The only comparable guns had been the enormous rail-mounted weapons of Nazi Germany. The G-6, however, was much lighter, mounted on a highly mobile vehicle which also carried forty-four rounds. It was not simply that the G-6 batteries, with their eighty-degree arc of fire and extraordinarily long range, could outreach the other Allied guns but that the G-6’s accuracy was such that the S-WP forward observers could see it tearing apart not only the big concentrations of Leopards and M-1s, as if they were metal shacks, but individual tanks as well.
Not only this, but the forty-two-mile range of the G-6 meant that the Soviet guns were reaching beyond U.S. First and Second Armored and the West German Twelfth Armored, severing their vital supply lines, allowing the bulbous-eyed Soviet Hind choppers to be whisked forward, cutting off the trapped American and West German columns, picking them off with laser and infrared antitank missiles.
After ten days of savage fighting, the Soviet-Warsaw Pact’s thrust along the Danube was beginning to pivot northward to join up with those forces that had broken through at Fulda and were now separating out into a “breaststroke” pincer in which the left flank was to drive south to meet up with those coming via the Danube, the northern prong to meet up with those forces who had smashed through the North German plain to Bremen.
The only real danger to the Soviet thrust remained Allied air superiority and the possibility, albeit a slim one, that Austria would throw its lot in with NATO. To thwart this, the Soviet commander of Southern Forces Europe, Marshal Gordayev, had SPETS teams ready near all river crossings from Innsbruck in Austria’s southwest through Salzberg, and from Austria’s northwestern region all the way east to the Carpathians on the Austro-Czech border.
By now NATO intelligence was as stunned as Seoul had been by the extent of the sabotage by Soviet-trained sleepers put “in place” during the detente of the Gorbachev-Reagan-Bush years. As a result, NATO intelligence teams were, as one British Foreign Office official put it, “swarming all over the place like a plague of locusts.” With the result, he reported, “that our chaps,” by which he meant MI6, “are finding the situation terribly confusing. Amateurs are tripping all over one another during the night.” In Vienna on the Reichsbroche Bridge, U.S. and British agents even exchanged shots, each believing the others were Russian operatives about to place an explosive charge midspan. The “charge” turned out to be a “rather sturdy soapbox,” reported the Foreign Office, left by some untidy fishermen.
“Of course,” the Foreign Office official, an under secretary, went on to explain to his vexed minister in Whitehall, “no one was hurt. Our chaps from MI6 were using revolvers which hadn’t been fired, I daresay, since World War Two — and the Americans, getting dangerously close, from all accounts, luckily heard one of our chaps swearing. So vociferously, in fact, that the American recognized him as British.”
“There’s no need for that,” said the minister sternly. “Absolutely no call for profanity. I thought we were recruiting a little higher off the shelf than that.”
“Quite, Minister. But I’m afraid you see Redbrick all over these days. Different class of people altogether. My God, you ought to see the written reports. Dangling participles positively litter the page.”
The minister sighed. The trouble was that this egalitarian notion that you were as good as any other man was too entrenched. It was enough to make one yearn nostalgically for the DOM — Days of Maggie — to return.
But while the Vienna mix-up was symptomatic of the early days of confusion, there was already a recognition by some of the Allied heads of stations in Austria that if “Chocolate Eclair,” as the Austrian president was known, did fall off the fence to the Allied side, then one of the ideal ways of sabotaging the bridges would be from one of the many barges plying the over-two-thousand-mile river. Accordingly, MI6 and CIA agents all along the east-west Vienna-Passau sector on the Austrian side were noting the large white numbers on the backs of the barge wheelhouses. Any barge that proceeded back and forth too often within a twenty-four-hour period became marked as a potential target, a potential SPETS sabotage platform. The Austrian river police, worried about offending either side, nevertheless inspected many of the barges for explosives, for, while frightened of offending the Soviet Union, Austria was equally concerned about the financial ramifications following an argument with the United States. No explosives had been found.
“Well, of course not,” said the minister of war, dropping the MI6 report from his hand, glancing down at the traffic along Whitehall. “These days you only need a satchel of explosives, don’t you?” he asked his secretary.
The secretary knew it wasn’t as easy as that; charges had to be placed precisely.
“I think we’re ready in any case, Minister,” replied the secretary. “If a barge so much as pauses longer than thirty seconds under any of the crossings from Austria into Czechoslovakia, we have informed the Austrians they can expect to be fired upon.”
“And what if our Austrian friends don’t turn to us but decide to run with Ivan? He certainly has the best of the field so far.”
“Then of course, Minister,” said the official, smiling, “we will blow the bridges ourselves.”
“Hmm.” The minister was still looking out his window, the first time he had done so for twenty-four hours, a camping cot having been set up in the office annex, as he’d stayed behind working hard on the problem of transporting the oil to the Continent now that the Chunnel had been blocked. He was surprised to find it was already dusk as a flock of pigeons dived and whirled in unison toward the stately Houses of Parliament. In a gloomy moment he wondered whether the mother of parliaments would survive. He suspected not.
“I’ve only one problem with your bridge readiness plan, Hoskins.”
“What’s that, sir?”
The minister, a cup and saucer in hand, was looking at the distant smudge marks against the sky, vapor trails crisscrossing as the Royal Air Force fought for supremacy over the channel. Perhaps it had been a strategic error to bomb Berlin, but for the moment retaliation from the Soviet-Warsaw Pact air forces seemed out of the question, at least on any large scale, the AA defenses in southern England being equipped with American radaR-1inked missile systems that some said were more sophisticated than the AEGIS system aboard the most advanced American cruisers.
“Sir?”
“What — oh, yes,” said the minister, taking a sip of his tea. “Don’t you think the Russians have already thought of bridge patrols, barge spotting, and all that?”
“Unquestionably, sir, but one can only—”
The minister lurched forward. There was a clatter of broken china, tea splashing over the desk blotter, and Hoskins’ lapel was warm, a mixture of blood and tea. Staring at the dead minister, Fitz backed away from the shattered window, the bullet hole’s spider-web radiating from its center.
BBC and ITN were instructed, under threat of D notice, to report the minister’s death as heart attack. Superintendent Favisham pointed out, however, that this might be a little “thin” as the minister was known as a “physical jerks man — jogging and all that. I suggest a stroke. Burst blood vessel. Can happen to any of us. Anytime.”