Andy Farman
Stand-To
DEDICATION
Dedicated to my parents Audrey and Ted Farman who brought up three kids on a Flight Sergeants wage, taught us to appreciate the written word and encouraged us to always have a book nearby. Kenneth Grahame, Arthur Conan Doyle, Alistair MacLean and Sven Hassel all send their thanks.
Foreword
My reason for sitting down and putting pen to paper was due to a lack of good military yarns in print at that time. I felt there were too many novels that although well written were almost totally American in outlook, giving only lip service to other nations services.
There have also been too few novels of a major conflict that do not end with the wheeling out of ‘the secret weapon’ / super-secret technology (rather similar to the manner in which Greek playwrights ended the play with the involvement of ‘The Gods’). I am not sure if that is an over reliance in books on the superior technology aspect that became apparent during the Gulf War, or simply a deep desire to find an ending to the story. On that note I have to admit that before I began to write I would have used the term laziness on the part of those authors but after three years of trying to write, hold down a full time job and still have a life I am not so critical. I recognise that desire to just finish and have done with. I have not invoked any Gods in this, my first effort, at writing either to inspire the words to appear or to bring it to a sudden end. The weapons within the book are existing technology at the time of writing and with one exception the performance of those weapons is documented and public domain. I was unable to find any data on the effects of nuclear weapons detonated below the sea, and as such I admit to ‘winging it’ there. Since I began writing, the SA-80 rifle the UK forces uses has undergone some major, and very expensive, re-working. It is by no means perfect but it has improved in terms of reliability, however it hangs a large question mark over the wisdom of those politicians who ordered its original distribution and over the integrity of the senior officers who permitted it to happen.
There are several novels that used World War 3 as the stage, most memorable for me have to be Harold Coyle’s ‘Team Yankee’, Tom Clancy’s ‘Red Storm Rising’ and Bob Forrest-Webb’s ‘Chieftains’. Bob’s book told the story from the viewpoint of the crew of a Royal Armoured Corp Chieftain tank, the only book about the British armed forces and it was superb.
This book has many viewpoints but the principle ground war in Europe is centred around a British Army infantry battalion and my reasons were that are a) I am British b) I am an ex — infantryman who served at the time the Warsaw Pact posed a very real threat.
There are heroes, heroines and villains from all sides of my fictitious global conflict and although you will pick up on my deep dislike of politicians I have even written a couple of good guys into their ranks — the laws of probability state they must exist somewhere, right?
I have never served in any navy or air force, let alone fought at sea or in the air, so please bear that in mind when you come across any errors because at the end of the day this book is only meant to be a means of harmless escapism.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks to my old friend Bill for his knowledge of police firearms tactics and the occasional slap on the back of the head to keep things real.
Thanks also to Ray for providing one of the characters, and a very special thanks to my father Ted Farman for patiently correcting grammar and punctuation.
And lastly of course my thanks to all the many and varied personalities I have met during both my careers over the years, both the good and the bad varieties, who have unwittingly added to this story.
We Stood-To before the dawn, our bayonets fixed, to repel we knew not what.
CHAPTER 1
The picture was that of a city, as it would be seen from a thousand feet in the air on a clear spring day. From the shadows cast by buildings and weight of traffic in evidence it could be supposed that the time was just before the working day began. It was a large city, with its old and new buildings hinting at commerce, history and possibly a seat of government.
A wide river flowed through its centre and river traffic was evident. Bridges spanned the river; tunnels crossed beneath it and together carried roads, tracks or pedestrians. Tiny figures showed people going about their business. One could only suppose at the mood of the drivers of vehicles that moved at a slow crawl.
The picture centred over a section where vehicles disappeared into a tunnel beneath the river to reappear upon its opposite bank.
Intensely bright spears of fire eight hundred metres long suddenly spouted from each tunnel mouth before being eclipsed by a rapidly expanding flower of flame emerging from the centre of the river between both tunnel mouths. A blast wave travelling at the speed of sound preceded the awful bloom, it shredded the tall symbols of commerce, levelled the markers of history.
A cyrillic word in orange letters began to blink in the top right corner of the picture at the instant the scene froze. A window appeared and overlapped the left side of the picture listing the estimated bounds of destruction and numbers of dead and injured. The vision of Armageddon disappeared as a disc was ejected and placed into an envelope bearing the cities name and was then filed in an attaché case amongst other discs in their separate envelopes. Each envelope bore a different name and there were one hundred names.
At 20,000 feet above Manchuria an Aeroflot flight with only four passengers aboard flies toward the capital of the People’s Republic of China, all four wear western style business suits although the bearing of one of these passengers suggests he is most at home in uniform.
Serge Alontov, Colonel General of Spetznaz Forces, currently inactive, switched off his laptop and ensured none of the discs had come loose from their envelopes before locking and putting aside his attached case. He had come a long way since his first fire fight as a young lieutenant in the Dasht-e-Margow Mountains of Afghanistan. That war had been the first crack in the mighty armour of Soviet communism that the majority of the world had witnessed.
For years NATO had encamped itself in the then 'West Germany' facing the combined forces of the Warsaw Pact known as the Red Army. It is historical fact that NATO had been greatly outnumbered on land, sea and air but the West had striven to maintain a status quo in arms by fielding ever more technically superior equipment, quality versus quantity. Had the Soviet Union remained reliant on its winning formula of weight of numbers instead of bankrupting itself attempting to match the West's technology, then Alontov knew with all his being that the Red Army would have triumphed because after all at a sixty to one advantage in armour, quantity has a quality all of its own.
Alontov was a patriot from a long line of loyal patriotic soldiers of the state whether Czarist or post-revolutionary, both his grandfathers had fought in the great patriotic war against Nazi Germany. His maternal grandfather had first battled Luftwaffe Messerschmitt Bf 109s from the open cockpit of a WW1 era biplane in the opening days of Germanys 'Operation Barbarosa' and barely escaped with his life. Later in the war he had risen to command a squadron of Yak-1 fighters before disappearing forever over the vast forest reaches of the Ukraine with two Fw 190s on his tail and thick oily smoke streaming from beneath his faltering engines cowling.
Alontov's paternal grandfather had been more fortunate, and young Serge had sat silently in awe on the floor near the log fire as his grandfather, and not so young old comrades retold one another of their journey from Moscow to Berlin, the battles fought and friends lost along the way.