As the first of many main battle tanks thundered past, Karena looked opened mouthed from the small flag on its antennae and back to the tank in the field. The soldiers were making no effort to prevent the tanks flying hammer and sickle flags from driving into their country, and the polish tanks main gun remained pointing backwards across the engine deck, away from the road.
Forty-six aircraft crossed the frontier enroute for Leipzig, a further sixteen orbited over Czech territory, these last aircraft were the Il-76 tankers and an A-50 AWAC, within the protection provided by AAA and with friendly air riding shotgun.
Ten Su-37 Golden Eagles led the way, and as before they were looking to remove ground radar and AWACs to ensure safe passage for their charges, Il-76s heavily laden with ammunition pallet’s, mostly for the artillery.
For their debut, they had had the benefit of surprise and the use of the enemy’s radar data hacked and downloaded by Red Army intelligence. Tonight they had only their wits and radar absorbent skins to help them, because NATO was not going to be suckered again as it had during the battle for the Wesernitz.
The previous night, NATO had their AWACs aloft but they had bolted to the rear well before the Russian stealth fighters had come within firing range. Everywhere, radars switched off and stayed off, it was as if NATO could see them coming but did not engage them. What NATO had engaged though, were the transport aircraft and the Red air force could only theorise on the cause.
Between the line of German brigades and besieged Leipzig, NATO had a crescent of AAA systems that had IR tracking and acquisition capabilities.
Unlike radar, there is little to alert an enemy to IR scanning except the systems small super-cooled sensors.
Radars day as the all-powerful secret weapon became numbered not long after its birth, when someone realised that with the right equipment the source could be pin-pointed. Admittedly its death is a long time coming but come it surely shall, and the nail that seals the coffin will be some other form of long range surveillance technology, as good as if not superior to the cathode ray tube. The smart money is already on how long before the successors Achilles heel is found though.
Infrared sensoring on Jernas equipped Rapiers, thermal cameras on Crotale NGs, Piranha wheeled AA vehicles thermal sights for their Mistral missiles, Roland’s Glaive sight systems and the Stormers IR sensors formed a barrier that nothing warmer than its surroundings could cross undetected.
The vehicles were in groups, and at least one would track the hi-tech Russian fighters for as long as possible once they had passed overhead.
Four pairs of F-117A stealth fighters were aloft and waiting for the advanced Russian fighters and they received their initial intercept data from the AAA units on the ground.
The first flight of four Il-76 transports were not to know it, but they were the bait that would locate the NATO AAA units that were so hindering the resupply of the airborne troops holding Leipzig.
72 Battery, Royal Artillery had divided into teams of three launchers each and were covering their sector, seven miles in length to the southwest of Leipzig. Elderly FV-432 APCs were the tractors that towed the Rapier FSCs. Field Standard C, systems to the firing points and the eight Mk2 Rapier missiles attached to the rotary towers.
Gunner Sally Whinley and L/Cpl Peter Gaurt unhooked the missile trailer before moving away the APC. The Dagger and Blindfire radars remained off whilst the passive infrared electro-optic sensor, mounted on the top of the turret was activated. The tracking device was soon in use providing passive target detection and acquisition in the Rapiers radar-silent mode. At the weapon control terminal the operator ran through his checklist and once satisfied that all was performing as required, the signal was sent that they were ready for business. Gaurt and Whinley got busy with pick and shovel and soon had dug a deep shell scrape, which they occupied, watching for enemy troops roaming behind the lines.
It was three hours’ before any airborne sources were detected and when they were the data was swiftly analysed. The pair of Su-37s they had detected was tracked as they passed them by and the data was passed on down the line.
In their hasty defensive positions Peter and Sally remained silent as they listened for hostile movement. Being so close was difficult for them as they were in the very physical discover phase of a relationship that had begun just a fortnight before, when Sally had joined the unit after a swiftly curtailed basic training course. It is hard to keep a romance secret in the closed environment of a mixed fighting unit and the other members of the unit had cottoned on quickly. Sally was a very pretty eighteen year old girl from Hertfordshire with an almost fragile quality about her and a lot of the ribbing Peter got from his mates was envy based. The battery sergeant major was not overjoyed when Gunner Whinley had joined the unit because she had no to-arms skills to offer the under strength unit. It wasn’t her fault that the war had broken out before she could complete her basic training and skills-to-arms course, so she was just an extra pair of hands and a warm body on the stag (sentry) roster. Peter was the 432s driver, and as such had no other skills other than the not too difficult task of attaching reloads, a skill quickly mastered by Sally. The unit had been stood down for essential maintenance the previous day and L/Cpl Gaurt had taken the Gunner Whinley with him in the 432 to a nearby village, ostensibly to forage for fresh produce. The healthy young couple’s relationship had taken the next step up in a small copse far from prying eyes, with a frantic half-hour’ copulating amongst the conifers. And so it was that they now concentrated hard on their tasks as sentries, in order to ignore each other’s presence.
An hour after the stealth fighters had past, the first lumbering Il-76 transports were detected at 8,000’, an altitude that was far higher than was safe but one that they had been ordered to fly at.