'Advance to Contact' (Armageddon's Song)

by Andy Farman

  “The letter was apparently resealed in the same envelope, the consulate’s address scrawled on the bottom, and on the back the words ‘Return to sender, address not known, no such number…”

  “No such zone.” Heck finished the sentence for him and added. “Elvis had such a way with lyrics, don’t you think sir?”

  “You might at least have put a godammed stamp on the thing when you posted it; he sounds pissed at having to cough up the postage."

  “Sir,” Heck began. “Small as it is, my detachment is a combat unit of the British Army…my people are soldiers, not troublesome tourists who lost their passports. Our vehicles go where we go; they don't get left on the dock to rust away.”

  The General waved the fax.

  “If you had been a candy-ass, young captain, I’d have thrown your ass in the brig for this….but you’ve got fighting spirit. But I have to be honest with you, if the Australians haven’t got ammunition that your tanks can use, then I’ve little use for your Challengers …you’ve got sixty rounds per tank, two engagements worth if you’re lucky…after that you’re battlefield replacements for my people.” He looked hard at the troop commander. “What do you suggest I say to the Honourable Gentleman in reply, Captain? He wants your nuts on a stick.”

  “With all due respect sir, tell him to stuff himself because we are off to play with our mates.”

  Duke Thackery laughed and screwed up the fax. “That’s not a very diplomatic way of putting it…get the hell out of here and leave it to me.”

  Heck stood and saluted before striding to the cabin door.

  “Oh, Captain!”

  Heck removed his hand from the door handle and turned back.

  “Sir?”

  The General stood and returned a quick salute.

  “If you get booted out of the army for this, may I suggest that you do not go into politics?”

  “Politics sir…good lord, no. One couldn’t possibly stand the strain of being so insufferably right all the time!”

  Germany: 0022hrs, 7th April

  At 45,000’ above Germany this night, eighteen Tu-160 stealth bombers carried eight Spetznaz troopers apiece in their bomb bays rather than explosive ordnance. The troopers’ individual heated cocoons had been jury rigged along with the oxygen supply. Team Five’s leader had her knees drawn up to her chest, in an effort to keep warm.

  Far below them, the NATO army’s withdrawal to a line that ran from Wismar on the Baltic coast, along the Elbe and Saale rivers to the Danube, had displaced over a million people who were fleeing west.

  The unadvertised and sudden pulling back beyond Berlin had taken most unawares and unprepared, those citizens of Berlin who had been too slow or disbelieving to act, now had new masters.

  Autobahns and roads that were banned to all civilian traffic had seen riots at some intersections. In one ugly incident, an American Military Policeman had been shot to death by a handgun wielding investment banker in a Porsche. The banker had been alone in the car, having left his wife asleep and driven in early for work. On seeing the troops pulling out he’d chosen to carry right on driving west. When bribery failed to get him onto the autobahn he’d resorted to murder which got him 10km further westward, driving at 120mph along the hard shoulder as he’d torn past NATO vehicles. At the next intersection was another Military Police TP (Traffic Post) where the colleagues of the murdered policeman had been alerted by radio. The Porsche was travelling too fast to stop if they had waved it down, perhaps the MPs tried, and then again perhaps they didn’t. Crews of the vehicles heading west to the new defence line turned their heads to look at the debris trail and mangled wreckage that had resulted from a single short burst from an M-60 machine gun.

  Team Five’s leader acknowledged an intercom message and switched on her own oxygen supply contained in a chest rig, before disconnecting from the Tupelov’s. As the aircraft began to circle she activated her suit's heating system and waited until she felt it take effect, the battery supply for it would only last thirty minutes at these temperatures so she hurried. Struggling from her cocoon into the limited space of the bomb bay she opened the cocoons occupied by her subordinates. The cold was a bitter, bone penetrating thing that sought to switch off the human body from the extremities inwards, despite their thermal clothing.

  The fourth and fifth cocoons she opened revealed dead troopers, one male and one female, the oxygen supply to the first had failed, whilst the woman had frozen to death somewhere over the Baltic when her cocoon’s heating system had failed, the cold had sent her into a sleep from which she had never awoken.

  The six surviving Spetznaz troopers attached their equipment, parachute harnesses and weapons rolls before securing the cocoons. Explosive and other equipment from the dead trooper’s loads were divided up amongst the living.

  There was nowhere to secure the bodies of their comrades and equipment so they were placed on the aft end of the bomb bay doors. At a command from the team leader the Tupelov’s pilot throttled back and pulled back the nose to +10’.

  At 60 knots above stall, the bay doors opened briefly before closing again and the pilot lowered the nose to –10’, opening the throttles once more to gain airspeed before turning for home.

  As rehearsed, the team immediately diverged when dropped into space, putting distance between themselves and comrades with whom a mid-air collision would likely be fatal in the pitch dark.

  Tumbling away toward the earth, the bodies and equipment of their dead colleagues would fall into a wood and open farmland a half kilometre apart.

  Solid cloud cover prevented them seeing anything of the ground below them; the blackout meant that there was no glow through the cloud that might indicate the street lighting of urban areas.

  In a clearing within the Teutoburg Forest, a radio beacon switched rapidly between frequencies as it transmitted, preventing counter-intelligence efforts from recognising it as such and obtaining a fix on its location, or that of the seventeen others that were transmitting.

  The team stayed in free-fall until the first wing shaped canopy opened at 11,000’, the remaining canopies opened at 500’ intervals after that.

  Steering in ever decreasing circles, guided by their instruments they entered the cloud one by one.

  The only lights visible anywhere were those of a few scattered refugees’ campfires as the leader emerged through the cloud’s base. She aligned her canopy in the direction her receiver told her the beacon was and turned a switch on the receiver’s side. A strobing light appeared far below and slightly to her right but she raised her goggles to check and she could no longer see it with the naked eye. Satisfied, she lowered the goggles back into place and the light reappeared.

  She was gathering up the folds of her canopy amidst young ferns at the edge of the clearing, when the next member of the team landed beside the beacon, coming to a halt after a half dozen running steps. The team member immediately vacated the centre of the clearing as she had done, moving inside the trees with the canopy in his arms.

  Working in silence the leader stripped off her parachute harness, chest rig, goggles, oxygen mask and outer garments. She withdrew a radio headset and swing mike, a pair of night goggles and associated power pack from her equipment bag and put them on before replacing her helmet, but she did not acknowledge the second team member when he collected her discarded items. Aided by his own goggles he placed her chute and discards with his own, before unfolding an entrenching tool and enlarging the cavity made by the roots of a fallen tree. At roughly thirty second intervals the team members landed in the clearing and added their gear to the growing pile beside the hole. Not a word was spoken by any of them as they went through well-practised drills, making the minimum of noise as they did so.

  Fifteen minutes after the last member was down the entrenching tool was put away and the team members lined up behind the leader who finished plugging in her headset and adjusting the harness attached to her weapon. After a quick radio check to ensure all their short
-range radios were sending and receiving, she led them off into the depths of the forest.

  After twenty minutes they neared the site of an old, disused quarry and stopped. An electronic sweep of the air was made for anything untoward within a two-mile radius. If a radio or mobile phone had even been switched on then they would have known about it. In pairs, four of the team made a physical sweep, circling the area outside the quarry before approaching it, now satisfied that no GSG9 ambush lay in wait. They entered not from the track that led to it, but from the quarry’s lip, one pair abseiling to the ground whilst the other pair took up firing positions.

  Working rapidly but with as much care as time allowed, the pair in the quarry searched for bombs and booby-traps before giving the all-clear forty minutes later.

  The team leader crossed the quarry floor and entered a solidly constructed concrete building set against the rock wall of an older, worked-out section of the quarry. The heavy steel doors that bore the standard warnings about smoking near high explosives were open and she entered, walking to the rear wall where a false wall of prefabricated steel had been removed, revealing a chamber hewn from the rock. The first pair of troopers had already removed the dust covers from the vehicles within, after ensuring the German security services had not discovered, and then booby-trapped the quarry and its contents.

  The pair of vehicles started first time, and they drove from the quarry, stopping briefly to collect their sentries who had recovered the climbing rope and made their way to the track.

  One hour’s drive brought them to a slope overlooking the autobahn E73 and the British military police post which controlled that section of it. They were two troopers short of the planned contingent but they adjusted their roster accordingly and once the vehicles were camouflaged their OP regime began and they obtained communications with other teams via mobile phone.

  Colonel General Alontov waited for the T-80 battle tank to come to a full stop before approaching it. The tank commander was grinning broadly as he removed his helmet and hoisted himself from the out of the turret’s hatch to clamber down the side of the turret and jump down beside Serge. They clapped each other on the shoulders and hugged.

  “It is so good to find you still in one piece comrade colonel general!”

  They were stood in the street outside the apartment store that Serge had moved his headquarters to from the hotel, armoured vehicles of the 6th Guards Shock Army moved past them as other vehicles from 11th Guards Tank Regiment's command element drew up behind their regimental commanders ‘vehicle.

  As much as SACEUR would have liked to have pounded on the Russian’s in the city and its suburbs more thoroughly, his air and artillery assets were fully committed in assisting all his units break contact. The Czech 2nd Shock Army and Russian 4th Guards Shock Army to the east, and the Russian parachute brigade around Leipzig airport had been dissuaded and prevented from exploiting his unit’s vulnerability in their tricky disengagement manoeuvres.

  6th Guards Shock Army had thundered through Poland unopposed, occupying Berlin before it slowed, allowing the 2nd Czech and Russian 4th Guards Shock who had bypassed Leipzig in pursuit of the NATO units that had opposed them in the east, to also attempt to cut off the NATO forces withdrawing from the north.

  NATO’s northern units slipped away before the manoeuvre could be completed, and the 6th continued its journey south, occupying other towns and cities bypassed by the preceding armies.

  As the relieving tank regiment's vehicles passed through their lines, Serge Alontov’s airborne division’s soldiers abandoned their positions and began moving to assembly points. They had two days now in which to reorganise and reconstitute before their next combat drop.

  ‘Amateurs talk tactics whilst Professionals practice logistics’, is a term used often in military colleges and academies around the world.

  The practice of an army needing to forage for its own food didn’t work very well even three thousand years ago, when supply needs were more basic, before a QM (Tech) was necessary. It did little to win the hearts and minds of the citizens being liberated or conquered/incorporated or generally being put upon by transient foreign armies enroute from their own turf to someone else’s. It often meant that starving soldiers fell victim to dysentery and disease, the trail of wasted and diseased bodies beside the road pointing the way that the army had gone.

  Rome had the problem sussed out, although they probably stole the idea from the Persians who in turn had copied it from China. A logistics corps to follow the army, and set up the supply depots to keep the bread and arrows coming.

  In the area of Germany known as Westphalia, south of the River Weser lies the Teutoburg Forest, where Roman expansion came to a crashing halt forever. Ten thousand veteran legionnaires and twenty thousand Roman citizens were slaughtered, and their bodies nailed to tree trunks in the Teutoburg Wald. However, it was poor leadership rather than supply problems that caused their end in that case.

  In more modern times that area became the stamping ground of BAOR, the British Army of the Rhine during the Cold War, and a smaller presence by the British still remains.

  Running southwest/northeast through the area is Autobahn E73, which had become the key MSR, the abbreviated way of saying Main Supply Route in military terms. The MSR is the artery that supplies the troops and in the British Army, as with most, the task of reconnoitring possible supply routes, organising harbour areas, detours, POL points (petrol, oil and lubricants), signing the route and controlling the traffic on it, falls to the military police.

  Traffic Posts (TP’s) are set along its route at critical points, where progress is reported and ‘pointsmen’ on traffic control wave their arms about an awful lot in all weathers.

  Part of the daily routine is ‘route maintenance’, traversing the area of responsibility to replace stolen or missing route signs, ensuring none of the signs are altered by Fifth Columnists, and ‘thickening up’ by adding additional route signs in among the existing ones.

  At only section strength in each location, the Redcaps still had to ‘stag on’ along with their other duties, providing local defence from attack on the ground and warning of air attack on the MSR and their own locations.

  352 Provost Coy, RMP (V) had travelled from their south London TA centre two weeks before, following route signs placed by another reservist Royal Military Police company. The company had arrived at Harwich where the Royal Navy had transported them aboard the LST, Sir Richard de’ Aquitaine to Zeebrugge where they had driven their long wheel base Landrovers off the tank deck and down the LST’s ramp on to Belgian soil, or rather concrete. Immediately upon arrival they had driven to the German frontier, stopping only to refuel and change drivers.

  352 Provost Coy’s war role was that of signing the MSR from the frontier as far as Hanover, where they handed it off to the MPs of the US Army. Until the fall of the Warsaw Pact it had been a role they had practiced every year, as NATO went through the annual motions of reinforcing Europe and resoundingly defeating the Red Army just prior to the scheduled ‘Endex’. Twelve years on from the last time the company had done this there were few soldiers remaining within its ranks with experience in the task.

  The military route signs consisted of black boards, and the name of the particular route would either be a three-letter word printed in white, for axial routes travelling between the front and rear area, or a simple symbol - such as a square or circle - for the routes travelling laterally across the theatre of operations White arrows on a black background indicated the direction if travel to the drivers.

  Before the first convoys reached the front, thousands of these boards had to be attached to 3’ steel pickets that were hammered into roadside verges or attached to trees and street furniture with wire ties. In the instruction given to young soldiers in how to correctly sign a route they are told to tilt the sign forward a degree or ten, to prevent its being read from the air, which sounds fine in theory and works for those signs on pickets, but just try it o
n a lamppost, a street sign or a tree.

  Back with 352 (V), in the first few days, mistakes had been made and bollockings delivered at all levels before the kinks had been ironed out, but not before one route signing party committed the greatest sin in signing, they screwed up their time appreciation for completing the task by failing to allow for mishaps. Three punctures and still five miles short of the planned release point, one of the signing party sighted the first convoy cresting a hill far behind. Half an hour later it crested another, much closer this time. The junior NCO in charge of the party grew more and more frantic, his people worked like Trojans but it was to no avail, the convoy caught up with them two miles from the release point. The commanding officer of the infantry battalion in the convoy was riding in a Landrover at its head; he stopped beside the RMP vehicle just long enough to obtain the name, regimental number and unit of the junior NCO in charge of the signing task. Then the convoy continued on with, of course, squaddies in the backs of the vehicles leaning out and jeering, derisively making the visual sign for ‘wankers’ as they did so. Fourteen days on and vehicles in the road convoys were running along ‘Nut’ route, ‘NUT (Up)’ with the supplies and reinforcements, then back along ‘NUT (Down)’ to the Belgian port of Zeebrugge to collect fresh loads.

  No. 2 Section, 1 Platoon, 352 Provost Coy occupied a TP on ‘NUT’. The MSR at this point ran along Autobahn E73 near the British garrisons at Bielefeld and Gutersloh, where convoys were directed to the Bielefeld turn-off to refuel at the garrison’s POL point before continuing to the front or on to RAF Gutersloh, if that was the destination of their supplies.