Sky Strike (10 page)

Swerving the APC on to the main road, Burke half-turned and winked at Dooley.
‘That’d be telling.’
‘Just drive.’
‘Yes, Major, driving now, Major.’
‘We are leaving a trail of incidents behind us.’ Removing his boot, Boris wiped it with a piece of cloth that was instantly stained black.

‘That’s one way to put it.’ Hesitating before slipping a half-bar of chocolate back into his pocket, Clarence proffered it to the Russian, who accepted it with a nod of thanks.

‘If somewhere they are being plotted, if pins are being stuck in a map, then by now the Communists will know which way we are heading.’

‘More than likely I would say. I think we got off to a bad start by stealing a general’s personal battle-taxi, especially as it turned out he had his nest-egg hidden in it. Didn’t he, friend Dooley.’

‘How did you ... I haven’t... what’re you on about?’

‘Thanks for the confirmation. I was wondering what was in that safe. It had to be code books or valuables.’

Scowling, Dooley dragged his pack closer with his feet, and scuffed it beneath his seat. ‘Bloody clever arse.’

‘When I first joined this group, you and the girl, you wanted to kill me...’ ‘Andrea still does, I still would given a suspicion of cause.’

Boris hesitated before asking another question. ‘Does your hatred go so deep, will nothing ever sate it? When the war ends, or when every Communist, perhaps every Russian is dead, what then?’

‘The ending of the war would make no difference.’ 

Clarence knew the answer, it dominated his waking thoughts, filled his dreams. ‘If it happened tomorrow I would find a way to go on. But it will not, will it? And I don’t want the death of every Russian, I don’t care if they are all killed, but I do not especially want it. All I want is six hundred to fall to me, two hundred for each of my family. I am over a third of the way towards that target.’

It was the calm manner in which the words were spoken that struck Boris. ‘And when you reach that figure?’

‘Most of my hunting is done in the Zone. The average life expectancy for a sniper is three weeks. I’ve been around fifteen months. I do not think it very likely I will have to make that decision.’

HEADQUARTERS.
ATR DEFENCE COMMAND.
CENTRAL SECTOR. ZONE.

‘I want them alive.’ General Pakovski picked up a chair and sent it crashing into a wall map. ‘Do you understand?’

The colonel had seen Pakovski in this mood before, and was frightened. ‘Of course, Comrade General. Everything will... is being done. We are getting reports ...’

‘Reports?’ Pakovski’s voice rose to a howl and he swept the contents of a bookcase to the floor. ‘I don’t want reports, I want results. This tanker driver you mentioned, where is he?’

‘Dead, Comrade General. They killed him.’

‘A pity. I would have done it. What of the civilians who were found nearby?’ ‘They have been questioned, but it is obvious they knew nothing.’ ‘Shoot them; and the commander of the camp guard, and the guards at the bridge...’ He paused. ‘Have I missed anyone?’

‘No, Comrade General. There is this, Comrade General.’ The colonel offered a radio message pad.

‘Read it’
‘Yes, Comrade General. We are getting reports, garbled as yet, from a Frontal Aviation Staff Training Centre, south of Schonebeck. It would seem to be a sighting, but it is unconfirmed as yet.’

‘Then have it confirmed, and return when you have. This matter is important to me.’ Pakovski closed a hairy-backed hand around a jar of pencils and crushed it flat, splintering every one. ‘Remember, I want them alive. I want to deal with them myself.’ He let the fragments fall to the floor, where he crushed them under his boot.

NINE
From the cover of the wall, Libby could see the never-ending series of dashes of yellow light from the masked headlamps of the Russian and East German supply convoys. They had been moving along the road all night without a break.

He felt ill, the sick-giddy feeling that came with being over-tired. The damp cold did not help. It should have been possible to see the first faint lightening of the eastern horizon by now, but after hours of darkness unrelieved by moonlight, the dawn was being denied him by the growing mist forming over every watercourse and field.

The chilling water-particle laden air struck at him through the old horse blanket he had wrapped about himself and numbed him to the bone. ‘Here, have this.’

Libby took the coffee Ripper offered and hunched about it to draw its last drop of warmth. At the first sip he felt better, and had to force himself not to gulp it down immediately. Taking his time, he savoured every last drop and felt its warming effect radiate through his cold body.

‘Traffic’s thinning. Major says we’ll be on our way again, soon as the flow is down to normal day time levels. You don’t see much civvy traffic anytime, do you?’
‘When the Warsaw Pact armies have finished pinching all the food, and every factory has been turned over to producing armaments, there’s not enough left for the civilian population to be worth shifting about the country.’

‘What do they live on then?’ Wisps of musty straw poked from beneath his jacket as Ripper beat his arms across his body.

‘A lot of them don’t, those that do, survive by growing their own food, or steal it, or play the black market’

‘Jesus, what a way to live.’
‘You call that living?’ Finishing the last dregs of the drink, Libby up-ended the cup to drain the semi-liquid residue of sugar.

The mist was growing thicker and the road was no longer visible. It was becoming lighter, but in a strangely luminous way, with no discernible source of illumination, as if the gods were making fractional adjustments on a giant dimmer switch.

‘Almost like home.’ Ripper took deep breaths, as though savouring the dew- laden air. ‘After a start like this, I always found a day was good for hunting.’

‘Let’s hope that doesn’t hold true for the Russians today.’ Libby saw that the American now stood surrounded by mould-speckled shreds of hay and straw. ‘Is there a good reason for you to turn yourself into an animated haystack?’

‘Sure is. While you all been trying to keep your teeth from chattering, I’ve been as snug as a bug in a dung heap ...’
‘Smell like one as well.’

Ripper ignored the rude interruption,’... and you could, with some of this tucked all around you.’ He pulled out stalks from his sleeves and the top of his pants.

‘Kinda tickles down there, especially if you’re not too careful and put a field mouse in as well. There’s other problems too. I used to take my girl to her grandpa’s barn, but after things went wrong a couple of times she didn’t want to know. First time she got herself all smothered in corn husks: I goes in fast like I always does, and it were like screwing glass-paper. Still managed to finish but by then I was sore as hell, real raw.’

‘That’s quite a fund of little stories you’ve got. Are they all that poignant?’ It took Ripper a moment to recover from the shock of seeing the sergeant suddenly loom out of the mist His fire-damaged face took on a spectral quality against the slowly swirling white backdrop.

‘You ain’t heard the half of this one yet. A couple of weeks and two tubes of antiseptic cream later we go back for another go. Maybe I’m the sort who doesn’t learn by his mistakes, anyway I was all worked up and in a hurry again and I got real careless. You know what a head of barley looks like?’

‘Why, you decided to change tack to a lecture on subsistence farming?’

I’ll tell you, it’s hard, real hard, with lots of long sharp whiskery bits.’ Ripper wasn’t about to be deterred from the recounting of the episode. ‘Well, one of them critters got in the way. Damned near speared my foreskin and stabbed poor Barby right where it hurts.’

‘You finished?’
‘No, Sarge, I recovered the full use of it inside of a week...’

‘Just get aboard will you. We’re moving. And get rid of that bloody straw. You look like something out of the Wizard of Oz.’

Libby trailed behind the pair, watching Hyde help the Yank remove his insulation lagging. Now they were on their way again the tiredness wouldn’t bother him, it would still be there, but the pressures and dangers would sublimate it to the need to stay alert.

And there was another reason. They were driving back towards the Zone, would reach it today if luck was with them. The Zone meant refugees, and he would want to see everyone he could. To miss one might be to miss Helga. His war, his part in this war, would end the instant he found her.

The young Russian conscript manning the checkpoint barricade had gone a bleached white, and the clipboard in his hand was shaking visibly.

There had been no chance to avoid it. After rounding a bend in the fog it had loomed up immediately in front of them, and Burke had been forced to brake hard to avoid ramming the big counterweighted ‘H’ beam blocking their path.

From the small guard hut came a bellow of raucous laughter, and an empty bottle arched from the open doorway to smash at the edge of the road.

About two seconds that was how long the conscript had to live if he shouted a warning to his comrades loafing over the half-seen card table in the shack. His eyes flickered from the turret machine gun to the several tips of barrels that poked from various weapon ports. Every one was pointed at him.

Very slowly the fresh-faced youngster backed to the concrete block at the pole’s end and put his weight on it. As it went down, the massive beam beyond the pivot rose from the supporting cradle on the far side of the road, and began to rise. Hunched over the rough-surfaced counterweight, the Russian closed his eyes tight, as though in prayer, and didn’t look up as the eight-wheeler trundled past.

‘Boris and dine must be guessing right about those coded radio signals we keep intercepting. They’re about us.’ Hyde knelt behind Revell’s seat. ‘Perhaps we should be looking for a change of transport?’

‘There’s no need, not yet.’ Revell checked his map, pencilled in the location of the roadblock. ‘That kid won’t have reported us, so as far as the Ruskies are concerned they’ll think we’re still back there, somewhere.’

‘And pretty soon they’re going to realise we’ve slipped through. Better to make the switch now, while we’ve the chance to choose the time and place.’

‘I say stick with this wagon for as long as we can.’ Burke was enjoying the drive. The mist had lifted sufficiently for him to motor as close to the vehicle’s top road speed as the twisting route would allow; enabling him to take advantage of the absence of other traffic, in the lull of activity between the re-supply convoys using the cover of the dark, and the coming of full day, when civilian, inter-unit and local traffic would take over. ‘Where the hell would we get another.’

‘Commie vehicle in this condition!’
Both driver and NCO had made good points, but for Revell it was a third argument that prompted his decision to press on as fast as they could. In fact it wasn’t even an argument, it was a solid gut feeling that told him to go for mileage first and subtlety afterwards, but it would do no harm to offer a placatory gesture to the sergeant.

‘Let’s see if we can’t have the best of both worlds. First chance we get we’ll pull over and do what we can do to alter this APC’s appearance. It’s too distinctive, so let’s see how we can make it look the same as the other Warsaw Pact wrecks of its type. God knows there’s enough of them about, we should be able to merge into them. They can’t possibly check every one.’

As if to bear out Burke’s argument, they passed three trucks pulled into the edge. Engine covers were raised on all three, as they were on a massive six- wheeled recovery vehicle a few hundred yards further on.

‘We’re being followed,’ Head poking out of an open hatch to catch some air and overcome the feeling of nausea the vehicle’s harsh ride gave rise to, Cline had seen a pair of machine gun armed motorcycle combinations and an armoured car gaining on them. Any doubts he had as to whether or not the APC was the subject of a pursuit were swiftly dispelled when a roof-mounted klaxon on the car began to blare up and down the scale.

‘Slow up. Let them get close.’ Revell tapped a grenade at Dooley’s belt. ‘You and Andrea pitch them some presents. Half a dozen should do it.’

The lead motorcycle had closed to twenty-five yards when the APC’s side hatches were thrown open and the grenades tossed out. 

Six irregular-shaped lumps of cast metal bounced on the road surface and rolled to a stop at its edge, then shattered and hurled fragments of metal in every direction.

Caught in the centre of the storm, the second combination disappeared from sight completely, hidden by the smoke and barely glimpsed flame of the detonations. The passenger and rider of the leading machine hunched low as they felt and heard the explosions behind them but it was too late. The bike’s rear wheel deflated, slashed open by a sliver of casing, and at that instant the rider slumped over his handlebars, a gaping wound in his neck.

Making a wild grab for the controls the passenger attempted to avert disaster, but it was already inevitable. The bike’s front wheel crabbed to the left and as the scuffing rubber sent it out of balance, men and machine were sent cart wheeling into the hedge.

As the mushroom of smoke from the grenades drifted upwards they were supplemented by a growing pall from the pools of blazing petrol and the burning bodies in the road. The armoured car had stopped, a front tyre fiercely alight. When the crew made a hurried exit to tackle the problem, Libby added to their discomfort with three short bursts he got off before a bend took them from sight. He thought he had missed, most of the tracer going high, until at the last moment he saw a crewman drop the extinguisher he was ineffectually wielding and clutch his stomach as he started to collapse.

‘Cat’s out of the bag now.’ Through a gap in the hedge Burke glimpsed witnesses to the incident.

Beside a netting-shrouded radio van stood several half-dressed East German signallers. Their open mouths made dark circles in their lathered faces.

‘I reckon those guys are going to be telling tales inside of the next few minutes.’ The target the van presented was visible for too short a space of time for Ripper to get in a shot, and he heard others swearing at the missed opportunity.

‘And a couple more after that, we are going to be the centre of a lot of attention.’ Cline checked that his rifle was within reach and patted his spare magazines. ‘If we get back we’ll be able to tell them we took on a whole Russian army.’

‘And their Airforce.’ Boris eased off the headphones. ‘Whoever is in charge of this search is pulling a lot of strings.

Inter-service co-operation is not the Warsaw Pact’s strongest point. Can we not use our radio to summon help of our own?’

‘Not yet.’ Every few minutes Revell was trying to fix their position, keeping a constant update on their distance from the Zone. ‘The raid on Kothen was the first time NATO has made a deliberate incursion into East Germany. If it’s screwed up as bad as it sounds, then they’re not going to be in a hurry to do it again. The longer we can hold out, the better chance we’ve got of getting some air-cover. Until then we’re on our own, we sort out our own troubles.’

‘Got one for you now, Major.’ Burke pointed.

They were fast coming upon the tail-end of a long line of troops marching in single file down either side of the road. There seemed to be some confusion among them, particularly among those at the back. It was obvious they had heard the brief action, but being nearly twenty miles behind their own front line they didn’t know what to make of it.

The first thing Revell noticed about them was that virtually every other man was carrying an anti-tank rocket launcher, and the second was that an NCO and an officer had stepped into the middle of the road to signal them to stop.

Burke didn’t, and the officer paid dearly for his careless curiosity as he was struck by the trim board on the hull front and had his head almost severed from his body. The NCO moved quicker, but in the APC they felt the series of minor bumps as the wheels on one side passed over his legs.

Streams of tracer leapt from every port and cut down the lines of men before they even had a chance to unslung their weapons. From the turret Libby raked the road ahead, dissolving opposition before it could form.

Under the impact of the heavy bullets Libby saw heads burst like melons under a sledgehammer. He could hardly breathe in the poorly ventilated turret and tears filled his eyes, but at such close range he could not miss. A few bullets hit the metal protecting him, but he hardly heard them above the noise of his machine gun, and he knew there was little chance of small-arms fire penetrating the most thickly armoured part of the APC.

Twice, the vehicle’s gathering speed and the mount’s limited depression, meant he couldn’t bring the weapon to bear on small groups that hadn’t panicked and looked like they might present a danger, but each time he saw the knot of soldiers disintegrate as the major used his assault shotgun.

When they reached the head of the column, Libby cranked furiously to turn the turret and then sent single shots or short bursts at any likely centre of retaliation. There were few.

In the space of twenty seconds a battalion-strength column had been reduced to a bloody shambles. Many soldiers had thrown down their weapons and run, hurling away their packs and other equipment as they fled across the fields. For two hundred yards the verges were littered with bodies. Sometimes it was just one, in other places four or five would be heaped upon each other and among them staggered or thrashed the maimed and dying.

Blood had splashed on Burke’s vision block and he had to open the front port to be able to see where he was driving. The sudden rush of air helped to drive the stench of cordite from the interior. Hundreds of cartridge cases rolled on the floor, making an incessant clinking that grew irritating.

A dial on the panel caught his attention. It indicated overheating in an engine. He reported it to Revell.

‘Nurse it a bit further, but don’t risk blowing it.’

Andrea heard. She had used all her ammunition and had been about to help herself to some from Burke’s pack. Taking three magazines she paused, then took a fourth. ‘It would not be a good time to start walking, would it?’

TEN
The trap had been hastily prepared but well sited. A tank transporter, still with its gutted T84 load aboard its semi trailer, straddled the road. In the fields to either side Russian infantry had hurriedly dug-in, the ramparts of freshly turned earth betraying every position. Further back, a pair of BMP infantry combat vehicles were half-hidden hull-down in a fold.

‘Through them or round them, Major?’ Burke closed his port, forced to accept the stain-restricted visibility, knowing that to leave it open would have been to invite a storm of small-arms fire.

‘Can’t risk the damage of a collision. Let’s take the scenic route.’ At extreme range a hail of automatic fire struck the side of the APC as it turned off the road, crushing a rusted tubular steel gate into the soft earth. Great lumps of turf and loam smacked on the roof of hull and turret as shots from the BMP’s 73mm guns added their weight, An RPG-7 anti-tank rocket flashed past, another self-destructed overhead and deep dents appeared in vulnerably thin top plates as most of that surface’s paint was charred away or blistered by the fireball.

Libby sent retaliatory fire at the enemy infantry but without noticeable effect, the fields soaking up the tracer that didn’t ricochet wildly into the sky. Even using all his skill and strength, he couldn’t hold the unstabilised weapon steady for more than a couple of seconds at a time, against the savage bucking of the ride.

The BMP’s started from concealment, pluming grey exhaust. Burke saw them and began to cut back towards the road. On the rough terrain the wheeled vehicle was at a disadvantage against its tracked opponents, whose better cross-country performance was already enabling them to close the gap as they took short cuts through patches of ground that Burke had to avoid for fear of bogging down.