Over the next four hours the Orion P-3s and Nimrods would kill another five submarines before the soviets crossed over into the preserve of the USS Twin Towers and the Canadian diesel submarines.
Major Richard Dewar, Royal Marine Commandos, commanding the M&AWC, supervised the loading of the last items of equipment aboard the
B2 Spirit bombers. The complex rotary systems that held the ordnance had been removed and now sat aboard the giant C-5 transports that had brought them in from the 509th Bomb Wings home at Whiteman AFB, Missouri, in readiness for the bombers proper job.
Dewar couldn’t take his whole cadre on the insertion, just eight men, and the SAS G Squadron, Mountain Troop and the American Green Berets were providing another eight each.
It wasn’t a set-up that Dewar was happy with, the guys from Mountain Troop had done major climbs, the Green Berets thought clambering up the Rockies a big deal, but those mountains were hardly high altitude. His men lived nine months of the year at altitude and most of that in arctic conditions, they had all been up Everest at least once and half had had a crack at K2, conditions very similar to what would be found in China. It would take stealth to enter the region, and the Americans had those means but they wanted in on the action on the ground. Major Dewar could live with that, but he could see no reason whatsoever for the ‘glory boys’ of the SAS to be included. In his opinion they were a bunch of cowboys and media darlings whose inclusion was merely political. Dewar had been told that they were going with them, like it or not, but he had won a small concession. In his specialisation, mountain and arctic warfare, he was the acknowledged top man in NATO forces, and to his great surprise the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs had approved the command position without question.
“If we were going in on surfboards I’d want a surfer dude from California leading, but its high ice, so I want that mad jock, Dewar. He’s the best, and the Green Berets will do as he says, when he says and as often as he says.”
Captain Garfield Woods of the Green Berets and Lt Shippey-Romhead of Mountain Troop were several hundred yards away in a dispersal occupied by an RAF C-130 Hercules of 47 Squadron. They were both trying very hard to impress their way into the panties of the aircraft’s co-pilot, Michelle Braithwaite, but the pretty Flt Lt had worked far too hard to earn her place on the Squadron strength to blow it by succumbing to the testosterone driven lusts of two squaddies.
She humoured them whilst laughing inwardly at their machismo, for all their strutting, she had actually been into more hot war zones than either man. Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, across the border with Afghanistan into Pakistan for a hot extraction, and some sneaky insertions into Columbia on anti-drugs work, and of course more recently onto the northern ice pack, and back again to extract the M&AWC.
47 Squadron would be doing the extraction and not the insertion on this job, landing on an old mountain strip that had been built to serve copper mines, 69 miles from the ICBM silos.
The B1-Bs and B2s would be stealthy on their return into the target area, and noisy as hell on the route out, Wild Weaselling the hell out of the Chinese air defences on the way. Two Hercules would fly in along the route cleared by the bombers, put down on the strip and await the troops arrival; one C-130 would be for the Marines, Green Berets and SAS troops. The second would be more M&AWC marines for local protection, because they could be sat on the strip a couple of days waiting for the troops to yomp their way across the mountains to reach them.
The one sided mating ritual was interrupted by the bark of Major Dewar, who at a range of 400 yards called the two officers to heel in a parade ground voice more used by Sergeants than by officers, but then Dewar had been a Troop sergeant before being commissioned eight years previously.
A pair of German Army Marder APCs, and a cluster of bodies marked the furthest point that local counter-attacks had progressed against the Russian airborne troops. The closest vehicle was still giving off wisps of oily smoke, but the furthest was completely gutted by fire, everything flammable had been consumed.
Oz crawled slowly past the APCs, keeping low and as close as possible to the hedgerow that ran up to within 100 metres of the enemy positions.
He gritted his teeth, forcing his body to behave normally, and not move in a jerky fashion in the freezing temperatures. The last two hours had been spent gathering information, and now he was on his way back with it.
After another half an hour he was back with his recce patrol in the FRV and pulling on his webbing. He had a night fighters tediously slow conversation with the L/Cpl he had left in charge of the patrol, consisting of him putting his mouth right next to the others ear to ask the slowly put questions before receiving the answer in the same fashion. Satisfied that the answers tallied with what he had deduced by himself, he led the patrol back to their own lines.
At 0330hrs Pat Reed held his O’ Group, his company and squadron commanders, the artillery, engineer and air support reps were all gathered together in the wine cellar of a large house commandeered by the battalion as a CP.
He had been able to speak briefly with his wife by telephone with regard to Families matters, ‘Families’ being the battalions married men’s families rather than his own. His own family was bearing up. His daughter Nancy at Edinburgh University was of course too far away from the cruise missile attacks on London and the oil refineries and depots to have been in danger, as was his son Julian, but Julian was here with 3 Mechanised Brigade as an AFC, Artillery Fire Controller, attached to the Light Infantry.
His wife sounded tired; she had been with the Padre and Captain Deacon, the Families Officer, at every visit to families in the London District Area to break the news that a husband, a father, wasn’t coming home again.
Talk, and rumours within the battalion had been about the attacks. No one here saw the TV footage of Canary Wharf falling, or St Thomas’s Hospital and Buckingham Palace on fire.
Downing Street had been empty of all Cabinet members of course, but the Diplomatic Protection Group officers and cleaning staff were not in a fallout shelter in the north of England when the missile landed.
There were no newspapers and the internet was out of course, so rumour control was holding sway.
After Arnie Moore barked out.
“Sit Up!”, bringing all talk to an end and a respectfully straightening up in the seats as the Commanding Officer entered the room, Pat sat them at ease and spent several minutes dispelling rumours and giving them a picture of what had transpired. None of the families had been casualties and what they were going to do now was to focus on their jobs and the next job at hand in particular.
“Ladies and Gents, Dutch, French and Belgian Brigades are at present containing the enemy airborne bridgehead at Haldensleben, and the NATO air forces and artillery are knocking down the ribbon bridges as fast as they are appearing. They haven’t stopped the enemy Divisions from closing on the opposite side of the river, but they are thinning them out… a bit.”
As Pat used a laser pen to indicate locations on the map, his audience located the place on their own maps.
“It appears that the airborne landings have been made in such a way as to act as stepping stones for a breakout in two places, and towards the English Channel, but our aircraft did get in amongst the transport streams and cause an element of havoc. As result of this there are a lot of enemy between us and the furthest DZ of the northern operation… and this is both good and bad news. It is good because they are without replen and have only what they carried in with them… and it is bad because they are going to slow us down. Our friends in the Light Infantry and Argyll’s are ready to jump off on a northern axis of advance on Helmstedt; we will join them after clearing away the enemy in between here and there. From then on we will fight as a brigade. I am well aware that this operation should be conducted by a full division, but the only free ones are still afloat somewhere between Antwerp and continental America.”