“Mow them down,” Colonel Muhlenkampf snapped, as the Bundeswehr infantry came up. They had body armour and better weapons – he saw a Russian aiming a cheap AK-47 at a German before being mown down – and they cleared the Russian infantry.
“Bastards,” the driver said. Colonel Muhlenkampf nodded. “What now, sir?”
Colonel Muhlenkampf lifted his radio and began to issue orders. Rommel would issue orders of his own, he was certain, but his force had to be protected – or it would be worn away.
Jagar studied the satellite imagery, marvelling again at the crystal-clear images. “General, they’re pulling back inside the city,” he said. Every fibre of his being demanded that the Germans follow the Russians and purge them from the city. They could do it, he was certain. “Should we order a pursuit?”
Rommel took the high cost of victory without flinching. The cost had been higher than expected, particularly with the new rounds that the Russian tanks had been issued with, capable of burning through a Firefly’s armour. Jagar knew that Rommel had expected that the enemy would succeed in developing such a weapon – after all, they’d been seeing Fireflies for a year and might even have captured a damaged model – but so soon?
“No,” Rommel said. Jagar blinked. “That’s what they want us to do.”
“Jawohl,” Jagar said, in acknowledgement of his own mistake.
“Quite,” Rommel said. The tall General smiled. “Order the force to spread out,” he said, studying the map of Baghdad. Half of the city was on the wrong side of the Tigris River, after all. “The combat engineers are to bridge the river as quickly as possible; the RAF can handle the Russian tanks that will try to interfere.”
“Back here again,” Flying Officer Mick Eccleston muttered, as the Harrier jump jet lifted off from the forward operating base at An Najaf – where the Iraqi Government was cowering after being driven from Baghdad – and headed towards Baghdad. Before the Transition, the RAF seemed to have spent most of its time attacking targets in the Middle East, attempting to finish the extermination of the terror groups.
The ground passed under the aircraft as he logged into the tactical combat net, his aircraft becoming part of a much greater whole; the entire British military machine in the Middle East. Orders appeared on the display; he was to attack Soviet armour near Baghdad. IFF signals from the Bundeswehr and other allied units appeared on the display, to avoid a blue-on-blue attack. He smiled grimly as he saw Baghdad; like many others in the Western armed forces, he had no love for the city, whatever the historians might have thought about looking at Baghdad. They would only have been happy if the Transition had taken them back to the Bronze Age.
He smiled; novels about alternate history had become very popular in Britain, once the immediate struggle for survival had concluded. He himself had read a trilogy on the subject of an entire island… although the author hadn’t predicted what had really gone back in time. He’d also read a series from the same author on the laws of nature changing, but he’d found it disturbing… and impossible.
“Harrier-one, you are cleared to enter the battlezone,” the AWACS controller said, breaking into his thoughts. “You may engage at will.”
“Yeah, yeah, you fucking control freak,” Eccleston muttered. He found it hard to be sympathetic to the controller; no pilot liked being told what to do by a man who had never flown a fighter jet himself. “Moving in now…”
Bursts of black flak appeared around the Harrier and he jerked away from the city. Ignoring a demand from the controller for a report, he triggered the launch of a bomb at the imprudent gunner, and swooped away from the threat.
“Echo-one, picking up targets now,” he reported. A line of Russian tanks were moving out of the city, towards a number of Bundeswehr IFF beacons. “Releasing bombs.”
He smiled as the bombs blasted down at the Russian tanks. A line of explosions shattered them, one by one, wiping them out. “Targets destroyed,” he reported. He checked his display. “Echo-one, I have two bombs left,” he said. “Any other targets?”
“General harassment,” the AWACS said. Eccleston nodded, picked a Soviet position within the city, and launched the bombs, swooping away to avoid the flak. Accelerating, he clawed for height, heading back to the forward base.
“A good days work,” he said, checking the display. Other aircraft were moving in, striking again and again at Soviet targets, deploying all kinds of different weapons against the enemy. “A very good day’s work.”
Royal Palace
Tehran, Iran
18th April 1942
Stalin, in his infinitive wisdom, had decreed that General Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov would set up his base in the Royal Palace, and so General Zhukov had complied. Now he struggled frantically to make sense of the data the radio and landline transmissions had brought him, and he felt fear gnawing at his chest.
“Why haven’t they jammed us?” He asked, as he studied the map. Baghdad and Basra were being surrounded and major air attacks had developed… against targets he would have sworn on Das Kapital that the British didn’t know about. Fuel and ammunition dumps, bridges, tank repair shops… all had been hammered from the air and destroyed.
“Perhaps they no longer have that capability,” Commissioner Petrovich suggested. Zhukov glared openly at him, confident that Stalin would forgive him if he won the battle. “They might be using it against the fascists, or the latest changes in the radio sets might be preventing them from using it.”
Zhukov bit off a comment about science not being considered a worthwhile subject in whatever dung heap commissioners were spawned on. Jamming wasn’t dependent upon the Soviet forces using a particular type of system – so far experience proved that that didn’t seem to matter.
“It makes no sense,” he said, refusing to be drawn. “They are besieging the cities, and pushing out, not attempting to take them.”
He scowled. Reports were never as clear as he wanted – he’d heard that the British could get something called a direct download from their forces – but it was clear that the forces inside the two cities were being sealed inside. Small forces had been deployed to surround the cities… while the main British force probed onwards, into Iran.
“Damn,” he said mildly, thinking baleful thoughts about the devil’s grandmother. Suddenly, everything made a certain kind of sense; the British were refusing the bait and allowing the forces within the cities to die on the vine. Instead…
“They’re coming here,” he said, and cursed openly. “That’s what they’re doing.”
Commissioner Petrovich stared at him. “What can we do about it?”
“The only thing we can do,” Zhukov said. “We’re going to pull out of the east of Iran, and re-concentrate in the north.”
If we can, an annoying imp at the back of his mind whispered. “We don’t have a choice, Comrade Commissioner Petrovich,” he snapped. “We move now, or we lose the forces when they cut the country in half!”
Commissioner Petrovich scowled. “It’ll still take them at least a week to reach here…”
“At worst, yes,” Zhukov said, who privately put it at two weeks. There was no need to mention that to the Commissioner. “That’s not the point; the point is that their forward operating bases for their aircraft will be moving forward. We’re already being pounded, Comrade, and the closer they get to us, the more pounding they can dump on us. Once they get close enough to have round-the-clock coverage, we’re going to be crushed and that will be the end of the forces in the east. They have to be moved!”