by Andy Farman
“Petticoat this is Surf, we have you strength three!”
An explosion and the sound of small arms fire in the background was evident.
“Surf this is ‘coat, you guys sound kind of busier than when we left, we are five minutes out but are you waving us off?”
“We are having trouble with the neighbours but we have their measure until the ammunition runs out. The other guys came up the logging trail through the forest from the west, so approach from the north east, over.”
“Roger that, out.”
On the ground, Limanova had been using the two elderly IFVs to ferry the men to an RV a half mile from the airstrip. As they had appeared out of the trees, tired and fed up, their new CO had briefed them, the old CO in plain sight behind him, dead upon the wet grass. Lt Col Limanova split them into groups of fifteen for ease of transport, and these would form five man fire teams in the attack. He did not expect cheers and what the Americans called Gung Ho, and in that he was not disappointed. The forest at night was in none of the militiamen’s comfort zones.
It had taken the Green Berets a little while to work out what was going on and six of the groups were delivered to the RV, crammed inside if they were lucky, or sitting on the roof getting wet if they were not. Groups 7 and 8 didn’t make it, the vehicles were ambushed with venerable 66mm LAWs. Four men escaped back into the forest but Petrov was not one of them.
He had ninety men with him and another hundred awaiting transport that was now burning fiercely on the logging trail. He told them to make their way to him on foot.
Those one hundred men were complying with his order, but they made their way very slowly.
They had an old M41 82mm mortar and two men who knew how to use it but no aiming post so they would use open sights and guess the required elevation.
With a few words of encouragement they had moved off and begun their attack.
It was as black as pitch but the landing lights, infra-red strobes, though invisible with the naked eye were clear and bright on the plasma screens.
Tracer flashed back and forth on the right of the airstrip and Caroline brought them in low over the trees to minimise their exposure to the ground fire.
The Green Beret commander was waiting for them, shouting above the sound of the still running engines and the gunfire.
Svetlana was in his command bunker trying to reach her contact in the government to get the militia pulled off. She had frequencies and callsigns that Torneski was meant to monitor, but if she were listening she certainly was not responding.
The fuel bowser was not there to meet them, it was back in the trees, a less obvious target.
“I know where it is, I’ll fetch it if the keys in the ignition?”
A mortar round landed over to the right, attempting by guesswork to hit or damage the aircraft they had heard land.
“Jesus!” Caroline swore.
“He can’t see to aim.” The Green Beret commented.
“He doesn’t need to.” Patricia said.
“There’s a pair of my guys near the fuel truck.” He told Patricia. “Be sure to shout a warning and don’t forget the password, okay?”
Patricia took off , running along the edge of the lighter runway until the break in the trees. She swung left, slowing as she headed into the dark trees.
A flash robbed her of all night vision and she was flying through the air to land in brambles, her hearing was gone, shot, robbed by the 82mm mortar rounds blast and only a tree trunk being between them had saved her life.
She regained her feet and blundered about trying to find the track again. She could not see the Green Beret sentries, or hear anything, let alone a shouted challenge for a password.
The burst of automatic fire on the opposite side of the runway to that of the attack drew an immediate request for a sitrep from the CP.
The phrase Blue on Blue is rather innocuous and disguises the enormity of an incident in the same way that calling a dead civilian ‘Collateral Damage’ does. The unit medic arrived at a run but Captain Patricia Dudley was already quite dead.
Frustrated at the lack of progress and despairing at his men’s reluctance despite there being an aircraft on the ground only a few hundred yards away. The Americans knew the ground well and had set up their defence accordingly. Lt Col Limanova had lost eight men within as many minutes of his attack starting and it ground to a halt. In his mind this was a stalemate, but in reality the professional soldiers had control of the engagement. He tried for air support to no avail and although he could find neither fault with the radio or its operator, but he was unable to raise anyone. This was thanks to silent jamming from the Americans. So involved was he with the radio and lack of communications he did not notice his force reducing in size as men slipped away, back in the direction they had come.
By the time Limanova decided on trying to get into a position where small arms could be used on the aircraft if it took off again, fire from his own militia towards the defenders was bordering on the pathetic. He left the radio operator with the mortarmen and went to investigate.
The jet aircrafts engine pitch altered and it began its take-off run. Limanova was reduced to shouting at the shadows to fire several aircraft lengths in front of it if they did actually see it.
Lt Col Limanova was on the track, kneeling and peering up into the rain, his AKM at the ready but he saw only a tail flame that suddenly appeared in mid-air, accelerating around in a great sweeping turn to dive into the ground at the same spot as his mortar and radioman. The blast deposited him several feet from where he had been standing to land in one of the many clusters of wheel ruts that had now formed large puddles on the logging trail. Earth, gravel and even parts of the radio operator and mortarmen were landing around him with a splash, a final mission critique on a now dazed Limanova’s first mission as a sub district commander.
Patricia’s death had demanded some kind of response, some action to mark her violent passing and the Maverick’s destroying the mortar and anyone nearby would have to suffice.
The Green Berets abandoned their positions and slipped away into the night, taking with them Patricia’s body to be buried in the forest at a traceable spot where she could be exhumed for proper burial by her family at some time in the future.
The shock and the grieving must wait though. They flew on, climbing to ten thousand feet to keep away from opportunists with Strela launchers, and turning due west with enough fuel, in theory, to reach NATO lines in Germany, but they had a head wind, the same one carrying the weather front from Western Europe to cover both Central and Eastern Europe.
Svetlana had been in her escape kit, camouflage coveralls over her civilian clothes and her face cammed to hide the shine for when the time came for her to evade away into the forest with the Green Berets. Her own ‘G’ suit had been buried after they arrived weeks before as she would not be using it again, at least that had been the thinking back then. She had retained only the thermals that Caroline called her ‘pornstar suit’ worn beneath jeans and sweater. So there she was, with a green and brown grease painted face and soil grubby G-suit in the back seat, wishing she had paid more attention when Patricia had once run through what her board could do.
She switched between ‘Nav’ and ‘Attack’ with a subsequent near cold sweat breaking out when she could not switch back. The ‘Help’ icon had saved the day, and that was now being employed as a tutor tool. Several hundred hours would be required for her to approach Patricia’s level of skill, but she had to start somewhere. After a half hour though she was smart enough to know she wasn’t smart enough.
“I am pretty much dead weight back here.” She told her pilot. “I don’t know if I’ll be competent to do more than identify an attacker for you, Caroline?”
“Don’t sweat it too much. The second seat was put in for the purpose of seeing how a command and control function would work. I could still fight the aircraft as normal, just a little slower.”
Svetlana found the loado
ut screen. A single offensive weapon remained, and the defensive ordnance had become seriously depleted on the bombing mission too.
“One AMRAAM, that is… Ahueyet!...did I just touch the wrong button?” Svetlana’s accent had switched from plummy Oxford English, to back alley Muscovite, and back again.
The plasma screens suddenly lost information for the second time that night. The RORSAT that had been launched out of Vandenberg airbase had apparently ducked when it should have dodged, or vice versa. The plasma screens de-populated as icons vanished.
“No, we just lost another multi-million dollar guardian angel, is all.” Caroline said. “All that radar energy makes them easier to find than comsats…have you got a satellite icon on the top right of the toolbar?”
“Yes.”
“Is it amber, red or green?”
“Flashing amber.”
“Touch the screen and it will ask you to input an authentication code…”
“Got it.”
The screens came alive once more.
“So tell me ‘lana, is the war over soon?”
“As soon as a lot of gold gets paid to someone’s secret bank account, and that was supposed to be following signals traffic intercepts indicating the Premier is dead after the site was nuked.” Svetlana said. “You did get it, didn’t you?”
“Sure did, but I can’t confirm if he was there or not.”
They flew on in silence, crossing the border into Belarus, then Lithuania, Poland and at last into Germany just north of a blacked out Berlin. Not quite home-free, the land below them was in enemy hands. Tentatively Svetlana typed out a request for a current situation report. The mission controllers knew where they were to an inch and she let them work out for themselves what was required.
From the air activity now becoming apparent, the war was showing no sign at all of stopping. CAP and close air support aircraft were landing and taking off, going to and from the approaching 4 Corps.
“Okay”, Svetlana said, reading off a response to her situation update request. “The Elbe line fell two days ago and so did the Saale so the current defence if centred on a hill called the Vormundberg, west of Magdeburg, and our nearest safe airfield is Gutersloh.”
“Forget it; we’ll be flaming out before we get there.” Caroline said. The headwind had been too much to cope with. “Still and all, we should be west of the Elbe when that happens so only about ten or fifteen miles to hike, by my reckoning.”
Fifteen miles of enemy infested territory to reach the Vormundberg, always assuming that they had not been rolled even further west and the long hill was a new real estate acquisition of the Soviets, by the time they reached it.
Only twenty two miles to the south, an A-50 Mainstay had lifted off from Schönefeld, south east of Berlin. Its icon had it typed as soon as the RORSAT identified it and Patricia Dudley would have immediately picked up on the potential danger.
Cottbus airbase had provided the combat air patrol protection for the Schönefeld Mainstays, but the Belgian airborne brigade had put the base out of action for the foreseeable future. Consequently, the runway of the old WWII Luftwaffe base at Fürstenwalde to the east of Berlin had been hastily adopted for use by the MiG-29s.
The left side screens flared red as soon as the aircraft began radiating as it climbed through 10,000’ on the way to its operational height of 38,000’.
It had them; the faint but definite return was a signature of the F-117s when caught in profile, close up.
The pair of MiG-29s were at 7 o-clock in respect of the Petticoat Express’s position, aiming to intercept their charge. On receipt of the A-50s targeting feed the pair banked right and then left, putting themselves slightly below and a half mile behind the F-117X. Both MiGs put their radars to standby, which kind of confirmed for the Petticoat crew that the A-50 had them locked up.
“What do I do?” Svetlana asked.
“Nothing, just try not to barf in your mask.”
Caroline selected their sole remaining ordnance from her position and when the Vega confirmed it had a solid downlink the rotating bomb bay doors cycled it out into a dark and very wet night.
The missile was under complete control of the Italian communications satellite, its sensors where also in standby mode but although it was cloaked electronically, its tail flame was still visible to the human eye.
“KURIT' V VOZDUKHE!” the flight leader shouted the missile launch warning into his radio. “Smoke in the air!”
The AIM-120 steered left and the Russian pilot lost sight of its tail flame. Their threat receivers were silent but both aircraft broke hard, discharging chaff and flares. They had not survived this long by taking anything for granted. Having completed a radical missile evasion manoeuvre the leader loosed off a pair of AA-8 Aphids under control of the A-50 so the super cooled IR threat sensor in the Nighthawk’s tail did not trigger an alarm, it would bring them in from outside the sensors detection envelope.
The A-50 was also discharging counter measures, but it did them no good. The Vega brought in the AMRAAM for a head-on attack and for the second time that night one of the big Soviet AWACS fell victim to the Nighthawk. The forward twenty feet of the fuselage disintegrated and the aircraft crashed to earth upon the Templiner See Causeway on the outskirts of Potsdam.
With loss of guidance from the Mainstay the AA-8 Aphids IR seekers went active and Svetlana’s world got turned upside down.
Caroline immediately rolled them inverted and pulled back on the side-stick, the automated defence systems spitting out flares as they dived. On her screen there flashed a red ‘AIRFRAME OVERSTRESS’ warning and an audible ‘Whoop’ in her headset until she eased off the manoeuvre but a shudder through the aircraft was a signal that something had just broken.
“Come on girl.” She cooed soothingly and stroked the control panel. “Just a few miles more, honey.”
The Aphids killed two flares and the MiG-29s overshot.
Caroline took them down to a thousand feet and back towards the west again.
The pair of MiGs took it in turn to go active on their radars, as much to tempt a response as it was to find the stealth aircraft. They flew a racetrack course before they too headed west, the logical destination for their enemy.
Their Zhuk-M radar came up empty, but the flight leader selected Aphids once more. The missiles sat on their pylons, the IR seekers active and discovered exactly what had broken on the Nighthawk.
A thermal shielding panel had come adrift and the weapons signalled a solid lock-on.
The MWS’s pulsing tone told both Caroline and Svetlana that they had again been found as the Aphids were launched, accelerating to Mach 2.7.
Flares lit off in their wake again and the Nighthawk began a vertical jink.
A severe, school ma’amish voice intoned.
“All Flares Expended!...All Flares Expended!...All Fla…”
‘AIRFRAME OVERSTRESS’ flashed on the screen, the warning Whoop cut across the school ma’am, sounding twice, and the F-117X came apart at twelve hundred feet above the Ausruhen im Wald, still sixteen miles east of the Elbe.
Saale River Valley, Germany: nineteen miles east of the Vormundberg:
The crackle of flames, burning vehicles and the screams of the wounded were most evident as Dougal led Recce Platoon back yet another tactical bound.
The Nova Scotia Highlanders and the 2nd Canadian Mechanised Brigade were being reduced by the moment, hammered by a full division, the Russian 32nd MRD. The brigade commander had expected that rough weather would follow their kicking the legs out from under 3rd Shock Army’s logistics, but he had never imagined anything on this scale.
He had contacted SACEUR and asked for permission to save what was left of the brigade, and so began the nightmare fighting retreat through the woods to the river Saale.
Dougal did not know at what point battalion headquarters had gone off the air, but brigade headquarters went silent around the same time, which left the Black Watch CO as senior officer
with the unenviable task of getting them across the river and into the French 8th Armoured’s lines where their combined numbers gave them a better chance of fighting off the Russian division.
Sergeant Blackmore brought up the rear, shouting a warning as a Leopard C2 of the Canadian VIII Hussars reversed, its main gun pointing back down the track they had taken but silent for lack of a suitable target; its machine guns though were firing short, economic bursts at the Russian infantry dogging their steps.
They had some two hundred metres to go to a harbour area where their LAV IIIs awaited.
The Leopard’s main gun suddenly lowered slightly and fired at something in its thermal sight. Down the muddy track a fireball arose through the trees and small arms ammunition began cooking off in the wreckage of a BTR-70.
The platoon took up firing positions and waited for the A Company platoons to fall back through them.
In the darkness a vicious fire fight broke out as A Company hit the Russian infantry again. HE and smoke grenades were thrown to assist the Canadians to break contact and they passed through Dougal’s men, carrying their wounded as they did so.
Dougal and his men lay there in the rain as the sound of A Company dimmed with distance behind them, and was replaced by cautious movement ahead in the dark woods.
A voice growled what sounded like a rebuke much further back, either an infantry officer forcing his men onwards or just as likely a KGB Political Officer urging an infantry officer to greater effort.
A flash and a bang from beside the track, just barely beyond minimum engagement distance and the Leopard staggered as a Sagger struck its right track, and in the flash of the missiles detonation he saw the Russian infantry coming through the trees.
The Leopards machine guns opened fire and Dougal’s men poured it on to for several moments.
The driver’s hatch of the Leopard opened and a figure pulled himself out.
“They’ve pulled back.” The driver said. “Time to do the same, if you don’t mind us coming with you, sir?”