by Andy Farman
Once again the throttles opened after they banked into a hard left climbing turn.
“That’s good, hold this angle…flat ground for a mile beyond then it rises in steps to a saddle. A mile of carefree flying and then it’s all downhill from there…there’s another Mainstay lifting off from Engels but it’ll take him time to get up high enough to safe operating height.”
Caroline lowered the nose and they skimmed the saddle, shielded from radar energy by the earth until cresting its far edge.
They were the visiting team and the defenders had the home advantage. Every attack scenario had been tried and tested during regular exercises before the war, before the West knew that the East was controlling what the satellites thought they saw. They knew all the approaches and the air defence radars had ceased 360° radiation, reverting instead to covering pre-assigned arcs, quartering the ground they knew an attacker must appear from.
Immediately upon reaching the far side of the saddle the screen flared red as powerful radar painted them.
“A Tombstones got us…Favorite’s launching at ten o’clock, six miles…pop-up coming up…Five…Four…Three…Two…One!”
Getting down in the weeds was their best tactic of breaking the radars lock but they were committed now and Caroline brought them out of their shallow dive, zooming up five thousand feet like a Pheasant flushed by the beaters, presenting their least stealthy profile, flares and bundles of chaff being pumped out automatically by the Nighthawk.
“Launcher cycling…weapon away!”
Fourteen radars, the seven MiG-29s, three Tombstones and four Clamshells had them locked up, their MWS was screeching its warnings that no fewer than seventeen radar-guided missiles were in the air. Favorites, Grumbles, AA-12 Adders and AA-10 Alamos were homing in on their radar return.
Patricia’s stomach churned as Caroline rolled hard with chaff bundles ejecting into their wake. She was taxing an airframe that was not built for aerobatics, sending them into a forty five degree dive on their egress heading, as steep as she dared take them. The Nighthawk’s twin General Electric F404 turbofans were a tried and tested design, the same engines that powered the F/A-18 Hornet and the French Dassault Rafale A, but unlike those combat aircraft the F-117A’s power plant had no afterburner ability purely and simply to reduce the stress on the airframe.
“Pull UP!... Pull UP!... Pull UP!...Pull UP!” exhorted the GPWS, replacing the Missile Warning System’s jarring tone as the aircraft’s attitude and proximity to the ground broke the missile locks more effectively than the chaff.
Back in the river valley, with the hills between themselves and the target Caroline wondered at what point she had simply stopped breathing. Sweat trickled down her face, the salt stinging her eyes.
“Time?” she queried.
“Eighteen seconds!”
Four more pairs of MiG-29 Fulcrums were lifting off to join the hunt and the seven already involved had gone to burner to close the engagement range between themselves and the lone attacker, asking for, and receiving permission to cross the restricted airspace above the mine.
On leaving the F-117X bomb bay the B-61 continued to climb for several seconds despite its weight. Gravity’s pull began to replace forward motion but its tail fins prevented an immediate vertical plunge back to earth, guiding it towards a precise spot on the surface below.
The worked out mine’s winding gear, tower and elevator were the only still functioning aspects of the old workings, the towers four legs straddled the mile deep shaft at the base of which an electric powered tramcar line ran a quarter mile to the bunkers outer blast door.
The weapon’s rocket motor only fired once it was facing vertically downwards, aligned with the centre of the shaft.
Concealed lighting was illuminating the car park landing pad beside the shaft and a Hind-D was settling onto it when something large struck the tarmac and bounced, colliding with its rotor blades. The blades shattered, shards spinning off in all directions and the aircraft was flipped onto its side where its captain quickly reacted by shutting down its twin engines. Both pilots and the crew chief clambered out and having got clear found themselves beside a seven foot diameter steel wheel, part of the winding gear that had sat atop the tower. The tower that had held the three tonne wheel had collapsed in on itself, the steel girders buckled and the internal steel cross braces that had kept the towers integrity for decades had been sheared. The crew stepped over twisted girders and gingerly peered over the edge into the dark maw of the now exposed main shaft.
The second Hind-D came to a hover a hundred feet above the shaft; its landing lights provided some illumination.
The elevator, cables and a lot of twisted steel had gone, presumably falling the entire way down the shaft. How was the Premier to exit now? Was there an emergency escape route back to the surface? Unbeknownst to the crew, they were inhaling radioactive dust caused by the sundering impact of the B-61’s depleted Uranium penetrator with the tower. Within two years all of them would have developed cancers, but as they stared down into the interior the delay fuse’s timer ran down to zero.
The At-A-Glance screens of the F-117X polarised, protecting the eyesight of pilot and EWO from the harsh light reflected of the hillside to their right, giving the night-time valley the appearance of a sun baked hell for almost a second.
Russia, Militia Sub-District 178: 2349hrs.
"Cease fire! Cease fire!"
The words were unfamiliar to either Russian but not the accent. The firing immediately halted and Petrov attempted to gain his feet to flee as Major Limanova switched off the set. He gripped the field radio on his drivers back, and kept him firmly against the earth.
"Americans sir!" he whispered hoarsely "What are the Yankees doing here?"
"I think we can safely conclude that they are not the NATO Peace Delegation and they are not here to surrender, young man." Limanova replied.
From the sounds of rustling in the undergrowth ahead he thought they must have sent out searchers to check for bodies in the kill zone' and when they found no human ones they would send out a clearance patrol, maybe? It was time to sneak away.
Having been caught on the wrong foot by the approach of an enemy from an unexpected direction, the Green Beret commander gave consideration to sending out a patrol but quickly dismissed it. He did not have the numbers available to patrol offensively so he chose the hunker-down option.
The hasty ambush had been sprung on nothing more sinister than a bigger than normal bunny but he was positive they had just missed the intended target. A radio transmission close in to the ambush site, during the ambush, was proof enough for him. They had been compromised but he was certain the enemy had no idea what they were dealing with and would assume they were the band of deserters. The militia was still milling around in the woods at night and it would be dawn before they got their act together. Long before the first rays appeared the F-117X would have returned, refueled and departed, as indeed would he, his men and their rather attractive contact with the flashing, come-hither, green eyes who spoke English with an upper class Oxford accent and Russian like a native.
The northwest listening post reported in, having heard a diesel engine vehicle start up rather noisily and depart to the north east. He did not stop to question why they had not heard its approach though, and that could have altered his decision making.
At the edge of the forest the commander of the sub district stood in the light from the headlamps of his own BMP command vehicle, staring at a map of the area as if looking for a sign, some clue as to how to reunite his units here in the open where transport could move them to the airstrip. Raindrops landed upon the clear plastic of the map case. The star filled vista from the early evening was gone as a weather front from the west finally reached them.
His head snapped up and towards the sound of the other BMP’s approach, and to describe Lieutenant Colonel Boskoff as furious was something of an understatement. He was shaking with rage as Major Limanova exited the
BMP-1, and having shouldered the field radio before approaching his superior he failed to salute, let alone attempt to apologise for his outburst on the command channel, not that such a severe breach of discipline could ever be forgiven or overlooked.
“What have you to say Limanova, what have you to say for yourself?” he screamed.
There were just the four of them at the forests edge, the two officers and their drivers. He would have relieved Limanova there and then but regulations dictated another Major would have to escort his deputy into custody. The only other major was in the forest somewhere on the commander’s orders, attempting to locate and rally the men but now as lost as they were, along with the captain and lieutenant who had preceded him, also with the same orders.
If the commander expected a response from his deputy he was to be disappointed.
Major Limanova placed the field radio on the ground between them and held out the telephone handset to the sub district commander.
“The District Commander would like a word.”
Snatching the handset the commander listened for several moments before responding.
“Colonel…sir, I do not know what idiocy Limanova has been spouting to you but yes, we are the closest unit but it is utterly impossible to do anything in the dark, the fool got everyone lost so we must wait for the dawn….”
A rebuke from the other end silenced him and he handed the instrument back to his deputy as he had been instructed.
Limanova put the proffered instrument to his ear.
“Yes sir…yes sir…I believe I can sir…with pleasure sir.”
Major Limanova lowered the handset, drew his sidearm and fired twice.
Twisting the frequency dial back to the unit command channel he holstered his pistol before speaking.
“All stations this is Lieutenant Colonel Limanova, you will all of you turn and follow your ears.” He turned and waved to Petrov who activated the vehicles traffic control siren and kept it on.
CHAPTER 3
West of Brunswick, Lower Saxony, Germany.
A great deal of time, energy and thought has gone into the formulation of codes and cyphers over the centuries, almost as much effort as that which is expended by code and cypher breakers. Of course in order to set about breaking a code it is first necessary to recognise that one is in use.
In 1951 British Intelligence commissioned a study into a completely unique set of codes and cyphers for use by agents and Special Forces acting behind Warsaw Pact lines in some future confrontation. This would of course have to involve seemingly random frequency changes in order to avoid the opposition’s signals intelligence recognising that an enemy was active on their side of the lines by their sending and receiving coded transmissions. Mathematicians, academic deep thinkers and members of the intelligence community, past and present, put forward their responses for consideration. One of the latter was a former officer in the Black Watch who had spent not a small amount of the previous war behind enemy lines in Greece, before returning to Hollywood to renew his acting career. He believed, from hard won experience, that the more complex a communication setup was, the more likely it was to fail. His input was to dispense with complicated codes and channel hopping and simply use the enemies own known military codes and frequencies as nobody would notice a needle in a stack of needles. Accordingly, good language skills with a mix of provincial accents were more important than memorised ‘keys’.
Thirty two proposals were eventually considered but the ‘Stack of Needles’ was dismissed as too simplistic and a multi layered mathematics based encryption code was adopted instead. The only people to believe that the simpler method had any worth were the Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye, the GRU, who are responsible for special forces acting behind NATOs lines in some future confrontation, and they received full details of all thirty two proposals via the Cambridge spy ring before the final selection process had even begun.
The Stack of Needles theory was tucked away safely for the future and updated whenever new working versions of a NATO army’s battlefield code came into their possession. For operations in Northern Germany, Batex, Codex, Son of Codex and Slidex code books were all in their turn faithfully reproduced in sufficient quantities to equip saboteurs, assassins, fifth columnists and road watchers. Even the high magnesium content of the Slidex strips was duplicated, those burnable keys which were the closest an infantryman carrying a radio set on his back ever got to that famous line on TV “This tape will self-destruct in five seconds!”
“…Whiskey Echo, Golf Juliet, Charlie X-ray, Zulu Mike, Sierra Delta, Lima Victor Bravo, roger so far, over?” the voice with a slight Liverpool accent queried in the operators headphones.
“Tango Four Four roger, over.” replied the operator with a lilting Welsh accent of his own.
The hash of electronic noise marked a pronounced pause as per British Army signals doctrine for long messages, during which another station could transmit an urgent message of its own on that frequency.
None did of course.
“Tango Four Nine, Two November…Quebec India Foxtrot, Yankee Golf, Echo Tango, Victor November…”
The operator filtered out the sound of the rain pelting against the canvas roof of the short wheelbase FFR Landrover in which he sat, copying the transmitted bigrams and trigrams with a pencil that had been sharpened at both ends in case a tip should break, recording them onto a printed signals pad. At the conclusion of the transmission he opened a green plastic wallet; its sized designed to fit easily into a map pocket. There was nothing upon the wallet to identify its purpose beyond the stores code for that item printed in block capitals ‘Army Code 62175’.
The first bigram and trigram in the message were not code at all, but the page number and cursor setting with which to decode their orders contained within the British army’s own BATCO code book.
The most difficult part of the process for the operator was that of keeping the BATCO wallet from sliding away owing to the uneven angle at which the Landrovers body was leaning due to a broken axle. The decoded orders were written out in long hand below the original message.
Tramping across an intervening muddy firebreak in the forestry block that concealed them the operator handed the signals pad to his small team’s commander in a camouflaged basher.
“My sobirayemsya nuzhny novyye kolesa …..we are going to need new wheels.” observed the officer, Captain Sandovar, after he had finished reading.
TP 32, MSR ‘NUT’ (Up), north of Brunswick, Germany: 10 miles south-west of the Vormundberg.
The job of Pointsman remains one of the least glamorous, and yet most hazardous duties for a member of the military police in time of war. In times of peace, it is just plain boring of course, but the task is nonetheless one of extreme importance in ensuring the swift passage of supply trucks, troops, stores and equipment to the front, and empty trucks back to the docks for fresh loads.
TP 32 was provided by 352 Provost Company RMP(V) by way of the reconstituted No.2 Section of 1 Platoon, 99% of the original 2 Section having fallen prey to Spetznaz troops in British uniforms early on in the war.
352 Provost Company’s Brighton and Southampton based platoons had loaned personnel to bring the section back to strength where it now manned Traffic Post 32’s two checkpoints with their dragons-tooth chicanes, one at either end of the junction where Autobahn 2 ran beneath the Brunswick Expressway.
The Autobahns 1
The junction was laid out like a simple cross just east of the Mitterland Kanal. The Expressway ran north/south with its flyover straddling the east/west carriageways of Autobahn 2.
On the north-eastern side of the junction sat the small provincial Braunschweig Airport with its single tarmac runway and a large flat grassy expanse beside it for light aircraft in the summer.
During World War 2 a research centre hidden in the forest next to the perimeter had developed the Henschel Hs 293 anti-shipping glide bomb, the ‘Daddy’ of air to surface stand-off missiles.
The airfield was currently in darkness, but for all that it was a hive of activity with US, German, British and Dutch military transport helicopter traffic coming and going, hot refuelling whilst the crews grabbed coffee next to their machines before having another underslung load of ammunition hooked on for delivery to the front lines.
Stores wise, this was the end of the line on ‘NUT’. The convoys deposited their cargos at the airport before heading to the rail yards at Hanover for another load.
For a time the NATO air force’s light and medium sized fixed wing transports had delivered palleted loads, but ironically it had been the great great grandsons of the Hs 293 that had comprehensively wrecked that single runway and destroyed two taxiing transports on the adjoining taxiway, a German C-160 Transall and a US Air Force C-23 Sherpa transport. Their twisted skeletons now lay abandoned where the bulldozers had shoved them.
The weather itself had soon afterwards turned to the bitter cold of a, thankfully short, nuclear winter and allowed the grass surface to be used by other Transall, Sherpa and C-130 Hercules. Once the thaw arrived of course it quickly became a quagmire, and with that the use by fixed wing aircraft had ended.
Beyond the airfields perimeter the Luftwaffe research centre was long gone, shattered by a series of US 8th Air Force raids in 1944 although the forest grew back over the decades and still remains today. There have been some incursions by farmers and housing developments since the 1970s, but the forest still extends east over the foothills to the banks of the Elbe.
South and east of the traffic post lay more forest, dark, wet and a little intimidating. An enemy could approach to within a few meters of the elevated autobahn from that direction. Trip-flares had been comprehensively sited amongst the trees and registered with fire by the heaviest weapons at the junction. Two GPMG s in the SF, Sustained Fire role, and manned by the infantry co-located with them to defend against the last of the Russian airborne troops still loose in small groups, those same ones who stubbornly refused to be mopped-up, contrary to continuous reports by the media. Thus far there had only been one triggering of a tripflare in the forest and that had introduced a bit of fresh meat into their diet, wild boar tenderised 7.62 style.