Upon reflection, it was the most disciplined killing frenzy the American had ever seen.
The Royal Marines of 44 Commando gave no quarter, they slaughtered without remorse, avenging their comrades of ‘Forty Two’ and leaving bodies in their wake, dead and dying as they retook 3 Company’s latest position and drove the Soviets back onto the steep slope they had so recently climbed. Men ran past him, tired men, the gun groups catching up with the riflemen who were now firing downhill.
The sun’s rays revealed the blasted hillside degree by degree, announcing an end to the longest of all nights.
Arnie looked for the CO and saw Pat kneeling and firing, but not at the beaten enemy on the slope, he was aiming at the infantry approaching the foot of the Vormundberg.
The Royal Marines raised their aim and the gun groups, still breathing heavily set down their GPMGs and got down behind them. A winded man is not the best shot, but there were plenty of targets down there, struggling through earth turned to molasses by countless armoured vehicles churning tracks in the previous twenty hours or so.
81mm and 51mm mortars began to land on the valley floor and those who had just reached the five tanks, all of them burning or oozing smoke, tried to use them for cover.
There was return fire but the rising sun was in their eyes.
Lt Col Reed removed the magazine off his SLR and checked his pouches for a fresh magazine, but he had used all four. Arnie took the magazine off his own rifle and handed it across.
Pat Reed took the proffered magazine with a perfunctual nod and continued with the killing.
It ended of course, not with the complete massacre of the hated 23rd Motor Rifle Regiment but in acknowledgement by those on the hillside that they still possessed humanity. Men were surrendering, waving opened field dressings, the only items in their equipment that were white.
Perhaps a hundred survived, perhaps less. Either way, the 23rd was effectively no more.
“Colonel Reed?” a voice called out enquiringly from behind them.
Pat raised an arm and on turning saw the battalion’s artillery rep approaching, and pointing.
“Look sir, above the far crest!”
Across the valley, on the top of the hill where the enemy had first appeared the previous day there now emerged more, climbing out of the river valley beyond.
“Fuck!” swore Pat. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!...haven’t we done enough, haven’t we?”
The best part of two first class Divisions approached, the 77th Tank Division and the 32nd Motor Rifle Division, two hundred and twenty eight main battle tanks, eighty two infantry fighting vehicles, plus artillery and the myriad support units required to maintain and run the divisions.
They had trampled the French armoured and Canadian mechanised brigades into the mud on the banks of the river to reopen the supply line, and now they would deal with the worn out defenders of the Vormundberg without hardly a pause.
“No sir, look up!” the artilleryman said. “Above the hill!”
Thin contrails, hundreds of objects were plunging out of the cloud base above the hill and the valley beyond, MLRS and 155mm ‘smart’ ordnance began winking like countless flashbulbs before reaching the ground.
They stood watching those twinkling lights, the defenders from all the nations upon the Vormundberg, the seemingly harmless light show in the distance, but then the sound reached them. It pummelled their ears as not just one, but all of the grid squares from the crest back to the river were ‘removed’.
4 Corps had won the race.
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants. It is the creed of slaves"
BOOK TWO
‘Crossing the Rubicon’
CHAPTER ONE
The pain roused Svetlana, dragging her back to the realm of consciousness where she took stock of her situation with little clue as to how she came to be where she was. She was swing from side to side in the breeze, the motion accompanied by the creaking of a branch above her head.
She saw that dawn was some hours past and that the rain had recently stopped. She could hear the drops that still fell from the branches to land on the soaked ground.
The pain radiated outwards from her lower back but when she tried to reach around with her right arm to examine the area, she could not in fact feel that arm at all. In a panic she groped with her left arm, searching for the right limb. She moaned in pain as the slightest movement increased the agony in her back. The arm was not there but there was no blood on her left hand either, surely they would have been if it had been ripped off? That thought sparked a memory, one of being in a cramped but warm cockpit one moment, and hurtling through the night and the rain the next, as if her seat had been shot out of a cannon.
A pretty close analogy as it happens.
Caroline had saved her, ejecting them both just as the abused airframe had said ‘Enough’ and given up the ghost.
She looked up and saw her arm had become trapped in the lines of the parachute when she had hit the tree and the canopy had collapsed. She retrieved the pale limb with difficult and not a little pain. The loss of feeling had been due to restricted circulation as if she had slept upon it, and she sobbed with agony as full blood flow was restored.
Regaining terra firma was difficult and she suspected a bruised coccyx was the cause. Before her first flight with Caroline back at RAF Kinloss, a seemingly long time ago, she recalled the stunningly attractive American pilot leaning over her and strapping her in whilst explaining the drills for abandoning the aircraft and the importance of posture at the moment of ejection. Svetlana’s libido had got in the way and she had become distracted by the possibility of kissing that mouth rather than listening to the instructions that were coming out of it.
She now leaned against the tree and listened. There was just the wind and the sound of the trees, nothing else. So, she thought to herself, Elena had kept her word by stopping the war, rather than just pocketing the financial inducement and continuing it once she had seized the leadership. That was something she had expressed her reservations about to Scott Tafler, whether Elena Torneski could be trusted to settle for US backing of leadership of the Russian Federation, and a whole lot of money, or to go for broke and a new Soviet Union, one that encompassed all of Europe.
“Where are you, Caroline?” she muttered to herself and looking around, seeing nothing but trees, she added a rider to that question. “And where the hell am I, for that matter?”
Major Nunro had landed in a small clearing, landing with a thump that knocked the breath out of her. This had been her second parachute descent but this time it had not been the result of a shoot-down, technically anyway.
On her escape and evasion course and subsequent refresher training, the instructors had all stressed the vital importance of burying the parachute, of denying a hunter team a start point. If it was that damned important though, she had always reasoned, then why were the aircrew provided with nothing more substantial than a survival knife with a blunt tip, to prevent the accidental puncturing of one’s life raft, always an important consideration in a forest.