The second Hind-D came to a hover a hundred feet above the shaft; its landing lights provided some illumination.
The elevator, cables and a lot of twisted steel had gone, presumably falling the entire way down the shaft. How was the Premier to exit now? Was there an emergency escape route back to the surface? Unbeknownst to the crew, they were inhaling radioactive dust caused by the sundering impact of the B-61’s depleted Uranium penetrator with the tower. Within two years all of them would have developed cancers, but as they stared down into the interior the delay fuse’s timer ran down to zero.
The At-A-Glance screens of the F-117X polarised, protecting the eyesight of pilot and EWO from the harsh light reflected of the hillside to their right, giving the night-time valley the appearance of a sun baked hell for almost a second.
"Cease fire! Cease fire!"
The words were unfamiliar to either Russian but not the accent. The firing immediately halted and Petrov attempted to gain his feet to flee as Major Limanova switched off the set. He gripped the field radio on his drivers back, and kept him firmly against the earth.
"Americans sir!" he whispered hoarsely "What are the Yankees doing here?"
"I think we can safely conclude that they are not the NATO Peace Delegation and they are not here to surrender, young man." Limanova replied.
From the sounds of rustling in the undergrowth ahead he thought they must have sent out searchers to check for bodies in the kill zone' and when they found no human ones they would send out a clearance patrol, maybe? It was time to sneak away.
Having been caught on the wrong foot by the approach of an enemy from an unexpected direction, the Green Beret commander gave consideration to sending out a patrol but quickly dismissed it. He did not have the numbers available to patrol offensively so he chose the hunker-down option.
The hasty ambush had been sprung on nothing more sinister than a bigger than normal bunny but he was positive they had just missed the intended target. A radio transmission close in to the ambush site, during the ambush, was proof enough for him. They had been compromised but he was certain the enemy had no idea what they were dealing with and would assume they were the band of deserters. The militia was still milling around in the woods at night and it would be dawn before they got their act together. Long before the first rays appeared the F-117X would have returned, refueled and departed, as indeed would he, his men and their rather attractive contact with the flashing, come-hither, green eyes who spoke English with an upper class Oxford accent and Russian like a native.
The northwest listening post reported in, having heard a diesel engine vehicle start up rather noisily and depart to the north east. He did not stop to question why they had not heard its approach though, and that could have altered his decision making.
At the edge of the forest the commander of the sub district stood in the light from the headlamps of his own BMP command vehicle, staring at a map of the area as if looking for a sign, some clue as to how to reunite his units here in the open where transport could move them to the airstrip. Raindrops landed upon the clear plastic of the map case. The star filled vista from the early evening was gone as a weather front from the west finally reached them.
His head snapped up and towards the sound of the other BMP’s approach, and to describe Lieutenant Colonel Boskoff as furious was something of an understatement. He was shaking with rage as Major Limanova exited the BMP-1, and having shouldered the field radio before approaching his superior he failed to salute, let alone attempt to apologise for his outburst on the command channel, not that such a severe breach of discipline could ever be forgiven or overlooked.
“What have you to say Limanova, what have you to say for yourself?” he screamed.
There were just the four of them at the forests edge, the two officers and their drivers. He would have relieved Limanova there and then but regulations dictated another Major would have to escort his deputy into custody. The only other major was in the forest somewhere on the commander’s orders, attempting to locate and rally the men but now as lost as they were, along with the captain and lieutenant who had preceded him, also with the same orders.
If the commander expected a response from his deputy he was to be disappointed.
Major Limanova placed the field radio on the ground between them and held out the telephone handset to the sub district commander.
“The District Commander would like a word.”
Snatching the handset the commander listened for several moments before responding.
“Colonel…sir, I do not know what idiocy Limanova has been spouting to you but yes, we are the closest unit but it is utterly impossible to do anything in the dark, the fool got everyone lost so we must wait for the dawn….”
A rebuke from the other end silenced him and he handed the instrument back to his deputy as he had been instructed.
Limanova put the proffered instrument to his ear.
“Yes sir…yes sir…I believe I can sir…with pleasure sir.”
Major Limanova lowered the handset, drew his sidearm and fired twice.
Twisting the frequency dial back to the unit command channel he holstered his pistol before speaking.
“All stations this is Lieutenant Colonel Limanova, you will all of you turn and follow your ears.” He turned and waved to Petrov who activated the vehicles traffic control siren and kept it on.
CHAPTER 3
A great deal of time, energy and thought has gone into the formulation of codes and cyphers over the centuries, almost as much effort as that which is expended by code and cypher breakers. Of course in order to set about breaking a code it is first necessary to recognise that one is in use.
In 1951 British Intelligence commissioned a study into a completely unique set of codes and cyphers for use by agents and Special Forces acting behind Warsaw Pact lines in some future confrontation. This would of course have to involve seemingly random frequency changes in order to avoid the opposition’s signals intelligence recognising that an enemy was active on their side of the lines by their sending and receiving coded transmissions. Mathematicians, academic deep thinkers and members of the intelligence community, past and present, put forward their responses for consideration. One of the latter was a former officer in the Black Watch who had spent not a small amount of the previous war behind enemy lines in Greece, before returning to Hollywood to renew his acting career. He believed, from hard won experience, that the more complex a communication setup was, the more likely it was to fail. His input was to dispense with complicated codes and channel hopping and simply use the enemies own known military codes and frequencies as nobody would notice a needle in a stack of needles. Accordingly, good language skills with a mix of provincial accents were more important than memorised ‘keys’.
Thirty two proposals were eventually considered but the ‘Stack of Needles’ was dismissed as too simplistic and a multi layered mathematics based encryption code was adopted instead. The only people to believe that the simpler method had any worth were the Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye, the GRU, who are responsible for special forces acting behind NATOs lines in some future confrontation, and they received full details of all thirty two proposals via the Cambridge spy ring before the final selection process had even begun.