ARMAGEDDON'S SONG (Volume 3) 'Fight Through' by ANDY FARMAN Page B

query to our friends the Admiral Potemkin but they have not responded.” He picked up a pencil and tapped it idly
against his knee.
    “I had hoped that on answering I would be able to
learn from them when… if … they had fuelled Tuan near the cape.”
    After a few moments contemplation he shrugged to
himself and then stood, retrieving a key from a chain about his neck with which
he opened his small safe to extract his copy of the mission planning pack.
    “I await instructions from Fleet but I think it
sensible to work on a new plan that will also keep the Russians happy by not
raising the target to the ground.”
    The Russians were fairly certain that had the launch
facility been on UK or US soil no tit for tat nuclear response would follow as
they were holding back from escalating the use of nuclear weapons beyond that
of depth charges, a situation China and Russia were capitalising on, but the
French were the atomic wild card in NATO’s pack.
    The original plan called for thirty eight SF
operatives to sink the freighter Fliterland beside the purpose built dock at
Kourou where the Ariane and Vega components were delivered by sea, thus severely
delaying further launches as the satellites arrived by sea from France and
Germany. They were also to drop the nearby bridge into the Kourou River to
prevent the components being brought overland from more distant port near Cayenne.
    At the launch pads, the approach ramps were to be
wrecked with cratering charges because the rockets were transported erect from
the final assembly building on roads that could not be more than 10° out of true.
    Any rockets already on the pad could not be damaged
without the risk of a catastrophic explosion but the same was not true of the
sensitive payload sat on top and costing tens of millions of Euros. These could
be rendered useless with a hundred Yuan’s worth of machine gun rounds.
    The key to the operation was that of speed and
surprise as the opposition were jungle warfare specialist units, the 3 rd Marine Regiment and the Foreign Legions 3e
Régiment étranger d'infanterie. The
Legion guarded the space centre and ran France’s jungle warfare school at
Regina, 80 miles from the space centre and close to the border with Brazil. The
marines themselves were all based along the borders with Brazil and Suriname.
    The simplest of deception plans had ensured that the
French regiments were being kept busy in
the interior and along the border with Brazil two hundred miles from the Space
Centre.
    In time of war the price of gold goes up and an
article planted in the popular Portuguese tabloid newspaper Correio da Manhã that told of a massive gold strike in French Guiana had been picked up
by the Brazilian media and ensured that the always troublesome Garimpeiros ,
the illegal Brazilian miners, were considerably more numerous and more blatant
in their trespassing than normal. This led to the Guiana Gendarmeries calling
on the Legion and Marines for support as the miners were aggressive and often
better armed than the policemen.
    3e REI was
effectively split in two by the Kourou River with its regimental headquarters near
Cayenne airport and one of its two infantry companies at Regina, a few miles
inland and in easy reach of the Brazilian border. These retained the regiment’s
small air detachment of a Puma troop carrying helicopter and a small Gazelle
for reconnaissance and communications (the Colonel’s taxi).
    North of the Kourou, the legionnaires’ assault
engineers and anti-aircraft detachments guarded the space centre with the
remaining infantry company, although a militia-like reserve company made up of
former Legionnaires had a platoon in Kourou and two more in Cayenne.
    The marines were even more divided, working out of
company and sometimes just platoon locations that were dotted along the border.
They were completely independent and self-contained sub units though; they
walked into the jungle and survived on what they carried on their