Hard Target (8 page)

As Dooley’s shout was first caught then mercifully smothered by the dense trees, it occurred to Collins, to wonder how long it would be before he became a shell, a husk, labelled only by extremes of mood as human. When Libby had been chosen to go with Hyde and Revell he’d thought himself lucky to be left behind. Now, as he watched Clarence’s legs continually circling as he laboriously hand cranked the turret round in a perpetual search of a target, he reconsidered.

The sun had been up an hour before the trio finally extricated themselves from the wooded graveyard of men and machines that hid their transport. Tracks that Hyde remembered had ceased to exist, reclaimed by the unchecked growth that also sought to conceal the wrecked and gutted remains of forty or more Russian armoured personnel carriers. Here and there, beside a trackless rusted hulk, the dull white bone dome of a fox-gnawed skull showed among the rank grass and weeds.

Close to the perimeter of the woods there was more recent evidence of violence. The rotting remains of bodies still bearing traces of civilian clothes lay inside the flimsy barricade that girded the lethal area.

There were already a few refugees about, some working in small groups gleaning missed corners of fields for a few ears of half-ripened barley: others, in twos and threes, staggered along under the weight of ill-trimmed logs. It was like viewing the periphery of a bizarre human ants’ nest, the object of whose workers was obscure and the result of whose labours were pathetic.

No one looked at the three men who trudged along the dusty well-worn path towards the camp, even though they passed quite close to some of the later risers.

The dress of most was as incongruous and ill matched as that of Revell and his companions. Among a group of middle-aged men squabbling and coming near to blows over a wormy sugar-beet, one wore a tattered raincoat over shorts and roll- neck jumper, another sported a paint-daubed pair of overalls and golf cap and a third, shoeless and carrying a rolled-up plastic cycle cape, had on a filthy T-shirt and the bottom portion of what might once have been an expensive tweed suit, a lady’s judging by the way the trousers fastened.

‘Almost there. It’s just over the next rise.’ For the last five minutes Hyde had been scanning the sky ahead, and now he saw it, the thin grey threads of smoke from countless numbers of meagre cooking fires. They rose up to blend together to form a dirty veil in the cloudless sky.

Now there were more people about, and a few of the shuffling figures threw curious glances at the three men who walked against the predominant flow of traffic away from the camp. Not many, though, after a glance at the sergeant’s gross disfigurement looked longer, or a second time.

They paused beside a hedge as a Russian Hind helicopter gunship lazily beat its way across the area at two thousand feet, and on out of sight into the thickening smoke haze over the camp.

‘Do the Reds take an interest in the camps?’ Revell felt less conspicuous when they started walking again, they’d been the only ones to stop.

‘Sometimes. A lot of Commie deserters find their way there, and usually end up banding together in a gang. After a while they get cocky and try raiding Ruskie supply dumps, then they get jumped on. The Reds move in, there’s a couple of days excitement, a few refugees get clobbered in the crossfire and then everything settles down again. Usually though they’re just content to keep an eye on the agency people, and maybe work a few foot patrols, plus of course they jam every frequency to stop news getting in or out. Normally in the five-mile so-called civilian area around a camp they keep out of sight, when it suits them.’

‘There’s the camp, Sarge.’ It looked bigger than Libby remembered if, had sprawled out across a few more hills. A straggling line of tiled rooftops and the jutting spire of a church marked at its centre the little village around which it had so explosively grown. Through a tear in the old coat he wore Libby put his hand into a pocket of his jacket. His fingers sought the familiar shape and feel of the small square of plastic covered photograph and his hand closed about it. Perhaps this time...

‘Where the hell do we start?’ They stood on ground a little higher than the camp, but even from that vantage point Revell could make out no pattern or system in the layout of the close-spaced huts and ramshackle shelters. Here and there a short stretch of path might be seen, but within a couple of yards it was lost to sight as it dog-legged around another of the randomly situated hovels.

Hyde didn’t answer, just started down towards the outskirts of the settlement. He knew precisely where to begin. No rearrangement or expansion of the camp could make him forget. If it had been fifty years since he’d last seen the ground, he’d still have been able to recall every inch of it.

The first structures they came to were skeletal affairs hastily erected by the most recent arrivals using only the scantiest supply of flimsy materials. As they threaded their way further in on an erratic course towards the brick-built core of the camp, the shelters became more elaborate. Ingenious use had been made of the most unlikely materials. Oil drums, tarpaulin, wooden pallets, dented jerry cans, anything that could be pressed into use. A clever few had even used fragments of aircraft fuselage looted from crash sites. The luckiest were those who had set up home in the ready-made residences supplied by the gutted shells of knocked-out armoured vehicles that the camp had grown to engulf.

A corner of Hyde’s mind saw the ground not as it was now, covered with a litter of human debris, but as it had been during those first wild battles when the Warsaw Pact forces had without warning hurled themselves through the Iron Curtain. Then this had been uncluttered rolling farmland, and the scene of ferocious armoured battles. For ten days the light of burning vehicles had been the only illumination in the smoke and dust that rose so thickly it had turned the days of midsummer into constant night.

Hyde recalled the morning when the battalion of Soviet infantry aboard armoured carriers had been forced into the cover of the woods by repeated air attacks, and totally destroyed by the combined destructive forces of several thousand hastily scattered mines and the firepower of five British anti-tank platoons. And then had come the order, ‘Board carriers’, and they’d charged out into the open to exploit the local victory.

Within a yard or two, Hyde knew he was walking very nearly the same course as his carrier had taken that day. For twenty glorious minutes they had rampaged through the flanks of Russian columns, wiping out one motor-rifle battalion and putting the survivors of two more to flight. Warning had just come through of approaching tanks when they’d collided with an overturned field kitchen trailer and shed a track. Even as the hatches had been thrown open for a bale-out, a sledgehammer blow had crushed in the side armour and a shaft of molten explosives and metal had blasted across the compartment. Hyde remembered the lieutenant’s head as it dissolved in the jet of plasma, and the searing terrible heat on his face.

For a moment Revell waited, not knowing why the sergeant had stopped, then he tried to nudge him forward and when that and the following dig in the ribs had failed, leant forward to whisper urgently into his ear. ‘What have we stopped for? Keep moving.’

There wasn’t much of it to be seen. A lean-to that had been erected at its rear left only a portion of its rust-streaked side visible between the crowd of sagging hovels that had sprouted up about it. No effort was needed on Hyde’s part to recall how it had looked when he’d last seen it, shortly before being picked up and whisked to safety by the crew of a Samaritan armoured ambulance from almost under the tracks of a Soviet T72. The spouts of flame had been boiling from every opening, and burning ammunition had fountained white streamers into the black smoke.

‘It’s nothing, nothing.’ He had seen enough, remembered too much. Hyde took his eyes from the sight and his mind from the memory. There were a few children running about, but not as many as Revell had expected. The camps in Yugoslavia had swarmed with them. Nor was there a single dog to be seen, usually so much a part of the refugee scene.

Attempts had been made by some of the inhabitants to inject if not a note, at least a reminder of civilisation. Plastic flowers, surely one of the few things these people could not put to a more useful secondary purpose, adorned a few of the huts. The one light touch did nothing to bide the utter squalor of the place, or mask its ugliness.
And there was one final aspect of the camp that could not be concealed, the stench from the crude overflowing lavatories spaced out across the area.

An old crone trotted from a side alley and collided heavily with Revell, dropping the large bundle of rags that she carried. Out of sheer habit the major bent down to pick them up for her, and for his trouble was almost slashed across the face by a claw-like wrinkled hand armed with five wicked talons.

The nails raked across his clothes, but the hag didn’t attempt a second blow; instead she dived down on the bundle, gathered it up and scurried around the trio to depart down another narrow passageway. She tried to spit at Revell as she went, but succeeded only in dribbling down her stained print dress.

‘She thought you were going to nick her stuff. We’re lucky she didn’t start screaming her head off.’ Anticipating the crone’s reaction, Libby had stepped aside. If the Yank wanted to make bloody problems for himself then let him find his own way out of them. You couldn’t get through to those tough old women. They were hard as nails and crafty as foxes. Too old to sell themselves, too active to get the special Oxfam rations for the infirm, their lives were a continual race against death. Their every waking moment was spent in search of the means by which they might ensure enough to eat for just another day.

‘It’s round here, I think.’ In the middle of a tortuously winding alley Hyde paused and looked about. It would have been a more profitable exercise to map the shifting dunes of a desert than try to remember the layout of one of these metamorphic settlements. A mildewed structure of corrugated asbestos sheets looked familiar. ‘We’ll try down here.’

There was room to admit them only in single file, and frequent twists and turns made their previous route as good as an autobahn by comparison. Hyde raised his hand and they stopped before a rickety hut that was only kept upright by its neighbours. He clenched his fist to rap at the thin wood frame to which the canvas door was fastened, but didn’t. Instead he took his knife and, motioning the others to silence, proceeded to cut an opening in the thick fabric. As he cut the third side of a square a man-sized opening appeared and the material curled down. Stepping into the gloomy interior he signalled the others to follow.

The filthy face and grime-smeared hands, that were all that was visible of the curled form beneath the pile of rags and paper cement bags on the sagging camp bed, blurred into rapid action with an ugly snarl.

Eyes only half accustomed to the gloom made it difficult for Hyde to accurately intercept the pistol produced from beneath the sacking, but the toe of his boot just caught it, and spun it to a far corner.

A howl of rage came from the figure, and then a brief torrent of hate-filled German, before Libby pounced and shoved a wad of cloth into the gaping mouth.

‘Shut up, you old cow.’ With the palm of his hand the sergeant shoved the woman back down on the bed from which she’d half-risen. He pinned her flailing arms to her side and her struggles ceased, but not her muted attempts to tell the intruders what she thought of them and their methods.

‘Take it easy, Sergeant. If you reckon she can tell us something, we need her cooperation. Breaking her arms won’t get it. Who is she?’ There was nothing to give Revell any hint that this was other than just one of the thousands of shelters that made up the camp: or that the old woman was any different from the specimen who’d attempted to claw him shortly before, or any of the hundreds more of her kind who must inhabit the place.

‘This is Old Mother Knoke. She’s just about the most poisonous old witch in the whole of the Zone.’ Shred at a time, Hyde pulled out the gag.

As the last piece was removed she opened her toothless mouth, then caught sight of the Makarov 9mm automatic that Libby had retrieved from the corner and was now training on her. Instead of shouting, she began a venom filled monotone of guttural invective.

‘In English, you nasty old bitch, in English.’ At the words from Hyde she stopped and put her head on one side, like a bird considering the risks before tentatively approaching what could either be a rare tasty morsel or a trap. Her eyes flickered from Hyde to Libby, and then to Revell, oh whom they lingered longer, before coming to rest on the sergeant again.

‘I know you, Faceless.’ The lank white hair bobbed up and down as she nodded her recognition. ‘Have they given up trying to repair you, will they not let you go home like that?’ Mother Knoke gave a dry cackle at her own humour, while her sharp grey eyes strayed once more towards the American officer. ‘Whatever you want it will cost you,’ again the sly glance at Revell, ‘a lot.’

‘You just worry about the payment you’ll get if you don’t supply what we want.’

Again there was the dry rustling laugh as the old woman digested Libby’s threat. ‘A shot will bring the Russians. There is a post not fifty metres from here.’ The lop-sided leer with which she concluded the sentence disappeared, as Libby gathered up a handful of mixed cloths and wadded them about the barrel of the pistol.

Feeling a light tap on his shoulder Hyde turned to see Revell’s beckoning finger, and went with him to a corner.

‘Sergeant, I’ve gone along with this so far, but will you tell me just what the hell you’re up to with this smelly old dame? Just how is she going to help us?’

Hyde checked over his shoulder and saw that Libby and Mother Knoke were still frozen in the same tableau, the swaddled tip of the gun barrel only an inch from the woman’s temple.

‘You know what it’s like in the camps, Major. To survive everyone has to corner some sort of business. Mother Knoke is too wrinkled to sell herself, too lazy to work, so she’s developed to a fine art and a decent, business what most old women do in a small way and never give a thought to, she’s a gossip. There’s nothing happens around here she doesn’t know about. She knows who comes, who goes, who dies. That’s now she lives. If you want to trace a member of your family or find out who’s paying the best price for young virgins, or who can get a message out to the West - then you ask Mother Knoke.’