The company had had a hard war so far despite not having arrived until several weeks after the fighting had begun. Modern armoured warfare uses up machines quickly and they had found reserve equipment in both short supply and in need of several upgrades. The old Abrams had the same 80s generation technology as at the time of mothballing, in the vast tunnel complex at Husterhoeh Kaserne.
C Company 2/198th was guarding this junction because the regiment had been pulled from the line in a pretty fought-out condition, as had other units of NATO’s armies, but each and every man and woman could hold their heads high and say with conviction “If you think we look bad then you should see the other guy.” The ‘Other Guy’ was the Soviet’s Tenth Tank Army which had started off as a two corps, tank heavy and first rate unit with 770 MBTs and 209 AFVs. ‘10th Tank’ was now two battered divisions worth of exhausted leg infantry. The men had been passed back east, allegedly to rest and refit, but they were ordered to hand off their surviving tanks, AFVs and guns to other units instead. The command elements from battalion groups upwards had been trucked away by KGB troops for a ‘debrief ‘and were never heard of again.
Lieutenant Stiles and just one other were the only officers that the company had, and sergeants filled the other command slots.
With only three M1 Abrams, one of which suffered from an unreliable transmission, they had relieved an understrength squadron of the Royal Tank Regiment which was ‘rested’ after just forty eight hours out of the line. Its crews of comparative youngsters, each one of them with old men’s eyes, had not been that much different from themselves.
Franklin now heard the M1s, and ITV start up in their camouflage net enclosures and move toward hull-down fighting positions, of which there were plenty. The British had prepared this place for defence by a tank company, not just one in name only.
The position was unoriginal inasmuch as it was recognized as a key defence point long before the time of Christ. The ancient routes that the autobahns now followed had required defence/taxation but the ground was flat at that point. According to local historians and archaeologists, the Hill fort that C Company occupied had been built from scratch, with hundreds of thousands of wicker baskets of spoil to create its height and dimensions. Time and the elements had reduced the hill to something less than its former glory and its wooden palisade had rotted away centuries ago, of course. The top of the fort was now flat and partially open to view, from the south in particular.
Those same historians had protested vigorously when the sappers and pioneers began laying the current new defences on top of the very, very old. They were set out in a triangular fashion, two hundred metres to a side with the corners at the south, east and west. There were no blocking positions to bar the way to an enemy motoring up to the junction, this was a hardpoint, an iron triangle, and from here they could engage targets approaching in any direction. An enemy had to deal with them all as a package, not in mutually supporting firing positions that could be quickly isolated by weight of numbers. Coils of barbed wire hindered the approach to the top by anyone on foot, and although laid with infantry in mind they had worked exceedingly well against protesters from the civilian population. Abandoned makeshift shelters, constructed of fertilizer bags and plastic sheeting for the most part, sat beside the foot of the fort where placards and protest banners decorated the steel barbs.
The ‘Uhry Hill Fort Preservation Protest Group’ camp had been abandoned before C/2/198 had arrived, however they had sent messages of good luck to the British tankers before joining the refugees fleeing west.
The junction itself was half a klick to the northwest where a section each of German Pioniertruppe, combat engineers, and Feldjäger military police were posted. There was not much interaction between the Americans and the Germans.
There was the usual shouting as camouflage nets snagged a vehicle and had to be unsnarled or the hard work of building those enclosures would be undone. That was the trouble with camouflage nets; they were nets, invented to catch stuff a very long, long, time before their adoption as tools of concealment.
The M125s merely started up, opened up the split hatch in the roof and cleared away the netting. The 81mm mortars were ready to put rounds down at any time.
Franklin tossed the CEOI to the tracks driver.
“Start trying a few channels, they can’t all be unworkable. When you get someone tell them you’ll be listening on their channel for them to pass the word to our battalion CP for an alternate frequency, and that we are stood-to as a precaution.”
He left him to it, pulled on his helmet and load bearing equipment before grabbing his weapon.
Stepping out into the rain he could see the 11 and 13 tanks were covering the west and south but the 12 tank was stopped out in the open, its driver trying to find a gear. That damn machine had been trouble since they’d drawn it from the POMCUS at Husterhoeh. The first sergeant was on the hull of the tank, kneeling beside the driver’s head, holding onto the main gun for support as he shouted advice.
The second platoon and third platoons had no serviceable tanks, and second platoon had absorbed the survivors of third platoon in the post-Elbe reorganization. Two thirds the strength of an infantry platoon and yet they were filling that role anyway, trudging wearily towards their own fighting positions, one on each side of the triangle. They were split into three squads of six men in two fire teams. Each team had their M-16s plus an M240 machine gun and a trio of FGM-148 Javelin missiles. Franklin had used the Javelin in Iraq and he hadn’t been a fan of it despite its advantages over previous weapons. An ATGW’s soft under-belly had always been its operators having to stay put while the weapons were in flight. The missiles had an obvious launch signature that identified its firing position, and of course where the guys who had launched it could be found and killed. Javelin was a fire-and-forget missile, the operator placed the reticule upon the target in the same way you would focus a modern digital camera, and the tracker acknowledged target recognition by forming a box about the targets image, again in a similar way to a camera. Once fired the missile then ‘soft launched’, thereby being some several feet from the soldier who had loosed it off before the rocket motor fired. The firer could scoot into cover immediately, which improved his chances of survival. The downside was that you couldn’t just see a target and simply engage it, because the cooling unit took a minimum of thirty seconds to do its thing before the seeker unit would work. It tracked a target thermally so on a hot day it could have trouble locating the actual target you wanted to hit. Not exactly anybody’s weapon of choice in a slug-fest but these weaknesses had been identified, and future upgrades would improve its engagement time. Teething troubles were ever the problem with weapons, and probably the only one to ever work as advertised from the moment it came out of its box was the flint knife, and that knife didn’t cost the same price as a Mercedes Benz convertible each time you used it.
He raised his face to the heavens, letting the rain wash away some of the tiredness and he was enjoying the sensation of raindrops on his face until the moment was ruined by an explosion.
Franklin crouched down instinctively, feeling the sudden wave of heat and a buffet from the blast. The first sergeant hit the wet earth in front of him, or at least part of him did. All four limbs and the head were missing.
There was a smell of high explosive caused by the detonation of a Sagger anti-tank missile. A pall of smoke hung around the 12 tank but it had not penetrated the armour. The driver was now frantically attempting to find a gear, any damn gear.