John Schettler - Devil's Garden

The Oberleutnant watched, astounded, as two rockets came streaking out from the Russian position, finding Becker in tank number two and putting an end to his promising military career, and then smashing the number three tank for good measure.

“Mein Gott! Was werden sie schlagen mit uns?” What are they hitting us with?

The Russians called it the, Mongrel, but NATO called it the AT-13 Saxhorn-2 Anti-Tank missile, with tandem HEAT rounds. The weapon had taken down modern Israeli Merkava tanks in Lebanon, and so the relatively light armor of the Panzer IIIs was no challenge. The Germans could have rolled up a heavy Tiger-I or even one of their monster tanks from later in the war. It would have made little difference. The missile would have blown through the 185mm armor of a Tiger II with little difficulty.

Wellborn was on the radio at once. “Westhoven? Come in. What is your situation?”

The commanding officer had no better results on the inland road. “Heavy resistance! We can’t get armor into firing position. They’re hitting us with something new. We’re waiting for the 88s, and then we’ll put ranged fire on those tanks.”

“Same here-some kind of rocket. They just killed Becker and three of his panzers! Where is Kersten’s artillery? Why have they stopped firing?”

“They were hit by mortar fire and fell back another two kilometers out of range. We’ll get supporting fire back soon enough. And I’m calling for air support as well.”

“Air support? Way down here?”

“Meindel’s Stukas are up over the Terek now. Just you wait and see what a few 500 pound bombs will do!”

That was good news, but Wellman had a strange feeling in his gut about this engagement. “I don’t like this Generalleutnant. These weapons have neutralized our advantage in armor. I tried two infantry assaults but the volume of defensive fire is very heavy. We must have an MG platoon in front of us.”

“We thought the same, but listen, Wellman. I know the sound of every Russian machine gun we’ve ever seen. No, this is something new, and it’s some kind of light machine gun. This is most likely a Guards SMG platoon.”

“Well enough… But if the Russian infantry fights like this from here on out…” He did not have to finish the sentence. Thus far the Germans had been able to handle anything the Russian Army put in front of them, but Wellman had an inner feeling that the law of overstretch was now coming into play. They were reaching the high water mark for the tide of steel and fire that had swept into Russia. The enemy was fighting hard at Stalingrad, and now they seemed to be equally tenacious here, and at Grozny to the northwest.

A Guards SMG platoon? Yes, that made better sense. Perhaps something more was afoot here as well. He could feel it, sense it. Something was wrong with this engagement. His troops should have been able to sweep into that rail depot in an hour. Instead he lost six armored fighting vehicles and nearly a full platoon of infantry. The rest of the column was coming up, but he ordered their 75mm Infantry gun to deploy further back and was planning to use it in an indirect firing role. He took a deep breath, watching corporal Schmidt to his left, who had been listening to the whole conversation. Wellman gave him a sidelong glance.

“Don’t worry, Schmidt. Did you think they would give us the road to Baku without a good fight?”

“No sir. But they have been retreating for so long.”

“Yes, and it started to feel easy, didn’t it? Well it’s never easy when the other fellow says no, here I stand and you will have to come for me if you wish to pass.”

“Well what will we do, Oberleutnant?”

“You heard Westhoven. The Stukas will be here soon.”

He started pulling slowly on the fingers of his gloves, tugging at them, his mind thinking hard on something. Schmidt had seen that look on the Oberleutnant’s face before, and he knew that, quite literally, the gloves were coming off when Wellman fell into this kind of mood.

“Contact Second Battalion. Tell them to move their entire column up.” He squinted at his map. We’ll hit them on their right flank, through that oil tank farm. There’s good cover for an infantry advance there, he thought. And then we’ll just have to slug it out, building by building, until we reach that main warehouse. And we have SMGs too…

* * *

Dobryninwas on his radio, yammering in Troyak’s ear. “I’ll have to pull the Mi-26 out and return it to the Anatoly Alexandrov. German planes, Troyak. It looks like fifteen or twenty on the radar.”

Troyak did not like the sound of that. These would probably be those same German dive bombers they had faced earlier. The German’s weren’t stupid. They could see that he had the firepower on the ground to stop them, and what they really needed was concentrated indirect fire on the Russian position. In about fifteen minutes that artillery will be down on us again, but first things first.

“Troyak to all hovercraft. Track and engage incoming enemy aircraft! Troyak to Fedorov, come in.”

“Fedorov here.”

“We’ll need fire support from the Shilka . If you haven’t already done so, deploy your radars and prepare to fire.”

“We’re ready now,” said Fedorov. “I’m heading your direction.”

“What about Orlov?”

“Zykov is searching the detainment center now. I was going to look for the Commissar, but then the Germans attacked so I moved the ZSU to a reserve position.”

“Good job, colonel. Orlov isn’t going anywhere soon. Zykov will find him. Bring the ZSU up here to my position east of the lake. Just follow the railroad tracks. But watch out for those German planes!”

The SA-N-5 was an older Russian naval SAM, with two quad mounts on the big Aist 609 hovercraft guarding the harbor. Called the “Arrow” by the Russians it was an old friend, but nonetheless very capable of tracking and destroying the threat posed by the German planes. Soon the scene was much the same as when the Anatoly Alexandrov first appeared in the midst of a Stuka raid over the Caspian Sea. The arrows streaked up into the grey sky, eager to find targets with their passive IR guided noses, and soon they began to get hits. With a maximum range of just over four kilometers, however, the German planes were already over the target and screaming down in their diving runs.

Now Fedorov looked up through his binoculars as the motors whirred to elevate the quad 23mm guns on the Shilka . The Russian radar guided guns were soon firing at enemy planes well above the low cloud deck, beyond Fedorov’s visual range. The noise of the guns prompted him to let his binoculars fall to his chest and cover his ears. The guns were capable of firing at nearly a thousand rounds per minute, but with a typical ammunition load of only2000 rounds, they were most often used in short bursts of three rounds per barrel. That was still enough to put twelve 23mm rounds on a target, with good accuracy, and in sustained burst mode the gunners might fire 30 rounds per barrel and put out ten times that volume.

There were eighteen German planes aloft, and the missiles quickly got nine. The Shilka had already made four kills when the bombs began to fall. At least five Stukas made it close enough to release their 500 pound bombs, and now they came screaming down on the rail yard churning up the steel rails and wood ties as they exploded with thundering concussion. Three bombs fell in the yard and island between the two opposing positions, but two landed right on target, plowing right into the main depot terminal and warehouse receiving building where Troyak’s Marines were hunkered down.