“No sir, SACEUR.” interrupted his own one-time 2 i/c, Major Spittori, who was now his natural successor as CO of the 11th Bersaglieri Regiment.
“General Allain himself.”
The Canadian was reputed never to delegate the issuing of a ‘difficult’ set of orders to subordinates.
Lt Col Lorenzo Rapagnetta, senior surviving officer of the Ariete Armoured Brigade seated himself before raising the handset to his ear. They were the only two using that secure channel and VP could be set aside.
“Good morning sir, may I respectfully enquire what I can I do for you?”
CHAPTER 2
Barely clear of the tree tops, its throttles open, the jet aircraft caused Major Limanova, the deputy commander of Militia Sub-District 178 to duck involuntarily as it passed overhead visible as a briefly glimpsed black silhouette, bereft of navigation or anti-collision lights against the stars it eclipsed in its passage.
The shock of the moment quickly passed and he had looked to the vehicle’s driver, Petrov, gawping dumbly at the skies but visible only for the glowing cigarette held between his lips.
If whoever was involved in whatever-the-hell was going on had heard them approaching, then the aircraft would have been shut down until they passed well away. It therefore stood to reason that the aircraft engine had masked the sound of the noisy AFV.
“Switch off!” he had shouted even as he broke into a run back to the vehicle, gesticulating with a throat cutting signal but the driver could barely make him out in the dark, let alone hear him.
He shone the torch at himself, half blinded by the glare he had stumbled and nearly tripping over because of it.
“Turn the damn engine off!” and the gesture got the message home where words failed.
Dropping back down into his seat through the hatch the driver had done as requested and the deputy commander stopped to listen as the sound of the aircraft rapidly diminished to nothingness, and only the wind in the trees remained.
“Sir, why did you want the engine off?” the driver asked as he re-emerged, standing on his seat.
The question caught Major Limanova off guard.
“Didn’t you hear that jet take off?”
“A jet, sir?”
“You heard an aircraft run up its engines and take off?”
“No, sir.”
“But you heard it fly over us…you looked up?”
“Crick in me neck sir, its cramped in this seat. I didn’t hear nothing on account of that.” He jerked a thumb to the right.
The driver’s position on a BMP-1 was offset to the left, the same as a car or trucks, where it occupied a third of the front section of the vehicle. The BMP-1s engine pack, a big six cylinder V8, took up the other two thirds. The single exhaust on the far right where it sat flush with the body had a silencer, but this vehicle was older than its current driver. Decades of soldiers had misused the exhaust, reducing the silencers muffling matrix to its current inefficient state by raising the rectangular steel grill covering of the exhaust outlet, dropping tinned rations inside to be broiled in the can, and forcing the grill closed again with brute force, such as by jumping up and down on it.
When they had halted here the deputy commander had walked forwards with his out of date map, a compass and torch to narrow down their location as there were more supposed firebreaks in reality than his map depicted.
The fabric and horsehair crewman’s helmet had irritated him, the rubber ear pieces made his skin itch and as he had knelt, away from the magnetic interference of the elderly AFV, orientating map and compass, he had raised an ear flap to scratch, and that was why he had heard the aircraft but the driver had not.
Out of date or not, the map showed a disused airstrip from the time of the Great Patriotic War, and it lay in the direction the mystery aircraft had come from.
Remounting the vehicle he reached for the radio microphone.
Moscow Air Defence Centre was no stranger to the vagaries of equipment generated false alarms or the phantom sightings of aircraft by nervous sentries, but it was unusual for a senior office to call in a sighting he had made.
Civilian air traffic was strictly controlled and the logs showed no scheduled flights or military scrambles at the time stated, and certainly there was nothing near the location given.
Likewise he had drawn a blank elsewhere as enquiries with the Kremlin confirmed that there had been no VIP traffic at that time. Anyone with sufficient pull to warrant air transport was elsewhere anyway, deep in a bunker.
Security and Intelligence Liaison would neither confirm nor deny any ongoing flight operations. Finally of course there were the ground radar stations and two orbiting A-50 Mainstays, three hundred miles southwest and northeast respectively, but replaying their records brought the deputy commander little in the way of credibility.
The duty watch officer with whom the increasingly frustrated militia officer was dealing now voiced his doubts.
“Comrade, the only air traffic in that area all day was attached to your own militia for a search operation and the air defence radar records show that it was above the airstrip you mentioned.” he stated the time as related to him a few minutes before. “Did the machine not land?”
The deputy commander felt a sinking feeling; he knew where Air Defence Centre was going with this.
He replied, resignedly.
“No comrade, they stated it was too heavily overgrown to risk clipping a tree.”
He could hear the watch officer on the other end kiss his teeth.
“Well comrade deputy commander what can I say, if a helicopter could not land then a jet aircraft could hardly take off, now could it?”
As days went, this had not been a good one and he could do nothing about his own commander’s attitude. There was most certainly no point in informing the sub district commander of what had occurred as he would have to admit that nothing had shown up on radar, and even his own driver could not support his claim.
“Grab your rifle and equipment Petrov.” he instructed, pulling on his own as he spoke.
“We’re going for a walk.”
For the past one hundred miles the hybrid Nighthawk, its callsign simply ‘Petticoat Express’, had been down in the weeds, staying mercifully untroubled by Moscow’s formidable multi layered defences and sensors by giving the city a wide birth.
“So where the hell is the promised satellite support?” Caroline had muttered soon after take-off.
The ‘At-a-glance’ system was up and working but it lacked was current information to project onto the aircraft’s screens. Only the previously known positions of defence sites were showing, and in the case of mobile air defence units this could have changed radically since the last update, weeks before at RAF Kinloss, in Scotland.
Shading that mirrored the level of their ‘painting’ by radars had been apparent of course, but the radar energy had not been sufficient to cause concern.
So far so good, thought Patricia, but had she been aware that six thousand miles away there was a battle underway in the jungle close by their first scheduled assistance she would not have been quite so relaxed.
They stayed low and relatively slow, holding to the bottom end of the aircraft’s best fuel economy performance and kept Nizhny Novgorod on their nose until they could drop into the Oka river valley and open the throttles a little more.
They kept to the southern side of the valley, cutting across broad swathes of marsh and bog that the river meandered around, the land around that region being largely low lying to the north. In contrast, the southern bank of the river rose as low, wooded hills.