When Richard had been a boy of four his parents had bought him a Scotty, a Highland Terrier that Richard had named Jack. There hadn’t been anything particularly outstanding about the animal but it had been his first dog and therefore memorable to Richard alone. The message, once decompressed and decrypted comprised of a single word, the name of Richards very first pet. He was a little taken aback at having received the Go word so soon; it was after all just a few hours since the bulk of the force had departed for the extraction point. A few men rolled their eyes skywards, having come near to completing their snow holes only to be informed that they were now to ‘paste up, patch up and piss off’, but no one complained aloud. The entrenching tools were packed away and warm clothing was once more pulled on,
The batteries in the RERs and laser designators were almost brand new but Richard had them changed anyway, before he led the Cadre out, back along the ridge and abseiling down to the canyon floor at the avalanche site. There was nothing left to indicate that troops had been there, except of course the small holes in the rock wall where the pitons had been driven in. Once the snow thawed it would doubtless uncover the bodies of the two dead men, the smashed equipment and abandoned kit, but for now the still falling snow was covering over all signs that men had passed this way.
The Cadre crossed the canyon and scaled the face on the opposite side without a single appearance by PRC helicopter patrols. Richard wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth, if the PRC aircrew felt the weather was unsafe to fly in then that suited him just fine. He knew that the enemy now was time, getting clear of the area before the manhunt began in the wake of the, hopefully, successful attacks on the silos. Once they had cleared this particular ridge and the valley beyond then their chances of successful evasion were greatly increased. With luck Garfield’s men and the Mountain Troop contingent would already have gotten the injured men across this ridge and down to the valley floor. Richard was not about to break a radio silence maintained since setting foot in China, they would find out how well Garfield had done when they caught up with them. He wanted to be on the valley floor before midnight and across it before the dawn, which would mean some gruelling cross-country skiing. Passing the word that there would be no rest stops tonight; Richard led the men past the site where they had weathered the blizzard, and onwards toward the valley.
Commanding 3rd Shock Army’s point Division was a fifty two year old Romanian from Piatra Neamt, in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. He had been a Lt Col commanding an artillery battalion during the last years under Ceausescu and had never envisaged reaching Staff rank; all those places had been earmarked years in advance for officers from Romania’s communist elite. With the fall of the tyrant however, the new government deemed him too lowly in rank to be tainted by association, and yet capable enough to handle the responsibility of a sudden elevation in rank, in order to help fill the vacuum created by the former general staff’s sudden retirement.
The division he led today was a different creature to the one he had brought over to the communist cause during the coup that had preceded this war; over a third of the original number had become casualties to NATO’s fierce defence by the time his division had reached the Spee. Originally the division had consisted of a reconnaissance regiment, a tank regiment and three MRRs, motor rifle regiments, each made up of three battalions; a rotary wing aviation battalion, an artillery regiment consisting of a heavy, a medium and air defence battalions, plus the usual engineering and logistic support units. All had been native Romanians, and a full two thirds had at least two years recent service under their belts. NATO had almost annihilated his reconnaissance regiment and all that had remained were two companies worth of men and vehicles, which had lately been reinforced and brought up to the size of a superannuated battalion. Shortly after reaching the Spee the division had been taken out of the line and sent to the rear to reconstitute, his three battered motor rifle regiments had amalgamated to become two, and the tank regiment now numbered two battalions instead of three. The arrival of a Czech and a Bulgarian MRR to bolster the division’s ranks had been a mixed blessing because it caused distinct communications problems, but they were already blooded and were therefore preferable to units consisting of green conscripts. Cold bloodedly, the division commander had assigned the Bulgarian’s the duty of walking point where NATO could dull its edge, and once the newcomers had become combat ineffective as a unit it would be broken up and absorbed by his Romanians whilst the Czechs took up point position and remained there until a similar fate befell them. It did not occur to him that the commander of 3rd Army had been thinking along exactly the same lines when he written his own orders, using the Romanian division as the expendable tip of a mainly Russian spear.
At a midnight O Group the division commander had deployed his Romanian MRRs, the 111th and 112th, on the left and right rear of the Czechs, who were to follow directly behind the Bulgarians. His tank regiment, the 93rd, was to follow on behind and in this fashion the tanks would be in position to exploit any breaches that might appear, passing through the lead units to either widen the breach or to punch deep into the enemy’s rear. The division’s axis of advance took them straight at a linear feature that lay like a natural barrier to the all-important Autobahns to the English Channel. According to his maps this feature was called Vormundberg, and according to intelligence it was occupied by a ragtag unit of British and Americans with a forward screen of French and British light troops, which he had described to his officers at the final O Group as, ‘hardly something to lose any sleep over’. It was therefore with a degree of optimism that the O Group had broken up and his officers had returned to their units to deliver their own orders. A large bite had been taken out of that optimism a few hours later, just as the division was about to jump off. NATO launched massed air raids on the Soviet armour west of the Elbe and for reasons unbeknownst to the division commander their own air cover had been conspicuously absent. As a result, all of the divisions units had taken casualties but the Bulgarians, being at the forward edge, had been hit particularly hard and had taken 70 % casualties, including their regimental headquarters. Under threat of arrest from his own superior the divisional commander had been forced to abandon the casualties, policing up the remainder and revising his plans so that the Czech regiment lead the way.
After the first forty minutes of an unchallenged advance he had felt some of the earlier optimism restore itself. At the top of a rise he had dismounted from his command vehicle to look back along the way they had come and was moved by the awesome spectacle that met his gaze. His unit may have been under strength but it was still impressive for all that, and beyond his divisions vehicles he could see those of other units, but as moving dots against the landscape. Surely NATO had nothing left with which to deny them their march to the coast? But five minutes later Milan missiles and expertly called in air strikes had begun exploding his precious reconnaissance vehicles.
Reports from the roving troublemakers of 2REP, 2e Regiment Etranger de Parachutiste’s Anti-Tank Platoon, and the Anti-Tank Guided Weapons Troop of 40 Commando RM, had charted the progress of Third Shock Army’s lead elements as they advanced westwards away from the Elbe. The French Foreign Legion paratroopers and the Royal Marine Commandos had used every opportunity to inflict harm and delay upon the enemy. Wire guided anti-tank rounds and air strikes called in by the NATO troops shredded the reconnaissance screen that preceded the armoured units, forcing the enemy to deploy forward other fighting vehicles to plug the gaps in the screen. The larger fighting vehicles were no substitute for the smaller, quieter and more agile specialist reconnaissance vehicles and were easy prey to the Milans of the French and British. Battle tanks costing millions of roubles were left burning in the fields and roads, falling victim to soft skinned vehicles that cost mere thousands. To counter this, the Soviet’s called in helicopter gunships to ride shotgun and range ahead of the tanks, and where they caught the NATO troops in the open the helicopters 23mm cannons tore up both the un-armoured vehicles and crewmen alike. The next air battle began as a direct result, with the marines and paratroopers calling for CAPs to deal with the threat from the air and the Soviet rotary wing crews quickly doing likewise once air-to-air missiles began thinning them out.