Save for the wailing sirens and the ongoing, ambient sounds of the surrounding environment, there was little noise for all that. Hurtling earthward at five times the speed of sound, the warhead ripped across the sky west of Thorne’s position in complete, eerie silence trailing a stream of superheated air and exhaust. It struck the earth at least three thousand metres west of Thorne’s position and the resulting explosion cast a huge pillar of earth and smoke high into the sky above the heat haze, all still in that strange, unnatural silence.
It was no more than a second before the fact that he was still alive sunk in, but the shattered feelings of defeat and bewilderment lingered as Thorne’s mind fought to clear the almost fugue state it had fallen into. Reality only truly came crashing back down on him ten seconds after the impact as the thunderous sound of the blast finally reached them accompanied by the raw, foetid heat of the shockwave as it washed over all of them. It was at that moment that Max Thorne finally realised that the weapon – clearly a very powerful conventional weapon – must have landed close to the main gates.
“Oh, Jesus Christ… Eileen…!” He broke into a desperate run, dodging around others still rooted to the spot and staring at the explosion in the distance as he headed straight for the jeep he’d commandeered earlier.
Donelson and Lloyd had closed off passage through the main entrance at the same time the Galaxy had commenced loading. Maintaining control as they allowed the last few civilians through the gates was almost too much for them, even with the assistance of MPs and a newly-arrived squad of heavily-armed regular infantry. Everyone had heard and then seen the arrival of the huge Galaxy in the distance, and most of those still left outside the gates were perceptive enough to draw a direct link between the landing transport and the groups of refugees being allowed through in groups, crammed fifty-at-a-time into the rear of flatbed trucks and being shuttled quickly away.
Lloyd had already left in one of the trucks, leaving Donelson to load and ride back in the last remaining vehicle. With his tank’s dug in position just a few hundred metres away, Jimmy Davids was one of a few additional officers and NCOs who’d come over to assist Eileen and Evan in finishing up. With a short-barrelled, folding-stocked M2A4 carbine in his hands, the tank commander stood side by side with a lieutenant in charge of the troops at the gate, lending moral support and firepower as the man barked a continuous stream of orders intended to prevent any unauthorised entry. All the while, Eileen went about completing the loading of the last truck’s rear cargo bed and securing the tail gate in preparation for departure.
Fights broke out between small groups in that moment, with minor scuffles threatening to escalate into a full-blown riot as the crowds were forced back on either side once more so that the gates might be opened wide to allow passage for the Sentinel and other armoured units returning from the western defensive line. Not interested in ending up crushed beneath the tracks of a sixty-tonne tank, the mass of shouting, struggling Egyptians held back just long enough for the convoy to pass through before surging on the gates once more, desperately pressing in against them as they closed.
Two of the infantrymen handling the left gate stumbled suddenly, pushed off balance by the unexpected pressure from the other side, and it bent inward a metre or so, creating a space wide enough for the crowd to push through two at a time. Several at the head of the throng immediately set upon the men holding the right side, tackling them to the ground and flailing at them with feet and fists as more of the crowd began to stream through behind them.
The shooting began almost immediately. An inexperienced private standing back from the gate watched a mate being dragged down beneath the weight of three attackers more terrified than angry and didn’t even think twice as he raised his rifle and fired bursts into each assailant. Two were killed instantly and a third mortally wounded, however the power of the rifle was such that several slugs passed right through the bodies of the refugees and struck the legs of the soldier beneath, wounding him also.
As was often the case in moments where groups of frightened, armed men were under great tension, it took only that one mistake in judgement for the rest to lose control. Indiscriminate firing broke out from guards forced to back away from the spreading mob, with aimed shots and bursts of automatic fire cutting into the front ranks of the terrified refuges, cutting down men, women and children alike. Screams of pain and fear rose up above the general shouting and howls of unrest while the bellowed orders to cease fire from the lieutenant in charge went completely unheeded in the chaos that ensured.
“Fall back…! Fall back…!” Davids shouted angrily at anyone who’d listen, his finger tense against the trigger of his carbine as he held it up in front of his face with both hands and aimed at the spreading group of Egyptian refugees. “Hold fire, you stupid buggers… hold fire, for Christ’s sake…!” But his calls for calm fell on equally deaf ears, and as more British soldiers were overwhelmed, beaten to the ground and trampled by the hysterical mob, the firing from the remaining troops only intensified.
Only a few hundred metres away still, the column of returning armour and mechanised infantry were alerted by the outbreak of gunfire and all turned immediately to face the unexpected threat. All of them saw their fellow soldiers fighting desperately to contain a rioting mob and they also saw some of those men fall, beaten to death beneath a crowd that in its terror and desperation had lost any semblance of sanity.
One of the Shermans opened up with its co-axial machine gun, sending.30-calibre slugs tearing through flesh and bone as its turret moved slowly to either side, mowing down anything living that stood in the path of the withering fire. A Browning M2 mounted above the cab of one of the M3 halftracks joined in, the sizzling streaks of red tracer arcing viciously across the intervening distance and literally tearing bodies apart under the devastating impacts of dozens of thumb-sized .50-caliber slugs. Even after two years of bloody combat, the images of the destruction that terrible fire wrought on the unarmed crowd were something that would stay with Davids and many of the others for the rest of their lives.
“Mother of God, there’s women and children…!” Eileen screamed from a few metres behind Davids, transfixed by the horror unfolding before her eyes as the final GMC truck she’d been loading powered hurriedly away in the distance. “Cease fire…! Cease fire…!”
“What the bloody hell are you still doing here, Eileen…? You need to leave… now…!” Davids turned and shouted directly at her, crossing the distance between them in a heartbeat. It was only as she’d spoken that he’d realised she was still there, and his every instinct as a man of that era took over in that moment. “Get out of here before this all turns to shite!”
“We have to stop this, Jimmy! We need to – !”
“It’s too late to stop it…!” Davids howled in her face, shocking her into silence as he let the carbine fall to his side, hanging by the sling about his neck, and used both hands to take Donelson by shoulders and shake her roughly. “There’s only one way this is going to end, and you cannot be here…!”
The moment of shock and surprise over being manhandled by a junior rank dissipated quickly in Eileen’s mind as the instincts of the naval officer within her took over, and she rose visibly within the tanker’s grasp, squaring her shoulders and shaking his hands away as anger and indignance rose in her eyes and expression.
“Get your bloody hands off me, Captain Davids…!” She bellowed back at him with all the force she could muster. “We need to stop this massacre right now, and you are going to help –!” She was cut off a second time as Jimmy Davids forcefully and quite unexpectedly lunged at her, wrapping his arms around her torso in a textbook rugby tackle and throwing her heavily to the ground, winding her badly as the entire weight of his own body crashed down on top of her.
It was only pure good fortune that the first impact had been east of where they stood. Even with his attention focussed purely on Donelson in that moment, Davids still picked up the massive explosion in hi
s peripheral vision, perhaps three hundred metres away with the Sentinel, Shermans and mechanised infantry standing directly between them. Pure instinct and reflex took over then as Davids had thrown himself at Eileen and brought her to the hard ground, shielding her with his own body in that scant, spare second or two before the blast hit.
It struck them perhaps a second later, bringing with it the roar of a hurricane and a ground-shaking upheaval akin to a minor earthquake. So close to the epicentre, XFV002 Elwood and the rest of the returning armoured force simply ceased to exist, torn to pieces by the force of an explosion their minds never had a chance to register.
For Donelson, it was like nothing she’d ever experienced in her entire life. A thunder roared around her that threatened to burst her eardrums as the ground shook with the force of a small earthquake. A savage, hot and almost supersonic wind smashed into them, carrying with it every piece of stone, earth, debris and man-made object it could pick up along the way and turn into errant, airborne missiles thrown with lethal force.
Lying weak and dazed on the hard-packed ground, Eileen instinctively clutched her hands to her ears and opened her mouth in a scream that was completely eclipsed by the surrounding maelstrom. The fact that her mouth was open and that she’d already been winded were probably the only things that saved her from serious internal injuries as the shockwave swept over them. The last thing she remembered before the darkness took her was the sensation of Davids’ body being lifted from hers by the force of the explosion and cast aside like a rag doll.
The Aggregat A-4 tactical ballistic missile had in Realtime been the official Wehrmacht RLM designation for the weapon the Allies would’ve come to know of as the infamous V-2 rocket. With more than a little irony and dark humour, Reichsmarschall Reuters himself had given this particular weapon the nickname of ‘Vergeltung’ (‘Vengeance’) in recognition of its original, Realtime namesake. The similarity in nomenclature however was the only one the two weapons possessed.
More than eleven metres long and with a diameter or 90cm, the ‘navalised’ A-4C type being launched from that pair of Type-XIV U-boats carried a launch weight of almost six tonnes. It was a somewhat modified version of the Realtime Soviet R-17 Elbrus (NATO reporting name ‘SS-1 Scud-B’, originally intended to deliver a tactical nuclear weapon (or conventional 1,000kg HE warhead) out to ranges of almost 400km.
Although no available nuclear weapons developed by the Nazis were as yet light enough to be carried by the A-4, the use of a far more efficient Walter HWK109 solid-fuel engine meant that it was able to at the very least deliver a far more powerful conventional payload equivalent to almost 2,000kg of high explosive. At the extremity of its range ‘envelope’, the weapon would reach an altitude of over 100km at the apex of its ballistic trajectory before tipping over once more and turning back toward Earth, reaching a terminal speed of Mach 5 (almost two kilometres per second) prior to impact.
Although far more fuel-efficient than its Realtime, Soviet counterpart, the A-4 unfortunately possessed a first-generation system of inertial guidance slaved to a very primitive analogue computer that ensured its accuracy was no better. With a CEP (‘Circular Error Probable) of over 3,000 metres even when fired from a stable, land-based platform, the A-4 was at best an area weapon with no capability for strikes against specific targets.
In its original form in service with the Soviet armed forces of the Realtime 1950s this wasn’t a major issue as a tactical nuclear warhead with a yield of between five to eighty kilotons was more than enough to ensure total destruction over an area far greater than that of the likely margin of error in the missile’s trajectory.
When armed with only a conventional warhead however – albeit an extremely powerful one – the Aggregat A-4 was tantamount to useless when deployed for any use other than area bombardment. A level of accuracy that was bad enough when used on land was made even worse when used at sea where the inherent problems of determining the exact position of the launch vessel in relation to the intended target exacerbated the situation dramatically. The ‘precise’ coordinates that had been programmed into each of the eight launched missiles had been the dead centre of Kibrit’s two main runways. The reality of it all meant that in truth it would be outright dumb luck if even one of those weapons landed within a thousand metres of it.
“Hacking…! Eileen…! Jesus Christ…!” Thorne howled in terrified frustration, the radio mike he’d been shouting into falling from his grasp as the second missile landed on the near bank of the canal, this time perhaps two thousand metres east of the parked Galaxy. Even at that distance, the shockwave was substantial enough to cause the huge aircraft’s wings to flex in protest as heat, dust and debris howled past in step with the roar of the explosion.
A GMC truck laden with refugees drove up at that point, coming to a halt not far from where he stood by the passenger side of the abandoned jeep. It would’ve been unfair to have suggested that Thorne felt actual disappointment as Evan Lloyd appeared in the cab’s open doorway, yet it was also true that something twisted inside him over the confirmation it gave that Donelson had indeed remained back at the gates.
As Evan dropped to the ground, the sounds of moans and cries of agony reached his ears, and Thorne realised that the cargo bed of the truck was carrying wounded. His eyes narrowed and focussed on the rear of the vehicle as several thin trickles of dark liquid began to pool on the ground in the shadows between the main wheels, seeping through the slats of the flatbed tray from above. The paired rear tyres on the left side were running flat and there was scoring and damage around the rear end, with twisted framework bend out of shape about the back of the tray and the wheel arches.
“Medic…! Medic…!” Lloyd howled at the top of his voice, staggering toward Thorne as if mildly drink. “We’ve got wounded! I need a bloody ‘handbagger’ over here now…!” An ex-USMC corpsman who’d arrived with the Galaxy crew was already running across the tarmac toward them with two assistants in tow, a pack of medical equipment over his shoulder in very much the same fashion as an overly-large handbag.
“We were maybe six hundred metres away when it hit,” Lloyd explained, his words slightly slurred as if he might be mildly concussed. We were lucky in the cab for all that,” he added, his eyes bloodshot and puffy and his dirty cheeks streaked with tears. “Those poor bastards in the back took the brunt of it…” He shook his head sadly. “Don’t even know what fucken hit us.”
Another missile speared into the earth at that moment, silent and deadly as the others and this time landing right between the ruins of the base’s main administration buildings to the north east. Structures that had already been bombed into shattered wreckage were completely obliterated in clouds of smoke and thrown debris as the huge warhead detonated amongst them.
“That’s what fuckin’ hit us!” Thorne snarled angrily as they, like everyone else, flinched markedly in reaction to the blast. “Cocksuckers are launching ballistic missiles at us now.”
“Thank Christ they don’t have any bloody nukes then,” Lloyd observed darkly as the heat of the blast washed over them once more, shaking his head sharply as if to clear his thoughts.
“They won’t need fuckin’ nukes if the land one of those bastards much closer!” Thorne shot back with venom, glaring in the direction of that last explosion. “Get everyone you can on the plane,” he continued, shouting orders over his shoulder as he turned and climbed across the jeep to slide behind the wheel. “Take any wounded you think you can move and put ‘em on the upper deck where they’ll have more room to lie down… I’m going back for Eileen…”
“Max…” Lloyd began as the jeep’s engine kicked over “…mate… they were way closer than we were… everything back there’s gone to shit… Eileen… she…” It wasn’t any lack of courage on Evan’s part that prompted him to dissuade Thorne from his mission. Rather, the terrible certainty that nothing could possibly have survived so close to the point of impact suggested that there would be nothing back there that
Max or anyone else from Hindsight could possibly want to see. The glare of defiance he received in return was enough to almost make him physically take a step backward.
“You think I’m gonna leave one of us behind?” He hissed with vehemence, the words almost spat from his lips with disgust at the thought. “Whether I’m back or not, you get that fuckin’ plane out of her the moment it’s loaded – that’s an order…! You hear me?”
“Max, you can’t – !”
The sentence was cut short as a fourth missile – the first from U-1404 – struck the surface of the Smaller Bitter Lake beyond the northern end of the runways, geysering a huge spray of salty water skyward near the bank but otherwise completely ineffectual.
“Do not wait for me…” Thorne barked “…do not… not for me…! You got that, lieutenant…?”
“Understood, sir,” Lloyd responded reluctantly after a long, tension-filled moment, livid inside that his friend had dared pull rank on him but unable, ultimately, to stand firm against the savage determination in Thorne’s eyes and voice. The jeep sprayed gravel from beneath its wheels as it fishtailed slightly then powered away to the west, Thorne’s cap flying off in the wind and instantly forgotten.
“Where the bloody hell’s he going…?” Trumbull demanded, having jogged across from where he’d been supervising the rearming of the F-35E the moment he’d seen Thorne drive away.
“He’s gone to find Eileen… she’s still back there…” Lloyd explained sombrely, his expression and tone speaking volumes as Trumbull threw a very concerned glance into the distance where a huge pillar of smoke continued to rise thickly into the sky.
Winds of Change (Empires Lost Book 2) Page 89