“Salaud!” roared Admiral Bernard as he leapt out his chair, the veins in his neck and forehead bulging. He stabbed a finger at the Foxhounds icon on the screen, now running toward safety.
“Somebody kill that son of a bitch!” But the soviet aircraft made it back to land and the Rafales had to break off as shore based SAM sites locked them up.
Bernard was incensed; he strode away from the screen. They had lost helicopters, maritime patrol aircraft and the crews, that was what war was about, but he didn’t have to like watching it happen.
“Do we have contact with the English submarine?”
“Perhaps… maybe the AWAC or JSTARS does, sir.”
“It has land attack missiles, yes?”
“Tomahawk TLAMs… yes sir.” answered the TAO.
“Call them up, call the Anglo’s and tell them to blast those airfields… ” he stalked back to the big screen, and once again stabbed his finger at the Mig-31. “… starting with the one this, Enfoiré… lands at!”
The TAO looked apologetic.
“Sir, we don’t own the Temeraire… CINCLANT does, we only have nominal control.”
Bernard thought about it a moment before saying.
“Well send the order anyway… and if CINCLANT complains, then you tell him the submarine has a French name… ” the senior French naval officer wore an expression of Gallic innocence and with an expansive shrug to match he finished. “… .and so we thought it was ours.”
The captain of Her Britannic Majesties Submarine Temeraire looked at the message form in his hand and showed it to his First Officer.
“Blimey, has the French admiral gone down with a bad case of Tourette’s?”
“The question is… is it lawful?” he looked again at the decoded message. “He does have a point though, if the Migs are rearming and refuelling for another go, then his applying for full authority would be too long.”
“He wants us to use our entire inventory of conventional warhead TLAMs?”
“Indeed he does.” The captain was lost in thought for a minute before he spoke again. “Okay, target the bunker busters on bomb dumps, and the bomblet carriers on runways, tank farms and flight lines. We had better get rid of the surface contacts closest to us, before we put the airfields out of commission too. We already have firing solutions on them, so let’s put them on the bottom, after which we would do well to clear datum PDQ!”
“Sir… you could get in deep shit for this?”
“It is a viable target… besides, what could they do to me, hmm?” he replied, looking at the other officer with one eyebrow raised. “Put me in charge of a boat full of broken down reprobates, and send us to sit on Ivan’s doorstep?”
The First Officer grinned as he went away to set it up.
Twenty minutes later and two Krivak class frigates, one of them five miles southeast and the other seven miles west of the Temeraire were struck by Spearfish wire guided torpedoes. Moments after that the TLAMs, Tomahawk land attack missiles, began breaking the surface and roared away into the night.
Steel railway tracks made up the roof supports of the battalion CP, and four layers of sandbags topped those but Barry Stone still looked up at the roof with a touch of trepidation, recalling the fate of the last CP when subjected to soviet artillery.
“RSM?” Lt Col Reed said quietly. “Whatever it is that you are thinking about, it is a tad too late to do anything about it now.”
“Yes sir, just saying my soldiers prayer sir. ‘Dear lord, I haven’t taken up your time with prayers for the past twenty years… and if you get me out of this in one piece, I promise I won’t bother you for another twenty more!’
The ground shook, as even from across the canal the huge charges landing made their presence felt in the CP.
“Two hundred and forty millimetre mortars by the sound of them, sir… their big bastards.” RSM Stone informed his C.O.
“Well, let’s hope your prayer works for all of us then, sarn’t major.”
The first rounds to land were all aimed at one particular target, a solid structure designed to bear the weight of twenty fully laden, multi-axle goods vehicles at a time. Ten M240 mortars had been tasked with cutting off the ‘island’ from escape or reinforcement, their first belt landed short but whoever was spotting for them walked the successive belts onto the bridge linking the ‘island’ to the NATO held bank.
About the same distance away from the bridge, but on the other side of the canal from the CP, Bill was experiencing his first moments of the receiving end of artillery. He had felt the impacts through the damp earth he was lying on, dust and grit danced in the air inside the hide.
“Bloody hell… !” The respirator, worn since they had arrived in the hide muffled his voice.
“Grit your teeth and try not to think about it,” Stef told him. “We’ve got about two hours more of this.”
The Met firearm instructor in a can’t-see-me-suit took little comfort from the words. Stef hadn’t mentioned to him that this was just the opening act, the ranging in. No point worrying the man unduly, he thought, as he double-checked their NIAD, which would warn them of the presence of chemical agents.
Various calibre rounds were landing on the ‘island’ now, some struck the flood defence barrier they had tunnelled this hide into, whilst others wasted their energies in the river. After about five minutes there was a pause as the Divisional Artillery co-ordinator for the 43rd Hungarian Motor Rifle Regiment set up all but two batteries of his guns, rocket artillery and mortars for a TOT shoot. Now that they all had the range and he had the times of flight from their scattered positions, all their shells would be landing at once. Intelligence reports had identified the units dug in on the piece of land as having played an effective roll against 6th Shock Army’s airborne division at Leipzig. He had no idea which idiot had given those troops that piece of ground to defend, but whoever it was had facilitated the removal from the board of a crack battalion. Once the ‘island’ had been made to resemble the surface of the moon, the guns would shift to the newly arrived unit behind them. The Hungarian artilleryman had no information on that units identity, but if they were green troops then they would soon be wishing they had taken up the cloth, rather than arms as a career.
Stef checked that the pieces of rag Bill had secured over the rifles muzzle and working parts with masking tape were still in place. He swept the torch beam around the hide to check all was packed away, and thought briefly of his last partner. Although it was only a few days ago that Freddie had been killed, Stef frowned when he could not picture his mates face. The freight train sound of over eighty shells and rockets of all calibre’s screaming down drove the thought from his mind, as he rolled himself into a ball.