With the contact report sent the snipers prepared to get noisy and Freddie was spotting for decent targets, i.e. officers.
“Tenth from the left, front rank, antennae tank with a twat waving flags about… must be the company commander, he’s got more antennas than all the rest in that rank,” his voice muffled by the respirator he wore. Big Stef swung the muzzle to the left.
“Got it.” He committed the target to memory and moved on to the next one that Freddie identified.
When the lead company drove straight into the minefield to their front, they gave muted cheers.
“Hellooo… what have we here… Stef, one-o’clock, six-hundred metres, right at the back… could be a big boss, command tank mate!”
Stephanski could not pick it out at first, not until a man in a turret very helpfully picked up a map.
Taking up the first pressure he murmured,
“And you sunshine… can say goodnight… forever.” In the confined space of the hide, the report was like a thunderclap.
In the last company of the regiment, its company commanders torso jerked spastically before sliding down out of sight into the turret through the open hatch. A blood splattered map fluttered away behind the tank and Colonel Eskiva, 75m behind it realised the danger.
“All stations, beware snipers, beware snipers!” he radioed to all his tank commanders before lowering himself down until only his head protruded, stuffing his own map inside his coveralls.
Switching frequencies he reported the current situation to division, giving the approximate location of the minefield but ended the transmission with a mere
“Proceeding,” before changing back to his regimental command net.
All but four of the leading company’s tanks and APCs had struck mines. He may have told division he was proceeding as planned but he had no intention of doing so. To have asked permission to change the axis of advance would have been fruitless, so he got on the regimental net and gave his orders, despite the very real possibility that someone back at division was monitoring this net, he had no choice.
The plough tanks had kept pace with the regiment, to the rear of the command element and they now accelerated, angling left to where his map showed a minefield to be. He already knew that there was a thick field directly ahead where none was supposed to be. Perhaps the British had deceived the recon elements of his army, perhaps not. The orders he gave stopped the regiments advance and turned them left where they would reform into columns behind the tanks with the mine ploughs. The British could not have mined the entire area, indeed they were not supposed to have any mines. Either way, the mobile troops who had harassed them on the way here had to have some means of returning to their lines through safe lanes.
Fifteen miles west of Wunschendorf, lay the field headquarters of the composite NATO division facing this Red Army thrust into Germany.
NATOs forces today bore little resemblance to that of the armies that had faced the Warsaw Pact until the nineties. Not the least of their problems was that of language, with English, French, and German being used, but the commander was a French-Canadian with a German wife, which eased the problem somewhat. Dialect and accent were another matter, when the commander found himself speaking to a native of Newcastle, Belfast or Glasgow. On the occasions that he spoke with some signallers from 3 (UK) Mechanised Brigade, he would interrupt them in mid-unintelligible babble, reverting to Quebecois.
“Se fermer la trappe,” and pass the handset to a Brit with a Gallic shrug. He knew that he was speaking English, he just didn’t know what language the men and women on the other end thought that they were speaking!
The staff had been plotting the location of the enemy’s artillery gun-lines and vehicle concentrations. Due to the high angle of flight of the enemy mortars, two different mobile radars were required to locate mortar, rocket and tube artillery lines. Cymbeline, mortar-locating radar, had detected the flight path of the mortar bombs, and taking two their trajectory’s it plotted the Grid Reference of the enemy base plates.
Phoenix Unmanned Air Vehicle’s (UAVs), small, stealthed aircraft roamed beyond friendly lines. The real time surveillance and target acquisition systems of the surveillance suite’s sent back information via datalink to the ground station that, in turn, transmitted the intelligence gathered directly to artillery command posts. The Phoenix’s Kevlar, glass fibre, carbon reinforced plastics and Nomex honeycomb construction, was kept aloft by 25hp, two stroke flat twin engines. The design made it hard to see with the naked eye, IR, radar or detect it by sound.
The headquarters also received Elint from its teams of mobile troops equipped with MSTAR, a lightweight Pulse Doppler J — Band, all weather radar. Being ground-based, it reached out only 20km but freed up the airborne JSTARS to concentrate beyond that range. MSTAR had the job of detecting helicopters, vehicles, infantry and assisted the artillery observer in detecting the fall of their own shot. The MSTAR electro-luminescent display, shows dead ground relief and targets track history, it also has the ability to superimpose a map grid at 1:50,000 scale, to ease transfer to military maps. All this information had told NATO that the enemy artillery was being very dumb, gambling with its own safety and security in order to deliver a heavier barrage. For the first hour and a half the Red Army guns had relocated after each shoot but since then had remained in place, pounding NATO lines. NATO had several reasons for not using its guns from the outset and fairly low ammunition stocks were one reason. The other was to preserve their guns for the armoured assault against them, first hammering the enemy artillery before dividing the guns to go for headquarters and logistics targets on one hand, and fire support for its troops on the other.
The divisional commander judged that the time was now, time to unleash his gunners and ground-attack aircraft on an enemy grown complacent.
At about the time Colonel Eskiva’s Motor Rifle Regiments lead Company hit the minefield, the NATO guns and MLRS let fly at their counterparts in a TOT shoot, timed over target, so the different calibre shells fired from differing ranges, all arrived at the same moment.
“You missed the bastard, Stef!” The Guardsman looked briefly across at his spotter.
“Maybe I didn’t hit the geezer you were looking at, but I got an officer in an antennae tank.”
Ahead of them the assault ceased its movement directly toward them and turned south, leaving Stef to pick his own targets whilst Freddie reported the change to the battalion CP.
Most of the commanders in the tanks that sported clusters of antennas, marking them as commanders of company’s and above, were now only exposing their heads. It is far easier to see what their commands were doing with the naked eye rather than through viewing blocks. Stef aimed at his next target, allowing for the vehicle speed and aiming slightly ahead. The Czech officer in the tank kept rising up to look around at his vehicles and Stef suddenly noticed that he wore no respirator or chemical protective clothing. He panned the weapon around, none of the enemy in sight was wearing NBC, and the only logical explanation was that they knew the chemicals would have dissipated, they had to have been non-persistent category weapons. Swinging back to the antennae tank he controlled the flow of his breathing, taking in oxygen as he aimed, letting a breath out as he took up the first pressure on the trigger and squeezed at the bottom of the breathing cycle, following through to watch the fall of shot. The company commanders head disappeared in a red mist and Stef shouted to Freddie that the enemy was unmasked and not wearing NBC clothing either. Freddie got back on the radio and Stef paused to listen beyond the walls of their hide, the enemy shelling had ceased.