She was gathering up the folds of her canopy amidst young ferns at the edge of the clearing, when the next member of the team landed beside the beacon, coming to a halt after a half dozen running steps. The team member immediately vacated the centre of the clearing as she had done, moving inside the trees with the canopy in his arms.
Working in silence the leader stripped off her parachute harness, chest rig, goggles, oxygen mask and outer garments. She withdrew a radio headset and swing mike, a pair of night goggles and associated power pack from her equipment bag and put them on before replacing her helmet, but she did not acknowledge the second team member when he collected her discarded items. Aided by his own goggles he placed her chute and discards with his own, before unfolding an entrenching tool and enlarging the cavity made by the roots of a fallen tree. At roughly thirty second intervals the team members landed in the clearing and added their gear to the growing pile beside the hole. Not a word was spoken by any of them as they went through well-practised drills, making the minimum of noise as they did so.
Fifteen minutes after the last member was down the entrenching tool was put away and the team members lined up behind the leader who finished plugging in her headset and adjusting the harness attached to her weapon. After a quick radio check to ensure all their short-range radios were sending and receiving, she led them off into the depths of the forest.
After twenty minutes they neared the site of an old, disused quarry and stopped. An electronic sweep of the air was made for anything untoward within a two-mile radius. If a radio or mobile phone had even been switched on then they would have known about it. In pairs, four of the team made a physical sweep, circling the area outside the quarry before approaching it, now satisfied that no GSG9 ambush lay in wait. They entered not from the track that led to it, but from the quarry’s lip, one pair abseiling to the ground whilst the other pair took up firing positions.
Working rapidly but with as much care as time allowed, the pair in the quarry searched for bombs and booby-traps before giving the all-clear forty minutes later.
The team leader crossed the quarry floor and entered a solidly constructed concrete building set against the rock wall of an older, worked-out section of the quarry. The heavy steel doors that bore the standard warnings about smoking near high explosives were open and she entered, walking to the rear wall where a false wall of prefabricated steel had been removed, revealing a chamber hewn from the rock. The first pair of troopers had already removed the dust covers from the vehicles within, after ensuring the German security services had not discovered, and then booby-trapped the quarry and its contents.
The pair of vehicles started first time, and they drove from the quarry, stopping briefly to collect their sentries who had recovered the climbing rope and made their way to the track.
One hour’s drive brought them to a slope overlooking the autobahn E73 and the British military police post which controlled that section of it. They were two troopers short of the planned contingent but they adjusted their roster accordingly and once the vehicles were camouflaged their OP regime began and they obtained communications with other teams via mobile phone.
Colonel General Alontov waited for the T-80 battle tank to come to a full stop before approaching it. The tank commander was grinning broadly as he removed his helmet and hoisted himself from the out of the turret’s hatch to clamber down the side of the turret and jump down beside Serge. They clapped each other on the shoulders and hugged.
“It is so good to find you still in one piece comrade colonel general!”
They were stood in the street outside the apartment store that Serge had moved his headquarters to from the hotel, armoured vehicles of the 6th Guards Shock Army moved past them as other vehicles from 11th Guards Tank Regiment's command element drew up behind their regimental commanders ‘vehicle.
As much as SACEUR would have liked to have pounded on the Russian’s in the city and its suburbs more thoroughly, his air and artillery assets were fully committed in assisting all his units break contact. The Czech 2nd Shock Army and Russian 4th Guards Shock Army to the east, and the Russian parachute brigade around Leipzig airport had been dissuaded and prevented from exploiting his unit’s vulnerability in their tricky disengagement manoeuvres.
6th Guards Shock Army had thundered through Poland unopposed, occupying Berlin before it slowed, allowing the 2nd Czech and Russian 4th Guards Shock who had bypassed Leipzig in pursuit of the NATO units that had opposed them in the east, to also attempt to cut off the NATO forces withdrawing from the north.
NATO’s northern units slipped away before the manoeuvre could be completed, and the 6th continued its journey south, occupying other towns and cities bypassed by the preceding armies.
As the relieving tank regiment's vehicles passed through their lines, Serge Alontov’s airborne division’s soldiers abandoned their positions and began moving to assembly points. They had two days now in which to reorganise and reconstitute before their next combat drop.
‘Amateurs talk tactics whilst Professionals practice logistics’, is a term used often in military colleges and academies around the world.
The practice of an army needing to forage for its own food didn’t work very well even three thousand years ago, when supply needs were more basic, before a QM (Tech) was necessary. It did little to win the hearts and minds of the citizens being liberated or conquered/incorporated or generally being put upon by transient foreign armies enroute from their own turf to someone else’s. It often meant that starving soldiers fell victim to dysentery and disease, the trail of wasted and diseased bodies beside the road pointing the way that the army had gone.
Rome had the problem sussed out, although they probably stole the idea from the Persians who in turn had copied it from China. A logistics corps to follow the army, and set up the supply depots to keep the bread and arrows coming.
In the area of Germany known as Westphalia, south of the River Weser lies the Teutoburg Forest, where Roman expansion came to a crashing halt forever. Ten thousand veteran legionnaires and twenty thousand Roman citizens were slaughtered, and their bodies nailed to tree trunks in the Teutoburg Wald. However, it was poor leadership rather than supply problems that caused their end in that case.
In more modern times that area became the stamping ground of BAOR, the British Army of the Rhine during the Cold War, and a smaller presence by the British still remains.
Running southwest/northeast through the area is Autobahn E73, which had become the key MSR, the abbreviated way of saying Main Supply Route in military terms. The MSR is the artery that supplies the troops and in the British Army, as with most, the task of reconnoitring possible supply routes, organising harbour areas, detours, POL points (petrol, oil and lubricants), signing the route and controlling the traffic on it, falls to the military police.
Traffic Posts (TP’s) are set along its route at critical points, where progress is reported and ‘pointsmen’ on traffic control wave their arms about an awful lot in all weathers.
Part of the daily routine is ‘route maintenance’, traversing the area of responsibility to replace stolen or missing route signs, ensuring none of the signs are altered by Fifth Columnists, and ‘thickening up’ by adding additional route signs in among the existing ones.