Post by forcon on Jun 5, 2019 19:35:22 GMT
This is the first chapter of a book I once planned to write. Be warned that I don't currently have any plans to finish the story, but my writing goes up through several chapters which I will post here so long as people like what they read!
One
H hour minus Thirty Minutes
Over the Baltic Sea
The gentle humming caused by the four engines of the giant Ilyushin transport plane failed to pierce the protective bubble that Junior Lieutenant Sergei Akromeyev had built around his thoughts. A fleet of similar aircraft soared unseen through the darkened sky beside Akromeyev’s aircraft, carrying the nearly two-thousand paratroopers of the 331st Guards Air Assault Regiment. War, spoken of by many but experienced by few, was upon them. The men aboard the aircraft were separated into two seating isles against each wall of the lumbering jet, with the whole company of over a hundred men crammed into its coffin-like boundaries. Between the two columns were three green-painted BMD infantry fighting vehicles, rigged up to parachutes of their own.
Junior Lieutenant Akromeyev, a pale-skinned man of twenty-four whose blonde hair was obscured by his green combat helmet, was not one of those individuals who had faced the enemy in combat before. A few of the senior officers and sergeants were veterans who had faced trial-by-fire in Syria, Ukraine, Georgia, or even Chechnya all those years ago in a minority of cases.
A figure emerged in the darkness from the front of the aircraft’s tubular interior, staggering down the walkway as the Ilyushin was gently buffeted by turbulence. Using the hulls of the trio of fighting vehicles as support, the figure continued to advance, its figure barely visible in the low-light, its shape marked out only by a helmet and a rifle. Akromeyev recognised the Slavic features of Junior Lieutenant Sergetov, one of his fellow platoon leaders as his form came within a few metres.
“Here we go, eh, Sergei?” Remarked the slightly older of the two.
“Indeed.” There was a moment of tense silence before Sergetov delved into his breast pocket and retrieved a small, metallic hip flask. “Drink?” He offered, taking a sip with a slight grimace.
“You know I don’t drink, Yuri.” Akromeyev hated himself for it, but he was tempted to accept his friend’s offer. He decided against it; his father had been an alcoholic and a drug addict. Before that, Akromeyev’s father had likewise been a soldier; an Afghanistan veteran who’s every conscious hour was tortured by memories of his nightmarish eighteen months of fighting with the Mujahedeen. Watching his father crumble into an inescapable pit of despair as his shellshock worsened hadn’t dampened the younger Akromeyev’s military ambitions one bit, but it had led him to a life of cautious and total sobriety.
“Thought you might have changed your mind, this being the beginning of World War Three and all.”
“Speaking of which, isn’t improper behaviour before the enemy, for example drunkenness,” Sergei said with a grin, “punishable by death?”
“It’s not to get drunk, just to take the edge off.” Sergetov took another drink, shorter this time as if expecting a berating. “Besides, nobody is interested.”
Master Sergeant Lushkov, the Starshina who had shown Akromeyev, two decades his younger, the ropes of the VDV, was sleeping, slumped nonchalantly in his seat.
“True enough,” Akromeyev replied. The older soldiers, the veterans, were slumbering while they could, not knowing when the next chance might come, while the younger men held hushed conversations betwixt themselves or tried to distract their own minds by incessantly checking their equipment or making private scribbles on notepads. Unlike Lushkov and the other NCOs, the Lieutenant had never been able to master the art of sleeping anywhere at any time. He supposed it came with age and combat experience. Or vodka and heroin, he reminded himself, thinking back to his youth in a crumbling Nizhniy Novgorod apartment.
“Sergei, what do you think it will be like?” Sergetov’s voice was barely audible over the droning of the jet engines. “War, I mean.”
The seated paratrooper shrugged. “I…it’ll be like pursuing one great decisive aim with force and determination, I suppose,” he answered, quoting Carl Von Clausewitz.
“I see you remember your history lessons well, Sergei,” Sergetov said, himself identifying the German military philosopher’s words from lectures at the Military Education and Scientific Centre, on the site of the former Frunze Military Academy. That was were both Sergetov and, despite the condemnation of his father and the pleas of his long-suffering mother, Sergei Akromeyev, had earned their commissions.
The two men were jolted from their debate by the sudden, cackled announcement over the tannoy that the aircraft and its passengers were fifteen minutes away from their drop-zone. They were over enemy airspace now, probably just coming into Latvian airspace over the Gulf of Riga.
“Good luck, Sergei Mikhailovich,” Lieutenant Sergetov said, turning away to return to his own platoon.
Master Sergeant Lushkov stirred and then sat up, donning his combat helmet and picking up his rifle. Though the windows in the passenger compartment had blinds drawn permanently down on them, Akromeyev new that in front of him the sun would soon rise, illuminating the battlefield. He found himself slightly short of breath and tried to conceal the fact that his hands were shaking, as much through excitement as through terror. His men were slowly standing, checking their own parachutes and then each other’s. Akromeyev and his Starshina performed the same ritual on one another.
Noticing his apparent anxiety, Lushkov winked and said, “Don’t worry, sir. Just follow your training and we’ll get them through this.”
Lushkov was, of course, referring to the thirty men whose lives were in the hands of Akromeyev, the untested junior lieutenant. He’d told himself he wouldn’t let them down since his first day out of training, when the fresh-faced young officer had stood in front of thirty even younger men and taken responsibility for their lives.
It was sound of the rear-door of the Ilyushin gently sliding open with a mechanical hiss that pulled Akromeyev back to reality, however, rather than the words of the ever-wise Sergeant Lushkov. The sound of cold morning air rushing into the interior overpowered the rustling of equipment and the flurry of panicked last-minute checks taking place within.
“Stand up!” Sergei barked, forcing his voice to project confidence that he did not feel. Hoping that those in front of him couldn’t see the trembling in his hands, he made the motion for his men to follow suit in case they had missed his command. Akromeyev risked a quick look behind him, seeing nothing but the pre-dawn twilight. He pondered why no fighters had been sent up to intercept the transport planes; to kill their human cargo before it could be unleashed. The platoon commander to his right ordered his men to hook up their parachutes to the static line, which would automatically open them when the troopers were clear of the aircraft.
Shit! Move, Sergei, you idiot. They’ll think you’ve frozen! For a split second his mouth refused to obey his brain, but then training took over and he quickly blurted out the orders. He knew he’d blown it now. How could he have made himself look such a fool in front of the men who he would momentarily be leading into battle?
They were all stood up, hooked up to the static lines and strapped into their parachutes. All there was left to do was survive the agonising wait until the light by the rear ramp would turn from red to green…How long did it take? Seconds or minutes in reality. It could have been years for those who were waiting. The ground passed beneath him in slow motion as Sergei approached the ramp. Mentally, he was telling, himself to keep calm and not to panic, and before long he was pleading with himself, losing a battle between platitude and panic within his own mind. Then the light turned green. Lieutenant Sergei Akromeyev leapt forwards into oblivion.
Eighteen Hours Earlier (H minus Eighteen Hours)
Tapa Army Base, Estonia
Estonia’s Tapa Army Base betrayed no hint to its occupants that it had once been a decrepit Soviet-era relic. Currently inhabiting the facility, which lay to the west of Estonia’s capital city, Tallinn, were the four thousand members of the British Army’s 14th Armoured Brigade, including the 1st Battalion, Princess of Wales Royal Regiment. The battalion, known in shorter hand as 1 PWRR, was joined by troops and vehicles from several other units, technically making it a battlegroup rather than a straight-up armoured infantry battalion. Amongst the personnel assigned to the headquarters section of 1 PWRR was Captain Sophie Turner, twenty-nine. She marched briskly down the foyer leading from her temporary office to the briefing room, marvelling at the state of the Army base; the building was modern, innovative even when compared with the British Army barracks’ back home. The Estonians had clearly built it to impress. As a seven-year veteran of the Intelligence Corps – the Green Slime, as it was known due to the colour of its members’ berets – Turner often found herself more comfortable in the darkened atmosphere of the unit’s regular basing facilities back home.
Entering the room alongside the battalion’s staff officers, the CO, and the second-in-command, Captain Turner noted the grim faces of her companions. The brief round of greetings was quickly followed by the ingress into the chamber of 1st Battalion’s company and platoon leaders. The responsibility of briefing them on the increasingly grave political situation and the subsequent deployment of 1 PWRR to forward defensive positions along the border with Russia, would fall to her.
The situation with the Russians had been growing evermore dire for months now, first with ethnic Russian groups in Estonia and the other two Baltic States of Latvia and Lithuania taking to the streets to object to their purported mistreatment by their respective governments, and then with the Americans accusing Moscow’s intelligence services of directly supporting the protests. The past two weeks had been especially gruelling and filled with tension. Back in the middle of October, the Romanian Navy had had one of its ships lost in an engagement with the Russians when that NATO member’s vessel was patrolling off of the coast of Crimea; a skirmish had broken out and three Romanian warplanes had been shot down, leading to the deployment of a US Marine Expeditionary Unit to Southern Europe. Then, less than two days ago, an American C-130 cargo plane over the Baltic Sea had been blown out of the sky by Russian fighters. Moscow had offered no comment over the incident, instead accusing NATO of provoking the incident to justify some sort of pre-emptive attack on Russia.
There was a lot more to the situation than that, but Turner’s job as the battlegroup’s intelligence officer didn’t extend beyond gathering and analysing information beyond that which would affect 1 PWRR’s direct situation.
Fear was palpable inside the briefing chamber, a room that reminded many of them somewhat of a school classroom. Anxiety hovered in the air like a buzzing insect, worry imprinted onto the faces of the men and women who took up seats in front of her after filing into the room like good schoolchildren. Lieutenant-Colonel Sutton, the mustachioed commanding officer of 1 PWRR battlegroup, briefly gave an introductory speech; Turner could perceive traces of tiredness and stress as the senior officer tried to uphold his typical palliative, monotone voice.
“Good morning, people. I’ll get straight to the point. I know you’ve all been keeping up with the news for the past few weeks, but there is now a direct threat of a Russian invasion of the Baltic States.” He let the words hang in the air for a scarce moment before continuing. “We have heard nothing out of Moscow for the past forty-eight hours now, and it is conceivable that the Russian President is out of position, and that their military is calling the shots now. The North Atlantic Council met several hours ago in Brussels and ordered a full-scale mobilisation of NATO forces. The UK threat level has been increased to severe. As of now, Operation Cabrit – the British mission to deter Russian aggression against the Baltic States – has become Operation Porter, which is the MOD’s war plan to repel hostile forces from Alliance territory, in conjunction with troops from sixteen different NATO powers.” After running his men through the immediate strategic situation, Sutton handed things over to Sophie Turner, his senior intelligence officer with the battalion staff.
“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” Turner began, clearing her throat confidently. “Like Colonel Sutton said, I’m afraid the situation we currently face is extremely grave. I won’t bullshit you.” Only officers swore in front of officers; it was one of the perks of a commission. “Our intelligence tells us we have at present three Russian army groups, which are corps-sized formations under NATO doctrine, moving towards the borders of Estonia and Latvia, and we have the movement of an airborne division to Kaliningrad. Closer to us is the Seventy-Sixth Guards Air Assault Division, which is based right over the border” – she beckoned to the map beside her, pointing to a location within Russia – “here at Pskov. They have been mobilising since yesterday.” The faces of the lieutenants, captains, and majors situated to her front showed deep concern. Many of them took notes while others nodded with pessimistic acceptance. “The Sixth Army, which consists of two mechanised brigades as well as extremely heavy artillery support, and has also possibly been reinforced with an armoured vision from the Moscow area, is moving into pre-attack positions along the Estonian-Russian border. We think the other two army groups, the 1st Guards Tank Army and the 20th Guards Combined Arms Army, are likely to go north-west into Latvia, where NATO defences are somewhat stronger. Nevertheless, I would like to point out that there is a possibility of the 20th Guards Army going northwards into Estonia and hitting us in our southern flank as well.” Sophie took a noticeable pause to catch her breath and to allow what she had just reported to sink in.
“What about the Suwalki Gap, Captain?” Colonel Sutton queried. Unlike the company and platoon leaders, the battlegroup commander stood a few feet away and on her left. The Suwalki Gap was a stretch of land that lay between the isolated enclave of Kaliningrad and Moscow’s traditional long-term ally of Belarus. The area itself, stretching for just sixty-four miles, was the only overland area through which Allied reinforcements could enter the Baltic States, and it was extremely vulnerable to attack from both the north and, if Belarus’ harried dictatorship chose to side with the Russians, from the south too.
“The Poles are covering the area with their own forces in expectance of an assault out of Kaliningrad. There are two Russian mechanised formations, one brigade and one regiment, stationed out there, plus the airborne division which has recently deployed,” she informed, pausing to check her notes, “the 98th Guards out of Ivanovo. The Polish Land Forces and NATO’s Joint Task Force – East will be focusing their efforts on keeping our LOCs open. I haven’t seen any indications that the Belarusians will join in, but we cannot rule that out.” With NATO mobilising, tens of thousands of troops would be coming into the Baltic States and Poland, but it would take them weeks, if not months, to arrive. Only after the events in Ukraine had the Alliance taken the threat from Russia seriously and after the two decades spent downsizing and budget-slashing that had preceded the fall of the Soviet Union, nobody was totally sure how well the large-scale reinforcement of NATO’s most exposed members would occur.
“I’d like to now move on to the tactical situation regarding the defence of Estonia. I know we’ve practiced this before, but we’ve never deployed in full-strength to our planned defensive positions.”
Turner used tapped the clicker in her hand a couple of times, grimacing for a brief and awkward moment when the controller refused to comply, before it finally chose that now was not the time to be having a temper tantrum and zoomed in on the map.
“1 Princess of Wales battlegroup,” she began, “will, as you know, be fighting from our planned MLR just west of Johvi, preventing a Russian pass down the E-20 Highway. We will have the Dutch acting as our cavalry scouts. To the south, we will have 5 RIFLES battlegroup, and 1 YORKS will be on our northern flank. The US Army is moving its 173rd Airborne Brigade into Estonia from Italy, but they will be positioned further south.” The Captain made to check her notes once again. “We think it will be the Sixth Army that hits us from the east; the Twenty-Fifth and One-Thirty-Eighth Motorised Rifle Brigades and possibly the Ninetieth Guards Tank Division are expected to move round the northern side of Lake Peipus, with a possible effort to launch a secondary offensive from the southern side of the river. Sixth Army troop strength is estimated to stand at about thirty-five thousand men and around two hundred tanks and armoured fighting vehicles.”
She was interrupted by Major Simmons, the battlegroup’s second-in-command or 2i/c. “They will have a hell of a lot of artillery in support and we will be outnumbered. We will not, however, be outgunned; all of you know that, pound-for-pound, our armour and artillery is superior to theirs.”
Captain Turner tried to disguise her displeasure at being interrupted by the 2i/c, only a few years her senior. His point was valid, but the Major’s interjection had been somewhat pointless and uninvited.
“As Major Simmons said, we have good defensive terrain and clear firing points down onto the highways through which their heavy forces will have to travel.” She was sure that the infantry and armour officers didn’t appreciate having their job explained to them by the Green Slime and chose to move on. “One of our major worries is that of an airborne assault behind our lines. The air assault division I mentioned earlier, the Seventy-Sixth Guards, at full-strength has about twelve thousand troops under its command as well as airdrop-capable IFV’s. They could land anywhere along the northern coast of Estonia or even directly in Tallinn itself.”
“Our friends in the Estonian Defence League will have anti-aircraft teams dotted around to try to prevent that, and the Americans are moving a squadron of F-16s into Amari Air Base,” Simmons added once again, this time drawing the unspoken condemnation not only of Captain Turner but of the battlegroup’s CO as well.
“That’s right, and we will have plenty of land-based air support from Poland, Denmark, and Norway as well as carrier-based air support from the Americans and the Prince of Wales out in the North Sea.”
Checking her own notes, Turner realised that she had effectively finished her briefing; it was not time to take questions from the unit commanders before her, and she asked if they had any, seeing several hands shoot up. Lt.-Colonel Sutton pointed to a fresh-faced Second Lieutenant by the name of Matthew Winters, one of the armoured infantry platoon commanders.
“What do we know about potential use of CBRN weapons against us?” Winters questioned. Turner’s eyes flickered downwards momentarily. It was the question nobody wanted to think about, the acronym that was enough to strike terror into the heart of any soldier.
“On balance, we think that the first use of theatre or tactical nuclear weapons by the Russians is not likely. They have quite a large numerical superiority and they aren’t about to risk a nuclear exchange unless they feel that the motherland itself is threatened. As for chemicals and biologicals, Russia has signed both the Chemical & Biological Weapons Conventions outlawing those, but from recent events in Syria and the UK we know that Moscow holds little regard for international law; I’d say chemicals are more likely to be used than biologicals, but again neither are particularly probable unless their ground forces perform worse than expected, since the Russians know that we will respond to any biological or chemical attack with our nuclear arsenal.”
H minus eleven Hours
West of the Latvian-Russian border
A cruel gust of biting wing nipped at Sergeant First Class Jamie Hartley’s exposed knuckles like a terrier at the heels of its master. Latvia, with its grey skies and sputtering drizzle, was the polar opposite of Texas. Fort Bliss, where Hartley, and the rest of the four-thousand-man brigade combat team was stationed, never failed to provide its own set of problems. Here though, instead of sand clogging up complicate machinery, there was the worry of artillery suddenly pouring down on one’s position and enemy warplanes screaming overhead. The M1A2-SEP Abrams tank, which had only hours ago been broken out of a US Army pre-positioned equipment warehouse near Riga, squatted low behind a mound of dirt. The platoon’s positions were dotted across a large field which served as a divide between two stretches of woodland. Little covered was offered by the autumn trees, which seemed to dance naked as they were rustled by the wind. Clambering up onto the metallic body of his main battle tank, Sergeant Hartley then proceeded to lower himself down into the vehicle’s cramped interior, grateful for the warmth it provided him.
“What’d the Captain say, Sergeant?” Asked Specialist Keller, Hartley’s gunner. Hartley had been in a briefing with Bravo Company’s platoon leaders and sergeants. 1st Platoon, of which Hartley was the platoon sergeant in concurrence with his role as commander of his own Abrams, had a relatively squared-away leader in First Lieutenant Wilkes.
“Nothing we didn’t hear on the pre-deployment briefing, Jake.” The Sergeant thought back to the speech that the commander of the 1st Battalion, 77th Armor Regiment, had given to his troops as they waited to board a fleet of Air Force C-17s bound for Latvia. “Men,” Lieutenant-Colonel Pendry had announced, “we are not going there to start a fight, but you can bet your asses that we will be ready for one.” The Colonel had gone on to give a short pep-talk about duty and responsibility before dismissing his men. The 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the US Army’s 1st Armored Division was again going to war. A war that had yet to begin, but a war that many in the Pentagon saw as an inevitability.
“You think it’s going to kick off, Sergeant?” Keller persisted like an over excitable child. Hartley, a veteran of two tours in Iraq several years ago, only nodded. Of the four men in the tank, Hartley was the only to have seen battle; he was also the oldest man in the platoon by a longshot. Keller was only three years out of high-school and even he was older than Specialist Tibbs, the Abrams’ bespectacled loader. Hartley’s driver, Private First Class Donnelly, wasn’t even old enough to legally drink alcohol yet, not that he allowed that fact to stop him.
“We’ll know soon enough, Keller.” He decided to elaborate, more for his own good than for that of his crew. He needed to purge what the officers and senior non-coms of Bravo Company had discussed the entombment of his own mind. “The CO thinks the Russkies are going to his us within the next forty-eight hours or so.” Along the border, special operations types, Green Berets and members of a pair of the Special Operations Command’s recently-formed and lesser-known outfits, the Asymmetric Warfare Group and the Intelligence Support Activity, had confirmed the presence of a huge number of Russian troops moving into pre-attack positions.
Tibbs, the loader, turned around; he had been standing over in the corner with his back turned to his tank’s commander and platoon sergeant. Now facing Hartley, he offered him a steaming cup of coffee.
“Thanks, Specialist.”
Tibbs nodded shyly in response.
“Un-fuckin’-believable.” Specialist Keller was shaking his head vigorously in frustration. Though Hartley couldn’t see his gunner’s face from his own cramped cupola, he could make out the silhouette of Keller’s bulky, ungainly combat-vehicle-crewman’s helmet moving from side to side. “You sign up to pay for college and you end up in a mobile target on some hillside in a country you ain’t even heard of before, on the brink of World War fucking Three…”
PFC Donnelly raised his voice, speaking loudly from his own separated compartment of the sixty-one-ton tank. “Keller, if you ever managed to get into college I’ll personally take Moscow,” he exclaimed in his overdrawn Louisianan drawl.
“Fuck you, Donnelly. They even teach you to read down in Swampville?”
Tibbs, like Sergeant First Class Hartley, preferred to stay out of the stream of insults between the driver and gunner. He buried his face in his own coffee mug, while the platoon sergeant looked anxiously around the red-lit interior of the tank. The old adage of hurry-up and wait rang true, with little that could be done to calm his nerves beyond compulsively checking and rechecking the vehicle’s communications systems, weapons and mechanics. Seeking to escape the good-natured row and the confines of the vehicle which he had only moments ago sought as a means of warmth and security, Sergeant Hartley removed his helmet and stood up on his chair, sticking his head out of the commander’s hatch. Although it was paradise compared to the foxholes that the infantry had to etch out a squalid existence in, the interior of a tank was an extremely claustrophobic atmosphere. Hartley had let his crewmembers outside in shifts to stretch their legs, eat, or smoke. Even then, they could never move far from the vehicle, in case they came under attack and had to mount up immediately. It was as though they were physically tethered to the Abrams by the uncompromising protection that it offered, and by the might of its firepower. Outside of the commanders’ hatch, SFC Hartley felt the wind batter his cheeks. The unkind, depressing rain had now escalated into something that was just short of a deluge.
H minus Eight Hours
Just east of Johvi, Estonia
Beneath a sunset obscured by low-hanging clouds, the shovels of over a hundred men stabbed deep into the muddy ground like bayonets into one’s enemy. They were digging furiously as though their lives depended on it; the older NCOs new by experience that the moniker was true. Other soldiers scurried about carrying sandbags and ammunition as they scrambled to create a series of effective fighting positions. Second Lieutenant Matthew Winters patrolled purposefully down No.1 Platoon’s lines, striking up conversations with each of the four-man fire-teams as he passed them by. The battlegroup was defending the main highway leading up from the border, with A Coy choosing to fight from a ridgeline dotted with small clumps of bare trees and overlooking the road which was surrounded on both sides by farmers’ fields and larger woodlands.
“How are you feeling, Mailer?” Winters asked the commander of One Section, a stocky, broken-nosed twenty-five-year-old with a head shaved so close that he may as well have been scalped.
“Cold as hell, sir, but otherwise okay.” Mailer was right; the temperature was only a few degrees above freezing, and the chilling wind combined with a gentle but everlasting drizzle only served to worsen the situation.
“We’ve got good firing positions. You lads will have to take out any armour that gets through the Chally’s lines with your Javelins.” Winters had seen his men practice with the ungainly shoulder-fired missiles before, but their success record had been patchy at best.
“We’ve done it before, sir. We can do it again. Ammunition is my big concern.” Winters nodded in agreement before delving into the side pocket of his smock and retrieving a cigarette. Mailer handed him a lighter, an expensive-looking metal zippo which clicked satisfyingly when he opened it.
“Thanks. I’ll have a word with the OC about getting more missiles, but I’m not optimistic.” Feeling powerless, the Second Lieutenant moved on down the line and greeted another fire-team. A Coy, the one-hundred-twenty-man rifle company of which Winters’ platoon was a part, had been assigned a troop of Challenger-2 main battle tanks from the Kings Royal Hussars to boost their firepower in the face of masses of Russian armour. He could make out the hulls of the four beastly, green machines through the treeline.
The tanks were dug in between two stretches of woodland, while the Warrior infantry fighting vehicles crewed by the infantrymen were positioned at the mouth of the forest, granting their 30mm RARDEN cannons as fire support to the hopelessly vulnerable foot-soldiers. Eyeing up the tanks and imagining their crews, warmed by heaters and protected by reactive armour, he felt a twang of regret about choosing infantry over armour. The only real protection from the winter which crept in from the east was his chemical warfare suit, which all the soldiers wore although leaving their gas masks stowed away in their webbing. They didn’t expect weapons of mass destruction to be used, at least not during the opening salvo of the fighting, but precautions were being taken in case; Russia was, after all, a major nuclear power and was known to also possess a chemical and biological weapons. In typical Army fashion, 1 PWRR’s soldiers had been issued their protective suits in desert camouflage; ironically, Winters had heard from some of the older soldiers that troops going into the deserts of Iraq back in 2003 had been given woodland-pattern protective suits.
He’d initially joined to become a tanker, but at Sandhurst he’d enjoyed practicing infantry tactics far more than he could ever have anticipated. “Go for armoured infantry, Mister Winters,” the training corporal had advised him. “It’s the best of both worlds.”
Yeah, right, going up against T-90s and attack helicopters with a pissing 30mm cannon and a few Javelins is the best of both worlds, you coffee-breathed little git. Christ, who’d want to be a foot soldier anyway?
Winter shook himself from his thoughts and spoke to Corporal Jennings, the young, but bright, NCO who commanded his Two Section.
“How are we doing, lads?” The eight men were split into several defensive positions, shallow trenches with sandbags all around them and camouflage netting over the top. The thin, wiry material was concealment as opposed to cover, meant to hide the troops sheltering below rather than protect them.
“Good, sir, good as can be, anyway.” Jennings clambered out of his position, moving slightly away from his companions. “I don’t like our position, Lieutenant. We don’t really have a good line of fire down onto the fields where they’ll start dismounting. And we could really do with another Gimpy.” Jennings was referring to a 7.62mm General Purpose Machinegun.
“You don’t think the Warriors can provide enough fire support?” Winters listened attentively to the opinions of the section commander. Though he was in charge of the platoon, he had yet to fire a shot in anger, while his platoon sergeant and all three of his section commanders had served at least one tour of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan.
“They pack a punch, sir. It’s just that the targets they choose aren’t up to us, not while we’re dismounted. They’re going to be focusing on Ivan’s vehicles while we want them to be taking out the infantry dismounts.”
“I see what you mean. It’s too late to bring in another machine gun but I’ll talk with Sergeant Whitaker about his targeting.” Winters paused to light another cigarette, and Corporal Jennings did the same. “We know they’re going to dismount to clear the woodlands; we’ll have pulled back before that happens.”
“Unless…unless we get overrun, sir.”
The platoon leader considered that possibility. He knew the odds facing them would be near insurmountable. Despite all the bluster at the battalion briefing, they had all known just how badly the British Army was outnumbered.
If A Coy was to be overrun, to become engaged in a battle from which it could not disengage, it would be destroyed in place if by nothing else than superior numbers. There were less than a thousand men and women fighting as part of 1 PWRR battlegroup, and although the rest of the 14th Armoured Brigade was here in Estonia as well, its total strength stood at less than five thousand men and women. Although there were French and Dutch troops present in Estonia as well, their numbers were equally miniscule, if not smaller. NATO also had present in Estonia a brigade of American paratroopers, lightly-armed if well-trained infantrymen that most officers in the British brigade doubted would survive beyond their first engagement with Russian tanks, armoured vehicles and heavy artillery.
He tried to put up a brave face. “That isn’t how we’ll do things, Corporal. We’ll bloody them and then pull back.” And then do the same thing, again and again. Fighting and withdrawing time and time again, dying and killing to buy time. The last part was left unspoken.
Winters backed away from his dismounted infantrymen and made his way over to the Warrior fighting vehicles. In an armoured infantry platoon, the three rifle sections each rode in their own armoured vehicle, while the headquarters section, including the platoon leader, a lieutenant like Winters, a sergeant, radioman, and a medic, were assigned to a fourth Warrior. Sergeant Whitaker, the senior NCO in Winters’ 1 Platoon, had been left commanding the four Warriors and their drivers and gunners, while Winters had taken charge of the infantry sections who he had told to dismount and dig in. He rapped on the rear door of his command vehicle. The steel door hurt his frozen knuckles, but seconds later the platoon sergeant obligingly allowed it to open. Though the Warrior had not been built with comfort in mind, it was at least slightly warmer than enduring the November morning outside, as the dismounts were doing.
“How are the lads, boss?” The bald-headed Sergeant Whitaker asked with genuine concern in his pronounced Cockney accent.
“Not bad, Mike.” He sat down on the torn-leather bench within the Warrior, opposite the NCO. “Scared, probably wondering what they’ve signed up for, but it could be a lot worse.”
“I’ve kept them in shape, sir.”
“Indeed you have. Jennings is worried about fire-support in dealing with the infantry dismounts.”
“Thinks we’ll be too focused on the vehicles, I suppose?”
“Yup. And since we don’t have another Gimpy to go around, I’m inclined to agree.” Sergeant Whitaker sipped at his tea and offered it to the Second Lieutenant, who gratefully accepted, clasping the lukewarm plastic mug in his hands as though it were precious cargo.
“We’ll make sure we focus more on the dismounts. It’s the armour I’m more concerned about. Have you had any luck getting hold of any more Javelins, boss?”
Winters shook his head morbidly. “Afraid not. There’s barely enough to go around for the anti-tank platoon, let alone us lowly riflemen.” He took a gulp from the mug. The brew was standard Army issue; nearly cold, so milky it could have been see-through, and filled with so much sugar that it was practically a solid.
“Sergeant, if your tea-making skills reflect your combat leadership, I’m not optimistic about our chances.” The laughter was cheap but well-needed.
One
H hour minus Thirty Minutes
Over the Baltic Sea
The gentle humming caused by the four engines of the giant Ilyushin transport plane failed to pierce the protective bubble that Junior Lieutenant Sergei Akromeyev had built around his thoughts. A fleet of similar aircraft soared unseen through the darkened sky beside Akromeyev’s aircraft, carrying the nearly two-thousand paratroopers of the 331st Guards Air Assault Regiment. War, spoken of by many but experienced by few, was upon them. The men aboard the aircraft were separated into two seating isles against each wall of the lumbering jet, with the whole company of over a hundred men crammed into its coffin-like boundaries. Between the two columns were three green-painted BMD infantry fighting vehicles, rigged up to parachutes of their own.
Junior Lieutenant Akromeyev, a pale-skinned man of twenty-four whose blonde hair was obscured by his green combat helmet, was not one of those individuals who had faced the enemy in combat before. A few of the senior officers and sergeants were veterans who had faced trial-by-fire in Syria, Ukraine, Georgia, or even Chechnya all those years ago in a minority of cases.
A figure emerged in the darkness from the front of the aircraft’s tubular interior, staggering down the walkway as the Ilyushin was gently buffeted by turbulence. Using the hulls of the trio of fighting vehicles as support, the figure continued to advance, its figure barely visible in the low-light, its shape marked out only by a helmet and a rifle. Akromeyev recognised the Slavic features of Junior Lieutenant Sergetov, one of his fellow platoon leaders as his form came within a few metres.
“Here we go, eh, Sergei?” Remarked the slightly older of the two.
“Indeed.” There was a moment of tense silence before Sergetov delved into his breast pocket and retrieved a small, metallic hip flask. “Drink?” He offered, taking a sip with a slight grimace.
“You know I don’t drink, Yuri.” Akromeyev hated himself for it, but he was tempted to accept his friend’s offer. He decided against it; his father had been an alcoholic and a drug addict. Before that, Akromeyev’s father had likewise been a soldier; an Afghanistan veteran who’s every conscious hour was tortured by memories of his nightmarish eighteen months of fighting with the Mujahedeen. Watching his father crumble into an inescapable pit of despair as his shellshock worsened hadn’t dampened the younger Akromeyev’s military ambitions one bit, but it had led him to a life of cautious and total sobriety.
“Thought you might have changed your mind, this being the beginning of World War Three and all.”
“Speaking of which, isn’t improper behaviour before the enemy, for example drunkenness,” Sergei said with a grin, “punishable by death?”
“It’s not to get drunk, just to take the edge off.” Sergetov took another drink, shorter this time as if expecting a berating. “Besides, nobody is interested.”
Master Sergeant Lushkov, the Starshina who had shown Akromeyev, two decades his younger, the ropes of the VDV, was sleeping, slumped nonchalantly in his seat.
“True enough,” Akromeyev replied. The older soldiers, the veterans, were slumbering while they could, not knowing when the next chance might come, while the younger men held hushed conversations betwixt themselves or tried to distract their own minds by incessantly checking their equipment or making private scribbles on notepads. Unlike Lushkov and the other NCOs, the Lieutenant had never been able to master the art of sleeping anywhere at any time. He supposed it came with age and combat experience. Or vodka and heroin, he reminded himself, thinking back to his youth in a crumbling Nizhniy Novgorod apartment.
“Sergei, what do you think it will be like?” Sergetov’s voice was barely audible over the droning of the jet engines. “War, I mean.”
The seated paratrooper shrugged. “I…it’ll be like pursuing one great decisive aim with force and determination, I suppose,” he answered, quoting Carl Von Clausewitz.
“I see you remember your history lessons well, Sergei,” Sergetov said, himself identifying the German military philosopher’s words from lectures at the Military Education and Scientific Centre, on the site of the former Frunze Military Academy. That was were both Sergetov and, despite the condemnation of his father and the pleas of his long-suffering mother, Sergei Akromeyev, had earned their commissions.
The two men were jolted from their debate by the sudden, cackled announcement over the tannoy that the aircraft and its passengers were fifteen minutes away from their drop-zone. They were over enemy airspace now, probably just coming into Latvian airspace over the Gulf of Riga.
“Good luck, Sergei Mikhailovich,” Lieutenant Sergetov said, turning away to return to his own platoon.
Master Sergeant Lushkov stirred and then sat up, donning his combat helmet and picking up his rifle. Though the windows in the passenger compartment had blinds drawn permanently down on them, Akromeyev new that in front of him the sun would soon rise, illuminating the battlefield. He found himself slightly short of breath and tried to conceal the fact that his hands were shaking, as much through excitement as through terror. His men were slowly standing, checking their own parachutes and then each other’s. Akromeyev and his Starshina performed the same ritual on one another.
Noticing his apparent anxiety, Lushkov winked and said, “Don’t worry, sir. Just follow your training and we’ll get them through this.”
Lushkov was, of course, referring to the thirty men whose lives were in the hands of Akromeyev, the untested junior lieutenant. He’d told himself he wouldn’t let them down since his first day out of training, when the fresh-faced young officer had stood in front of thirty even younger men and taken responsibility for their lives.
It was sound of the rear-door of the Ilyushin gently sliding open with a mechanical hiss that pulled Akromeyev back to reality, however, rather than the words of the ever-wise Sergeant Lushkov. The sound of cold morning air rushing into the interior overpowered the rustling of equipment and the flurry of panicked last-minute checks taking place within.
“Stand up!” Sergei barked, forcing his voice to project confidence that he did not feel. Hoping that those in front of him couldn’t see the trembling in his hands, he made the motion for his men to follow suit in case they had missed his command. Akromeyev risked a quick look behind him, seeing nothing but the pre-dawn twilight. He pondered why no fighters had been sent up to intercept the transport planes; to kill their human cargo before it could be unleashed. The platoon commander to his right ordered his men to hook up their parachutes to the static line, which would automatically open them when the troopers were clear of the aircraft.
Shit! Move, Sergei, you idiot. They’ll think you’ve frozen! For a split second his mouth refused to obey his brain, but then training took over and he quickly blurted out the orders. He knew he’d blown it now. How could he have made himself look such a fool in front of the men who he would momentarily be leading into battle?
They were all stood up, hooked up to the static lines and strapped into their parachutes. All there was left to do was survive the agonising wait until the light by the rear ramp would turn from red to green…How long did it take? Seconds or minutes in reality. It could have been years for those who were waiting. The ground passed beneath him in slow motion as Sergei approached the ramp. Mentally, he was telling, himself to keep calm and not to panic, and before long he was pleading with himself, losing a battle between platitude and panic within his own mind. Then the light turned green. Lieutenant Sergei Akromeyev leapt forwards into oblivion.
Eighteen Hours Earlier (H minus Eighteen Hours)
Tapa Army Base, Estonia
Estonia’s Tapa Army Base betrayed no hint to its occupants that it had once been a decrepit Soviet-era relic. Currently inhabiting the facility, which lay to the west of Estonia’s capital city, Tallinn, were the four thousand members of the British Army’s 14th Armoured Brigade, including the 1st Battalion, Princess of Wales Royal Regiment. The battalion, known in shorter hand as 1 PWRR, was joined by troops and vehicles from several other units, technically making it a battlegroup rather than a straight-up armoured infantry battalion. Amongst the personnel assigned to the headquarters section of 1 PWRR was Captain Sophie Turner, twenty-nine. She marched briskly down the foyer leading from her temporary office to the briefing room, marvelling at the state of the Army base; the building was modern, innovative even when compared with the British Army barracks’ back home. The Estonians had clearly built it to impress. As a seven-year veteran of the Intelligence Corps – the Green Slime, as it was known due to the colour of its members’ berets – Turner often found herself more comfortable in the darkened atmosphere of the unit’s regular basing facilities back home.
Entering the room alongside the battalion’s staff officers, the CO, and the second-in-command, Captain Turner noted the grim faces of her companions. The brief round of greetings was quickly followed by the ingress into the chamber of 1st Battalion’s company and platoon leaders. The responsibility of briefing them on the increasingly grave political situation and the subsequent deployment of 1 PWRR to forward defensive positions along the border with Russia, would fall to her.
The situation with the Russians had been growing evermore dire for months now, first with ethnic Russian groups in Estonia and the other two Baltic States of Latvia and Lithuania taking to the streets to object to their purported mistreatment by their respective governments, and then with the Americans accusing Moscow’s intelligence services of directly supporting the protests. The past two weeks had been especially gruelling and filled with tension. Back in the middle of October, the Romanian Navy had had one of its ships lost in an engagement with the Russians when that NATO member’s vessel was patrolling off of the coast of Crimea; a skirmish had broken out and three Romanian warplanes had been shot down, leading to the deployment of a US Marine Expeditionary Unit to Southern Europe. Then, less than two days ago, an American C-130 cargo plane over the Baltic Sea had been blown out of the sky by Russian fighters. Moscow had offered no comment over the incident, instead accusing NATO of provoking the incident to justify some sort of pre-emptive attack on Russia.
There was a lot more to the situation than that, but Turner’s job as the battlegroup’s intelligence officer didn’t extend beyond gathering and analysing information beyond that which would affect 1 PWRR’s direct situation.
Fear was palpable inside the briefing chamber, a room that reminded many of them somewhat of a school classroom. Anxiety hovered in the air like a buzzing insect, worry imprinted onto the faces of the men and women who took up seats in front of her after filing into the room like good schoolchildren. Lieutenant-Colonel Sutton, the mustachioed commanding officer of 1 PWRR battlegroup, briefly gave an introductory speech; Turner could perceive traces of tiredness and stress as the senior officer tried to uphold his typical palliative, monotone voice.
“Good morning, people. I’ll get straight to the point. I know you’ve all been keeping up with the news for the past few weeks, but there is now a direct threat of a Russian invasion of the Baltic States.” He let the words hang in the air for a scarce moment before continuing. “We have heard nothing out of Moscow for the past forty-eight hours now, and it is conceivable that the Russian President is out of position, and that their military is calling the shots now. The North Atlantic Council met several hours ago in Brussels and ordered a full-scale mobilisation of NATO forces. The UK threat level has been increased to severe. As of now, Operation Cabrit – the British mission to deter Russian aggression against the Baltic States – has become Operation Porter, which is the MOD’s war plan to repel hostile forces from Alliance territory, in conjunction with troops from sixteen different NATO powers.” After running his men through the immediate strategic situation, Sutton handed things over to Sophie Turner, his senior intelligence officer with the battalion staff.
“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” Turner began, clearing her throat confidently. “Like Colonel Sutton said, I’m afraid the situation we currently face is extremely grave. I won’t bullshit you.” Only officers swore in front of officers; it was one of the perks of a commission. “Our intelligence tells us we have at present three Russian army groups, which are corps-sized formations under NATO doctrine, moving towards the borders of Estonia and Latvia, and we have the movement of an airborne division to Kaliningrad. Closer to us is the Seventy-Sixth Guards Air Assault Division, which is based right over the border” – she beckoned to the map beside her, pointing to a location within Russia – “here at Pskov. They have been mobilising since yesterday.” The faces of the lieutenants, captains, and majors situated to her front showed deep concern. Many of them took notes while others nodded with pessimistic acceptance. “The Sixth Army, which consists of two mechanised brigades as well as extremely heavy artillery support, and has also possibly been reinforced with an armoured vision from the Moscow area, is moving into pre-attack positions along the Estonian-Russian border. We think the other two army groups, the 1st Guards Tank Army and the 20th Guards Combined Arms Army, are likely to go north-west into Latvia, where NATO defences are somewhat stronger. Nevertheless, I would like to point out that there is a possibility of the 20th Guards Army going northwards into Estonia and hitting us in our southern flank as well.” Sophie took a noticeable pause to catch her breath and to allow what she had just reported to sink in.
“What about the Suwalki Gap, Captain?” Colonel Sutton queried. Unlike the company and platoon leaders, the battlegroup commander stood a few feet away and on her left. The Suwalki Gap was a stretch of land that lay between the isolated enclave of Kaliningrad and Moscow’s traditional long-term ally of Belarus. The area itself, stretching for just sixty-four miles, was the only overland area through which Allied reinforcements could enter the Baltic States, and it was extremely vulnerable to attack from both the north and, if Belarus’ harried dictatorship chose to side with the Russians, from the south too.
“The Poles are covering the area with their own forces in expectance of an assault out of Kaliningrad. There are two Russian mechanised formations, one brigade and one regiment, stationed out there, plus the airborne division which has recently deployed,” she informed, pausing to check her notes, “the 98th Guards out of Ivanovo. The Polish Land Forces and NATO’s Joint Task Force – East will be focusing their efforts on keeping our LOCs open. I haven’t seen any indications that the Belarusians will join in, but we cannot rule that out.” With NATO mobilising, tens of thousands of troops would be coming into the Baltic States and Poland, but it would take them weeks, if not months, to arrive. Only after the events in Ukraine had the Alliance taken the threat from Russia seriously and after the two decades spent downsizing and budget-slashing that had preceded the fall of the Soviet Union, nobody was totally sure how well the large-scale reinforcement of NATO’s most exposed members would occur.
“I’d like to now move on to the tactical situation regarding the defence of Estonia. I know we’ve practiced this before, but we’ve never deployed in full-strength to our planned defensive positions.”
Turner used tapped the clicker in her hand a couple of times, grimacing for a brief and awkward moment when the controller refused to comply, before it finally chose that now was not the time to be having a temper tantrum and zoomed in on the map.
“1 Princess of Wales battlegroup,” she began, “will, as you know, be fighting from our planned MLR just west of Johvi, preventing a Russian pass down the E-20 Highway. We will have the Dutch acting as our cavalry scouts. To the south, we will have 5 RIFLES battlegroup, and 1 YORKS will be on our northern flank. The US Army is moving its 173rd Airborne Brigade into Estonia from Italy, but they will be positioned further south.” The Captain made to check her notes once again. “We think it will be the Sixth Army that hits us from the east; the Twenty-Fifth and One-Thirty-Eighth Motorised Rifle Brigades and possibly the Ninetieth Guards Tank Division are expected to move round the northern side of Lake Peipus, with a possible effort to launch a secondary offensive from the southern side of the river. Sixth Army troop strength is estimated to stand at about thirty-five thousand men and around two hundred tanks and armoured fighting vehicles.”
She was interrupted by Major Simmons, the battlegroup’s second-in-command or 2i/c. “They will have a hell of a lot of artillery in support and we will be outnumbered. We will not, however, be outgunned; all of you know that, pound-for-pound, our armour and artillery is superior to theirs.”
Captain Turner tried to disguise her displeasure at being interrupted by the 2i/c, only a few years her senior. His point was valid, but the Major’s interjection had been somewhat pointless and uninvited.
“As Major Simmons said, we have good defensive terrain and clear firing points down onto the highways through which their heavy forces will have to travel.” She was sure that the infantry and armour officers didn’t appreciate having their job explained to them by the Green Slime and chose to move on. “One of our major worries is that of an airborne assault behind our lines. The air assault division I mentioned earlier, the Seventy-Sixth Guards, at full-strength has about twelve thousand troops under its command as well as airdrop-capable IFV’s. They could land anywhere along the northern coast of Estonia or even directly in Tallinn itself.”
“Our friends in the Estonian Defence League will have anti-aircraft teams dotted around to try to prevent that, and the Americans are moving a squadron of F-16s into Amari Air Base,” Simmons added once again, this time drawing the unspoken condemnation not only of Captain Turner but of the battlegroup’s CO as well.
“That’s right, and we will have plenty of land-based air support from Poland, Denmark, and Norway as well as carrier-based air support from the Americans and the Prince of Wales out in the North Sea.”
Checking her own notes, Turner realised that she had effectively finished her briefing; it was not time to take questions from the unit commanders before her, and she asked if they had any, seeing several hands shoot up. Lt.-Colonel Sutton pointed to a fresh-faced Second Lieutenant by the name of Matthew Winters, one of the armoured infantry platoon commanders.
“What do we know about potential use of CBRN weapons against us?” Winters questioned. Turner’s eyes flickered downwards momentarily. It was the question nobody wanted to think about, the acronym that was enough to strike terror into the heart of any soldier.
“On balance, we think that the first use of theatre or tactical nuclear weapons by the Russians is not likely. They have quite a large numerical superiority and they aren’t about to risk a nuclear exchange unless they feel that the motherland itself is threatened. As for chemicals and biologicals, Russia has signed both the Chemical & Biological Weapons Conventions outlawing those, but from recent events in Syria and the UK we know that Moscow holds little regard for international law; I’d say chemicals are more likely to be used than biologicals, but again neither are particularly probable unless their ground forces perform worse than expected, since the Russians know that we will respond to any biological or chemical attack with our nuclear arsenal.”
H minus eleven Hours
West of the Latvian-Russian border
A cruel gust of biting wing nipped at Sergeant First Class Jamie Hartley’s exposed knuckles like a terrier at the heels of its master. Latvia, with its grey skies and sputtering drizzle, was the polar opposite of Texas. Fort Bliss, where Hartley, and the rest of the four-thousand-man brigade combat team was stationed, never failed to provide its own set of problems. Here though, instead of sand clogging up complicate machinery, there was the worry of artillery suddenly pouring down on one’s position and enemy warplanes screaming overhead. The M1A2-SEP Abrams tank, which had only hours ago been broken out of a US Army pre-positioned equipment warehouse near Riga, squatted low behind a mound of dirt. The platoon’s positions were dotted across a large field which served as a divide between two stretches of woodland. Little covered was offered by the autumn trees, which seemed to dance naked as they were rustled by the wind. Clambering up onto the metallic body of his main battle tank, Sergeant Hartley then proceeded to lower himself down into the vehicle’s cramped interior, grateful for the warmth it provided him.
“What’d the Captain say, Sergeant?” Asked Specialist Keller, Hartley’s gunner. Hartley had been in a briefing with Bravo Company’s platoon leaders and sergeants. 1st Platoon, of which Hartley was the platoon sergeant in concurrence with his role as commander of his own Abrams, had a relatively squared-away leader in First Lieutenant Wilkes.
“Nothing we didn’t hear on the pre-deployment briefing, Jake.” The Sergeant thought back to the speech that the commander of the 1st Battalion, 77th Armor Regiment, had given to his troops as they waited to board a fleet of Air Force C-17s bound for Latvia. “Men,” Lieutenant-Colonel Pendry had announced, “we are not going there to start a fight, but you can bet your asses that we will be ready for one.” The Colonel had gone on to give a short pep-talk about duty and responsibility before dismissing his men. The 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the US Army’s 1st Armored Division was again going to war. A war that had yet to begin, but a war that many in the Pentagon saw as an inevitability.
“You think it’s going to kick off, Sergeant?” Keller persisted like an over excitable child. Hartley, a veteran of two tours in Iraq several years ago, only nodded. Of the four men in the tank, Hartley was the only to have seen battle; he was also the oldest man in the platoon by a longshot. Keller was only three years out of high-school and even he was older than Specialist Tibbs, the Abrams’ bespectacled loader. Hartley’s driver, Private First Class Donnelly, wasn’t even old enough to legally drink alcohol yet, not that he allowed that fact to stop him.
“We’ll know soon enough, Keller.” He decided to elaborate, more for his own good than for that of his crew. He needed to purge what the officers and senior non-coms of Bravo Company had discussed the entombment of his own mind. “The CO thinks the Russkies are going to his us within the next forty-eight hours or so.” Along the border, special operations types, Green Berets and members of a pair of the Special Operations Command’s recently-formed and lesser-known outfits, the Asymmetric Warfare Group and the Intelligence Support Activity, had confirmed the presence of a huge number of Russian troops moving into pre-attack positions.
Tibbs, the loader, turned around; he had been standing over in the corner with his back turned to his tank’s commander and platoon sergeant. Now facing Hartley, he offered him a steaming cup of coffee.
“Thanks, Specialist.”
Tibbs nodded shyly in response.
“Un-fuckin’-believable.” Specialist Keller was shaking his head vigorously in frustration. Though Hartley couldn’t see his gunner’s face from his own cramped cupola, he could make out the silhouette of Keller’s bulky, ungainly combat-vehicle-crewman’s helmet moving from side to side. “You sign up to pay for college and you end up in a mobile target on some hillside in a country you ain’t even heard of before, on the brink of World War fucking Three…”
PFC Donnelly raised his voice, speaking loudly from his own separated compartment of the sixty-one-ton tank. “Keller, if you ever managed to get into college I’ll personally take Moscow,” he exclaimed in his overdrawn Louisianan drawl.
“Fuck you, Donnelly. They even teach you to read down in Swampville?”
Tibbs, like Sergeant First Class Hartley, preferred to stay out of the stream of insults between the driver and gunner. He buried his face in his own coffee mug, while the platoon sergeant looked anxiously around the red-lit interior of the tank. The old adage of hurry-up and wait rang true, with little that could be done to calm his nerves beyond compulsively checking and rechecking the vehicle’s communications systems, weapons and mechanics. Seeking to escape the good-natured row and the confines of the vehicle which he had only moments ago sought as a means of warmth and security, Sergeant Hartley removed his helmet and stood up on his chair, sticking his head out of the commander’s hatch. Although it was paradise compared to the foxholes that the infantry had to etch out a squalid existence in, the interior of a tank was an extremely claustrophobic atmosphere. Hartley had let his crewmembers outside in shifts to stretch their legs, eat, or smoke. Even then, they could never move far from the vehicle, in case they came under attack and had to mount up immediately. It was as though they were physically tethered to the Abrams by the uncompromising protection that it offered, and by the might of its firepower. Outside of the commanders’ hatch, SFC Hartley felt the wind batter his cheeks. The unkind, depressing rain had now escalated into something that was just short of a deluge.
H minus Eight Hours
Just east of Johvi, Estonia
Beneath a sunset obscured by low-hanging clouds, the shovels of over a hundred men stabbed deep into the muddy ground like bayonets into one’s enemy. They were digging furiously as though their lives depended on it; the older NCOs new by experience that the moniker was true. Other soldiers scurried about carrying sandbags and ammunition as they scrambled to create a series of effective fighting positions. Second Lieutenant Matthew Winters patrolled purposefully down No.1 Platoon’s lines, striking up conversations with each of the four-man fire-teams as he passed them by. The battlegroup was defending the main highway leading up from the border, with A Coy choosing to fight from a ridgeline dotted with small clumps of bare trees and overlooking the road which was surrounded on both sides by farmers’ fields and larger woodlands.
“How are you feeling, Mailer?” Winters asked the commander of One Section, a stocky, broken-nosed twenty-five-year-old with a head shaved so close that he may as well have been scalped.
“Cold as hell, sir, but otherwise okay.” Mailer was right; the temperature was only a few degrees above freezing, and the chilling wind combined with a gentle but everlasting drizzle only served to worsen the situation.
“We’ve got good firing positions. You lads will have to take out any armour that gets through the Chally’s lines with your Javelins.” Winters had seen his men practice with the ungainly shoulder-fired missiles before, but their success record had been patchy at best.
“We’ve done it before, sir. We can do it again. Ammunition is my big concern.” Winters nodded in agreement before delving into the side pocket of his smock and retrieving a cigarette. Mailer handed him a lighter, an expensive-looking metal zippo which clicked satisfyingly when he opened it.
“Thanks. I’ll have a word with the OC about getting more missiles, but I’m not optimistic.” Feeling powerless, the Second Lieutenant moved on down the line and greeted another fire-team. A Coy, the one-hundred-twenty-man rifle company of which Winters’ platoon was a part, had been assigned a troop of Challenger-2 main battle tanks from the Kings Royal Hussars to boost their firepower in the face of masses of Russian armour. He could make out the hulls of the four beastly, green machines through the treeline.
The tanks were dug in between two stretches of woodland, while the Warrior infantry fighting vehicles crewed by the infantrymen were positioned at the mouth of the forest, granting their 30mm RARDEN cannons as fire support to the hopelessly vulnerable foot-soldiers. Eyeing up the tanks and imagining their crews, warmed by heaters and protected by reactive armour, he felt a twang of regret about choosing infantry over armour. The only real protection from the winter which crept in from the east was his chemical warfare suit, which all the soldiers wore although leaving their gas masks stowed away in their webbing. They didn’t expect weapons of mass destruction to be used, at least not during the opening salvo of the fighting, but precautions were being taken in case; Russia was, after all, a major nuclear power and was known to also possess a chemical and biological weapons. In typical Army fashion, 1 PWRR’s soldiers had been issued their protective suits in desert camouflage; ironically, Winters had heard from some of the older soldiers that troops going into the deserts of Iraq back in 2003 had been given woodland-pattern protective suits.
He’d initially joined to become a tanker, but at Sandhurst he’d enjoyed practicing infantry tactics far more than he could ever have anticipated. “Go for armoured infantry, Mister Winters,” the training corporal had advised him. “It’s the best of both worlds.”
Yeah, right, going up against T-90s and attack helicopters with a pissing 30mm cannon and a few Javelins is the best of both worlds, you coffee-breathed little git. Christ, who’d want to be a foot soldier anyway?
Winter shook himself from his thoughts and spoke to Corporal Jennings, the young, but bright, NCO who commanded his Two Section.
“How are we doing, lads?” The eight men were split into several defensive positions, shallow trenches with sandbags all around them and camouflage netting over the top. The thin, wiry material was concealment as opposed to cover, meant to hide the troops sheltering below rather than protect them.
“Good, sir, good as can be, anyway.” Jennings clambered out of his position, moving slightly away from his companions. “I don’t like our position, Lieutenant. We don’t really have a good line of fire down onto the fields where they’ll start dismounting. And we could really do with another Gimpy.” Jennings was referring to a 7.62mm General Purpose Machinegun.
“You don’t think the Warriors can provide enough fire support?” Winters listened attentively to the opinions of the section commander. Though he was in charge of the platoon, he had yet to fire a shot in anger, while his platoon sergeant and all three of his section commanders had served at least one tour of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan.
“They pack a punch, sir. It’s just that the targets they choose aren’t up to us, not while we’re dismounted. They’re going to be focusing on Ivan’s vehicles while we want them to be taking out the infantry dismounts.”
“I see what you mean. It’s too late to bring in another machine gun but I’ll talk with Sergeant Whitaker about his targeting.” Winters paused to light another cigarette, and Corporal Jennings did the same. “We know they’re going to dismount to clear the woodlands; we’ll have pulled back before that happens.”
“Unless…unless we get overrun, sir.”
The platoon leader considered that possibility. He knew the odds facing them would be near insurmountable. Despite all the bluster at the battalion briefing, they had all known just how badly the British Army was outnumbered.
If A Coy was to be overrun, to become engaged in a battle from which it could not disengage, it would be destroyed in place if by nothing else than superior numbers. There were less than a thousand men and women fighting as part of 1 PWRR battlegroup, and although the rest of the 14th Armoured Brigade was here in Estonia as well, its total strength stood at less than five thousand men and women. Although there were French and Dutch troops present in Estonia as well, their numbers were equally miniscule, if not smaller. NATO also had present in Estonia a brigade of American paratroopers, lightly-armed if well-trained infantrymen that most officers in the British brigade doubted would survive beyond their first engagement with Russian tanks, armoured vehicles and heavy artillery.
He tried to put up a brave face. “That isn’t how we’ll do things, Corporal. We’ll bloody them and then pull back.” And then do the same thing, again and again. Fighting and withdrawing time and time again, dying and killing to buy time. The last part was left unspoken.
Winters backed away from his dismounted infantrymen and made his way over to the Warrior fighting vehicles. In an armoured infantry platoon, the three rifle sections each rode in their own armoured vehicle, while the headquarters section, including the platoon leader, a lieutenant like Winters, a sergeant, radioman, and a medic, were assigned to a fourth Warrior. Sergeant Whitaker, the senior NCO in Winters’ 1 Platoon, had been left commanding the four Warriors and their drivers and gunners, while Winters had taken charge of the infantry sections who he had told to dismount and dig in. He rapped on the rear door of his command vehicle. The steel door hurt his frozen knuckles, but seconds later the platoon sergeant obligingly allowed it to open. Though the Warrior had not been built with comfort in mind, it was at least slightly warmer than enduring the November morning outside, as the dismounts were doing.
“How are the lads, boss?” The bald-headed Sergeant Whitaker asked with genuine concern in his pronounced Cockney accent.
“Not bad, Mike.” He sat down on the torn-leather bench within the Warrior, opposite the NCO. “Scared, probably wondering what they’ve signed up for, but it could be a lot worse.”
“I’ve kept them in shape, sir.”
“Indeed you have. Jennings is worried about fire-support in dealing with the infantry dismounts.”
“Thinks we’ll be too focused on the vehicles, I suppose?”
“Yup. And since we don’t have another Gimpy to go around, I’m inclined to agree.” Sergeant Whitaker sipped at his tea and offered it to the Second Lieutenant, who gratefully accepted, clasping the lukewarm plastic mug in his hands as though it were precious cargo.
“We’ll make sure we focus more on the dismounts. It’s the armour I’m more concerned about. Have you had any luck getting hold of any more Javelins, boss?”
Winters shook his head morbidly. “Afraid not. There’s barely enough to go around for the anti-tank platoon, let alone us lowly riflemen.” He took a gulp from the mug. The brew was standard Army issue; nearly cold, so milky it could have been see-through, and filled with so much sugar that it was practically a solid.
“Sergeant, if your tea-making skills reflect your combat leadership, I’m not optimistic about our chances.” The laughter was cheap but well-needed.
