Blind Fire (13 page)

‘Who will it be next?’ It was something he had to ask. There was no hesitation, no surprise or mock confusion. ‘Perhaps the one who knows about heavy weapons, Libby. Or perhaps the big man, Dooley.’ ‘Yes, you’ll learn about fighting from him, and end up having to fight him off. Is that what you want? Or don’t you mind so long as you pick up some useful tips on bayonet work?’
‘Yes, I mind. But he will not touch me, I can look after myself. And if he should try, then I shall do something to him that will prevent his ever trying again.’

Not for a moment did Clarence doubt her, she meant every word. Perhaps he was fortunate that his sex drive was dormant. Had he not been restrained by the crushing weight of his memories, it would have been very easy to feel strongly attracted to this superb young woman. Perhaps in time he would have been.

He looked at the scratch marks on the wall beside him. It needed just one more, just one to bring his score to two hundred. The opportunity came almost immediately. Only two blocks away, a Russian tank commander was hobbling down a side street. There was lots of time, even more when the target stopped to rest and rub a leg that a torn pair of coveralls revealed as livid and swollen. The powerful telescopic sight allowed him to see the man’s face clearly as he grimaced from the pain of his wound.

Slowly and deliberately, Clarence aligned the cross-hairs on the man’s thorax, at the base of his breastbone. A bullet there would do terrible damage, smashing ribs and driving them through the stomach and into most of the essential organs. Very gently, the sniper crooked his finger around the trigger. At the instant he exerted the slight pressure necessary, he jerked the tip of the barrel upwards.

Its velocity unimpeded by the padded helmet through which it first passed, the bullet stoved in the top of the Russian’s head as he bent down. Coming out of the back of his neck, the now deformed round splattered hair and tissue and lumps of starred cranium across the wall on which he was leaning. The body slumped to a crouched position, head on knees, arms folded around them.

There was nothing special about number two hundred, nothing to mark the corpse as any different from the hundred and ninety-nine that had gone before, except that for a brief moment Clarence had come close to forgetting his real reason for doing it. Damn it, she had almost got to him. Well to hell with her, let her latch on to one of the others, he didn’t need her. He didn’t need anybody.

A movement in the graveyard caught his attention, and the faces of his children were before him as he took aim. He was remembering again, prepared to collect another payment.

TEN
‘We can’t just let him bleed to death.’ Ripper swabbed the deep red blood bubbling from the row of punctures in Wilson’s chest with an already saturated field dressing.

Libby made a quick inspection of the ground-floor front lounge of the little house into which they had dragged the wounded man. With the exception of the locked door they’d kicked in to gain entry, it must have looked exactly the same as it did the day its owners had been forced to hurriedly abandon it. A large polished dresser appeared promising. Keeping low, and wedging the damaged door back into place as he passed it, he crossed the sculptured bronze-coloured carpet and tried each drawer in turn. From the third and fourth he took handfuls of napkins and a large white cotton tablecloth.

‘Here,’ he tossed them to the young American, ‘use these. Bind them tight around his chest. It might help.’

As Ripper stripped off the soaked jacket and shirt, Libby went to the window, and standing back from it, using the cover of the partially drawn curtains, watched the Russians working to separate the truck from the carrier.

They had not bothered with a pursuit. Apart from posting a few nervous-looking machine gunners in various doorways, they seemed far more interested in getting mobile again. While they worked with sledgehammers and crowbars to part the entangled metal, the vehicle’s turret constantly rotated to cover them with its heavy cannon.

With a final rain of massive blows, delivered by a hulking senior sergeant who had grabbed the hammer from a fast tiring private, the Russians were at last able to push the truck clear. A captain, who until now had not stooped to manual work, stepped forward and taking the implement from the sergeant, prodded the carrier’s broken track.

‘They’re not going anywhere in a hurry.’ Leaving the window, Libby went to where Ripper had at last succeeded in fastening the improvised bandage. A huge white bow stood up on Wilson’s chest, rapidly turning from pink to red, as it absorbed the continuing flow.

Wilson was unconscious. Each laboured breath brought another trickle of blood from the side of his mouth. The vivid streak running down his chin was in stark contrast with his pallor.

‘What d’yer reckon. He gonna make it?’

‘No.’ It was brutally abrupt, but Libby knew he’d be doing no favours by saying anything else, by holding out false hope. God only knew what had kept the Yank alive so far. He was hit in the lungs and must have lost the best part of four pints of blood already. It was everywhere, staining the carpet and Ripper and him.

‘Aw shit. This weren’t supposed to happen.’ Ripper made minor adjustments to the absurd bow, now losing its shape and collapsing as it blotted up more and more blood. ‘We only came out here for a spot of fun, to get a medal. What am I gonna tell his wife? He only got married just afore he came out here. Sally’s expecting in the spring.’
‘You want to tell her anything you better concentrate on keeping yourself alive, that’s unless you want to end up like him.’ It wasn’t the casualty on the floor Libby was referring to. He jerked his thumb towards the scene of the collision. ‘Did you know him as well?’

Not taking his eyes off his friend, Ripper shook his head. ‘First time I seen him was today. They gonna do that to Wilson as well?’

It always came as a shock to the new men, the first time they saw the treatment meted out by the Russians to the bodies of NATO troops. Libby had seen it too often to still be deeply affected, but now and again some communist NCO or officer would come up with a new idea, and then the atrocities listed against the Warsaw Pact forces would be lengthened by yet another degrading obscenity.

The body of the truck’s driver had been extricated from the crushed metal of the cab, and a couple of Russians, directed by the hammer-wielding senior sergeant, had roughly nailed it to a door before dousing it in fuel and setting it alight.

Now the corpse’s bullet-shattered head drooped to contemplate with empty soot- filled sockets the charred ruin of its body, dose-by, the APC’s crew worked on their damaged track, apparently oblivious to the appalling stench.

‘If they find him, I expect they’ll make the time. They don’t ever get leave, or much free time come to that, so they look on it as a sort of entertainment, light relief. That’s nothing to what they get up to if they get hold of our wounded.’

‘That’s sick. Hell, where I’m from we got some real mean guys. The sort of fellas who’d stamp you into the ground, then come back and sue yer for damaging their boots, but that lot out there, they’re sick. I heard the stories, but that...’

‘That’s nothing.’ Libby got out another tablecloth and pulled dust sheets off the furniture to make blankets. A spasmodic shaking gripped the wounded man and his hands and forearms were cold to the touch. He draped them over him, tucking them in about his chin.

‘Ever since the revolution, they’ve been doing a bugger sight worse things to their own people. How many did Stalin get through, twenty million? And how many was it that Brezhnev starved in the labour camps, or had tortured in the Lubianca, or turned into cabbages by sticking them in. mental wards and pumping them full of drugs? The civvies back home think they’re such a fucking clever crowd, keeping the war in the Zone. All they’re bloody doing is giving the commies more time to practise. If they gave us the weapons and the men to do the job once and for all, we could shove them all the way to bloody Siberia, and back into the fucking dark ages.’
‘Seems to me as some of them reckon they’re still there.’

‘They are.’ Slowly and carefully, Libby slid another cushion beneath Wilson’s head as pink bubbles formed at his nostrils. ‘The commies are at about the same level as the Japs were at the start of World War Two, and you know what they got up to.’
‘He feels awful cold.’

Libby moved Ripper’s hand, and felt for a pulse. It was hard to find, weak and fluttery. ‘Not long now. Better get ready to move out. Sounds like there’s still plenty of fighting going on in the centre of town.’ ‘I’m not leaving him, no way.’ There was aggression in Ripper’s abrupt announcement.
‘That wasn’t what I said…’ The bubbles had stopped growing and popping at Wilson’s nostrils. Libby sought the pulse again. ‘…but there’s no point in staying now. He’s gone.’
‘Give me a grenade.’ Ripper held out his hand. ‘Are you thinking of doing something silly?’ Without giving it a second thought, Libby had reached for one of the fragmentation grenades attached to his webbing. He paused, and didn’t unclip it.
‘I’m gonna get me a commie battle taxi. I owe it.’ The long thin bony fingers were still held out towards him, making opening and closing grasping gestures. ‘You can’t take out an APC with one of these. The best you’ll manage is to stir up a bloody hornet’s nest.’

‘OK, so tell me how I do it then.’ He’d withdrawn his hand and was now stripping Wilson’s body of its spare ammunition. ‘I reckon it’d please him if I used some of his lead for this job. That’d be a kinda justice, don’t you think?’ ‘I suppose so. Alright, we’ll do it together, but we do it my way.’ Libby handed over two grenades. ‘You remember that. My way.’

‘Don’t matter a cuss to me which way, so long as it gets done.’ Before standing up, Ripper removed Wilson’s dog-tags. They were wet and sticky with congealed blood. ‘I sure do wish I could take him home to Sally, for a decent Christian burial. Don’t seem right, leaving him here, like this.’ ‘You can tell graves registration. Make a note of the address, otherwise he might lay here for years. They’ll take care of him. He’ll have a proper burial, eventually.’ ‘Yeah, I’ll do that.’ Ripper flicked the edge of a dust sheet over the pale face. ‘Now how about we go kill ourselves a whole parcel of commies?’

All the houses on the road had been locked, a symbol of the touchingly hopeful faith of the town’s fleeing inhabitants in the possibility of returning one day. It was difficult to quietly gain access to one close by the scene of the collision, and when they at last resorted to breaking a pane of glass, the sound of its falling on to a tiled kitchen floor seemed monstrously loud, coming as it did during a short lull in the battle.

There was a smell of decay in the house, strongest near the expensive fitted units in the kitchen. Green mould filled the shelves of an open fridge and spread across the floor, following the course the melted ice had taken. On a worktop, there was evidence that a meal had been in the midst of preparation when the alert had sounded.

‘You looking for something?’ Expecting to head straight for the front of the building, Ripper couldn’t work out what was going on, when Libby lingered in the kitchen to rake and rummage through every cupboard.

Stuffing an assortment of clinking bottles and various garish plastic containers into a pedal bin liner he hastily emptied of stale rubbish, Libby ignored the question, then led his companion at a fast pace through the dining room and lounge and up the stairs to the top floor. They barely made it in time.

Some of the Russians had begun to take an interest in the contents of the houses about them, and one after another front doors were collapsing before determined shoulder charges.

‘Better get ready. They could try here soon.’ Taking one of the containers from the bag, Libby ripped a sheet into strips and began to bind a grenade to it. ‘Give me a hand then.’ He pushed a selection across the double bed to Ripper. ‘Now what’s this supposed to do?’ Ripper examined the label on a two litre bottle of lavatory cleaner, an illustration making its application obvious. ‘You want to make them clean round the bend?’

‘Funny, ha, ha. Just bloody do it.’ Finishing the first, Libby picked up a bottle of bleach and gave that similar treatment. Tm fed up with being on the receiving end of that chemical muck the Ruskies are forever chucking about, it’s our turn to have a go with the stuff. Or at least make the buggers think we are. Soon as they catch a whiff of this, you watch them panic’ Cautiously, he moved to the window.

The Russians were beginning to emerge with their booty from the houses they had already looted. As they sorted it, deciding what to keep and what to abandon, their decisions were frequently peculiar, prompted more by whether or not it was possible to get a particular object aboard their transport than by the value of the article.

Their officer strolled about with an affected attitude of disinterest, but now and again he would pounce on one of the piles and appropriate some piece for himself, handing them to a private staggering along in his wake, burdened with a bulging valise.

As a pair of junior sergeants approached the house, there came a shout from the men working on the damaged track. They had completed the repairs. With their officer deeply occupied with gaining a larger than fair share of the strangely assorted loot, the enemy machine gun teams began a hasty and incautious withdrawal back to the APC.

‘There won’t be a better chance than this.’ Libby took a grenade and attached bleach container, and pulled out the pin. ‘Lose that window when I tell you.’

Down below, spurred on by the continuing sounds of bitter fighting from elsewhere in the town, the Russians were forgetting rank and manners as they made a crush at the carrier’s rear doors.

‘Now!’
Twenty rounds from Ripper’s assault rifle shattered the still rain-dotted panes and broke apart the peeling frames. Through the hail of spinning fragments the ill- balanced contrivance tumbled end over end. It struck the road a few yards short of the carrier and went off immediately in a great cloud of steam and spray.

The sudden and overpowering stench sent the Russians into a panic as it washed over them. The scramble to get into the carrier ceased abruptly and every man snatched frantically at the pouch holding his respirator, elbowing others aside to lift it to his face.