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

by FARMAN, ANDY

  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 3rd 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 3rd 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.

  2nd 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 th
e 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 sh
eared 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?