'Advance to Contact' (Armageddon's Song)

by Andy Farman

  Henry Shaw did not respond, and Rickham realised the general was totally ignoring him. Walter S Rickham wasn’t used to being ignored by those he considered to be members of the ‘ruled classes’. He grabbed Henry by the collar, dragging him around to face him.

  “Walter!” The President had risen from his chair and was looking daggers at his fellow politician. “That’s enough!”

  Rickham let go of the general with a contemptuous flourish, and only then did Henry look at him. “You got that one for free.”

  Rickham strode to the door of the conference room, stopping for the marine sentry to open it for him, which he did, after a very deliberate pause.

  The briefing continued for another half an hour before breaking up and the President sent an aide off to find Rickham, whilst General Shaw returned to his own staff, and the matter that he had been dealing with before the briefing.

  If the President had to choose between the general and the senator to be stranded on a life raft with, without hesitation he would have picked Henry Shaw, but he had goals he wanted to achieve whilst being the President, and for that he needed Rickham. Before he left the White House, he wanted decent education, literacy for all and one hell of a lot more people living above the poverty line. He wasn’t aiming for an instant zero unemployment Utopia, but full education for all would be the first step on that road. The bottom line was, he needed a second term in office if he hoped to achieve that, and for that he needed the Rickham’s and grubby money that the man represented. Henry Shaw had ruffled Rickham’s feathers, and the President needed to smooth them over, the best way he could think of doing that was to massage the man’s ego.

  “Walt, I haven’t been able to have a face to face with the other allied leaders since the war started, and video conferencing lacks the personal touch.”

  “You can’t smell the other guys fear.” Rickham nodded.

  It wasn’t actually what the President had meant, but he gave a half smile that flicked on and then off.

  “Walt I am sending one of the Presidential seven forty seven’s to Europe, and the other over to Australia and New Zealand to collect heads of state or their representatives, and bring them back here for a face to face summit. I’m shorthanded, we lost a lot of good people in Washington, and so I would take it as a big favour if you would accompany the flight to Europe as my personal representative?”

  The President hid a smile as he saw Rickham’s reaction; it was subtle body language clues that gave him away, a glint in the eye and the subconscious squaring of the shoulders. The man was both flattered and calculating how this could be turned to its best advantage, what ‘spin’ to apply. The capital could be great, ‘At a time of global conflict, the President turned to me personally for assistance.’

  “Mr President, in the crisis such we find ourselves in, it would be very small minded of me to refuse such a request.”

  “Thank you Walter.” He replied with a gracious smile, and made a mental note to inform the leaders who would be on Air Force One, that absolutely nothing of any sensitivity was to be discussed or disclosed in this man’s presence.

  Call-up papers had been sent out to one million American men and women, ordering them to report at varied Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine boot camps for basic training. It was something that the President had not consulted with General Shaw, ostensibly because the plans for this eventuality had been drawn up decades before, but the Commander-in-Chiefs reticence had made him suspicious. The general ordered a random selection of the personal details of those who had been called up, and he hadn’t liked what he had seen so he had made his next request more specific. He knew a number of individuals who qualified for this call to arms, and right now he was seriously pissed that most did not appear on the current list.

  Not a single name associated with any of the President’s chief contributors, or in fact any of the top two hundred richest peoples sons or daughters appeared on the list. The great bulk of those expected to put their lives in harm’s way were working class. Any person at college, or expected to enter college in the next twelve months, had been given deferments, it was a clause that had been added in the last week, without the military’s knowledge. Despite the offered deferments, many young people at college had put away their books for the duration and gone of their own free will to the recruiting centres.

  Henry Shaw had two of his own children in the service of the country, a son flying AV-8Bs off the Inchon, and a daughter who was the TAO aboard the USS Orange County. His youngest son qualified for this call-up but his name did not appear, as if that little detail was supposed to appease the general, and ward off the eruption that was looming.

  He had allowed himself to think that in this adversity, this president would do the right thing, but he had learnt that despite all that had happened, the President was planning for the future, currying future favours; business as usual.

  Well General Shaw was having none of it, he cancelled fifteen thousand notices to those who came from the lower wage brackets, or whose families would suffer undue hardship without them. Most, though not all were family men and women, and they were substituted with the names of sons and daughters of politicians, billionaires, millionaires, oil company executives and captains of commerce. His own youngest son’s name was included, as was that of the Presidents eldest. The first to receive the notices were a couple of hundred individuals who were already in Federal service, their once smart business suits were not smart anymore, and pedicured digits were encrusted with the grime of digging bodies out of building in the Capitol, and burying them in mass graves. The armed forces did not have any use for lawyers right now, so they would all find themselves assigned as recruits, earmarked for the infantry and Marine Corps as riflemen, once the boot camps had finished with them.

  The President wanted him visiting the battlefronts so he packed his bag and handed over to Admiral Gee, who would hold the fort until Henry’s return.

  With that done he contacted personal friends and acquaintances on both sides of the Atlantic, and arranged a meeting.

  Denmark Straits, between the Faroe’s and Iceland: 2016hrs.

  From the southeast of Iceland, stretching away toward the Hebrides is a wide, deep-water basin. After rounding the North Cape it was an area that the soviet submarines could traverse with the added protection of its depths before running the gauntlet of the line of hydrophones in the GIUK Gap.

  Almost without exception, the diesel-powered vessels had run long and hard on their batteries the previous night, and now needed to snorkel in order to charge them again. They had left Norway’s area of responsibility but were now in the hunting grounds of the British, American and Portuguese Maritime patrols in the sky, British ASW surface units and Canadian and US hunter killer submarines. Although all the aircraft would land on the Faeroes, Danish sovereign territory, to refuel and rearm at some point, the Danes would not take part in the operation as her small, Gulfstream maritime patrol aircraft were for shipping and fisheries protection, not submarine hunting.

  In order that NATO aircraft did not end up dropping on NATO submarines, the aircraft were deployed far out across the basin, leaving the western edge of the basin, and the twenty miles either side to the silent service.

  HMS Illustrious, with her helicopters and her frigates were west of that point, and representing the last line of ASW ships that the soviets had to get past before they reached the shipping lanes. Of course the ships would not pack up and go home if any leaked through, but this was their best chance at stopping the threat against the convoys.

  ‘Trident Eight Four’, a RAF Nimrod MR2P out of Kinloss, via refuelling in the Faeroes, had expended its load of sonar buoys and been relieved by a Portuguese P-3 Orion in order to return to the tiny islands and reload. They were now five minutes out, with a full load once more when one of the operators got a contact.

  “Pilot, faint surface contact, bearing three two seven…range eleven thousand.”

  The news that th
e submarines, or at some of them could shoot back, had come as an unwelcome surprise for the crews, and until such time as a defence could be devised, the crews were trying all manner of things to fox the submarines. The pilot of Trident Eight Four put the nose down, at the same time as throttling back to reduce the aircraft’s heat signature, and in the back a crewmember got ready some magnesium flares, in preparation to eject them should anything nasty be awaiting the aircraft.

  The Portuguese P-3 had also detected what was in fact a snorkel, and the Orion was much closer.

  They watched the Orion on radar as it began its run, and then the P-3s track vanished, without any warning whatsoever. The only thing the Nimrods pilot could be reasonably sure of was that if it had been a missile it had not come from the radar target, it was too far away. He noted the position that the Orion had disappeared, and swept in on the same line, but dropping a torpedo a mile short of that position. The Nimrod was dropping flares every few seconds, and the big aircraft banked hard after releasing, which probably saved all their lives.

  They had inadvertently turned toward the undetected Whiskey class boat, and the aircraft’s bulk masked the heat signature of the four BMW/Rolls-Royce BR 710 turbofan engines, and the launched-at-depth air defence missile curved down to follow the last flare ejected by the Nimrod crewman. At only 100 feet altitude when it ignited, the flares life was very limited, but the heat-seeking missile followed it down and impacted with the sea.

  Aboard the Whiskey, the LAD mast was retracted when the Nimrods Stingray torpedo was detected and following Russian Naval doctrine the diesel boat went to flank speed, turning towards the threat. The theory was that if they closed the distance quickly, the torpedo may not have had sufficient time to arm itself, but the Stingray was armed the moment its drogue chute detached from its anchor point at the weapons stern. The warheads and fuel in the Whiskeys torpedoes, sitting on racks in the forward torpedo room blew when the Stingray detonated on the submarines bow. Trident Eight Four had circled around, still ejecting flares manually and they saw the sea heave upward in a tall pillar of angry water. As the column of water subsided, the Whiskeys stern broke the surface with its propellers still turning as it rose vertically from below the surface for a moment, before disappearing back into the depths.

  The sound of the concussion warned the snorkelling Kilo, which now sought to get below the thermal layer where the sonar returns from any buoys dropped by the hunters would be distorted. However, the Nimrods pilot was confident that they had a good enough fix without dropping buoys, and the aircraft’s bomb-bay opened as the aircraft swept in, another Mk-50 dropped clear and splashed into the cold sea. The Nimrod was on a roll, three minutes later the Kilo surfaced; wallowing in the waves as the crew took to inflatable life rafts.

  Over the next four hours the Orion P-3s and Nimrods would kill another five submarines before the soviets crossed over into the preserve of the USS Twin Towers and the Canadian diesel submarines.

  Edwin Andrew Air Base, Mindanao, Philippines: 2141hrs, same day.

  Major Richard Dewar, Royal Marine Commandos, commanding the M&AWC, supervised the loading of the last items of equipment aboard the

  B2 Spirit bombers. The complex rotary systems that held the ordnance had been removed and now sat aboard the giant C-5 transports that had brought them in from the 509th Bomb Wings home at Whiteman AFB, Missouri, in readiness for the bombers proper job.

  Dewar couldn’t take his whole cadre on the insertion, just eight men, and the SAS G Squadron, Mountain Troop and the American Green Berets were providing another eight each.

  It wasn’t a set-up that Dewar was happy with, the guys from Mountain Troop had done major climbs, the Green Berets thought clambering up the Rockies a big deal, but those mountains were hardly high altitude. His men lived nine months of the year at altitude and most of that in arctic conditions, they had all been up Everest at least once and half had had a crack at K2, conditions very similar to what would be found in China. It would take stealth to enter the region, and the Americans had those means but they wanted in on the action on the ground. Major Dewar could live with that, but he could see no reason whatsoever for the ‘glory boys’ of the SAS to be included. In his opinion they were a bunch of cowboys and media darlings whose inclusion was merely political. Dewar had been told that they were going with them, like it or not, but he had won a small concession. In his specialisation, mountain and arctic warfare, he was the acknowledged top man in NATO forces, and to his great surprise the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs had approved the command position without question.

  “If we were going in on surfboards I’d want a surfer dude from California leading, but its high ice, so I want that mad jock, Dewar. He’s the best, and the Green Berets will do as he says, when he says and as often as he says.”

  Captain Garfield Woods of the Green Berets and Lt Shippey-Romhead of Mountain Troop were several hundred yards away in a dispersal occupied by an RAF C-130 Hercules of 47 Squadron. They were both trying very hard to impress their way into the panties of the aircraft’s co-pilot, Michelle Braithwaite, but the pretty Flt Lt had worked far too hard to earn her place on the Squadron strength to blow it by succumbing to the testosterone driven lusts of two squaddies.

  She humoured them whilst laughing inwardly at their machismo, for all their strutting, she had actually been into more hot war zones than either man. Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, across the border with Afghanistan into Pakistan for a hot extraction, and some sneaky insertions into Columbia on anti-drugs work, and of course more recently onto the northern ice pack, and back again to extract the M&AWC.

  47 Squadron would be doing the extraction and not the insertion on this job, landing on an old mountain strip that had been built to serve copper mines, 69 miles from the ICBM silos.

  The B1-Bs and B2s would be stealthy on their return into the target area, and noisy as hell on the route out, Wild Weaselling the hell out of the Chinese air defences on the way. Two Hercules would fly in along the route cleared by the bombers, put down on the strip and await the troops arrival; one C-130 would be for the Marines, Green Berets and SAS troops. The second would be more M&AWC marines for local protection, because they could be sat on the strip a couple of days waiting for the troops to yomp their way across the mountains to reach them.

  The one sided mating ritual was interrupted by the bark of Major Dewar, who at a range of 400 yards called the two officers to heel in a parade ground voice more used by Sergeants than by officers, but then Dewar had been a Troop sergeant before being commissioned eight years previously.

  East of Wuitterlingen, Germany: 0150hrs, 12th April.

  A pair of German Army Marder APCs, and a cluster of bodies marked the furthest point that local counter-attacks had progressed against the Russian airborne troops. The closest vehicle was still giving off wisps of oily smoke, but the furthest was completely gutted by fire, everything flammable had been consumed.

  Oz crawled slowly past the APCs, keeping low and as close as possible to the hedgerow that ran up to within 100 metres of the enemy positions.

  He gritted his teeth, forcing his body to behave normally, and not move in a jerky fashion in the freezing temperatures. The last two hours had been spent gathering information, and now he was on his way back with it.

  After another half an hour he was back with his recce patrol in the FRV and pulling on his webbing. He had a night fighters tediously slow conversation with the L/Cpl he had left in charge of the patrol, consisting of him putting his mouth right next to the others ear to ask the slowly put questions before receiving the answer in the same fashion. Satisfied that the answers tallied with what he had deduced by himself, he led the patrol back to their own lines.

  At 0330hrs Pat Reed held his O’ Group, his company and squadron commanders, the artillery, engineer and air support reps were all gathered together in the wine cellar of a large house commandeered by the battalion as a CP.

  He had been able to speak briefly with his wife
by telephone with regard to Families matters, ‘Families’ being the battalions married men’s families rather than his own. His own family was bearing up. His daughter Nancy at Edinburgh University was of course too far away from the cruise missile attacks on London and the oil refineries and depots to have been in danger, as was his son Julian, but Julian was here with 3 Mechanised Brigade as an AFC, Artillery Fire Controller, attached to the Light Infantry.

  His wife sounded tired; she had been with the Padre and Captain Deacon, the Families Officer, at every visit to families in the London District Area to break the news that a husband, a father, wasn’t coming home again.

  Talk, and rumours within the battalion had been about the attacks. No one here saw the TV footage of Canary Wharf falling, or St Thomas’s Hospital and Buckingham Palace on fire.

  Downing Street had been empty of all Cabinet members of course, but the Diplomatic Protection Group officers and cleaning staff were not in a fallout shelter in the north of England when the missile landed.