Oz fished out a packet of cigarettes and offered one to the Para with the freshly broken nose, slowly the two groups of soldiers did likewise and for fifteen minutes they were no longer quite enemies.
Nikoli at last looked at his watch.
“It is almost time.” He barked an order and his men put out their cigarettes and began walking back to their own lines.
“Colin, Oz… Take care of yourselves, okay?”
“Likewise Nikki, you keep yer head down hinney.” And with that they parted, returning to their own armies to begin the business of killing once more.
With five minutes still to go the landscape was devoid of visible life and Freddie again had the heavy rifle’s butt in his shoulder.
Big Stef slowly moved the telescope across the opposition’s real estate, looking for anything that would indicate a target, be it a shadow, a silhouette, smoke from a cigarette or steam from a hot drink, anything.
At one second past the agreed ending of the cease-fire a single shot rang out. The 7.62mm round made a loud crack in passing, exceeding the speed of sound in its flight and entered a small gap in a rubble pile. The firer edged slowly backwards out of his firing position to crawl through the muck of a drainage ditch to another spot scouted earlier. As he moved he took great care not to get dirt in the muzzle, the working parts or to jog the PKS-07 sight seated atop the SV-98 sniper rifle, the successor to the Dragunov.
Dust that had drifted through the gap in the rubble earlier had caught the sunlight for just a moment or two before it settled. In venting his frustration, Lance Sergeant Laker had sealed his own fate.
The JBD, jet blast deflector for Cats One and Two, prevented damage and injury to equipment and crew as the throttles opened on the big Grumman F-14D Tomcats two General Electric F110-GE-400 engines, and the 54,000lbs of thrust they produced.
On Cat One the aircraft’s nose dipped under the strain and then the catapult hurled it down the deck, quickly followed by the F-14 on Cat Two.
Once the Tomcats reached 20,000’ they topped off their tanks from buddy stores on another Tomcat and set a course of one six one degrees. Apart from there 20mm Mk-61A1 Vulcan cannon’s, the Tomcats carried only one other weapon apiece, long and fat they hung below their centreline hard-points.
Despite the fact that the weapons were on their way to be used against the enemy, the armourers had refrained from chalking banal slogans on the things, they exuded a menace that you just didn’t want to mess with.
Fifteen minutes after the first two had launched, a second pair left the deck of the USS Gerald Ford, and these turned to zero four two degrees after tanking, whilst the third and final two-ship formation involved in the operation flew due east forty minutes later.
The Seawolf class SSN, USS Twin Towers had slid down the slipway at Newport News in June of the previous year. Originally named Sea Leopard, she had left on her proving trials in October renamed in memory of the victims the 11th September terrorist attacks. Her reactor plant and steam turbines were capable of pushing the attack boat through the water at 39 knots, but her single screw was now only producing turns for twelve.
The task assigned to the US, Canadian and British boats had been one of reconnaissance, locating the enemy submarines that had blown through into the Atlantic on the first day. The NATO submarines had established that the wolf packs were each in two staggered lines abreast with twelve miles separating each line. The Russians had correctly assumed that the NATO convoys would be taking the shortest possible route to Europe, and their last satellite pass had pinpointed the position, course and speed for the wolf packs to complete their alignment. The convoys were coming to them so they did little more then hold station whilst edging forwards at five knots.
Bad luck had befallen the Twin Towers by way of an Alpha with an experimental sonar suite, which had twitched enough to have her captain go looking to see if they had actually detected a NATO SSN.
Slipping away from the Alpha had cost them twelve hours, by the time they had come up enough to stream their wire antennae the order to get the hell out of Dodge was ten hours old. Twelve knots was the fastest they could safely go without the world and his brother hearing them, and they had slowly worked their way up to that over two hours. The Twin Towers skipper did not know when H Hour was, that was at Admiral Mann’s discretion.
All watertight doors had been closed immediately after the beat feet message had been decoded, but only the officers and the chief of the boat had been told why. The sonar operators had been instructed to remove their headphones and switch on the speakers. It had caused them all to frown; their ears could not detect the minute sound traces over the speakers that they could with headphones.
The first two pairs of Tomcats had taken station in front of the convoys to the north and south of USS Gerald Ford’s, the furthermost convoy being to the south.
Once the third flight of Tomcats had tanked they all headed east to their first pre-programmed waypoints, from where they first let down to six thousand feet before turning through 180’ and each pickling off the first weapon. Afterburners kicked in once the ordnance dropped away and the operation was repeated twelve miles to the west.
As with the first weapons, a parachute deployed to prevent damage to the weapon when encountering the surface of the ocean and the weapons began to receive data downlinked from a navy communications satellite.
The weight of the weapons pulled the parachute shrouds below the surface and they trailed down behind the ordnance, which sank at a surprisingly slow rate.
Two thousand feet below the waves, the Alpha class attack submarine Omsk, was on a heading of 270’. Captain Yuri Kelyovich expected to make contact with the outer screen in the dawn and had his least experienced men on watch; his best hands were resting until then. He himself was lying in his bunk, writing up his log before sleeping.
The danger from maritime patrol aircraft had been constant, but with a whole ocean to search they would have to be exceedingly unlucky to be detected. NATO patrol and attack submarines were a different story; they were so damned quiet.
In the early hours of the morning his best sonar operator had been certain that he had heard something other than whales screwing and shoals of fish, and because of his faith in the man they had spent fruitless hours stalking nothing. With her search abandoned, the Omsk now sought to rejoin the forward line before the dawn
Kelyovich finished noting his log before switching off the light, and considering what he was expecting to do the next day he fell asleep quickly.
At precisely 2010hrs, in six separate locations in the north Atlantic, at an average depth of six thousand feet a five-megaton nuclear device detonated.
The big screen aboard the USS Gerald Ford had three areas outlined; squat oblongs with east/west axis named Alpha, Bravo and Charlie, with Alpha the northernmost, depicting the anticipated areas of damage.
On detonation, each device flash evaporated a half-cubic kilometre of seawater and the pressure waves sought to compress the molecules of water at the extremities. The surface of the ocean momentarily dipped toward the ocean bed before being flung skywards.
Where the pressure wave travelled downwards it punched through millennia’s worth of silt, baring the planet’s bedrock on the ocean floor for a five-kilometre radius before it rebounded off it, upwards and outwards.