The runner who arrived at the mortars had paced out the distance from the start line on his way, and fractional adjustments to the elevation of the barrels were made accordingly. Now that all was set the lieutenant commanding the section watched the luminous minute hand of his timepiece creep around its face.
Jim Popham was on his way back to his own Warrior when a rumbling started from the north. He thought it was still thunder at first but the sound continued on unabated, and he paused to listen for a moment to what would become known as the largest artillery bombardment in Europe since the Second World War, as the Red Army made a final effort to break the NATO line.
The sound was eclipsed by the detonations much closer to home of several thousand bomblets arriving on the largest concentrations of soviet airborne troops, and Jim flinched, putting his hands to his ears to drown out the cacophony of sound.
Ray Tessler was trying not to feel like a schoolboy sent to wait outside the headmaster’s office when Major Popham returned, however the American merely informed him he would command one of the 1 Platoon vehicles, as would Oz and Arnie.
On the soviet mortar line the soldiers glanced apprehensively up at the skies, wondering if an MLRS had targeted the real estate they were currently occupying. The forest still reverberated with the echoes of the bomblets that had just annihilated about two thirds of each battalion’s strength and the officer had to snap at them to return their attention to the business at hand.
The lieutenant raised his arm, in his uplifted hand the white pages of an open notebook stood out clearly in the dark and the number two men on each mortar inserted the finned base of a round into the muzzles and paused, retaining their grip on the round as they watched for the arm to fall. As the second hand completed the minute his arm swept downwards and the rounds were released.
The recoil sank the base plates an inch into the earth, and then the bipods retaining collars were unclipped, the barrels were unseated from those same base plates which were then hauled from the sucking mud by anxious hands.
‘Arthur’ was still scanning the forest and had computed the mortar lines location even as the first mortar barrel was being slung onto a shoulder by a soldier already running toward the next position, as fast as his burden would allow him.
The 155mm rounds landed slightly ‘over’, but still close enough to have killed anyone remaining. As it was the concussions bowled over the last of the retreating men despite the two hundred metres worth of trees between himself and the point of impact.
Coming so soon after the employment of the MLRS, Colin’s first reaction to the belt of mortar rounds straddling the logging track was that they were about to become blue on blue casualties, those targeted by accident by friendly forces. One Nine, the company commander, assured him otherwise and it was several minutes before this was repeated, the rounds landing alongside the firebreak to their left and bringing a tree crashing down.
Counter battery fire moaned mournfully overhead and with a large degree of satisfaction several Guardsmen cheered on hearing secondary explosions, but the men were not cheering five minutes later when the next belt arrived, landing square on to their position with one of the rounds exploding amongst the collection of wounded.
L/Cpl Bethers ignored the screams and switched on his nightscope. According to his watch the dawn should soon be breaking but for now it was as dark as pitch. The low pitched hum the device emitted cut out without warning, its batteries exhausted and Bethers placed it to one side and gripped the trip fares communications cord, carefully pulling it taut in readiness for use.
The next fall of mortar rounds was again by the logging track, but this time they were smoke rounds rather than HE and the defenders on that side listened hard for an attack to emerge from that direction.
B Battery received the fire mission but received a ‘stop’ order from the brigade artillery rep. On receiving the gun lines acknowledgement brigade sent the Apache back into the area for a damage assessment of the MLRS strikes. The Apache had monitored the cat and mouse game between the enemy mortars and their own artillery, and on their own initiative made a beeline for that area of forest. It wasn’t the mission they had been given, but that could wait a little longer.
Thoroughly winded by their exertions the mortar crews reached their next base plate position and flopped down in the mud, too spent to continue until they had at least regained their breath.
The sound of the helicopters beating blades came upon them quickly, but the trees masked the direction the low flying aircraft was approaching from until it cleared the pines at the northern end of the clearing.
Flaring to a halt barely six feet above the treetops its downwash whipped the branches of the conifers to frenzy, and the belly mounted chain gun pivoted downwards, questing the heat sources below. 30mm cannon shells marched across the clearing sending up geysers of mud in a line until it reached the weary mortar crews who were only just starting to react. Too late, much too late for all but three who managed to reach the trees, then finally the helicopter banked away to disappear into the rain swept pre-dawn.
Bethers hissed at his gunner to stop gawping over his shoulder and look to his front. “I can’t see shag all corpor… ” The unmistakeable sound of someone stumbling in the dark interrupted him and Bethers tugged hard on the communications cord, which set off the flare pot to reveal the approaching first line of soviet troops.
Taking up his clicker Bethers squeezed not once but twice, because the Claymore failed to detonate on the first and subsequent attempts. His gunner on seeing the difficulty immediately opened fire along with his number two, aiming short bursts at individuals amongst the trees. Bethers unplugged the firing cable from the clicker and hurriedly inserted into it the cable for his last mine, and with a final look to ensure the enemy were in range of where the mine should be he depressed the clicker’s generator arm.
The firing of the flare pot had got Colin’s attention but Bethers did not answer his radio. He was already crawling towards the rearmost position as the gimpy and riflemen to either side of the gun group engaged targets he himself could not yet see due to the severed boughs and splintered sections of tree trunks that had steadily accumulated on the forest floor since the ambush.
To add to their woes they were now being taken under fire from the left by crew served automatic weapons, firing on sustained fire rates.
He paused long enough to call in a fire mission to suppress the fire from the left before peering around the bole of a tree.
He could see the soviet troops skirmishing toward them through the trees and then his eyes fell on something closer to, in a tree a few paces from Bethers and his gun group. He recognised the firing cable wrapped around the object, strapping it to a tree trunk where it had been repositioned and faced down at an angle at the defenders.
Bethers finally connected the end of the cable into a clicker and Colin saw him glance toward the soviet troops, judging the moment to fire.
“NO BETHERS!”
The gun group and riflemen in the nearest shell scrapes disappeared amid black smoke, the welter of flying wood splinters, blood, bone and mud blown skywards by the impacting shrapnel from the Claymore. A white phosphorus grenade exploded, set off in the pouch of one of the gun group by the impact of a ball bearing passing through the pouch. The rounds in magazines next to the grenade began cooking off in the intense heat it produced.
Colin removed a grenade from a pouch and called up the remaining groups on his PRC 349, ordering them to send every other man to form a new line level with his shell scrape, and then knelt up to throw the grenade beyond the lingering smoke.