'Advance to Contact' (Armageddon's Song)

by Andy Farman

  “Arse, bollocks and wank…the wankers gone!”

  Big Stef sneezed as dust raised by Freddie’s tantrum got up his nose.

  “Stroll on, mate…you’ll have this lot down on our swedes if you ain’t careful!”

  It was almost ninety minutes before CSM Probert appeared, the last man to emerge from the back of a Leipzig public bus, the last vehicle in the exchange, and could stand squinting at the light. The remaining newly released POWs POW’s were filing towards NATO’s side of no-mans-land, but Colin paused to look about. He had been blindfolded for five hours despite the windows being blacked-out.

  “Sergeant Osgood!” he called out when his eyes had adjusted enough for him to see.

  Oz grinned broadly as he recognised his friend.

  Colin was shoved roughly from behind and turned to confront a Russian Paratrooper.

  “Move…English shit!”

  As per the agreement, all the troops at the exchange point had their weapons slung and magazines secured in ammunition pouches. However the Russian wore on his hand a wicked pair of brass knuckle-dusters.

  “Push me again you tosser and I’ll back-squad yer teeth to zed week!”

  The angry remark drew all eyes; both British and Russian as the paratrooper started to say something in return, but Colin stepped in fast and hit him squarely in the mouth with a straight left that snapped his head backwards. After a split second of silence the troops of both sides piled into one another, fists swinging and boots flying. It didn’t last long because officers from either side ran over barking orders at their men.

  Fighting next to Colin, Oz heard the shouting but he was having a good time and sent his opponent stumbling backwards, flattening the Russians nose with a ‘Glasgow Handshake’ before backing off and adding his voice to that of the officers.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw something flying towards him and ducked out of the way, the object hit Colin before falling to the earth.

  Colin picked up his webbing fighting order and looked at the man who strode through the huddle of Russian paratroops.

  “Much obliged sir.”

  “Well I’ll be, it’s the Fanny Magnet!” was all Oz could say.

  “Hello Sergeant Osgood, nice head-butt by the way.” Nikoli extended his hand to the Geordie squaddie.

  All the returned NATO prisoners had been brought back in just the uniforms they had on their backs, their captors knew that there was plenty of equipment from the dead with which to speedily re-equip them. As a matter of principle neither side had reunited the prisoners they had, with their kit. It takes time to get webbing to fit properly and even longer to replace the personalised items they carried in and on it. Nikoli reached into his smock and withdrew Colin’s K-Bar fighting knife and shorter bladed survival knife, which he handed across to the CSM.

  “Aren’t you going to get in the shit for this?”

  “It is a small matter Colin, and besides which these men are all from my Company.”

  Oz was grinning at the Russian lieutenant.

  “We heard you had done a runner and were shagging the brains out of some drop-dead-gorgeous RMP captain. You never turned up at the internment centre, and the monkeys were going ape trying to find you?”

  “That is a long story Oz, but as you can see I did get back to Russia.” He looked around at his troops and spoke to them in a calm voice. The Russians expressions still looked fierce once he had finished, but they had a touch of respect in them too.

  “I told them that I lived and trained with you all for six months, that you were good men and almost as good a unit as we are.” Actually Nikoli had only worked with Colin and Oz, but it served to act as a buffer against any of his own men starting another fight.

  Oz fished out a packet of cigarettes and offered one to the Para with the freshly broken nose, slowly the two groups of soldiers did likewise and for fifteen minutes they were no longer quite enemies.

  Nikoli at last looked at his watch.

  “It is almost time.” He barked an order and his men put out their cigarettes and began walking back to their own lines.

  “Colin, Oz…Take care of yourselves, okay?”

  “Likewise Nikki, you keep yer head down hinney.” And with that they parted, returning to their own armies to begin the business of killing once more.

  With five minutes still to go the landscape was devoid of visible life and Freddie again had the heavy rifle’s butt in his shoulder.

  Big Stef slowly moved the telescope across the opposition’s real estate, looking for anything that would indicate a target, be it a shadow, a silhouette, smoke from a cigarette or steam from a hot drink, anything.

  At one second past the agreed ending of the cease-fire a single shot rang out. The 7.62mm round made a loud crack in passing, exceeding the speed of sound in its flight and entered a small gap in a rubble pile. The firer edged slowly backwards out of his firing position to crawl through the muck of a drainage ditch to another spot scouted earlier. As he moved he took great care not to get dirt in the muzzle, the working parts or to jog the PKS-07 sight seated atop the SV-98 sniper rifle, the successor to the Dragunov.

  Dust that had drifted through the gap in the rubble earlier had caught the sunlight for just a moment or two before it settled. In venting his frustration, Lance Sergeant Laker had sealed his own fate.

  Atlantic Ocean: 1759hrs, same day.

  The JBD, jet blast deflector for Cats One and Two, prevented damage and injury to equipment and crew as the throttles opened on the big Grumman F-14D Tomcats two General Electric F110-GE-400 engines, and the 54,000lbs of thrust they produced.

  On Cat One the aircraft’s nose dipped under the strain and then the catapult hurled it down the deck, quickly followed by the F-14 on Cat Two.

  Once the Tomcats reached 20,000’ they topped off their tanks from buddy stores on another Tomcat and set a course of one six one degrees. Apart from there 20mm Mk-61A1 Vulcan cannon’s, the Tomcats carried only one other weapon apiece, long and fat they hung below their centreline hard-points.

  Despite the fact that the weapons were on their way to be used against the enemy, the armourers had refrained from chalking banal slogans on the things, they exuded a menace that you just didn’t want to mess with.

  Fifteen minutes after the first two had launched, a second pair left the deck of the USS Gerald Ford, and these turned to zero four two degrees after tanking, whilst the third and final two-ship formation involved in the operation flew due east forty minutes later.

  The Seawolf class SSN, USS Twin Towers had slid down the slipway at Newport News in June of the previous year. Originally named Sea Leopard, she had left on her proving trials in October renamed in memory of the victims the 11th September terrorist attacks. Her reactor plant and steam turbines were capable of pushing the attack boat through the water at 39 knots, but her single screw was now only producing turns for twelve.

  The task assigned to the US, Canadian and British boats had been one of reconnaissance, locating the enemy submarines that had blown through into the Atlantic on the first day. The NATO submarines had established that the wolf packs were each in two staggered lines abreast with twelve miles separating each line. The Russians had correctly assumed that the NATO convoys would be taking the shortest possible route to Europe, and their last satellite pass had pinpointed the position, course and speed for the wolf packs to complete their alignment. The convoys were coming to them so they did little more then hold station whilst edging forwards at five knots.

  Bad luck had befallen the Twin Towers by way of an Alpha with an experimental sonar suite, which had twitched enough to have her captain go looking to see if they had actually detected a NATO SSN.

  Slipping away from the Alpha had cost them twelve hours, by the time they had come up enough to stream their wire antennae the order to get the hell out of Dodge was ten hours old. Twelve knots was the fastest they could safely go without the world and his brother hearing them, and they had slowly worke
d their way up to that over two hours. The Twin Towers skipper did not know when H Hour was, that was at Admiral Mann’s discretion.

  All watertight doors had been closed immediately after the beat feet message had been decoded, but only the officers and the chief of the boat had been told why. The sonar operators had been instructed to remove their headphones and switch on the speakers. It had caused them all to frown; their ears could not detect the minute sound traces over the speakers that they could with headphones.

  The first two pairs of Tomcats had taken station in front of the convoys to the north and south of USS Gerald Ford’s, the furthermost convoy being to the south.

  Once the third flight of Tomcats had tanked they all headed east to their first pre-programmed waypoints, from where they first let down to six thousand feet before turning through 180’ and each pickling off the first weapon. Afterburners kicked in once the ordnance dropped away and the operation was repeated twelve miles to the west.

  As with the first weapons, a parachute deployed to prevent damage to the weapon when encountering the surface of the ocean and the weapons began to receive data downlinked from a navy communications satellite.

  The weight of the weapons pulled the parachute shrouds below the surface and they trailed down behind the ordnance, which sank at a surprisingly slow rate.

  Two thousand feet below the waves, the Alpha class attack submarine Omsk, was on a heading of 270’. Captain Yuri Kelyovich expected to make contact with the outer screen in the dawn and had his least experienced men on watch; his best hands were resting until then. He himself was lying in his bunk, writing up his log before sleeping.

  The danger from maritime patrol aircraft had been constant, but with a whole ocean to search they would have to be exceedingly unlucky to be detected. NATO patrol and attack submarines were a different story; they were so damned quiet.

  In the early hours of the morning his best sonar operator had been certain that he had heard something other than whales screwing and shoals of fish, and because of his faith in the man they had spent fruitless hours stalking nothing. With her search abandoned, the Omsk now sought to rejoin the forward line before the dawn

  Kelyovich finished noting his log before switching off the light, and considering what he was expecting to do the next day he fell asleep quickly.

  At precisely 2010hrs, in six separate locations in the north Atlantic, at an average depth of six thousand feet a five-megaton nuclear device detonated.

  The big screen aboard the USS Gerald Ford had three areas outlined; squat oblongs with east/west axis named Alpha, Bravo and Charlie, with Alpha the northernmost, depicting the anticipated areas of damage.

  On detonation, each device flash evaporated a half-cubic kilometre of seawater and the pressure waves sought to compress the molecules of water at the extremities. The surface of the ocean momentarily dipped toward the ocean bed before being flung skywards.

  Where the pressure wave travelled downwards it punched through millennia’s worth of silt, baring the planet’s bedrock on the ocean floor for a five-kilometre radius before it rebounded off it, upwards and outwards.

  The real damage was caused by the collision of the pressure waves in each of the areas as water, which refused to compress, encountered titanium and steel constructions that would.

  The Alpha attack boat Omsk, which had broken formation to chase the USS Twin Towers shadow, was making ten knots in order to regain her position at the centre of the leading line of 9th Flotilla submarines.

  Screams from the duty sonarman woke her captain and he leapt from his bunk to dash to the sonar station just aft of his cabin as a boom like the hammer of hell sounded throughout the hull.

  Blood was leaking from between the young man’s fingers that were pressed over his ears and his screams were high pitched with agony. As the captain reached out to pull the sailors hands away the pressure waves reached the Omsk almost simultaneously. Bow and after planes bent or sheared from the hull as the eastern pressure wave struck the stern and whipped the vessel into the vertical plane, bow down.

  The majority of the crew were either killed or rendered unconscious as they were propelled into ceilings and bulkheads, and then the western wave struck. The Omsk’s titanium hull collapsed flat. Like stepping on a polystyrene cup the two waves slammed together the walls of her pressure hull.

  Those vessels not caught between hammer and anvil either lived or died depending on their positions in relation to ground zero.

  USS Twin Towers was at 600ft and making 18knots on a heading of 045’ when the speakers in the sonar compartment screeched and then cut out. Her captain’s face drained even as he bellowed orders.

  “Hard left rudder, come around to two seven zero degrees…crash surface, blow all tanks!” He gripped the periscope mounting and set his feet “Sound collision…all hands brace for impact!”

  The deck heeled hard over and all those in the know prayed that they would make the turn and not be hit beam-on by what was coming, and as it was they were when the acoustic wave arrived like a vanguard, causing more than one man to unconsciously wet himself.

  Twin Towers completed the turn and reached the surface, bursting out of the depths.

  “Sail camera on!” and the monitor flicked to life, to show just darkness ahead. “Switch to lo-lite…I can’t see shit!” The picture changed and he could see the submarines casing up to the bow, but the picture looked wrong, it was as if the vessel were down at the bow. He could see the horizon but it was too high…and then his mouth went dry as the horizon got ever higher.

  “Oh my God…” was all he was able to whisper before the bow started to rise, higher and higher.

  Sixty-two miles from ground-zero of the eastern device in area Bravo, an eighty foot high wave was travelling outwards at seventy miles an hour, whilst to the west, rising up into the stratosphere, it appeared as if six white columns were holding back the vacuum of space, as the tops of the plumes spread wide to eventually join fingers.

  Eleven minutes before the mines had detonated; Captain C.D Steinways, Commander Air Group for USS Gerald Ford watched his wingman trap successfully and called the GF’s controller with his fuel state and range.

  “Tower, this is Tomcat zero one…ten miles out, showing eleven thousand pounds…do I have a clear deck?”

  “Zero three one, Tower…we don’t have you visual as yet…continue approach…the deck is clear, be advised that all vessels are battened down and we are at high NBC state ”

  “Zero three one, rog.”

  “Tomcat zero three one, Tower…we have you visual now…you are slightly high.”

  “Zero three one, roger that.”

  “How’d it go zero three one?”

  “Six buckets of instant sunshine right on the nose Tower.”

  “Roger that…we have you at one mile, call the ball zero three one.”

  The Tomcat caught the three-wire on an almost empty flight deck; every other airframe that couldn’t be crammed into the hanger deck had been flown off. Being the last back the aircraft would be secured for heavy weather and hopefully would survive the coming event. The CAG and his RIO were hustled below as the wranglers raced to secure the twenty-two ton Tomcat. All that was aloft now were helicopters, maintaining the ASW screen.

  Computer modelling in the States had given them some idea of what the outlying effects would be, but it was all theory when it came down to it, no one really knew. The CAG had joined Admiral Conrad Mann and the rest of the staff in CIC, arriving after the scheduled detonation of the weapons, and there they drank coffee, spoke in low tones and waited.

  Twelve miles ahead of each convoy, three frigates cruising in line abreast and five miles apart had their radars radiating. Forty-six Knox class frigates were built between 1969 and 1974, with the coming of the larger Perry class they were paid off, with the majority being sold to other nations. A number joined the reserve fleet of which five had been reactivated for this convoy. On the bridge of the small, eld
erly Knox class frigate, USS Peel, her captain had the deck, peering out ahead into the darkness. The majority of the crew, like her captain, were reservists and had been together as a ships company less than two weeks. The captain ran a car dealership in Seattle since leaving the regular navy in the mid-nineties, his Executive Officer was a journalist and the helmsman an actor in a soap opera, eager for the war to end so he could get back to playing the ‘evil twin brother’ in ‘The Wealthy &The Beautiful, three days a week, before the scriptwriters had his character abducted by aliens, or similar.

  The ship was rigged for a hurricane and all the crew in life vests when the radar painted over something forty miles ahead, moving fast and wider than the display on the bridge radar repeater.

  “Start the upload…let’s get this data out.” He avoided adding ‘in case we don’t make it’ as the radar picture was beamed to a communication satellite and from there distributed to a hundred different stations where they could see the speed and dimensions.

  His voice was a lot calmer than he felt inside.

  “Mr Corben,” he addressed the Exec. “Sound the collision alarm, if you please…all hands brace…this could be a rough one.” He stood up from his chair, crossing to the helmsman. “Son, it’s been awhile since I drove, why don’t you get off below until this blow passes?” looking around the bridge at the remainder of the watch he nodded aft. “Same with you people, you can come back up once its past…dog the hatch behind you.” Once they had cleared the bridge he spared a thought for his wife,

  “Honey, don’t go getting all mad at me now,” and removed the cellophane from a pack of cigarettes before lighting up for the first time in three years.

  The top of the wave was higher than the Peel’s superstructure and the captain gripped the wheel firmly in both hands. The bow rose to a full 20’ above the horizon before the foredeck disappeared into the wall of water and the superstructure was engulfed. USS Peel became a submarine as the moving mountain smashed over her, swallowing the 5”/54 turret but tearing away her ASROC launcher that sat aft of it on the foredeck. The Peel was a surface combat ship, below the waves was not her element and she rolled to port with her single screw seeking to drive them to the surface once more.