The method for finding breaks is to carry a field telephone and follow the wire, stopping every 25m to call in until either no one answers or the station at the end of the line does. Once that happens you back track 12m and try again, moving back and forth, shorter and shorter distances until the break is found. It’s a tedious process at the best of times, but tonight atop the hill that now looked like a moonscape, it was hard going and bloody difficult. The four regimental signallers split up, dividing the workload in order to get it done as fast as possible, feeling their way along the wires in the dark.
Morgan could hear aircraft over the crack of tank guns, they were NATO aircraft but he didn’t care, he just wanted to get back below ground into the safety of the CP bunker. His heart was beating and his hands shook as he traced the wire he was following, under, over and around broken, splintered trees and cratered earth.
Without the benefit of night viewing aids of the quality their enemies had, Colonel Eskiva could see that his units’ accuracy was suffering when the moon disappeared, so he ordered his dismounted mortarmen to put up para-illumination rounds. NATO could already see them so he wasn’t giving much away by employing a double-edge tool.
As the enemy assault grew closer it became more difficult for Major Darcy’s tank to engage them, the barrel was depressed to its maximum and undergrowth on the slope was further hindering their efforts. The enemy had changed direction yet again and where now heading for the river at an oblique angle, heading straight for them. He ordered his driver to reverse out of the position and proceed to another over to the left. It meant exposing themselves, briefly skylined for about 40m but the clouds had blocked out the moon and the only light was across the river, provided by burning enemy tracks. He had, however, forgotten to take into consideration that the route was littered with obstacles and would have to be negotiated slowly.
Back across the river, in the hide beneath the railway, Big Stef and Freddie were getting frustrated too. Until the clouds had arrived Stef had fired almost continuously, as the litter of empty cases on the floor of the hide attested. He worked the bolt back and forth, sighted once more and fired yet again, with something like a 75 % kill rate. Most of the tank commanders were out of sight, having buttoned up the tanks and others raised their heads only rarely, never more than shoulder high above the hatch either. The Challengers and Milan crews were making the Czech’s for every yard they approached and the snipers targets were now mainly the survivors of knocked out tanks and APCs. They ignored the obviously injured crewmen and infantry, taking out the healthy ones who would be put straight back into the fray in replacement vehicles once this battle was done. There were exceptions however, and twice Freddie had looked across at Big Stef as he had ignored the targets he’d identified, to shoot a different one entirely. Freddie made no comment about the wasted ammunition though, because he too would probably want someone, friend or foes to end his suffering if he emerged from a wrecked vehicle as a human torch. They had reported the withdrawal of AA vehicles back into the trees, but could not pinpoint the present positions, so artillery was landing in the trees in a ‘best guess’ sort of fashion. The loss of the moonlight would require switching the present sight with the nightscope, which was less accurate. Reluctant to do so unless as a last resort, Stef peered through the sight, seeking an opportunity whilst Freddie tried to identify a target with his MIRAS sight that his oppo could see to shoot at.
As the para-illum rounds bursts overhead the hilltop and plain were bathed in a combined total of two million candle power of light, from gently undulating flares that floated earthwards beneath small parachutes.
Colonel Eskiva saw the Challenger II on the skyline and shouted the target indication into the interphone. As the turret turned and barrel raised, he saw a Sagger crew hunched down in a ditch, squinting against the glare for a target but had not apparently seen the British tank. Leaning across the turret's coaming, he shouted at the top of his voice to them, pointing as he did so and two weapons fired at exactly the same instant, one was 7.62 calibre, the other was 125mm.
One the hillside Major Darcy was on the Guards battalion CP net giving a sitrep and didn’t hear gunners exclamation of
“Oh fuck… we’re for it now!” as he saw night turn to day outside.
In Colonel Eskiva’s T-90, the 1A45T, automatic fire-control system ordered the carousel automatic loader to retract and the gunner took over. The smoothbore gun recoiled as it sent a discarding sabot round at the exposed British tank that was picking its way around splintered tree trunks.
Fluids do not take kindly to compression if they are confined inside a sealed vessel, such as a skull. The sonic shock wave that preceded the bullet into Eskiva’s open mouth had already folded back the colonels tongue, forcing it down his throat with such force it tore off at the root. As the bullet itself entered the skull through the top of the colonels mouth, the accompanying shockwave forced the fluids and soft tissue away, displacing it as a boulder would if dropped into a pond. There was nowhere for the displaced matter to go and the fluid refused to be compressed, so something had to give. The colonels skull came apart and his eyeballs burst outwards from their sockets. It all happened in less than a thousandth of a second and the colonel did not even know he was dead.
On the hill the majors tank was struck on its right side, on the turret ring, the joint where turret meets chassis. The depleted uranium tip was ten times denser than water and not even the Chobham armour of the British tank slowed it. The energy created by the impact turned the armour plate molten, and the round passed through into the interior of the turret, decapitating Darcy’s gunner and instantly raising the inside temperature to 560’ centigrade. The flash point for the propellant inside the British tanks bag charges was considerably less than the furnace like temperature of the turret and they exploded, setting off the stored HESH warheads as they did so. If Colonel Eskiva’s gunner hadn’t been staring at the ruined head of his colonel, whose still twitching body had tumbled back into the turrets interior, he would have seen the Challengers turret part company with the chassis, spinning end over end, down the hill and into the river with a huge splash.
Guardsman Morgan had grown anxious to the point of desperation as the return fire from the Czech’s indicated how much closer they were. He had lost the telephone cable he had been following and could not find it again in the pitch dark, nor could he find his small torch, with its tiny aperture, made smaller still by strategically applied masking tape. Cursing and shaking he was close to panic as he pulled a chemical light stick from a map pocket. He fumbled with the wrapping until he got the thing out and bent it at the middle, breaking the glass tube inside the plastic casing, allowing the chemicals inside to mix.
Lt Col Hupperd-Lowe and his nine strong escort were feeling their way through the darkness towards 1 Company’s headquarters CP when the colonel saw a bright green, fluorescent light suddenly appear. Recognising it for what it was he was almost speechless with rage, not fifty metres from the CP some idiot was showing a naked light, a sodding bright one at that and he made towards it, shouting as he went.
The Czech Su-17s reached the valley but could not raise the regimental commander of the attacking unit on the radio. They could see firing and knew roughly what ground the enemy held but no more. The leader of the formation cursed as a Starstreak missile slammed into one of their number, sending it into the earth in a pillar of flame. Quite suddenly there appeared directly ahead on the top of the enemy hill a bright light. It was not a big light but in the pitched dark on top of the hill it acted like a beacon of bright green. He could see no future, quite literally, in hanging around without some instruction from the ground forces as to where they should place their ordnance, so he called the other three aircraft and ordered them to dump their loads on the light ahead before egressing the area on burner.