“Doodlebugs!” The call went up from several points in the camp. Then the sirens cut off. There was an eerie silence as the troops on the ground listened to the uneven rumble as the missiles approached. Rockingham found himself willing them to keep going, to pass on to another target. Suddenly the sound cut out at the worst possible time, when the missile was almost directly overhead. “Everybody down!” The cry was universal as the entire base camp took cover. Rockingham was counting seconds until impact.
The explosion was devastating. The early Doodlebugs had used a cheap explosive that lacked shattering power but the newer ones didn’t. The missiles hit the ground in a shallow dive so that the warheads exploded above ground level. That maximized the area covered by the blast and fragments. Shattered glass from windows scythed across rooms. As always, the blast from the first explosion took strange and unpredictable paths that would leave one set untouched while the one beside it shattered into a silver rain. Even as the echoes of the first explosion faded, another took over. It rolled across the cantonment and the troops inside it. A third followed, then a fourth. Rockingham was prone on the floor of Rodger’s office, waiting for the explosions to cease. A fifth went off, then a sixth and he started to relax. Then he heard gunfire from the cantonment perimeter.
Sergeant Andrew Burns Currie shook his head to try and clear the cotton wool that seemed to have covered him. His Vickers gun was mounted in a solidly-constructed bunker made of pine logs set in an earthen embankment that was also reinforced with pine logs.
Currie saw his first rounds go wild, overhead, scattered into the greenery of the forests. He was still seeing slightly double but the comforting, familiar hammering of the Vickers gun was curing him faster than anything else could have done. It was a sovereign remedy for blast-shock, doing something so familiar that the brain didn’t have to think about it. He corrected his aim and walked the stream of machine gun fire into the group of skiers. They tumbled and fell, tangled in a heap as the steady burst chewed into them. The flat of his hand was beating lightly on the machine gun receiver, sending the barrel in a steady arc that raked the burst across the men who had been frantically trying to get to his position before the deadly tattoo could start. Then, he reached the end of his arc of fire and started back again, the same slow, steady, 450 rounds per minute, beat that crucified infantry in the open.
The attack wilted in front of him. There was a special art required of a medium machine gunner, a combination of skill, patience and determination. The Vickers gunners were a breed apart, recognized by a special combat badge and by the less desirable compliment of being the hated target of the enemy. A Vickers gunner had to have the fortitude to ignore what was happening in front of him, to resist the effort to concentrate his fire on threats. Instead, he had to sweep the line of bullets backwards and forwards across his beaten zone at a steady, specified rate. If he did so, then it would be impossible for an enemy to advance through that beaten zone. They would try, and they would die, cut down by the remorseless beat of the Vickers Gun. But, if the gunner was not resolute, if he started to try and fire on the advancing threats individually, tried to use his judgment in shooting down the most pressing threats first, then the deadly web of fire would be broken and the enemy could advance into the beaten zone and survive.
Sergeant Andrew Burns Currie was a very resolute man. The stream of fire from his gun swept backwards and forwards across his assigned beaten zone. In front of him, the Finnish infantry died.
The Finns, or those that had survived, had already gone to ground, trying to escape from the remorseless machine gun. They were firing rifles at the embankment, and particularly at the machine gun bunkers, Apple and Baker. There was no problem in spotting them. Each was marked by a little cloud of steam as the Vickers guns boiled off the water that kept the barrels cool. Water, in the form of snow, was another thing that was not in short supply during a winter on the Kola Peninsula. Currie saw a concentration of impacts around the biggest group of Finnish survivors and for a moment thought that Apple had broken its swing to fire on them. He quickly realized the thought was unworthy of him, Apple was raking its beaten zone just as methodically and systematically as Baker. The impacts were coming from rifle and Bren Gun fire.
The streams of .303 bullets from the two Vickers guns and Currie could only guess how many rifles and Brens were suddenly augmented by explosions around the dip where the Finns were clustered. Currie grinned at the sight, even as his methodical sweeps ignored it.
Time to switch targets. Currie elevated his barrel just a touch and now his stream of bullets was raking the treeline from which the Finnish skiers had debouched. Apple followed suit and now the two Vickers Guns were lacing the trees with their methodical patterns of fire. Neither gun stopped firing, anybody who knew the Vickers Gun also knew that they usually went wrong when starting a burst. Once they were working, they kept on working. The two steady, methodical 450 rounds per minute streams of fire never stopped. Now their interlocking patterns meant that nobody could get out of that treeline alive.
Rockingham lifted the wooden shoulder stock of his Capsten Gun to his shoulder and squeezed off a burst across the compound. That was an advantage the Canadian submachine gun had over the Russian and German models; its magazine loaded from the side. That made it possible for a man to fire from a fully-prone position or take cover beside a window and fire out. The Capsten had its critics, a bit of misplaced gaspipe with a magazine some called it, but it had its merits.
Unfortunately, this one was a Mark III; an older model that used the original Russian 7.62 Tokarev round. His troops had the new Mark V with longer barrel and the hot Tokarev Magnum the Yanks had developed. Rockingham squeezed off another burst in the general direction of the Finnish infiltrators that were working their way through the base.
“Watch it, John!” Rodger’s voice was urgent. Rockingham had been about to sneak a look out but the warning stopped him cold. “There’ll be snipers all over the shop. Those damned Finns can shoot the nuts off a mosquito.”
To confirm his words, there was a crack and the wood beside Rockingham’s head exploded into fragments. The sniper must have guessed where he would be and tried a shot to see if it would penetrate the wood. It hadn’t, but the splinters spalling off the inside had been bad enough. Rockingham could feel his cheek wet. He tried another quick burst and changed the magazine.
“Friend!”
The voice had come from inside. Rodgers drew his Browning Hi-Power. The double-stack magazine for 7.62 Tokarev made for a bulky pistol but it was fine when one got used to it. It gave the user a lot of firepower; much
