Enemy In Sight by Nick Ryan

Author:Nick Ryan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-04-11T22:00:00+00:00

*

“What time is it?” Wayland stretched his back and scraped his hand across his sweaty brow. He was filthy with dust and dirt.

“After three,” Sergeant McGrath said. The men stood back from the worksite and cast their eyes across the intersection. The sky was an ominous red, filled with dust and ash. The afternoon sun shone like a fireball behind dense billows of smoke. The village appeared other-worldly – like a scene from a science fiction planet, backdropped by the eerie blood-red gloom.

It had been two hours of frantic effort since Captain Kohn and the wounded Irish infantry had been driven south to Warsaw with a straggle of civilian evacuees. Now, at last, Wayland felt preparations to defend the village were complete.

Two of the remaining eight Abrams had been dug in behind redoubts to defend the main intersection; one on either side of the road. With Kohn gone, the commander’s tank had been parked hull down behind a crumbled stone wall and then camouflaged with thrown debris and building rubble to conceal and further protect it. Then more rocks and broken bricks had been brought to insulate the side armor. With just a three-man crew, the gunner would man the tank commander’s station, leaving the loader still to load and the driver free to manoeuvre the vehicle. But the position of the tank had turned the Abrams into a virtual pill-box. It would only reverse out of danger if the Russians threatened to overrun the village.

The second tank was Wayland’s, parked in the ruins of a house on the opposite side of the road. Here they had used two abandoned tractors to shield the tank’s side armor and fortified the front of the hull behind the rubble of an old brick chimney. The two tanks would form the centre of the defensive line and hold the road north against enemy tanks. The rest of the remaining Abrams were similarly positioned hull-down in good defensive locations along the western streets. Wayland’s plan could not call for a mobile defence; there simply weren’t enough tanks to cover the village’s most vulnerable points against a determined attack. Only Sergeant McGrath’s Abrams would be kept in reserve, parked behind the ruins of the school building and able to dash to vulnerable points to shore up crumbling defences.

Wayland’s greatest worry was ammunition. Sergeant McGrath gloomily reported that each tank had scarcely half their normal loadout left. The White Platoon tanks had a little more because they had not yet been heavily engaged in combat, but the grim total was far less than Wayland had hoped for. He made some mental calculations and grunted.

“I figure we’ve got enough for a twelve-minute battle. After that we’re going to be in serious trouble.”

He ordered McGrath to redistribute ammunition so the two vehicles at the crossroads and his reserve tank were well stocked with sabot rounds, and sent most of the available HEAT rounds to the tanks on the western edge of the village where he expected the Russians to attack again with their BMP-3s.

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