Three Kings (Kirov Series) (31 page)

Hitler nodded. “Very well,” he
said. “But move those units to North Africa as soon as possible. Move
Grossdeutschland to Italy, no matter what your war games tell you about Turkey.
Cut the orders today.”

It was one of those impulsive
decisions that Hitler was noted for over the course of the war. He never
concerned himself with logistics, except in the grandest scheme of things as he
set his mind on getting control of oil and resources. How his armies would
actually extract and use those resources was not his concern.

Keitel might explain the
difficulties of supplying troops in the desert, the limits of daily tonnage
they might get through the few good ports they had at Tripoli and Benghazi, but
Hitler did not wish to hear any of that. He simply wanted divisions moved
about, and what the Führer wanted, he almost always got. In this case, however,
Hitler’s impulsive order to reinforce Rommel was to prove very timely, for the
Western Desert was about to have visitors, with weapons and capabilities the
Führer could only dream about now.

The Italians had been both right
and wrong with their report from Giarabub. There was a small detachment from
the 7th Royal Horse Artillery that had just arrived at
Siwa
,
the artillery that had been requested by Colonel Fergusson for his attack on
Giarabub. He had also requested tanks, but what he would actually get was
beyond his wildest imagining. Something was blowing in from the heart of the
sandstorm that had bedeviled the area the last 24 hours. Something wholly
unexpected even now slipping through a crack in this broken world to arrive at
this fateful hour in the lonesome, wild deserts of a forsaken land.

The instant Troyak saw that odd
glow in the sky his instincts for battle served him well. “Marines! Battle
order!” He shouted, and his men reacted with the same ardor, weapons in hand,
with troops fanning out in a wide perimeter forward of the KA-40. One man was
setting up an 82mm mortar to the rear, another lowering the auto grenade
launcher to its tripod mount. Still others had taken up positions behind any
cover they could find, with riflemen darting behind some large rocks while
other men with the RPG-30s looked for a depression where they could get a good
field of fire on anything advancing on their position.

Popski stood there for a brief
moment, eyes puckered, hearing a strange growl coming from the south, out of
the heart of the high plateau they were on. There was a sudden, foreboding
wind, blowing opposite the direction of the storm, and it gave him a shiver, a
cold wind that raised his hackles, as though he were standing at the edge of
infinity and about to slip over.

Who could be up here, he
wondered? Could the Italians have patrols this far out? Now he clearly heard
the sound of advancing vehicles, but they did not sound like anything he had
heard before. They were certainly not those jeeps from the Long Range Desert
Patrol he had talked about, and the Aussie Cavalry unit had forsaken its light
tanks and reorganized in trucks for this deployment.

There was a heavy growl to the engine
sound, deep and menacing. Might this be the armor that Fergusson and his Aussie
detachment had requested? Perhaps the Desert Rats had managed to get a
battalion of tanks fit for duty, but how would they get them here so soon? They
would have had to go by rail out past the rocky hill country beyond Al
Fayum
and
Birkat
Karun. From
there they could have taken the long desert road through
Aweina
and
Zabu
. He had scouted it himself on his last trip
out to
Siwa
, but why would they climb up here? The
oasis country was well south and west, in the low depression. Were they lost?

Yet there was no mistaking the
sound now. The telltale rattle of tank tracks could be heard above the low
growl, and he could see dark shapes emerging from the chilling wind. Something
big was out there, something with power behind it, and now instinct compelled
him to move, joining the Russian Marines in a desperate search for any cover he
could find.

Chapter 26

In
the year 2020, with the
energy crisis deepening after renewed fighting in the Ukraine had severed
natural gas pipelines feeding a hungry Europe, oil prospecting efforts reached
a fever pitch. All the world’s great fields had already edged over the top of
the oil peak depletion curve and now were in steady decline. The United States
had been blasting and squeezing shale oil and gas from the Green River and
Bakken shales in the US, but the oil was deep underground, embedded in the rock
and difficult and expensive to extract. Aside from the new superfield at
Kashagan in the Caspian Basin, there had been little in the way of good old
fashioned light sweet crude found for many decades…. until the year 2020.

An oil man on a safari road trip
from
Mersa
Matruh
to
Siwa
had stopped and wandered off the desert road in an
isolated area at the southern tip of the dreadful Qattara Depression, and he
saw something in the rocks there that prompted him to return with a survey team
to take another look. British Petroleum soon followed up on his survey by
quietly negotiating further exploration rights in the region, promising a cash
starved Egypt a substantial royalty on any significant finds. The discovery
that would be known as the “Great Sultan of the Desert” would rock the oil
world when BP finally announced that they had used new deep lateral drilling
techniques to locate a massive field of both oil and gas, with reserves
expected to exceed 70 billion barrels, the size and scale of Saudi Arabia’s
renowned Ghawar field, now fitfully soaked by water infusion to force out its
remaining oil, and in rapid depletion.

The new BP concern promised a
much needed boon to energy reserves for the West, and a reinvigoration of the
tired Old Man of the Middle East, Egypt. The initial development phase,
designated Sultan-A, or Sultan Apache, proved very promising. Yet once again,
the oil and gas the developed West so desperately needed, was lost in the
heartland of a desolate and forbidding desert, and a land populated by
resentful Arabic cultures that had been radicalized over many years of
dissention and conflict. Situated half way between the Oasis of
Siwa
and the smaller
Qara
Oasis
to the northwest, high atop a prominent rocky outcrop, the oil engineers of
British Petroleum staked out their claim and began intensive development. Soon
there was a thriving encampment in the midst of nowhere, with barracks and
facilities to support several hundred oil workers, engineers and some of their
families.

When Berber militias near
Siwa
became a problem for Egypt, the Egyptian Army deployed
a mechanized force to the area, but the tactic soon backfired. With the central
government weak, and power falling to the Army, the forces sent to
Siwa
simply joined the rebel forces, compounding their
mischief now that they had heavy AFVs and tanks. The BP oil men watched nervously
from behind the miles of chain link fences surrounding the site, topped with
barbed wire, but it was a thin defense.

Then, in October of 2020, the
renegade force launched a daring raid on the site. It resulted in the massacre
of over fifty oil workers, with many more taken as hostages, and the wanton
destruction of valuable drilling rigs and other equipment. Great Britain
appealed to the Egyptians to intervene with troops loyal to the government, but
the on again off again ‘revolution’ in Egypt saw the current central authority
collapse as it had done so many times before.

It was then that Great Britain
decided to take matters into its own hands, in true American fashion, and
dispatched its formidable 7th Armored Brigade to Egypt to secure the Sultan Apache
oil concern and protect the lives of British citizens and property of the
Crown.

No strangers to the desert, the
Brigade still bore the insignia that had become world famous under the banner
of the British 7th Armored Division. The unit had fought in the bitter
conflicts in Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan, all other operations aimed at
securing the safety of oil reserves, and was well experienced in the art and
trial of desert warfare. After military reforms it had lightened up
considerably in its force structure, becoming largely a motorized infantry
brigade when serving in Afghanistan. While there it patrolled in light armored
trucks like the Mastiff, Wolfhound and Husky, but for this deployment the
British Army wisely decided to return the unit to its former glory as a fully
armored force.

There had been much debate and
budget wrangling over how to equip a new mechanized force for the Army 2020
program. Many vehicles had been tested and considered, Germany’s Boxer, The
Swiss built Piranha V, and finally the French VCBI Armored Infantry Combat
Vehicle, which eventually was purchased by the British until they could come up
with something better. It could serve well as an infantry AFV with a modular
“DRAGAR” turret, mounting a 25mm NATO autocannon and a coaxial 7.62mm
machinegun. An eight wheeled vehicle, the VCBI had decent armor for its class
at 14.5mm, a speed of 100KPH and a range of 750 kilometers. It was perfect for
a fast scouting role.

The British renamed it the
“Dragon” after its turret design, and purchased enough to outfit a squadron of
the 12th Royal Lancers as a
Recce
unit. Two older
infantry units that had served in the 7th Brigade in the past were recalled,
the 3rd Mercian Battalion and the Highlanders Battalion. They were both still
using the well tried upgraded Desert Warrior IFV, a tracked vehicle that was
designed to keep up with the best British tanks at 75KPH. These units had been
upgraded to the new 40mm main gun, and had a little more secondary armament
with two 7.62mm guns, one a chain gun, and the other a standard MG. Some were
fitted with the deadly American made TOW anti-tank missile for added defense
against enemy tanks.

The real power of the brigade was
in the tank battalion sent to deal with the armor in the renegade Egyptian
unit. The Royal Scotts Dragoon Guards were called, fielding 45 of the superb
Challenger 2 main battle tanks. The unit had been slated to be gelded and down
scaled to a light cavalry force in the Army 2020 plan, but this had not yet
happened, and thankfully so. Britain needed some muscle now, and the Dragoons
were still there to provide it.

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…