Hammer of God

Chapter 21

There were other things in the sky that night, not the wrathful god of Ba’al Shamin, bent on vengeance for the desecration of his temple site, but a whirling beast from another time. The Germans heard the odd thumping in the sky, unlike the sound from any aircraft they knew. They looked for planes, but nothing could be seen, as the KA-40 was up above a bank of low clouds that night. Yet the pilots could clearly see the positions of the German artillery on infrared, the tubes of the guns still hot from the rounds they had fired earlier in the day.

Troyak had also started a little mortar duel, risking heavier reprisal, and casualties, to see if he could draw enemy heavy weapons fire on his position. He wanted to pinpoint the locations of the enemy mortar teams, and soon found them returning fire. There was also an infantry gun that the Germans had positioned in the ruins of Diocletian’s camp. All these positions were fed to the helicopter, which had been waiting in a well hidden canyon on the dry highlands to the north. Now the pilots were up in the Big Blue Pig, unseen by the enemy on the ground, but clearly heard. The thumping of the KA-40’s engines resolved to a loud roar, and minutes later hot yellow fire streaked down from the grey clouds, as if Ba’al himself was throwing his thunderbolts on the heathens below.

The rockets came in on the artillery positions first, blasting the 105s, and the ammunition stored in the trucks nearby. There were huge explosions when one truck took a direct hit, setting off its hold of H.E. rounds.

Oberst Wolff was out through the entrance to the temple, where four tall stone columns held up a portion of the crumbling roof. Four more columns stood in a colonnade off towards the sound of the action, and numerous others had fallen long ago, their rounded weathered forms littering the ground, with others lined up like broken tree stumps in a long row.

“What is happening?” he shouted at a Sergeant.

“Air strike!” the man replied. “But with what? Those are not bombs.”

Wolff stared at the scene, seeing more missiles streaking down and exploding on the hills south of the fortress. “What in god’s name… Those are rockets! It’s some kind of flying Nebelwerfer! Listen to it!”

The roar of the helo’s engines had awakened the whole regiment, and now machineguns were firing up at the sound, though the gunners could not see their target. Off near the artillery, a 20mm gun began to blast away, sending tracers up into the grey overcast. A minute later the sound subsided, and field phones were ringing inside the temple.

Wolff strode in to take the report from his signalman. The artillery and mortar positions had all been targeted and hit by a very precise rocket weapon. One battery had lost three of four guns, another lost two, and three mortar teams reported casualties. Anger flashed in his eyes when he went back outside, glaring at the stark, brooding hill, crowned by the stony fortress.

“Leutnant Hammel!” he said in a sharp voice, still edged with the lightning of his temper. “Get the pioneers ready. We attack that hill at once!”

An hour later they came for the fortress of Fakhr-al-Din, a platoon of assault engineers picking their way up the southwestern slope of the hill, accompanied by two rifle platoons. The ground there was more broken as it folded into another masking hill, where a barren road climbed its way up towards the summit. At places the slope covered their approach, but near the top they would be faced with a long rocky grade that led to a deep dry moat at the base of heavily striated rock that formed the foundation of the fortress.

Troyak shook his head when he saw the deployment on his night vision glasses. “It looks like a full company,” he said to Zykov, “and they are carrying a lot of equipment-possibly demolition teams. We can’t let them get satchels at the base of this fort. These walls won’t survive that.”

“Time for the AGS-30’s,” said Zykov, referring to the two autogrenade launchers they had positioned on the roof of the fort. They looked like a typical machinegun on a tripod, with a round mustard-green ammo canister on the right side. But they fired 30mm grenades in rapid bursts that hit like thunder. The weapon was light enough to be lifted and carried by a single man, making it a very agile weapon for close in combat defense. It could hit gun positions, buildings and bunkers with lethal, accurate fire, or be used to put down dense, effective suppressive fire over a wide area, out to 2100 meters.

The Marines fired at a quarter of that range, sending a shower of 30mm grenades down on the advancing pioneers. They were quickly pinned down, with heavy casualties, but soon Troyak saw that small teams were crawling up the slope, dragging long tubes and satchels. He ordered the Marines to open up with all their automatic weapons, and the fire was deafening.

Wolff watched the action from the Roman ruins, seeing the hot tracers streaking down from the high battlements, grenades exploding, and something else like another rocket firing down the long slope. It was not long until the Captain of the Pioneers called on the radio to tell him they could not reach the summit of the hill.

“We can’t get anywhere near that fort,” he said. “The ground is too open-no cover-and my god, the enemy firepower is murderous. There must be a full machinegun platoon up there, and they have some kind of heavy weapon that saturates the ground with grenades. These are not the British we fought in France.”

“Very well, get your men back. We’ll use the Schwere Company, and give them a taste of their own medicine.”

Wolff was disheartened when he heard the reports on his artillery, and he ordered the men to move his remaining guns under cover of the palm groves, not realizing that would make little difference to the infrared sensor capability of the KA-40.

This group is a crafty lot, he thought. They deliberately initiated that mortar duel at dusk to find our gun positions. Luckily we did not hit back with the recoilless rifles. I can see that we will have to apply a much stronger hand to neutralize that fort.

He turned to a Sergeant, giving a curt order. “Signal 1st Company. Hit that damn Chateau with the recoilless rifles, and any mortar we still have. Keep their heads down up there! I want them under fire all night long. Then get a message to Fliegerfuhrer headquarters at Homs. Tell them the British made a night air attack here, and we had better damn well have some air support tomorrow. Where are the Heinkels? Where are the Messerschmitts?”

There was a sudden chill in the air, and the call of a distant bird seemed a haunting jibe. He looked around at the ruins of empires past, and the thought came to him that this had once been a military encampment, and the ravaged stone columns were brought down as much by the travail of war as by time. Here he stood in the shadowed detritus of one of the world’s great empires, now fallen into ruin, a desolate landscape in an equally barren desert. The stumps of what had once been old statues to the mighty who ruled here stood like broken teeth in the rubble about him, and he was briefly possessed by a feeling of his own mortality, and the brevity of life.

“It’s too exposed here,” he said. “We’ll move the regimental headquarters to the old amphitheatre. That area is well protected.”

He looked through his field glasses, scanning the distant hill, lips tightening. Let us see how well you sleep tonight under my guns, he thought.

It was a long, hard, sleepless night in the Castle of Fakhr-al-Din, at least for Fedorov. The Germans kept up light mortar fire from the 5cm tubes, a round every five minutes, and it was enough to keep Fedorov awake all night. Many of the Marines seemed unbothered, huddling in the weathered stone rooms of the fort, dozing as if nothing unusual was happening.

“A good solid fort,” said Popski, sitting with Fedorov in one of the lower chambers. “Too bad it’s going the way of all the other ruins here. The Germans are just firing to torment us now, but I think they’ll get serious in the morning.”

Fedorov had a listless look in his eyes, weary, and forlorn. This place had been built for war, the walls and much of the ruined area below them had been constructed by Hadrian and Diocletian. This had always been a military outpost as much as a commercial trade center, offering merchants a way station on the desert route that might avoid the heavy taxes imposed on goods shipped up the Euphrates.

He sat there, beneath those ancient stone towers and battlements, and thought of his own position as Captain of the battlecruiser Kirov. The citadel of the bridge was just another fortress at sea, he thought, and I am a warrior, as much as I might think otherwise, as much as I may hate war itself. Armies had fought one another for this place many times, and the blight of war would go on into the future, until our weapons finally make an end of us all.

He thought again of the things he had seen on this impossible journey, of those initial encounters with the British fleet and the inevitability of that first missile they fired to avoid being spotted. He remembered those harrowing moments in the night action in the Alboran sea, chasing salvoes from the massive 16-inch guns of Rodney and Nelson. He could still hear the awful scream of the Japanese dive bombers in the Coral Sea, and the sight of the mighty battleship Yamato, stricken my their Moskit-II missiles and burning in the darkness of war. And always at the end were those memories of Halifax, burned and scalded by some terrible holocaust, and all the other blackened cities they had found.

What were we fighting for, he wondered? He knew the war in 2021 had started with a dispute over what seemed an insignificant speck of rock on the South China Sea, but beneath that rock were the lucrative rights to oil and drilling contracts in a world ever thirsty for energy. And the British were coming here to secure and clear the oil pipeline route through these ruins, as much as to flank the French defense at Damascus. Just east of this place they had already taken the T3 pump station, and an equal move to the west would give them T4.

“They sure didn’t like that Helicontraption when it was up there breathing hell on their guns,” said Popski. “Can we finish the job tonight?”

“We’ve expended all our rockets,” said Fedorov. “They have the miniguns, but I was thinking to keep that in reserve-just in case the Germans do get serious and try another ground attack. Troyak says they can’t take this place with ground troops, but that may not stop them from trying.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” said Popski. “Your Sergeant is right. Even if they did get men up this hill, have a look at that moat out there. They’ll never get over that. It’s fifty feet wide in places, and after that it’s a long way up these walls and towers. No. They’ll have to pound this fort to a pile of rubble like the rest out there… But that’s what they’ll do if they have the guns and ammo. Let’s hope the British can win through.”

Fedorov’s eyes darkened at that. “I don’t think we can count on that any longer,” he said disconsolately. “I had a good look at the German column, and Troyak says he’s already identified three battalions. So we have a full German regiment out there. The town and palm groves are going to provide them good defensive ground. Frankly, I don’t think the forces the British have can beat them here. They were supposed to push on to Homs, and that action, combined with the Indian division moving up the Euphrates, was enough to compel the French to throw in the towel.”

“Word is they have Foreign Legion down there in the town.” Said Popski.

“They do, and that force alone would make this place a tough nut to crack. Add in this regiment of German troops, and the British will be stopped here, I’m sure of it. So they won’t get to Homs, and the French will fight on. In fact, the presence of German troops here is a very serious matter. It never happened, you see, in the history I know. But I suppose all that has gone to hell, hasn’t it.”

“You look like it was all your doing,” said Popski.

“In many ways it was.”

“Oh? How do you figure that?”

Fedorov gave him a half hearted smile. “It’s too long a story to tell, Popski. But from the moment we first appeared here, things have gone awry. We tried to avoid this, but no matter what we did, it always came down to one side or another firing weapons. Admiral Volsky was correct. If we build things like my ship, like that Helicontraption, as you call it, then we’ll certainly end up using them one day. It’s just like this fort. Here it sits, built centuries after the ruin of that Roman city down there, but did anyone learn from that? No. The sun sets on one empire, and rises on another. Men of war came here again, and built their battlements anew. And me? I’m Captain of a fortress at sea. I know the history of this entire war. I should know better than to think we could control its outcome, but still we fight.”

He shook his head, weary as the next 5cm mortar round came down on the hillside. “Perhaps were all just fools, Popski. We thought we could do something to make an end of war before it makes an end of us all, but one thing leads to another here, and I’m not so sure we can do anything to prevent what’s going to happen. Here we are, the warriors from the future, demigods for all we know, and with weapons no man of your day can really comprehend. But we sit in this fort like the men who first built it, and now it is only that steep barren hill out there, only these stone walls and that moat that will prevent the Germans from killing us. You see, we aren’t demigods after all-we’re just men like you and all the others here, and all men die.”

“True enough, but don’t sell yourself short. Kinlan’s lads had something to say about Rommel’s plans. Yes? You thought we could give the British a leg up here by taking this fort, but alright, the Germans surprised us-a wolf in the fold. They weren’t in your history books-too bad for us. Yet those Marines of yours don’t seem to care much about that. Damn good men, this lot. That said, we’ve only twenty here, gods or men, and the Germans have a whole lot more. If they do stop the British like you say, then they’ll also have the time they need to pound this place to dust. That’s what it will come down to. If they have the rounds with them, they can break this fort. So it might be nice to have a few of those metal monsters Brigadier Kinlan brought along,” he sighed. “Think we’d better call in some help?”

“This place is too far away,” said Fedorov. “We can’t expect any help from Kinlan…” He stopped, thinking. “But we might get some help from the Argonauts.” The light of an idea was in his eyes again. “They could get out here on those X-3 helos, and with a lot more firepower.”

Popski raised an eyebrow at that. “I’ve seen enough of this war to know what the world is in for if it goes on much longer. But getting a look at the way you people fight is enough to chill any man’s bones. I’ve always had respect for a good machinegun, but something about the weapons on those things are… well, murderous. Just the same, if you plan to hold this fortress, then I think we’re going to need all the help we can get. Otherwise, it might be best to call that whirlybird of yours back and get the men out, if we can.”