Both officers carried mess tins, mugs and ‘scoffing rods’, knife, fork and spoon clanking in one hand as they headed over to the covered football stand to join the breakfast queue.
The stand was the cookhouse and feeding area for the combat team, the changing rooms were the ‘barracks’ for the cooks and REME L.A.D, Light Aid Detachment, and the car park sported a covered workshop constructed of scaffolding with a ‘wriggly tin roof’, which means ‘corrugated metal sheeting’ to civilians.
“So we have a spare barrel and a bunch more rounds per tank?” Tony asked.
When the Australian Defence Force was looking to replace its ageing German Leopard 1s it had tested the contender’s main armament. The German Leopard 2s L44 main armament also ‘gunned’ the US M1A1 Abrahms, and an L44 was tested for comparison beside the British L30 tank gun. The rifled British gun could throw a HESH, shaped charge road, 8,000 metres, a full five miles, with great accuracy and twice the range of the smoothbore German gun. But accessibility to spares and upgrades from the other side of the Pacific as opposed to the other side of the planet was a factor in Australia’s choosing the American tank over the German and British MBTs. It also meant that in a magazine in Darwin there was sat 144 rounds of ammunition left over from that testing.
Heck’s troop of Challenger 2s had arrived in Australia with just their ‘Front Line loads’ of forty nine rounds per tank and the commander of 5th Mech, ‘Duke’ Thackery, had little use for the Brits other than as a forlorn hope and as casualty replacements as the Abrahms and Challengers ammunition was not compatible.
“In the big scheme of things we have thirty six reloads per vehicle, which is good for one engagement perhaps…still, it’s better than jack-all, isn’t it?” Heck responded.
“Not enough for General Thackery to change his plans. You are still a throw away quick reaction force to plug any penetrations.”
“Throw away?” Heck muttered aloud. “Penetrations?” he continued. “I am not sure I like the parallels with those of a ‘spent johnnie’.” he concluded.
Danny frowned.
“Pardon?”
“A used, prophylactic.” Tony informed him.
They joined the end of the queue, standing behind Sergeant Rebecca Hemmings and Master Sergeant Bart Kopak. Rebecca still wore a drawn look on her otherwise pretty features. Becoming a widow early on in the war was not a matter that she had fully come to terms with yet, but the ever hopeful Bart was there if and when she did.
Bart was ‘not on rations’ with the British unit anymore. They no longer warranted a liaison team, just Danny King the captain from the 11th Armoured Cavalry. The three officers were aware of the situation but none of them made any comment. Rebecca and Bart were good people.
The line shuffled on, closer to the heavy ‘ Hay Boxes’, the insulated metal containers for transporting cooked food to the troops. Such containers had once been lined with dried straw to retain the heat and as such the name ‘Hay Box’ had remained.
Eventually each officer was served and found a spot to sit together in the stands to eat.
A slice of fried bread, a fried sausage, a fried egg, two tinned tomatoes, half a dozen tinned mushrooms and a half ladle of baked beans.
Be it Chelsea Barracks or Camp Bastion, Catterick or Kembla, the high cholesterol breakfast was an even surer sign than a bugler sounding reveille that the British Army had started a new day.
A day, which had started badly, was steadily getting worse for the deputy commander of Militia Sub-District 178. His boss had been slightly vocal when the men had not been in position and ready to go a half hour before dawn, rather vocal when the dawn came and no move was made, and screaming dire threats into radio microphones thirty minutes after that.
The trouble was, the thousand and twelve men they had were policemen, not soldiers, and lining them up twenty feet apart along the forest’s edge was not as easy as it sounded.
Shortly after they had stepped off, the real difficulties had become evident. Gaps appeared where men elected not to push through heavy brush, but rather to walk around. Men walked alongside friends chatting, and where the going was easy the line surged forward, leaving others struggling through underbrush far behind.
It was not happening as the sub district commander had envisaged, the evenly spaced line of his briefing was not going to sweep evenly along at three miles an hour, uncovering the killers as it flushed them from hiding, and apparently it was all his deputy’s fault.
The commander had been unwilling to listen to other opinions, which was nothing new; he was an arrogant individual at the best of times.
The deputy had put forward the possibility that the culprits could have put a lot of distance between themselves and the scene of their crime, which was why the search of farms and buildings in the region had come up empty, and why the reconnaissance helicopter the previous day had not uncovered any clusters of skulking humanity in the trees of the forest.
His opinions and theories carried little weight at the best of times, and these earned him a contemptuous rebuke.
The deputy had initially been in charge of the line of militiamen, then humiliated in front of the men by his superior when all did not go according to plan, he had been despatched instead with two BMP-1s to check on the men cordoning the forest.
It had taken an hour for the deputy to accept that he was better off away from the line of ‘beaters’ because things would only get even more fraught as time went on. His boss, the commander, was an idiot and what is more everyone knew he was an idiot, so what did it matter that he had treated his deputy like an imbecile in front of the lowest ranks? All he had to do was ensure there were no problems with the cordons, and generally keep his head down for the duration of the operation. It would take several days to comb through the forest so he would take the opportunity to enjoy the time away from the overbearing buffoon who held the next rank, savour the independence and autonomy whilst he had the chance.
The deputy commander directed the driver of his vehicle to head for the nearest roadblock, after that he would look at the map for the best way through the forest. An easily navigable route would cut time off the journey from one side to the other, and would serve to avoid crossing the commander’s path.
Those men engaged in the preparation of the Cadre’s ‘accommodation’ were stripped down to just their arctic white smocks, which were providing only camouflage, not warmth, in the sub-zero temperature. Despite the freezing air the men were warm from tunnelling into the snow, and had removed upper layers of clothing to prevent sweat forming.
Richard worked along with them, preparing the location for an indefinite stay, or at least until all the pieces were in place, and the attack could go ahead. The major knew nothing of the other elements involved, and had he been asked about Operation Equalizer or Operation Guillotine he would have shrugged his shoulders and asked in all truthfulness what they were. He wasn’t a fool though and knew that in all probability there had to be at least one other operation working toward achieving the mission’s ultimate aim. Logic dictated that there had to be an operation running to take out the PRCs other means of waging intercontinental nuclear war, that of the submarine threat. He had spent many hours aboard submarines during his career, but always as a passenger enroute to or from some covert operation or other, he had no idea how they would go about finding China’s vessels in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Driving submarines was a complete mystery to him, and yet some people were remarkably good at it, as testified by the blinking ‘message’ light he had just noticed on his communicator.