by Andy Farman
Lt Col Reed was not entirely happy with their position, true though that they had the Elbe to their front and right, the canal running east/west on their left, but a branch of the canal also ran behind them into Magdeburg.
The battalion and its attached units were effectively on an island surrounded by water and the bridge carrying the A2 over the canal to their rear was their only means of withdrawal. It was unlikely that the enemy would deliberately drop the bridge to the west, but accidents can happen.
The last NATO units withdrawing from positions around Berlin had passed through their position just before 9pm the previous day, US Army military police had been the very last to cross. Behind the MPs had been a horde of fleeing humanity, desperate to cross the river but the engineers orders were to blow it after the last MP vehicle reached the western bank.
Guardsmen and airborne troopers had tried to persuade the engineers to keep the bridge up until the enemy had appeared; to allow as many civilians to escape as possible, but the bridge had been blown as ordered.
The Autobahn’s bridge, like most post war bridges in Germany, had been built with demolition in mind, for an occasion such as this; cavities for demolition charges were built in to the design.
The first refugee had been 500m from the bridge when it had gone up, and once the rubble and dust cleared refugees stood on the shattered eastern ramp, staring silently at the safety of the western bank, now denied to them.
As the Major in command of the demolition team had pointed out, Spetznaz and fifth columnists were causing havoc with the lines of communication, and they just couldn’t take the chance that some of them were using the refugees as cover, to seize the bridge for their own forces to cross over.
Most of the refugees had moved on, trying to find other ways across but several hundred had camped out on the eastern bank, oblivious to the danger that they were in.
The refugees also posed a hazard to the security of the NATO troops still on the far bank, acting as a tripwire for enemy troops advancing ahead of the main force. The battalion had a listening post out, well dug-in and cammed up but several times refugees foraging for firewood had walked over the hide.
Big Stef was in the hide, just over a mile east of the river. His new partner was a battlefield replacement, a ‘stab’, stupid TA bastard at that, not even a Guardsman. Bill had green Velcro patches on his camouflage smock under his ghillie suit that were missing the ‘RMP’ flash that once sat there. It was bad enough that the man was a copper in civilian life without advertising his ‘weekend monkey’ hobby too, so the flashes were deep inside his bergen. Stef didn’t know how well Bill could shoot yet, he wasn’t entirely happy with the staff sergeant's field craft but to be fair he hadn’t had a lot of practice, and it did seem to be improving as old lessons were remembered. He did know that Bill was an SCO19 firearms instructor so he hoped the man could hit what he aimed at. The last crop of replacements had joined them during the final day at Leipzig airport. Most were ex-regs but there were a few from TA infantry regiments whose establishments rendered them too small to take the field as formed units so they were battlefield replacements. Bill was the only non-infantry wallah, posted in to bolster the under-strength sniper contingent.
Bill seemed pleasant enough, but Stef was no stranger to being on the receiving end of Queens Regulations, he didn’t like ‘monkeys’ much, as squaddies called the Redcaps.
Bill was the first to spot the Russian eight wheeled BTR-80A; it was taking advantage of the slope down toward the river to coast along the autobahn with its engine idling. Big Stef listened as Bill called in a real live fire mission for the first time in his service, and grudgingly accepted that it was faultless. Two and a bit minutes later the BTR-80’s, 280hp KamAZ-7403, engine roared as it propelled it backwards to escape the mortar rounds that had been called in.
“I think it’s time to foxtrot oscar, Bill.” Stef pushed away the turf and wood hatch at the rear of the hide, checking that the coast was clear before pulling himself out and reaching back in for their Bergens, which Bill passed up to him.
The sniper’s ghillie suits were lined with thermal suppressant hessian, this lowered their heat signatures rather than eliminated them completely, and the face and hands would still show up on a thermal imager. The strips of overlaid cloth, designed to break up recognisable shapes hung off them as they crawled toward dead ground that would give them cover from view from the autobahn.
They skirted a hastily erected refugee shantytown as they neared the river; it was spread along the fields bordering the river and had to be bypassed. Both soldiers walked quietly so as not to draw the attention of the refugees in their tents and brushwood and fertiliser bag shelters.
On reaching the bank they took cover whilst Stef called up the far side for a small assault boat to collect them. The mortar fire landing a mile away had roused the refugees who either made preparations to move on before the dawn or whispered in frightened tones to one another.
The sound of twin outboard motors got the attention of the refugees as the assault boat approached the eastern bank; it prompted a stampede toward the spot it was heading for.
“Oh, bugger…this doesn’t look good,” said Bill as he used his night goggles to try and work out which would arrive first, desperate civilians or their transport.
There was little doubt in either soldier’s mind that it could get ugly, pretty bloody quickly and they backed up to the water's edge with their weapons in their shoulders. As the assault boat reversed its engines to prevent its impact with the river bank, the leading knot of refugees got to within 30m of them and Stef fired a round above their heads. It stopped them all in their tracks, except for one woman who paused only momentarily. She had a bundle in her arms and the man next to him held a small boy, the couple were breathing heavily from the exertion of running. There was a rapid exchange of German between the couple and the man obviously didn’t want to relinquish the boy at first, but she spoke sharply at him, before changing to a much softer tone. The pounding of feet was getting louder as the larger group of refugees began to catch up, and the man lowered the boy to the ground. Taking the boy's hand the woman hurried forward towards the snipers, ignoring the levelled weapons. “Bitte, bitte,” was all she said over and over until she reached Bill’s side. At first he thought she wanted to come with them, but she thrust the bundle at him, forcing him to lower the rifle and nestle the bundle in his left arm. Turning to Big Stef she picked up the boy, who couldn’t have been older than three or four and held him out to the soldier. Big Stef kept his rifle levelled at the crowd whilst trying to avoid eye contact with her.
With a slight bump the assault boat nudged the bank behind them.
“Are you people comin’ or not?” a testy voice asked from the boat.
“Jesus wept!” Stef finally said under his breath. “Cover the people on the bank!” he shouted over his shoulder. As he heard a weapon in the boat being cocked he lowered his own and took the child from the German woman.
“Danke…danke shon!” she whispered and she kissed him on the cheek before turning away, a hand to her mouth and shoulders hunched as she walked back toward her partner who came forward, put his arms about her and led her into the crowd, out of sight of the children they had given up.
Stef and Bill got into the boat, which reversed away from the bank as a great tide of refugees arrived, shouting imploringly at them. The boats cox’n opened the throttles and brought them around, heading back to friendly lines. About a thousand people now lined the bank, many were crying as they saw salvation departing.
In the dark neither Stef nor Bill could see the faces of the cox’n or the Royal Engineer sapper who was riding shotgun. “Bollocks…I feel really unclean.” the sapper said at last to no one in particular.
The small boy sat bewildered and frightened between the strange soldier’s knees as the boat bounced along, he winced and looked up fearfully as Stef ruffled his hair. Stef looked over at the shape of Bill.
“What you got there?”
Bill was unwrapping the bundle and uncovered a tiny face, his nose wrinkled at about the same time.
“It’s a shitting machine of indeterminate sex, I think?”
“Well the Razman is just going to love this…not!”
41 20 N 100 20 E: Same time
Shuang Cheng-Tzu, the ‘East Wind launch facility’ of the People’s Republic of China’s space program, near Jiuquan in Kansu Province on the southern rim of the Gobi Desert, was constructed in 1963 on the orders of Chairman Mao.
The facility’s two hundred-something buildings along thirty miles of the Etsin River are built from materials brought in along a spur line of the Urumcji-Lanzhou rail line. The railway is virtually the only way to reach the facility and the PRC’s ICBM silos that are also sited in the region.
It is one of the most inaccessible and well-defended regions of mainland China and right now it was the focus of a great deal of activity.
Twelve ‘Long March 4’ boosters were in various stages of assembly, whilst a thirteenth and fourteenth sat on their individual pads. The facility held six launch pads but was using only two, although launches would be separate events, so as not to alarm the West as to exactly what was going up.
The Swiss Embassy in Beijing was notified that over the next 48hrs, the PRC would be launching ‘weather satellites’ in order to monitor the effects of the nuclear weapons detonated in the Atlantic ‘by the warlike western powers’.
The Swiss passed on the word to NATO but at USAF’s hardened space command bunker in South Dakota, they watched closely via a low orbit satellite as the Chinese vehicle broke through the clouds. Everything indicated that it was a normal operation to lift a satellite into low orbit, as did the remaining twelve over the next few hours.
No one seriously believed that the Chinese needed thirteen weather satellites to monitor the exceptional cloud cover that now covered a larger portion of the planet than ever previously recorded. Best guess was that they were increasing their stocks of orbiting communications and surveillance satellites, since the US had started knocking them down. When Russia also put another eight satellites up, without warning but at hourly intervals, the same thoughts applied there too. However, once all twenty-one were aloft they began radical manoeuvres, using up irreplaceable fuel at an extravagant rate.
Although rocket scientists were involved, it did not take the brains of one to work out that the ‘weather satellites’ were far from harmless instrument packages.
The President was in the middle of a videoconference with the European leaders when Joseph, his CSA interrupted him.
“Mr President?” he said from out of camera shot. When the President looked around, the CSA made a zipping motion across pursed lips before making thumbs down gesture.
“Gentlemen…General Shaw is going to sit in for a minute or two whilst I take a call in the next room.”
The ‘next room’ in this case was the bathroom that adjoined the videoconferencing suite. “Joseph, even married guys with kids get talked about if they follow other guys to the john…what’s the problem?”
“Sir, Russia and China today launched twenty-one satellites between them, we assumed they were in response to our anti-sat missions, thickening up their available units, however they are now moving into positions which we predict will allow then to intercept our own.”
“Killer satellites?”
“Yes Mr President, either particle beam or kinetic energy weapons, an attack on our satellites is now in progress…space command has already started altering orbits. It takes up one hell of a lot of computer time to work out new ones where they can still do the job for us.”
“What’s the bottom line Joseph?”
“The bottom line sir is that we are going to lose some assets up there…either to their weapons or simply by running out of fuel through playing kiss-chase in outer space.”
“So which ones are they going for,” asked the President. “Surveillance or communications?”
“Surveillance sir or our RORSATs to be specific. There’s a lot less for the other type to look at since Grease Spot. I think we will see more launches before long, they will come for our COMSATs next.”
“Do our allies know?”
The CSA nodded in affirmation. “Yes Mr President, right now the low orbit above this planet resembles the freeway filled with drunk drivers.”
TSC-16 was an old satellite inasmuch as its fuel tanks were dry; it could no longer stave off the pull of the earth’s gravity by adjusting the height of its orbit. Operated by La Marine Nationale, the French Navy, it was sweeping across the Atlantic when it ran into a wall and died three months earlier than its operators expected.
Stalingrad-05 had launched just three hours before and had the easy task of destroying the French sitting duck. The Russian satellite was little more than a shotgun with a single shot capability, radar, remote control, fuel tanks and manoeuvring jets strapped on. The ‘buckshot’ was in the form of 10,000 tiny cubes of aluminium that were fired into its target's predicted path by the self-destruction of the Russian satellite. The cubes of aluminium did not need to be weighty, as indeed they weren’t.
Stalingrad-05 had matched orbits with TSC-16 and rotated about its axis to point its business end at the French satellite 400 miles behind. 9,997 pieces of buckshot in the gradually expanding cloud of metal missed TSC-16 completely, but the quarter-tonne satellite was travelling at 38,000mph when it impacted with three, one half-ounce cubes, and disintegrated in rather spectacular form.
CHAPTER TWO
South of Byaroza, Belarus: 0310hrs, same day.
However things were going in space, the Pacific or the rest of Europe, it was all of little interest to the Belarus armed forces. Having worked out a rather bold plan with the Poles, they were now in dire straits.
The loyal Belarus numbered seven under-strength motor rifle regiments, and three armoured regiments, shadows of their former selves, plus artillery and engineers. Three divisions worth of men and equipment lay wrecked and mangled, dead and burnt out between their present positions, and the banks of the Dnieper.
Since the battle on the Dnieper at the start of the war, they had fought one other major battle, which had been in defence of Minsk, the capital. That had been a delaying action, allowing as many as possible to flee the city, but it had cost them dearly.
Poland had agreed to come to their aid in a plan devised by the Belorussians, which called for the Belarus forces to make a fighting withdrawal southwest, drawing the enemy on as they did so. It had been a running battle interjected with counter-attacks to cause the most hurt to an enemy superior in number.
The Poles were then meant to punch out due east, outflanking the enemy before curling around to the southwest to strike them in the rear, severing their logistical support train as they did so. It would probably have worked too, had not an enemy covert operation decapitated the Polish government and High Command.
Polish forces had crossed the border, but under the command of men who knew the names, addresses and whereabouts of every member of every Polish soldier’s family. The Polish troops could either fight their former allies or their loved ones would die.
The Poles were to the west and northwest of the Belorussian army, the Ukrainians to the south and the Russians were rolling in from Minsk, to the northeast. The Belorussians who had gone over to the other side at the outbreak of war were also present, but they had been incorporated into the Russian ranks after heavy losses at the hands of their countrymen.
The remains of the Belarus army were now centred on the tiny hamlet of Zditovo, with three lakes in a roughly triangular pattern, providing flank anchors.
Major Johar Kegin, a pilot without an air force, was now a foot soldier in command of an infantry platoon, a post that called for a lieutenant’s rank, but the battalion commander was never going to let him run anything larger. Kegin had a professional to do the real thinking, Sgt Topl, a career infantryman with
no apparent sense of humour. All Johar had to do was look confident and encourage the troops, the sergeant at his elbow told him what to say and do.
Johar’s platoon was part of the 11th Motor Rifle Regiment, and they with the 6th MRR were dug-in facing slightly north of east. On the northwest side of the triangle the 7th MRR and 19th MRR had the narrowest frontage, but the boggiest ground to defend. The widest was held by 4th, 23rd and a composite regiment comprising the remnants of 2nd, 10th, 12th MRR, 1st Airfield Defence Regiment and the gunners of several batteries that no longer had ammunition for their pieces. Every unit there also had cooks, drivers, air force personnel and civilian volunteers in their ranks.
Before their positions lay some of the most expensive tank traps in the world, towed artillery pieces with their breech blocks removed, were in clusters designed to channel the enemy into killing fields. They had more guns than they had ammunition for, so the rounds were distributed to the self-propelled batteries and the remainder had disabled their guns before joining the ranks of the infantry. Thin ditches had been dug in front of the positions, too shallow to offer real cover to an enemy. Rain had fallen all night, covering their narrow bottoms and drumming off the barrels beside them.
The army’s soft skinned transport was either submerged or poking above the surface of the lakes, just off the banks where they had been pushed to deter or hinder amphibious flanking attacks by APCs and light tanks. Although their fuel tanks had been drained of diesel for the armour, and petrol for field defences, the oil from the waterlogged engine blocks and sumps polluted the surface of the lakes.
To the rear of the foxhole that Johar shared with Sgt Topl was a T-72, dug-in in the hull down position as a static pillbox. It had just enough fuel to provide power for its turret; the rest had been siphoned off for their best tanks, the least badly damaged. Johar’s armoured neighbour was just one of over thirty tanks and APCs that now provided strongpoints in the defence. Eighteen tanks and twelve APCs constituted the mobile reserve, held ready to plug any gaps that may appear in the defensive lines.