'Advance to Contact' (Armageddon's Song)

by Andy Farman

  The establishment of the platoon was supposed to be one officer and thirty-six men, two hours ago however it had stood at one and twenty-one. When Johar got back to their foxhole he reported to the company CP that it now stood at one and sixteen. There were no wounded, when only a head and shoulders are exposed above ground the majority of injuries are traumatic head wounds.

  Near the village at the centre of the Belarus position, the defenders’ three remaining SP batteries completed their relocation and brought their guns around on new bearings and elevations, one fired a counter-battery mission whilst the other two concentrated on the armoured assault closing from two sides.

  In their holes in the ground the defenders peered across the open ground into the darkness, officers tasked with watching for amphibious armour approaching from the far side of the lakes didn’t notice the twenty men emerging silently from beneath the surface.

  The re-breather sets that the Spetznaz troopers wore did not emit tell-tale bubbles of exhaled air as aqua-lung gear did. The sets and flippers they wore were discarded close to the shore before the troopers even broke the surface and crawled ashore, pulling bundles after themselves and with weapons ready.

  The ZSUs that had come to the assistance of Johar’s defence line withdrew to reload; the APCs collected their dismounts and pulled back too, leaving the infantry to prepare themselves for the next attack.

  The stationary tanks wanted to start doing their jobs as soon as possible and called up the mortars for more para-illum; it took longer for the flare to illuminate the battlefield, igniting further away behind the enemy so as to silhouette them.

  The moment the Belarus T-72s had targets that they could see, they began tracking the lead tanks, 800m away and closing.

  The Russian T-80s were superior fighting vehicles in comparison to the Belorussian machines, but they relied on their thermal sights at night and the defending AFVs’ engines were idling, just batteries producing power for the radios, plus, they were hull down with engine decks below ground level.

  Johar and Topl cursed and covered their ears when the T-72 behind them suddenly opened fire. The engines may not have given off clear heat signatures but the hot muzzle blasts told them where to look, and after just two rounds the Belarus tanks barrels glowed in the Russians thermal sights.

  Another para-illum was put up to augment the one already up, and the Russian tanks began to return fire. Johar and Topl ducked again as the T-72 fired, the sound of its gun merged with that of a loud ripping sound in the air and the T-72’s turret rang like a bell as a Russian sabot round glanced off its side. A second sabot ploughed a furrow into the muddy ground beside the tank, which fired back at its attackers.

  The approaching enemy armour was close enough now that the defenders could see infantry crouched on the engine decks behind the turrets of the tanks and jogging behind, using the vehicles' armoured bulk as cover. These infantry were the ones they had driven off a little while earlier, quadrupling the infantry already carried in the enemy MRR’s APCs .

  Artillery began to land near Johar once more and they crawled into their shelter bay and huddled again on the mud floor.

  On the south-western line the barrage lifted, shifting fire to the, as yet unaffected north-western positions. The infantry scrambled from their shelter bays and began to engage the armour with their few remaining anti-tank weapons at a range of 200m.

  The Belarus commander decided to split his reserve force in two, to bolster the defence on the two sides threatened by the Russians and Ukrainians. Ideally he would have liked to have some reserve to play with, but it was now an all or nothing situation. He turned from the map and snapped his new orders to his staff officer. Outside the barn in the wet night, four shadowy figures sprinted away into the darkness. In the mud lay four bodies, dispatched by head shots from sound suppressed weapons, the eyes of all four were open and mirrored each other’s expressions of surprise as they gazed unseeing at the bleak wet setting they had ended their lives in.

  Four shaped charges, one placed against each corner of the barn robbed the structure of its integrity. Shattered stone, propelled by the blasts at 200mph tore into soft tissue inside the structure a second before the walls and roof caved in.

  Two batteries of 2S1 "Gvozdika" 122mm self-propelled howitzers and one battery of 2S3 "Akatsiya" 152mm guns were all that the Belarus retained for artillery support. The 122mm were engaged against the advancing MRRs whilst the 152mm battery received range and bearing to the enemy guns from a battlefield radar via the main CP. When the flow of information to the big guns suddenly halted, the battery commander used his initiative and shifted fire to the southwest.

  The 9M111 Fagot is an infantry portable anti-tank weapon similar to the Milan and TOW systems, weighing 38kg with missile attached, it has a range of 2,500m and can penetrate 60mm of steel plate. The 2S3 Akatsiya’s armour was only 20mm in depth. The Big SPs were lowering their barrels to the new elevation when the hatches of the vehicle on the extreme left blew off, followed immediately afterwards by a catastrophic explosion that blew the big artillery piece apart. The remaining vehicle commanders ordered the drivers to move, believing that counter battery fire had at last found them.

  The Spetznaz troopers operating the Fagot took only twenty-four seconds to detach the empty launcher and attach a fresh one, they worked from left to right, aiming through the thermal sight and keeping the crosshairs on the spot they wanted to hit. The anti-armour missiles followed the data fed to them through the filament of wire that trailed behind, linking them to the weapons sight. Wherever the crosshairs were laid, that is where the missiles struck.

  Whilst the battery's guns were being taken out, two five-axle support vehicles with reloads stacked on their flatbeds, and the battery commanders BTR-80 command vehicle came under intense fire from two pairs of troopers armed with stubby OTs-14 Groza assault weapons. The troopers first fired 40mm grenades from the Groza’s underslung grenade launcher through the open rear doors of the BTR and in to the truck’s cabs, before flipping the fire selectors and emptying 5.56mm Teflon coated rounds into the survivors.

  In less than four minutes the 152mm guns were wrecked and burning in the night as the troopers picked up their launcher and reloads, heading off toward the sound of the nearest 122mm batteries guns.

  As soon as the barrage landing on their positions switched to the rear, Sgt Topl was out of the shelter bay and peering over the foxholes parapet, the lead AFVs were less than 200m away. To the left of the platoon position, a large shell crater occupied the spot where two riflemen had once been, creating a wide gap between themselves and their neighbouring Platoon on that side.

  “Major…come on, we’re going forward!” he shouted into the shelter bay. Johar saw the sergeant’s legs disappear as the man left the trench, so he crawled out of the shelter bay and began to pull himself out also before stopping. The ammunition boxes were inside the bay, they would need them very soon so he stopped midway out of the foxhole, ducking back under the low roof to retrieve them.

  Behind them in the T-72, the air stank of burnt propellant and the sweat of fear as the commander brought the turret around slightly to bear on a T-80 whose self-stabilised gun was pointing unerringly at them. He lowered the sights, aiming for the junction of turret and body when the T-80 fired, its depleted uranium round struck the Belarus tank squarely and the T-72’s own ammunition exploded.

  Johar was dragging the ammunition boxes clear of the shelter when the round struck like a thunderclap. Instinct propelled him headfirst back into the shelter bay, where he curled into a protective ball.

  The T-72s turret parted company with the rest of the fighting vehicle, punched upwards by the simultaneous detonation of the tank’s ready loads.

  The weight of its gun barrel tipped it over the horizontal plane and the turret performed a semi somersault, slamming down on Johar’s foxhole, eighteen tons of steel sealing it like a tomb.

  Sgt Topl was a third of the way to the late Rudik
’s trench when the T-72 exploded. Crouching low he peered back at the tank and witnessed the turret slam down onto the foxhole he had just vacated, sinking about a foot into the soft earth. He opened his mouth to shout the major’s name but stopped, with a regretful shake of his head he looked back to the front, crawling the rest of the way to the left flank’s foxhole.

  7.62mm rounds from the nearest tank stitched a line across the ground near him and he tumbled headfirst into the empty foxhole, landing amidst the remains of the soldier who had shared it with Rudik. His nose curled in distaste at the smell and the gore that smeared him as he pulled himself upright.

  Russian infantry were jumping off the rear of the tanks, some were hit in mid-air by the defender's fire, their bodies losing co-ordination and tumbling to the ground like puppets without strings. Topl fired bursts into the infantry nearest to him; their return fire was heavy but not terribly accurate.

  They huddled as close to the tank's armoured sides as they could, firing from the hip as they kept pace with it.

  As Topl changed mags the enemy had moved close enough to throw grenades and one exploded on the parapet, shrapnel struck the side of his helmet, knocking him sideways back into the mud and gore. His head span and as he tried to climb to his knees, he could hear nothing but a roaring sound in his ears. Topl vomited and dug his fingers into the earthen walls of the foxhole, seeking some point of stability but the roaring sound increased. What light there was eclipsed by the Russian T-80 driving over the foxhole and stopping, Topl looked up and then screamed as the tank began to turn in place, collapsing the foxholes walls, filling his mouth with damp soil and stilling his voice forever.

  Nevada Desert: 1823hrs, 8th April.

  General Shaw presented the plan that would involve US Green Berets, Britain’s Special Air Service Regiment’s Mountain Troop and their Royal Marines Mountain & Arctic Warfare Cadre, B2 Spirit Bombers and the Philippines Air Force facilities on Mindanao. Several thousand miles away in Russia, a covert team would already have been inserted by some of the same B2 bombers along with F-117A Nighthawks. At sea, eight SSN’s would be hunting for the PLAN ballistic missile submarine.

  “What we are juggling with here sir, are limited resources and critical timing. The B2s giving tanker support to the Russian operation, Guillotine, have to be repositioned in the Philippines to tank the B2s that will be taking in the ground troops for Equaliser, that’s what we are calling the China op. Once the ground forces for Equaliser, have been inserted, the B2s have to reconfigure back to their bombing role.” He fixed the President with a look.

  “I don’t like complex ops Mr President, the simpler they are, the less that can go wrong and this is about as complex as they come. It’s a three-piece op, at sea, in China and in Russia. If one falls down, they all fall down…I don’t like it but it is the only option open to us at the moment, sir.”

  The President nodded.

  “I am familiar with Guillotine Henry, I heard about it before you did,” he smiled smugly, it wasn’t often the chief executive knew of military matters before the chairman of the joint chiefs. “Guillotine is being handled the old fashioned way, on paper. I don’t trust these damn computers since China got into them, so how have you been planning this?”

  “Sir, we are using stand-alone's, no network, no Internet.”

  “Good, good…tell me about this submarine?”

  “Sir, the Xia is a home grown vessel, not a Russian cast-off. She displaces 7,000 tons submerged, has a crew of one hundred and four. Nuclear reactor, two steam turbines and a single screw that is capable of producing 22 knots, flat out. She completed an extensive overhaul two years ago to enable her to carry their new JL-2 SLBM, submarine launched ballistic missile. The JL-2 has a range of 5,200 miles with a payload of four, 3-megaton independent re-entry vehicles each. The Xia carries twelve of these missiles. When at sea, she is always escorted by two Han Class SSNs, which are also PLAN designed and built. The PLAN had four Han Class, one is laid up with reactor problems, and the Royal Navy’s HMS Hood sank another in the North Pacific. And this…” General Shaw handed an aerial photograph across of a submarine on the surface.

  The President took out his spectacles and put them on. “…This was taken by a light aircraft just after dawn, at the start of the invasion of Luzon, in the Philippines.” The General informed him. “Those men on the aft casing are commandos launching rubber boats…something which should be done at night, but maybe they had problems and launched their attack late. The point I am trying to make is this... PLAN was hardly going to have their precious Xia nearby, so the one sunk by Hood had to be part of the Xia’s escort. We know the exact spot she was sunk, the time and day, so it narrows down our search area considerably.”

  “Okay Henry, didn’t the Brit boat hear this Xia?”

  “Sir, best bet was that the Han was clearing their area of operations of any unwanted shipping. It was attacking a British flagged sailing vessel when Hood bagged it; the Brits didn’t hear anyone else about. The Hood was just about out of ordnance when they sank it, they are enroute to Pearl to reload and offload the sailing boat’s crew, along with a pee-oh-double-u…a Chinese aviator, and two survivors from the John F Kennedy group.”

  The President raised his eyes at that.

  “How the hell do you survive a nuclear attack?”

  “By being out of range, trying to shoot the attackers down at the time. One is a Sea Harrier pilot, the other is…” he flipped through some pages. “…Lt Nikki Pelham, an F-14 pilot. Her RIO was killed when the Han attacked the sailing boat.”

  The name rang a bell somewhere and the President’s forehead furrowed as he tried to recall where he had heard it.

  “Pelham…how do you spell that Henry?”

  The general told him and the President cursed.

  “Oh dear lord…there is nothing fair in this world is there?”

  Henry Shaw had a blank look on his face.

  “Do you remember the story from Washington, the lawyers killed by the poor guy whose whole family had been killed, and then he turned the gun on himself?”

  General Shaw thought for a moment before it came to him. “He was in town to visit the ‘Nam memorial when the bomb went off…then found out his daughter had been aboard John F Kennedy…” It then dawned on him then that the Pelham in the article was one of the same. “...oh God, poor girl.”

  “As soon as we’ve finished here Henry, get a wire off to Pearl, see what you can do for her when she arrives…I take it the press do not know yet that there were survivors?”

  “Definitely not Mr President, we do not name any assets, or give the enemy any idea as to what was where and when.”

  “Good, keep it that way please…or some sonofabitch is going to be shoving a mike in her face and asking how she feels about her family dying and her dad being a murderer just the second she steps off the boat!”

  The President signalled for more coffee and when he and General Shaw were topped up they continued.

  “This Russian Major who’s going back into Russia…Bedonavich?” Henry nodded and the President continued with his question. “I understand he wants to try and contact some friends in the Russian military, what do you think his chances are?”

  “Well Mr President, pro New Soviet Union types hold all the top echelon of slots on the staffs, plus of course the war is going well for them…I am rather pessimistic as to his having any luck in bringing them over to our camp. I have already spoken to Terry Jones, I think it is unwise to try…at this stage anyway. If one of them denounces him, he will be arrested and tortured as a matter of course. He blew their operation with the bombs, and he is still supposed to be in the West, they are not likely to be using kid gloves if they get their hands on him. It could compromise the whole operation; Terry has already told him that.”

  The chief executive approached the plasma screen, which was displaying a large-scale view of the earth from the North Cape to the tip northern tip of Australia. He touched t
he screen northeast of Moscow, and the view zoomed in on the area.

  “What is the state of play with the assets on the ground?”

  “Sir, Spec Ops infiltrated a team into Russia once we knew we were going to war with these people. They are fully covert right now; they have taken no action yet except to establish contact with CIA’s people in place and recon the landing site. They have not ventured out into the open, the civil and military police over there are seriously on the lookout for deserters and draft dodgers. The Russian assets that CIA has are only safe if they are in their fifties; the safe houses are all off the beaten track in the forests, as is the airstrip. It is a Second World War site that CIA has been keeping in reasonable shape for years…just in case. There is a tanker of fuel, stolen I believe, and civilian transport.”

  The President made a cynical grunting sound.

  “What was that movie in the sixties with the phoney secret army in Russia…’Billion Dollar Brain’, let us hope CIA’s assets really exist, not just on paper!”

  The General smiled briefly.

  “Sir, Spec Ops troops on the ground verified that everything is as promised.” He brought up the area south of the Gobi Desert on the plasma screen before widening the view considerably. “Anyway, as you already know all about Guillotine sir, can I move onto Equaliser….For the insertion into Kansu Province, we are positioning B2s for tanking at a military strip west of Rangoon in Burma. They will land at night, tank the insertion aircraft over the Bay of Bengal the same night and be gone by dawn. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are going to promenade their troops and start shaking fists at one another over the Kashmir Region, starting in two days’ time. Hopefully, should the PRC radars spot anything over the Bay of Bengal; they will put it down to one of those three nations up to something nasty which does not involve China. The B2s have a 3000km journey to the DZ, which is 70 clicks from the target…the troops walk the rest of the way. First priorities are the two ICBM fields and the second is China’s space centre. They get into position to laser mark the targets, set up the equipment and egress the area undetected. The sites may, or indeed may not have laser detection devices so the equipment is switched on remotely either by satellite or by the bombers themselves. We use SRAMs, short range attack missiles with 500kt warheads. Unlike command bunkers, which are essentially solid shells on springs, an ICBM silo has to be more accessible in order to launch the missiles; therefore it is less well protected. Extraction of the teams is another thing entirely, they are going to have to E&E, escape and evade to an old mountain airstrip 160 klicks west where we can lift them out by C-140. Mr President, this plan has 1001 things that can go wrong with it, but we have no other options. Japan threw in the towel rather than have her cities nuked…again. The other countries in the region will not take direct action until the nuclear threat is eliminated. Even with the ICBMs taken out, we are going to have one hell of a fight on our hands, even with our potential allies fighting along too.”