Foxtrot 6

This is my new story. People have commented that my stories aren't long enough. I hope this suits them better. As always, your comments are welcomed, and I will respond to them.

Foxtrot Six.

Chapter 1 - Reconnaissance

Russian Enclave of Kaliningrad Oblast, Baltic Coast, Friday, 28 June 2024

'KIIITTTT!'

The word was shouted; drawn out, extended on the 'I' for a good two seconds and ended with emphasis on the 't'. Kit, the British military slang word for any equipment issued to soldiers.

Mike calls out the details.

'It's a column of nine... no... ten Russian Buk self-propelled air defence missile units.'

Basically the Buk's a tracked armoured vehicle which, depending on their role, are either radar Target Acquisition Radar vehicles or Transporter Erector Launcher vehicles equipped with surface-to-air missiles.

'Ten of the buggers,' I say quietly, 'that's a bloody battalion is that.'

'You're picking up a Manchester accent mate,' Mike snorts in a Lancashire accent so strong that can only be sliced with a chainsaw.

He keeps the digital night vision binoculars with the built in video camera firmly trained on the line of mechanised SAM launchers. I know that he's taking lots and lots of pictures. Even banter can't distract him.

'You're surprised?' I reply, 'hanging with you lot day in day out.'

I grab the Nikon Digital SLR with its unfeasibly long telephoto zoom lens and start making the most of this Kodak moment. The camera and night vision gear actually helps reinforce our cover story if we get bagged. We're a couple of natural history buffs who got lost. The border between Russia and Poland is notoriously porous round here. It's plausible that the border, marked only by red and green striped boundary markers could be crossed by accident. Well, maybe that should be almost plausible.

'Didn't you used to be a Brummie or something until you came up north?' he comments.

'No, I don't come from Birmingham, I come from Stoke,' I tell him. 'Geographically we're part of the West Midlands, but in reality we're the north's red headed stepchild.'

Mike Braithwaite snorts with amusement. He's a squat, powerfully built guy who sports a droopy Zapata moustache and ever-present yellow tinted aviator glasses.

The most important thing to know about Mike is that he's army barmy. Waiting for our flight over to Poland we'd had a couple of beers in the departure lounge. It was the first time in the twelve months since I started at the Institute that we've had the opportunity to have a meaningful conversation about anything other than work.

Over the beer he'd told me that he'd wanted to be a soldier since he was a little boy. He couldn't wait until his eleventh birthday when he was able to join the army cadets. His ambition had been to eventually join the paras.

At FE college he'd been on a uniformed services course. It wasn't quite military enough for Mike, however, so he joined the army reserves too. And that's when it happened.

While on a training weekend he'd been on an assault course when he fell and hit his head. The medics checked him over and realised that there was something wrong. Further tests revealed that he had a detached retina. And that was the end of his military career.

Now, in his spare time, he's an adult sergeant instructor in the army cadets. It's as close as he'll ever get to soldiering.

We both work for the Trans-Atlantic Institute for Strategic Studies. A think tank with a foot on each side of the Atlantic, having study centres attached to universities in Manchester in the UK and North Carolina in the States. I'm based at the Manchester centre, ostensibly as a project research assistant while I also work part-time on a PhD in history.

The Institute is, at least according to the website: 'an independent Non Government Organisation, produce evidence-based research, publications, conferences and custom briefings on defence and security, whose mission is to help build a stronger trans-Atlantic relationship. There is, However, more to the Institute than meets the eye.

So, where do you reckon they're going?'

'Obvious isn't it? They're heading for Chernyakhovsk Air Base,' I answer, 'We worked it out by looking of Google Earth during the pre-planning meeting back in Manchester. That track can only go there.'

This is the second Buk SAM battalion we've seen crossing the countryside in the night.

'The Russian High Command know they can't beat our surveillance satellites,' Mike said, 'but by conducting a nocturnal redeployment they hope to prevent prying eyes noticing what they're doing. That way they can prevent major intel leakage onto social media.'

'Ey, tovarishch general, kak ideya rabotayet?' I muttered in bad Russian.

'What's that mate?' Mike asked.

'I said; 'hey comrade general, how's that working out for you".'

'Not so good I reckon,' he chuckles.

The path they're on only goes to one place; they're redeploying back to the air base. But that's why we're here, as in a CROPS position, a Covert Rural Observation Post. It's a wooded hill in a nature reserve that's open to the public, but overlooks a fork in the road where two dirt tracks converge in the Kaliningrad Defensive Area.

We've got a Toyota Hilux hardtop SUV, it's parked up under a clump of trees. We've draped it with a camouflage net. It's not brilliant but it'll have to do.

From our position we've got an unobstructed view of traffic moving to the military air base. With the photographic evidence we've now got, it confirms what I began to suspect six weeks earlier.

I first became aware that something was going on when observed that social media users had noticed an up-tick in Russian military cargo flights, particularly An-124 and Il-76 military transport aircraft out of Kaliningrad. As the region shares land borders exclusively with NATO member states, flights from Kaliningrad back to Mother Russia cross the Baltic Sea and international airspace meaning that they have turn on their transponders, an electronic device that produces a response when it receives a radio-frequency interrogation. This means that their flights are logged on various websites, and it's easy to track them.

The Russians were beginning to withdraw their air defence systems from the Baltic enclave. The question is where?

I suspected that they were moving them to Rostov-on-Don. Recent Ukrainian strikes using long-distance missiles and drones had damaged Russian air defences in the occupied Luhansk region. Now all I needed was evidence to prove that the

Russians were on the move.

I reported this to Aaron Stone, the American boss of the Trans-Atlantic Institute for Strategic Studies. Reports originating from the Institute were marked as 'Foxtrot Six'. The letter 'F' is 'Foxtrot' in the NATO phonetic alphabet and the sixth letter in the alphabet.

He had been able to sell my theory to our clients; the Pentagon and Whitehall. But they wanted more intel before they acted on it. They wanted eyes on the ground to get evidence. Which is why Mike and I are here.

But right now I was beginning to think it was time we weren't here. I can hear the sound of helicopter rotor blades. Faint but getting louder.

'We've got company mate, a chopper,' I announce, and then start scanning round with my own digital binoculars. 'Yeah, it's a Mil 17 Hip, coming in from the east...'

'...All the better to have the rising sun behind it,' Mike says thoughtfully, 'sounds like the pilot knows what he's doing.'

'You reckon?' I mutter laconically. 'Any road, it's time we weren't here.'

'Ah, yeah, we'd better make like shepherds,' he says, 'and get the flock out of here.'

+++

Chapter 2 - Just a Blow Job

The Warehouse Serviced Apartments, the Northern Quarter, Manchester, Saturday, 29 June 2024

The alarm on Nell's phone shattered what little sleep she'd managed to grab. She'd got home at quarter to three in the morning and now she had to get up at the crack of dawn. Well, eleven AM if she was being strictly accurate.

Nell threw the duvet back, she'd gotten into bed naked simply because she'd been too damned tired to put her PJs on. She grabbed what passed for her nightwear, one of her flatmate Smith's old rugby jumpers. She'd 'borrowed' from him when he wasn't looking. It was at least a couple of sizes too big for her, but it felt...comforting. She shuffled into the bathroom.

Just a blow job she mused. That was all it was supposed to be. There aren't any dignified names for it. Call it 'fellatio' and at least it sounds like the pastime of the euro trash jet set. But it's still just a blow job when you get right down to it.

Nell looked at her reflection in the mirror and winced. Her left eye was swollen and purple; she had a shiner. The bastard had done a hell of a job on her. There was no way round it, makeup wouldn't conceal her black eye.

And Smith, her roomie, was due back. He texted her on Wednesday to say he that he'd had to go to Poland for three days to attend an emergency conference. Whatever the hell one of those is. He was supposed to return today. Well, there was no way she was going to meet him at the airport. She didn't own a pair of sunglasses big enough to hide the damage.

When he gets home he'd take one look at her and lose his shit. Which would be an extreme reaction considering that they were only room-mates. It's not like he was her boyfriend or something.

Though Nell had to admit, she wouldn't mind if he was. Smith was just over six feet tall and big with it, having broad shoulders and a muscular build that was, now that he was in his thirties, beginning to show the first signs of running to flab. His hair was dirty blond and shaggy. To be honest it could do with a trim. But it was his piercing blue eyes that she first noticed about him. Nell had to admit, cute.

They'd been sharing the rent on the flat in the centre of the city for six months and he had always behaved like a perfect gentleman. Damn him. But she was working on him, gradually working him down. She was a woman who always got her own way.

Nell had grown up in Whatcha Falls in the Texas Panhandle. Her dad was career military, a full bird colonel in the air force at Shepherd AFB. Her mother had been a veterinarian. But when Nell was ten, her mom was killed in a car accident.

From the age of ten to twelve her life was a haze of lawyers and frozen dinners; in the end, the family received a settlement, a significant portion of which was put into a trust fund for her. But once the dust settled life at home got rough.

She had known since she was young that something wasn't right. She didn't feel like she was a boy. Nell wasn't comfortable with the skin she was in. As she entered her early teens, she began exploring her options; experimenting with girls clothes and makeup. This did not sit well with her father; he was very conservative in his views on most things, and rock solid on the concept of gender identity. He was into classic rock, one of his favourite bands was the Kinks. But despite that he disagreed with Ray Davis' lyrics in Lola: 'girls will be boys and boys will be girls, It's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world.'

Another reason was that when she cross dressed Nell had a strong resemblance to her mother; they were both natural blonds, tall and athletically built. But that similarity only made things even uglier between Nell and her father when she came out as trans and started dressing as a female full time.

Despite her traumatic teenage years she managed to secure a college scholarship to San Francisco to study for an associate degree in law. Nell's end goal on graduation of becoming a paralegal. But after twelve months of her two-year degree, she realised that the law wasn't the profession for her.

San Francisco was where she began to transition. She started taking the feminizing hormone spironolactone and her body began to change. Nell began working as a waitress in the Playroom a trans bar in the Mission District. There other transwomen were supportive of her transition.

However, San Francisco was also the place and time where all her vultures came home to roost. She began to explore a party girl lifestyle, giving herself over to new experiences, the sort of thing that she'd kept away from at high school.

Soon she was caught in a maelstrom of bad relationships, drugs and alcohol. Nell managed to withdraw from school before she destroyed her GPA, but everything else was wrecked.

But Nell survived. She came out of the other side of her personal swamp clean and met Oliver, a nice older man. He was attracted to her and she enjoyed the steadying paternal influence of a sugar daddy. Oliver gave her the love and support her own father couldn't. He paid for the treatments and surgeries she needed to complete her transition. But in the end they got bored with each other and drifted apart.

After that relationship ended Nell spent a summer drifting aimlessly along the California's Pacific Coast Highway in her elderly MGB Roadster. She did some soul searching and a flash of inspiration came to her late one night in a motel as she watched TV. She was binge watching BBC America when what seemed to be the solution to her current situation occurred to her.

She had always been an Anglophile, and it seemed natural for her to cross the Atlantic and try again to get a degree. She applied online and had interviews for three British universities by Teams before she was offered a place at Manchester.

She was studying for a degree in fashion design, a subject that she felt much more comfortable with than law. Meemaw Abigail, her mom's mom, taught Nell to sew. Once she mastered the basics she began to design and make clothes.

As a student Nell was prepared for money to be tight. Her trust fund covered the tuition fees - but only just. British universities charge foreign students through the nose for the privilege of getting an education in their red brick cloisters.

Having enough cash to eat was a pinch, rent was out of the question. She made friends and was sofa surfing at her university buddy Kate's place, sleeping on her futon. It wasn't good and, at least technically, she was homeless. And when Kate graduated and moved back to her folks place she was

But she liked living in the UK. She found that the Brits got some things right. For instance there was the NHS over here. It wasn't necessary to go into financial meltdown just because you got sick. Then there was the fact that the Second Amendment didn't exist on this side of the pond. Gun control was a way of life here. Finally there was the way that most Brits accepted LGBT people. Sure there was some prejudice, there were homophobic and transphobic assholes everywhere. But compared with conservative, Republican Texas, the British trans community didn't know how lucky they were.

Smith was a friend. She met him a couple of months before Kate packed up and moved out. He'd just started working on a part time PhD in history. He was funding himself on a student loan, but he also worked part-time for a think tank. Whatever one of those is. It seemed to pay well though. The two bedroom serviced apartment was way better than the futon in her friend's living room, where she'd been staying previously.

So she worked to make ends meet. On the weekend Nell was a waitress at the Moulin Lounge, a drag burlesque club in the Gay Village on Canal Street. It was a retrograde step back to her time at the Playroom in California. But after strutting her stuff on stage, she was back front of house waiting tables. There were odd occasions when she met someone, and if they weren't too awful, she'd have a break to vape and take them out back into the alley where the Lounge's employees went to smoke. She'd give the guy a blow job. Usually they gave her some cash as a gift. She didn't think of it as prostitution, it was up to them if they expressed the appreciation for her oral talents. And the money helped to top up her wages for the night.

The guy she serviced last night got pissed off after he came of her boobs. Maybe he wanted to come in her mouth. That was a definite no-no as far as she was concerned. Safety is sexy. Nell was even prepared to admit that he got overcome with guilt at getting a blow job from a trans woman. Whatever the reason, he'd punched her in the face and run off into the night. The bastard.

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Chapter 3 - Pedal To The Metal

Russian - Polish border, Saturday, 29 June 2024.

'That bloody helicopter's still with us,' Mike hisses.

The Mil 17 had been shadowing the convoy as it travelled down the road. It was probably escorting the vehicles as they moved back to Chernyakhovsk. Whoever was in the helicopter had spotted us, even though we were camouflaged and in the forest nature reserve, an area that was open to the public, not the Kaliningrad Defensive Area, which obviously isn't.

The helicopter pilot had spotted us clearly watching the activity in the off limits military area and our presence pissed him off. But the people in the helicopter were almost irrelevant. It was the helicopter itself that had taken on the persona of the aggressor.

The Mil 17 Hip's an old school design. It's based on the Mil 8 helicopter, also called Hip just to be confusing. The Mil 8 first flew in 1961. The Mil 17's evolved from the older helicopter; same old school airframe but new engines, rotor blades and avionics.

The helicopter dropped to a hover about fifty feet above a junction five hundred metres ahead of us. I slowed the Hilux down and stopped at the side of the track. Suddenly the outrigger sponsons loaded down with rocket pods looked damn scary.

'What do we do then?' I asked.

'Well despite what Jeremy Clarkson and the old school Top Gear gammons reckon, the Hilux isn't indestructible,' Mike says thoughtfully, 'and those 80mm rocket pods could quite easily turn us into a smoking pile of wreckage.'

'Thanks for pointing out the patently bleeding obvious,' I answer tersely, 'now, how about you come up with something positive we can use?'

'We could go cross country and lose him under tree cover?' Mike suggests.

The helicopter began to move towards us, now only about thirty feet above the ground. It's doing what can only be described as a version of a scorpion's striking stance. It's nose was pointing down and towards us, the back end up and waving from side to side. The Hip came forwards oh so slowly, perilously close to a line tall trees that hemmed in the sides of the road.

'You know, if we're going for a drive in the country,' I slammed the Toyota into reverse, 'now's the time to do it.'

There's a bend a hundred metres behind us and I noticed that there was a narrow dirt track through the trees just beyond it. That's what I'm aiming for.

A fast glance at the speed display shows that we're doing forty miles an hour, in reverse, but speed is necessary for what comes next. Too slow and we'll just stall, becoming a dead duck. Too fast and me might spin out, completely missing our mark, and quite possibly rolling the SUV onto its roof.

'What's the bloody whuppa-whuppa up to?' I ask.

I'm looking over my shoulder as we hurtle backwards down the road.

'Oh, he's still there,' Mike says, 'the sod's stuck to us like glue.'

'Bugger.'

We near the turning point and I bring my foot up off the accelerator, transferring the Hilux's weight to the front wheels, providing maximum grip to the car's front end, and allowing for a swift and solid turn into my intended manoeuvre.

My hands are at one o'clock and seven o'clock on the wheel. It feels wrong for them to be in this position. Counter-intuitive and uncomfortable. But I've been on the defensive driving course on the runway of a defunct air base in Lincolnshire. I spent a long summer's day practising J-turns over and over again. Now I'm going to put into practice the theory I've been taught.