John Schettler - Crescendo of Doom

We must get to that airfield, he knew. That is where those fighters must have come from, and that must be my principle objective here. I am told the 7th Machinegun Battalion is coming from Aleppo. When will they arrive? Don’t count on them doing your work for you, he chided himself. The airfield is north of the river, and the main road to Aleppo is to the south of that barrier. The 7th will have to take one of the two bridges if they want to get into the town, so all the real objectives of worth beyond that are mine for the moment.

Time to get busy.

Troyaksaw the Germans coming on his night vision goggles. He was noting the movement of the men carefully, seeing them deploy, luminous green shapes in the eerie dark. A recon team and three squads in waiting, he noted. He gave a quiet hand signal to his fire team, just five men here on the high knob of Hill 272, and another five under Zykov on Hill 264 to the northwest. Neither team was adequate to the task it had been given, but at least he had men on both hills, which was better than yielding one to the enemy without a fight.

Yet when he saw the forces deploying below, he knew his five man team was going to be easily flanked. They simply could not cover all angles and approaches to the hilltop, so he immediately called for Chenko to bring up his team from the airfield and cover the ground between the two knobs.

His own grim prediction was soon to be proven true. The Germans moved in Altmann’s platoon, along with all the men in Reinhardt’s Schwere platoon, which had assembled to support this attack. Troyak could see them moving, and settling into depressions in the ground below, and he instinctively knew what he was looking at. They were selecting good firing positions for any heavy weapons they might have, and once he had allowed the enemy to settle on ground of its choosing, he called Popski at the airfield.

“We’ll be under attack soon,” he said. “They’ll probe my position first, and pay for that, but they’ll follow with mortar fire soon after. I’ll send you a grid position for our mortar team. Are the helicopters ready?”

They were.

Two of the three X-3s were revving up again to provide fire support that Troyak believed would be the decisive edge here. The third X-3 had departed south to reconnoiter the German advance, and pick up more fuel from their operating base. They would use only half as much as they could carry by making the flight down and back to the T3 Pump station, and so for the moment their airborne fire support was limited, though even one X-3 was a formidable addition to his firepower here.

On Troyak’s order the Podnos 82mm mortars opened the game, the first rounds whining in to fall on the German positions below. He could see the men reacting as they should, going to ground, yet still advancing under any cover they could find. They know enough not to get stuck under that fire, he thought. These are well trained men, and they’ll outnumber us three to one or better for this first engagement. No matter. We have the firepower to stop them here.

His confidence was not unwarranted. Just as the enemy began to answer with their own 5cm and 8.1cm mortars, the first of the X-3s was up and over their position, quickly finding the enemy mortar teams and moving to attack. The hiss of the rocket pods soon followed, and would be a hard shock to the Germans when the missiles hit home.

The Hydra 70 had an old pedigree, developed from plans laid down for a distant cousin in the late 1940s after the war. The Mark 40 was a fin folding unguided aerial rocket made by the U. S. Navy, serving in both the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and the newer Hydra 70 had the same simple design. The Navy was now deploying a guided version using lasers, but the X-3s had the older rockets, all unguided, but with a good 8 kilometer strike range. They had two seven tube pods mounted that day, which could use single or ripple fire to engage targets. Unguided or not, the optics on the X-3 were going to get the missiles where Lieutenant Ryan and his sidekick Tom Wicks wanted them, and that was right on the three 81mm mortar positions in Reinhardt’s Schwere platoon. They put three missiles on each position, getting all three mortars and then angling to look for other targets of opportunity.

“Good shooting Tommy!” said Ryan when he saw the results.

“Always aim to please,” said Wicks in return. “What’s that yonder at about three-o-clock?”

Ryan pivoted his X-3, the powerful high resolution optics and cameras painting the ground where Wicks was pointing. He could clearly see the Germans deploying another weapon, and then it fired, sending a round out toward the high ground that smashed into the shoulders of the hill.

“Looks like some kind of Recoilless Rifle. Take it down, Wicky.”

“Right-O, LT.” Wicks fired, three more rockets snaking in to the target in short order. The resulting explosions blasted the weapon, sending it careening up and away from its original firing position.

“A good hard knock, Tommy.”

“That’s why they call me Tommy Knocker,” said Wicks. “Shall we give them a taste of the minigun?”

Troyaksaw the rockets go in with lethal accuracy, and soon after the snarl of the minigun raked the ground below. It fell on the men of Reinhardt’s platoon, inflicting heavy casualties where they scrambled on the relatively open ground. The Germans had finally recovered from the shock and were now directing machinegun fire at the helo, forcing Ryan to bank and climb away from the scene. But the job had been done, and the heavier support weapons in the Schwere platoon had been taken out, as Troyak expected. Now it would come down to guts and small arms fire, but the Russians had plenty of both, and now possessed the heavier mortars, the Germans having no more than a single light 5cm tube in each platoon.

Over on Hill 264, Zykov watched the battle begin with a big grin on his face. While a part of him whispered that the fight was unfair, offering due respect to the Germans who had to face their modern weaponry and firepower, the greater part sided with that grin. When men were out there with rifles, and coming to kill you, then any advantage on your side was welcome without scruples or any regrets. He knew that the enemy would hit them with any weapon they had, and so the Russians would do the same, no questions asked.

In that passing moment, he thought of Captain Karpov, the hard fighting commander of the ship through so many battles at sea. Karpov knew what Zykov accepted as a matter of course. You hit the enemy hard, knock him down, and if he gets up to fight again, then that’s your fault. That was the cold rationale of war, and every warrior subscribed to it on one level or another.

When the X-3’s climbed they suddenly saw something on the ground to the west, and Ryan veered in that direction. “Argo Leader, this is X-1 overwatch. Be advised of a truck column north of the river and inbound on your position, over.”

“Copy on that, X-1. Care to form the welcoming committee?”

“Will do, Argo Leader. Ryan out.”

The column Ryan had spotted were the first arrivals of the German 7th Motorized Machinegun Battalion, dispatched to this position some time ago by the division commander, von Sponeck. They had driven all day and into the night to reach Raqqah. One company had found a bridge just barely able to support the weight of the trucks, and with a little shoring up from the engineer platoon, they made it across. The rest of the battalion was on the main road south of the river, which would lead to the better bridges now being held by the Argonauts.

Ryan decided to have a look around, signaling the other X-3 to scout south and then rejoin his bird over the river. They soon began to piece together a picture of the gathering fight, as all forces in the region were now sending troops to this place, marching to the sound of the guns. Due south, they spotted what looked to be another German force at first, but when Ryan reported the movement to Popski, the gritty Colonel simply smiled.