Three Kings (Kirov Series)

by John Schettler

  One of the most heavily armored tanks in the world, it used 2nd generation Chobham armor, known as “Dorchester” armor in the service, with twice the strength of steel systems. The sloping armor was designed to deflect AT rounds away from vital areas, and the protection could be further enhanced by mounting Explosive Reactive Armor kits.

  When the tank hit back, it used a formidable 120mm main gun, with the same 7.62 chain and machine gun systems on the lighter vehicles, and provisions for a grenade launcher and larger 12.7 MG.

  All these formations were grouped under the banner of the 7th Armored Brigade. Now, after 80 long years away, the Desert Rats were returning to their old stomping ground in Egypt, where their forefathers had once hallowed the battlefields like Beda Fomm, Tobruk, Sidi Rezegh, El Alamein, and the pursuit of the German Afrika Korps to Tunisia. Now it would face a wild and wily foe in the Berber tribes of middle Egypt, functioning as a heavy security contingent, largely within the border zone of the Sultan Apache fields, a rough equilateral triangle measuring 50 kilometers per side.

  The British press made good mileage from the motto of the heavy Royal Scotts Dragoons Battalion: “No one provokes me with impunity.” British units in Challenger tanks had destroyed a total of 300 enemy fighting vehicles in the Gulf War, without losing a single tank to enemy fire. There were no further attacks on BP facilities after the Desert Rats arrived, and Britain was soon busy again with the business of extracting oil from the deep depressions when the threat of growing war loomed heavily in 2021.

  The 7th Brigade was still in Egypt when hostilities opened in the Pacific, and over nine bitter days of increasing escalation, the flames of war burned ever closer as all the world’s energy centers became prime targets of opportunity. The fighting had started over an isolated rock in the East China Sea, the Senkaku Islands to Japan, the Diaoyutai Islands to mainland China. It had soon spread to Nigeria, the Gulf of Mexico, the Persian Gulf, and the Kashagan fields of the Caspian Basin.

  Too isolated to be threatened by land, the 7th Brigade stood its watch with its air defense units on high alert. Only an air strike could really do any harm…. Or a missile. All was quiet over those first eight days in the desert. The soldiers manned their patrols, the desert heat remained relentless and the cold nights equally unforgiving. Then the ire of man became a fire of wrath and doom on that ninth day, the last day that humanity and civilization itself would have any need for oil and gas on planet earth. The 9th day was the day the first missiles fired and, as might be expected, Sultan Apache was high on the target list.

  When they got the brief emergency flash message indicating a missile was inbound, the 7th Brigade rushed to activate its Aster-30 Block III Ballistic Missile Defense Battery, the only one in the unit capable of responding. It fired at dusk that day, the thin trails streaking up through the sky as the Berbers watched from the nearby oasis settlement at Siwa. They had seen the heavy British armored units, the tough, professional soldiers that manned the Brigade, and they wanted nothing more to do with their war on Western oil men. Now they wondered what the British were firing at, as news travels slow in the desert, even news of the impending end of the world…

  Brigadier General Jacob “Jake” Kinlan was in his command vehicle when it came, high up in the desert sky, three explosions as the Aster missiles hungrily sought out their targets. They got two of the three warheads from the incoming missile, a mini MIRV re-entry vehicle with three 15 kiloton bombs. The third was jarred enough by the explosions that it was sent careening off target, falling wide of the mark over the desolation of the Qattara Depression and exploding in a massive aerial fireball, about a thousand meters above ground. It was meant to fall just a little lower, and ignite its awful nuclear fire directly over the Sultan Apache site, but fate or good luck had intervened in the tip of that third Aster missile, and the Desert Rats would be spared.

  The Brigade was “buttoned up” when the attack came in, their desertized, air conditioned fighting vehicles on full NBC alert, many already hull down in revetments dug into the chalky yellow loam of the desert soil. They would survive the blast to a man, with not a single casualty, but they would never fight for the government that had sent them to Egypt again… at least not for the government that died that day when the missiles fell on London in the year 2021.

  Yet strangely, the battle history of the Desert Rats would not end that day, the 9th day, the final day of the long escalation that brought hell to earth and ended human civilization. It was the day that left behind little more than the blighted, charred remains of cities all across the globe, places seen only by the living eyes of a very few, and most of those aboard one brave Russian ship that had disappeared a month before the fighting began—the battlecruiser Kirov.

  * * *

  “Pony up!” Major Reeves gave the order to his Recce Troop, 1st Squadron, 12th Lancers, well outside the brigade perimeter that night, and with orders to scout the way north. The brigade had been hunkered down in NBC mode, all buttoned up with filters running and snorkels sipping and cleaning the air. The men had just completed air samples for radiation levels, tapping their touch screen digital panels in the new Dragon IFVs, which formed the bulk of this squadron. To their great surprise and relief, everything was green and clean. The Russians had thrown an ICBM at them, with a MIRVed warhead. They got two of the three bombs that meant to destroy this vital unit in the British Army where it stood its security watch over the even more vital oil facilities at BP Sultan Apache. That third warhead had gone off, but it was well wide of the target zone, and 7th Brigade would live to fight another day… but not in the year 2021.

  One man had inadvertently seen to that, though history would never record his name. Was he the hungry young mishman who had taken that last sweet roll in the bakery bins of Kirov’s mess hall? It did not matter. The only thing that did matter was that Gennadi Orlov found himself at Bir Basúre that night, about seven kilometers from the place that would one day mark the northern border of Sultan Apache oil field. And Gennadi Orlov had brought something with him in his pocket, though he did not know what it was.

  Major Reeves was leading his troop, as he often did. He was a self described “desert loving Englishman,” a line he filched from his favorite movie, Lawrence of Arabia. He had signed on for Army service as soon as he was of age, and specifically requested service in the 7th Brigade, the Desert Rats, his Great Grandfather’s old unit. The stories he had heard as a boy had stayed with him all his life, from the sand boxes where he once played them out with his toy soldiers, to the real deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan. He was a Desert Rat, through and through, and knew the proud history of his Brigade chapter and verse.

  They were going to use infrared and night vision sensors to advance, their lights dark as the sleek new eight wheeled IFVs rolled forward over the tough ground. He had orders to move out and scout the road north through Bir Basúre. The Brigade wasn’t sticking around for the Russians to drop another egg on them, and he would lead the way out.

  “Well where’s the bloody road?” said Reeves, tapping his digital terrain map. GPS was down, most likely the result of the EMP effects from that big air burst they had just ridden out. They still had their map available, but it failed to locate their present position, or that of any other vehicles in the brigade. The satellites are probably gone as well, he thought. Communications had been spotty all evening before the missile alert came in. Things were heating up in the war, and now it had finally come to the desert.

  “Can’t see a thing,” said Cobb, the driver. “We should be right smack on the road, sir. In fact we were right on the road when that alert came in, and we’ve only moved a few yards to the hull down revetment. It should be right under our noses.”

  “Well it’s not under our noses, Cobber. You must have canted off into another bloody salt pan of something.”

  “No sir,” Cobb protested. “I’d feel that bang away. We’ve got good wheel traction, the ground is firm, but the road… well it’s just
not there any longer, sir.”

  “Probably buried under a foot of sand by now with this wind, Move us out. I’m signaling the column to follow. The damn thing can’t all be under sand, and we’ll find it soon enough.”

  Reeves was going to get his job done, road or no road. Frustrated, he opened his top hatch and stuck his head out, wanting to put his human senses to the test where the digital sensors had failed. The smell and sting of blowing sand was all he got for his trouble. Yet the column was ready to move out, and he was the tip of the spear, fearless, because right behind his squadron was a Sabre of heavy Challenger 2 tanks from the Royal Scotts Dragoons. The deep growl of those big tank engines could be heard over the whine of the restless desert wind, and that had a way of giving a man confidence in his job.

  Reeves looked over his shoulder, squinting through his protective goggles, and could barely see the tanks behind his column, though he could hear them even better now. It was pitch black, and the wind was bitter cold. He could not even see the lights from the perimeter towers back at the Sultan Apache facility, which seemed odd, in spite of the obscuring sand storm.

  He was a scout, and it was his job to lead the tanks forward, but here they had gone and blundered right off the road, and it was nowhere to be seen. Good enough. He was back through the hatch, shutting it tight as he pull off his protective eye goggles.

  “Off you go, Cobber, ahead one third. Gunners ready! I don’t want to be surprised by one of those bloody Egyptian T-72s. Watch that infrared, boys, the night vision is all dodgy in this blowing sand.”

  The surprise he hoped to avoid was out there, just a few hundred yards ahead, but it was not a T-72—far from it. He was about to run up on a heavy squad of Russian Marines who had just landed here in a helicopter, and he would get the surprise of his life soon after.

  Chapter 27

  Popski had seen the cool precision of the Russian Marines, and his opinion of the men ticked up a notch when they deployed. Zykov’s humor was well stowed, and he was all business now, seeing to the proper sighting of the squad’s machine guns. He had a Bullpup on each flank, satisfied that they had good overlapping fields of fire. So Popski found Fedorov near the KA-40, and waved him away.

  “You won’t want to be anywhere near that thing,” he said in a low, urgent voice. “Get over here. Quickly!”

  Fedorov ran for the covered position where Popski huddled behind a large boulder. “I hope your men don’t get trigger happy,” said Popski. “We don’t know what’s in front of us yet.”

  “Troyak!” Fedorov hissed. “Weapons tight. We fire only if fired upon.”

  The Sergeant signaled he understood, and then passed the word to his men, though he didn’t like the order. He knew how vulnerable they were now on the ground, and he had taken everything Popski had said about the dangers of the desert to heart. The KA-40 was sitting there like a fat cow, an easy target if this was enemy armor. Like a good sonar man, he had filed away his own inner recollection of various vehicle sounds, and this one gave him a shiver. There were tanks out there, and they sounded like heavy tanks, something he had not expected he would encounter here. So now he knelt by the mortar team and waited, the tension building with every second.

  The wind… it was cold and biting now, and the blowing sand seemed strangely luminescent. Troyak had a very bad feeling about it, and then he heard the higher whine of wheeled vehicles, closer, wafting over the deep growl of the tank engines. He enable the grenade launching function on his assault rifle, his finger at the ready near the trigger.

  “Nobody fires a single round until I do,” he rasped. And they waited.

  * * *

  Reeves could see it clearly now on his infrared screen, a massive heat signature on the ground, dead ahead. “Something big out there, he said aloud, and began tuning his image to get a better picture. It looked for all the world like…

  “We’ve got company. Anyone hear about a helo scheduled in tonight?”

  Nobody said anything. “I didn’t think so. Well that’s one fat helicopter sitting about 300 yards out, or I’m a Leprechaun.” He was on his radio set at once, speaking through his headset microphone.

  “1/12 Lancers on point. We have a helicopter on the ground out here, about seven kilometers outside the perimeter, over.”

  There was some wait, and nothing came back, so he tried again.

  “1/12 Lancers on point. Lieutenant Reeves reporting. Please respond, over.”

  “HQ Staff. Say again, 1/12. What’s that about a helo?”

  “1/12 on point, sir.” And he repeated his report, hearing a lot of talk in the background when the HQ Staff returned.

  “Sorry 1/12, there’s a bit of confusion here. Bloody sand storm is thick as pea soup. Can’t see three feet here, but we copy on your helo report. Nothing scheduled. Proceed with caution and ID contact, over.”

  “Copy that, HQ, advancing to point of contact. Over.”

  Reeves tapped his driver on the shoulder. “Ease us on up to that contact,” he said. “Nice and slow.” He was reaching for his external megaphone to broadcast a warning. “Helicopter on the ground, please identify. This is the British Army.” His voice boomed out on the external speaker.

  It was a well rehearsed procedure the unit had developed in their dealings with the locals here. They would ID themselves as British Army, which was usually enough to quell any trouble or disturbance they might come upon during a patrol. By day it didn’t matter, for their vehicles and insignia were now well known to the local Berbers. By night they used the megaphone to warn anything they came upon, and if they didn’t get a satisfactory answer he would fire a warning shot and repeat his challenge. That was usually enough to settle the matter, but this was a hair-trigger situation now with a squad of Russian Naval Marines training every weapon they possessed in his direction.

  “British Army?” Popski heard the challenge and had his wits about him. “Anyone have a lantern handy?”

  “In the helo,” said Fedorov, and he led their guide back to the KA-40 to fetch a beacon lantern from the side supply compartment. “Now you tell your boys to just lay low and keep cool while I flash our recognition signal.”

  He stepped well away from the helo, and flashed out some light signals, simple Morse Code for L.R.D.G., the Long Range Desert Group. Anyone in the British Army should know what that meant.

  Reeves saw it, looking from his driver to his gunner with a frown. “Recognition flash,” he said in a low voice. “Anybody read that?”

  “I think it’s Morse code, Lieutenant. Yes sir… that’s dot, dash, dot, dot… dot, dash, dot… I think they’re sending L.R.D.G., and it just repeats again.”

  Reeves ran that through his head until it rang a very loud bell there—L.R.D.G…. “Someone playing games tonight?” he said.

  “What’s it mean, sir?”

  “Can’t mean what I think it does. That’s the old Long Range Desert Group from the last war, the big war here in North Africa.” So he thought this was most likely someone getting cheeky from a supply helo that had run in from Mersa Matruh. Anyone who knew about the L.R.D. G. was most likely British out here, but it wasn’t very smart to play word games in a situation like this. And why hadn’t they heard about this helo run? Nothing had been scheduled. Perhaps they were going somewhere else, and just set down here because of the storm. He had it exactly right, though he wasn’t quite sure of himself just yet. So he got on the external speaker system again.

  “Come forward and identify yourself. Nice and slow, please.” Then he took a risk and had his driver flash the headlights on his vehicle. It would give his position away, but the growl of those tanks behind him had his dander up, and he was willing to take the chance. Otherwise he was going to have to dismount a squad and have them advance on foot, which he now ordered anyway.

  “Number three,” he said quickly in his headset command mike. “Dismount and advance.”

  “Aye sir,” it was Sergeant Williams, and he had his men out the bac
k exit ramp of his Dragon IFV, a squad of five fanning out, with two men to either side of the column and the Sergeant leading on point.

  “I’d best handle this,” said Popski. “Have your men lie low.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Fedorov insisted.

  “Better you wait here, Captain.”

  “No, I think I should come along. Lead the way, Major.”

  A Major ranked a Captain in the army, but this man was navy—the bloody Russian Navy at that. A Captain was a bit of a demigod in the Navy, and this man had the ear of General Wavell himself, so Popski relented.

  He stood up, still holding the signal lantern, and started off on foot, fearless. If this was the British Army then he should have nothing to fear, but he kept his right hand on his sidearm where it rode on his hip just the same.

  Shadows loomed ahead in the blowing sand, like ghosts materializing on the wind. Then they became the more familiar shape and form of men… soldiers… weapons at the ready. He waited, confident and eager to see who was coming for dinner. When the squad came up they were well forward of Troyak’s Marines, which was just what Popski wanted. One false move here and the whole scene could erupt in a firefight that nobody wanted.

  He saluted to the Sergeant, not headstrong enough to wait for him to do so first. He wanted to defuse the situation as quickly as possible.

  “Major Peniakoff, Long Range Desert Group,” he said, noting the Sergeant’s shoulder patch and the black beret he wore. He was a Desert Rat, he knew at once, but what was the 7th Armored doing out here? These had to be the reinforcements that the Aussies had been hoping for.