ARMAGEDDON'S SONG (Volume 3) 'Fight Through' (31 page)

The deputy commander directed the driver of his
vehicle to head for the nearest roadblock, after that he would look at the map
for the best way through the forest. An easily navigable route would cut time
off the journey from one side to the other, and would serve to avoid crossing
the commander’s path. 

Gansu Province: China.

Those men engaged in the preparation of the Cadre’s
‘accommodation’ were stripped down to just their arctic white smocks, which
were providing only camouflage, not warmth, in the sub-zero temperature.
Despite the freezing air the men were warm from tunnelling into the snow, and
had removed upper layers of clothing to prevent sweat forming.

Richard worked along with them, preparing the location
for an indefinite stay, or at least until all the pieces were in
place,
and the attack could go ahead. The major knew nothing
of the other elements involved, and had he been asked about Operation
Equalizer
or Operation
Guillotine
he would have shrugged his shoulders and asked in all
truthfulness what they were. He wasn’t a fool though and knew that in all
probability there had to be at least one other operation working toward
achieving the mission’s ultimate aim. Logic dictated that there had to be an
operation running to take out the PRCs other means of waging intercontinental
nuclear war, that of the submarine threat. He had spent many hours aboard
submarines during his career, but always as a passenger enroute to or from some
covert operation or other, he had no idea how they would go about finding
China’s vessels in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Driving submarines was a
complete mystery to him, and yet some people were remarkably good at it, as
testified by the blinking ‘message’ light he had just noticed on his
communicator. 

When Richard had been a boy of four his parents had
bought him a Scotty, a Highland Terrier that Richard had named Jack. There
hadn’t been anything particularly outstanding about the animal but it had been
his first dog and therefore memorable to Richard alone. The message, once
decompressed and decrypted comprised of a single word, the name of Richards
very first pet. He was a little taken aback at having received the Go word so
soon; it was after all just a few hours since the bulk of the force had
departed for the extraction point. A few men rolled their eyes skywards, having
come near to completing their snow holes only to be informed that they were now
to ‘paste up, patch up and piss off’, but no one complained aloud. The
entrenching tools were packed away and warm clothing was once more pulled on,

The batteries in the RERs and laser designators were
almost brand new but Richard had them changed anyway, before he led the Cadre
out, back along the ridge and abseiling down to the canyon floor at the
avalanche site. There was nothing left to indicate that troops had been there,
except of course the small holes in the rock wall where the pitons had been
driven in. Once the snow thawed it would doubtless uncover the bodies of the
two dead men, the smashed equipment and abandoned kit, but for now the still
falling snow was covering over all signs that men had passed this way.

The Cadre crossed the canyon and scaled the face on
the opposite side without a single appearance by PRC helicopter patrols.
Richard wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth, if the PRC aircrew felt
the weather was unsafe to fly in then that suited him just fine. He knew that
the enemy now was time, getting clear of the area before the manhunt began in
the wake of the, hopefully, successful attacks on the silos. Once they had
cleared this particular ridge and the valley beyond then their chances of
successful evasion were greatly increased. With luck Garfield’s men and the
Mountain Troop contingent would already have gotten the injured men across this
ridge and down to the valley floor. Richard was not about to break a radio
silence maintained since setting foot in China, they would find out how well
Garfield had done when they caught up with them. He wanted to be on the valley
floor before midnight and across it before the dawn, which would mean some
gruelling cross-country skiing. Passing the word that there would be no rest
stops tonight; Richard led the men past the site where they had weathered the
blizzard, and onwards toward the valley.  

Germany.

Commanding 3
^rd
Shock Army’s point Division was a fifty two year old
Romanian from Piatra Neamt, in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. He
had been a Lt Col commanding an artillery battalion during the last years under
Ceausescu and had never envisaged reaching Staff rank; all those places had
been earmarked years in advance for officers from Romania’s communist elite.
With the fall of the tyrant however, the new government deemed him too lowly in
rank to be tainted by association, and yet capable enough to handle the
responsibility of a sudden elevation in rank, in order to help fill the vacuum
created by the former general staff’s sudden retirement.

The division he led today was a different creature to
the one he had brought over to the communist cause during the coup that had
preceded this war; over a third of the original number had become casualties to
NATO’s fierce defence by the time his division had reached the Spee. Originally
the division had consisted of a reconnaissance regiment, a tank regiment and
three MRRs, motor rifle regiments, each made up of three battalions; a rotary
wing aviation battalion, an artillery regiment consisting of a heavy, a medium
and air defence battalions, plus the usual engineering and logistic support
units. All had been native Romanians, and a full two thirds had at least two
years recent service under their belts.  NATO had almost annihilated his
reconnaissance regiment and all that had remained were two companies worth of
men and vehicles, which had lately been reinforced and brought up to the size
of a superannuated battalion. Shortly after reaching the Spee the division had
been taken out of the line and sent to the rear to reconstitute, his three
battered motor rifle regiments had amalgamated to become two, and the tank
regiment now numbered two battalions instead of three. The arrival of a Czech
and a Bulgarian MRR to bolster the division’s ranks had been a mixed blessing
because it caused distinct communications problems, but they were already
blooded and were therefore preferable to units consisting of green conscripts. 
Cold bloodedly, the division commander had assigned the Bulgarian’s the duty of
walking point where NATO could dull its edge, and once the newcomers had become
combat ineffective as a unit it would be broken up and absorbed by his
Romanians whilst the Czechs took up point position and remained there until a
similar fate befell them. It did not occur to him that the commander of 3
^rd
Army had been thinking along exactly the same lines when he written his own
orders, using the Romanian division as the expendable tip of a mainly Russian
spear.

At a midnight O Group the division commander had
deployed his Romanian MRRs, the 111
^th
and 112
^th
, on the left and right rear of the Czechs, who were
to follow directly behind the Bulgarians. His tank regiment, the 93
^rd
,
was to follow on behind and in this fashion the tanks would be in position to
exploit any breaches that might appear, passing through the lead units to
either widen the breach or to punch deep into the enemy’s rear. The division’s
axis of advance took them straight at a linear feature that lay like a natural
barrier to the all-important Autobahns to the English Channel. According to his
maps this feature was called Vormundberg, and according to intelligence it was
occupied by a ragtag unit of British and Americans with a forward screen of
French and British light troops, which he had described to his officers at the
final O Group as, ‘hardly something to lose any sleep over’. It was therefore
with a degree of optimism that the O Group had broken up and his officers had
returned to their units to deliver their own orders. A large bite had been
taken out of that optimism a few hours later, just as the division was about to
jump off. NATO launched massed air raids on the Soviet armour west of the Elbe
and for reasons unbeknownst to the division commander their own air cover had
been conspicuously absent. As a result, all of the divisions units had taken
casualties but the Bulgarians, being at the forward edge, had been hit
particularly hard and had taken 70% casualties, including their regimental
headquarters. Under threat of arrest from his own superior the divisional
commander had been forced to abandon the casualties, policing up the remainder
and revising his plans so that the Czech regiment lead the way.

After the first forty minutes of an unchallenged
advance he had felt some of the earlier optimism restore itself. At the top of
a rise he had dismounted from his command vehicle to look back along the way
they had come and was moved by the awesome spectacle that met his gaze. His
unit may have been under strength but it was still impressive for all that, and
beyond his divisions vehicles he could see those of other units, but as moving
dots against the landscape. Surely NATO had nothing left with which to deny them
their march to the coast? But five minutes later Milan missiles and expertly
called in air strikes had begun exploding his precious reconnaissance vehicles.

Reports from the roving troublemakers of 2REP,
2e Regiment Etranger de Parachutiste’s
Anti-Tank Platoon, and the Anti-Tank Guided Weapons
Troop of 40 Commando RM, had charted the progress of Third Shock Army’s lead
elements as they advanced westwards away from the Elbe. The French Foreign
Legion paratroopers and the Royal Marine Commandos had used every opportunity
to inflict harm and delay upon the enemy. Wire guided anti-tank rounds and air
strikes called in by the NATO troops shredded the reconnaissance screen that
preceded the armoured units, forcing the enemy to deploy forward other fighting
vehicles to plug the gaps in the screen. The larger fighting vehicles were no
substitute for the smaller, quieter and more agile specialist reconnaissance
vehicles and were easy prey to the Milans of the French and British. Battle
tanks costing millions of roubles were left burning in the fields and roads,
falling victim to soft skinned vehicles that cost mere thousands. To counter
this, the Soviet’s called in helicopter gunships to ride shotgun and range
ahead of the tanks, and where they caught the NATO troops in the open the
helicopters 23mm cannons tore up both the un-armoured vehicles and crewmen
alike. The next air battle began as a direct result, with the marines and
paratroopers calling for CAPs to deal with the threat from the air and the
Soviet rotary wing crews quickly doing likewise once air-to-air missiles began
thinning them out.

Arndeker was listening to events taking place overhead
but not getting involved in the dogfights. He was at 150 ft. and banking to the
left to follow the contours of a hill whilst keeping an eye out for a chimney
stack on the horizon. The chimney was a visual marker, once seen he would steer
a few degrees to the right of it until he reached a disused and weed choked
canal which he could follow, making use of the man-made defile’s cut for it
through the low hills. It would bring himself and the four F-16s with him down
the right flank of the enemy armoured thrust heading for the autobahn. The
mission called for them to RV with two flights of three Swedish Gripen’s and following
hot on the heels of a Wild Weasel sortie by French Armee de l’air Jaguar,
Mirage F-1 and 2000Ds, they were to make as many sweeps of the armoured
formations as Arndeker felt were advisable. Right now he felt a suitably safe
and appropriate number was probably zero, but he wasn’t able to say what he
felt, i.e., “I’m tired of this game and I don’t want to play anymore,” because
he was the squadron commander, an officer in the armed forces of his country
and the one who set the example for his subordinates to follow. It just wasn’t
acceptable to announce that he vomited at the thought of going into combat
again, that his nerve was close to being shot, or that it took five fingers of
vodka just to get him off to sleep at night. It wasn’t acceptable in the eyes
of his peers and it wasn’t acceptable in his own either. Lieutenant Colonel
Patrick Arndeker, USAF, loving husband and proud father of two was racing
toward burn out and he couldn’t see it, he couldn’t see it because to open his
eyes to that possibility was not acceptable either.

This sortie was a maximum effort by his squadron, with
all available airframes taking part, and Lt Col Arndeker who had decided to
rest his pilots where possible between sorties had no option but to comply. The
first mission of the day, intercepting the inbound strike against 4 Corps, had
cost the squadron his wingman, and whilst he had been at the emergency field
his Exec had led the remainder against a second strike. His Exec had not
returned from that one, which left his squadron with exactly five operational
airframes left out of the fifteen there had been at the outbreak of the war.

Quite apart from the slowed reactions induced by
fatigue, Arndeker had witnessed for himself of late a phenomenon that he had
read of in pilots during the First and Second World Wars, that of a
recklessness in some of his pilots, as if they were resigned to an untimely end
and therefore did little to avoid it, such as flying straight and level through
ground fire when they should have been jinking to throw off the gunners aim.