'Advance to Contact' (Armageddon's Song)

by Andy Farman

  So far, since dropping into the high valley, they had covered a mere seven miles as the crow flies, but the majority of the daylight hours had been spent on a mainly vertical face that had one bitch of an overhang between the third and fourth belay’s. Major Dewar had led the climb with Corporal Alladay bringing up the rear and retrieving as many of their limited supply of pitons as he could.

  Garfield Brooks and Shippey-Romhead joined the Royal Marine Major, breathing heavily as they trudged through the yard deep snow to his side. Richard was munching away on a chocolate bar when they reached him, and he broke off some cubes of the fruit and nut confectionary and handed them across.

  “I wonder how many hundreds of years ago it last snowed here?” he asked them.

  Garfield glanced around, they were on a narrow plateau with just a low ridge separating them from the valley beyond, and it looked to him what he thought a mountain range should look like.

  “Isn’t this usual?”

  Richard knew what the Green Beret was thinking.

  “Not at this altitude, these are just the babies of the range, the big ones are further west…starting about forty or so miles off, they have permanent glaciers on the highest ones. I am a little worried by what a sudden thaw will do here; it could sweep a lot of accumulated loose earth and rock into the valleys so we could have landslides…and flash floods down below will be a nightmare.”

  Neither of the other officers had given any thought to that aspect, the messed up weather patterns would have a knock-on effect that would have to be considered globally, for years to come.

  “Have you thought why the Chinese built their sites here…apart from the security aspect of being in a remote area, and defensibility of course?”

  “I guess that would be the geology and the weather, no earthquakes, volcanic activity, and no floods or snowfall to worry about.” Shippey-Romhead ventured.

  “So if you were the commander of this region, and you saw what we are seeing…” Richard asked, “…What would you do?”

  Garfield swore under his breath.

  “I’d ship in a small army of labourers to do some emergency drainage construction, to prevent my missile sites from getting flooded out.”

  Richard nodded in agreement. “Let’s hope they don’t get air transport priority, and this same weather has blocked the railway line further south, so they haven’t got here yet. Otherwise there could be a few thousand extra pairs of eyes about.”

  Looking southwest Richard saw the horizon darkening. They still had three hours of daylight left, but he ordered everyone to start preparing for the night.

  Garfield protested.

  “We still have a few hours left; we can be halfway to the next valley floor in that time.”

  “In under two hours’ time we could be experiencing one bitch of a storm.” He inclined his head toward the low ridge, “We will have that to act as a windbreak, and if it has blown itself out by morning we can continue on…in the meantime I want all the guys preparing for a blow, and temperatures falling below minus twenty.”

  Pratt Walk, London, SE11: 1428hrs, same day.

  A large building of ugly 60’s design occupies the small street across the Lambeth Road from the official residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the contrast is harsh.

  The earliest parts of Lambeth Palace had been built in the 1400’s, Tudor times, on land where Christian churches have stood since 1062. High walls seal off its elegant gardens from the twenty first century, but from the balcony of the canteen that served the Metropolitan Police Forensic Laboratories, a glimpse of another world could be had, least ways in the winter it could, when the branches of the trees lining Lambeth Road were bare.

  Dennis Roper wasn’t in the canteen; he rarely ate there, preferring instead the sandwiches his wife made for him each morning. He munched on them now at his workspace as he tried to make a dent in the backlog of work allotted to him.

  Dennis’s job was comparing tool marks and footmarks found at crime scenes with those found at other scenes, and hopefully against arrest records, those ‘hits’ made for good copy on clear-up reports. It was a job that required concentration but he had a computerised database with which to run his comparisons.

  He hadn’t had any really tasty crimes to work on so far this week, just burglaries and auto crime, and he finished writing up the results of his search on tool marks from a council flat burglary, before lifting the next Form 5223 from the ‘Awaits’ pile. On the form were written the notes, comments and brief circumstances by the SOCO, scene of crimes officer, who had attended the scene, but Dennis rarely gave those more than a quick glance.

  This new job was a boot mark found at the scene of a burglary in Purley, at the premises of a chemist shop. It seems the burglar had trodden on a sheet of paper whilst carrying out an untidy search, probably for drugs Dennis mused.

  Removing the sheet of paper in question from an exhibits bag that came with the SOCOs notes, Dennis scanned it into the memory, set the correct scale of the image, added the crime and job numbers, and began the search by identifying the make of footwear that used the shape of tread on the exhibit, and then the foot size. Petty thieves rarely wander far, and wear and tear constantly erodes the tread, so he set the search for a twenty-five mile radius and for the previous six months only.

  Dennis pressed enter, and left something with a far bigger memory than his own to do the legwork whilst he finished his sandwiches and made himself a cup of tea using the department kettle in a side room, to wash down the cheese and pickle.

  By the time he arrived back at his workspace, blowing on the surface of the hot beverage to cool it slightly, the search had been completed within the parameters he had set, so he was surprised to find the most likely ‘hit’ had a reference to a police force several hundred miles outside the geographic parameters he had selected. Dennis was aware that high profile, serious or confidential cases could be ‘flagged in’ to every database in the country, but this was the first time it had occurred on one of his jobs, and he was still thinking just that when the phone at his elbow began to ring.

  Within walking distance of the forensic laboratories another equally unimposing building sits on the banks of the River Thames.

  Tintagel House is the home of the people who police the police in London, although that organisations name changes every few years at the whim of whatever Home Secretary happens to be holding office. A10, CIB, MS15 are three of the former names of the organisation now known as the Department of Professional Standards. If any single element of the Metropolitan Police Service has reaped the benefits of information technology, it has to be DPS. Their facilities made them uniquely placed to alert the various interested parties should any fresh leads appear in the unsolved matter of the murder of four members of the police and security forces in Scotland; which is how they knew Dennis had found a match at the same moment he did.

  The war had denuded the Met of virtually all of its military reservists, and until retired members of the service could be recalled to take up the slack, the Met would continue to suffer under manning in all areas, and so it was that shortly after 4pm a contingent of a half dozen detectives from SO15, the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorist Command arrived in the office of Croydon’s burglary squad to take over the investigation of a smash and grab at a Purley chemists shop.

  Pacific Ocean: 40’ 20” N. 171’ 33” E: 1724hrs, same day.

  The crew of Her Majesty’s submarine Hood had quickly slipped back into their ultra-quiet regime, after the hurried turn around at Pearl and high speed run to get on station. Those who were not on watch either slept or lost themselves in the much thumbed pages of dog-eared paperbacks, as this was about the only form of recreation left open to them. All non-essential systems were shut down and this included the ships TV and DVD player, not that anyone in the crew could ever again watch one of the war films in the ships library in quite the same way as they had before. They had experienced war for themselves and foun
d it far scarier, less melodramatic, and not at all glorious.

  Conversations were conducted in hushed tones, not that it was necessary, but that was what the present atmosphere induced in the crew.

  HMS Hood had left her homeport of Faslane almost four months before on a cruise that should have ended weeks ago. Her crews brief had been to look good and fly the flag in the former stamping grounds of the empire.

  The old naval base at Singapore now served cruise ships, not men-o-war flying the white ensign, and the huge facilities in Hong Kong had been dismantled prior to the People’s Republic of China resuming ownership. The lack of a Union Flag flying in the Far East had affected arms sales and prompted the despatch of HMS Prince of Wales, Malta, Cuchullainn, the Hood and the necessary fleet support vessels. Their role had changed suddenly and they were now the sole surviving warship of that group.

  The Petty Officers kept the men as busy as they could, giving the hands as little time as possible to dwell on events, but there was a limit to what could be polished and scrubbed, and those activities ceased once the Hood arrived in her patrol area.

  The conversation in the vessels Ward Room was that of the war, their present mission, and the morale of the crew.

  The captain was present, by invitation, because by the traditions of the Royal Navy the Ward Room is for the ships officers, not her captain.

  Space is not something that is foremost in the minds of submarine designers, so even without the full complement of ships officers present, because half were on watch, it was rather cramped.

  For many of her crew this had been their first taste of war, for others it had also been their first cruise.

  It had come as a bit of a shock to the system for some, but on the whole the captain thought they had a crew to be proud of. He did of course think they had been lucky in that though.

  “My first ship was HMS Plymouth, one of the old Leander class frigates,” the captain recalled. “My first cruise was the Falklands Task Force, a hell of an initiation that was.” He sipped at the tea a steward had set before him, remembering the Argentinean Sky Hawks defying the tracer and missiles to bomb the ships. His own frigate had a Bofors, world war two anti-aircraft technology manned by eighteen-year-old ratings that had been the highest single source of scorers against the fighter-bombers. Strange how their courage and motivation had not been universal.

  “I remember being quite gob-smacked that anyone in the service would try to leave on the grounds that they hadn’t joined the navy to fight. Some did though when it became clear that we were going to war, and I remember some technicians refused to go ashore after the landings at San Carlos Water. They were radar bod's and never expected to be so close to the fighting, but at the end of the day they had made a commitment to their country in return for food, lodging, wages, training and a skilled job they could later use in civilian life, and then they welched on the deal.”

  The First Lieutenant stirred his own tea.

  “What were your feelings toward them at the time sir?”

  “I was younger then, I would have thrown them over the side.”

  His subordinate smiled. “And now that you are older and wiser, sir?”

  The captain also smiled, looking around at each of the officers as he replied.

  “Now that I am older, as the First Lieutenant has so kindly pointed out, and wiser in the ways that make for an efficient military unit, I’d shoot the gutless little shits in the knees before sending them over the rail.” The smile did not exist in the captain’s eyes; he knew that for the ‘lack of moral fibre’ in one individual’s character, countless others could die. “Gentlemen….” he continued. “…someone once said, ‘Courage is being the only one around who knows that you are afraid’. Now I don’t know who it was who said that, but he wasn’t a politician. We either have a crew who are very good at doing that, or a crew of psychopaths, and I know that I for one am not a fearless warrior, however, stresses and strains will wear anyone down, given time, so I want you all to keep an eye on the men.”

  The conversation moved on to the intentions of the PRC, and the North Koreans, who had as yet to make an offensive move above mobilising the reserves. The captain held the opinion that they had not rolled south because China wanted their neighbour uncommitted militarily; a ready reserve and a flank guard for the PRC. Hood’s engineering officer had a different theory however. “Rumour has it that they have in recent years undergone a famine that wiped out millions, and now that they have called up the reserves there are too few left in rural areas to get the next harvest in. So if I were running things there, I wouldn’t want my army engaged elsewhere when the old brain washing breaks down and the populace say enough is enough.”

  The engineer had little love for the North Koreans; his father had been in the 1st Battalion, Gloucestershire Regiment during the Korean War. That single battalion which had held the ridge above the Imjin River from 22nd April to 25th April 1951 against 27,000 Chinese troops. When the ammunition ran out the 589 survivors of a once 1000 strong unit, had dispersed into the countryside, to escape and evade its way south, but his father had not been one of the 63 who had made it back to friendly lines, he had the misfortune of being captured by the North Koreans, rather than the Chinese.

  In the engineer’s opinion, anything bad that happened to a people who had tortured his father to death had to be a good thing.

  A steward brought in cold cuts and sandwiches, the same fare that the rest of the crew were eating today, but the meal was interrupted by the captain being summoned to the control room.

  HMS Hood was on the trail of the Xia.

  Russia: 0730hrs 17th April.

  In a drab and colourless neighbourhood of Moscow, the description of which quite frankly mirrored ninety percent of that capital, a worried young man awoke after too little quality sleep, and too much cheap vodka.

  Computer audits were unannounced events within the KGB, and something like volcanoes or earthquakes by their indiscriminate nature. Nobody, no matter what their rank or standing was immune to their effects. They had access to all areas of a departments systems, even the files on politburo members while they were checked for who had accessed them, and when.

  For Udi, the dreaded audits had become the next Kyoto quake in that it was not so much imminent as much as according to predictions it was overdue.

  He crawled out from under the covers, shivering in the frigid air as he fumbled with the single bar electric fire that served as his apartment’s sole dedicated source of heating.

  There was less of a chill in the air of the other room, owing to the warmth emitted by an impressive computer set-up. Udi as a rule kept his system running for no more than six hours a day, more than that and his electricity bill made inroads into his less than generous wages, he was dreading the next one.

  Only by uninstalling a large number of other programs, had Udi Timoskova been able to free up enough memory for his system to filter out the jamming on the disc. It had taken three days just to obtain the images he now had, and the quality was not the best.

  So far he had blurry and distorted visuals of the dachas hallway, and no sound at all. He would leave the program running on the hallway and stairs download, before moving on to the upstairs room.

  The only way he could do this was in stages, images first and then the sound, until he had a crystal clear article, and could see everything, and hear every word that been spoken in the dacha that night. He did not dare approach his boss with anything less, but time had to be running out before the unreported jamming that night was discovered, and when that happened Udi had better be ready.

  Udi went to the bathroom and grimaced at the man that stared back at him, his skin looked almost grey. Running some water he quickly washed and shaved before pulling on some clothes, breakfast would have to wait until he got to work.

  Leaving the program running, Udi put on his coat and left, carefully locking up behind him.

  Arkansas Valley, Nebraska, USA: 13
00hrs, same day.

  Admiral Gee, his aides and the President’s advisors stood as the chief executive entered. The relocation from Haddon’s Rock had been difficult, due to a broken helicopter, which had delayed occupation of this new site by almost twenty-four hours. However, the President had gotten to walk in the sunlight and breathe fresh, unfiltered air for the first time in weeks whilst awaiting a replacement aircraft to pluck him and his Secret Service detail from the midst of a curious, yet patently un-awed field full of dairy cattle.

  The President had not been out of contact with the chain of command, he knew that the convoy had survived the night but not the details; this meeting was to bring him back up to speed.

  “Sit down please ladies and gents.” He noticed a face that he had not seen since before the outbreak of hostilities, that of the FBI Director and he wondered what had brought Ben Dupre all the way out here.

  Crossing to his own seat he paused and addressed the admiral.

  “Don’t get me wrong Admiral, I think you are doing a stand up job…but where the hell is Henry Shaw?”

  “Sir, he is still meeting with the various general staffs of the NATO countries.”

  The president grunted.

  “Getting his boots muddy and playing rifleman is more like. I want him back here in forty-eight hours at the latest, and no excuses Admiral.”

  “I’ll see he gets the message, Mister President.”

  Taking his seat he allowed Gee to open the brief on events in Europe.

  “Mister President, in another thirty-six hours the convoy will begin arriving at the channel ports, and unloading its supplies and the four armoured divisions of 4th Corps.”

  “We lose any?”

  “Of merchantmen, not a one Mister President. Conrad Mann foxed the Sov’s. While they beat on his warships, thinking it was the whole convoy, the merchant ships and their skeleton screen reached the air umbrella.”