Thanks to CajunBear73, OechsnerC, and everyone else for their reviews and commentary
=O=
Chapter 27: Active Defense
Disputed Area
The C-142 Vertitruck made a low pass over the mountain gorge, giving Heather a good view of the scenery. Amidst towering peaks, their caps lightly dusted with the first snows of autumn, a little chain of huts and small farms stood, strung out along the slivers of flat land that marred the slopes of the rugged valley. Along the huts, a little dirt road – one of the precious few roads running across the poorly trafficked disputed wasteland – wound a convoluted course through the gorge at it snaked towards India.
On the road, three wrecked trucks lay in state amongst a small complex of blast craters, victims of Pacifican air superiority.
The roar of turbojets overwhelmed the Vertitruck's buzzing engines as an F-4 Phantom, a dozen freefall bombs hugging its belly-mounted conformal fuel tank, screamed overhead. In the distance, explosions rumbled, and palls of smoke rose into a clear blue sky.
Perfect bombing weather.
The Vertitruck came in to land on the crest of a low hill. Heather adjusted her M1 helmet and twisted the charging knob on her rifle. The ramp went down, and Heather jumped clear just in time to avoid being trampled by a pair of stretcher-bearers with Airborne patches prominently displayed on their shoulders.
Heather ran up a hillside littered with crates of rations, ammunition, and water, and ducked as a lightweight howitzer blasted a shell downrange. The ridge crested, and she hit the deck, mindful of Indian artillery.
Before her, the gorge opened into a broad valley, carpeted in farms and dotted with scores of houses. Columns of dust and smoke rose from burning buildings and artillery fires. A forward air controller, searching for targets, scanned the valley through his binoculars even as his radioman yelled into an olive-green phone. Another F-4 screamed overhead, dumping three more tonnes of high explosive into the cauldron.
"Are you with Intelligence?!" An Airborne Captain crouched down beside her.
"Yeah!" Heather shouted. "Where's the thingamajig?"
"Back here!" He said. "Don't worry! The Indians don't have much arty left around here!"
An Indian heavy machine gun opened up, sending tracers upslope, and Indian mortar rounds sent everyone diving for cover.
Airborne artillery, mortar and heavy machine guns delivered an adequate riposte, and the incoming fire slackened.
"What's going on down there?!" Heather winced as a pair of Thunderbolt attack jets roared over the ridge, their wings bulging with guided missiles.
The Captain laughed. "That down there is brigade headquarters for half the Indian garrison! We've screwed the Indians seven ways to Sunday!"
"Color me skeptical, 'cause they're still shooting at us!" Heather frowned.
The Captain shook his head. "When we rolled up their outposts up north, they decided to send reinforcements from here and from further south! But Air Force rules the skies, so no choppers for them. And there's only two, maybe three one-lane dirt roads running north-south in this entire sector!" He chuckled darkly. "Air Force caught most of them with their pants down, strung out across those godawful roads."
He smiled. "This is a mop-up. Fast air's knocked down the bridge down south, and the Airborne did a great job flying in to capture the towns down there too. The Indians here are locked in, their friends are locked out, and we've chopped 'em into easily digestible chunks.
He sighed. "Gotta say, they're tenacious bastards, though. Fighting us just like they fought the Krauts back in World War Two – or so my Sergeant says…"
"Get down! Bomber strike!" The radioman screamed.
Heather swore as three massive chains of explosions erupted across the valley, sending walls of smoke and dust skywards. The very earth itself seemed to quake as the bombs continued to fall, and a punishing wall of noise rolled over her position. She pushed herself deep into the ground, heedless of the dust and gravel.
"Arc Light." She whispered to herself.
Three B-52 bombers were plastering the valley with nearly a hundred tonnes of high explosive freefall bombs.
The thunder stopped, and Heather gingerly looked up. It was hard to believe anything could have survived that.
And yet…
The heavy machine gun chattered to life again. The Captain grunted in distaste. "Damned B-52 jocks. When will they learn that carpet-bombing doesn't do all that much against dug-in troops? Give me a flight of Phantoms with guided missiles any day. Precision-guided munitions kill the bastards faster and cheaper."
He stood, and shouted. "Okay, people! First platoon goes forward, second provides cover! Be careful, minimize casualties, no need to rush 'em! Let the Air Force do the heavy lifting!" He shook his head at Heather. "The site's back behind the ridge – it's pretty hard to get to; so stay here until I can get back. We're starting early."
The company's mortars got to work.
A steady stream of attack jets passed overhead as the platoon inched its way down into the village. Chinook gunships took up their stations, alternatively roaring across the village in blistering attack passes, shells spewing from their autocannon, or circling lazily just out of range of enemy fire. A slow forward air control plane buzzed lazily overhead, staying low with the helicopters to avoid Indian fast jets.
Counting on air superiority was one thing. Being sloppy was another.
As the Airborne closed in, Indian infantry opened fire from their ruins of farmhouses and irrigation ditches. Heather watched through binoculars as gunships and attack jets made pass after pass against the newly revealed Indian positions (with a little help from the FAC not far from her).
A shoulder-fired missile, then two, then three streaked towards a Chinook, which erupted in a shower of flares even as its pilot maneuvered wildly. Primitive seekers sought flares and tiny fins failed to correct flight paths, allowing the Chinook to escape unscathed. The heavy machine gun rocked to life, sending tracers arcing downvalley into the bombed-out village.
The great shadows cast by the mountains slowly moved across the valley, indifferent to the vast firepower chipping away at the great gorge, carved over the eons by wind, water, and gravity. A fresh ration in her belly, Heather yawned as another artillery barrage started falling around the Indians, pounding them relentlessly even as HLHs lifted fresh truckloads of shells to the isolated hilltop. The Airborne slowly overran the first Indian position, and the process repeated itself as the infantry ground on.
She itched to pick up her rifle, run down into the valley, and join the fight with the rest of them.
It made no sense, of course. She'd just get in the way. Even if she could fight well, she hadn't trained to fight together with Airborne troops.
A warrior could win a fight. But it took an army to win a battle, and a nation to win a war. And in the grand scheme of things, it was winning wars that mattered.
That's where the Nazis and Japanese got it wrong, with their pointless talk of ubermench and samurai and their idiotic glorification of the warrior. The army of soldiers beats the band of warriors almost every time.
And fighting was no longer her job anyway.
The heavy machine gun rocked to life again. Yep, she could believe that it took an average of a quarter of a million bullets to kill one soldier. Heck, for a B-52, it might take five tonnes of bombs to kill a man. What else was new?
An F-4 had just loosed a stick of bombs on a particularly uncooperative farmhouse when Heather spied movement in the distance.
A pair of light tanks – apparently flown in by the Airborne - emerged from the smoke, blasting away at buildings with their stubby main guns. Suddenly, all hell broke loose as three Indian light tanks emerged from hide positions, and blasted the Pacifican light armor virtually point blank – in an apparent bid to avoid being hit by airpower.
Two Sheridans were ripped to shreds almost immediately, but the third survived long enough to fire an antitank missile, which destroyed one light tank. A Chinook gunship raced across the sky, tearing into the tanks with autocannon fire. More fire raked the tanks as Thunderbolt attack jets swooped in, their pilots eager to score tank kills with missiles and gatling cannons.
The Captain jogged back to Heather as the battle wound down. "Where the heck did they come from?" She gestured towards the light tanks.
The Captain shrugged as he led her away from the battle. "Our main attack was from down south, which was why they got all the light tanks." He grimaced. "The boss wasn't careful enough with the Sheridans. And we wasted so much effort flying 'em in with HLHs, too…"
He led her across the ridge. "This is what you came for. We managed to overrun them before they could destroy their equipment."
He led Heather along the ridge, passing by a small troupe of prisoners – two Russians and three Indians, under heavy guard – down to a small pit.
Half-buried in the pit was a cylinder, roughly the size of an oil drum, with wires and plugs protruding from the exposed end.
Heather's eyes opened wide as she eyed the device… and the narrow mountain pass not far below them. This was not a bad place for one.
"Is that…"
"Ask 'em yourself." He turned to the prisoners. "You two tell her what you told me!"
Heather's Russian was rusty, but the gist was clear.
She interrogated them further, but they refused to answer.
She nodded to the Captain. "Good work calling this in, Captain. This is huge."
"You're telling me!" He exclaimed. "If they set that thing off, it'd have had a good shot of blasting the entire hillside into the gorge. That'd have closed the pass quite permanently."
"Also huge politically." Heather pointed out. "But nevermind. The bastards won't say whether or not the thing is safe to handle, but I would guess that it is. We'll have a team dig it up, fly it to a safe, isolated location, and look it over. I've been told to advise you to evacuate the area as soon as possible, but leave a few volunteers to guard the site."
"Will do. You can't be too careful around nuclear demolition charges. How big do you think it is, twenty kilotons?" The Captain rubbed his chin. "Back out west, we were kitted out with medium atomic demolition charges about yay big - just in case Soviet tanks came pouring in from the Kazakh and Kyrgyz Soviet Republics." He stared down at the valley below. "The passes in the Tian Shan Range aren't much wider than these bad boys, so I'm guessing they'd use nukes about the same size."
He raised an eyebrow at Heather. "A bit on-the-fly, isn't it? I thought we'd have procedures in place for this sort of thing."
Heather sighed. "We did not expect them to do this."
"Just like how nobody expected the Soviets would put strategic nuclear missiles in India, and just like how nobody expects them to shoot at us with chemical weapons or tactical nuclear weapons."
The breeze blowing on Heather's exposed skin suddenly felt far too cold. "I presume you have suits stashed away somewhere?"
For a brief moment, and for the first time in her life, Heather was looking forward to wearing a nuclear-biological-chemical warfare suit – basically a suffocating, hot, heavy, bulky rubber-and-plastic suit with a removable gas mask.
"Yeah. Fighting in NBC suits will be godawful, and our ops are going to slow to a crawl, but we'll manage. But we're going to need some warning on when to start putting them on. Frankly, I'm telling my boys to don suits the moment we moment we clear out their forces from the area. Because this…" He gestured to the nuclear demolition charge. "…does not exactly inspire confidence in our intelligence apparatus."
Heather nodded. "I'll… pass on your concerns to my superiors."
A flight of CH-62 Heavy Lift Helicopters came roaring past, light tanks, big self-propelled artillery guns, and shipping containers slung beneath gaping bellies. "Oh good, reinforcements."
Heather scanned the skies for her Vertitruck as the sun sank over the high peaks around them, and the sky turned a brilliant purple. Golden pools of sunlight played across the valley floor.
She inhaled, and let the smell of explosives, dust, and burning rubble fill her nostrils.
Another turbojet roared across the skies, Heather turned to track the aircraft… and hit the deck as a twin-engined Indian light bomber – an old lend-lease Canberra - roared through the valley, unleashing half a dozen bombs on the Airborne troops down below.
Leakers, flying low and fast to slip past Pacifican combat air patrols. The Indians might be able to sneak a few sorties in, but the Air Force would get most of them – and that was what mattered. One or two sorties would hardly turn the tide.
Unless, that is, they were dropping nuclear weapons.
No trace of nuclear freefall bombs and nuclear artillery shells had been found in India so far, but there had been no trace of atomic demolition munitions either.
The Indians here might have been finished, but India was far from beaten.
=O=
The Soviet Major picked at his dinner as he nervously listened in to the conversation. Across the table, Soviet officers from across Assam had gathered to swap stories and tell tales after the meeting. With the relative lull that had settled over the theater over the past three days as the diplomats continued to yell at each other, regional commanders wanted to use it to implement changes from lessons learned over the past week of fighting.
He checked the room. The zampolit – the political officer – was conspicuously absent – as were the Indian officers. The Colonel of the air defense regiment was absent too – killed by a Pacifican airstrike, it was said.
"I'm telling you, the General Secretary miscalculated, that stupid bastard." The Colonel of the rocket regiment took another sip of vodka.
The Captain frowned. He liked the General Secretary – a true communist, a friend to his people, not like the tyrannical Stalin. "How were we to know that the capitalists would react so rabidly to an Indian nuclear umbrella?! We've had over a thousand nuclear missiles for five years, and even though they threatened to blockade the motherland, they never actually went ahead and attacked."
"The capitalists have the nuclear advantage. They'll resort to anything to start a war with us." The commander of the FROG short-range rockets opined. "We should just admit defeat and pull out."
"Nonsense." The Colonel said. "That would be a terrible blow to Soviet prestige, and a betrayal of our great ally and friend! How could you suggest such a thing?"
"It's just not worth it." The FROG commander said. He looked conspiratorially at the door, where a young Lieutenant stood guard, watching for the return of the Indian officers. "And… the Indians are getting antsy. I caught an Indian artillery commander trying to borrow a nuclear FROG round. He insisted he didn't know it was nuclear, but I knew better."
"Shhh! They're back!" The Lieutenant said.
The Indian Officer stepped into the room – the same one, the Major noted, that had helped him with his traffic jam those long months ago.
He began to speak, his Russian fluent and crisp. "Friends! I have a great announcement. We are about to embark on a counteroffensive to retake the Pacifican positions!"
The Major nodded. He'd seen the columns of trucks driving by his hide areas – and the effects of the Pacifican airpower that was ravaging them.
"Such an action appears imprudent at the present time, considering the unfavorable correlation of forces in the theater." The Colonel said.
The Indian Officer nodded. "We know. But our leaders insist that we try to retake the North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA) posthaste!" He sighed. "We must follow orders, of course. What soldiers would we be if we picked and chose which orders to follow?"
Everyone in the room nodded in agreement.
"But there is a way we can retake NEFA." He flourished a map, and placed it on the easel in the middle of the room. "Using tactical nuclear firepower, we can easily eliminate the Pacifican helicopter division that currently holds the mountains. From there on, it will be a simple matter of rounding up and policing any pockets of resistance that may remain."
"Out of the question. The risk of escalation is too great. Moscow would never allow this. And the imperialists will simply respond with their nuclear weapons, and stop your regiments dead in their tracks." The Colonel put down his fork.
"Friends – I implore you to seek permission to use your nuclear weapons. The lives of thousands of my men, the honor of India, the revolutionary zeal of the Indian Communist Party, and the prestige of the Soviet Union all hang in the balance. Moscow has not heeded the cries of my people. Perhaps they would be more reasonable if their own generals showed them the reality on the ground." The Indian officer placed his hands together, and bowed slightly.
The Colonel sighed. "We'll look over your proposal, and see what we can do."
The Major nodded energetically as the Indian left. The Indian proposal was sheer lunacy, but it was nice to see someone else who had faith in World Socialist brotherhood.
The Colonel was scowling, and motioned for the gathered Soviet officers to huddle close. "Police your nuclear weapons, and prepare destruction plans in the event that the Indians try to capture them. Report any unauthorized attempts to use nuclear weapons to me."
The Major's eyes went wide. "But Colonel, the Indians are our allies! Our friends!"
The Colonel nodded. "Desperate friends make dangerous friends."
In the room next door, the Indian Officer's assistant sneered even as he took notes, a huge headseat strapped to his head. The listening device had picked up every word.
