It didn’t matter. “Contact Major Ryan,” he ordered. The time had come to play the last card in his hand, the only card he had held back for the final battle. There had been no other choice, not until now; the last card had to be played, or abandoned along with the war. “The tanks will advance and engage the enemy.”
Chapter Fifty-One: The Second Battle of Dorking, Take Two
Yet we had plenty of warnings, if we had only made use of them. The danger did not come on us unawares. It burst on us suddenly, 'tis true; but it’s coming was foreshadowed plainly enough to open our eyes, if we had not been wilfully blind. We English have only ourselves to blame for the humiliation which has been brought on the land.
Near Dorking, United Kingdom
“Advance!”
Major John Patrick David Ryan settled himself firmly in his command tank as the Eurotank — perhaps the last Eurotank left in existence — began to move forward. The command Eurotank had been designed as a larger version of the original, with space for the officer in command of the regiment to direct his tanks as he saw fit; the British Challengers that moved forward were older and slower, although tougher. The design was more than thirty years old — some of the tanks were older still — but they could still hold their own.
He held his breath as the final tank lunged forward. Hiding the tanks had been a nightmare; it had been hard enough moving them around without the heavy vehicles smashing up roads and motorways, although that, at least, was a positive bonus when slowing the enemy down was part of the mission objectives. The tanks had normally been moved around the country on trains and tank transporters, but there had been fewer exercises for coordinating such activity before the war began, and now it was almost too late. Had they been kept in Scotland, he wasn't sure that they would have managed to get them down to England in time to fight; the devastation the Russians had caused to the British infrastructure had been serious. They had been competing with various companies and government-run commissions, always hard men to beat, but the Russians had aimed to destroy, rather than milking a crumbling edifice of every last pound before it was too late.
It wouldn’t be long before the Russians saw them and responded; it was all-too-possible that the Russians had seen them hiding the tanks, despite their best precautions. He had kept his men away from the vehicles right up until the final moment, just in case the Russians caught sight of them, but it seemed as if the American data had proven itself and the Russians were completely unaware that they still existed. The Russians had destroyed enough tank parks and storage silos; he hoped that, perhaps, they were starting to wonder if they had destroyed all of Britain’s tanks. They had certainly given it the old college try.
The Americans had supplied them with microburst communications equipment and they used them exclusively; the Yanks were pretty certain that the Russians would be unable to track them through their microburst emissions. He would have preferred more tanks, even outdated early-model Abrams tanks, but it had been impossible to have those shipped over for the war. – A handful of American EW gear had also been sent over; the Russians would be finding all manner of problems with some of their systems, problems that would make them wonder if they were having glitches, or if something was definitely out there, hunting them. The sensor ghosts would make tracking the second part of the plan difficult; a lot of men were about to die. Ryan could only hope that their deaths would be worth something.
The Russians had been forcing armoured columns up the British roads, springing ambushes and bringing up vast firepower to confront the British defenders, before trying to crush the entire British Army. The line had broken up ahead and, as Russian doctrine ordered, the Russians had thrown the better part of one of their armoured units into the gap, trying to push it open wider. They had to distrust the strange mixture of patchwork fields and houses on the outskirts of Dorking; scouts reported that the Russians had blasted a number of houses with heavy tank shells for no apparent reason.
The latest microburst update flickered onto his screen; the Russians had launched their main push into the region, breaking into vacuum. His force was ambling onwards, picking up speed; they would be in a perfect position to ambush the Russians in moments. All they had to do was remain quiet… and hope that the Russians neither saw them, nor heard the rumble of the tank’s diesel engines. It wouldn’t be long now.
Colonel Bogdan Aleksandrovich Onishenko glared around him as the T-100 rumbled past yet another perfect ambush site, one hand on the holster he wore at his hip. He didn’t like Britain; it went from strange countryside to patchwork fields to quite large habitations, all within the space of a few miles. Onishenko had been in tanks since he passed through basic training; he knew enough to know that the British were sneaky and very good at improvising. So far, there had been no real resistance once the main defence line had been breached, but the British would be scrambling to establish a second line as soon as possible, perhaps even before his unit could really put the boot in.
He muttered a curse under his breath, directed equally at the British and his superiors alike. They had insisted on limiting the amount of damage the Russian forces did — a tall order under any circumstances, and rather at odds with the ruin that Russian forces had reduced Dover to, before the fighting there had mercifully come to a halt. Several of his tankers had fired on buildings which had looked suspicious; he found it hard to reprimand them, although he had no choice, but to tell them off. They wouldn’t face the penal units for such actions, but it wouldn’t be good for winning hearts and minds… not that there were any civilians around to impress with Russian restraint.
Coming to think of it, the only British civilians he had seen had been a set of looters, who had been forced to face the jeers of the Russian soldiers before being set to work moving equipment for the Russians as part of a long sentence for looting. Their protests hadn’t bothered the Russians at all; it was better than being dumped into a penal unit, assuming that the FSB didn’t just shoot them on sight. One of them had refused, unable to believe what was happening to them; he had been shot down like a dog. Onishenko hadn’t cared; discipline had to be maintained, whatever the price…
“Colonel, we may have aircraft in your general area,” a controller called, from one of the Mainstays orbiting far behind the lines. Onishenko cursed again; the Mainstays had been having problems all day with sensor ghosts, sending out air raid warnings at the drop of several hats and ordering armed fighters to intercept phantom targets. It would be much easier if a handful of fighters were on permanent CAP, but some bureaucrat in the Russian Air Force had insisted on fighters maintaining a distance to avoid them being shot down by ground-fire; the losses in the first day of the invasion had stunned them. “Please be alert for air traffic…”
Onishenko cursed again. The Russians had hundreds of bombers, criss-crossing the sky and waiting for targets; his men, spooked, would be likely to fire on them or call for fighter support for cover against their own people, let alone the dangers of Russian aircraft seeing what they thought was hostile units and opening fire at ‘danger close.’ All he had to do was cut through the British lines and sow panic in their rear; at the moment, he was wondering if they even had a rear. They could have been halfway to London by now if the higher-ups hadn’t insisted on playing it carefully…