One nice thing about stopping in to the division HQ is the food. They had actual cooks and hot grub. The coffee didn't come out of a pouch either. The cooks had adopted Kat as much as anybody had and whenever she came through the line her tray was piled up too high to see over. One of them would usually help her get to the table with it. It is almost sickening to see a big burly Master Sergeant with more hair coming out of his ears than on his head try to hold the door for the little girl in BDU's. Heaven help the poor soul who tries to cut in line in front of Kat.
At the table I sat across from Ann. Her eyes got big as she saw the tray Kat was bringing over. She looked like she was going to say something, till she saw the grizzled old cook helping Kat by carrying her drinks.
"I don't know what the hell is going on here, Hill, but you have obviously got these people buffaloed. They even help your unauthorized orphan. When I mentioned that I had time in grade on you, the CO told me that I could either work for you or for the shit burning crew, my choice. I'm not sure what kind of scam you are running, but I will find out and bust you, count on it buddy. There is no way you can be having the kind of results you say with no more power than Wolfelt told me about."
I sighed deeply trying to figure out how to win this woman over to my side. I didn't want to get rid of her, but if she were going to fight me I would have to. Ann knew how to run a TACJAM with the best; after all Doug Brigham had taught her, and she could be a big help. If she had to go I'd have to split out Stretch or Wolfelt's #2 to run her hut, then train someone to work with me. That was way too much trouble.
Tom Wolfelt sat down next to Ann. "No scam going on here Sergeant. We use directed power and interference, along with deception, to confuse the enemy and make them doubt their own radio network. All the power you need to have is just a little more than the guy you are blocking. The Russian radios only have two power settings, low and high. High is only 50 watts sent through an omni directional antenna. Even if you are twice as far away, 100 watts through a log periodic is going to overwhelm the signal at the receiver. The trick is to only hit the receivers you need to, not all of them, and not constantly. Just make the traffic more difficult to get through, or if you are lucky you can make it the wrong traffic. Hill sets out a plan for the net we are targeted against, and we follow that plan completely. If you try to strike out on your own you will be blasted and probably get us blown up too. Let us know now whether or not you can get with the program, cause if you fuck this up I'll shoot you myself and save Kat the effort."
Ann's head shot over to look at Katrinka. "Glupaya sobaka" is all Kat muttered. Ann looked to her second. "She called you a "Dumb bitch", Fleming said. "I would have to agree with her. The methods you were using got the rest of our teams shot up. Hill has kept his going for months and they have been effective. I like what I've heard and I'm working with them." Sgt Fleming put his head down and dug in to the food.
Christopher had a confused look on her face at this point, and I decided to push. "Lani, what have you got on the arty group that targeted us last time? I think that it may be time to shut them down." Everholz flipped her notebook over to a particular page and handed it to me. "Strelka 34, not very imaginative is he? (strelka means arrow) Gets his firing orders from Ladka 94, radar, Yabloka 45, number one gun, Strelka 35, and so on. Radar supervisor is queer? How the hell did they figure that out? Never mind, I don't want to know. Okay, Tom, I need you to get some recordings of Ladka, Yabloka, and Strelka 34. The number 2,3, and 5 guns are all on the same azimuth from a southern position so you'll block them. I will be directing traffic for Ladka and Strelka 34. You'll block all real traffic and use your recordings to cause confusion. Shift change is at 2000z hours. Lani, coordinate with the analysis hut and have them set up a time on target of 2005z tomorrow. We should have the radar so mad by then that he won't see shit coming in till it's too late. Christopher, you'll ride with Tom and Fleming with me. This should only take around ten minutes so we'll only use the two huts. Shamu can stay here and get the maintenance that I'm sure it needs after your trip down to join us. Johnson, your choice, go with whichever team you like. I want you three to get the idea in real time. Any questions?"
Ann looked at me like I was nuts, "Just like that, you are going to perform a mission without higher authority? How the hell are you going to do that?"
"He is going to ask me, young lady, and I will tell him to go for it. He's right, that arty unit has been a thorn in our side for too long. When he says to coordinate with the analysis group, he means me." Lt. Nichols had walked up behind Christopher while I had been talking. "He sees vulnerabilities the rest of us don't, and he has my confidence. Is that clear, Sergeant?"
I looked up at the LT, "Thank you ma'am. Could you see to the maintenance boys getting on the new system? I don't want to take it out until our guys get done with it. I wouldn't trust those 1st Cav mechanics as far as I could spit." When she nodded at me I looked around the table and everyone was finished eating, except of course for Kat. I nudged her, "get a doggie bag, hon, we need to get on the road." I looked over at Everholz, "you got our next sites, Lani?" When she nodded, I said, "Okay folks, let's move."
Everyone got up and headed out. I saw that Johnson was going with us. Mechanics were already moving Shamu and the jeep toward the motor pool. Christopher was able to slow them down long enough to get her and Fleming's bags and her on out of the jeep trailer.
It was a tight squeeze to get everyone into our vehicles. I had to stop by the motor pool to get a couple of extra hearing protectors. You could lose your hearing quickly without them in either the track or the goat. There were only two seats in the goat. Stretch and Lani took them, but there was sufficient space in the front of the track for four, especially since Kat took up so little room. I hoped that by the time we got to the site Deb and Lani would have made up. I hated the idea of losing either of them.; I depended on them both to keep me honest.
We arrived at our site and I pulled the track in under some trees, leaving me a straight-ahead exit. Backing TACJAM was not a quick thing, it had no mirrors and you had to have someone on the ground guiding you. Do without the ground guide, and you were likely to damage something. I shut down the engine and we all got out of the cab.
"Why did you park under these trees? You can't put up the antenna here." Fleming asked.
"This is our hide position, we'll be doing some radio work from here with the other team and HQ, and I don't want anyone from the other side associating our in-house radio traffic with the jammer. I never use the same site for both types of traffic. We always move at least a quarter mile away before running a mission. That is a part of my S.O.P. Lani has a printed copy of some of the things we have found to be good ops and you'll get it later. I didn't want to try and shove too much down Christopher's throat at once."
Fleming was nodding his head and walking over toward the goat. Tonight and tomorrow were going to be spent setting up all the little things that made for a successful mission. Our receiver wasn't DF capable, but we had the locations of all of the stations in the net and our azimuths to them. We switched off listening to the radio and working with the map and doing perimeter guard. I had Lani send a change to team two about targets. I heard something from one of the gun sites that I thought Stretch could exploit.
On a normal night we would all sleep in the goat. We would set up 3 sleeping bags and hot bunk it with the person on guard duty. You would wake the next person up, and as they got out you would take over their bunk. As I was the only male on the team I noticed some very odd scents from time to time. On a mission prep night there was too much activity in the goat to sleep very well. At these times the easiest thing to do was to set up a cot under a tree and stretch a shelter half out over it.
I was setting mine up when Kat came over. "Sergeant Mick, may I stay with you tonight? I have set it up so we have the same guard time; and of course I help you with radio."
One of the reasons we were so successful was Kat. I was not going to tell Ann this, but Kat worked with me on the nets. My Russian military terminology and such were pretty good, but I had never been any good at normal conversational Russian. The Soviet Union had some of the same problems with language that other large amalgamation countries did. Their people came from many cultures with differing modes and forms of speech. The military radio traffic was set up in such a way as to make the commander understood by everyone. No one cared if the tank driver was understood, but the commander's orders had to be. I was familiar with this, but when the ops slipped into conversation I was lost. Stretch was better than I was, but Kat was a native speaker.
"Sure sweetie, bring your cot over and we'll set them up side by side." As she went to get her cot I attached her shelter half to mine and gave us a little privacy by letting it hang down in front. Once everything was set up Kat brought out her leftovers, to include a couple of bottles of Coke someone had stashed into her bag, and we had a picnic meal under canvas.
"You need to give in and do Debra, Sergeant Mick. Give her what both of you need, but don't let her have your heart. She'll be fine as long as you are together, but when you are apart, she'll go back to what she was before. It is not her fault; she can't help how she is. You won't do me, so do Stretch, she needs it bad."
"I know little one, but I have a couple of problems with that. One is that Stretch works for me, how are Lani and the other teams going to take it? I know I wouldn't be able to hide it; I'm just not built that way. The other part is that I have trouble separating my heart from that activity. I promise to think carefully about it and do something soon. Now I have a question for you. Do you know of any family that would want to take you in? I worry about what happens to you if I have to leave here."
"I don't think so. Grandfather Pushkin was told that he could transfer to Czechoslovakia or to Siberia. He was building supervisor for the politika and when they found dissidents in our building, he had to leave. He took whole family with him. Grandama Pushkin, mama, papa, my sister Tsvetlana, and me. Mama's familia was in Murmansk, most of them in jail, when it was bombed. Babushka died last year, cow kicked her. All the rest were killed when they took our farm, I watched the house burn, and no one left it. I am all I know of for Pushkins from Novgorod."
Katrinka was snuffling by this time and I pulled her to me in a hug. "I thought that might be the case. Would it be okay with you if I ask the CO to investigate how I would go about adopting you? I don't want to take away your proud family name, just put mine on the end. How would Katrinka Pushkin Hill sound?"
Kat pushed me away and looked into my eyes as if trying to see if I was joking. Satisfied she sat up straight and announced, "Katrinka Anastasia Pushkin Hill please."
Then she gave me a quick kiss on the lips, jumped up, and ran off. Probably to tell Lani and Debra what I had said.
Sleeping was surprisingly easy with Kat never letting my hand go. We talked quietly while on guard and Kat confided in me just how she had gotten away from the farm. She said that when the men had arrived, she was out in the barn feeding the cattle. She was grabbed from behind, draped over the gate of the stall and raped. When the man was done, he pulled her around and hit her a couple of times. Kat had faked being knocked unconscious, and the guy left her to get his friends for more fun. As soon as he was out the front door, she left by the back and hid in the woods. She and her sister had played hide and seek in those woods for years, and no one would find her there. She watched from hiding as they fired the house and barn. She had been walking for three days when she came across us.
Our time at intercept was fun. We worked well together and we had several really good recordings to use and more tid-bits about the net we were going to work on.
The next day I tried to get everyone involved in the planning. I wanted to shut down this net, not just interfere with it. By the time our arty was firing I wanted these people to be shouting obscenities at each other and not even hear the incoming rounds. Lani proved to be a good brake on ideas that got too far out there, but there really weren't that many that we couldn't pull off.
That evening, as the time for step off got close, the tension was mounting until we finally climbed into the vehicles and fired them up. All the planning was done, all the messages sent, all the tapes compiled and in the hut, all the frequencies and azimuths plotted. Time to go.
I fired up the big old diesel, put her in gear, released the brakes, and gave the bitch the gas. Tree limbs broke against the hut and we were on the way. Ops site was only 10 minutes away and I didn't want to get there any sooner than necessary. I had to have an open sky above the system and that meant that we were visible. Just being in these sites made my blood curdle. All it would take is someone looking the wrong way at the wrong time and we were history. We would be here for the duration of this mission, and not a second more.
The goat pulled in under the trees just to the side of the clearing and I parked TACJAM right in the middle. Kat was on the far side of the cab and she got out and set the ground rod with the bumper mounted hydraulic ram as I got out and ran back to open the hut. Thirty30 seconds later the generator was screaming and the antenna was on its way into the air. While it was on the way up I was firing up the system and Deb had joined me in the hut. When the antenna reached its top she programmed in the azimuth and the polarity. We were using a slant polarity this time to widen our effect zone. It would take a little more power, but we would be able to target more receivers. Fleming got in with us and said that Lani had gotten "GO" from platoon ops.
The next ten minutes lasted forever. I was busy listening to and jamming the various stations using static, noise and bogus recordings. If I hadn't been so busy I would have laughed myself silly at what Stretch was doing to Yabloka. She was mimicking the supervisor from gun position two. The last I heard Yabloka was going to fuck Strelka 36 and all his kids and sell his wife back into the whorehouse where she had been when Strelka 36 had married her.
I kept an eye on the time and at 2004z the green lights flashed and I could feel the antenna beginning to fold and stow. We quickly shut everything down and jumped out of the hut. Adrenaline was pumping through me and I could see the flush on Fleming and Stretch that showed they felt the same. Lani was outside the door and said, "the first rounds should be hitting any time now, the LT said first class job; the ice cream is on her."
I could feel the rumble through the ground of a lot of explosives landing on target. I didn't pause though and headed for the door of the track. Kat already had the ground rod disconnected and was climbing in her side. Johnson and Fleming followed her and I goosed the old girl, following the blackout lights of the goat. For the first time since we had been conducting operations in this area of Czechoslovakia, our mission site was not obliterated as we left. We stopped a couple of miles down the road and waited for the all clear from platoon ops to proceed to HQ for some badly needed rest.