Three Kings (Kirov Series) (32 page)

Brigadier General Jacob “Jake”
Kinlan was in his command vehicle when it came, high up in the desert sky,
three explosions as the Aster missiles hungrily sought out their targets. They
got two of the three warheads from the incoming missile, a mini MIRV re-entry
vehicle with three 15 kiloton bombs. The third was jarred enough by the explosions
that it was sent careening off target, falling wide of the mark over the
desolation of the Qattara Depression and exploding in a massive aerial
fireball, about a thousand meters above ground. It was meant to fall just a
little lower, and ignite its awful nuclear fire directly over the Sultan Apache
site, but fate or good luck had intervened in the tip of that third Aster
missile, and the Desert Rats would be spared.

The Brigade was “buttoned up”
when the attack came in, their desertized, air conditioned fighting vehicles on
full NBC alert, many already hull down in revetments dug into the chalky yellow
loam of the desert soil. They would survive the blast to a man, with not a
single casualty, but they would never fight for the government that had sent
them to Egypt again… at least not for the government that died that day when
the missiles fell on London in the year 2021.

Yet strangely, the battle history
of the Desert Rats would not end that day, the 9th day, the final day of the
long escalation that brought hell to earth and ended human civilization. It was
the day that left behind little more than the blighted, charred remains of
cities all across the globe, places seen only by the living eyes of a very few,
and most of those aboard one brave Russian ship that had disappeared a month
before the fighting began—the battlecruiser
Kirov
.

* * *

“Pony
up!” Major Reeves gave the order to his
Recce
Troop,
1st Squadron, 12th Lancers, well outside the brigade perimeter that night, and
with orders to scout the way north. The brigade had been hunkered down in NBC
mode, all buttoned up with filters running and snorkels sipping and cleaning
the air. The men had just completed air samples for radiation levels, tapping
their touch screen digital panels in the new Dragon IFVs, which formed the bulk
of this squadron. To their great surprise and relief, everything was green and
clean. The Russians had thrown an ICBM at them, with a
MIRVed
warhead. They got two of the three bombs that meant to destroy this vital unit
in the British Army where it stood its security watch over the even more vital
oil facilities at BP Sultan Apache. That third warhead had gone off, but it was
well wide of the target zone, and 7th Brigade would live to fight another day…
but not in the year 2021.

 One
man had inadvertently seen to that, though history would never record his name.
Was he the hungry young
mishman
who had taken that last sweet roll in
the bakery bins of
Kirov’s
mess hall? It did not matter. The only thing
that did matter was that Gennadi Orlov found himself at
Bir
Basúre
that night, about seven kilometers from the
place that would one day mark the northern border of Sultan Apache oil field.
And Gennadi Orlov had brought something with him in his pocket, though he did
not know what it was.

Major
Reeves was leading his troop, as he often did. He was a self described “desert
loving Englishman,” a line he filched from his favorite movie, Lawrence of
Arabia. He had signed on for Army service as soon as he was of age, and specifically
requested service in the 7th Brigade, the Desert Rats, his Great Grandfather’s
old unit. The stories he had heard as a boy had stayed with him all his life,
from the sand boxes where he once played them out with his toy soldiers, to the
real deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan. He was a Desert Rat, through and through,
and knew the proud history of his Brigade chapter and verse.

They
were going to use infrared and night vision sensors to advance, their lights
dark as the sleek new eight wheeled IFVs rolled forward over the tough ground.
He had orders to move out and scout the road north through
Bir
Basúre
. The Brigade wasn’t sticking around for the
Russians to drop another egg on them, and he would lead the way out.

“Well
where’s the bloody road?” said Reeves, tapping his digital terrain map. GPS was
down, most likely the result of the EMP effects from that big air burst they
had just ridden out. They still had their map available, but it failed to
locate their present position, or that of any other vehicles in the brigade.
The satellites are probably gone as well, he thought. Communications had been
spotty all evening before the missile alert came in. Things were heating up in
the war, and now it had finally come to the desert.

“Can’t
see a thing,” said Cobb, the driver. “We should be right smack on the road,
sir. In fact we
were
right on the road when that alert came in, and
we’ve only moved a few yards to the hull down revetment. It should be right
under our noses.”

“Well
it’s
not
under our noses, Cobber. You must have canted off into another
bloody salt pan of something.”

“No
sir,” Cobb protested. “I’d feel that bang away. We’ve got good wheel traction,
the ground is firm, but the road… well it’s just not there any longer, sir.”

“Probably
buried under a foot of sand by now with this wind, Move us out. I’m signaling
the column to follow. The damn thing can’t all be under sand, and we’ll find it
soon enough.”

Reeves
was going to get his job done, road or no road. Frustrated, he opened his top
hatch and stuck his head out, wanting to put his human senses to the test where
the digital sensors had failed. The smell and sting of blowing sand was all he
got for his trouble. Yet the column was ready to move out, and he was the tip
of the spear, fearless, because right behind his squadron was a Sabre of heavy
Challenger 2 tanks from the Royal Scotts Dragoons. The deep growl of those big
tank engines could be heard over the whine of the restless desert wind, and
that had a way of giving a man confidence in his job.

Reeves
looked over his shoulder, squinting through his protective goggles, and could
barely see the tanks behind his column, though he could hear them even better
now. It was pitch black, and the wind was bitter cold. He could not even see
the lights from the perimeter towers back at the Sultan Apache facility, which
seemed odd, in spite of the obscuring sand storm.

He was
a scout, and it was his job to lead the tanks forward, but here they had gone
and blundered right off the road, and it was nowhere to be seen. Good enough.
He was back through the hatch, shutting it tight as he pull off his protective
eye goggles.

“Off
you go, Cobber, ahead one third. Gunners ready! I don’t want to be surprised by
one of those bloody Egyptian T-72s. Watch that infrared, boys, the night vision
is all dodgy in this blowing sand.”

The
surprise he hoped to avoid was out there, just a few hundred yards ahead, but
it was not a T-72—far from it. He was about to run up on a heavy squad of
Russian Marines who had just landed here in a helicopter, and he would get the
surprise of his life soon after.

Chapter 27

Popski
had seen the cool
precision of the Russian Marines, and his opinion of the men ticked up a notch
when they deployed.
Zykov’s
humor was well stowed,
and he was all business now, seeing to the proper sighting of the squad’s
machine guns. He had a
Bullpup
on each flank,
satisfied that they had good overlapping fields of fire. So Popski found
Fedorov near the KA-40, and waved him away.

“You won’t want to be anywhere near
that thing,” he said in a low, urgent voice. “Get over here. Quickly!”

Fedorov ran for the covered
position where Popski huddled behind a large boulder. “I hope your men don’t
get trigger happy,” said Popski. “We don’t know what’s in front of us yet.”

“Troyak!” Fedorov hissed.
“Weapons tight. We fire only if fired upon.”

The Sergeant signaled he
understood, and then passed the word to his men, though he didn’t like the
order. He knew how vulnerable they were now on the ground, and he had taken
everything Popski had said about the dangers of the desert to heart. The KA-40
was sitting there like a fat cow, an easy target if this was enemy armor. Like
a good sonar man, he had filed away his own inner recollection of various
vehicle sounds, and this one gave him a shiver. There were tanks out there, and
they sounded like heavy tanks, something he had not expected he would encounter
here. So now he knelt by the mortar team and waited, the tension building with
every second.

The wind… it was cold and biting
now, and the blowing sand seemed strangely luminescent. Troyak had a very bad
feeling about it, and then he heard the higher whine of wheeled vehicles,
closer, wafting over the deep growl of the tank engines. He enable the grenade
launching function on his assault rifle, his finger at the ready near the
trigger.

“Nobody fires a single round
until I do,” he rasped. And they waited.

* * *

Reeves
could see it
clearly now on his infrared screen, a massive heat signature on the ground, dead
ahead. “Something big out there, he said aloud, and began tuning his image to
get a better picture. It looked for all the world like…

“We’ve got company. Anyone hear
about a helo scheduled in tonight?”

Nobody said anything. “I didn’t
think so. Well that’s one fat helicopter sitting about 300 yards out, or I’m a
Leprechaun.” He was on his radio set at once, speaking through his headset
microphone.

“1/12 Lancers on point. We have a
helicopter on the ground out here, about seven kilometers outside the perimeter,
over.”

There was some wait, and nothing
came back, so he tried again.

“1/12 Lancers on point.
Lieutenant Reeves reporting. Please respond, over.”

“HQ Staff. Say again, 1/12.
What’s that about a helo?”

“1/12 on point, sir.” And he
repeated his report, hearing a lot of talk in the background when the HQ Staff
returned.

“Sorry 1/12, there’s a bit of
confusion here. Bloody sand storm is thick as pea soup. Can’t see three feet
here, but we copy on your helo report. Nothing scheduled. Proceed with caution
and ID contact, over.”

“Copy that, HQ, advancing to
point of contact. Over.”

Reeves tapped his driver on the
shoulder. “Ease us on up to that contact,” he said. “Nice and slow.” He was
reaching for his external megaphone to broadcast a warning. “Helicopter on the
ground, please identify. This is the British Army.” His voice boomed out on the
external speaker.

It was a well rehearsed procedure
the unit had developed in their dealings with the locals here. They would ID
themselves as British Army, which was usually enough to quell any trouble or
disturbance they might come upon during a patrol. By day it didn’t matter, for
their vehicles and insignia were now well known to the local Berbers. By night
they used the megaphone to warn anything they came upon, and if they didn’t get
a satisfactory answer he would fire a warning shot and repeat his challenge.
That was usually enough to settle the matter, but this was a hair-trigger
situation now with a squad of Russian Naval Marines training every weapon they
possessed in his direction.

“British Army?” Popski heard the
challenge and had his wits about him. “Anyone have a lantern handy?”

“In the helo,” said Fedorov, and
he led their guide back to the KA-40 to fetch a beacon lantern from the side
supply compartment. “Now you tell your boys to just lay low and keep cool while
I flash our recognition signal.”

He stepped well away from the
helo, and flashed out some light signals, simple Morse Code for L.R.D.G., the
Long Range Desert Group. Anyone in the British Army should know what that
meant.

Reeves saw it, looking from his
driver to his gunner with a frown. “Recognition flash,” he said in a low voice.
“Anybody read that?”

“I think it’s Morse code,
Lieutenant. Yes sir… that’s dot, dash, dot, dot… dot, dash, dot… I think
they’re sending L.R.D.G., and it just repeats again.”

Reeves ran that through his head
until it rang a very loud bell there—L.R.D.G…. “Someone playing games tonight?”
he said.

“What’s it mean, sir?”

“Can’t mean what I think it does.
That’s the old Long Range Desert Group from the last war, the big war here in
North Africa.” So he thought this was most likely someone getting cheeky from a
supply helo that had run in from
Mersa
Matruh
. Anyone who knew about the L.R.D. G. was most likely
British out here, but it wasn’t very smart to play word games in a situation
like this. And why hadn’t they heard about this helo run? Nothing had been
scheduled. Perhaps they were going somewhere else, and just set down here
because of the storm. He had it exactly right, though he wasn’t quite sure of
himself just yet. So he got on the external speaker system again.

“Come forward and identify
yourself. Nice and slow, please.” Then he took a risk and had his driver flash
the headlights on his vehicle. It would give his position away, but the growl
of those tanks behind him had his dander up, and he was willing to take the
chance. Otherwise he was going to have to dismount a squad and have them
advance on foot, which he now ordered anyway.

“Number three,” he said quickly
in his headset command mike. “Dismount and advance.”

“Aye sir,” it was Sergeant
Williams, and he had his men out the back exit ramp of his Dragon IFV, a squad
of five fanning out, with two men to either side of the column and the Sergeant
leading on point.