Overkill (7 page)

‘I was hoping someone was going to say something about eating. Lead me to it.’ Appreciative lip-smacking noises came from Dooley.

Among the weapon- and ammunition-draped recumbent forms someone laughed. Revell couldn’t see who, but he recognised it as a woman’s laugh, though it was brief and held more of sarcasm than humour.

Herding the students before them they crossed a wide street that had once been lined with trees: now only stumps or shrapnel-slashed branchless trunks remained. Here and there showed the burned-out skeletal frame of a truck or tram and walking was made difficult by chunks of brick and pieces of bomb casing that turned under their feet.

Ahead of them loomed a forest of apartment blocks, and they climbed a ramp- like pile of rubble to enter one by a second-floor window. As the last of them did so, a desultory artillery fire began to register on the area.

A long time ago Clarence had turned off his mind from the physical discomforts and privations of the war, and now he drank the thin greasy soup without noticing its taste and ate the stale bread without noticing that it had none, save for a markedly bitter flavour to its thin crust. He ignored what went on around him. Having found a comparatively quiet corner he’d settled down with his meal and now warded off any attempted conversation with a scowl.

‘Here, Clarence.’ Dooley noticed the sniper eating alone. ‘You afraid somebody is going to nick your chow? Forget it. The way this stuff tastes nobody in his right mind would want it.’

‘You’re wrong there, mate.’ With his spoon Burke indicated the students, who having been bound hand and foot had been dumped close to the trestle from which the meagre rations were being doled out. ‘I been told those blokes didn’t have any ration cards on them. In dodging the draft they also missed out on the nosh. Look at ‘em.’

The youths were watching every ladleful of soup, every morsel of bread as it was dispensed. Some of them were drooling, and a pair of them bumped and wriggled against each other, even tried to use their teeth as weapons in a fight to reach a fragment of crust that fell to the floor.

It was stiflingly hot, with the steam from the cooking adding to the humidity of the night. As the last dregs were licked from bowls the members of the unit drifted from the apartment to find cooler, less crowded places to sleep. Most of them still nibbled at the small hunks of coarse bread, making it last.

Many floors above them a shell landed on the roof, reducing the height of the block by a few more feet and sending a shudder through the whole structure. Revell heard it, and seconds after noted the slight falls of dust it brought from the cracked plaster of the ceiling. From outside came grating and thumping as debris fell down the side of the building, bouncing from the window ledges. Popping the last chunk of bread into his mouth, he punched his pack into a more comfortable shape and lay down.

He was too tired to find anywhere else, and the hiss from the gas burner beneath the bubbling soup was soporific. As his eyes closed, by the faint illumination from the cooker he saw the blonde again. She had stopped, and was looking into the room from the corridor. In the instant before he fell asleep Revell felt she was looking at him.

The students had gone, dragged noisily away at first light, when the shelling had stopped.

‘Where have they gone?’ There was a pain in his neck, and only that told Revell that he really had been asleep for a full four hours, not the ten seconds it felt like.

Having to look up from his map to see who was meant, the colonel just shrugged. ‘Not to a firing squad, if that’s what you were thinking. Most likely they’ll be de-loused, fed, and put to work under close supervision on a burial detail. A week of that and they will be begging to join a fire-brigade.’ He pointed to an area to the south of the city. ‘This is what interests us now, Kirchdorf. There is open ground there, the Russians might think it possible to use tanks. We are to persuade them otherwise.’

Masses of pencilled alterations did not make the map easy to read, but the underlying markings and configurations of the suburb were unmistakable. Revell said so.

‘Yes, the map does say it is a built-up area, Major, but you have much to discover about our poor city yet. We leave immediately.’

‘Another flag to be pulled down? Another group of schoolboys to be spanked?’ Andrea had not bothered, as some of the others had, to inch sufficiently close to eavesdrop on the briefing.

‘Fancy spanking some schoolboys do you?’ A leer spread across Dooley’s broad features.

She ignored him, but seeing the major was watching, allowed herself a small tight smile in his direction.

It was enough to make him turn away and seek distraction in some petty task. Revell felt himself break out into a sweat and prayed that he wasn’t blushing. Those words, and that smile had triggered something inside of him. Leaning against the table he tried to subdue the iron-hard erection that he felt sure must be bulging visibly, for everyone to see.

Stupid; he was being stupid. The smile meant nothing, malice had ^prompted it, it was no more than a taunt. But still, it was the first time she’d made any sign of even acknowledging his existence. And the thought of her, wearing just that smile, that cruel, beautiful smile, and spanking ... Digging his ragged nails into his palms he willed the thought to go, and his huge erection with it, and was only partially successful at both.

He was the last to leave, and as he went out into the dust-filtered sunlight he saw the blonde.

The hair that escaped from beneath the American steel helmet she wore looked clean, shiny even. He could see little of her face behind the camera she aimed at him, but the hands that held it were smooth, and the long nails were painted a pale pink. There was time only to notice that the one-piece suit she wore was pinched in tight at the waist above a flat belly and slim thighs, and then the precarious path down the rubble ramp took all his attention. When he reached level ground and turned to look back, she was gone.

Kirchdorf was only a name on out-of-date maps. A few stretches of road between swathes of churned ground indicated that there had once been something there, but the scattered heaps of rubble gave no clue as to what.

A few distorted electricity pylons, a handful of fire-scorched telegraph poles; those were virtually the only reference points in a landscape as devoid of them as any desert. Only one cluster of shell and bomb damaged structures retained any semblance of their former condition, gave any clue as to their original purpose. The half-spans of bridges, pockmarked columns and precariously supported broken sections of elevated^ roadway marked where an autobahn interchange had stood.

They took up positions in trenches and weapons’ pits that others had dug and fought and died in. The evidence was everywhere. Not all of the burial squads had been thorough. Lumps of putrefying flesh, fragments of bone, hanks of hair, even an eye attached by the shrivelled cord of its retinal nerve to a quarter of a skull, littered the bottom of the excavations.

All of the earthworks looked to have been abandoned long ago. Most had partially caved in and the floor of each was thick with powdered dust and ash. To Hyde, the gun pit he was working to rebuild had a familiar appearance. On another battlefield he had seen something strikingly similar, the way the collapse was all on one side, the scorching on the other, and the patterns in the dust, as though it had been swirled round and round by miniature tornadoes. Nearby heaps of rubble reinforced the feeling as he saw glitter from beads of shining material, as if the very stone and steel had for an instant begun to melt and drip at the moment of the building’s collapse and had refrozen to their solid state with the swift passing of the incredible forces that had done it.

Retrieving his pack from a corner, Hyde took out a small drab-painted box with a dial set in its front, and uncoiling a wire from its back, pushed the probe attached to its end towards the dust at his feet.

‘Major.’ Wiping it clean, Hyde capped the survey meter probe before replacing it in his pack. ‘I’ve just run a check. There’s more than just background radiation around here.’

‘How much more?’
‘Hard to tell, there’s a lot of variations. Generally it’s in the region of a hundred Rads. We can take that, but there are a few hot spots close by where it goes right off the scale.’

‘Mark them and warn the others.’ Revell had already noticed the same evidence of ground and air nuclear bursts. Judging by the appearance of what was left of Kirchdorf, several high sub-kiloton weapons had blasted and seared it.

No wonder the colonel had described the area as suitable for tanks. It was possible, even likely, that the Russians had not been aiming at any specific target when they smeared the suburb, military or otherwise. Perhaps, having become irritated by the grindingly slow pace and expense of fighting through built-up areas they had decided to tailor some ground to suit themselves.

And there was something else about the place that made it tank country. Only men sealed inside a filtered air-conditioned environment behind thick armour could be sure of crossing it without danger of contamination and be certain of being fit to fight when they reached the far side.

For Revell, it was already too late to take any precautions. He was caked with the dust. It seeped inside his clothes, he could taste it in his mouth. Even if the Russians did not come, if the tank attack didn’t materialise, death was already creeping up on him.

SIX
They allowed the Soviet scout car to pass right through their line. The dust that hid them also served to part-blind the vehicle’s crew as it rose to cover periscope prisms and the armoured-glass blocks protecting the vision ports.

Even when it crossed an occupied trench, offering its thin underbelly to the men beneath, no move was made against it. Engine growling and burbling away to itself, it motored
on
until its small machine gun armed turret was hidden from sight by the mounds of debris.

Ten minutes later it returned. This time it moved less cautiously, and stopped long enough to put several hundred rounds into the area of the interchange. Apparently satisfied when no fire was returned, it headed back the way it had come.

An hour passed, in which the sun climbed higher and beat down more fiercely. Their sweat mixed with the dust and brought to their bodies an unbearable itching sensation they could do nothing to relieve. None of them touched the water bottles they had been allowed to half fill before leaving. If it was bad now, it was going to be a lot worse.

Revell felt almost guilty when the colonel sent him forward to investigate the sound of tank engines that had been audible for some time, but that was not accompanied by the clouds of dust that would have indicated movement and betrayed a precise location.

He took Andrea with him, and together they crawled, slid and ran two hundred yards to the shelter of a rusting Leopard tank. Wriggling in through a hole low in its hull side they carefully extended the aerial of their radio out through the crack around the edge of the distorted loader’s hatch.

An ammunition explosion had gutted the inside of the tank, only the massive breech of the main armament remained intact. The turret had been lifted by the blast and now it was possible to see daylight between its bottom rim and the top of the hull.

It hardly seemed possible they could have got so close. A pair of Soviet T72s stood not fifty yards off. Both had their engine covers open, and a harassed mechanic was leaning over one compartment, while he shouted at and argued with the crew seated on the other tank. 

Around the tanks were a company of Russian infantry. Having grown bored with waiting they had organised various diversions, among which games of cards and dice seemed the most popular. A group of young officers stood and talked among themselves. Glancing frequently at the tanks, they looked even more often at their watches.

‘They are afraid. They have fallen behind their schedule.’ Andrea eased herself to a more comfortable position. It brought her into contact with Revell, but she made no move to back off.

He spoke quietly into the radio, but his mind was on other things. Was it his imagination or could he feel the heat of her body through the several layers of clothing between them? If it was only his imagination he was content to let it stay that way, an illusion was better than nothing. After all the months of hoping, of hopeless scheming, this was the first time he’d been alone with her.

And now that at last he was so close to her, it had to be at a time, and in a place, when he could not exploit the situation. They had seen what they’d come for, now they had to get back, and fast. The engine covers were being slammed closed and the infantry prodded to their feet.

Stifling though it was inside the metal hull, they still felt the additional heat from the exhaust gases of the scout car as it stopped alongside. A fraction of an inch at a time Revell began to retract the radio aerial, until it slid to the thinnest end of the crevice through which it projected, and stuck fast with near twelve inches of the shining metal still sticking out.

With engine beats that were far from healthy the T72s began to lurch forward, inexperienced drivers, or failing gearboxes giving the infantry riding on the rear decks and turrets an uncomfortable time.

As they began to move, Revell noticed a junior sergeant deliberately slip back from the back of the second tank and sit in the track marks clutching his ankle and feigning injury. Two privates were less concerned with appearances and simply jumped, sprinting away. An officer fired after them and the slower of them stumbled, recovered and tried to hobble on, fast being left behind by his companion. The officer fired again and this time the limping man went right down, rolled once, arched into a spasm and lay still.

With that example before his eyes the junior sergeant made a miraculous recovery and dashed after his mount. He leapt for the back of the tank and as he got a hold was kicked in the face by the officer who had used the pistol with such effect. Letting go with one hand he swung round, and as he threshed to regain a grip put his right leg between the whipping track and the drive sprocket.