Hammer of God (Kirov Series Book 14) (21 page)

“And
from the east,” said Barre. “There are no good roads from the south. The ground
is too soft there for heavy trucks.”

“My
men are already engaged there,” said Wolff. “But never mind, I will deploy one
company and see to the matter. Where is your garrison?”

“On
the north edge of the town, positioned to block the main road. That is where
they will come.”

“Good
enough. We will cover your flank south of this position. Can you tell me who is
in that fortress?” He pointed over his shoulder at the bleak hill that lowered
over the whole scene.

“We
don’t really know. They came last night, possibly by parachute, because we saw
no vehicles. They must be British commandos.”

“I
see.” Wolff nodded, pursing his lips. “Well, tonight we’ll see about that fort.
I have a company of assault pioneers, and men on all the hills south and west. We’ll
cover the Roman ruins and move additional troops into the town. May I leave an
officer with you here to coordinate?”

“That
would be good,” said Barre.

“And
the British? Do you have any idea how large their force is to the east?”

“That
remains to be seen. They have already toppled the Golden Square in Iraq, seized
control of Baghdad and the rest of that place in a matter of weeks. Rumors fly
that they had a big armored force there, but we do not yet know their strength.
One thing is certain. Now they are here.”

Wolff
smiled. “Yes, it seems so, but do not worry, Colonel. Now
we
are here,
the German Army, and my regiment is just the leading edge of the forces to be
committed to Syria. An armored force you say? Well, we have tanks too. The
entire 9th Panzer Division is deploying by rail through Turkey to Aleppo and Homs
to stop the British offensive, and the rest of my division will be deployed
into Eastern Syria.”

“The
British are moving up the Euphrates, or so we have heard.”

“That
may be so, but our 65th Regiment will stop them in due course. As for me,” he
removed his glove and extended a hand. “I am Oberst Ludwig Wolff, commander of
the 47th Regiment. Our boys gave you fits in France, and now we’ll see about
the British!”

Chapter 21

There
were other things in
the sky that night, not the wrathful god of Ba’al Shamin, bent on vengeance for
the desecration of his temple site, but a whirling beast from another time. The
Germans heard the odd thumping in the sky, unlike the sound from any aircraft
they knew. They looked for planes, but nothing could be seen, as the KA-40 was
up above a bank of low clouds that night. Yet the pilots could clearly see the
positions of the German artillery on infrared, the tubes of the guns still hot
from the rounds they had fired earlier in the day.

Troyak
had also started a little mortar duel, risking heavier reprisal, and
casualties, to see if he could draw enemy heavy weapons fire on his position.
He wanted to pinpoint the locations of the enemy mortar teams, and soon found
them returning fire. There was also an infantry gun that the Germans had
positioned in the ruins of Diocletian’s camp. All these positions were fed to
the helicopter, which had been waiting in a well hidden canyon on the dry
highlands to the north. Now the pilots were up in the Big Blue Pig, unseen by
the enemy on the ground, but clearly heard. The thumping of the KA-40’s engines
resolved to a loud roar, and minutes later hot yellow fire streaked down from
the grey clouds, as if Ba’al himself was throwing his thunderbolts on the
heathens below.

The
rockets came in on the artillery positions first, blasting the 105s, and the
ammunition stored in the trucks nearby. There were huge explosions when one
truck took a direct hit, setting off its hold of H.E. rounds.

Oberst
Wolff was out through the entrance to the temple, where four tall stone columns
held up a portion of the crumbling roof. Four more columns stood in a colonnade
off towards the sound of the action, and numerous others had fallen long ago,
their rounded weathered forms littering the ground, with others lined up like broken
tree stumps in a long row.

“What
is happening?” he shouted at a Sergeant.

“Air
strike!” the man replied. “But with what? Those are not bombs.”

Wolff
stared at the scene, seeing more missiles streaking down and exploding on the
hills south of the fortress. “What in god’s name… Those are rockets! It’s some
kind of flying Nebelwerfer! Listen to it!”

The
roar of the helo’s engines had awakened the whole regiment, and now machineguns
were firing up at the sound, though the gunners could not see their target. Off
near the artillery, a 20mm gun began to blast away, sending tracers up into the
grey overcast. A minute later the sound subsided, and field phones were ringing
inside the temple.

Wolff
strode in to take the report from his signalman. The artillery and mortar
positions had all been targeted and hit by a very precise rocket weapon. One
battery had lost three of four guns, another lost two, and three mortar teams
reported casualties. Anger flashed in his eyes when he went back outside,
glaring at the stark, brooding hill, crowned by the stony fortress.

“Leutnant
Hammel!” he said in a sharp voice, still edged with the lightning of his
temper. “Get the pioneers ready. We attack that hill at once!”

* * *

An
hour later they came
for the fortress of Fakhr-al-Din, a platoon of assault engineers picking their
way up the southwestern slope of the hill, accompanied by two rifle platoons. The
ground there was more broken as it folded into another masking hill, where a
barren road climbed its way up towards the summit. At places the slope covered
their approach, but near the top they would be faced with a long rocky grade
that led to a deep dry moat at the base of heavily striated rock that formed
the foundation of the fortress.

Troyak
shook his head when he saw the deployment on his night vision glasses. “It
looks like a full company,” he said to Zykov, “and they are carrying a lot of
equipment—possibly demolition teams. We can’t let them get satchels at the base
of this fort. These walls won’t survive that.”

“Time
for the AGS-30’s,” said Zykov, referring to the two autogrenade launchers they
had positioned on the roof of the fort. They looked like a typical machinegun
on a tripod, with a round mustard-green ammo canister on the right side. But
they fired 30mm grenades in rapid bursts that hit like thunder. The weapon was
light enough to be lifted and carried by a single man, making it a very agile
weapon for close in combat defense. It could hit gun positions, buildings and
bunkers with lethal, accurate fire, or be used to put down dense, effective
suppressive fire over a wide area, out to 2100 meters.

The
Marines fired at a quarter of that range, sending a shower of 30mm grenades
down on the advancing pioneers. They were quickly pinned down, with heavy
casualties, but soon Troyak saw that small teams were crawling up the slope,
dragging long tubes and satchels. He ordered the Marines to open up with all
their automatic weapons, and the fire was deafening.

Wolff
watched the action from the Roman ruins, seeing the hot tracers streaking down
from the high battlements, grenades exploding, and something else like another
rocket firing down the long slope. It was not long until the Captain of the
Pioneers called on the radio to tell him they could not reach the summit of the
hill.

“We can’t get anywhere near that fort,”
he said.
“The ground is too open—no cover—and
my god, the enemy firepower is murderous. There must be a full machinegun
platoon up there, and they have some kind of heavy weapon that saturates the
ground with grenades. These are not the British we fought in France.”

“Very
well, get your men back. We’ll use the Schwere Company, and give them a taste
of their own medicine.”

Wolff
was disheartened when he heard the reports on his artillery, and he ordered the
men to move his remaining guns under cover of the palm groves, not realizing
that would make little difference to the infrared sensor capability of the
KA-40.

This
group is a crafty lot, he thought. They deliberately initiated that mortar duel
at dusk to find our gun positions. Luckily we did not hit back with the
recoilless rifles. I can see that we will have to apply a much stronger hand to
neutralize that fort.

He
turned to a Sergeant, giving a curt order. “Signal 1st Company. Hit that damn
Chateau with the recoilless rifles, and any mortar we still have. Keep their
heads down up there! I want them under fire all night long. Then get a message
to Fliegerführer headquarters at Homs. Tell them the British made a night air
attack here, and we had better damn well have some air support tomorrow. Where
are the Heinkels? Where are the Messerschmitts?”

 There
was a sudden chill in the air, and the call of a distant bird seemed a haunting
jibe. He looked around at the ruins of empires past, and the thought came to
him that this had once been a military encampment, and the ravaged stone
columns were brought down as much by the travail of war as by time. Here he
stood in the shadowed detritus of one of the world’s great empires, now fallen
into ruin, a desolate landscape in an equally barren desert. The stumps of what
had once been old statues to the mighty who ruled here stood like broken teeth
in the rubble about him, and he was briefly possessed by a feeling of his own
mortality, and the brevity of life.

“It’s
too exposed here,” he said. “We’ll move the regimental headquarters to the old
amphitheatre. That area is well protected.”

He
looked through his field glasses, scanning the distant hill, lips tightening. Let
us see how well you sleep tonight under my guns, he thought.

* * *

It
was a long, hard,
sleepless night in the Castle of Fakhr-al-Din, at least for Fedorov. The
Germans kept up light mortar fire from the 5cm tubes, a round every five
minutes, and it was enough to keep Fedorov awake all night. Many of the Marines
seemed unbothered, huddling in the weathered stone rooms of the fort, dozing as
if nothing unusual was happening.

“A
good solid fort,” said Popski, sitting with Fedorov in one of the lower
chambers. “Too bad it’s going the way of all the other ruins here. The Germans
are just firing to torment us now, but I think they’ll get serious in the
morning.”

Fedorov
had a listless look in his eyes, weary, and forlorn. This place had been built
for war, the walls and much of the ruined area below them had been constructed
by Hadrian and Diocletian. This had always been a military outpost as much as a
commercial trade center, offering merchants a way station on the desert route
that might avoid the heavy taxes imposed on goods shipped up the Euphrates.

He
sat there, beneath those ancient stone towers and battlements, and thought of his
own position as Captain of the battlecruiser
Kirov
. The citadel of the
bridge was just another fortress at sea, he thought, and I am a warrior, as
much as I might think otherwise, as much as I may hate war itself. Armies had
fought one another for this place many times, and the blight of war would go on
into the future, until our weapons finally make an end of us all.

He
thought again of the things he had seen on this impossible journey, of those initial
encounters with the British fleet and the inevitability of that first missile
they fired to avoid being spotted. He remembered those harrowing moments in the
night action in the Alboran sea, chasing salvoes from the massive 16-inch guns
of
Rodney
and
Nelson
. He could still hear the awful scream of the
Japanese dive bombers in the Coral Sea, and the sight of the mighty battleship
Yamato, stricken my their Moskit-II missiles and burning in the darkness of
war. And always at the end were those memories of Halifax, burned and scalded
by some terrible holocaust, and all the other blackened cities they had found.

What
were we fighting for, he wondered? He knew the war in 2021 had started with a
dispute over what seemed an insignificant speck of rock on the South China Sea,
but beneath that rock were the lucrative rights to oil and drilling contracts
in a world ever thirsty for energy. And the British were coming here to secure
and clear the oil pipeline route through these ruins, as much as to flank the
French defense at Damascus. Just east of this place they had already taken the
T3 pump station, and an equal move to the west would give them T4.

“They
sure didn’t like that Helicontraption when it was up there breathing hell on
their guns,” said Popski. “Can we finish the job tonight?”

“We’ve
expended all our rockets,” said Fedorov. “They have the miniguns, but I was
thinking to keep that in reserve—just in case the Germans do get serious and
try another ground attack. Troyak says they can’t take this place with ground
troops, but that may not stop them from trying.”

“I
wouldn’t worry about that,” said Popski. “Your Sergeant is right. Even if they
did get men up this hill, have a look at that moat out there. They’ll never get
over that. It’s fifty feet wide in places, and after that it’s a long way up
these walls and towers. No. They’ll have to pound this fort to a pile of rubble
like the rest out there… But that’s what they’ll do if they have the guns and
ammo. Let’s hope the British can win through.”

Fedorov’s
eyes darkened at that. “I don’t think we can count on that any longer,” he said
disconsolately. “I had a good look at the German column, and Troyak says he’s
already identified three battalions. So we have a full German regiment out
there. The town and palm groves are going to provide them good defensive
ground. Frankly, I don’t think the forces the British have can beat them here.
They were supposed to push on to Homs, and that action, combined with the
Indian division moving up the Euphrates, was enough to compel the French to
throw in the towel.”

“Word
is they have Foreign Legion down there in the town.” Said Popski.

“They
do, and that force alone would make this place a tough nut to crack. Add in
this regiment of German troops, and the British will be stopped here, I’m sure
of it. So they won’t get to Homs, and the French will fight on. In fact, the
presence of German troops here is a very serious matter. It never happened, you
see, in the history I know. But I suppose all that has gone to hell, hasn’t
it.”

“You
look like it was all your doing,” said Popski.

“In
many ways it was.”

“Oh?
How do you figure that?”

Fedorov
gave him a half hearted smile. “It’s too long a story to tell, Popski. But from
the moment we first appeared here, things have gone awry. We tried to avoid
this, but no matter what we did, it always came down to one side or another
firing weapons. Admiral Volsky was correct. If we build things like my ship,
like that Helicontraption, as you call it, then we’ll certainly end up using
them one day. It’s just like this fort. Here it sits, built centuries after the
ruin of that Roman city down there, but did anyone learn from that? No. The sun
sets on one empire, and rises on another. Men of war came here again, and built
their battlements anew. And me? I’m Captain of a fortress at sea. I know the
history of this entire war. I should know better than to think we could control
its outcome, but still we fight.”