Chieftains Read online

  Max Fairly nodded, then smiled., 'Trust an Emperor's Chambermaid, James.'

  Davis was apprehensive. Although it was claimed men could live for two weeks battened-down inside the hull of their Chieftain tank, breathing pure air through the NBC filter system, in practise he knew it wasn't that simple. Regardless of what they said, none of the tanks were completely air-tight and there was always the danger of seepage; the main gun, when it had been fired and was being reloaded, was just a hollow tube with one end out in the open air and the other inside the tank's fighting compartment. The crews had to expect to fight dressed in their NBC suits, hot, sticky, stinking and unpleasant. Like himself, most of the men would gamble comfort against their lives, and leave off their respirators until the last possible moment.

  Thank God, he thought, at least they made damn sure you knew the drill. It was all about surivival in the event of germ or chemical warfare; even following nuclear attack when every dust particle in the area would become radioactive. Inside the tank you lived in the suits because the gas that could be outside was invisible, and there were no gas indicators amongst the tank's instruments; the only warning you might receive would be over the HF, by which time it could already be too late. If possible, you stored the crew's body waste in plastic bags and stuffed them out through the disposal hatch whenever you got the chance, but if the air was really contaminated then no one took off the NBC suits at all. For a time you might try to hang on, but in the end your body's natural functions always beat you.

  Tinned compo rations! Three four-men packs to a tank! You heated them in the boiler. If the electrics packed up and it was still safe to get outside, then you could cook over tablets of Hexamine; otherwise, you ate cold. Fortunately, the boiler was usually reliable and also provided hot water for drinks.

  If you were wise, he mused, you hap a flask of spirits tucked away somewhere out of sight; it was a small enough luxury, even though it was against regulations.

  Davis had stayed closed-down once, for a full three day period; Bravo Two's fighting compartment had become a cramped and stinking prison, and clambering out of the Chieftain at the end of the exercise into the fresh air had felt like rebirth. Some of the men in the regiment hadn't been able to take it, the claustrophobic atmosphere and their own filth had become too unbearable. Those who failed the test had been transferred, some to the support vehicles. A few, disappointed, had applied for the civilian re-training schemes and left the army. Sergeant Davis had been pleased by the performance of the men of Bravo Troop. They had moaned, complained, bitched, but they had stuck it out; even better, he knew they would have gone on enduring the discomfort for another ten days if necessary.

  Sergeant Davis had Charlie Bravo Two closed-down at the moment. It wasn't necessary, but it was cutting out the chill breeze that was now rippling the trees and shaking the moisture to the ground beneath. There was little warmth inside the tank and he was glad he was wearing a sweater beneath his coveralls and NBC suit. The interior lighting was off and Inkester the gunner was dozing just below Davis's knees, somehow wedged between the hard backrest of his seat and his equipment. Davis had his legs up across the breech of the gun. Deejay, the driver, was in his forward compartment and in his reclined position was also undoubtedly taking the opportunity to grab a few minutes' rest. Eric Shadwell, the loader, was to Davis's left, propped between the ammunition, the bag-charge bins and the breech mechanism.

  Shadwell was awake and restless, his small padded seat in the fighting compartment supported him less than those of his fellow crew members. He stretched himself and pressed his hands into the small of his back. One of his legs had gone to sleep and was now tingling and sensitive as his movement restored the circulation. 'Bloody hell,' he swore softly. To occupy his mind he began mentally counting the ammunition; sleek evil-looking shells. Sixty-four of them in all, most situated in racks beside him. A few lay forward, stored to the left of DeeJay the driver, but they were difficult to reach if the tank was in motion.

  Shells. Shadwell knew a lot about them. Bravo Two was carrying only two types at present: High Explosive Squash Head, abbreviated to 'Hesh', and Armourod-Piercing Discarding Sabot, officially 'APDS', but usually called 'Sabots'. He closed his eyes and pictured them striking the armour of an enemy tank. 'Bam...splat...' That was Hesh, exploding, flattening, sending a shock wave through metal that tore off a massive scab on the other side, splintering and ricochetting around inside the enemy's hull. 'Bam...zonk...' The Sabot, a tungsten steel bolt carried by a softer metal shoe which it left on impact, and then drove on through the armour as though it were nothing more than thin balsa wood. 'Bam, splat...bam, zonk...' He made the sounds again, and mimed the reloading of the gun.

  The separate explosive charges which propelled the shells helped to make his life easier; no used shellcases came back into his compartment, everything was discharged forward. He could also select the appropriate power of charge, which assisted the shell's trajectory.

  The Russians didn't use loaders in their tanks, he remembered. Sod that! The Russians had automatic-loading guns so they only had three men in a tank crew, but their system had a weakness. If the automatic-loading system failed, then their tanks became useless. NATO designers believed hand loading to be more reliable; Shadwell agreed with them. Besides, what the hell would he be doing if Chieftains only had three men to a crew? Bugger king a driver, or a gunner...and there would be fat chance of him making commander for a long while!

  What else was there for him to count? Machine gun ammo? Six thousand rounds for the 7.62mm mounted above the cupola! Nice gun, you could aim and fire it from inside the tank. There used to be another...the point-five was used for ranging the main gun...obsolete now the Barr and Stroud laser range-finder was fitted. The range-finder was quicker to use, and more accurate.

  He sighed.

  It was surprising how big the interior could seem at times, like a bloody cathedral; especially when it was all in darkness. He could just see the dim outline of one of the crew's Sterlings in its clips on the other side of the compartment. It seemed a hundred yards away...too far...the other end of a long tunnel. Even Sergeant Davis's boots looked too small to be real, as though Shadwell was viewing them through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.

  Maybe I'm asleep, thought Shadwell. It's all a bloody dream this caper, I'll wake up in the quarters. No such sodding luck...I'm awake! Maybe everybody's dead? DeeJay's dead...killed by a secret death-ray...dead in his driving seat...his head lolling and his tongue hanging out! Inky's bought it, too...lying there with his eyes bulging in their sockets and his stomach swelling with gases. And Sergeant Davis...sitting there...just sitting...his hands on the cupola control, locked in a death-grip...clutching. Shadwell's thoughts were making him nervous. It was like sitting up alone, late at night, watching a horror movie. Shadows normally unnoticed, suddenly became threatening.

  He spoke loudly, his voice echoing slightly. 'It's the same as bloody Suffield.' The remark was less of a genuine observation than a plea for someone to answer him. The fear was growing and he was feeling isolated, and lonely. Suffield was the site of the NATO tank ranges in Canada, where the regiment had spent some weeks earlier in the year. Neither the landscape nor the present circumstanced justified the remark. The only link was the time the men had spent on night manoeuvres, firing at targets through the infra-red sights...and it was dark outside Bravo Two now! Dawn was just a thin pale band above the eastern horizon.

  Shadwell, as loader, saw very little of the external action when the tank was in battle. He had a periscope of his own, but there was seldom time to use it; often he saw nothing except his racks of shells, the charges and the breech of the gun. If he attempted to use his periscope, everything had already happened by the time he got his eyes re-focused to the longer distance or adjusted to the change of light. It didn't worry him too much. Sometimes he managed to see where the shells he loaded struck their targets, but if not he still found satisfaction in imagining the scene th
rough the voices of the men on the radio or the Tannoy.

  No one answered him, so he said bleakly: 'Well, not exactly like Suffield; at least we haven't had all our bloody gear shot to hell by our own infantry.' He was remembering an incident that had happened on their last visit to the Canadian ranges. On the night before a combined armour and infantry exercise there had been a bar-fight between men of the regiment and a number of the infantrymen. The next day when the tanks had been advancing across the ranges, accompanied by the infantry using live rounds in their rifles, the tanks themselves had become targets. All the personal gear carried by the crews in the storage boxes on the outside of the hulls had been shot full of holes.

  There was still no reply. Desperately he changed the subject. 'There was supposed to be an old Clint Eastwood shitkicker in the barrack's cinema tonight. I was going with the corporal's daughter.'

  Shadwell was a few months short of his twenty-first birthday, lightly built and thin featured. His home was a small council house semi on a Manchester estate. The youngest of a large family living in crowded conditions, his first night in army quarters had been an almost agoraphobic experience. He was a man whose friendships gave him as much anxiety as pleasure. 'Are you asleep, Sarge?'

  Morgan Davis said, 'Yes.' He could almost hear Shadwell sigh with relief at the sound of a human voice. 'What's on your mind, son?'

  'For Christ's sake,' groaned Inkester, the gunner, from below Morgan Davis's legs, 'why don't you take an overdose, Eric!'

  Shadwell ignored him. 'You think we're going to have to fight, Sarge.' It was a statement, not a question.

  Morgan Davis decided to be honest. 'Yes, I think so.'

  'What's it going to be like?'

  'Magic,' interrupted Inkester. 'We take a few of them out, then retire to a new position before their artillery can range in on us, then we brew up a few more. When the odds are reduced, we push them right back to the Urals. It'll be magic.'

  'Be quiet and go back to sleep, Inkester.' ordered Davis. He spoke towards Shadwell in the darkness. 'No one knows what it's going to be like. It's a new kind of war. All we have to do is to obey orders, and keep our heads down.'

  'My dad was in the last war,' said Shadwell, in an attempt to prolong the conversation. 'RASC. He got one home leave from Egypt in three years. Three bloody years, Sarge.' It seemed like a lifetime to the young loader.

  'This war won't last more than a few days.'

  'Just so long as I get a crack at a T-80,' said Inkester. 'Just one T-80 in my sight, broadside on...I dream of them, Sarge. A whole long row of them silhouetted on a skyline, moving along like ducks in a shooting gallery. Pop...pop...pop...there they go. Magic!'

  The radio crackled. Sergeant Davis adjusted his headset, pulling it down tighter over his beret. 'All stations Charlie Bravo, this is Charlie Bravo Nine.' The troop leader's voice was penetrating. 'Stand to, and prepare for action. Load Hesh, and keep to your own arcs. Out.'

  Davis acknowledged, and then switched on the Chieftain's Tannoy. 'Okay, lads, stand to. Shadwell, load Hesh.' He didn't give them time to question him. 'It sounds like we've got a war...'

  Inkester's voice was pitched high with surprise: 'Christ!'

  'Now take it easy...all of you. Inkester, no itchy fingers, wait for your orders. If someone's going to start something, it's not going to be Bravo Two.'

  'Loaded,' bellowed Shadwell, his voice cutting through the still air.

  'You daft pillock,' complained Inkester, loudly. 'You bloody near deafened me! We all watched you load a minute ago.'

  'Shut up,' said Davis. 'Keep your eyes open, and stay alert. Hewett, everything okay your end?'

  DeeJay revved the engine slightly and checked his gauges. 'It all looks good, Sarge.'

  'Keep it that way.' Davis dimmed out the compartment lights and leant his head back against the rest. He reached out and touched the steel of the turret with his fingertips. It was cold, damp with the condensation of the crew's breath. He could feel the throb of the engine. Bravo Two! She was a good tank, reliable, responsive to the treatment she received from her crew. He remembered being told how it had been when the cavalry regiments lost their horses before the start of World War Two – men had wept as their mounts had been led away to be replaced by armoured vehicles. If the situation were reversed, Davis thought, he would have identical feelings...you got to know a vehicle, trust it, understand its likes and dislikes. He had never owned a horse, but three-quarters of a million pounds worth of Chieflain took some beating. The womb-like darkness and security of Bravo Two's fighting compartment was comforting.

  THREE

  Any doubts which were in the mind of Captain Mick Fellows of the Royal Tank Regiment concerned not the rapidly developing situation, but the sanity of being placed in his present position by a foreign commanding officer. He felt sure the scheme in which he and his small unit of Rarden-armed Scimitars were involved, on detachment to the Armoured Infantry Division of the 1st German Corps, must have been devised by a lunatic with no concern whatsoever for the lives of his men.

  Officially, Captain Fellows' troop was known as a 'stay-behind-unit'. There were others, mostly infantry. Their job was to remain in concealment until the first echelons of an enemy attack had passed, and then to harrass and disrupt the logistics columns or communications wherever possible. That was fair enough, sensible tactics, but the German commander had, in Fellows' opinion, allowed his enthusiasm for guerrilla warfare to obscure the impracticability of the plans he had developed for a unit whose normal duties were reconnaissance.

  Mick Fellows was waiting with his Scimitar troop in a concrete bunker within a kilometer of the East German border, in dense pine woods between the villages of Bahrdorf and Rickensdorf to the south-east of Wolfsbug. His German commander's belief was that any major Soviet assault in his sector would have as its centre-line the autobahn which ran from Helmstedt to Hannover, and he had deployed his troops for that eventuality.

  The bunker was carefully concealed. The Scimitars it contained were not those Fellows' troop normally used for training; these four had lain in readiness in the bunker since the slow build-up towards hostilities two and a half years previously. No tank or vehicle tracks, which might reveal their presence to enemy aircraft or surveillance satellites, led to their position.

  The red glow of the lighting within the Scimitars' bunkers removed all the opposing colour, blending the overalls of the men and the camouflaging of the tanks into the rose shadows. The air was warm, oil-scented. Earlier in the day the exhausts of the vehicles had been coupled to the ventilation system and each engine tested; now there was little to do but wait. At the far end of the bunker were a platoon of the 22nd SAS, their faces daubed with camouflage cream. They appeared casual, relaxed, some of them dozing or playing cards. There was no way in which Fellows could have identified their officer or the NCOs by their dress or weaponry.

  His Scimitar commanders, all lieutenants, were studying the map on a low table near the bunker's radio equipment. He joined them. He could sense the keen edge of nervous anticipation in the tense manner of their conversation; it was no different from the pre-patrol anxiety they had all experienced in Northern Ireland. Tonight none of them knew exactly what to expect. Even Fellows himself had no experience of battle, other than that simulated in exercises; but he knew that no matter how startling the explosions of dummy mines and shells close to the aluminium hull of the Scimitars, they would bear little resemblance to the real thing. Fellows had awakened from a nightmare when he had attempted to sleep earlier in the evening. In his dream his Scimitar had faced a ring of Soviet T-80s, a hundred of them encircling him, the muzzles of their 122mm guns following him as he sought desperately to escape. His own gunner was picking target after target with the Scimitar's Rarden, firing the light 30mm cannon in short bursts. The shells were splattering ineffectively against the massive T-80 hulls, and Fellows' driver seemed unable to manoeuvre to find the weaknesses on their sides. Helplessly, he watched as one m
oved towards him, as though to indicate it desired single combat; a Goliath against a David Fellows had experienced the terror of imaginary death, watching the dark muzzle of its gun selecting a target on the Scimitar's vulnerable aluminium body. He had seen the belch of white fire...and awakened sweating. He understood the feelings of his men.

  'Winning the war?' He tried to sound lighthearted and casual, but realized his attempt to reproduce the kind of conversational voice he might have used in the mess probably had the opposite effect. He had spoken to Sache- Worrel, a baby-faced twenty-one year old less than a year out of Sandhurst. Sache-Worrel was barely five feet eight in height, and looked as though he should still be at school. Fellows doubted if the second lieutenant needed to shave more than once a week.

  He suspected the man was blushing. Sache-Worrel always blushed whether the words addressed to him were a compliment or a reprimand. 'No, sir.'

  A first lieutenant, a little older and much more confident, joined the conversation protectively. 'We were discussing Hannover, sir. It's bound to be a key Soviet Red.'