Looking out through the windshield, Sergeant Jones saw the lead Viking slam back into the ground in flames, emitting a heavy billowing smoke. Within seconds, another large explosion nearly knocked their vehicle over on its side and peppered the left half of the vehicle with shrapnel.
“Contact front! Everyone out!” he shouted to the squad of soldiers as they fought to get the rear compartment door opened.
One of the privates kept pounding on the door, but he couldn’t get it to budge. “It’s jammed! I can’t get it open,” he yelled, terror in his voice.
The other Marines now turned to look at Jones, who was momentarily perplexed by what the young man had just said. Then the solution dawned on him. “The turret — everyone, go out the turret!” he ordered.
The gunner, who luckily had not been sitting in the turret at the time of the explosion, opened the sealed hatch and climbed out. He grabbed his rifle and slid down the side of the armored vehicle, away from the shooting, and signaled for the others to join him. The other four Marines in the vehicle quickly climbed over the side of the vehicle and fell into the half-meter-deep snow, bullets cracking all around them as they sought cover.
Crump, crump, crump.
The sound of mortars landing nearby added further confusion to the scene.
Whoosh… Boom.
One of the Challenger tanks exploded from an unseen missile that struck it just as it had moved off the road to engage whatever enemy force was attacking them.
“Follow me, Marines!” shouted Jones. He led his small four-man team away from the vehicle further into the woods to the right of the attack. They needed to get away from the vehicle, which was now a sitting duck, and get a better picture of where the attackers were, so they could figure out what needed to be done.
The second Challenger tank that had been behind their vehicle also lurched to the right of the convoy. The tank fired a round that sailed right over their heads, impacting against what Jones had thought was a pile of logs heavily covered in snow. When the round hit, the entire area exploded and a nearby machine-gun bunker opened fire on them.
Jones hit the dirt, then yelled out to his Marines, “Return fire!”
He shuddered. The Challenger had just fired a shot that had, in all likelihood, saved their lives. Sergeant Jones watched as it gunned his engine and advanced toward the enemy position. Its main gun barked a second time, and the gun bunker blew apart, silencing the gun crew.
As he and his men advanced toward the enemy position, Jones heard lots of loud shouts around him. Other squads of Marines filtered into the woods further back in the column. One of the Ajax’s 40mm cannons joined the fray, adding its own firepower.
Within a few minutes, though, the firing by both the Marines and the armored vehicles had stopped. Everyone took a moment to catch their breath and determine if they had killed all the attackers.
“If any of the Russians are still alive, they’re either good at playing possum, or they’ve withdrawn further into the woods and disappeared,” Sergeant Jones commented.
The Marines spent another thirty minutes checking the enemy lines, checking on the dead and making sure the wounded were tended to. The short ambush had cost them one Challenger tank and two Viking troop carriers. In exchange, they had destroyed a Russian BMP-3 vehicle and three antitank missile crews. A total of eighteen Russian fighters had been killed in the ambush, and three wounded Russians were taken as prisoner. With the attack over, the Marines piled back into their vehicles, shaking off the attack as best they could as they resumed their advance to Vologda.
Based on the results of the recent conflict, the Royal Marines switched around the formation of their convoy. A heavy scout element advanced several kilometers ahead of the main convoy, followed by two Ajax vehicles in the lead. Bringing up the tail were two Warriors, two Challenger tanks and two Viking armored personnel carriers.
No sooner had the unit traveled fifteen kilometers down the road than a series of IEDs detonated along the armored column on the highway. They must have been placed prior to the heavy snowfall, because there was nothing evident to give away the fact that they were there. The Russian spotters had allowed half a dozen vehicles to pass through their kill zone before they triggered the nine 152mm artillery rounds they had daisy-chained together. The explosions tore through the convoy, severely damaging more than a dozen lightly armored Vikings and other armored personnel carriers. As the British soldiers attempted to recover from the shock of the IEDs, a separate group of Russians eighteen kilometers away began their part of the attack.
Standing inside the living room of the small home in Chekshino that his officers had commandeered, Colonel Yury Chirkin of the 74th Guard’s Motor Rifle Brigade puffed away on his pipe, looking at the map on the table before him. What concerned him most was how rapidly the Allied forces had advanced inland, especially given that the Allies had had to traverse more than 1,400 kilometers of northern Russia in the dead of winter to reach Moscow. However, Yury had learned early on in his military career fighting in the Chechen War that one should never underestimate the resolve of one’s enemy.
Letting out a puff of smoke, Colonel Chirkin looked up at Lieutenant Colonel Maslov, the commander of the 867th Separate Motor-Rifle Battalion and the lead element of his brigade. They were now the only real combat force standing between the Allies and Moscow. “Colonel Maslov, how confident are you that your units will be able to stop the British?” he inquired, giving the man one of his famous icy-eyed stares.
Maslov held his chin up and puffed his chest out like a proud peacock as he announced, “My men will hammer the British and send them scurrying back to Archangelsk.”
Colonel Chirkin looked around the room at the other officers. “This guy is just talking tough for their benefit,” he realized. He didn’t want smoke and mirrors, though; he needed an honest answer.
“I want everyone else besides Lieutenant Colonel Maslov to go take a break and stretch your legs outside for a minute,” he ordered.
After everyone had filed out of the room, Colonel Chirkin turned his steely gaze back on Maslov. “So, how exactly will your men crush the British?” he asked.
With the other officers no longer present, Maslov’s façade dropped. His face was somber. “Sir, we can’t crush the British,” he admitted. “There are too many of them heading down the M-8, and they are being quickly followed by a Canadian division and an American division. The best I can do is slow them down and bloody them up.”
Colonel Chirken smiled since he had managed to get an honest answer and placed his hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “Colonel, that is all we can hope to do. I don’t expect you to hold the Allies with a single battalion of soldiers. I do need you to slow them up — bloody them along the way, sapping their strength as they trudge through the interior of mother Russia. We don’t have much time, and I must be heading back to my own headquarters, so please walk me through your attack plan.”
Lieutenant Colonel Maslov breathed an enormous sigh of relief and nodded. “I’ve placed several small platoon-sized ambush units along the M-8 to carry out a series of hit-and-run attacks. The weather over the next couple of days is going to work to our advantage because my ambush units have easily concealed multiple IEDs along the side of the road, near these points here,” he said, pointing to a map. “The armored columns will be forced to stop and deal with the casualties from the explosives, and when they do, the real ambush will begin.