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

by FARMAN, ANDY

  Ray Tessler alighted carefully as he was far from ‘mended’ and had refused to take any of the offered seats on that overcrowded carriage his travel warrant permitted him to use. Being jostled, albeit it accidentally, had been character building in the extreme.

  He was wearing new kit, and it gave off that slightly oniony odour of moth repellent that the MOD treats its uniforms with.

  In addition to his aches and pains, Ray was feeling not a little pent up anger.

  Held in military custody without charge, he had been questioned on whether or not he had overheard anything that would be of interest to a prosecution counsel in a war crimes trial.

  Ray had answered all the questions truthfully. Sorry, but he had not help them. He had not heard anything about anti-personnel mines or prisoners being shot. However, if they would care to ask some questions that would be of interest to a defence counsel?

  Ray was issued with new kit and a travel warrant before being sent on his way. He would not be returning to 1CG, he was now a member of 2CG. The 2nd Battalion was at full strength but he had four days leave before reporting for duty. There was a parting shot though, under no circumstances was he to contact anyone within 1CG and he was not to say a word about the questions he had been asked. To do so would tantamount to conspiracy, and grounds for immediate arrest. Did he understand?

  Yes, Ray had assured them, he understood completely.

  Ray found a pay phone and made a call.

  “Hello, Mrs Reed? My name is Ray Tessler, Company Sergeant Major Tessler, and I need to speak to you urgently.”

  Gansu Province, China:

  For the third time in an hour Richard Dewar’s force slowly but carefully sank down into a firing positions as the sounds of other troops reached them on the wind.

  During their infiltration of this most sensitive of regions of the People’s Republic of China he had been concerned at the lack of activity on the ground, as if they had known the combined US/UK force was coming, and had a trap waiting.

  What Major Dewar had not known was that the same inclement weather that had for a time grounded the helicopters the PRC were using, had also caught the ground troops without arctic clothing and equipment.

  With the arrival of arctic standard lubricants for the aircraft there also came skis, equipment and clothing, bringing a resumption of foot patrolling.

  By sheer good fortune the snowfall had resumed before the withdrawing M&AWC had reached the top of the avalanche site, heavy enough for them to be able hear and not see a helicopter land and take off at a spot further along the gully.

  Richard had correctly deduced that something heavier than the light reconnaissance machines was putting troops on the ground, reducing the time it would take to resume normal coverage of the security forces area of responsibility because of the snow.

  The problem of enemy troops coming across the tracks left in the snow by the American and British troops had been covered without successful resolution in the planning stages. One of the proposals had been for the combined force to wear boots that copied the tread of those issued to the People’s Liberation Army, but all of the troops had vetoed that one. With two possible exceptions the British and US personnel all had feet much larger than the Asiatic norms, and besides which no one wanted to walk sixty-eight miles across mountains in brand new boots, the ones they had were broken in and fitted just fine, but thank you for asking anyway!

  Richard lay in the snow now alerted by the sound of metal on rock, after which had followed fragmentary snippets of Cantonese, including laughter.

  It was something of a relief to Richard, confirming the drop of troops in the area had nothing to do with them, they had not been compromised. A hunter force would hardly be talking, let alone joking around, if they were seeking an insurgent force or saboteurs.

  Richard waited for ten minutes after the last sound of the enemy patrol had faded before resuming their march.

  With Sergeant McCormack bringing up rear, Richard pushed on as quickly as he felt it safe to do, and hoped that that would be the last such hold up, because if their current rate of travel did not improve they could be for too close to the silos when the bomber force attacked.

  Near Saratov, Russia:

  Having arisen early Elena Torneski was looking for the first opportunity to leave the underground facility. It should not have been difficult she’d reasoned, because when she had left the Premier’s side for her bed, he had been euphoric at the army having crossed the Elbe and establishing a large bridgehead, but so few hours later the cleaners had been summonsed again to mop up gore from the floor of the Premier’s office.

  Incandescent with rage was a fairly mild description of the Premier’s mood, and he hadn’t calmed down that much when she had been summoned to explain why the KGB had not foreseen the NATO airborne moves or detected the preparatory build-up. Had her agents in the various western governments been asleep at the switch?

  Elena Torneski had left the command chamber with orders to find out why no warning had been received and she had no choice but to report back with answers when she had them.

  Those politicians that could be contacted had all given her the same reply that SACEUR had cut them out of the loop so completely that not the vaguest hint had reached their ears.

  Strangely, this had served in some ways to placate the Premier who reasoned that if a government no longer fully trusted it’s military, and then they would keep a tighter grip on their nuclear weapons, wasting time in unnecessary debate, if and when their Generals asked for them.

  The Premier had been toying with the idea of using battlefield nuclear weapons to stop 4 Corps, or smash any last lines of resistance west of the Elbe or possibly even both options. The spectre of a swift NATO reply in kind, which would negate any gains within hours, had of course always made those options too risky, up until now!

  The Premier had sent his KGB Chief to wait in the ante room while he considered the possibilities and weighed up the odds, which he would do alone as he held his own General Staff in complete contempt. He did not hold Torneski in the same contempt but he did not ask her opinion on many matters either because she was after all, only a woman.

  She knew that the Americans would not launch an ICBM against this facility because the moment a launch was detected the Premier would order a massive counter strike before even learning of where the enemy attack was directed. The Americans would use stealth bombers and for all their high tech wizardry they would still only come during the hours of darkness.

  She had memorised when ‘last light’ would be, and for her own safety she should ideally be at least forty miles upwind of this place by then.

  Sat in anteroom for hours, the wall clocks audible tick-tock had grown louder as the day had worn on, or so it seemed to her.

  Ironically, where it had been General Allain’s plan that had thwarted her escape from the Premier’s secure hideaway in the morning, it was another part of SACEUR’s plan that facilitated her leaving it in the very late afternoon.

  The destruction of the ribbon bridges was the deciding factor for the Premier. It wasn’t that he was bored of shooting his own military men, he would just rather kill tens of thousands of NATO’s men and women instead, and he now believed he could do it with impunity. However, Torneski had been summonsed when reports of the French and Canadian action along the river had been received, and she had thought for a moment that it was her turn for a bullet in the spine.

  Although the military held the means to deliver the nuclear weapons, it was State Security, the KGB, who retained the warheads. It was to prevent the military using them to overthrow the government, a sensible precaution really, and the head of that state security left the facility in order to supervise the hand-over of six 5-kiloton air launch SS-N-26 warheads for immediate use.

  Seven hundred and fifty-nine kilometres north northwest of the bunker, the last of the camouflage was being cleared from the runway and secured, lest any should be sucked into the F-11
7Xs air intakes.

  Patricia had run diagnostics on the aeroplanes systems hours before, and also on their ordnance, getting a red light on an AMRAAM self-guidance board, meaning that it may fail to guide onto the target without the Nighthawk illuminating its target for it, but otherwise finding they were good to go.

  With her job done there she had managed to catch a few hours of sleep, waking in the failing light.

  Not finding either Caroline or Svetlana in the command bunker she had been about to make her way through the dark woods, back to the Nighthawk, when she had been stopped by one of the Green Berets and given both the password and a warning to stick to the established paths with an ear open for a challenge by sentries.

  She had returned to the command post where an update had been received on the progress of the bomber forces roundabout route. The attacks, although the targets were over four thousand kilometres apart, had to be simultaneous. No one involved at the sharp end of the operations had been told of the mission at sea, but as intelligent, reasoning individuals it would not have surprised any of them that the mission had a briny side to it. Take-off time was advanced by twenty minutes due to a tail wind the bombers were experiencing.

  They had time for a leisurely meal of MREs and then a last check was made of the runways surface by troops wearing PNGs before Patricia and Caroline climbed aboard the Nighthawk.

  The take-off went without technical hitches of any kind; the aircraft easily cleared the trees at the runways end before turning onto the heading for their first leg, unaware that they had compromised the presence of the landing field for all time.

  In order to move more quickly from one area of the cordon to the other the deputy commander of Militia Sub-District 178 had decided to cut the corners, using the tracks through the forest.

  The map he was using had not been updated for thirty years so he had taken it cautiously; leaving the mass of metal he was travelling in to frequently check his compass.

  He had approached the airstrip from almost the opposite direction to that of painfully shambolic advance his superior was leading, and the engine sounds from the Nighthawk prevented the nearest Green Beret listening post from hearing the fighting vehicle draw close.

  The deputy commander was checking his compass when he recognised the sound of a jet aircraft running its engines up prior to its take-off run, and then two minutes later the aircraft passed just a hundred feet above his head, a shadow that briefly eclipsed the backdrop of stars in its passing.

  41” 29’ N, 171” 17’ E.

  There was a definite sense of tension growing within the confines of the pressure hull that had nothing to do with the barometric scale, thought HMS Hood’s captain. Each of the allied hunter-killer’s had in turn dropped back to a distance where they could safely creep toward the surface unheard by their prey, and deploy floating antennae’s before returning to station, fully briefed in what was required.

  The captain had briefed the department heads and they in turn had informed each member of the crew that the long days tiptoeing along ended today, but only a successful conclusion to the stalk could influence the direction of the war in their favour.

  The captain had done the rounds, looking into the faces and eyes of teenage ratings that had reached maturity in outlook in the space of weeks rather than years. It was not that long ago that he would have witnessed a disgruntled crew had he announced then that despite their hard work and skill in locating the enemy boomer, another vessel would be carrying out the attack.

  The war was not one of point scoring for these young men, they didn’t care who fired the final shot, they just wanted it over with and their homes and loved ones safe again.

  The time of the attack had not been widely announced, and yet within a very short space of time it had been common knowledge. The closer the hour drew near, the more palpable the feeling in the air.

  The captain had dealt with the pressure in a manner he had discovered years before, and it had never failed. The monotony of clearing the administrative back-log, writing annual personnel assessments and a report on this vessel, which had been launched less than a year before wiped away all tension, drowning it in the necessity of creative and analytical thought. Did he think the standard of her construction met Royal Navy requirements? Absolutely! He had typed.

  So engrossed was the Captain with his department chiefs reports into the their subordinates abilities and how these could be improved upon even more, that it took a call from the control room to bring him back to the here and now.

  It was fifteen minutes before the ordered time of attack when he entered the control room and he noticed straightaway that there were several off watch personnel present.

  “Gent’s.” he said in a low voice.

  “This is the control room of one of Her Majesty’s warships, not the terraces of a football stadium and as we are now going to quietly assume action stations you need to be elsewhere, clear?”

  He first checked the time, ten minutes to go, and then the plot, which showed the Chinese boomer still half encircled by themselves and the three US submarines. His Number One had the watch and all was as it should be.

  “Captain, sir?” he turned in the direction of the voice, towards the sonar department where one of the operators was sat with a slight frown.

  “Yes, what is it?”

  The operator had apparently heard something because he did not immediately reply, he was still facing his captain but his eyes were focussed elsewhere. After a moment the blank expression disappeared and the young man spoke about what had occurred, and why that concerned him.

  “Sir, mechanical noises roughly on a bearing of Two Nine Nine.” The captain knew without looking back at the plot that the USS Santa Fe, the designated shooter for the imminent attack lay in that direction, but the operator was not finished. “They are very faint but…but a little louder than I would expec…….” Some further faint noise interrupted him momentarily but he had no difficulty in identifying it.

  “Bow doors opening, sir”

  There was still six minutes to go, and the captain was about to query what he had just been told but a look of alarm appeared on the sonar operator’s face and was then voiced in his report.

  “TorpedoTorpedoTorpedo….two…three, now four torpedoes in the water astern of the Santa Fe, captain!”

  Another operator spoke up.

  “Santa Fe launching noisemakers and increasing speed sir………the boomers heard it, she’s spooling up too, captain!”

  Of course she damn well heard it, the captain though bitterly, they’d have to be under sedation to miss it.

  “Captain?” his First Lieutenant had an expression on his face that clearly read ‘What the fuck just happened?’

  “It’s the mysteriously absent Chuntian, Number One, she is missing no longer.”

  If the captain had to theorise then it would be that she had been off station on some mission of importance and on her way back she must have rumbled the NATO vessels, flooded her tubes out of earshot and then crept back in to make her attack. There was no way that she could know what the flotilla of western submarines had intended on doing in just a few scant minutes, but as a spoiling attack the Chinese captain couldn’t have chosen a better moment even if he’d planned it.

  The sonar operators were feeding information to the control room, tracking the torpedoes and the other vessels, “Captain, the first two torpedoes are closing rapidly on the Santa Fe and the other two have acquired the USS Columbia.”

  “The first weapons have begun rapid pinging and are accelerating for the Santa Fe…two more weapons launched captain, these have just turned to the north, they’re steering for the Tucson sir, they knew where she was too.”

  The Chuntian had to have made her approach from the northwest, the captain mused to himself, because she must surely have heard Hood from any other direction. Columbia had been between the British and Chinese attack submarines, masking them from one another.

  T
ucson turned away from the approaching weapons and her blade count rose considerably whilst closer to home the Santa Fe released another noisemaker and began a radical turn to starboard but only one of the Chinese torpedoes went for it. The other ignored the newly activated counter measure and although it was travelling too fast to match the US submarines turn it did not matter. The weapons proximity fuse triggered at twelve feet from the vessels stern casing, plates buckled inwards and the seams between them parted, flooding the submarines engine compartment in just seven seconds. Her captain ordered crash surface but before air could be pumped into the ballast tanks the second weapon having swept through the bubble cloud and reacquired, struck the base of the sail and exploded.

  Hood’s captain looked at the control room clock and noted bitterly that the second hand was only just sweeping around in its first full circle since his sonar department had alerted him. Just sixty-one seconds ago the one hundred forty strong crew of Santa Fe had been alive and as blissfully oblivious to their peril as everyone else on the western vessels.

  The board told him that Columbia was between themselves and the Chuntian, so the Hood could not fire without the risk of hitting the American Los Angeles class vessel unless one of two things happened, they manoeuvred into a position where a shot would not endanger the friendly vessel, or…

  The second option occurred even as the captain was thinking it.

  “Control Room, sonar…explosion on the Columbia’s bearing…sound of bulkheads buckling and general breaking up noises.”

  The captain felt a void open in the pit of his stomach. Another vessel and her crew gone, just like that!

  “Sonar…what is the Xia doing? I want you to keep on her because if you lose her we are up the proverbial without a paddle, clear?”

  “Aye aye, sir!”

  “Weapons…do you have a solution on the Xia?”

  His weapons officer had been working on a firing solution on the newly arrived PLAN attack submarine and the captain’s question took him unawares. The captain read that on his face. “As soon as you have a solution on Chuntian launch two Spearfish at five second intervals. That should keep those Chinese on their toes and buy the Tucson a little breathing space but cut the wires once number two is away.” He explained.