Here is the last preview chapter for Eagle Guardian: The War of 2010, it is one of the latest chapter where World War III has started.
Chapter L
There was a Russian-flagged ship located fifteen miles offshore, just outside Norwegian territorial waters. It was to the northwest of Tromsø and had been there all night. The MV Kuzma Minin was a freighter outbound from the distant Algiers and heading for the Russian port of Arkhangelsk. It had come to a halt just after midnight. The ship wasn’t drifting but was running on minimal power and holding its position. Norwegian coastguard authorities had first reacted before the military had got involved. At the beginning of the week, Russia had blown up that oil rig in the North Sea and now they had a ship of theirs acting extremely suspiciously on the edge of Norway’s sovereign seas. With haste, the Norwegians reacted to the presence of the Kuzma Minin. Contact was made by radio where the captain claimed that he was having power difficulties. He requested permission to come to Tromsø and dock there, citing the safety of crew and cargo. This was denied. A Norwegian ship headed towards them and instead, coastguard personnel would come aboard. The response which came was that that would be unsafe for them to do so. If the alarm bells weren’t ringing already, they were after this. Further military assets were alerted. Whereas before it was just an aircraft and a patrol boat, now there were several of each all paying attention. Warning alerts were sent to several military sites throughout the north of the country. As to the Kuzma Minin, what exactly was going on was unknown. That unknown breed grave concerns. Where there commandos in there? Was the ship secretly armed ready to strike at Norway? Dawn came and news arrived that Dutch (aided by the British) had raided that ‘ghost ship’ in the North Sea. This pushed the Norwegian alert level even higher. The war which everyone feared, but had tried to convince themselves wasn’t coming, looked increasingly likely. Norwegian military forces prepared to engage that ship as they moved even more military assets into standby positions nearby. It was all a ruse though. The Kuzma Minin was just a distraction. The civilian crew aboard, joined by several GRU officers who had manned the radios, were only here to draw as many eyes on them as possible, eyes which weren’t wanted to look elsewhere.
H-Hour arrived.
Norway came under direct attack as did other NATO nations. One of the origins of that attack wasn’t from the Kuzma Minin though. There was another ship which the Norwegians should have been paying attention to: this was the MV Pride of Lagos, a West African ship which had arrived yesterday at the port of Harstad. Port authorities had already checked it out but their checks hadn’t been thorough enough. From out of it came Russian naval commandos. There were less than forty of them and well-armed they might have been, but this was quite the task that they were charged with. Assaulting the port of Harstad and engaging civilian security people was one thing; holding what they would take was quite the other. The port town was in a reasonably isolated area but it was home to Norwegian military forces from that country’s own commandos. Many of those men were elsewhere: others were at their garrison. Harstad was to be fought over throughout the morning. Those commandos waited on reinforcements… and waited… and waited. Where was their support?
Multiple attacks were directed against selected sites across the north of Norway. Russian forces went into action to smash opposing NATO forces in the region as well as take territory. They made a three-pronged approach to do this. It wasn’t something to be completed in a day, let alone the morning when it started, but it was meant to see victory as an outcome after a few days of fighting. The Norwegians were expected to fight & fight well and the Russians were well aware that the country’s allies had forces arriving in Norway too. Regardless, the attack was made. There was an overland attack made where first one motor rifle brigade, and with another one following, was to advance westwards overland from the Kola Peninsula. Russian Airborne Troops were to make landings in the rear, to the north and northwest of the Narvik area. There was to be an amphibious assault too, also in that general region over on the western side of Norway’s Arctic, but this one would take time to get going. The Russian plan of attack was complicated. There were multiple components. Terrain and weather, as well as the strength of the opposition, defined the whole planned operation. There were many self-imposed limitations on the attackers too, all of those which came from Moscow. Some hushed conversations between senior military people questioned whether those back in the Kremlin actually wanted them to win… or just tie down so many NATO forces in one hell of a mess that this was looking likely to create by all of the complications?
The border crossing was undertaken by the lead elements of the 200th Brigade. These Russian forces went over under the cover of an artillery attack and with localised tactical air support. It was a long way to Narvik. Norwegian forces began harassing them straight away. The forward defensive forces fell back as they fought and commenced long-planned measures to delay and cripple an attacker. Their fight was going to be long and hard from them but they intended to make it just the same for the Russians invading their country. Rapidly, the Russian timetable started to slip. They were barely inside Norway and the mess that had been feared by some of the realists was already happening. The 25th Brigade remained in Kola and ready to start following in the next couple of days: some wondered if they would ever make that trip. The amphibious operation wasn’t one what mirrored had been done down in the Baltic. There was no element of surprise available due to the distances involved and the significant NATO forces in the way. Overnight, a massive Russian naval combat flotilla had started moving towards the North Cape – to round that headland at the very top of Scandinavia – and joining them too were the amphibious ships who slipped their moorings from Kola ports under the cover of darkness. The warships out ahead would have to open the way by engaging in battle those who attempted to bar their path. Only then could the ships carrying the 61st Naval Infantry Brigade do the same and head for their far-off landing sites. The Norwegians were waiting for the Russian combat flotilla. Within hours, doing what aircraft hadn’t be able to do due to enemy air activity, Norwegian submarines struck. There were several of these all offshore north and east of the North Cape. They began duking it out with the Russian Navy’s Northern Fleet.
Norwegian aircraft were unable to intervene in the opening stages of what would become the Battle of the North Cape because they were busy. The Russians had filled the skies with combat aircraft of their own. These were in support – indirect rather than direct – of the third element of the combined assault into Northern Norway. Fighters and strike-bombers were engaged by the Norwegians where F-16s clashed with MiG-29s and Su-24s. There were a whole series of confusing fights going on high up in the skies with victories claimed on each side in these clashes. The pilots of these aircraft didn’t see their opponents. These engagements were all made at beyond visual range. There were RAF Sentry aircraft at Bodo (others in Germany too, all rather than at their home base of RAF Waddington; the reason why the Spetsnaz strike there had been called off) providing AWACS support to the Norwegians and the Russians had airborne command-&-control aircraft of their own in the form of A-50s. The task for these battle controllers in the sky was immense. They were doing a remarkable job and nothing got past them. The British saw the slower-moving Russian transports and the Russians saw the Norwegian fighters moving against them. Each side reacted to one another in this. Those transports were eighteen aircraft carrying paratroopers, An-26s and Il-76s, with each was making a lone & unescorted flight. The F-16s got some of them but others got through. They flew above a trio of designated drop-zones and from them the paratroopers jumped. The airborne battalion from the Russian 11th Air Assault Brigade was split up into three assault companies to make these jumps leaving the rest of the brigade, with its airmobile units, to be flown in later.
The Bardufoss Jump met the most success. The company of Russian paratroopers who landed all around this Norwegian airbase, from where the majority of the currently-airborne F-16s were flying, had a hard fight once on the ground first against a Norwegian Army unit and then Air Force personnel. They fought their way into the airbase among an evacuation taking place there from the Norwegians as they pulled out, destroying what they could on the way. Su-24s provided some air support for this and was crucial but soon enough, those aircraft were gone: they were so far from home and thus short on fuel. The paratroopers were soon joined by the beginning of the airlift to bring in more men yet this fight wasn’t over. The Norwegians had other airbases in operation and while the disruption from losing Bardufoss was going to hurt greatly, they weren’t finished here. Incoming Russian transports loaded with more men as well as light armoured vehicles now faced attack. Man-portable missiles were used to shoot them down on approach. Norwegian troops, beaten back by the assault, reassembled for a counterattack. The second assault was the Evenes Jump. This was another airbase, though smaller than Bardufoss. Only half of the troops made it to the ground alive. They were afterwards meant to move off and up to Harstad while keeping Evenes secure: two significant tasks to achieve simultaneously and what a challenge that was. It was one which they failed to achieve. Localised counterattacks drove them back from Evenes itself and pinned them with their backs to the sea. The Russians didn’t have the airbase in their hands and nor were they going to lead a later assault to link up with those fighting for their lives at Harstad. Then there was the Andoya Jump. This was a wash-out. Strong, unexpected gusts of wind at the last moment blew many paratroopers off-course… and into the sea. Andoya was an airbase on a headland at the top of an island. Only a maniac would try to take this facility like this. The paratroopers were not maniacs but the senior man who had cut their orders was. Three quarters of those initially sent to Andoya didn’t make it. The others were killed in battle or taken prisoner. Among the defenders of Andoya were US Marines: they had ground personnel for their aviation units on the ground and fought alongside their Norwegian comrades-in-arms to keep Andoya out of enemy hands.
The wheels had come right off the Russian assault into Norway. The reverses suffered were grave and, taken this early on, were looking likely to make the whole thing a disaster. The Russians pushed onwards though. Those ground forces kept moving from their border start lines. The naval engagements off the North Cape continued. The airlift of men to join the paratroopers (those left alive) was to keep going. There were a series of fights in the sky between aircraft with now Norwegian aircraft engaging ground targets too, on their own soil, along with the Russians doing the same. None of this was coming to a stop anytime soon. The Russians still wanted to overcome Norwegian & NATO resistance while the Norwegians and their allies were determined to defend their territory.
The immediate available forces to each side in-theatre at the start of the conflict were evenly matched. Russia had its four brigades (two in action; two to follow) while NATO had three combat brigades plus significant smaller – Norwegian – attachments. Norway had just the one standing brigade yet could mobilise many more men and organise them quickly. Both the Royal Marines (with Dutch attachments) and the US Marines also had a brigade-sized force of men too. They could, and would in the case of the Americans, be joined by many more. NATO was fighting on friendly territory here. This was good ground to defend. Where Russia had made a head-on attack followed by ongoing attempts to secure the rear was overall a good battle plan yet it was hardly that unexpected in the strategic sense. For decades, NATO had studied how to defend the north of Norway. The Russian attack nearly directly mirrored one of several mock invasions plotted by ‘red team’ planners. Defeating an attack like this was what NATO moved to do.
The fighting continued. Russia and NATO battled it out. There were further surprises in the rear where Russian Spetsnaz made an appearance later rather than at the immediate outbreak of the fighting and they caused trouble in many places. In addition, the airbase at Bodo, where the RAF Sentry’s were joined by US Marines aircraft spinning up ready for conflict – there was a squadron of FA-18s present to aid the embattled Norwegian Air Force, – came under missile attack. First there were distant Russian bombers (staying in Russian airspace) which fired their long-range cruise missiles and then to support this a Russian submarine offshore launched several more. That submarine was the Nerpa, an Akula-class attack submarine. India wanted this submarine on a long-term lease but the international situation had seen it in Russian Navy service. Cruise missiles were fired from its torpedo tubes rather than VLS launchers limiting their numbers yet giving the submarine time to hide between these firings. Bodo’s runway was cratered at times and there was a wait to sweep it of the cluster munitions. Twice the Nerpa did this. The third time this was tried, it wasn’t so lucky: a Norwegian P-3 Orion, an aircraft which had earlier sunk that ship Kuzma Minin regardless of what it had or hadn’t done, dropped a torpedo on the submarine. The Norwegians had lost a submarine in the Battle of the North Cape earlier in the day but taken an enemy one out here. Russia would rue the loss of such a submarine as the Nerpa. It could have played a far more significant role in the war than the short role it had. The Norwegians would spend a long time afterwards worrying about the effects of this sinking which they themselves had done: the Nerpa was a nuclear-powered vessel. Would the safety measures there aboard in the face of catastrophic hull loss to prevent an ecological disaster hold out? The submarine had gone down in (relatively) shallow off-shore waters.
The issues around Bodo, plus the loss of Bardufoss, only slowed the movement of NATO force to join the ground fight that the Norwegians were in. They were moving soon enough though. The British and Dutch headed for Andoya and Harstad; the Americas were inbound for Bardufoss to aid the Norwegians there. Norway was going to be a secondary theatre of this war going on elsewhere but that didn’t mean that it was going to be any less violent nor intense.