Wesley-Jones looked behind, checking the rest of his packet were keeping pace, as they slowly gathered speed, the lead vehicle taking them up to a steady thirty-kilometres an hour. This was going to be a tough journey for the tank commander and driver. It was hard enough concentrating on distance driving during daylight hours but, at night-time with only convoy lights to guide them and no escort, it was extremely stressful. Fortunately, German roads were generally pretty straight, with few climbs, as opposed to the winding country roads back in Britain. The packet made its way south, rattling along route three, passed the Naturpark Sudheide on their left, and through the village of Celle. Here, they were held up by RMPs for five minutes as priority traffic crossed their path. The entire British Army was on the move, heading to their wartime dispositions, ready to repel any potential invader. The military police controlling the flow of traffic released them and they continued their journey south, then south-west, then south again, moving onto an autobahn where they upped their speed to thirty-five kilometres per hour.
The Chieftain suddenly ground to a halt, its back end up in the air and the front dipping down. Wesley-Jones was flung forward, the air forced from his lungs as the rim of the hatch dug into his chest. He heard shouts and curses below as Ellis and Patsy were thrown about.
“What the fuck, Mackey?”
“Sorry, sir, didn’t see the Land Rover had stopped.”
He peered ahead and could see red-filtered torches moving around. Before he could react, the tank lurched forward again, and he could see darkened vehicles on the roadside — a random checkpoint, no doubt.
“OK, Mackey?”
“Yes, sir.”
He suspected that Mackey had become mesmerised by the constant need to stare into the night, tracking the vehicle and the road ahead, and had lost concentration. He was as much to blame, if not more. He had an equal responsibility to keep watch on the road ahead. No, he thought, he had the greater responsibility. He was in command.
“You’re doing a great job, Mackey. Thirty minutes and we’ll take a ten-minute break.”
“I’m fine, sir.”
“I’d rather get there ten minutes late with an intact Chieftain than have it wrecked.” Wesley-Jones laughed. They left the route 37 autobahn and turned onto route 7, through the small forest of Altener Wald. Their speed crept back up to a steady twenty-five. On the opposite carriageway heading north, he could hear, above the sound of his own small convoy, the rumble of tank tracks and the steady drone of high-powered engines as a squadron of Leopard I and IIs rattled by in the opposite direction, heading north. Probably a tank company from a unit belonging to 1 German Corps, heading north to their own wartime locations. They turned off the autobahn onto the B443 where their speed dropped back to thirty-five to thirty-kilometres an hour. Crossing over route 37 again, they headed south-west then south.
“You OK, Mackey?”
“Yes, sir. No need to stop. Wide awake now.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, sir.”
“OK. We could do with keeping on the move. You’ll be excluded from the sentry rota, and you can catch up on some sleep when we get there.”
“OK, sir.”
“Corporal Patterson. Patsy!”
Patsy climbed up through his hatch. “Sorry, sir, nodded off.”
“That’s OK. Can you crack that flask and pass everyone a brew.”
“Sure, sir.”
“Ellis awake?”
“No, sir. Can’t you hear him snoring from here?”
The lieutenant laughed. “Leave him be then. He can take the first stag when we park up.”
Patsy dropped back down into the fighting compartment to sort out drinks. They were well south of Hanover now and, apart from a few stops, had made good progress. They were roughly one-hundred kilometers from the barracks and, at 0530 in the morning, found themselves in the small village of Eime, three and a half kilometres west of Gronau and the River Leine. The River Leine, Blue Rabbit, was the stop line for the 1st and 3rd Armoured Divisions, 4th Armoured Division already moving into position further east, acting as the covering force to allow these two key forces to dig in. The troop had been allocated a lager at a farm on the outskirts of Eime, along Elzer Weg.
They backed the three tanks into large barns that had been made available by the farmer, the 434 under a cam-net outside and the Land Rover snug against one of the farm building walls. The German family were out almost immediately they had finished parking up, providing bratwursts and brotchen, with lots of senf, a favoured German mustard, for the weary troops and even a bottle of Alt beer each. Lieutenant Wesley-Jones immediately got to work preparing a message for his squadron commander who was probably not more than half an hour behind them. He had met with the RGJ Lieutenant. They were cammed up in a small copse close by. The rest of the troop, apart from those posted on sentry duty, were, once they had scoffed the food and drink provided by their hosts, destined to hit the sack and catch up on some sleep.
He pulled the A-5-sized pad out of its wallet, tore off one of the double-sided sheets and placed it in his BATCO wallet. The side he was going to use would be valid for the next eighteen hours. The BATCO (Battlefield Code) cipher sheet was composed of a plaintext character set consisting of twelve symbols, the digits 0 to 9, a decimal point and a change character denoted as ‘CH’. The cipher table was a matrix of nineteen columns and twenty-six rows. The columns were divided into two groups. The seven columns on the left were numbered from 2 to 7. The column under each of the digits had listed a randomly scrambled alphabet. The thirteen right-hand columns were numbered 0, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, CH and ‘.’. He wrote down the outline of the message in his notebook first. He selected one of the first seven columns using the key digit, searching for the row in which the key letter occurred. He continued tracing his finger over the pad until the message was complete. He read the message. Two-Zero from Two-One-Bravo. Infantry attached. In location Grid 494707. Await your arrival. Message ends. Satisfied, he transmitted the encoded numbers, put the BATCO wallet away, grabbed his SMG and went in search of Sergeant Andrews to check on their security for what was left of the morning. He anticipated that they wouldn’t be here for long as they needed to move into their main positions. The engineers would probably be in the process of digging their tank berms and preparing positions for infantry units. It was going to be a long twenty-four hours, he thought to himself as he clambered out of the turret.
Chapter 22
The assembly area for the 62nd Tank Regiment, of the 10th Guards Tank Division, was a hive of activity. Colonel Oleg Pushkin, commander of the 62nd, and Lieutenant Colonel Trusov, commander of the 2nd Battalion, stood watching as a regiment of BM-27s growled past, each eight-wheel drive, Zil 135 chassis mounted with a multi-barrelled rocket launcher. They crawled past one by one, the large wheels grinding over the specially prepared route. Otherwise, by the time the eighteenth one had passed, the twenty-ton monsters would have made the track impassable for anything other than tracked vehicles. They were from the Group of Soviet Forces Germany’s Missile Brigade, belonging to 34th Artillery Division. This was an indication of the importance of the role to be played by 3rd Shock Army, in particular 10th Guards Tank Division. Colonel Pushkin’s 62nd Tank Regiment, along with 248th Guards Motor Rifle Regiment, were to be the spearhead in the attack on the NATO forces that would be stacked up against them on the other side of the Inner German Border, less than seventy kilometres away.