In fifty minutes it would be dawn. The night was moonless with the stars obscured by a high layer of thin cloud. Earlier it had drizzled lightly, rain as fine as mist, and now there was the sharp chill of autumn and the metallic scent of damp woodland in the air.
Morgan Davis could feel the cold security of his Chieftain's armour against his back. Bravo Two rested hull-down below the crest of a ridge of high ground on the Elm Hills, overlooking the plain towards the East German frontier. Tonight the sky was uncharacteristically dark; the black-out of the lights of the town of Helmstedt to the north-east, and those of the numerous small villages, had extinguished the usual warm tinting. A few meters ahead of the sergeant, slightly to his right, small bright glow-worms wavered in the gloom, the fluorescent sights of infantry AR 18 rifles.
There were sounds, unnatural and muffled yet familiar to him; the stifled movement of men in the darkness, whispered conversations, a throat softly cleared, equipment adjusted, the trickle of urine against a tree root; Davis had heard them all before, it seemed like a thousand times.
They had been stationed on the hill for the past five hours, since their night drive down from the 14th/20th King's Hussars depot; the main battle tanks of Charlie Bravo Troop deployed on the left flank of Charlie Squadron, while those of Alpha and Bravo Squadrons were dug in three-quarters of a kilometer to the south, in the fringes of the woods. The battle group's reconnaissance Scimitars, light tanks, fast and manoeuvrable, waited a kilometer and a half away towards the east, on the plain itself.
The moist air was condensing on the leaves and polished limbs of the birches, dripping to the thirsty ground beneath. It had been the first rain for almost a month and, although the earth was still firm, its surface was slippery. It would be difficult for tyred vehicles to move through the woodland for the next few hours; the hard sun-baked soil with its fresh thin coating of mud would be like ice beneath the heavy wheels.
Hewett, the Chieftain's driver, was a lanky Yorkshireman. His nickname DeeJay was an abbreviation of 'double-jointed' and stemmed from his ability to fit his tall frame into the cramped driving section of the tank. He was squatting near Sergeant Morgan Davis's feet, his shoulders wrapped in a waterproof poncho. The gunner, Inkester, was sheltering inside the fighting compartment with Shadwell the loader, who was heating water for mugs of instant coffee.
DeeJay Hewett asked Davis: 'Why don't they ever tell us what we're supposed to be doing?' Avoiding an immediate interview with his commanding officer hadn't reduced his despondency. It was Thursday morning now, and he had a useless civil airline ticket in his locker for a flight out of Hamburg airport at 09.00 hours. His wedding, planned for Saturday in the Leeds Registry Office, was a fading dream. There had been hardly enough time for him to telephone England and ask his brother to postpone everything. He knew all the arrangements had been made, the hall for the reception hired and the catering and drink ordered There would be more than fifty guests to contact and furnish with explanations. His fiancée and her family didn't always understand the ways of the army, perhaps wouldn't even believe his excuse. DeeJay hadn't been able to estimate the possible length of the military exercise and so couldn't promise a future date.
Davis was going to say: 'We're already doing what we're supposed to be doing,' but instead he remained silent. Hewett's complaint was only intended to ensure that his senior understood the trooper's vexation was undiminished. It was a form of blackmail which Sergeant Davis encountered regularly. If there was a vaguely justifiable complaint, some of the men would try to use it as a lever. Hewett would be hoping for some kind of special concession later, relating to his offence, as compensation. Davis knew all the men in Bravo Troop better than his own children; he spent far more time with the men than with his family. The troop had been together for almost two years with no replacements; twelve men in all, including himself and Lieutenant Sidworth. Davis had been married five years, to a German girl he had met in Hamburg. He saw his wife and the twins only at weekends; she refused to live in the regiment's married quarters near Belsen, so he paid a high rent for a small apartment near her parents' home in the Hamburg suburbs. It kept her contented, but the Davis family poorer than he thought necessary. He was thirty-two, the oldest man in the troop by seven years, and one of the longest serving NCOs in C Squadron. His Welsh ancestry showed in his short build, dark eyes and black hair, and he still retained the accent of his childhood spent in the market town of Brecon where his father had been a stone-mason. There were few Welshmen in the regiment, which did most of its recruiting in the north-west of England.
The plain below him was still in darkness, but he could easily visualize its hidden landscape. The ground ahead of his Chieftain's position dropped away quickly through the ordered forest with its plantations of larch, pine and occasional hardwoods, until it reached farmland and the Schöningen Schöppenstedt highway. The fields between the woods and the East German border were hard-worked, interlaced with narrow roads and tracks, their crops of sugar beet almost ready for lifting, the straw for the storage clamps already stacked along the boundaries; Later in the autumn the beet would be delivered to the Schöningen factory for processing.
On the lowest ground was the border itself, the Iron Curtain, one thousand three hundred and ninety-three kilometers of barbed wire, anti-personnel minefields, automatic firing devices, pillboxes and observation towers, where soldiers of the GDR remained unfriendly and aloof.
Davis was brooding over an uncomfortable feeling; more than simply a premonition. Outwardly, this military exercise was little different from many others. There had been the usual theatrically urgent orders and then the deployment to the pre-determined battle stations. The same sort of thing happened frequently, and was designed to keep the army on its toes whilst at the same time acting as a reminder to the Warsaw Pact countries of the readines of the NATO forces. Whenever there was a worsening of East-West relationships, there was a great stirring amongst the opposing armies as each rippled its muscles as a warning to the other. But this time? For months there had been talk of a dangerous change in the balance of power in Europe; the USSR had taken advantage of the recession in the west in the early 1980s to build up their own armies regardless of the cost to their people. Western governments had not responded quickly enough and Russian military superiority had reached the critical level. The scales were heavily balanced in favour of the USSR and, if it failed to act soon, its leaders surely knew there might never be quite so ripe an opportunity.
The strikes and workers' discontent in Poland in 1980 had diminished during the next two years when some of the people's demands had been met by their government and the strikers' enthusiasm cooled by the threats of Russian intervention, but in 1984 the problems had flared again, and then boiled over into Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslovakia. Davis wasn't interested in politics, only their outcome; but the incursion by Soviet forces into Yugoslavia less than a week before had brought an instant reaction from the United States. Part of their Mediterranean fleet was already in the Adriatic, and they were supplying arms and equipment to the Yugoslav army now fighting the invaders in central Serbia. Davis had lived with the threat of war throughout all his fourteen years of military service, but he knew it was closer tonight than it had ever been before.
It was possible that even the evacuation of families was part of some training scheme, but coupled with the manner in which the regiment's tanks had been brought into the border area in darkness under their own power instead of on transports, it was all too close to the real thing for Davis's peace of mind. The map reference of his present position seemed to confirm his thoughts.
A hundred times before, the regiment had been alerted and ordered to some obscure theoretical battle position; sometimes as far to the west as the Rhine. The alerts were part of the training, exercise scenarios conceived by the intelligence officers who plotted most of the schemes. The fifty-two-ton Chieftains were driven from their ranks in the vehicle parks or sheds, loaded on to transporters to protect the German road surfaces from the ravaging steel tracks, and taken to some piece of ground where they could be offloaded to roar and crush their way to the fire-points.
This time it had all been different.
Davis had been to this battle position only once before…three years previously, and then not in a tank but as a passenger with his former troop leader in an armoured personnel carrier. Because of lack of vision available to the passengers inside the APC it had been difficult to follow its route, and when it had stopped it was in an overgrown track cut through birch forest. The party had consisted of the squadron leader, troop leaders and their sergeants. The squadron leader had taken them a few hundred meters deeper into the woodland on foot. Davis had been surprised to find carefully constructed fire-points hidden amongst the trees, each excavated to take a tank, hull-down, with just enough of the vehicle above ground to permit the gunner to use his sights and depress the gun its full ten degrees if necessary.
'Satisfied, Lieutenant?' Davis had overheard the major question a troop leader.
The lieutenant stared down across the long easy slope towards the frontier. The ridge commanded a broad open section of the plain between two small hamlets. A stream only visible through binoculars and little more than six meters in width defied the distant border, meandering its way between East and West Northwards was rich flat farmland, interposed with bands of young pine forests. 'It's a good position, sir.'
'The best we have, gentlemen,' said the squadron leader to the group of men. 'I pray to God we, never have to use it.' The officer had spent the next hour discussing the features of the terrain and how they could best be used in the event of a Soviet attack. Davis had heard the map reference mentioned during the return trip to the barracks. His mind had grasped it immediately, filed it away for the future. And the future had become the present. Not once in all the many exercises in which Sergeant Davis had taken part had the hidden fire-points ever been used…until now!