Northern Fury- H-Hour

by Bart Gauvin

  That’s why this is so ugly, Jack thought. There were no good guys, only victims of the hatred and geopolitical gamesmanship engulfing Poland. Jack liked to report on conflict because, deep down, he’d never moved past his love of the comic book superheroes of his childhood. Battles between good and evil to protect the weak. He found that he was always looking for heroes in his stories, and the villains they would fight. Situations like this reminded him that the world wasn’t a piece of fiction. There were no camps of good and evil.

  Flipping his notebook closed, Jack walked towards the car where his interpreter waited to take him back to Warsaw. He’d come looking for a story that exemplified the violence starting to rip Poland apart. He’d found it here in Ossówka. As he walked, he started to compose the closing lines he would submit, a closing that reflected his own dark mood after seeing firsthand how that conflict was turning brother against brother. The Second World War grew out of Poland more than fifty-three years ago. Now, with every circular act of violence and reprisal spreading bloody vigilantism in the county’s muddy streets, the Third could be taking root.

  PART II: AREA OF INTEREST

  “Their drills were bloodless battles, their battles bloody drills.”

  —Flavius Josephus

  CHAPTER 6

  0755 CST, Sunday 13 December 1992

  1355 Zulu

  Petawawa National Forest, north of CFB Petawawa, Ontario, Canada

  THE TWO HELICOPTERS threw up a swirling white cloud of ice crystals in the pink rays of morning light as they flared and descended into the small clearing deep in the Petawawa Garrison’s wooded training area. The craft were Canadian CH-135s, copies of the venerable UH-1N Twin Huey, their two-bladed rotors beating the frigid air with a distinctive thwack-thwack. In unison, the pilots pulled back slightly on their collectives and dropped carefully through the icy cloud. The skids sank softly into the layer of snow that hadn’t been blown away by the rotors’ downdraft. The doors on both sides of the olive drab-painted choppers slid open with a bang on touchdown as more snow cascaded from the branches of surrounding trees, adding to the snowy vortex.

  Four men in parkas with white covers and woodland pattern camouflage pants jumped out of each helicopter. One man on each side ran out three paces hunched over beneath the spinning blades before dropping into a prone firing position and aiming his black carbine away from the aircraft. The others yanked rucksacks and bundled skis out of the cargo compartments and into the blowing snow. The last bundle hit the ground just as the helicopters’ engines increased to a high-pitched roar. The craft lifted upward, gently at first as the pilots cleared the men on the ground, then more rapidly as the Hueys’ noses tilted downward, accelerating the helicopters forward. Elapsed time on the ground for the birds had been about twenty-five seconds.

  Sergeant David Strong pulled himself up to a kneeling firing position as the roar and violence of the downdraft gave way to the rhythmic thwack-thwack of receding rotors. He watched the aircraft clear the evergreens at the edge of the field and bank right. In moments they were out of sight, the sound quickly fading. After the noise, the silence of the forest was almost deafening, and the sergeant experienced the now-familiar loneliness of being left behind in remote places. He breathed it in as he took in the scene around him. The snowy clearing was enclosed in a palisade of dark trees. Above the treetops the southeast sky was glowing indigo with the sunrise, while the northern and western skies maintained the deep blue of night.

  Strong twisted to look back over his shoulder. The other three members of his team were also up and kneeling, training their weapons towards the four points of the compass and stealing quick glances back at their leader. In the middle of their diamond was the equipment. Thirty meters away the other quartet knelt in their own diamond formation. The sergeant caught the eye of one of his team, the hulking Master Corporal Roy, and after a silent hand signal the man got up, moved to the center and retrieved his rucksack and skis before returning to his post in the small perimeter. The other two did the same, moving one at a time in their pre-rehearsed order to haul their equipment back to their posts. Finally, Strong moved back and grabbed his own pack.

  Once each man had donned his rucksack and snowshoes, skis lashed vertically along the sides of their packs, Strong gave another hand signal. The team stood up in silent unison and began jogging, still in their loose diamond formation, towards the nearby tree line. To his right the sergeant could see the other team doing the same, cutting a parallel course towards the protection of the trees. They passed from the growing morning light of the clearing into the soft semidarkness of the forest, where, after several dozen meters, they linked up with the four men of the other group. After another hand signal the men dropped their rucks into the snow and knelt. Six of the soldiers formed a single oval perimeter while Strong and the other team leader moved to the center.

  The two knelt and dropped their packs in the middle of the perimeter. The other man, Colour Sergeant Edwards of 22 Special Air Service Regiment, spoke the first words since they had exited the helicopters. “Well,” he said in a deep voice, betraying faint traces of a Cockney accent, “shouldn’t we be going?”

  “Change our dress first, eh?” responded Sergeant Strong in his softer Canadian dialect. “We need to strip down for movement and adjust our camouflage.”

  “Adjust it ’ow?” asked the Brit.

  “Woodland pattern on top, white pants,” came David’s quiet response.

  “Why’s that, mate?” asked Edwards. The British SAS men were conducting a week of cold weather familiarization with Strong’s newly-forming Canadian Joint Task Force 2. The Canadian special operations unit would officially stand up next April, and a troop of the SAS Regiment’s D Squadron was here for several weeks to assist with the activation. The Canadian sergeant was impressed by the British NCO’s willingness to ask questions and learn, despite the brash front that the man put up to the world. Both groups of elite soldiers were learning.

  “White on top, green on bottom was good for the low brush of the clearing,” explained Strong, patiently, “but in the trees, we’ll blend in better with it reversed. You’ll see. We’ll have to stop and change again for the leg of the route that goes along the lakeshore.”

  Edwards nodded. Uniform adjustments were a normal part of small unit infantry movements. He was on this training patrol to learn the nuances of his craft that were unique to cold, snowy environments. The two leaders went to their respective teams and quietly gave the order. One at a time each man retrieved and donned his white pants cover and stuffed the heavy parka into his ruck, then strapped the snowshoes on the back of their rucksack with bungee cords.

  Several of the combined patrol were beginning to shiver. The ambient temperature was just a couple of degrees below freezing, but their worn clothing was light in anticipation of the movement ahead. A hand signal from Strong brought them to their feet. Each shouldered his pack and snapped on skis, then slung his weapon tight across his chest so it would not interfere with the poles but could still be brought up to a firing position at a moment’s notice. Corporal Tenny, demolition expert for the Canadian team, took point, and the eight men skied into a single file: Canadians in front, Brits behind, five meters between each soldier. They had nearly thirty kilometers ahead of them. Tenny shot a quick bearing with a compass lashed to his webbing, then started south at a moderate pace.

  After several minutes Sergeant Strong skied up until he was following just behind Tenny, skiing in his subordinate’s tracks. His patrol had only been together for a few days as JTF 2 slowly coalesced at their new Dwyer Hill facility northwest of Ottawa. Strong hadn’t really gotten to know the three other men he would lead yet. Several hours skiing through the woods should fix that, he thought, looking forward to the chance to both converse with his men and observe their stamina. He engaged Tenny in quiet conversation as they glided through the evergreens, asking the othe
r man about his family, interests, hobbies, the usual.

  Tenny was the youngest member of the team, displaying the quick wits and cockiness of his youth. He was also single, but with a girlfriend back in Ottawa. He seemed to exhibit the pattern of one failed relationship after another, common to many elite soldiers. Strong got the impression that this latest relationship was already on the rocks. Professionally, Tenny was familiar with all manner of explosives and the various creative ways in which they could be employed to solve almost any problem, and he so far hadn’t been shy to suggest such solutions in their patrol planning. If all you have is a hammer, Strong thought with a smirk.

  Satisfied that he’d gotten some background on his youngest patrol member, David dropped back five meters until he was near to his radioman, Corporal Brown. Brown was a fast talker, and it didn’t take much prodding for Strong to learn from the man’s staccato prose about his conflicted identity. Brown was Inuit on his mother’s side but his father was a hard-drinking miner in the Northwest Territories. He wasn’t shy about which of his two estranged parents he loved more, and David learned after a few minutes of conversation that Brown liked to be called Clark as a nod to the Inuit name his mother had given him: Aclark. Issues of parenting seemed to be weighing heavily on the radioman, as David knew already that Brown was newly married with a kid on the way. Strong wasn’t sure yet which event had come first: the marriage or the pregnancy. Brown continued from one subject to the next, not waiting for his sergeant to offer either questions or comment. I hope he can be more concise on the radio, Strong thought as he worked to extract himself from this conversation and drop back again to his last patrol member, the hulking, shave-headed team medic, Master Corporal Roy.

  Felix Roy was a quiet giant. He’d spoken the least of any of them in the few hectic days they’d been together. The master corporal was a Québécois, that David had gleaned from the thick French-Canadian accent that seasoned Roy’s few words. The bigger man responded to Strong’s queries with mostly monosyllabic grunts as they skied one behind the other, but David learned that his team’s medic was married to his high school sweetheart, that they had four children together, David had nearly choked at this revelation, and that he had done his previous service, unhappily, with the Canadian Airborne Regiment.

  Despite the big man’s thriftiness with words, David felt the most drawn to Roy among the three members of his patrol. The hulking, almost brooding quiet wasn’t unfriendliness. Rather, the man was calm, self-assured, patient, highly competent, and obviously very happy with his home life. The sergeant left the conversation feeling comforted and surprisingly envious. He’d have to endeavor to turn that envy into respect. Instinctively David ended the conversation and skied to the front of the file to take point from Tenny.

  David had always pushed himself harder than anyone else, seeking greater challenges after each new accomplishment. He hungered for acclaim. Maybe his parents, good people though they were, had failed through apathy or absent-mindedness to praise him growing up, or maybe it was just innate. Strong only knew that he lived for the accolades he earned in each new job, endorsements became all the more satisfying as his accomplishments became more impressive. This addiction to approval drove him ever onward. Trying out for JTF 2 had followed a very successful tour leading a reconnaissance section of the 3rd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry out west in Calgary. He’d finished at the top of the grueling selection course to earn this new role in his country’s most elite unit. Now his job was to pull himself and the three other members of his patrol together into a cohesive team. He skied harder.

  They continued through the forest, eschewing the frequent fire breaks and dirt roads that crisscrossed the woods. As the sun rose higher in the southeastern sky the temperature crept above the freezing point. The snow began to stick to their skis, making their progress under eighty pounds of equipment punishing.

  Kilometers passed, and the only sound in Sergeant Strong’s ears was the gently rhythmic swish-swish of his skis. David looked over his shoulder as the patrol approached their first navigation checkpoint. Tenny and Brown both had grimaces on their sweaty faces, apparently unhappy with the pace set by their leader. Roy’s face, further back, was impassive, harder to read. Behind him, the Brits’ file was starting to stretch out some. Not so used to skiing, eh? thought David. He was sweating as well, around his belt and under his webbing, but he knew that he could march any of them into the ground.

  They reached the navigation point and a hand signal sent the patrol silently gliding into a cigar-shaped perimeter where they unclipped their skis and knelt. As the men took turns taking pulls of water from their green plastic canteens, Strong met the SAS patrol leader, Edwards, at the center of the formation. The Brit’s face was streaked with sweat and he too looked less than pleased. He confirmed the impression with his first words: “Mate, you’re the expert in this sort o’ thing, but all this sweat can be a problem, as cold as it is out ’ere, can’t it?”

  “Cold?” answered the Canadian with a smile. “It’s not even below freezing today. We’ll do this again in a couple months and it’ll be thirty below.”

  “All the same,” came Edwards’ measured response, “this ain’t selection any more, chum. For us, or for your blokes either. You need to watch your pace so you’ve got some juice left for the show. You can dehydrate in the cold, too, you know.”

  David knew the Brit was right. It took quite a bit of self-assurance for someone as competitive as Edwards to recommend a slower pace. But he has years of experience in the world’s most renowned special forces community, thought David. He’s got nothing to prove to us. If Strong was going to hone the sort of team that would confirm to his superiors, and more importantly to himself, that he was every bit as worthy to be in the same class as men like Edwards, then he needed to set the tone early and keep the pressure on. Of course, he admitted to himself, working the men into a heavy sweat on the opening leg of a long cold weather march would be a major mistake on a real mission.

  “I take your meaning,” David answered with a curt nod that ended with him looking down. “Brown will take point for the next leg. We don’t need to change undershirts until we stop for a longer period. I’ll check in with November Zero One,” that was the exercise control center’s radio call sign, “and we can be moving again in five minutes, eh?”

  Edwards nodded and both leaders moved back to their teams. Brown made contact with the headquarters via the radio in his ruck, relaying the patrol’s position and status. While Brown was speaking quietly into his handset, David pulled out his map and re-checked their position on the route. They had traveled about a third of the distance, making better time than they’d planned. David hated making mistakes and berated himself silently for pushing too fast.

  Brown led the team along a lake full of dark water not yet frozen over. The patrol paused to again reverse their camouflage pattern to better blend in with the rocks and low vegetation near the shore. Over the next several hours, each member of the patrol, Canadian and British, took their turn at point, navigating the group through woods and around clearings and icy ponds. The combined British-Canadian team ended their march, skiing out of the forest and hand-railing a dirt road into one of CFB Petawawa’s firing ranges.

  Members of what would become the JTF 2 headquarters troop were standing by at the firing lanes with a diverse array of weapons laid out on sandbags, ready for use. Strong and Edwards had arranged during their planning session for the firearms to be pre-positioned here. They were mostly of Soviet origin and included various models of the AK rifle, RPK light and PKM general purpose machineguns, and even a heavy tripod-mounted DShK machinegun, called a dushka by westerners.

  The patrol “went admin” as they entered the range area, dispensing with the tactical patrolling techniques they had been practicing up to this point. They skied up to an open-sided shed at the rear of the range and cached their rucksacks, skis
and weapons in two neat rows, massaging their shoulder where the straps had been cutting in for the past several hours. Their legs wouldn’t get a rest for a while yet.

  The two leaders gathered their men around and explained the exercise. It was a simple weapons familiarization, made more difficult by their fatigue. The men would pair off, one Brit with one Canadian, and cycle through each station, disassembling, reassembling, and then engaging targets with the various weapons. The men went back to their rucks, changed their sweaty undershirts and added layers against the cold, then paired off and fanned out towards the firing line.

  An olive drab painted VW Iltis jeep crunched up the gravel access road towards the firing lanes. Another player in this tactical exercise was not expected. Strong could see the lanky frame of the JTF 2 sergeant major in the driver’s seat. Next to him was his counterpart, the sergeant major of the visiting SAS troop. Excellent, thought David, a chance to show the leadership how well we’ve prepared. The Iltis came to a halt near the shed and the two senior warrant officers swung themselves out of the doorless vehicle. Smiling and apparently joking with each other, they walked towards Strong and Edwards.

  Sergeant Strong greeted his superiors, excited for the opportunity to show off his team, then turned and waved towards Brown and one of the SAS troopers. The two men were walking up to the big DShK, its bulbous flash suppressor capping the end of a meter-long barrel. Each man was trained with the weapon in front of him, but weapons familiarization was a highly perishable skill, particularly on a rarely seen heavy firearm like this one. Strong followed the two men over to the firing position, the other leaders in tow.

  Brown dove right into his task, removing the machinegun from its tripod with his SAS companion’s help and field stripping the weapon until its parts were all laid out on a poncho to one side of the firing post. David was gratified by Brown’s performance, but he winced as the younger man progressed through the reassembly process. Strong saw him forget to re-insert a key pin as he fed the gas return back into the receiver. The British soldier, kneeling next to Brown, caught the mistake and pointed it out. The Canadian swore, embarrassed, and pulled the return back out, replaced the pin, then reinserted the tube.