It was dark before Nikki’s still form was pulled inside the protective canopy along with the meagre survival stores from the American rafts. It was cramped inside with the three of them, but once it was done the two men bailed out the excess water and sealed up the opening against the wind. Working in the dark they stripped Nikki naked before the Scotsman extracted a survival blanket from his own rafts stores, and between them they wrapped it around the unconscious female. Sandy ordered Chubby to strip and climb in next to her, sharing his warmth.
They had left her helmet on until then, but now Sandy cracked one of their tiny stock of chemical light sticks and set to work.
“She has a lump on the back of the head but the skins not broken… I think its concussion and shock, the cold hasn’t helped either, we could lose her in the night Chubby, exposure may have set in, see how blue her lips are?” There were two chemical ‘hot pads’ in the life raft stores, small plastic envelopes that reacted to the air and heated up, once their seals were broken. Sandy stripped off his flight suit and under clothing before unsealing the raft and wringing out all their garments as best he could and then zipping up again. He activated the pads and squirmed his way under the survival blanket, on Nikki’s other side. The two men wedged the pads between their bodies and hers before they settled in for a long uncomfortable night.
The 1000’ long antennae had been streamed almost two hours’ before any transmissions, pertinent to the vessel, had been received. HMS Hood had precisely five torpedoes remaining before she became redundant, and the nearest replacements were in the Hawaiian Islands, at Pearl Harbour. Her Captain had wanted to head for Japan to rearm but the naval base was under near constant missile attack and COMSUBPAC, the USNs commander submarines, Pacific, had waved them off. Within a day and a half a single Seawolf class, US attack submarine would be on station; another was enroute from Pearl. Royal Navy Captains are not privy to their own Admiralty’s strategies and the Hood’s commander was certainly not privy to the US Navy Departments machinations, so he could only guess at where the Pacific submarine fleet was, certainly not in the North Pacific, that was for sure.
The USA had minimal land forces in Japan anyway, and soon they would be gone along with air and sea assets. US shipping in the Pacific had been federalised and ordered into ports in South Korea and Japan, the submarines were going to protect the sea-lanes from those ports to Australia, and only then could they venture forth and sink ships as they were supposed to do.
She was two hundred miles away from the John F Kennedy group when the carrier and her escorts had been destroyed; but water is a better medium than air for carrying sound and they heard the combat group die.
Hood and come out to the Pacific as part of the same flag waving exercise as Prince of Wales, Malta and Cuchullainn, and now was the sole surviving warship. Their orders requested them to return to the area, not so much to search for survivors as to show that they had tried. The Captain knew that it was a more humanitarian task, on behalf of the thousands of next of kin and loved ones, rather than a mission with a solid military purpose. For that reason he had been given a way out, room to refuse so as to rearm and continue war patrols, but he knew some of the wives and families and he knew he would have to look them in the eye again one day.
HMS Hood reeled in the floating antennae and came about, diving to 400’ and set a course of 315’ as he informed the crew of their task. They would be using their periscope far more often than was healthy, laying them open to detection from sensitive radars and MAD passes, where aircraft fly low, looking for their instruments to detect magnetic anomalies and twitch, telling them a submarine was close to the surface.
Lt Col Pat Reed MC, arrived at a muddy track junction in some woods to take command of the 1st Battalion Coldstream Guards, or rather the two hundred and eleven officers and men that remained who were fit for duty.
He brought with him forty-seven Coldstreamers as replacements, along with two hundred and eighty-eighty paratroopers of the American 82nd Airborne battalion that had fought its way back to NATO lines at Leipzig. For a time at least, the remnants of two proud battalions would fight together as a single unit with himself as the commander, and a major from the 82nd as the 2 i/c.
The Guards RSM, Barry Stone, or ‘Baz the Raz’ to the boys had taken a Warrior to meet them on the road seven miles away, in order to guide them in. The new CO and the American troops arrived in Bundeswehr, German Army trucks, and introductions were made all round.
Major Jim Popham was the senior surviving 82nd officer; Regimental Sergeant Major Arnie Moore was his right hand man. Both Americans carried injuries from the fight at the airport which should have excused them from combat for a while, had they not left the aid station as soon as the grenade fragments had been removed and the wounds cleaned. The four of them shared the Warrior that guided them to this spot, during the journey Lt Col Reed grilled the RSM as to what had occurred beside the river, what was now required and how were the troops. He had already read the reports and had been briefed by an officer from division, now he wanted to hear it from someone who had been there.
The RSM and the new CO had soldiered together before, so the RSM pulled no punches.
“A lot of the boys have captured AKMs secreted away; the LSWs let us down… quite badly. The section gunners binned them when we pulled out, which was about four hours’ after the last one stopped working. We ran out of reloads for the Milan’s and we ran out of NLAWs too. It wasn’t that their artillery prevented replen’s being brought up, their guns were knocked out for nearly two hours’. The MOD knew we would be fighting lots of armour, yet we didn’t have nearly enough. It was their artillery that did the damage initially, the tactic of our own holdings its fire until their armour committed was bollocks, sir. They hammered us, killed a lot of men and screwed up command and control, they should have counter battery’d sooner, much sooner. The boys in the reverse slope got hit heavily by mortars, where the guns couldn’t reach, but they didn’t have as many of those as they had guns, the guns slaughtered the depth positions. We don’t know what happened to Colonel Hupperd-Lowe, once the barrage stopped he went forward, he may have been at the 1 Company CP when an airstrike took it out”
The colonel was listening intently,
“Did many get left behind, there must have been some trapped in shelter bays?”
“There is no way of telling, I just hope those who dig themselves out screw the bobbin, and think to evade right from the off sir. The enemy isn’t taking prisoners; they even kill the wounded.”
The new commanding officer was watching the RSMs eyes, he knew without asking that that he had witnessed something that angered and haunted him.
“What’s their mood, any quitters?”
“We had a handful who were ineffective after the shelling stopped, but the boys fought until we had to pull out, no one quit and they are ready for round two.” He looked at the colonel before continuing, “They are pissed off at the shiny arses in Whitehall giving them crap… again, you may see another 1918 march on Parliament when this is over!”