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Authors: James Rouch

Tags: #Fiction, #Espionage

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BOOK: Overkill
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‘This what I think it is?’ Revell had seen Clarence testing the contents of some of the split sacks.

‘In Northern Ireland we called it Co-op Mix. Usually it’s fertiliser and sugar, only the Reds don’t have sugar in these sort of quantities, or if they had it’d all be on their black market by now, so they must have found a substitute. Whatever it is, this certainly takes home-made bombs out of the kitchen industry league.’

‘Looks fucking dodgy tome.’ Having picked up a fuse all ready for attachment to a completed mine, Dooley very carefully set it down again when his examination revealed a chunk of plastic explosive moulded around its base.

‘It can be. The IRA have had a few own-goals with this stuff, but I’ve never seen this much being mixed before, not all at once. There must be tons of it.’

‘Not for long.’ Revell slipped off his pack and began to take out the compact demolition charges. ‘Set these for ten, no better make that fifteen minutes. Bury them in the barrels that are already filled and among the sacks. I don’t want the Commies rushing back in after we’re gone and undoing all this.’

Taking six of the one-pound charges Revell went to the far end of the assembly line and began to place them among a group of finished mines, heaping loose powder about to conceal them. Out the corner of his eye he thought he saw a movement close to where Andrea was working. He casually edged that way, pretending to hitch his slung assault shotgun to a more comfortable position, then as he reached her side unslung it and pumped three rapid shots into a huge pile of empty sacks.

Echoes boomed about the cavernous interior, turning the three shots into a wild continuing fusillade.

While Andrea covered him, Revell ploughed through the punctured plastic and hauled out two Russians. One of them, an officer, died even as he was laid on the open floor. The pioneer who was with him was in a bad way, he’d taken a full charge in his back but he was still alive.

Swooping on the corpse, Dooley stripped it of pistol and insignia and everything else he considered of value. 

‘What about this one, or are you going to have the decency to wait for him to die.’ Clarence watched the process with distaste.

With a sharp knife Dooley removed the officer’s buttons and ornate belt buckle. He didn’t even spare a glance for the dying man. ‘You’ve got to be joking. A Ruskie pioneer? A fucking cannon fodder conscript they haven’t even bothered to give a rifle. You got to be joking.’

Andrea looked from the officer’s dusty but mostly correct uniform, to the pioneer’s rags and tattered boots. ‘Another fine example of Communist equality; and that they would teach the world.’

The wounded man was moving, trying with movements he could hardly control to reach the mangled centre of his back. His questing fingers touched the area and dipped into the pulped flesh and oozing blood. He gave a despairing cry that turned to a choking cough and then an ugly rattle, as the terror of the extent of his injuries and his situation struck him, and died.

‘Eleven minutes, Major.’ Clarence had to duck back inside as he called from the doorway, on coming under fire from one of the barges. As he levelled his sniper rifle waiting for the Russian officer to pop up again, he heard the sharp crack of the Iron Cow’s Rarden and the shouts and screams that came from the barge as two shells passed through it from side to side. Above the cries of wounded he heard another commotion, and then a pistol was thrown over the side, followed by the limp and bloody body of an officer. A selection of off- white rags were waved from the craft.

They didn’t have to wait. Burke had the HAPC ready for them when they reached the steps. As they boarded, one of the charges they’d left behind went off prematurely. It was very muted, producing only billowing clouds of white powder that fountained from every vent and opening in the building.

The girl had said nothing to him about the incident in the power station. At the time Revell had thought he was saving her life. Alright, so the reality wasn’t as dramatic as that, but she must have known what was in his mind, and still she’d said nothing. She never spoke to him, she answered when he spoke to her, but she never initiated conversation. Sometimes being around her became so difficult for him, so frustrating, he felt he could almost lash out at her. If he did though she’d hit back, and despite her slighter build would probably manage to hurt him before he could pin her down. He could imagine a wrestle with her being exciting, the thought of it was rousing him ...

All of the remaining charges blew together. Every door and window and ventilator was blasted from the power station as the whole structure swayed and bulged. For an instant it seemed as if it would remain intact, and then the wall facing on to the wharf, already weakened by the earlier explosion, crumpled away from the rest of the building and a thousand tons of razor-sharp rubble collapsed into the river and across the barges.

‘Tell them the job’s done, there won’t be any more mines.’ As their radio-man, watched by Sergeant Hyde, transmitted the message, Revell reached for his water bottle. It was empty. As he bent down for it, the letter fell from his pocket. He snatched it up and crumpled it into another whose zipper still worked. Now he was wishing he hadn’t brought it with him, what the hell, he wasn’t interested in what the bitch got up to now. When she’d remarried it was for more than mercenary reasons—he’d been happy to hear that she didn’t want any more money out of him. That, he’d thought, had severed the last link between them. There’d been no children, and now there wasn’t even alimony to bind them. But she’d kept writing and he’d kept on reading, and re-reading. He’d never yet had the willpower to throw one of them away unopened, and every time he wished he had. He could feel the bulk of the screwed-up letter in his jacket; if only it was that easy to crumple and put from sight his memories.

On his screen he could see the convoy was catching up to them. It was time to push on, before they were called back to assist with any more close fire-support missions. He used the internal communication system to talk to the crew.

‘According to Intelligence reports,’ Revell allowed a brief pause for the inevitable groan from Burke and sardonic laugh from Ripper, ‘we should be approaching the last ring of positions the Ruskies have around Hamburg. The fighting’s been fluid in the last few days, so things might have changed, but it shouldn’t amount to much ...’

‘You inclined to put any money on that, Major? If you are I’d kinda like a piece of the action. The Sarge has got a stack of markers of mine I’d rather like to have settled before I go to meet my maker...’

‘Hey, Ripper, when is your appointment to see Franken Stein?’

‘Shut it, Dooley.’ Revell let their gunner work off his irritation at the interruption by firing on a four-wheeled Gaz armoured car trying to reverse into a firing position on the bank. A single shot started it burning.

Sitting with his back against the hull, Clarence didn’t bother to look out. There was nothing to be gained by knowing where they were, not for him. He didn’t give the orders, couldn’t fire with effect on any target he might glimpse. His rifle had the range, but not the hitting power. The handful of special rounds he had, those with the armour-defeating depleted uranium core, he’d save until he could be sure they weren’t being wasted. Some of the others always wanted to know what was happening, where the current danger lay, he didn’t. If he couldn’t influence what was going on, why concern himself with it.

If a shell or missile was coming at them they’d all know about it soon enough, for a brief pain-filled moment; and if the round missed then any worrying would have been for nothing. Clarence knew just about all there was to know about death, except what it was actually like, but he’d sent more than two hundred others to find out. The prospect of meeting it himself didn’t bother him. For ages now he’d been living on borrowed time. Some day, maybe today, he was going to have to pay back.

Sporadic mortar fire was sending geysers of water high into the air, and then it became suddenly heavier, until spray was continually drenching the Iron Cow. It was like motoring through torrential rain.

A light cannon joined in and the hull rang as rounds bounced from the armour. Machine gun fire was added, but only the speckled traces of light on the hostile fire locater betrayed the fact. Their flight was unseen, their impact unheard.

‘Where’s the heavy stuff?’ It was an involuntary reaction for Revel 1 to duck when the tracer shell ricocheted from the dome of the cupola hatch. Damn it, if this was another of the Russian main positions then they should have run into opposition from weapons of far bigger calibre by now. Where the hell were they? Were the Commies keeping them concealed, saving them for the convoy? It was hard to believe, the lone HAPC was a tempting target for any enemy gunner. There were few who could resist the temptation to try and disable it, to earn the big bounty the Soviet High Command offered for one captured intact.

‘Something on the screen, Major. Dead ahead.’ Boris tried to make sense of the radar image. ‘I can’t make it out, it looks ... it looks like they’ve built a wall across the river.’

‘Here, let me see.’ Hyde looked over the operator’s shoulder, and saw the same incomprehensible picture. ‘It’s bloody impossible.’ He tried the thermal imager, and all he got was a view of a great grey cliff that stretched almost from bank to bank.

‘Yeah, and why not a wall. Great at building walls the Commies.’ The three rounds he put into it made no impression. On his screen Ripper saw them impact, and then nothing. ‘Usually though they put ‘em up to keep their people in…’

‘That’s not a wall.’ Revell went for a wider view, and suddenly could see that the ‘wall’ was topped by superstructures and derricks. The Russians didn’t need heavy weapons, the convoy would be going no further.

The many block ships they’d encountered downstream, found in groups of two and three, paled before this. Across the full width of the Elbe thirty or more merchantmen had been scuttled to form an impassable barrier of steel.

‘So much for bloody satellite reconnaissance.’ Through the mist of water kept in permanent suspension by the deluge of bombs, Burke could see the overlapping hulls. ‘I wonder when they’ll get round to spotting this lot.’

‘It hasn’t been here long.’ Movement caught his attention, and Revell saw an ore carrier begin to take on a list. ‘They almost left it too late, it’s only just finished.’

‘That’s what we’ll be if we bloody stay here much longer. The Ruskies have got every bloody inch of this river zeroed.’ Burke swore.

‘Shut it, you miserable bugger ...’ Hyde started to go forward, but never made it. A mortar shell scored a direct hit on the starboard engine and the craft staggered, throwing everyone about. Hauling himself to his knees, he looked down. The floor was awash. He turned to search for the damaged section of hull, and then the smell hit him and he shouted to countermand Revell’s order to their gunner to fire on a flak mount aboard a container ship settling by the bows in mid-stream.

‘No, hold your fire, hold it. A fuel line’s gone, we’re filling up with kerosene.’

THREE
Fighting the controls, Burke managed to bring the craft back on to an even keel, but even with the ride height reduced by half the demands being made on the remaining engine were almost too much, and one after another all but the most vital auxiliary systems had to be shut down.

The first was the air conditioning, and that left them with no alternative but to open the hermetically sealed ramp a fraction in an effort to dispel the dangerous accumulations of fumes from the spilt fuel. ‘Beach us.’
‘We’re OK, we’ve still got headway, I can get us back.’ Burke couldn’t understand the officer’s order. They had problems, big problems, but they weren’t on fire, and they weren’t sinking. ‘It’s OK, Major ...’

‘Beach us. There’s an empty slipway ahead and to the left.’ Burke complied, juggling the controls to keep the fifty per cent power evenly distributed around the edges of the flexible ride curtain and battling to overcome the Iron Cow’s tendency to keep veering to the right.

Light litter flew from beneath the craft as it left the water and travelled on to the timber-strewn launching ramp. The enemy fire intensified, but the cannons could no longer be brought to bear and what mortar bombs came near had their effect smothered by the stacks of plate and mountains of drag chains among which they landed. A single machine gun continued to fire with results, peppering the hull at close range.

‘Get them out, Sergeant.’ Revell unfastened a locker and began to unpack the cased equipment he took from it. ‘I want a tight perimeter defence around this bus. Mutually supporting positions, all in good cover. I’ll leave the details to you. Boris stays with me.’

‘Me as well?’
The answer Burke got from the NCO was to be dragged from his seat and have his rifle thrust at him before being propelled through the exit.

‘Make this priority.’ Revell completed the assembly of the equipment as he called to the radioman. ‘Don’t route it through the command centre in the convoy, give it straight to GHQ. Be brief, use your own words and tell them the position, and then say they’ll have laser designation on the block-ships in two minutes. Better tell them we’re only half a mile from target. I hope they’ll bear that in mind when choosing warheads, otherwise we won’t be here to line up a second target for them.’

It was a tight squeeze working in the cramped confines of the turret. Revell pulled the co-axial machine gun from its mount, and with no time for finesse dropped its component parts on to the thinly padded bench below. The laser only just fitted into place, its power-pack actually nestling against the compact body of the Rarden.

Taking up position behind it, Revell aligned the sight on a tanker of about twelve thousand tons that formed the centrepiece of the obstruction, and waited. He was gambling that Command would have something in reserve capable of doing the job, and that the haste with which the Russians had been forced to complete their preparations meant they’d not had the time to install any sophisticated counter-designation equipment.

BOOK: Overkill
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