by Andy Farman
“Sir…he was one of the dead, his back was broke but he could still shout orders, he lay on his back giving encouragement and directions when yelling was inappropriate. All the officers was injured too, but the Chief, well…he was a good man sir. A little while after we got up top, well he just stopped talking and we realised he was dead too.”
“How can we still be afloat…what the hell happened?”
The bosuns mate finished examining him and sat back on his haunches.
“The way I figure it, we was still reeling in the array when that thing went off, so I reckon the torpedo struck it, instead of us.”
A sick bay orderly came up and the mate stood to give him room to work. “Who has the boat?”
“Mr Hannigan sir, he had a dislocated shoulder but he’s got things under control, with a little help from us older hands….hell of a first cruise for him.”
Pitt could only nod in reply, and then the orderly produced a syringe.
“Sorry sir but I need to reset those breaks before I can move you, I’m putting you under for a while.”
The Captain open his mouth to protest but he felt a sharp jab and seconds later darkness closed in.
United States Embassy, London: 2005hrs, same day.
The Commissioner did not enter the embassy through the front doors in Grosvenor Square, but via Blackburne Mews at the rear of the building, and into the indoor garage. His driver remained with the car as he was met by a junior staff member and escorted upstairs to Arnie Petrucci’s office. The CIA Head of Station rose from his desk and crossed the room. “Commissioner, thank you for coming.”
They shook hands briefly and waited for the escort to withdraw from the room, closing the door after him before seating themselves and getting down to business. The policeman opened his briefcase and handed over notes, and a small bottle containing a tissue sample.
“The Grampian Police are a little put out that you wouldn’t take them at their word.”
“Their Chief Constable seems like a good guy to have around, I’ll call him tomorrow morning and square things…it’s not that we doubt their ability, we just need to get a second opinion to be entirely certain that the remains are of Major Bedonavich. It would be a hell of a thing to carry on running what it is we are running if he was in fact in their hands and being worked on.”
The Commissioner made no attempt to draw Arnie on what the operation was; he just sat there quietly.
“Have you had any success with tracking down the killers?”
“Yes, and no. A Ford Transit van was found burnt out on the outskirts of Aberdeen, not an unusual occurrence for the area in which it happened, but this one had a body inside it, death was from gunshot wounds.”
“Score one for Constantine then.”
The policeman nodded.
“Possibly.” It would be a few days yet before the scene had been examined to everyone’s satisfaction, and a firm picture of who had done what, was established.
“In the meantime we are checking CCTV footage in shops, chemists and petrol filling stations between the scene and Aberdeen. DNA examination of the male and female found at the scene show them to be east European, but immigration have no trace of their dabs on file.”
“So they were illegals?”
“Not necessarily, their fingerprints would only be taken if they had applied for residency, not tourism or business.” The Commissioner rose to his feet. “If there is nothing more Mr Petrucci, then I will be on my way?”
Arnie led him to the door and with a shake of hands the policeman left with his escort, leaving the American to summons a courier who would take the tissue sample to Langley for a second comparison against one they already held.
Mao carrier group, Java Sea south of Borneo:
0910hrs, same day:
Vice Admiral Putchev smiled and nodded his thanks to the crewman as he took the proffered mug from the tray. Captain Hong himself smiled as he watched the simple act of politeness, and found he was also saying thank you when the tray was next offered. The Russian’s command style, so in contrast to that of the authoritarian Chinese system, was definitely rubbing off on him.
After sipping at the beverage appreciatively, he turned to the Russian.
“What did you say goes into this?”
“Cocoa and sherry…but you can use any sweet wine really.”
“It is…unusual, but agreeable for all that.”
“I spent three months as an observer with NATO, aboard the British destroyer HMS Devonshire. A strange peoples the British, but I got quite fond of this on cold nights in the Atlantic. A far more pleasant product of those islands than their skinny women and cricket.”
Hong took up his night glasses and swept the horizon. All radars with the exception of a merchantman forty miles ahead of the fleet were powered down. Despite her looks, the merchanter out ahead was crewed by naval ratings and ‘walking point’. What appeared to be standard steel shipping containers on her decks, were in fact made of plywood, camouflage for the surface to surface and Crotale launchers concealed beneath them.
Aside from the two carriers, there were thirty-nine other surface combat ships, nineteen amphibious assault ships and twenty other transports, tankers and cargo vessels making their way south flanked by submarines. Had not the intelligence gathering satellites in low orbit been attacked so comprehensively, they could not have moved an inch without the enemy knowing of it. The west had actually aided the PRC, by exploding their bombs in the Atlantic they had rendered their own Photo/Reconnaissance satellites impotent. Only RORSAT’s would be of any use for months to come, it made him worry about how his father and mother would cope on their farm, with low sunlight and too much rain.
The PRCs Special Forces and intelligence services had been at work all over the region, not just along the route they were taking, disabling shore based radars to ensure an undetected passage for the fleet. Those few ships that had endangered the fleet by their presence, risking the open seas in a time of war, had been boarded after the communications equipment had been jammed. Hong did not know what became of the vessels, crews and passengers; those were questions that would get him shot.
Thus far all was going to plan, except that they were now limited to one landing zone when they reached Australia, as the others had been discovered. It had however had one unplanned yet positive effect; the Australians were now looking the wrong way, toward the Coral Sea. Not that it mattered that greatly, the invasion forces they carried outnumbered the combined forces of Australia and the American troops from Korea by four to one. An air-mobile brigade’s helicopters sat upon the makeshift landing pads on ten container ships, and two motor rifle divisions plus a Regiment of engineers would land on ground secured by an airborne Regiment. Hong was not privy to all the operational details, but all personnel taking part were practising chemical warfare drills every day, even he was required to attend training sessions. Australia had always publicly denied ownership of weapons of mass destruction, and banned visiting warships from entering her waters if they carried them. Perhaps his government knew something, knew of some secret stockpile that the Australians had?
The latest intelligence briefing mentioned nothing of this, in fact the Australians had been very efficient in closing down the PRCs networks or just making life difficult for the spies. A large convoy had arrived from America along with the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier and a larger than normal surface combat group. It did not say what the convoy contained, but it was probably war stores and new equipment to replace what the Americans had abandoned in Korea. The main source of this latest intelligence originated from a pair of Project 636 boats, Russian built Improved Kilo class diesel submarines, monitoring sea traffic to and from the ports.
The presence of the carrier group was a complication that concerned both Hong and Putchev, as it had been assumed the Americans would have staged their efforts out of Pearl Harbour. If those damned submariners hadn’t got caught at the start of the war, the invasion of
Australia wouldn’t have had to be advanced by months, before the west and the Anzacs could mobilise and organise a defence of their islands. Putchev, who was privy to more than the Chinese captain had told him that the US withdrawal from Korea to Australia had been un-catered for in the plans, they had expected them to reinforce Hawaii or the Philippines with those units.
Mao had received replacements for her earlier losses in aircraft the day after the John F Kennedy was destroyed, but Admiral Kuznetsov had not, hers arrived whilst the carriers were transiting the Mindoro Strait, between the island of that name and the tiny Nanga Islands. There had been more ships in the fleet at that point, and the newly arrived Russian aircraft flew on, refuelled, bombed up and joined the strike missions against Cebu and Mactan. The invasion force for those islands had parted company with the fleet that night, cutting east, then south around Panay with four frigates for gunfire support. Two days later Chinese marines were walking through the wreckage and ruins of what had been a city, virtually levelled as punishment for their earlier resistance and the sinking of another warship.
The force bound for Cebu was still in the Sibuyan Sea, 127 miles from their landing site when the small Singaporean Riken class, coastal patrol submarine Conqueror, had got inside the ASW ring. Conqueror put a torpedo into the side of a troopship before being pounced on, and the game little vessel put another 533mm torpedo into one of the frigates from her forward tubes before ducking under her victim and adding the even smaller 400mm torpedoes from both stern tubes.
A volley of 75mm ASROCs killed the diesel boat but her main target; the troopship was too big to succumb to the lightweight munitions, and was able to limp on. The frigate was taken in tow with the intention of getting her to shallow water and beaching her enroute to Cebu for later salvage and repair, but her tow parted during the night in the Jintotolo Channel and she went on the rocks off the northern tip of Negros, with the smoking volcano of Mt Kanla-on in the background.
The carriers hadn’t paused in their journey south, whilst still providing air support for the second and successful attempt to take the islands. Once the strike missions were done with, Putchev had paid a visit to Admiral Kuznetsov and returned in good spirits, the work on the Varyag was almost complete. The ship had been all but complete when the funds dried up and she had been mothballed awaiting a buyer. Poorly maintained during those years, the completion of the work could not begin until that same neglect was first put right. That had been the next task of the shipyard once Mao had been commissioned, but now the reactor was being installed and the ship would soon come to life, Putchev’s next command.
Helmstedt, Germany: 2300hrs, same day.
At the time in the war when Leipzig had been taken by parachute assault, the German government would never have sanctioned the wholesale destruction of a German town or city. The pressure is definitely on; thought the commander of Serge Alontov’s 2nd Brigade, as he peered through the aperture of the rubble and sandbag bunker he presently occupied. If he had hoped for a fight like their last one, the air launched cruise missiles that had destroyed the power station two hours after they landed, had knocked that firmly on the head.
Unlike the last mission, they were not here solely to stop the NATO units being re-supplied at the front, but to hold the road for their own army to use when they broke out over the Elbe and drove to the sea.
The scream of incoming shells forced him to duck, and the earth heaved up to meet him and the dust of another building on Kalsergarten billowed outwards from the collapsing structure.
The NATO forces of the British 3rd Mechanised Brigade were gradually reducing the picturesque Lower Saxony town to rubble. Buildings hundreds of years old lay in ruins. It really was a tragedy, thought the Colonel who had been stationed in the eastern side of the town in his younger days, when the border between east and west ran through the town. There had been people living here for over three thousand years, the stone graves of the nearby Lübbensteine were proof of that.
His headquarters were sited on the junction of Kalsergarten and Magdeburger Tor, not far from the railway and south of the positions that cut Autobahn 2, a location he was beginning to suspect NATO was well aware of. Somewhere out there, probably watching right now was a team of artillery spotters, but the only way to clear them out would be to search every house, and his men were fully committed right now. Three Infantry battalions were applying the pressure to his foothold in the west, and they weren’t hanging about. His intelligence had identified them as the 7th/8th Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, an allegedly inferior unit of part-time soldiers, who were proving to be every bit as good as their regular sister battalion, the 1st Battalion Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, who were also opposing him. The other unit was the 2nd Battalion Light Infantry, and between the three of them they had overrun his outlying positions, south of the former university town. Technically he should have the advantage, a dug-in man is worth three in the open, but over six hundred of his men had not made it to the DZs, victims of shoot-downs by NATO fighters or mis-drops. He had reorganised his battalion so they each had three companies instead of four, due to his third battalion losing three quarters of its number on the way in. Lost with them were radios, heavy weapons and leaders that he was sorely missing now, and he couldn’t improvise in the way they had at Leipzig, the cellular network was down. He had no artillery, the plan made them unnecessary as by this time tomorrow the breakout across the Elbe would have been achieved. He thought it ironic that none of the planners had chosen to jump in with either airborne division, and he didn’t expect T-80s to come rolling down the road anytime soon either. He was now reliant on the mortars that had made it in, and the pallets of ammunition for them that the Il-76 transports carried in on resupply drops.
NATO had no such problems, and was using artillery of all calibres upon the town along with airstrikes. He was losing men with every artillery and air strike, but it was creating a landscape that favoured a defender more than it did an attacker. So long as he had his landing grounds in the north, astride the autobahn, to keep his men supplied with ammunition then he would hold.
CHAPTER four
Russia: 2310hrs, same day.
A figure moved cautiously over the snowy forest floor north of Moscow, there was only a couple of inches on the ground, which in itself was unusual because as a rule this far north they received at least three times what would fall on western Europe. The thaw from the winter proper, had barely finished before the weather went crazy, decided the figure, but it was still bitterly cold all the same.
Hunkering down in the snow his one-piece hooded coveralls blended in with the white forest floor and he raised a thermal imager to his eyes, studying a building ahead.
Udi Timoskova had been nicknamed ‘Weasel’ very shortly after starting elementary school, and the name not only stuck into adulthood, it fitted too. A flair for burglary and a talent with all things electronic had brought Udi to the notice of the authorities, following a long run of thefts from the IT community. Udi would bypass the electronic security to gain entry to whichever site had the latest software and hardware, remove what he wanted and depart, carefully covering his tracks as he went. No evidence of the burglary was detected, but the losses were. Suspecting a crooked employee to be responsible, one firm installed a tracking device within its latest hardware products, and a young Udi Timoskova had been caught red handed.
The thefts had not gone unnoticed by the intelligence service, which viewed them potentially as a matter of state security, so Udi was visited in his cell and ‘rigorously interrogated’ to ascertain what, if any, threat to the state existed.
After four long days in custody Udi was given a choice, spend fifteen years as some lifers bitch or work for the state counter espionage arm, it wasn’t much of a choice really but it meant his ultimate goal of getting to the USA and starting his own private enquiry agency, was almost unreachable from that moment on.
He was a loner and once his trustworthiness had been esta
blished, then that was how he generally worked.
Since the start of the war his department had been exceedingly busy, bugging the homes of anyone the premier felt could possibly be a threat to his position, and that turned out to be an awful lot of people.
This present assignment involved someone who was away from the city, and if not at the premier’s side, then at his beck and call. The brief stated that the subject had some cause to return to the city on operational matters on occasion, so all possible haunts were to be covered. Udi himself could not see why the subject would come to their personal dacha, if he were that person he would spend as little time as possible away from the hardened bunker they’d come from.
The imager showed a totally cold building, and his other devices showed that infrared, ultra violet and ultra-sonics were not present either, not inside nor out. He could have wasted an hour or so looking for other detection systems, such as old-fashioned pressure pads just below the surface of the earth but it would have been a waste of his time. Packing away his various electronic gadgets he moved around to the driveway and simply walked straight up to the front door.
Gaining entry took but a few moments, and once inside Udi took out a digital camera, photographing all the rooms. He was disappointed that the interior had little by the way of luxury items, everything was basic and functional. One bedroom at the top of the stairs held nothing but a few plain chairs and a mattress on the floor, covered in a dustsheet, as was everything else in the building.
Udi would have preferred to use fibre optic to connect the tiny cameras and microphones to the telephone lines, but he did not have the time for that. He placed his remote devices where the dacha’s own electrical appliances magnetic fields would hide them from electronic sweeping, checked their batteries were full and then fixed his receiving device to a tree 50m away. From this he ran thin cables to a telephone cable junction box beside a road, and spliced them in before finally checking all was functioning properly. Returning to the dacha he again got out his camera, bringing up the images of each room he made sure everything was exactly as it had been before he had gotten to work and then he left, leaving no clue that anything was amiss.
