curtain, he emerged in the dimly lit interior.
“Sir.” said one of the radio operators in the cramped confines they had to work in. “The commanders on the line.” indicating the telephone handset to their secure ‘means’, protected by fourteen layered encryption.
He paused for a moment before replying.
“Bloody good range that set has if it can reach the afterlife.” he observed with a hint of sarcasm, not directed at anyone in particular.
The brigade commander, his 2 i/c and the regimental commanders, their own included, had been killed several hours before at an O Group, assassinated by Russian Spetznaz troops in the guise of a Carabinieri close protection squad.
“No sir, SACEUR.” interrupted his own one-time 2 i/c, Major Spittori, who was now his natural successor as CO of the 11th Bersaglieri Regiment.
“General Allain himself.”
The Canadian was reputed never to delegate the issuing of a ‘difficult’ set of orders to subordinates.
Lt Col Lorenzo Rapagnetta, senior surviving officer of the Ariete Armoured Brigade seated himself before raising the handset to his ear. They were the only two using that secure channel and VP could be set aside.
“Good morning sir, may I respectfully enquire what I can I do for you?”
CHAPTER 2
Russia, Militia Sub-District 178.
Friday, 19th October. 2109hrs.
Barely clear of the tree tops, its throttles open, the jet aircraft caused Major Limanova, the deputy commander of Militia Sub-District 178 to duck involuntarily as it passed overhead visible as a briefly glimpsed black silhouette, bereft of navigation or anti-collision lights against the stars it eclipsed in its passage.
The shock of the moment quickly passed and he had looked to the vehicle’s driver, Petrov, gawping dumbly at the skies but visible only for the glowing cigarette held between his lips.
If whoever was involved in whatever-the-hell was going on had heard them approaching, then the aircraft would have been shut down until they passed well away. It therefore stood to reason that the aircraft engine had masked the sound of the noisy AFV.
“Switch off!” he had shouted even as he broke into a run back to the vehicle, gesticulating with a throat cutting signal but the driver could barely make him out in the dark, let alone hear him.
He shone the torch at himself, half blinded by the glare he had stumbled and nearly tripping over because of it.
“Turn the damn engine off!” and the gesture got the message home where words failed.
Dropping back down into his seat through the hatch the driver had done as requested and the deputy commander stopped to listen as the sound of the aircraft rapidly diminished to nothingness, and only the wind in the trees remained.
“Sir, why did you want the engine off?” the driver asked as he re-emerged, standing on his seat.
The question caught Major Limanova off guard.
“Didn’t you hear that jet take off?”
“A jet, sir?”
“You heard an aircraft run up its engines and take off?”
“No, sir.”
“But you heard it fly over us…you looked up?”
“Crick in me neck sir, its cramped in this seat. I didn’t hear nothing on account of that.” He jerked a thumb to the right.
The driver’s position on a BMP-1 was offset to the left, the same as a car or trucks, where it occupied a third of the front section of the vehicle. The
BMP-1s engine pack, a big six cylinder V8, took up the other two thirds. The single exhaust on the far right where it sat flush with the body had a silencer, but this vehicle was older than its current driver. Decades of soldiers had misused the exhaust, reducing the silencers muffling matrix to its current inefficient state by raising the rectangular steel grill covering of the exhaust outlet, dropping tinned rations inside to be broiled in the can, and forcing the grill closed again with brute force, such as by jumping up and down on it.
When they had halted here the deputy commander had walked forwards with his out of date map, a compass and torch to narrow down their location as there were more supposed firebreaks in reality than his map depicted.
The fabric and horsehair crewman’s helmet had irritated him, the rubber ear pieces made his skin itch and as he had knelt, away from the magnetic interference of the elderly AFV, orientating map and compass, he had raised an ear flap to scratch, and that was why he had heard the aircraft but the driver had not.
Out of date or not, the map showed a disused airstrip from the time of the Great Patriotic War, and it lay in the direction the mystery aircraft had come from.
Remounting the vehicle he reached for the radio microphone.
Moscow Air Defence Centre was no stranger to the vagaries of equipment generated false alarms or the phantom sightings of aircraft by nervous sentries, but it was unusual for a senior office to call in a sighting he had made.
Civilian air traffic was strictly controlled and the logs showed no scheduled flights or military scrambles at the time stated, and certainly there was nothing near the location given.
Likewise he had drawn a blank elsewhere as enquiries with the Kremlin confirmed that there had been no VIP traffic at that time. Anyone with sufficient pull to warrant air transport was elsewhere anyway, deep in a bunker.
Security and Intelligence Liaison would neither confirm nor deny any ongoing flight operations. Finally of course there were the ground radar stations and two orbiting A-50 Mainstays, three hundred miles southwest and northeast respectively, but replaying their records brought the deputy commander little in the way of credibility.
The duty watch officer with whom the increasingly frustrated militia officer was dealing now voiced his doubts.
“Comrade, the only air traffic in that area all day was attached to your own militia for a search operation and the air defence radar records show that it was above the airstrip you mentioned.” he stated the time as related to him a few minutes before. “Did the machine not land?”
The deputy commander felt a sinking feeling; he knew where Air Defence Centre was going with this.
He replied, resignedly.
“No comrade, they stated it was too heavily overgrown to risk clipping a tree.”
He could hear the watch officer on the other end kiss his teeth.
“Well comrade deputy commander what can I say, if a helicopter could not land then a jet aircraft could hardly take off, now could it?”
As days went, this had not been a good one and he could do nothing about his own commander’s attitude. There was most certainly no point in informing the sub district commander of what had occurred as he would have to admit that nothing had shown up on radar, and even his own driver could not support his claim.
“Grab your rifle and equipment Petrov.” he instructed, pulling on his own as he spoke.
“We’re going for a walk.”
For the past one hundred miles the hybrid Nighthawk, its callsign simply ‘Petticoat Express’, had been down in the weeds, staying mercifully untroubled by Moscow’s formidable multi layered defences and sensors by giving the city a wide birth.
“So where the hell is the promised satellite support?” Caroline had muttered soon after take-off.
The ‘At-a-glance’ system was up and working but it lacked was current information to project onto the aircraft’s screens. Only the previously known positions of defence sites were showing, and in the case of mobile air defence units this could have changed radically since the last update, weeks before at RAF Kinloss, in Scotland.
Shading that mirrored the level of their ‘painting’ by radars had been apparent of course, but the radar energy had not been sufficient to cause concern.
So far so good, thought Patricia, but had she been aware that six thousand miles away there was a battle underway in the jungle close by their first scheduled assistance she would not have been quite so relaxed.
They stayed low and relatively slow, holding to the bottom end of the aircraft’s best fuel economy performance and kept Nizhny Novgorod on their nose until they could drop into the Oka river valley and open the throttles a little more.
They kept to the southern side of the valley, cutting across broad swathes of marsh and bog that the river meandered around, the land around that region being largely low lying to the north. In contrast, the southern bank of the river rose as low, wooded hills.
The vast, and massively polluted industrial centre of Dzerzhinsk slid by, shrouded in soot and smoke, five miles off their left wing. The factories and chemical plants were visible, illuminated to cope with twenty four hour production and making a mockery of blackout regulations.
As Dzerzhinsk passed away behind them Caroline raised the nose and turned south to avoid the Oka River Bridge and its defences.
The Nighthawk skimmed above the wooded hills, nosing over into the next valley, now clear of known air defence zones and heading towards its target.
ESA Launch Facility, Kourou, French Guiana
The glow out to sea evidenced the flames consuming the French corvette Premier-Maitre L'her, mortally wounded by the People’s Liberation Army Navy diesel electric submarine Bao, she stubbornly clung to the surface and once the flames had consumed her sundered superstructure they began to feed on the aluminium in her hull.
She still possessed a full magazine below the waterline and as she was not drifting shore wards and therefore not a danger to the town so she was given a very wide berth, abandoned to her inevitable fate.
Life rafts dotted the ocean to the north of the corvette where wind and tide took them, sweeping them towards the former penal colony isles off the coast, and of course the dense offshore minefield.
Pleasure boat owning civilians and Kourou’s few remaining fishermen where now being summoned from their beds, and directed to carry out search and rescue for survivors from the Premier-Maitre L'her as best they could.
The sister ship of the stricken warship, the Commandant Blaison, pennant number F793, had arrived but she was to seaward, conducting a hunt for the second Chinese submarine, the Dai.
The colony’s Governor had been made aware that the Dai had launched a single cruise missile and the significance of that event led to a panicked dusting off of contingency plans for protecting the colony in time of nuclear attack that had been written in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The Commandant Blaison was closed up to action stations and conducting NBC Warfare procedures as she sought to find and sink the Dai before she could launch a fresh attack.
The locating of the Dai would be one of immense difficulty given the means that remained at the disposal of the colony. Two specialist ASW maritime patrol aircraft and two ASW hulls would have had a better chance, but in the space of less than an hour that force had been reduced to half its original size.
Aboard the surviving Atlantique the trio of ASW operators had identified Dai’s type and therefore the type of weapon deployed. They could take a map and a set of compasses and draw a semi-circle off the coast which defined that weapons known/believed maximum range and that would give them the maximum area they not only needed to search but also to keep secure. The Dai of course had not had time to reach that pencil line so that left a smaller semi-circle, but one that was expanding exponentially by the moment.
If she was not found and sunk by the coming of dawn they would have an awful lot of ocean to search.
The colony’s pair of Breguet Atl
antiques, Poseidon Zero Four and Poseidon One Eight had been hurriedly armed with the means to sink submarines earlier in the evening but not the wherewithal to find them remotely once submerged. The tail boom mounted magnetic anomaly detector requires the aircraft to directly overfly the unseen submarine in order to detect it. The sowing of lines of sonar buoys permitted a single aircraft to cover a vastly larger area, and it was akin to tying tin cans to a barbed wire fence.
The Atlantique could carry seventy two of the devices, thirty of which were pre-loaded into launch tubes offset on the left side of the belly, just aft of the cockpit. However, counter measures to submarine launched anti-aircraft missiles were not the only item used prolifically in recent weeks.
They did not have seventy two sonar buoys at Cayenne, they had seven.
Zero Four was still burning at the end of the runway at Cayenne when One Eight touched down and raised a welter of spray as it dashed through the puddles with both pilots applying the brakes and reversing the propellers, shortening the landing run-out well clear of the wreck of the other Atlantique. Once halted, they sat for several minutes watching the flames consume Poseidon Zero Four.
“Là, mais la grâce de Dieu vont I…there but for the grace of God go I” declared her captain with other crew members crowding into the cabin to crouch and peer through the windscreen at the conflagration, which until a short time before had been an identical aircraft to their own.
The crew of Zero Four stood over by the military end of the airfield, a fenced off cluster of huts and tarmac ramp. They had escaped death or injury but showed no outward sign of relief as they watched their aircraft’s death throes.
