' The Longest Night ' & ' Crossing the Rubicon ': The Original Map Illustrated and Uncut Final Volume (Armageddon's Song) (36 page)
Authors: Andy Farman
The enemy was of course aware that the invaders were a long way from home and had relatively few helicopters, at least until such time as suitable airfields could be captured.
The Chinese 3
rd
Army’s 1
st
Corps would land before dawn at several beaches, not just the one. It was logical to assume an invader needed a central beachhead and it was also logical that the beachhead would be where the defenders were barring the way to a Pass.
Someone on the Chinese planning staff would beg to differ with that assumption.
“Conn, Sonar…new contact bearing zero eight seven degrees, range ten thousand meters, speed twelve knots. Classify as civilian coastal traffic, Captain.” She was an old and noisy coastal freighter trying to go about her business under the cover of darkness. Their previous contact had been doing likewise, and that had been a small tanker.
At some point in this war, thought Li ruefully, I may actually get to do what submariners are supposed to do, sink stuff.
To his mind the empty and docked
Fliterland
did not count.
Another half hour brought to the control room the state employed cut throat who commanded the special forces unit. He lacked the charm, wit and quiet wisdom of Jie Huaiqing; in fact he seemed devoid of humour completely. Li shook his hand and wished him luck. There would be no pick-up by this vessel, no need indeed for any further participation. The men would link up with the army once the landing had succeeded.
The submersible would tow his men inshore at the northern end of the target beach, dropping them off as the teams targets drew close.
The shoreline here was defended, but not to the same extent to which Port Kembla and Batemans Bay was. Kembla had the port facilities required as a base for future operations, as well as access to one of the few passes through the mountains to the west. Batemans Bay was linked to Canberra via the Kings Highway, Route 52, and it was just half the distance in comparison to taking the steeply winding road that zig-zagged up the escarpment of Mt Kembla to the Macquarie Pass.
Zheng He
put about and moved quietly away, back out into the deep waters that offered greater safety than the inshore shallows.
Behind them, two pairs of swimmers who had already detached from the submersible and would next abandon their rebreathers in six feet of water. They crept ashore at Moruya
North Beach, crawling slowly up out of the surf using the noisy runoff from a drainage culvert as cover.
Soldiers of the 1
st
/19
th
Battalion of the Royal New South Wales Regiment were dug in inside the trees bordering the sandy beach. The citizen soldiers were well trained and alert, but unaware that the weakness in their defence had been spotted on a digital movie taken by a Chinese family on holiday two years before.
Behind these defenders lay a small airports runway and behind that lay more alert Australians with guns, but the special forces troopers bypassed them all, crawling 439m through the culvert, beneath the runway to the saltwater stream that fed it. From there the troopers split up, heading for command posts.
At the mouth of the Moruya River the next four kicked away from the submersible and swam for the cliffs at Moruya Head. The night climb was not the most difficult any of them had previously undertaken, and they too sought out the company CP for the defenders of Shelly Beach.
The submersible would enter the river and secure two bridges, killing the waiting Australian sappers before they could blow them, and directing precision shellfire onto a gun battery nearby.
C Troop, D Squadron, 1
st
(AU) Armoured Regiment attached to B Company, 1
st
/19
th
Battalion, Royal New South Wales Regiment: Moruya North Beach, NSW.
0412hrs Saturday 27
th
October.
The shelling of the beach, and the Burrawang Forest behind it, came as something of an unpleasant surprise for the citizen/reservists and regulars alike for two reasons. Firstly, this was a heavily forested area that stretch twenty six miles inland. Only an idiot or a Chinaman who’d been sat in the sun too long would chose this spot to invade Australia, which at least had been the opinion of the soldiers up until an hour before. Secondly of course, they had been expecting to be relieved by a Pom infantry brigade.
‘Tango Four Three Charlie’, a German built Leopard 1 that was older than even the old man of the crew, Trooper ‘Bingo’ McCoy, the twenty eight year old driver, rocked on its tracks as a shell exploded in the trees nearby. The vicious splinters were little threat to the tank, but a deadly danger to the infantry who shared this ordeal by fire.
The Australians had decided on replacing the old main battle tanks with American M1A1 Abrams, but the war had occurred before that process had begun.
“This is just a diversion.” opined the tanks gunner, Che Tan, and not for the first time. “The real effort will be up the coast. I’m tellin’ yer, that’s how they’ll play it.”
They were in a hull down position well to the rear of their fighting positions, beyond the boundary of Moruya Jockey Club, the race track north of the river of the same name. Che was Australian born and bred; his parents though had arrived as refugees from Vietnam. There was nothing inscrutably oriental about Trooper Tan; he said it as he saw it.
“They’ll get bored and bugger off in a minute.”
A near miss shook the vehicle, red hot steel splinters striking its armour.
The rest of the crew in the turret stared accusingly at the gunner for tempting fate.
“A minute?” asked the driver. “I’ve got five dollars if someone’s got a stopwatch and better odds.”
They were suited and masked for NBC, three quarters of a mile from the beach, back from their forward fighting positions amongst two platoons worth of the Royal New South Wales Regiment, along with a pair of ASLAV armoured recce vehicles of the 2
nd
/14
th
Light Horse. The racetrack, a coastal road, a copse and an airfield runway lay between their current position and where they would fight.
Either side of C Troop’s current location
, were the company headquarters of the infantry, occupying a dug-in CP, mortar pits and trenches. The infantrymen had no armoured fighting vehicles; just canvas topped Mercedes Unimogs in a harbour area further to the rear. The clerks and storemen huddled in the shelter bays praying that no direct hit would end them instantly, and no near-miss would collapse the trench upon them and end them slowly.
“Seriously though
,” Che said. “What are we doing here? It’s not tank country; there are rivers and billabongs all over the shop, and enough trees per acre to make a billion matchsticks.”
“Colour, dash and daring, boy
,” Chuck Waldek, the loader said. “Colour, dash and daring, ‘cod without us this would just be another mindless shitfight between their moron grunts and our cut-lunch-commandos” as he referred to volunteer reservists.
The tanks crews had made good use of the aforementioned trees, cutting branches and foliage to strap to the turret and flanks with D10 telephone cable. By doing so they spared their cam nets and also took their cover with them whenever they moved.
The barrage lifted, shifting to possible reinforcement routes, sealing off the Australians from help.
“Hello all Tango callsigns, this is Tango Four Nine, ‘Wicked Lady’, over.”
A and B Troops responded, and then it was their turn.
“Tango Four Three Alpha, ‘Wicked Lady’, over!”
“Tango Four Three Bravo, ‘Wicked Lady’, over!”
“Tango Four Three Charlie, ‘Wicked Lady’ over!” Gary Burley, the tanks commander replied.
“
Tango Four Nine, ‘Wicked Lady’, out.”
Sergeant Burley switched to intercom.
“Okay Bingo, let’s go, get us to the first firing position, the landing craft have been spotted heading in!”
A hundred metres spacing between the vehicles, they moved slowly forwards like articulated garden features, leafy branches seemingly growing out of the steel plate. They manoeuvred around trees until reaching the chain link fence surrounding the race track and accelerated. Four Three Charlie’s driver ignored an open gate in order the trash a long length of the fence which they carried with them, entangled over the front of the Leopard.
“Well that was smart, wasn’t it?” Gary said to the driver in censure.
“Bollocks, the amount of money I’ve lost in this place I reckon I must have paid for it twice over.” Bingo grumbled back. He had picked up his nickname because he was so addicted to giving away his cash to bookies after each Army Appreciation Day (payday, in Anzac parlance), he had even been spotted sat amongst blue rinsed old ladies in Bingo Halls trying to win it back before his wife found out.
The Leopards were illuminated by the blazing spectator’s stands and stables. The horses, and much of the local population, had moved away over the previous week when it became evident that invasion was inevitable.
“Bloody hell, if you spent enough here to qualify as an owner then I reckon yer about bankrupt now, mate!”
The racecourse had received the attention of naval gunfire, as had the small provincial airport, where flames were leaping high from the hangars and buildings, clearly visible above the trees to their right.
The damage wrought to the fence seemed rather trivial in the face of what the invaders were doing. When Banjo repeated it at the other side it became snarled up with the first one they had crashed through, leaving the fence raising sparks as it trailed behind them across George Bass Drive, the coastal road.
Bingo slowed as they entered a copse of trees just before the airport runway, as this was the infantry’s in-depth position. Running over someone in the dark here was a distinct possibility.
On the far side of the runway lay the final thin strip of trees before the beach, and as the tanks reached midway across the runways tarmac something emerged from behind the extreme left of those trees.
Gary was staring through his night sight at the mass of green hues and saw the thing appear.
A Ming Tz combat hovercraft was rounding the fighting positions, outflanking the Royal New South Wales Regiment defenders before disgorging its infantry. The 7.62mm machineguns in its turret firing into the first positions, but the
23mm automatic cannon mounting engaged the trio of Leopard tanks.
The Australian Leopards had the far reaching Royal Ordnance L7A3 105mm rifled tank gun, but its long rang was not required. Four Three Charlie fired on the move, the HESH round doing wicked damage to the armoured hovercraft just four hundred metres away.
Four Three Alpha also fired; the troop commander’s Leopard hit the Ming’s fuel tank. Three hundred gallons of high octane aviation fuel went up in a fireball, engulfing the hovercraft and the naval infantry.