ARMAGEDDON'S SONG (Volume 3) 'Fight Through' (27 page)

Back in the park the neat rows of tents had been
reduced to torn bundles of canvas, many of which were burning fiercely. A
mortar man working in the dark had in error selected a WP, white phosphorus
smoke round, which had burst in the centre of the camp, landing amongst the
jerry cans of petrol and kerosene the cooks used to fuel the field ovens.
Burning particles of white phosphorus and burning fuel had splashed outwards to
set alight not only tentage, but also soldiers who had been using the tents as
cover from view. The sight of human torches in their target area had made even
the tough professionals of the Belgian airborne pause, easing their fingers off
triggers for a moment, but then the snipers ceased looking for leaders and
began shooting the burning men, and the remainder resumed the job they were
paid for.

3
^rd
Lanciers normally provided the brigades dedicated
anti-tank support, but today they had unshipped four of the Milan’s from their
jeeps and left the remainder along with the jeeps, back in England. One pair of
the Milan’s was sited to cover the autobahn approaches to the bridge, whilst
the other two covered the flanks of the mortar line. Fighting as infantry the
remainder of 3
^rd
Lanciers provided the protection for the combined
mortar line from the 1
^st
and 3
^rd
Parachute Battalions and a tactical reserve for the
brigade commander whilst the two parachute battalions advanced north into the
town. 

Blocked at the second railway bridge the jeep company
commander watched with a sense of frustration as mortar rounds exploded on the
railway embankment, on the street behind the bridge and on buildings next to
it, in fact the rounds were landing everywhere but on the intended target, the
western end of the bridge where the ZSU had been.

The Belgian’s, like all the other NATO airborne forces
behind the lines this day had only the ammunition stocks they had jumped in
with. They were wasting mortar rounds and the commander called an end to the
fire mission and concentrated on finding another solution. The jeep company had
started with four Milan equipped vehicles, of which one was at the first
railway bridge and a second was lying on its back at the foot of the
embankment. He had one of his remaining Milan vehicles on standby, and sent two
more of his snipers to the three storied corner house at the end of the side
street they had taken cover in. Forcing the street door open the pair made
their way to the top floor but they were unable to find a window that allowed
them to see the far side of the bridge. They were in the process of dragging a
sideboard onto the landing below the attic hatch when the house’s lawful owner
appeared at the top of the stairs. The sight of the elderly housefrau made the
paratroopers pause in what they were doing.

Clad in a floor length nightgown and wearing a yellow
builders hard hat for protection, she was carrying a tray upon which rested a
silver coffee pot and her best china cups and saucers, with slices of cake on a
matching plate.

“Kaffee, junges?”

Several minutes later the commander entered the attic
where his men had removed roof tiles. A sniper had to swallow a mouthful of
chocolate cake before reporting that they could now see the ZSU and it was
still at the end of the bridge. Returning to the street he dispatched the
waiting Milan equipped vehicle with another jeep for support. Driving out of
the side street they turned into the road running parallel with the embankment
and floored the accelerators. Bursts of small arms followed the vehicles, fired
by the sentries on the bridge, but the ZSU was too far from the parapet to
engage.

Three hundred yards along the street, the jeeps halted
in front of a haberdashery store and dismounted the Milan launcher. Ignoring
the solid looking shop door they followed a litterbin through the store window
and made their way to the rear. No damage was required to exit through the
rear; a key was sat in the back door lock and after drawing the door’s bolts
they clambered over a wall at the back of the yard to find themselves on the
embankment.

The snipers confirmed by radio that the ZSUs barrels
were still pointing unerringly along the track and the Milan crew stayed out of
sight below the stone parapet.

At a range of only 200m from the bridge the helmeted
heads of the two sentries filled the snipers telescopic sights whenever they
popped up for a peek over the parapet. Unwisely both enemy soldiers chose to
take a look at the same time and both snipers fired as one before turning their
attention to the tracked flak vehicle.
Distracting the ZSUs
crew proved to be a simple matter, though not without certain hazards.
It took ten rounds fired at two second intervals to get the attention of the
ZSUs commander.  Irritated at the rounds ricocheting off the turret he
looked through the viewing blocks until he saw the muzzle flash of the weapon
which was no threat to his vehicle or its occupants, but the regularly spaced
rounds smacking off the 3” thick armour would seriously get on their nerves if
it continued.

The Belgians saw the turret begin to swivel in their
direction and knew it was time to go. Unfortunately, having scrambled over the
roof ties to the narrow attic hatch they found it was impossible to negotiate
as quickly as might be desired. The leading man was still squeezing himself
through when the first 23mm rounds struck the far edge of the roof, and then
began to move towards them as the ZSU continued to traverse. Stranded until his
mate could get clear, the second sniper took one look over his shoulder at the
stream of cannon shells that were demolishing the roof and stepped off the
joist he was balanced upon, crashing through the plaster ceiling into the room
below.

Having effectively blown apart the roof the ZSUs
gunner started on the top floor, lowering the barrels and reversing the
turret’s traverse. Now clear of the attic the first sniper took the stairs five
at a time whilst his mate, liberally covered in plaster dust and lagging behind
on the landing, dived headfirst over the banister rail as the first baseball
sized holes appeared in the walls.

With all their attention on the task in hand neither
the vehicles commander nor the gunner saw the Belgian Milan crew rolling off
the top of the parapet to land beside the track. The ZSUs driver on the other
hand could see them clearly in his lo-lite screen and shouted a warning over
the intercom as he put the vehicle into reverse.

It was a hundred metres to the railway station and a further
hundred before the stations raised platforms gave way to the marshalling yards,
and until it reached them the ZSU was hemmed in on both
sides.   

The jeep’s driver passed the launcher and three rounds
across the parapet to its crew and then ducked when the ZSU opened fire. Seeing
his first burst miss the gunner shouted at the driver to stop, his weapon was
not self-stabilising and the uneven surface was throwing off his aim, but the
driver could see the paratroopers attaching a round to the side of the launcher
and was in a funk. They clearly weren’t going to make it and he forgot about
what he should have been doing, focusing instead on the threat along the
railway line. With a screech of tortured metal the ZSU veered off its straight
line, hitting the edge of a concrete passenger platform and with a shudder its
engine stalled. The driver threw open his hatch and was halfway out when the
wire guided missile passed beside his head and struck the vehicle’s turret ring.

The leading company of the 3
^rd
Battalion met little resistance when it reached the park. They found thoroughly
demoralised Soviet soldiers hiding behind trees and anything that could provide
cover. Those that had weapons tossed them away and knelt with hands clasped
behind their necks when called on to do so.

Dawn was beginning to break as the last man from 3
^rd
Battalion crossed the only remaining bridge across the Spee for twenty miles,
but ten minutes later it too had been dropped into the polluted water.

The brigade commander used the light from the flames
of the last of the Soviet anti-aircraft vehicles to be hunted down to study his
map before ordering his force at the airbase to pull out and head for their
next objective.

2
^nd
Commando Battalion had suffered far heavier than the
rest of the brigade’s dozen dead and wounded, but they had been faced with
regular troops in prepared positions that had to be attacked across open
ground.

The commando battalion had captured the airbase motor
pool intact and had sufficient transport to carry the troops, the wounded and
pull the brigade’s 105mm guns. From where he was standing the brigade commander
could see a glow across the rooftops to the north from the fires at the airbase
tank farm. All that remained to be done at Cottbus was to destroy the stored
munitions, much of which had been moved from the bomb dumps and placed in
stacks on the runways where they would be detonated once the troops were clear.

An aide intercepted the town folk who were making a
beeline for his commander, armed with a bottle of Schnapps and wanting to greet
the town’s liberators. The commander felt a sickness settle in his stomach. His
brigade was mounting captured and commandeered vehicles in preparation to pull
out, and he wondered what revenge would be exacted on the town when the Red
Army reoccupied it.

Two explosions to the south jolted him from his gloomy
thoughts and he turned to his radio operator. The signaller finished
acknowledging a message and reported that a pair of BMP-2 fighting vehicles had
appeared on the eastern side of the autobahn. The Lanciers Milan’s had engaged
both but only succeeded in destroying one of them. 

It was time to go.

CHAPTER 5

Russia: Same time.

Following Svetlana and Caroline’s visit to the Russian
girls contact, the routine at the farmhouse had sunk back into more or less the
same monotonous routine as previously.

Svetlana no longer had to listen to the radios
constant programming of folk and classical music from dawn to dusk. From 1900
to 2100 were the times she now draped herself in an armchair next to the old
couples’ radio set, the rest of the time she and the Americans helped out
around the farm.

The previous afternoon Patricia had left once more to
perform maintenance on the Nighthawk; it left the pilot and the spy to help the
farmer and his wife until the evening.

At 8pm Svetlana had listened to the hourly news
report, hearing how the courageous Red Army had forced the Elbe and Saale
rivers and NATO was in full retreat, which to her reckoning made it the seventh
time in the past two weeks. Even the wording of the item was identical to that
of the previous bulletins.

After the news the music programme had resumed with
Wait
For
Your Soldier
, sung by a well-known baritone and Svetlana had sat
upright. After all the previous so-called good news reports, the audiences had
been treated to stirring performances by the Red Army Chorus singing the likes
of
The Brave Don Cossacks
. The piece tonight had been followed by
Ochi Chornye
,
Dark Eyes, but the romantic gypsy melody had stopped after twelve seconds with
an announcer apologising for technical difficulties before it had restarted.

Caroline, sketching the Russian girl once again had
noticed the body language change and paused in what she was doing.

The same baritone who had performed the song,
informing already faithful and patriotic womanhood that their men would return
and to keep faith in inevitable victory had then sung
Dubinushka
.
The sequence of the first two songs, with the
technical difficulties
had
been the signal from Elena Torneski that the Premier’s present location
followed. Torneski had allotted each of the secure locations the title of a
song and Svetlana opened a map, finding Saratov on the river Volga, and then
tracing a finger westwards to a river valley twenty-six miles from the town.

“Here’s your target Caroline.”

Major Nunro had looked at what was marked as a disused
mineshaft set in a re-entrant off a narrow river valley.

“Can you hit it?” Svetlana had asked.

“Oh we can hit it honey, we just got to get there
first.”

It was only a little under 400 miles as the crow
flies, but it meant an initial circular route to avoid overflying the Moscow
air defence zone, after which they would need to pick their way around four
fighter bases that lay on the way.

Leaving the Russian girl, she had set up the satellite
transmitter, sending the location to the US and informing them they could not
attack for at least eighteen hours, allowing for the time it would take to
return to the forest strip once Pat had returned.

Svetlana was no longer in the living room when she’d
returned. The water was being run upstairs so Caroline lifted a floorboard and
false section of pipe below it to bring out a laptop. The USB she had inserted
contained what had been the most up to date intelligence on AAA locations in
Russia at the time they had left Kinloss.
With
the machine powered up she’d begun the business of plotting a route.

Patricia had an uncomfortable journey, as usual,
concealed within their contact’s ancient van.  Patricia had been trying to
learn basic Russian and used a flashlight to read the children’s textbook she
had found in a box at the farm. It was one way to pass the time, repeating
parrot fashion such useful phrases as “
Ya
zhyvu
na
marskom
paberezh’e
”,
as if a KGB guard at a checkpoint could give a damn that she allegedly lived at
the seaside, though! Twenty miles from the forest the contact had stopped the
van and left the cab to stand beside it, looking for
all the
world like a man tending to the call of nature. Being inside the rattling
contraption she could hear little of the outside world so it came as a shock
when he spoke loud enough for her to hear, informing her that there were
helicopters in the area and about a mile off one was hovering, the light
reflecting off the lenses of a surveillance device it carried. No doubt the
crew were watching them as he spoke, his head carefully away so they could not
see him speaking.

“How long have they been watching us?” Pat had asked.

“Off and on for about forty
minutes.”
“
And you only tell me now?”

She hadn’t been able to see him shrug as he did up his
fly buttons.

“I didn’t need to pee until now. Their cameras are
very good; they would see I was just pretending if I stopped when I first saw
them.”

They had continued the journey and the helicopter,
apparently satisfied had vanished for the time being, no doubt checking on
other vehicles in the area.

At a small hamlet the driver had stopped the van and
left her there whilst he went to make discrete enquiries.

On his return the news had been nearly all bad,
deserters had taken over one of the more remote farms, remaining until the food
had run out before moving on, but not before killing the family that lived
there, to prevent them from sounding the alarm as soon as they were out of
sight. The bodies of the family
had been
found that morning, and the word around the hamlet was that they had been
related in some way to the regional military commander, who had drawn on
resources from surrounding regions and begun a manhunt. All properties were
being searched and roadblocks were up on all the roads, slowly extending out
from the scene. The only good news was that the helicopters were on loan to the
region for just today, and of course the contact knew of another route to the
forest, always providing it wasn’t too muddy for his van.

“How far is this commander extending his search, as
far as our farm?”

“Possibly, and possibly they will search the forest
also, it is an obvious place for deserters to hide but only now are there
enough militiamen available to do that.”

“How did you find out all of this?”

“The baker, his son-in-law is a militiaman, and they
both like people to know they are in the know.”

Lying in the darkness with the contact leaning against
the vehicle’s side, eating Tvarok and Chyorny Khlep, local cottage cheese and
black bread purchased from the talkative baker, Patricia was silent for a
moment as she weighed up the correct course of action to take.

“We have to go back, collect the others and get to the
forest.”

“Da.”
He wrapped the remains
of his snack in a tissue to be finished later, and fished out the vans keys.
Five minutes later they were heading back.

A thousand feet above the forest one of the
helicopters in question slowly quartered the area. In the observer’s monitor,
the heat sources showed up as lighter outlines. Birds, small animals, silka
deer and wild boar, all left their traces on the screen, but humans thus far
had been the only cause of excitement all day. It had landed in a clearing to
drop off five militiamen before taking to the air once more, ready to provide
fire support. It had proved an anti-climax to find two elderly men from a local
village cutting wood, and after collecting the militia the patrol had continued.

The presence of the helicopter was of great concern at
the airstrip. The Green Berets positions were all covered with heat sensor
defeating material, grey woven, man-made fabric that could be cut to size. Even
up close the strip looked disused, its surface fractured by the hardy bushes
and grasses growing through the cracks they had made, but the downwash of the
helicopters blades would literally blow away that deception, if it landed there
or even hovered a few feet above. 

The entire detachment had stood-to when the sound of
the aircraft had reached them, moving to the dug in positions circling the
strip, but it was almost an hour before anyone saw it. The detachment commander
had picked up the field telephone and received the report. The report had been
concise and accurate, identifying the threat as a single a Mi-8R Hip with
military markings. The detachment commander had questioned the observers
identification because of the similarities between the Mi-8, the ageing
workhorse of the rotary wing fleet, and the Mi-171 which was more heavily
armed, carried more armour and also a modern ECM suite, however the soldier
qualified his identification of it by stating the tail rotor was on the right
of the tail assembly not the left, and there was an absence of the bulbous
additional filters, a feature of the Mi-171, on the turbine intakes above and
slightly aft of the cockpit. The Mi-8R was a reconnaissance aircraft and as
such could only carry eighteen troops, six less than its troop carrier sibling,
but the Mi-171 could carry twenty-four also. Either way, if properly trained
and handled, those troops could tie down his men until reinforcements arrived.

The Green Berets could easily bring the machine down
but that would be letting the cat out of the bag and at the end of the day, if
the enemy discovered their presence then the mission was a failure. If Major
Nunro was not able to fly the F-117X out then the weapon would have to be
removed and the aircraft destroyed. What would then follow that course of
action would be the E&E from hell, and the detachment commander didn’t give
a lot for their chances of survival if that came about because the priority
would be to keep the weapon out of enemy hands, and that meant staying together
as a unit rather than scattering in pairs.

The American Special Forces troops watched the
helicopter, kept their FIM-92A Stingers close to hand, and settled down to a
long day.

The journey back had been a nightmare, thanks to a broken
hose that had been temporary fixed with a roll of duct tape, and a puncture and
further complicated by a frozen wheel nut, which had sheared off, consequently
it was gone midnight before the van had halted a quarter of a mile from the
farm. Patricia, stiff from the long confinement left the van and made her way
cautiously across country, her heart pounding in the expectation that the
militia had beaten them here and were just lying in wait for her return.

Like most aircrew Patricia had posed for a photo in
flight school, clad in flight gear with helmet under one arm and a Beretta 9M
featuring prominently in its shoulder holster, it was the warrior bit, but like
most aircrew she hadn’t spent a great deal of time at the range. The two
English police officers had made her and Caroline put several hundred rounds
down the range before taking them through CQB, close quarter battle scenario’s
to gain familiarity with the weapon, and therefore confidence. She wasn’t
bubbling over with confidence as she’d set off with a handgun supplied by the
contact, reminding herself to make use of shadow and remain still when the
clouds gave way to the moon, using the time to memorise the ground between her
present piece of cover and the next.

When cloud covered the moon once more she moved
cautiously forward with her Beretta held before her, straight-armed and the
weapon in a two handed grip. The bulbous, six-inch long
sound suppressor destroyed the balance and she had
been warned that both range and stopping power would be inhibited, so she had
to be close for it to be of any use. Where her eyes went the weapon followed
and after several hundred yards she was feeling a lot better about this, the
Lara Croft of the flight line, but then she swore under her breathe, calling herself
some very unflattering names as she knelt and cocked the weapon, wincing at the
noise it made before standing once more and continuing. Why the hell hadn’t she
thought to make the weapon ready whilst still inside the van?

The house, when it came into view, was in darkness and
she paused for a few minutes to listen, realising that ears were at least as
important a sense as the eyes at night, before moving around the house in a
circle. Once she reached the side of the house where the old ladies herb garden
lay she paused again, waiting for the moon to appear through a gap in the
scattered cloud covering in order to look at the well-tended and raked surface
for boot prints, there were none. Surely anyone surrounding and then searching
the place would have walked across it at some point, wouldn’t they? Off in the
direction of their nearest neighbour a dog barked, its sound carrying across in
the nights stillness, Patricia couldn’t remember hearing that before and peered
in the direction of the disturbed canine but the other farm wasn’t visible from
ground level.

Inside the dark house she paused inside the kitchen to
listen, but found that her heart rate was so high the coursing blood in her
veins was inhibiting her hearing and she had to wipe the sweat off her palms,
rubbing them against the material of her jeans whilst holding the Beretta one
handed, before fishing out a pen light.