by Andy Farman
The cameras were rolling as on the stroke of 0400hrs a stony faced Lt Col Pat Reed, stood in the commander’s hatch of his Warrior IFV, drove off Horse Guards Road and onto the parade ground. It led the small convoy of armoured vehicles, a company’s worth, and the single surviving troop of A Squadron, The Kings Royal Hussars.
1st Battalion, its tiny remainder, lined up its vehicles facing Lt Col Manson and his men and shut down, debussing smartly and falling in with their weapons in three ranks. The Hussars left a lasting impression on the parade square with their tracks, as the two Challenger IIs and a thirty year old Chieftain 10 stopped, pivoted to face left, and halted.
There could not have been a greater contrast between the two units. The men of one, small in number and dressed in dirty, often torn and blood stained combat dress, with fighting vehicles to match, and the other at full strength, well rested and smartly turned out.
A microphone was in place on the saluting dais for the Defence Minister, the waiting press corps attentive and her expression that of the cat that had got the cream.
She began by apologising to the assembled reporters for a deception she had been forced to employ, but there would be no ceremony, just a reckoning, and the exposure of men who had dishonoured their flag. Rogue elements within the armed forces and their disobedience to orders, their arrogant refusal to accept the laws of the land had, with deep regret, necessitated her actions. How else indeed but a trick could have brought back the most blatant of the offenders, bringing them back to where justice could be administered, and the guilty punished.
She glanced over then at Pat Reed and his men. They stood stock still as if again on sentry outside Buckingham Palace, beyond the park. They did not appear to have reacted to her words in any way?
Probably she had used too many long words for them to understand.
The Defence Minister then read out the charges, the allegation that anti-personnel mines had been used at Wesernitz in violation of government agreements with the international community, of cowardice in the face of the enemy, again at Wesernitz, and of failing or refusing to accept the surrender of men of the Russian airborne forces at Leipzig/Halle airport, a capital offence under the Geneva Convention’s rules of war.
The men did not budge or move an inch.
As neither the civil or military police could be trusted she gestured with a wave to the smoking man with a radio. He crushed out the cigarette against the memorial to the Guards dead of the previous two world wars, and spoke into his radio. Two hundred members of T5S emerged from out of concealment inside St James Park, armed with riot batons and walking forward across Horse Guards Road en masse to disarm and arrest the 1st Battalion.
The man on the extreme left was the first soldier any of the T5S contractors reached, but he was not quaking in fear, he was grinning. The contractor grasped the barrel of the soldier’s rifle and attempted to wrest it from him, but Colour Sergeant Osgood was not a man to give anything up easily unless he was of a mind to. At that point it dawned upon the man before Oz that none of these men were wearing berets as they had been briefed would be the case, their heads were encased in Kevlar and their faces were painted for war. The glint of light off the belt of mixed link on a GPMG at the next soldiers feet had him realise that all the weapons had magazines attached, the tanks were buttoned up with the crews still inside and the soldier whose rifle he gripped was now openly laughing at him.
Oz head-butted the contractor, the edge of his helmet flattening the man’s nose and the neat, orderly ranks, dissolved as the seventy two members of the battalion went for the two hundred private security contractors.
Danyella gaped and took a step backwards as the contractors at the rear wisely turned and ran.
The press of course were not running, they were not going anywhere. This was good copy.
“Make them stop!” she shouted at her protection officers, who appeared not to hear.
“Make them stop!” she yelled again, at her PR officer this time.
The girl first looked at the fighting men meting out barrack room justice to the contractors, and then back at her employer as if she were crazy.
“No, you idiot!” Danyella shrieked, pointing at the photographers and TV news crew “Them!”
If she could not regain control of what the media were going to report then she would be finished.
The Defence Minister turned, intending to leave the rostrum and smash a few cameras if that is what it took, but blocking her way was Annabelle Reed, eyes bloodshot and puffy from crying, the notification of her son’s death only broken to her a few hours before by Sarah Osgood and Captain Deacon. Annabelle’s fist did not quite render the same level of damage as an Osgood head-butt; however the result was impressive nonetheless.
Five minutes later and a dozen contractors lay unconscious on the parade ground, discarded T5S uniform hats and riot batons lay littered about where their owners had abandoned them and fled.
Simon Manson was still standing before his battalion, not quite believing what he had seen.
“Fall out and mount up!” Pat Reed commanded, his voice carrying easily across the square, and with an awful start Lt Col Manson realised that the order had been directed at the 2nd Battalion as well as Reed’s own men. To his complete horror his men were obeying.
“Sarn’t Major Tessler!” he shouted. “Control those men!”
“Go fuck yer self.” Ray replied and joined the 2 i/c of the 2nd Battalion in his Warrior.
Pat Reed led his sobbing wife gently away and the fighting vehicles departed with a purpose, separating at the road and making for different objectives. Simon Manson stood alone in the middle of the square, and Danyelle Foxten-Billings was sat on the dais, bleeding from the broken nose.
And the Press?
Well they were just loving it.
Downing Street.
0407hrs.
The Defence Minister had left an all-night meeting of the Cabinet at 10 Downing Street to preside over her media event on Horse Guards, just a couple of hundred yards away. The meeting continued without her, a junior minister making notes of all that transpired in her absence. The post-war retention of some of the laws contained within the wartime special powers act, the encompassing of MP’s expenditure under the official secrets act and the permanent replacement of many public services with private contractors. The pressing issue however, was whether or not to end the war effort now that the immediate danger was gone? The PM already knew his Defence Ministers view on that, so the shaking heads around the table when the question was voiced negated the need to call for a vote.
A creaking sound could suddenly be heard from the doorway. All heads turned in that direction. The door and frame had been replaced and reinforced following the arrest of a certain PM just prior to the wars commencement. Despite this measure they could see the doorframes visibly bow away from the door. A loud bang then followed and the door crashed open.
A host of uniformed policemen stood behind Sir Richard Tennant, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, who entered and dropped a red painted door ram onto the carpet in the room with a 'thud'. He grimaced and reached behind to knead his back.
“To be quite honest.” He addressed the assembled Ministers. “If I have to keep doing this, I’m going to put my back out one of these days.”
Wandsworth.
0510hrs.
Amongst other areas, T5S (Custodial) had taken over the running of Wandsworth Prison from HM Prisons, a service for which they received payment from public funds in accordance with the size of the prison population and the status of individual inmates. Overcrowding had become the norm.
A panicky telephone call to the Senior Contractor resulted in a hurried assembly of some of their most lucrative prisoners, the ones who had been kept incommunicado on remand. They were subject to a subsequent bundling into prison vans for dispersal to other prisons, those also run by T5S (Custodial), not HMP of course. There were more of these prisoners than there was
room in the two vehicles that were available at the time. With the vans full the gates were opened and the vehicles departed, each in a different direction along Heathfield Road. The northbound prison van was negotiating the narrow bridge across the railway lines beside which the prison was situated and the southbound van jumping hooded red lights at road works by Alma Terrace. Something caught the eye of the van driver on the bridge, something traversing at speed the tidy suburban back gardens lining the railway cutting. A Warrior infantry fighting vehicle appeared, emerging through a garden fence with much accompanying splintered wood flying willy-nilly. It rocked to a sudden halt astride the road, blocking the exit off the bridge. The vehicle commander grinned maliciously at the driver of the van. Engaging reverse gear and backing away as fast as he could manage, the van driver attempted to escape them, however Major Mark Venables had also taken a short cut.
The Serious Crime Group’s surveillance teams had been keeping tabs on the whereabouts of certain remand prisoners for several weeks. O.Ps covered all entrances to the prison, the telephones, landline and mobile alike, were all tapped, and thanks to the efforts of the Special Reconnaissance Regiment’s late night visit a month before, they could also see and hear what transpired in key areas without the contractors being aware. When preparations to emergency evacuate those same remand inmates were detected, the operation went into high gear, as did the approaching would-be liberators who were still on the South Circular Road.
The vehicles left the highway at the first opportunity to race directly across Wandsworth Common to the Victorian built prison. The surface of the Common was torn up, flying high, churned up by the caterpillar tracks of a dozen armoured vehicles and spat out behind, a turf and earth wake behind the speeding tanks and IFVs. Early morning traffic on Trinity Road skidded to a halt, with a resulting fender bender at the sight. A Challenger II left the Common and tore across the road without stopping, smashing through a hedge and into the prison’s staff car park. It flattened several contractors’ private cars to then emerge at the bridges other exit, bursting through a second hedge and skidding to a halt, boxing the prison van in.
The southbound van fared no better, and all of this took place as the Senior Contractor watched from his office window. Despite this experience, entry to the prison was refused, its doors firmly locked and barred.
Mark Venables employed his special key to change that, the one weighing 62.5 tonnes.
Colin Probert had lost a disturbing amount of weight since Oz had seen him in the forest, close to death following the night battle with the Russian paratroopers. He lay pale and wasted upon the bed in his cell in the solitary confinement wing. A rattling of keys had continued for a full minute before the correct key was found and the door swung open.
“How you doing, marra?”
Colin had been dumbstruck. He had been steeling himself for an eventual one-sided trial and never seeing the light of day, or his family, for many years. In his weakened state he could not help it, tears welled up.
“Less of that mate, Janet needs you strong, so let’s be getting you home.”
With its missing soldiers recovered, the armoured vehicles departed, heading for the next objective.
Arkansas Valley Nebraska, USA. Two days later.
‘Mutiny Monday’ was the term coined by a CNN newsreader to describe events in Europe.
At the same time as European governments were being replaced, the New Soviet Union fell apart. The unseating of governments installed against the will of the populations saw more violence than those taking place amongst NATO countries. The cabinet members of the puppet Polish government attempted to flee Warsaw by car, their convoy protected by their own armed security. Twelve Warsaw residents were killed by the security detail at a makeshift roadblock. The security men joined their principals, hung by the neck from lampposts by an angry crowd numbering thousands.
The UK had been the first NATO member state to overthrow its elected government but Denmark and Spain went the same way before that particular day was done. The remainder followed with alacrity.
A complete sea change had taken place across the Atlantic, at least as far as its politicians went.
The shedding of Soviet control once more was of course welcome. The Red Army fragmented, its divisions returning to their own countries. No standing force of great significance would be required to ensure the ceasefire was honoured.
The next video conference the President made with Europeans had required the names of the countries new representatives being stuck to the monitors.
In the hours before that conference it had been tense, as the President was faced with the very real prospect of America fighting on alone, or suing for peace with the Chinese.
He sat facing strangers, although not all were unknowns. A former SACEUR headed the British Council, as they called themselves.
“I will get straight to the point.” The President said, addressing them all. “The United States of America takes a very dim view of the events which have transpired over the previous forty eight hours.”
They listened, looking back at him, their expressions neutral.
“May I ask what the intentions are of you Europeans with regard to the war?” he continued with only the barest of pauses. “Now that your own borders are again secure, is it your intention to make peace with the People’s Republic of China?”
“Mr President.” The retired British general began. “By mutual agreement I am speaking for all of us on this side of the Atlantic, and we fully expected a deep concern to be expressed by the USA.” He paused, taking a sip of water before continuing. “We regret we will be unable to continue…”
Here it comes, thought the President, we are unable to continue the war but we are grateful for the assistance of the United States, etc etc….
“…until we have reorganised and reconstituted our units, those that fought in Germany and in the Atlantic. Some battalions and regiments must amalgamate and some air force squadrons will disappear temporarily from the order of battle, their equipment and personnel absorbed into other units…”
The President sat up a little straighter.
“…but we are assembling the necessary shipping, and we will each have one mechanised brigade ready for transportation and deployment to the Far East by the end of this week, a Corps in total, and others to follow later.”
The Europeans were not calling it a day, Australia and New Zealand were not being written off, and America was not finding itself standing alone.
CHAPTER two
Australia
(3 minutes: 10 seconds after the Chinese ICBM launch)
Ian McLennan Park, Kembla, Woolongong: New South Wales. 40 miles south of Sydney.
Friday 19th October. 2353hrs.
All was quiet; the sky was as of diamonds strewn on black velvet. Certainly no one still living in Port Kembla could remember there ever not being light pollution before the enforced blackouts. On the odd previous occasion that a brown-out occurred, Sydney was only a mere 40 miles away and the glow from the city that never quite slept, would eclipse the stars to the north. Now of course, nature’s great free light show was available to all, weather permitting.
Master Sergeant Bart Kopak of the 11th Armored ‘Black Horse’ Cavalry Regiment had once more ‘dropped by’ on the excuse of seeing how things were with the Brit unit he had, for a time, acted as liaison to. His tank company’s fighting positions were sited to cover the beaches at Kilalea State Park and Minnamurra, ten miles away. His company location was now no longer at the racetrack with divisional headquarters, but on a field beside the Shellharbour Club, closer to where it was expected to fight. Bart seemed to manage to find plenty of reasons to visit the divisions HQ though.
Vehicles that were not on emergency business were not permitted to approach the man-made hill occupied by the ‘The Queen Elizabeth’s Combat Team’ during the hours of darkness and so Bart left his Humvee at the bottom of the hill with his load bearing equipment in the bac
k. It was a beautiful night and he hoped that would play in his favour when he saw Rebecca. Taking just his M-16 he walked the rest of the way, first looking in on the small unit’s commander. Captain Hector Sinclair Obediah Wantage-Ferdoux, RTR, otherwise known as ‘Obi Wan’ to his troops and simply ‘Heck’ to everyone else, had just returned from Darwin with the main tank gun rounds and the two 120mm rifled barrels that had been gathering dust. The practice of not keeping all of ones eggs in one basket was well under way at the ordnance depot. It had been a hive of activity, dispersing its stored munitions to a multitude of smaller, scattered magazines along the coast. As a consequence it had taken six hours before anyone had been available to begin loading up their trucks with the boxes of rounds. The needs of the small British contingent were pretty low on the depots list of priorities. Heck was tired and hungry so Bart did not stay long and left the British tanker to it.
Sgt Rebecca Hemmings was not at the REME LAD area but was instead taking her turn on the watch keepers stag roster in the CP. Bart’s arrival was an excuse to step outside for a breath of air. The sentries and those manning the CP were in CBRN Dress State 3, they all wore clumsy NBC overshoes, smock and trousers. Gloves (Cotton: Inner: Small) already inserted in the rubber outer protective gloves in the respirator case with the mask ready for instant use. Her hair was dusty, sweaty and needed its daily wash. Hardly glamorous attire, but to Bart’s eyes Rebecca could just as well have been in crystal slippers, ball gown and wearing a diamond tiara.
They lay on the grass bank looking at the stars and talking about anything but the reason for his constant visits. Bart had been steeling himself all day for what he wanted to now say. He had run through in his head every word of a prepared speech but just as he was about to broach the subject Rebecca sat up, suddenly alert.