Dispatches
Authors: Steven Konkoly
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Dystopian, #Post-Apocalyptic
Dispatches
Book Four in The Perseid Collapse Series
A Novel by Steven Konkoly
Copyright Information
© 2015 Stribling Media. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Stribling Media.
Contents
PART I “BIG PICTURE” Winter 2019-2020
PART II “LITTLE PICTURE” Late April 2020
Dedication
To my family for their tireless support and love.
Acknowledgments
To the usual suspects. You know exactly who you are. Thank you!
About the Author
Steven Konkoly graduated from the United States Naval Academy and served as a naval officer for eight years in various roles within the Navy and Marine Corps. He lives near the coast in southern Maine, where he writes full time.
His first novel,
The Jakarta Pandemic,
reached readers in 2010, followed by four novels in the
Black Flagged
series:
Black Flagged
(2011),
Black Flagged Redux
(2012),
Black Flagged Apex
(2012) and
Black Flagged Vektor
(2013).
The Perseid Collapse
(2013)
,
book one in
The Perseid Collapse Series,
signaled his return to the post-apocalyptic genre, followed shortly by
Event Horizon
(2014)
and
Point of Crisis
(2014).
Please visit Steven’s blog for updates and information regarding all his works:
About Dispatches
After finishing
Point of Crisis
, I thought
The Perseid Collapse
series was finished. I couldn’t have been more mistaken. As I walked away from the series, glancing fondly over my shoulder, two main themes emerged from emails, reviews and blog comments. 1.) What’s happening in the world outside of New England? 2.) I can’t wait to see what happens to the Fletchers after the winter.
I tried to keep walking, but eventually I turned around and stared at these loose ends. Ideas formed, and before I knew it, a new concept emerged. One that would address both themes voiced by readers. The format for this concept changed several times, ultimately resulting in a hybrid novel. Essentially two stories in one.
Dispatches
is broken into two parts.
Big Picture
and
Little Picture
.
Big Picture
takes readers across the globe, to conflicts arising in the absence of the United States’ foreign presence. Of course, America is not out of the fight—she’s just taking a quieter, more satisfying role in the unfolding events.
Little Picture
pulls you back to Maine, to once again walk in Alex Fletcher’s shoes (and many others), as the Fletcher crew is once again faced with drastic choices that will ultimately decide their fate.
There’s another reason
The Perseid Collapse
series isn’t finished. Right now, more than a dozen talented authors have released novellas based in
The Perseid Collapse
series’ world
,
taking the series to new heights. You read that correctly. The series is far from over—thanks to Amazon’s Kindle Worlds program.
VISIT MY KINDLE WORLDS WEBPAGE
to purchase the novellas, read about the authors currently involved and
learn how you can contribute a story
.
But first, Happy Reading!
PART I
“BIG PICTURE”
Winter 2019-2020
“Meet the New Soviets. Same as the Old Soviets”
Chapter 1
Narva, Estonia
Late November 2019
Colonel Egon Saar drifted to sleep in his seat, his head snapping up to greet the same digital screen he’d stared at for the past several hours. He checked his watch, already knowing the time. Zero-two hundred. Two in the damn morning and the Russians were still playing games across the river.
“Let’s get this over with already,” he mumbled.
His artillery battalion had been moved to Narva two weeks earlier, based on NATO satellite intelligence suggesting a buildup of Russian armor units east of the Luga River. Three days ago, Estonian agents in Kingisepp reported T-14 “Armata” tanks crossing the Luga. He hadn’t slept since receiving that message. The presence of T-14s, Moscow’s latest generation main battle tank, meant one thing. Invasion was imminent, spearheaded by the Moscow-based, elite 4
th
Independent Tank Brigade. The Estonian Defense Forces assembled in the vicinity of Narva would be little more than a speed bump on the road to Tallinn for a Russian tank brigade.
He prayed his wife had listened and taken the kids to Stockholm. If they hadn’t left by now, they might never get out. The Russian invasion would undoubtedly be combined with an air and naval blockade of Tallinn, cutting off any possible means of escape. Unfortunately, he had no way of knowing if they had left the country. Saar had surrendered his cell phone before deploying. It was better not knowing, because there was nothing he could do to help them.
He’d said goodbye in their apartment, a few blocks from the main gate to the sprawling Estonian Defense Force base in Tapa—fighting off tears his children couldn’t fully understand. His wife knew there was little chance that he would return. She had heard enough about Russian artillery from him to know that he’d be among the first casualties. Kissing them goodbye for the last time was the hardest thing he’d ever done.
The Russians would pay a dear price for this.
He removed his headset, stood up in the cramped command vehicle, and weaved through the equipment operators, pulling his headset cable with him. A small coffee station stood on the map table, rigged directly to the armored personnel carrier’s electrical system. Besides the heating system, the coffee maker represented their only luxury in the field. A gust of wind buffeted the thirteen-ton vehicle, barely audible through the armored hull. Conditions outside were miserable. Positioned in a thick forest on the bluffs northeast of Narva, his artillery battalion was exposed to the bitter northerly winds sweeping off the Gulf of Finland.
The weather didn’t matter to the men and women of his artillery battalion. They were all tucked inside heated vehicles. The battalion consisted of twelve self-propelled ARCHER systems and three times that many support vehicles. Not a single soldier in his unit needed to be outside in the subfreezing temperature. The same couldn’t be said about the infantry battalion guarding his position. Their perimeter extended several hundred meters in every direction, consisting of observation posts, machine-gun nests and squad-sized rapid response teams—huddled in shallow holes carved out of the frozen ground. They were miserable
.
“Colonel, I’ve lost the ARTHUR feed,” said the operator next to him.
Colonel Saar turned his attention to one of the screens behind him. ARTHUR, or Artillery Hunting Radar, represented their only chance of detecting an incoming artillery attack. Since his battalion’s artillery batteries were the only viable threat to Russian tanks crossing the Narva River, he fully expected to be the focus of an intense artillery strike at the outset of hostilities.
“Get a report from them immediately,” said Saar.
A few seconds later, the operator lifted the headset above his ears. “I think we’re being jammed.”
Saar pressed one of the buttons connected to his headset. “Vortex, this is Thunder actual. Lost contact with Watchtower.”
When he released the button, a shrill, oscillating sound filled his ears, causing him to throw the headset onto the map table. They were most definitely being jammed. Somewhere high above the cloud layer on the Russian side of the border, several aircraft were flooding his battalion’s radio frequency spectrum with “noise,” rendering digital communication impossible. He started the stopwatch function on his sports watch.
“Contact battalion spotters via landline. I want to know what’s happening in Narva.”
“Colonel, spotters report heavy small-arms fire at the Narva Bridge.
“Which side?” demanded Saar.
“Ours!”
“Copy,” said Saar, contemplating the situation.
The Russians had probably sent a sizable Spetsnaz force to secure the western bridgehead. There was only one course of action left, and Saar needed to act immediately to give it any chance of success.
“Transmit over landline to battery commanders. Execute Fire Plan Alfa X-ray. Expend all rounds.”
The sergeant stared at him for a moment before quickly lowering his headset to pass Saar’s command. “Alfa X-ray” was a northern-front battle plan devised several days earlier under the direction of his commanding officer, Brigadier General Lepp. It wouldn’t prevent the Russian invasion, but it would buy Tallinn some time to petition NATO. Not that NATO was in much of a position to help. They had been completely unprepared for the sudden withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Europe.
“Battery commanders have acknowledged the order, sir.”
Saar nodded before grabbing his combat helmet hanging on his seat. “I suggest everyone gears up.”
He didn’t need to elaborate. The combined firepower of an entire Russian artillery brigade would be leveled against them. There wouldn’t be much left of his battalion after the Russians’ first salvos. Before he’d finished snapping his chinstrap, the vehicle shook from a hollow crunching sound—the first of his battalion’s two hundred and fifty-two high-explosive artillery rounds had been fired.
The command vehicle continued to rattle and drum as the ARCHER Artillery Systems fired shell after shell into the night sky.
ARCHER was a fully automated, self-contained system utilizing a preloaded magazine drum filled with twenty-one artillery shells. The 155 mm field gun could fire the entire magazine in less than a minute in salvo mode, nearly quadrupling the sustained firing rate of conventional artillery pieces. Fire plan Alpha X-ray’s success depended on this unique capability. By his best guess, the first enemy rockets would strike Saar’s battalion in less than—he glanced at his watch—forty seconds. He needed to empty the battalion’s guns before the rockets struck.
Fire Plan Alpha X-ray had two components, split between the battalion’s twelve ARCHER units. When initiated by the gun commander seated in each ARCHER vehicle, the system’s fire control computer took over and delivered the ordnance according to the plan. The first eight rounds fired from each gun would target the two vehicle bridges spanning the Narva River, focusing most of the barrage on the solidly constructed Tallinn-St. Petersburg Highway (E20) Bridge.
Twenty of the ninety-six precision-guided shells would hit the smaller bridge south of Ivangorod. Shutting down these crossings would either force the 4
th
Independent Tank Brigade one hundred and eighty kilometers south to press their attack into Estonia, or stall them outside of Narva—until Russian combat engineers figured out how to get the brigade’s tanks across the river. Not all of the Russian tanks would make the trip across.