by Andy Farman
The M-16 was the weapon of preference for the SBS; it was light and easy to handle. Its 5.56 round lacked the stopping power of heavier ammunition but it was ‘soldier proof’, hard to bend. The M-16 is in service worldwide, and a proven piece of equipment.
Once they had cover from view from the approaching APCs they broke into a jog until they had reached the far side of the hill, and once there the sergeant slowed the pace slightly to that of a forced march. The enemy were probably planning on surrounding the hill before combing it with a ring of troops that closed in on the summit like a noose; he wanted to get clear of the area before that happened.
Their boots squelched in the mud as he removed the tactical palmtop from inside his smock and reconnected the lead to the satcom transmitter strapped about his waist. Once the green ‘link established’ light illuminated he pressed two keys, the first being for the pre-programmed ‘Compromised/Bugging out’ message, and the second for the direction they were heading, 0’ magnetic.
Whilst they were still high enough to see beyond the fir trees that started half way up the hill and marched off some two miles northwards, the marine with their thermal scanner had a look for any sources that would indicate a threat.
The thermal scanner did not detect the BTR or the twelve Russian security troops; there were far too many trees in the way for their thermal images to register. The BTR was parked in a hollow, the engine was silent and the crew was making up the numbers in the three snap ambushes that were in place on paths coming off the hill.
When the marines were about two thirds of the way down, the noise of engines reached them, the sound drifting through the pine trees. If they slowed to a tactical pace they would be caught inside the cordon the enemy was obviously intent on putting in, but if they carried on at this pace they stood a real chance of walking into a kill zone. Sergeant Ramsey did not like feeling like being a grouse being driven by beaters, the birds ran into gun line every time.
Ramsey ordered Harris, the point man, off the animal trail they were following, they would keep it about 50m to their left, and although it would mean they travelled more slowly it would also lower the risks of them running into an ambush.
The damp pine needle floor cut the noise that they made but it was more tiring feeling their way between the trees, ducking under low boughs rather than create a racket by pushing through and past them.
Harris was ducking under a low branch when he froze, before snapping his M-16 into his hip and aiming at something that Sgt Ramsey, twenty feet behind, could not see. There was a burst of firing, both from the marine and from somewhere else, and the young marine dropped dead in his tracks.
The method for dealing with an ambush is simple, the situation may not be survivable but the anti-ambush drill is there none the same. At the first burst of firing the remaining marines charged through the trees at where they believed the enemy were, screaming like banshees and firing as they went. Shock value is the purpose of the drill, turning on an enemy who has the advantage, making him get his head down and with luck giving him some brown adrenaline in his pants for good measure whilst stealing the initiative from him.
The four Russian security troops in the ambush had taken up position in the undergrowth some 40m from the trail, and had the foresight to place one of their number facing the rear. It was this man that the marine had found himself eyeball to eyeball with at a range of just ten feet. The rear protection man and the marine killed one another with their first rounds, the sudden firing from behind them taking the remainder by surprise.
Ramsey was firing from the hip as he came through behind the Russian ambushers, his rounds had been fired blind but once past the tree beside his dead marine he saw the remaining Russians awkwardly training their weapons around. Ramsey hit the ground as his two other marines burst into view, and aware that he had only a few rounds left in the existing magazine, he selected single shot before double-tapping the centre man in the centre of his chest as that man squirmed on his back trying to bring his AK to bear. The roar of gunfire was over in a second, two more Russians lay dead whilst a third clutched at the line of holes across his bloodied belly and screamed in agony. Just a glance at the position of the wounds told the tale of irreparable damage to liver and spleen leading to a lingering and agonised death, a single shot stopped the screams a moment later.
Another marine was down; shot through the face, chest and throat his heels drummed on the forest floor momentarily before his body spasmed and suddenly relaxed.
Ramsey cursed himself for not going slower on the bug-out, as he and the last marine dropped their Bergens and emptied their mates’ ammunition pouches of full mags and grenades. Stepping quickly over to the nearest Russian he rolled the body face down before removing the pin from a grenade and wedging it underneath, spring-arm uppermost. The marines then made off to the north, abandoning their Bergens were they’d dropped them.
The route the marines took brought them close to a stream, so Sgt Ramsey swerved towards it when he heard the water, the engine noises were getting louder and if the ambushers had not been alone then they could easily have already been cut off. From what he recalled of the ground beyond the wood there was precious little cover and the banks of the stream might just keep them out of sight.
Their breath fogged the frosty air as they pounded on downhill, and from behind them they heard shouts as more enemy troops found the bodies at the ambush site.
A loud explosion silenced the shouts moments later, as the body of the booby-trapped soldier was rolled over by a comrade seeking to discover if the man were still alive. It minimised the chances of pursuit and instilled fear into an enemy growing confident in the hunt.
They were coming to the edge of the pinewood and could see by the grey pre-dawn light that the six hundred odd metres of scrubland to the next woodland began only seventy or so metres away. Ramsey slowed, lowering himself down the bank into the icy water that came up to his knees, and the marine with him followed suit. The banks showed signs of the heavier flow of water that would have been present earlier in the month, when waters from the spring thaw would have swollen it. Both men crouched forward at the waist in order that only their heads appeared over the edge as they moved more slowly to the edge of the trees, where they halted. Ramsey paused for a moment as he looked around, and satisfied that there were no enemies yet in sight he took a pace forward. In the poor light he failed to see the two grenades, wedged between submerged boulders and linked together by a length of tripwire below the surface. The commander of the BTR had placed similar crude booby traps at another half a dozen likely routes that he did not have the manpower to cover. Sergeant Ramsey looked down when he felt the resistance against his left shin, thinking it was a trapped branch, and then the pressure against his leg disappeared as the pins slipped out. The young marine behind Ramsey was looking to his left when the grenades went off, peppering him with shrapnel, one piece of which entered below his ear, travelling upwards into his brain. He never even heard the sound of the explosion that killed him.
Sgt Ramsey was thrown forward by the double blasts, almost losing his grip of the M-16 as the freezing water closed over him. His ears rang but the right one seemed to be on fire as he pushed himself back up into the air, a thousand red hot needles seemed to be sticking in him. He pulled himself to the bank and rolled onto his back before reaching up to feel his ear, but it was gone, torn off along with a portion of scalp and his hand came away bloody. He had a pain in his right hip but he bent his knees to stand anyway, or at least he thought he had. Flopping unexpectedly onto his left side he saw with surprise that his left leg below the knee was held in place only by a strip of flesh. His camouflaged trousers were shredded below the thigh and also saw that the pebble bank on which he lay was wet with blood, leaking from a dozen wounds. He rolled onto his back again, feeling the onset of shock but focusing his mind to keep it at bay, shock kills and he needed to remain calm whilst he worked out how he was going to give himself first aid.
The pain had not come yet but it would, and soon.
He was gripping his rifle in both hands and taking deep breaths, allowing his training to surface through the threatening trauma, when at that moment a figure appeared on the opposite bank. Acrid smoke from the explosions hung in the air, and the enemy soldier was stood on the edge of the bank looking to his left, upstream of Ramsey toward the scene of the blasts. When the soldier looked to his right, downstream, his weapon did not follow his eyes but he started to bring it around when he caught sight of the marine sergeant, aiming a weapon of his own right at him. Ramsey shot the soldier through the midriff; he folded in the middle with an audible “Ooph!” and sat down heavily before flopping face forward off the bank and into the stream with a splash, to struggle feebly for a moment before going still.
Whoever they were, they weren’t trained infantry thought Ramsey as a second soldier showed himself, visible only from the top of his shoulders to his helmeted head, craning his neck to see where the shot had come from. Ramsey took quick careful aim before shooting this second man in the face and a faint red halo appeared behind as it snapped back, dropping out of view as its helmet spun off to land with a thud out of sight.
To his left was a boulder that would offer more cover than he presently had, but before he could crawl towards it six objects flew from beyond the far bank to land in the stream with a splash, or clattering against the rocky bank he lay against.
Ramsey stared at the fragmentation grenade that came to rest just out of arms reach of him; he had time to announce a disgusted oath.
“Oh…shit,” and then it went off.
The seas off the cape are some of the most dangerous on the planet, often stormy and always carrying fragments of the northern ice pack, to a greater or lesser degree depending on the time of year.
In the dark, the Tarantula, fast missile attack craft had their radars on low power as they surged ahead, an estimated fifteen minutes from optimum launch range. The first wave would take out the outlying NATO picket ships; the second wave the inner, leaving the carriers vulnerable to the Backfire bombers, fighter-bombers, destroyers and frigates that would follow.
Aboard the task force the ships went to high NBC state, as the Super Etendards approached their own release points and their Anémone radars painted over the fast attack craft.
To the southwest of the French strike aircraft, the Rafale M advanced interceptors hugged the shoreline just above the waves in line astern, throttles as far back as safety would allow. The Russian airborne controllers aboard the lumbering and aged A-50s had watched them emerge from the NATO jamming and sprint toward the mainland, to all intents to the assistance of the Norwegians. Radar cannot see through mountains and there was too much happening for them to waste time with what became of the tracks that disappeared and did not reappear on the other side of the high terrain. The A-50s had the Super Etendards heading fast and low to the east, out of the electronic haze of jamming produced by the AE-6Bs, so they took over the Tarantulas’ air defence fire control systems and the boats increased speed from thirty knots to forty. The Tarantulas' SA-N-8 Gremlins could accelerate to 1.7 Mach in under four seconds, but had a range of just 7km so the A-50s vectored in a pair of S37s. They would not arrive in time to prevent the French strike from launching, but the eight Frenchmen could not be carrying enough weapons to make an impression anyway.
The RNAF F-16s and RAF Hawks suddenly disengaged from the battle above Banak and beat feet to the west, leaving the battered Russian fighter bombers an open goal.
To the north of Banak, the flight of three S37s noted with satisfaction the departure of the NATO fighters and the unwavering orbits of the AWAC, JSTARS and their escorts. They had moved into trail as they crossed the northern tip of Norway, threading through narrow valleys, and across fjords but now the open ocean was in sight. As they crossed the high cliffs to begin their transit of the Atlantic their threat receivers screeched the warning that they had been locked-up by infrared missiles. The Russians’ Saturn/Lyulka Al-41F engine nozzles altered direction as the fighters broke left, right and upwards, discharging flares as they did so. The French pilots could not match the turns, but they were already in knife fighting range when the Russians cleared the coastline, each S37 had three Magic II high velocity heat seekers chasing them, they ignored the slow moving flares, tearing past at 2.7 Mach.
The Super Etendards on the anti-shipping strike split after four launched a single weapon apiece. The Russian controllers watched half the attackers turn for home on burner whilst their missiles went ballistic. The senior controller ran the missiles' data against known profiles for anti-shipping missiles; he didn’t get a match, which did not surprise him because he personally knew of none that behaved that way. The remaining four launched two minutes later and turned hard, heading for the safety of the task force, their weapons did at least perform, as anti-shipping missiles should. His attention was then called back to the first missiles which had levelled out briefly at 30,000 before beginning steep descents, and then he noticed that the NATO forces had ceased radiating. With the exception of one AE-6B Prowler that was still jamming, all NATO radar and communication equipment was switched off rather than turned to standby, and no one was looking east of the North Cape.
“Dolboy'eb!” the senior controller cursed his own stupidity and stabbed the ‘all freqs’ transmission switch.
“False Dawn…False Dawn!” he was almost screaming the code words. The Soviet units in the attacks came from more countries than just Russia, not everyone spoke Russian but they had all been given code words for a variety of occurrences.
Having put out the warning he unstrapped himself and sprinted up the aircraft for the A-50’s own master shutdown switch, for a man of fifty-five he was negotiating the chicane formed by the operators’ seats quite well, but he wouldn’t make it.
The Russian destroyers and frigates began launching on the incoming missiles although they would also be too late, at 10,000 feet above sea level the four warheads detonated.
Many of the units in range of the effects of the nuclear airbursts were far too busy to initiate the shutdowns, let alone look up the code word.
Aboard the A-50 the datalink to the Tarantulas terminated, radar screens went blank as the EMP, electromagnetic pulse, tripped the built in safeties but still burnt out several circuit boards.
Fortunately for the A-50 pilots, they were on the northbound leg of their orbit at that moment, they knew that all the Russian warheads that were likely to be used today were conventional, but no one believed that NATO would use nuclear weapons off a member state's coastline.
Whilst the Russian controllers frantically replaced burnt out boards the second flight of Storm-Shadows flew on unchallenged half a mile apart, to detonate over the first wave of missile boats.
Radars and communications failed in many Russian airframes within a three hundred-mile radius, and retinas burnt out in those who were looking the wrong way at the wrong time. Airborne command and control for all Russian forces was lost over the north of Norway, and their naval surface combat units were either vaporised, or burning from stem to stern.
The ASW helicopter base and its defences at Banak lay in flames, but no airworthy aircraft had been there when the attackers arrived, they had dispersed the day before, along with essential equipment and personnel. Helicopters do not need runways; they were ready to commence operations once the Russian air attacks had been beaten off.
The Hawks and F-16s returned, although the Hawks arrived later having recovered to Bodø, to the south, to rearm with another pair of AIM-9 Sidewinders each.
One force that was largely intact was the Tu-22ME Backfire anti-shipping strike with its seven remaining S37 Golden Eagle stealth fighters. Two of their number had been intending to ruin the French fighter-bombers whole day, when five miles north of their own destroyer and frigate force they had been swatted from the skies.
The commander of the Task Force strike gave his orders to the regimenta
l commanders; they left their holding orbits and split up into their high, low, left and right attack elements, heading west.
The AWAC and JSTARS turned back toward the east, initiating the powering up sequences for their surveillance, command and control systems. The datalink with the Task Force was re-established and the French aircraft carrier began launching the forty remaining Rafale Ms. The single AE-6B Prowler that had continued to fog the radar screens, denying the enemy an exact fix on the task force, curled down toward the icy waters streaming smoke and flame. Despite its electronic safeguards, several electric fires started by the EMP had been beyond the ability of the crew to put out; a helicopter was heading toward the imminent crash site.
Fleet defence was handed over to the Royal Navy Sea Harriers off the Jeanne d'Arc and the AV-8B Harriers from the Spanish carrier Principe de Asturias whilst the French advanced fighters attempted to break up the enemy attack long before it was in range to launch its missiles.
As the Russian A-50 began the process of re-booting its systems the strike against the NATO blockade went in unassisted, the S37s only had their own systems to work with. The S37s’ commander looked at the electronic mess that was blocking his radar emissions and made a hard decision, his aircraft curved back around to the east to take station behind the leading regiment of fighter-bombers, thirty Flogger Js.
The Russian stealth fighters had been a thorn in NATO’s side since the battle of Leipzig, and as much as the senior NATO controller would have liked to waste them all before sorting out the strike aircraft there was too much at stake here. She watched the stealth fighters’ heat signatures replaced at the forefront and ensured that none of the French pilots got carried away. Each regiment taking part, with the exception of the S37s, had two aircraft assigned to carry a pair of multi-phase jammer pods and only a couple of Aphids for self-defence, these aircraft now powered up their pods.