Baltic Black Ops: An Action-Packed Spider Shepherd SAS Novel by Stephen Leather

Author:Stephen Leather [Leather, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-10-25T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 26

The SAS and the Nats began their campaign against the Russian enemy almost at once. It started in a small way, with isolated, small-scale attacks, but rapidly escalated as the Nats hit their stride. The first targets were the road and railway construction sites and, while the compounds and holding areas storing bulk materials and heavy equipment were relatively well-guarded, the actual sites where construction was under way were manned by only a handful of guards by day and even less at night, and many of them were civilians, rather than soldiers.

The labour force carrying out the work was a mix of workers of different nationalities. The unskilled labourers were mostly Russian conscripts, many of them young men doing their national service, but also including convicts offered early release from prison in return for twelve months hard labour. Poorly fed and housed, working twelve-hour shifts and paid late or not at all, their morale was non-existent and most were only going through the motions, making a show of activity when their supervisors looked in their direction, but otherwise, leaning on their shovels, smoking and skiving. The men driving tunnels and setting charges to blast away rock-faces were miners from Russia’s Kuznetsk and Kansk-Achinsk regions, but many of the skilled workers, like the engineers and surveyors planning the works and the drivers operating the plant and heavy equipment like cranes, bulldozers and JCBs, were foreigners, including Poles, Germans, French and Belgians. They were paid in hard currency, fed better and lived apart from the other workers in a specially-built accommodation block. They were also allowed off-site in the evenings, to drink and socialise in nearby towns. The supervisors were all Russian officers, who largely left the foreigners alone but whose idea of the way to man-manage their Russian labour force appeared to be to curse, threaten and beat them.

Under the direction of Jock, Bugs and Tex, the Nats carried out surveillance on the sites for twenty four hours and they then drew up a plan of attack. ‘I think a three-pronged strategy is the way to go,’ Jock said. ‘The first one, is that in daylight hours we carry out sniper attacks on supervisors and officers. Tomas, we’ve got a few of the old, low and slow SVD sniper rifles and two of the more modern Dragunov 7.62s, that are high and fast.’

‘I’m not sure I understand the difference,’ Tomas said. ‘Which should we use?’

‘It depends on the range you’re firing from,’ said Jock. ‘The older SVDs were simply standard rifles fitted with optical devices instead of iron sights, but the moderate quality of the optical devices reduced the range at which even the best sniper could achieve a hit, and as you know, rounds fired from a standard rifle just go in a flat trajectory and eventually fall to earth. Modern sniper rifles are fitted with far superior optics and are so powerful that the rounds can travel a mile, but they fire in an arced trajectory that makes range-finding absolutely crucial.

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