' The Longest Night ' & ' Crossing the Rubicon ': The Original Map Illustrated and Uncut Final Volume (Armageddon's Song) (26 page)

Arnie Moore made no apology, but gave no clue that he was responsible for the CO’s tumble either. He shouted to the nearest 9 Platoon trench, identifying himself and the rest as the CO’s Rover Group and warning them to watch their rear.

“Now.” Pat shouted to his radio operator. “Tell Jim Popham to go now!”

Jim Popham’s small force of Warrior IFVs moved into view and opened fire from the flank.

In order to engage the IFVs the tanks left the cover of the hillside, moving back into the churned mud soup that was
the valley floor where they were again ‘in-play’ from fire from the Highlanders Milan teams and C Squadron.

The infantry attack slowed, faltered, and only the officers were keeping the men from withdrawing.

Bill allowed the rifle to point naturally at the target, the sight rising and falling with his breathing. At the bottom of the breath he squeezed, the butt kicked back and he followed through.

“Next one” Stef muttered. “Three clicks left, he’s got no rank tabs but he’s got a radio operator dogging his heels.”

This one was canny, he didn’t stay still even when he was stationary, his head and torso were in constant motion and Bill spent a while trying to predict his next movement. It was like trying to hit a balloon tethered in a gusty wind, his head would not stay still.

“Sod this, it’s boring.” He grumbled at last, raising himself on his toes to alter his position fractionally before relaxing once more. He fired, and the radio operator fell on top of the wily officer, pinning him to the ground. A second’s pause as another minor realignment of position took place and Bill shot the officer in the head.

“Who’s next?”

“A guy who just realised he is now the battalion commander…go six clicks right, the one with the big grin on his mug.”

Bill shot him too.

The two leading Warriors blew up, hit by tank fire and an RPG respectively; the latter struck the turret and set off the stored HE and APDS clips. The wrecks blocked the way for the remainder and Pat’s planned Hammer and Anvil withered and died. Only Jim Popham’s Warrior was able to fire into the flank, aiming between the burning vehicles.

“With me!” Pat Reed shouted, and ran past Arnie Moore towards the trench fight.

“God give me strength!” the RSM grumbled. “Someone break the CO’s legs before he gets himself killed, f’christ sakes!” Arnie added with an oath.

The enemy had the skeletal 8 Platoon’s two trenches and one of 7 Platoon’s. Stabbing down with bayonets, clubbing brutally with rifle butts at the defenders in the remaining trenches.

Voice muffled by his respirator Pat screamed hatred at these men who had killed his son and were now killing his battalion. He charged forwards without waiting to see if anyone followed.

A big sergeant rammed his bayonet through a respirator and into the face of a young American paratrooper, firing a shot to release the blade now wedged in a cheekbone, he grinned at the effects. Pat’s bayonet took him straight through the sternum and the force of the charge knocked him from his feet. The man to the sergeant’s right turned and raised his rifle and bayonet high. Pat’s side was unguarded but Arnie Moore’s blade took the man in the throat. Arnie’s helmet took most, but not all, of the force of a rifle butt and he fell to his knees. He looked up and saw the weapon reversed and dawn’s first rays upon the blade. Another rifle butt took his attacker in the throat and Arnie felt the ground vibrate as pounding boots thudded past him, driving into the Czech infantry, driving the men in front back into those behind.

Upon reflection, it was the most disciplined killing frenzy the American had ever seen.

The Royal Marines of 44 Commando gave no quarter, they slaughtered without remorse, avenging their comrades of ‘Forty Two’ and leaving bodies in their wake, dead and dying as they retook 3 Company’s latest position and drove the Soviets back onto the steep slope they had so recently climbed. Men ran past him, tired men, the gun groups catching up with the riflemen who were now firing downhill.

The sun’s rays revealed the blasted hillside degree by degree, announcing an end to the longest of all nights.

Arnie looked for the CO and saw Pat kneeling and firing, but not at the beaten enemy on the slope, he was aiming at the infantry approaching the foot of the Vormundberg.

The Royal Marines raised their aim and the gun groups, still breathing heavily set down their GPMGs and got down behind them. A winded man is not the best shot, but there were plenty of targets down there, struggling through earth turned to molasses by countless armoured vehicles churning tracks in the previous twenty hours or so.

81mm and 51mm mortars began to land on the valley floor and those who had just reached the five tanks, all of them burning or oozing smoke, tried to use them for cover.

There was return fire but the rising sun was in their eyes.

Lt Col Reed removed the magazine off his SLR and checked his pouches for a fresh magazine, but he had used all four. Arnie took the magazine off his own rifle and handed it across.

Pat Reed took the proffered magazine with a perfunctual nod and continued with the killing.

It ended of course, not with the complete massacre of the hated 23
rd
Motor Rifle Regiment but in acknowledgement by those on the hillside that they still possessed humanity.  Men were surrendering, waving opened field dressings, the only items in their equipment that were white.

Perhaps a hundred survived, perhaps less. Either way, the 23
rd
was effectively no more.

“Colonel Reed?” a voice called out enquiringly from behind them.

Pat raised an arm and on turning saw the battalion’s artillery rep approaching, and pointing.

“Look sir, above the far crest!”

Across the valley, on the top of the hill where the enemy had first appeared the previous day there now emerged more, climbing out of the river valley beyond.

“Fuck!” swore Pat.
“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!.
..haven’t we done enough, haven’t we?”

The best part of two first class Divisions approached, the 77
th
Tank Division and the 32
nd
Motor Rifle Division, two hundred and twenty eight main battle tanks, eighty two infantry fighting vehicles, plus artillery and the myriad support units required to maintain and run the divisions.         

They had trampled the French armoured and Canadian mechanised brigades into the mud on the banks of the river to reopen the supply line, and now they would deal with the worn out defenders of the Vormundberg without hardly a pause.   

“No sir, look up!” the artilleryman said. “Above the hill!”

Thin contrails, hundreds of objects were plunging out of the cloud base above the hill and the valley beyond, MLRS and 155mm ‘smart’ ordnance began winking like countless flashbulbs before reaching the ground.

They stood watching those twinkling lights, the defenders from all the nations upon the Vormundberg, the seemingly harmless light show in the distance, but then the sound reached them. It pummelled their ears as not just one, but all of the grid squares from the crest back to the river were ‘removed’.

4 Corps had won the race.

"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants. It is the creed of slaves"

(William Pitt)

BOOK TWO

‘Crossing the Rubicon’

CHAPTER
one

Germany: West of Potsdam.

Saturday 20
th
October. 1034hrs.

The pain roused Svetlana, dragging her back to the realm of consciousness where she took stock of her situation with little clue as to how she came to be where she was. She was swing from side to side in the breeze, the motion accompanied by the creaking of a branch above her head.

She saw that dawn was some hours past and that the rain had recently stopped. She could hear the drops that still fell from the branches to land on the soaked ground.

The pain radiated outwards from her lower back but when she tried to reach around with her right arm to examine the area, she could not in fact feel that arm at all. In a panic she groped with her left arm, searching for the right limb. She moaned in pain as the slightest movement increased the agony in her back. The arm was not there but there was no blood on her left hand either, surely they would have been if it had been ripped off? That thought sparked a memory, one of being in a cramped but warm cockpit one moment, and hurtling through the night and the rain the next, as if her seat had been shot out of a cannon.

A pretty close analogy as it happens.

Caroline had saved her, ejecting them both just as the abused airframe had said ‘Enough’ and given up the ghost.

She looked up and saw her arm had become trapped in the lines of the parachute when she had hit the tree and the canopy had collapsed. She retrieved the pale limb with difficult and not a little pain. The loss of feeling had been due to restricted circulation as if she had slept upon it, and she sobbed with agony as full blood flow was restored.

Regaining terra firma was difficult and she suspected a bruised coccyx was the cause. Before her first flight with Caroline back at RAF Kinloss, a seemingly long time ago, she recalled the stunningly attractive American pilot leaning over her and strapping her in whilst explaining the drills for abandoning the aircraft and the importance of posture at the moment of ejection. Svetlana’s libido had got in the way and she had become distracted by the possibility of kissing that mouth rather than listening to the instructions that were coming out of it.

She now leaned against the tree and listened. There was just the wind and the sound of the trees, nothing else. So, she thought to herself, Elena had kept her word by stopping the war, rather than just pocketing the financial inducement and continuing it once she had seized the leadership. That was something she had expressed her reservations about to Scott Tafler, whether Elena Torneski could be trusted to settle for US backing of leadership of the Russian Federation, and a whole lot of money, or to go for broke and a new Soviet Union, one that encompassed all of Europe.

“Where are you, Caroline?” she muttered to herself and looking around, seeing nothing but trees, she added a rider to that question. “And where the hell am I, for that matter?”

Major Nunro had landed in a small clearing, landing with a thump that knocked the breath out of her. This had been her second parachute descent but this time it had not been the result of a shoot-down, technically anyway.

On her escape and evasion course and subsequent refresher training, the instructors had all stressed the vital
importance of burying the parachute, of denying a hunter team a start point. If it was that damned important though, she had always reasoned, then why were the aircrew provided with nothing more substantial than a survival knife with a blunt tip, to prevent the accidental puncturing of one’s life raft, always an important consideration in a forest. 

It had still been dark when she had dragged the parachute shrouds into the undergrowth inside the treeline, bundling them into some bushes and out of sight.

Putting distance between herself and the area of a shoot-down had been the next step, if she had followed the drills, but she was not going anywhere without the Russian girl. She found a large and elderly oak tree on the edge of the clearing and sat under one of its great boughs, out of the rain and waited for the dawn, listening to the sound of battle over the horizon.

As the sun had arisen the rain had tailed off, disappearing east with the cloud. Daylight revealed her surrounds, including the white shrouds of the bundled parachute. Being an X aircraft, an experimental testbed, it had not been necessary to install the green variety. Soggy, dead bracken that she added did not make a whole bunch of difference. If someone was looking for her from the air, they would see it.

Her survival vest contained a SAR Beacon but she had it switched off. The majority of downed aircrew who are captured have used the device early on and still within the area of the shoot-down. Svetlana had no vest or beacon so she would find her and they would both beat feet before Caroline used hers to summon a rescue.

She had no clue as to where Svetlana had landed, she had to assume they were not far apart as they had been sat with only feet separating them at the time of ejection, but walking in ever increasing circles about the clearing for two full hours had not reunited them.

The distant gunfire tailed off over a period of perhaps thirty minutes, although the odd shot sounded here and there.

The sound of metal upon metal brought her up short and she dropped to the ground, peering around a tree trunk for the
source of the noise. She saw nothing  at first, not until a mere twelve feet away a camouflage net was lift by a Soviet tanker in black coveralls, and behind him she glimpsed the unmistakeable track and drive wheels of an armoured fighting vehicle of some description. Shocked, she looked around and saw more of the nets and realised she had walked into a harbour area. Backing away she almost stumbled over two reposed figures behind a machine gun, quite obviously sentries but from their gaunt appearance they had fallen asleep at the switch through exhaustion. She had walked past them, into the area without even seeing them.

Having crept away, looking frequently behind she relaxed, walked around the bole of a large tree and straight into the view of three uniformed KGB soldiers with a German Shepherd dog on a long lead. From their reactions they had apparently been tracking her.

Fight or flight? She had her 9mm Beretta in a shoulder holster but against three men with assault rifles it would be a short fight indeed. She turned and ran; the men shouted and released the dog.

Limping from tree trunk to tree trunk for support, Svetlana had begun to wonder if she had in fact broken the small tailbone. The pain was almost enough to induce vomit.

She kept the sun at her back and hobbled west, gritting her teeth and refusing to stop and rest as she did not know if she could find the strength to move again.

It was after an hour that she saw something white in the undergrowth and discovered a badly camouflaged parachute, presumably Caroline’s.  There was no sign of the pilot, no giveaway flash of blonde hair amongst the trees and so she continued on, heading west.

The shouts of more than one man and the bark of a dog came to her through the trees an hour later, and then a scream, a loud cry of fear that she recognised as coming from the American. Vomit arose as she hurried toward the sound, but she spat out the bile without stopping.

Caroline was face down on the forest floor, blood leaking from a scalp wound where she had been pistol whipped unconscious. A large dog, its teeth bared, stood beside her as three soldiers, KGB troops by their insignia, tugged down her G-suit down over her hips. The pilot had a boot pressed between her shoulder blades by the dog’s handler, holding her in place as his companions next undid their trousers. Quite obviously a gang rape, and probably a murder would follow if Svetlana took no action.

The dog’s handler had Caroline’s Beretta stuck in his belt and his own AKM held loosely in his right hand. The other two had laid their own weapons against a tree. The dog handler was the greatest threat and Svetlana leant against a trunk, aimed and fired the automatic taken from the field policeman weeks before. Two quick aimed shots took him in the chest and throat, and then she moved her point of aim to the right, to the KGB trooper nearest the two AKMs. It was a miscalculation on her part for as the handler crumpled his dog leapt towards her. She swung back and fired again, hitting the animal in the chest as it launched itself at her throat. The dog slammed into her, and Svetlana fell back with a cry of agony but retained a grip on the handgun. Bile filled her mouth again having jarred the injury on landing. The troopers had reached their weapons but a voice barked out a command in accented Russian, ordering them to stand down. Svetlana could not see the newcomer but with arrogance typical of the KGB one spat deliberately, contemptuously at the speaker before raising his weapon in Svetlana’s direction. A shot rang out and blood spurted from the side of his head before he could fire and he dropped, still holding the assault rifle. Turning and aiming, the third trooper then hesitated, staring down the barrel of the gun that had killed his companion. The sound of pounding feet approaching was followed by more shouting of commands by several voices at once, in Hungarian this time, but the trooper got the message, dropping his weapon and raising his hands.

“If you shoot at me, my men will kill you.” A voice said in very halting English from beyond the tree she had been leaning against. However, she retained a grip on her handgun, raising it towards the sound of the voice.

“You should be aware that the war, at least in Europe, is over.” The speaker added. “I think it would be a shame for us both to die after the fighting has finished, don’t you agree?”

A soldier knelt beside Caroline and she altered her aim, pointing at him. He looked to his right, directly at her and then at the gun before ignoring them both and tending to Caroline. Clearly a medic was not going to be putting himself in harm’s way as part of a deception. Applying the safety catch she tossed her handgun away where the unseen speaker could see it.

An older man appeared and made safe the handgun he was holding before assisting her to her feet.

The surviving KGB trooper was escorted away, past the two dead men and one equally dead dog.

“Thank you.” It was all she could think of saying at that time.

“You are most welcome, young lady.” responded Colonel Leo Lužar. 

Arkansas Valley Nebraska, USA.

When 4 Corps had arrived and removed the spear tip from 3
rd
Shock Army’s advance, the Red Army had found itself in a worse position than it had a week before. The banks of the Elbe and Saale were back in NATO hands, held by fresh troops and fully equipped units, unlike before.

Their Premier was dead; the man who had designed and orchestrated the Third World War was now a bunch of irradiated atoms a mile underground with a man-made depression in the earth’s surface, a quarter miles across, as a grave marker.

A new leader had emerged, apologising via video conferencing with the President for the hours it had taken to rein in the Red Army, Navy and Air Forces.

The President sat in a darkened room, presumably to deny any possible clue as to its location. Premier Elena Torneski sat in front of a flag of the Russian Federation, which served the same purpose, and for an hour they spoke, with the President extracting various assurances from her as to a withdrawal to pre-war lines.

Torneski’s position was far from secure but international support could change that.

As the conferencing link was ended the lights came up in the Presidents room to reveal that he had been far from alone.

“Okay.” Said the President. “Thoughts and observations?”

“Am I the only one who noticed that the brakes only came on
after
they lost the race for the autobahns?” said Ben Dupre, the FBI Director. “And what’s with that hair?”

The President looked down at her file and the few photos that they had of this comparative unknown, and compared it with another photograph of a different Russian national.

The President turned in his seat to look at Ben and nod emphatically in agreement.

“Absolutely.” He stated before looking at his CIA Director “That would seem to be one for you psychoanalysts, Mr Jones.”

Terry Jones did not take notes however. The CIA’s expertise in such matters was unsurpassed and already in hand regarding Premier Torneski. The organisations predecessor, the ambiguously names Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, employed the offices of one Walter C Langer to help them second guess a certain dictator. In 1943 Mr Langer, despite not holding a degree in psychiatry, duly submitted what became the benchmark for all future works in that field. The report entitled ‘The Mind of Adolf Hitler’ opened a window onto one sick puppy. Since then all world leaders, friend, foe and neutral alike have had dossiers that included psychoanalysis by the experts at Langley. The President himself would be somewhat put out to learn that such a report existed on Theodore Kirkland, the current POTUS, as is the case for all occupants of the Oval Office.