' The Longest Night ' & ' Crossing the Rubicon ': The Original Map Illustrated and Uncut Final Volume (Armageddon's Song) (13 page)
Authors: Andy Farman
Behind the tanks, the infantry tore down cables and cut wires. Not all the wires were for demolition and a white flash, accompanied by a scream, drew a rueful smile from Stiles, the ramrod of a power line maintenance crew back in Madison County.
Behind him the mortars were firing almost continuously now, swivelling first one way and then the other. That at least was something that the attackers seemed to lack, that and artillery.
“Small mercies.” Franklin muttered to himself. “Anymore where those came from, big fella?” he asked, looking up at the heavens, but all he got was wet.
TP 32, MSR ‘NUT’ (Up), Autobahn’s 2 & 391, north of Brunswick, Germany: 24 miles south-west of the Vormundberg.
At TP 32, nine miles to the west of TP 33, the sound of cross-country tyres humming on the tarmac somewhere in the distance had L/Cpl Green, 352 Provost Company RMP, looking westwards before checking his watch. Their own ‘rover’ had only left on route maintenance a half hour before, but maybe they had found the problem quickly. Nevertheless he took the big flat bottomed Bardic lamp and turned a dial at its top to select a red filter before setting it carefully on the ground where it both illuminated the caltrop spikes, and its glare would conceal him from clear view in his shell scrape.
In the covering trench set further back they were used to the eccentric antics of the loner, but they knew the story of how the Russians had killed his colleagues and left him for dead, so they made no comment about his habits and he went about his business undisturbed.
They far preferred it when Maggie was pointsman though, she was quick with the banter and far better looking.
“Here we go.” Captain Sandovar said speaking over his shoulder to the six men crammed together in the rear of the Landrover.
“We have just a little over five minutes now before our friends make their presence known. So deal with the sentries quickly and neutralize those bridge demolition charges, understood?”
The British military number plate from their short wheelbase FFR now adorned this vehicle. The signing trailer had been left behind amongst the burnt out cars and vans at the rest stop with the bodies of Maggie Hebden and Tony Myers beneath its tarpaulin.
The young man had shown courage in his refusal to divulge the password of the day, even after one ear had been removed
and dangled before his eyes by Sergeant Viskova. Captain Sandovar had therefore played good guy to Viskova’s sadistic bad guy and explained that they were paratroopers merely attempting to regain their own lines. In return for the password they would remove his and the young ladies boots and leave them stranded. If he refused however, well his men had not been with a woman for quite some time and his colleague was a good looking girl… he had left the threat unspoken. Of course the young soldier had not been aware that Viskova had been rather over enthusiastic in his disarming of the fair young lady and she was already extremely dead.
“Thirty two.” he had said at last.
“Thirty two?” Sandovar had queried, looking into the British soldiers eyes.
There was anger but no hint of guile in the young man’s return stare and Sandovar had nodded confirmation to Sergeant Viskova who had immediately cut his throat.
One Landrover pretty much looks like another and this one slowed before it entered the chicane, switching its dipped lights off so as not to illuminate or dazzle. They were all on the same side, were they not?
However, having stopped there was no sign of a traffic pointsman anywhere.
Sandovar opened his door and stepped out into the rain, using a hand to shield against the glare of the lamp as he looked about.
“Halt!” a voice said from somewhere beyond the lamp.
Sandovar squinted against the light. He could hear the Landrover’s chassis creak as his men slowly lowered themselves over the tailgate and extended the telescopic body of a 66mm LAW as quietly as they could. He quickly spoke with a raised and authoritative voice to cover the noise, and to act as a distraction of course.
“Captain Brown, 101 Provost Company, where the hell are you?” and took a step forwards.
“I said ‘Halt’…sir.”
The challenger was not apparently intimidated by testy senior officers.
“Thirty?” the voice said at last.
“Two.” Sandovar answered and took another step.
“I didn’t tell you that you could move, did I sir?”
Sandovar heard the unmistakable sound of a safety catch being released.
In the covering trench the soldiers from 1 Wessex grinned at the officer’s discomfort. More than once this military policeman had caught hell from officers like this, but having been shot once by someone in an officer’s uniform he clearly didn’t give a crap when they kicked off. It was good sport to watch.
“When you go out the gate at Chi, do you turn left or right for the Wellington Arms, and what side of the street is it?”
Captain Sandovar almost stammered a “What?” but that would have been a serious error. ‘Chi’ was slang for Chichester, the RMP training depot, wasn’t it?
He took a guess and trusted to bluff and bluster, allowing the handle of his fighting knife to slip out of his sleeve and into the palm of his hand unseen.
“Turn right, it’s on the left….and now you and I are going to have a conference without coffee, young man!”
His men were all out of the vehicle now, poised and tense, the LAW was armed and the firer need only step from behind the Landrover to take out the trench.
Captain Sandovar, the stolen Landrover and his Spetznaz team disappeared in a hail of flame, fire, black smoke and ball bearings.
Staff Sergeant Vernon had been trying without success to reach the signing vehicle owing to the jamming that had begun a half hour before. The DEL connection was apparently broken. Only the field telephones were working. He now stumbled from the TP, gaped at the western traffic point for a second before shouting.
“STAND-TO!…STAND-TO!”
It was a fairly unnecessary order as the thunderclap of sound that reverberated across the sodden landscape had carried that message already.
Rudely awoken bodies were pulling on webbing and fighting order, grabbing personal weapons and running to their assigned stand-to positions.
S/Sgt Vernon sprinted along the hard shoulder to where Simon was just rising to his knees in the shell scrape, a claymores clicker in one hand.
“Where the
fuck
did you get that?” Vernon asked.
He did not get an answer, but he did get to see Simon smiling for the first time.
What was left of the Landrover, and that wasn’t much, was scattered across all the lanes of both carriageways. The twisted chassis and engine block sat on perforated, burning tyres several feet from where the vehicle had been stopped. The skinned carcass of what had once been a man was draped over the central crash barrier.
The 1 Wessex sentries were wide eyed and hyper, still shocked at what had occurred. A vehicle had turned up and an officer had given the correct answer when challenged but his pointsman had still blown him away, quite literally.
Over on the airfield they were standing-to also, but not with the same sense of urgency.
What had happened, why was there no air raid warning?
With all the noise of the helicopter traffic no one noticed what was appearing out of the forest at the north east corner until the Romanian T-90s gunned their engines and charged at the wire mesh perimeter fence.
Three enemy tanks, externally clad in blocks of explosive reactive armour which gave them the appearance of scaly skinned monsters were here, behind the front lines?
The left-most T-90 struck a bar mine, a severed drive wheel flew high in the air, sections of amputated track spun away but no sooner had it ground to a halt its main gun elevated slightly and began to track its prey.
The
Autobahns 2
The crippled tank’s target was a slow moving CH-53 Sea Stallion with a full cargo net of underslung artillery ammunition. There had been no wave off broadcast from the tower, no warning from the ground, and although the large machine in its German army camouflage paint scheme was moving too quickly for an accurate shot with a standard main gun round, it was a sitting target for the 125mm, beam-riding 9M119M
Refleks
missile that the main gun fired in its direction.
Essentially an anti-tank missile that was fired like a shell, the
Refleks
flew down the beam of the tanks laser range finder to its target. Although it was unsuitable against fixed wing aircraft, it worked well against the slower rotary wing variety.
The missile struck the German Sea Stallion’s engine housing and detonated against main transmission, causing the heavy lift machine to immediately depart from controlled flight. It dropped like a stone with no hope of auto-rotation, falling the hundred feet onto the previously wrecked runway, landing directly upon its cargo net. The metal main rotors still rotated at a blur until they truck the tarmac and shattered, sending jagged sections for hundreds of metres in all directions. The small cluster of a half dozen airmen and women at the mobile canteen were sliced in two by a six metre length of rotor blade.
The Sea Stallions fuel tanks ruptured and the volatile contents ignited explosively.
The general reaction was initially one of shock, with ground crew, loaders and even the thirty strong Bundeswehr
defence platoon left gawping instead of reacting for several vital seconds.
The control towers panoramic windows shattered into a hundred thousand shards of glass shrapnel and the roof blew off as the T-90 fired a second time.
Only now did they collectively realise the danger they were in.
Ground personnel scattered, seeking cover from the other two tanks that ploughed through the perimeter fence and without pause raced towards the flight line, machine guns and main armament firing.