Chieftains

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.