ARMAGEDDON'S SONG (Volume 3) 'Fight Through' (46 page)

Pat paused in the entrance to the CP, looking back at
his Adjutant.

“Timothy, I just told you that until further notice
Major Popham is the ‘The Daddy’, but that does not make
you
my
Mother.”

The Warriors had not yet arrived and random mortar
rounds were landing over to the left so Pat ducked into the dugout cum briefing
room to wait, and there found the two snipers, Stef and Bill sharing a mug of
coffee.

“As you
were,
chaps.” Both
men had stood respectfully on recognising the CO, and now relaxed, sinking back
onto their haunches. Pat squinted as if trying to see through the side of their
metal mug, trying to discern the constituent parts that made up the hot
beverage within.

“I don’t suppose you have any sugar in there, do you?”

“If you want, I’ve got some artificial sweeteners
somewhere, Boss?”

Pat pulled a face.

“I thought you two had been told to report to 1
Company?”

“With respect sir, the ground back there can be
covered by a half blind clerk, the maximum range offered is only four hundred
metres.” He was looking for signs of anger or annoyance in his commanding
officer, but none were apparent. “We were loitering here and looking for a lift
on a battle taxi going forward, sir.”

The sound of Rolls Royce Perkins, V8
engines reached them, winding their way around from hide positions in the rear.

The snipers thought their last orders did not befit
their skills, and Pat was inclined to agree.

“Well you had better come along with me then.”

The Warriors halted outside where all three mounted
up, running to the vehicles in a half crouch as heavy artillery rounds moaned
their mournful way westwards, seeking NATO gun line’s.

Aboard ‘Sabre Dance Two Four’ the operators finished
their post-MLRS strike estimate and passed on two sets of figures, the
optimistic and the pessimistic, knowing the true figure lay somewhere between.

Elements of two divisions had been targeted, 9
^th
and 13
^th
Guards, both elite Russian units had been hit hard
even if the lower figure were held to be true. It would be of little immediate
assistance to the men and women blocking the juggernauts way to the autobahns
though, the Hungarian division had finished its deployment into column of
regiments and was moving now towards the units immediately in front, the Light
Infantry, Coldstream Guards, Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders and the Wessex
Regiment. All were British units of 3 (UK) Mechanised Brigade and the Guards
were already in contact, but within an hour and a half the entire defence line
from the Dutch 2
^nd
Armoured Brigade on the left flank to the US 4
^th
Armoured on the right were going to be fighting for their lives.

Down on the ground the anti-tank troop of the second
Royal Marine unit, 44 Commando, hadn’t waited for the Hungarians to begin their
advance. The marines ducked around the Romanians left flank, taking the fight
to the enemy and getting their punch in first. The sensors on Sabre Dance Two
Four picked up thermal signatures consistent with explosions of armoured
vehicles amid the Hungarian ranks.

The forward edge of the battle area was not the only
scene of activity on the operator’s screens, both the French 8
^th
Armoured and Canadian 2
^nd
Mechanised Brigades were now driving back towards the
Elbe, and where they found enemy support units they destroyed them. Both
brigades had detached small combat teams that headed west to provide a delaying
force for the Soviet armour that would inevitably turn on them. A French
company combat team had fallen on two batteries worth of Russian MSTA-S 152mm
Self-Propelled howitzers and their ammunitions carriers being refuelled beside
a road. The thick columns of black smoke and continuing secondary explosions
punctuated the urgency of radio transmissions from Soviet troops under attack.

The route taken by Mark Venables Challenger had been
picked up by the CO’s driver who had followed the trail marked by the tanks
caterpillar tracks over the hilltop. It was an unplanned by-product of the
track plan enforced by the CO, no vehicles had been permitted to venture onto
the hilltop where its thermal output would have glowed brightly for all to see
for miles around, assuming of course that the ‘all’ had heat sensors in their
recce vehicles/surveillance aircraft. With an air raid in the offing the
Warriors hadn’t hung around to admire the view, the rollercoaster ride had been
endured by the vehicles occupants, terminating as it did a hundred and fifty
metres from 3 Company’s CP.

Pat Reed clambered from the lead vehicle and jumped
down into a nearby shell crater, waiting for Guardsmen in the second vehicle to
manhandle two boxes of Stingers that the company’s CQMS had apparently
requested. Sgt Higgins, Bill and Stef joined him, taking care to avoid the
muddy water that was already starting to fill the hole.

Artillery had been falling on the forward slopes but
suddenly it stopped.

Big Stef clambered up the side of the crater and
looked for the next cover, it was another crater just a few yards away and he
took advantage of the lull to jog towards it. A trio of jet aircraft screamed
down the valley, flying parallel with the positions held by the Guards and 82
^nd
men, Stef dropped to a crouch, taken unawares by their presence and feeling
vulnerable above ground. He looked to see if they were friend or foe but the
aircraft had gone, disappearing faster than his head could turn, and then the
big Geordie was lifted bodily and thrown eight feet.

By chance Pat Reed had been looking in the direction
the aircraft had appeared from and he had seen the large weapons carried either
side of the aircrafts centre points. The aircraft, which he had identified as
Mig-31 Fulcrums, were at less than a thousand feet and punching out flares and
chaff. Two Stingers chased the burning magnesium instead of the Soviet machines,
which released the weapons one at a time, a small drogue parachute deploying
from the base of each almost immediately.
The Guards Lieutenant Colonel hadn’t been able
to understand why they were dropping so far away from his defensive positions,
and then noticed the first weapon to be released had disappeared from view in a
rapidly expanding cloud of vapour that seemed to originate from within itself.

The vapour ignited.

The ground shook as though a giant had run a half
dozen paces, the thunder of the detonations burst the eardrums of two men in
the most forward positions, and the flash of the explosions left spots before
the eyes.

Pat felt as though he’d run into a wall as
over-pressure sent him tumbling into the craters mire-like bottom but immediately
afterwards he was gasping for air like a landed fish. Dirt and light debris
were sucked from the ground, drawn toward the growing, roiling balls of flame,
following in the wake of the oxygen that they were feeding on. 

Bill was the first to recover enough to crawl up the
crumbling sides of the shell crater; the last of the fireballs was disappearing
skywards, leaving behind smoke and confusion. Stef had landed in the churned
mud at the side of the track, but he had regained his wits enough to give his
mate a thumbs up that he was okay. Relieved, Bill looked towards the fields
over which the fuel/air weapons had detonated; large burnt areas marked the
spots below where the weapons had gone off.

A myriad of fires were burning in the fields, two
hedgerows were aflame, and a grey haze of smoke polluted the air. In the middle
distance more flames and smoke arose, though these were from one of the
Fulcrums, brought down by a Starstreak before it could egress the area.

The weapons dropped by the Fulcrums had been far
smaller than those used by NATO on the besieged towns, but their power had been
frightening all the same. With all the dust and smoke in the air it took a
moment for him to notice the damage that had been caused by the weapons
incredible pressure waves.

“Sir, I think you had better look at this.”

Pat Reed took a moment to respond, he was indulging in
the resumption of an old habit, that of breathing.

Forcing his aching body into motion the half soaked
officer disengaged himself from the almost freezing water and mud, dropping
down beside the sniper and letting his eyes follow where Bill was pointing. At
first he thought his attention was being called to the approaching enemy
assault, but then his gaze fell closer to home.

“Ah.” The CO took in the numerous small craters amidst
the larger ones caused by the earlier questing artillery, using a single
syllable to acknowledge recognition, and two to express a full understanding of
the consequences.

“Bugger.”

Rolling over he looked for the Defence Platoon
sergeant and found him at the bottom of the crater, liberally daubed in mud
from the same puddle that he himself had been deposited in “Sarn’t Higgins.”

“Sir?”

“Inform Zero that there are significant breaches in
the minefields.”

With the dawn that morning had come sniper fire but
little else to concern Colonel Lužar or the men of the 43
^rd
Motor Rifle Regiment. The sound of distant gunfire to the west had begun
several hours before, reminding them that the war had passed them by for now,
but then again no one was in any particular hurry to catch up with it. Only the
youngest of the newly arrived recruits wanted to be in the thick of it, the
remainder, especially the veterans, were content to remain at an ever
increasing distance from the fighting.

In the late afternoon Lužar had been dozing, sitting
at the command
er’s position whilst his
gunner kept watch. He was woken by his gunner informing him that one of the
infantry platoon commanders on the extreme left had reported hearing faint
sounds of automatic fire from the southwest and possibly explosions, the sounds
had stopped as quickly as they had begun and so the colonel instructed that the
message be passed on up to division, where it was received without enthusiasm.
The colonel returned to his slumbers only to awoken again a half hour later by
Division ordering him to detach one infantry company to the divisional reserve
for ‘security duties’. Colonel Lužar was working out which company could be
despatched and cause the least upheaval to the rest of the regiment as it
filled in the gap, but division called again and requested a further company in
addition to the first. It seemed to the colonel that he was the subject of a
Candid Camera program when having decided on which companies would go, division
changed their demand to that of a battalion.  With a sigh he screwed up
the notes he had made for the reshuffle of the rest of the regiments positions,
and ordered his first battalion to prepare to move. His regiment had only three
companies of tanks and only two of those were made up of main battle tanks.
First battalions
tank company
were his PT-76 tanks,
thinly armoured, under-gunned and getting long in the tooth, but he needed his
heavier armour to deal with any counter attacks. He couldn’t think that
anything else would be needed by the division to guard its roads and bridges,
or at least that is what he thought until he had a query about fuel re-supply
from the CO of his Third Battalion. None of his regiment had been visited by a
fuel truck to top off their tanks since before the river crossing, and even on
idle the engines consumed diesel greedily.

He suddenly had a bad feeling that the no show by the
fuel trucks and the requests for him to detach troops were linked somehow.

In just under an hour following the first order to
detach troops his First Battalion moved out. A minimal screen from Second
Battalion had occupied key points in First’s positions, and an hour later the
regiment’s shift of positions was complete. Lužar informed division and
requested an ETA on refuelling, but the reply was so lacking in real
information as to be worthy of a politician.

Following the airstrike’s the last remaining elements
of 23
^rd
Czech MRR had enjoyed a few kilometres of relatively
trouble free motoring. Gator mines had halted a further five of their number
but the aircraft had not returned and NATO artillery had left them alone,
choosing to fire counter battery missions.

The ranks of armour were doing it differently this
time; advancing in half companies whilst the remainder of that particular rank
were in whatever
cover
was available, and ready to
provide gunfire support.

2 Troop had the senior troop commander and he had been
liaising with 3 Troop plus the surviving Apache and Lynx helicopters, dividing
up the visible targets. When the leading enemy rank came within 3000m he
depressed his radios send switch.

“Fire!”

The tank lurched as it sent a sabot round downrange
and the extractors hummed, clearing the fumes of spent propellant that emitted
from the breach as it reopen to accepted a fresh round and bag charges.