Blind Fire (19 page)
‘Abuse...? You mean... hey, that’s dirty.’ Ripper had never heard a woman talk like that before. Not even Charlene, and she’d been real fond of men, had sampled almost all of them around town, some said even her pa’s German shepherd. The big guy was welcome to this one, talking dirty like that. It weren’t decent.
Frankfurt was lit up below them. There was no blackout in force, it was only in the Zone that showing a light could bring down death in any of a dozen different forms. Beyond it, the illumination of the towns and cities on either side gave unmistakable warning to any bomber crew that it might have strayed too far from its target, and the gain from a single contrived ‘accident’ could not be worth the dislocation of transport and manufacturing that would come with the inevitable retaliation. But sometimes there were accidents, real ones, and then the hot lines would burn, ‘arrangements’ would be reached, notes exchanged through neutral countries and the incident buried as swiftly as its victims.
The pace was set by the war on the ground, a situation that suited the Russians with the huge reserves of armour and trained manpower they had built up during the sixties and seventies. And it suited the NATO command, all too aware of its relative weakness in strike aircraft after the near destruction of the air-arm at the beginning of the war, when planes and pilots had been thrown away in desperate attempts to stem the communist advance.
There was no traffic on the streets. With the odd exception, every vehicle had been pulled into the side of the road before its driver and passengers had sought the safety of the deep shelters.
The city was like a body that had recently been taken off a life support machine. All the organs functioned for the time being, but without the brain’s direction it would not be long before they faltered and stopped.
‘Close as I can figure, we should be about over them now.’ ‘What’s our altitude?’ Revell leant over the pilot’s shoulder to try to read the instrument himself.
‘Two thousand. You want me to circle?’
‘Yes, and can you take us down further.’ Pilot and co-pilot exchanged glances. It was the co-pilot who spoke for them both.
‘You know we’ve got no armour on this tub. All we’ve got is the flak-jackets we’re sitting on, and they’re staying there. They can shoot my head off, but I’m keeping my balls.’
‘Just a couple of passes should do it, then you can drop us and go home.’ ‘OK, a couple, and then off.’ Pushing the stick forward, the pilot put the Chinook into a steep spiralling dive to twelve hundred feet.
They beat across the industrial estate, over warehouses, light engineering works, a small chemical plant. A man was stationed at every window, every doorway, and still there was no sign of the Russian tanks.
‘I know they’re down there.’ Screwing up his eyes, Revell urged himself to greater concentration. ‘Start the second run.’ ‘Nothing.’ The pilot took time to look down at the well-lit metalled roads and floodlit storage yards laced with sidings. ‘Command must have given us the wrong references ... Shit, no they didn’t.’
From a service station forecourt gobs of fuzzy bordered luminescence climbed towards them, seeming to travel faster as they approached. A second stream joined the first as it cut the air behind them.
The Chinook’s airframe was shaken hard enough to fracture its welds, as the pilot opened the throttles and jinked the chopper away from the chasing tracer.
‘The buggers are refuelling.’ Dooley shouted as he replied to the hostile fire with short bursts from an M60 he held out of the open door. His targets were far beyond the weapon’s effective range, and the tracks of the tracer were lost against the service station’s floodlit forecourt.
‘Put us down as close as you can.’
On Revell’s instructions, the chopper executed a tight half-turn, came to a dead stop, and went straight down like an express elevator.
First out, Revell supervised the fast disembarkation of the others. Hyde was last, carrying the heavy designator. He waved to the chopper’s crew, his words inaudible through the thrashing of the blades above his head, and gave them a thumbs-up.
The pilot didn’t have to hear the order, he’d anticipated it as the last of the squad jumped clear. With a rising scream, the high set engines went to full power and lifted the Chinook into the air.
Three hundred feet above the car park in which it had dropped them, the chopper’s front engine gave out a series of flame-accompanied bangs from its exhaust stack. Its rate of climb slowed and stopped and it hung there, its underside clearly illuminated by the light from the street lamps.
Tracer flicked past it, one round flashing like a firework display as it burst against a rotating blade. Another joined it, then a third. Several of the bursts went into the cabin, or bounced from its curved sides, going off at wild angles.
Just when the faulty engine picked up once more, and the helicopter began to lift again, two of the lines of bullets found the front rotor assembly. Shedding blades and shining lengths of transmission shaft the Chinook staggered, then began to whirl around in a flat spin as it plunged earthwards. The point of impact was out of their sight, beyond a long low building flanked by rows of hoppers and silos. They heard the crash, and anticipated the bubble of flame that soared and flared briefly in the darkness.
Hyde put his arm out, and held Libby back. ‘Nothing you can do, not going in from that height.’
A shower of fluttering strips of burning paper rained from the sky. Charred pornography, fragments of maps, pages of logbooks made a fiery flurry of litter.
When the last pieces were consumed and their ashes fell and broke on the roads and rooftops, Revell tore his eyes from the scene as the sound of tank engines intruded. ‘Get on that radio. I want a link with our battery kept open all the time. All of you, stay close, remember our task is to provide covering fire for Sergeant Hyde with the laser, so I don’t want anybody starting a shooting war on his own account.’
One of the T84s was still at the pumps, its crew working frantically to complete the replenishment and join the other four tanks waiting along the road. The turret- mounted anti-aircraft machine gun of every one was manned.
While the others fanned out to either side, Hyde and Cohen took up positions among precarious stacks of weathered and much stencilled packing cases in a yard across from the gas station. Checking the laser projector was looked into the correct frequency, Hyde turned on the designator to warm it up.
‘I’m ready. One round to start.’ He settled behind the box and targeted on the T84. This was his own little world, where he could be God. Where he was God, dispensing death with precision. Anything within his field of vision he could destroy. Beside him, Cohen was droning the map reference into the radio; it wouldn’t be long now.
Hyde was counting down the seconds. Thirty; the Russian crew had almost finished. One of them threw aside the hose, letting the last gush of fuel spew across the forecourt. Twenty; he’d leave triggering the beam until the last moment. If the T84 had sensors aboard, he’d give its crew no time to act on their warning. Ten seconds; grey smoke spouted from the rear of the vehicle as it began a jerking turn that would take it out on to the road. Switch on ... now.
High above the city, at the apogee of its soaring, thirty thousand yard trajectory, the rocket-boosted Copperhead artillery shell began its hurtling descent towards its general target area. Its ultra-sensitive seeker instrumentation, activated by the violence of its 7,000g launch, began to search for sources of laser radiation.
Almost immediately, it detected that being bounced from the hull of the accelerating T84. The round checked the frequency code of the emission it was homing on, matched it with its pre-programmed information and deployed its stubby mid-body wings.
Travelling at incredible velocity, the tiny control surfaces only had to move fractionally to carry out the final course corrections and bring it to its target. The fifty pound high explosive squash-head charge made a direct hit on the turret top beside the gunner’s hatch. The metal could offer no meaningful resistance to the forces unleashed against it...
As the service station’s high set canopy lifted off its girder supports and disintegrated, a roaring fireball engulfed the pumps and seared the front of the workshops behind them. The T84 rolled out of the flames, towing them with it, and minus every external fitting. It struck a row of cars and climbed on to them, bursting out their windshields and crushing their bodywork, before canting over and toppling on to its side.
A river of blazing fuel gushed from its ruptured hull, pouring down drains and into cracked-open inspection covers. Destruction became complete when the first of the underground storage tanks erupted and showered thousands of gallons of fuel across the area.
Tremors shook the ground as petrol ignited in the confines of the drains and sewers. A second storage tank blasted a hole in the forecourt and sent semi-molten brass valves and fittings and jagged lumps of concrete through the walls and roofs of nearby factories.
‘They’re coming after us.’ Cohen punched the sergeant’s shoulder to get his attention when shouting failed. ‘Look, they’re coming for us.’
Closed down, their co-axial machine guns sweeping the frontages to either side, the last four Soviet tanks were bearing down on them. Their leader fired its main cannon, and blasted a SeaLand container truck parked nearby.
‘Get me another round.’ Grabbing the radio-man’s wrist, Hyde pulled him back down.
Cohen was sending even before the sergeant had finished speaking. ‘ ...and we need it now, like right now.’ He sweated as he watched the T84 coming closer and closer. A burst punched through the crates above their heads and his pounding heart recorded every second that passed. Now the lead tank was only a hundred yards away, and he hugged the radio pack to his chest. ‘Isn’t that bloody shell ever coming?’
‘Another seven seconds I think,’ Hyde was perfectly cool, even sparing the time to answer a question to which the radio-man had expected no reply. The hawser- draped hull filled the viewfinder, the tiny green power-pack condition indicator in the bottom left-hand corner of the miniature screen was superimposed on a mud- spattered, crumpled track guard.
The tank burst apart as its own ammunition added its explosive force to the Copperhead’s pulverising impact. A blackened torso thudded on to the road, to be crushed by the tracks of the other tanks as they bulldozed past the hulk. ‘What are you waiting for? Let’s get the hell out of here.’ Revell grabbed the designator’s other handle and, with Cohen following, helped Hyde with it to the wire mesh fence on the far side of the yard.
As they ducked and squeezed through the gap the lieutenant had cut and held open for them, they could hear the packing cases tumbling and splintering before the Russians’ unchecked advance.
They were only halfway across the steel stockyard when the leading armour effortlessly flattened the fence. A man shouted and fell as it opened up with its secondary cannon. Hyde caught a glimpse of the machine gun victim’s face. It was the Yank with whom he’d shared the boiled sweets.
‘Set it up here.’ Revell darted in behind a huge bright yellow Lancing-Boss forklift, dragging Hyde with him.
‘How many rounds?’ Kneeling beside them, Cohen was already in contact with the battery.
Hyde stripped the covers from the Hughes equipment. ‘Four, at twenty second intervals; as soon as they’re ready.’
The giant side-loader had vast ground clearance, and Hyde took aim from beneath its chassis. Nosing into the yard, the lead tank had slowed to a more cautious pace, but it was still coming on, and now it enjoyed the partial cover of the steel billets and coiled sheet strewn around, as well as the legs of various gantries.
It was the jib of an overhead crane that intercepted the first shot, and as the thunder of its crashing to the ground died away, the second struck a rack of seamless tubing.
A 125mm shell exploded against the far side of the fork-lift, rocking it on its suspension and punishing the ears of the men in its shelter.
‘Bloody hell, they build these things tough.’ Using his teeth, Burke tied a knot in the improvised bandage he’d wrapped around a gash in his left forearm. ‘But for Christ’s sake clobber that Ruskie next time, Sarge, it might not soak up a second.’
Oblivious to everything else, Hyde concentrated on the approaching T84. The tank constantly had to dog-leg to right or left to find a route through the cluttered yard, and each time it did another stack of metal would take it from his sight. It was at such a moment that the third Blind Fire round came down, and blasted a tangled pile of scrap.
Revell had already passed the word, and as it emerged unscathed from the smoke the T84 was met by a hail of rifle and machine gun fire and a storm of 40mm grenades.
It came on through it all, shrugging aside the puny bullets and suffering no more than loss of paint and damage to some external equipment from the grenades. All three grenades that Andrea fired struck the vehicle’s turret front, and all three exploded harmlessly. She was prevented from firing her last by Dooley. ‘Go for the driver’s periscope. Blind the fucker.’
Taking the advice, and a fraction longer over aiming, she put the next round on to the target, and saw the tank suddenly veer off course and slow.
It was the chance Hyde had been waiting for, and he guided the last of the 155mm shells on to the T84s engine deck. The resulting explosion all but cut the tank in half, and the fire that followed lit the stockyard like day.
Climbing on to the forklift, Revell looked for the last two tanks. Their way blocked by their blazing companion, they had lowered their underbelly blades and were carving a way round it. Slabs and sheets of metal squealed and made masses of sparks as they were rammed and shoved aside. He’d hoped to have bought a longer respite from pursuit, but the Russians weren’t letting up pressure for a moment. All day he had been the hunter, now the roles had been reversed, and he didn’t like it. Jumping down, he was chased by a long burst of machine gun fire, and as he led his squad at a sprint through the yard the forklift was struck by two shells simultaneously and collapsed on to its nose as one giant wheel was wrenched off, and another flayed and set alight.