Sky Strike (17 page)

And for those who did make the break, who tried to reach the West, simply evading the Russian patrols was just the start. Minefields, ground surveillance radar linked to machine guns firing on fixed lines; areas where persistent toxic chemicals still lingered and territory heavily irradiated by atomic air bursts, all those had to be avoided, with movement limited to the hours of darkness. The wonder was not that some made it to the West, but that any ever tried.

The group they had met up with, they would have been through all that already, and now after days of hunger and constant fear they were near the limit of their endurance. Their abortive attack on what they’d thought to be a Russian patrol had been their last fling.

What would his last fling be? Dooley had never given it a thought before. Maybe he’d just had it. When the repairs were completed they would be off again, driving fast towards whatever nastiness the Russians had in store for them next.

His eyes felt heavy, and his head dropped forward on to his chest. He knew he was falling asleep, could feel it stealing up on him, and didn’t resist. Letting his mind drift it came back time and time again to the recent experience with the woman. She had used him ... that worried him ... he didn’t want that to be his last fling...

‘Fat stiff.’ Burke had seen Dooley follow the woman from the trees, and now as he reassembled the water pump saw him nodding off. He felt like throwing something. ‘How come everything always goes his way? Look at him, he doesn’t have a bloody care in the world. Christ, you wouldn’t think he was in the ruddy Zone would you?’

‘I expect he has problems, worries.’ At last Libby was satisfied with the strength of the belting he had made.

‘Him, never. Eating, fucking and fighting, that’s all he thinks about. His only problem is getting enough of them. He’s forgotten that woman already.’

‘Maybe not.’ Libby gave the belt a final test, and it passed. ‘Maybe not.’

HEADQUARTERS.
AIR DEFENCE COMMAND.
CENTRAL SECTOR. ZONE.

The telephone kept slipping in General Pakovski’s moist grip. He could feel sweat trickling down inside his uniform, soaking the back of his jacket. ‘... Yes, Comrade Lieutenant General, they are the only ones who have broken out ... Yes, every effort... I understand Comrade Lieutenant General, you have given Moscow assurances on the strength of those I gave you ... Three more hours, thank you, Comrade Lieutenant General...’

Before he finished speaking, Pakovski heard the line go dead, but he completed the sentence for the sake of appearance; the colonel was in the room. ‘Where are they now?’

On the wall map the colonel circled a patch of forest on the western border of the Harz nature park. ‘They are here, Comrade General. The local commander says the ground is too difficult for armour, but he has managed to move two battalions of light infantry into the area, and they are attempting an encirclement. He says it will be difficult to take them alive if they should fight...’

‘They are getting too close to their own lines, now I want them dead.’ Pakovski could tell there was something else.

His snap made it no easier for the colonel to broach the subject. ‘Well, what is it?’

‘Eh, it is just that the infantry commander has questioned the authority of your orders, as have the air units you have ordered to join the search...’

‘Say what ever you have to, threaten, promise, bribe: I must have the group destroyed. That is all that matters. I will deal with the other problems afterwards.’

As the colonel went out, the general took his pistol from its polished holster and laid it on the desk in front of him. He had intended to use it on the survivors of the NATO group. Now, unless they could be wiped out, it would have to serve another purpose.

FIFTEEN
They were about to give the Land-Rover a tow start behind the APC when the first star shell ignited with a loud ‘crack’ several thousand feet above the tree tops.

Night was washed from the forest by the harsh glare and replaced by searing white light in which the boundaries of shadows were marked with knife-edged precision.

‘Russian infantry, bloody thousands of them. All around us.’ Cline was out of breath, and the fast passage he had made down the hillside to be sure of being the first to report had marked his face and hands with long livid cuts from whipping spike-tipped branches.

Standing half-out of a roof hatch, Revell sensed rather than saw the quality of the light diminish as the flare sank lower, and looked up in time to see it replaced by another high overhead. ‘How long before they reach us?’ ‘Five minutes. They’re just coming on like a load of zombies.’ ‘OK, pull the sentries back. We’ll have to try and crash out of here.’

As Hyde bent down to detach the wire hawser from the Land-Rover’s two- tiered front bumper he was pushed away by the dark-haired women. ‘You must take us with you.’
‘There’s no armour on your transport, you’ll be a big soft target for everything that misses us.’ In her voice Revell could hear a blend of begging and demanding and pleading. ‘You don’t know the risks.’ ‘We do, but more than that we know what will happen if we stay, when those animals find us. Please, you must take us, we accept the risk: you cannot leave us for them.’

A star shell, its fiery magnesium filling not totally consumed, fell through the trees thirty yards away and as its parachute snagged, started a blaze among tinder- dry lower branches. White smoke began to wreathe the base of the trees about it, held down by the interwoven canopy above.

With the air filling with the sweet, biting scent of hot pine resin, Revell saw a chance. He tossed the vehicle’s signal pistol to the sergeant. ‘See what you can do to stoke that, but try not to fry us.’

Variously coloured balls of blinding fire bounced through the trees, and where they lodged became the seat of secondary blazes that began to merge into a single wall of smoke-shrouded flame.

Burke started forward cautiously, to put the minimum strain on the tow line, and even so felt the snatch as the weight of the Land-Rover was taken up. With the star shell at their backs, it was the Russian infantry’s long shadows he saw first, and then as he rounded the turn in the track they were only twenty yards in front. A snap-fired rocket toppled a tree alongside and as other launchers were levelled he threw the APC through a tight turn and drove it straight at the wood-fed inferno.

The roar of the flames blotted out the noise of the engines, the sound of trees going down before the armoured vehicle’s raked front. Smoke filled the interior and fire licked at vision blocks and weapon ports.

Emerging from that hell of their own creation, they immediately ran into straggling lines of enemy infantry that had been halted by the burning trees. Several were mown down, caught by the wide hull or crushed by evergreens snapped off by its pounding progress.

Every round for the heavy machine gun expended, Libby traversed the turret and used an AK74 from a vision port to give what cover he could to the Land- Rover.

Bucking and leaping over every obstacle, he could see the woman at the wheel wrestling to keep the sturdy vehicle in the APC’s wake. A body flopped about in the seat beside her, restored to life by every jolt and with each movement spattering the inside of the starred windscreen with pink-tinged brain matter from its bullet-smashed forehead.

Showers of anti-tank rockets flew past. Some impacted against the trunks of trees almost at the moment of launch and broke up to throw back in their operator’s face the blazing contents of their propellant section. The forest was made still more hellish by the staggering fiery apparitions those accidents created.

Other rounds ricocheted from tree to tree, until they self-destructed over some group of infantry, or found a mark among them.

A hand grenade detonated between the APC and its tow, and the Land-Rover came through the fireball stained with bars of soot and covered in forest litter. Tracer that failed to penetrate the eight-wheeler’s well-angled thick hull plates met no such resistance from the thin vertical walls of the Land-Rover’s hardtop.

Twice, Libby saw tracer whose source he could not engage plunge in through the drab painted aluminium; the second time a long burst that stitched a close- spaced row of neat holes the length of its side.

And then they were through, fresh clean air began to replace the choking cordite-tainted smoke and the chemically coloured fires and lines of tracer were being left behind. But there was one more obstacle.

Parked across the junction of track and road was a long nose-to-tail line of Soviet-made trucks. To either side of the track was a drop that in the dark Burke couldn’t be sure of negotiating, even without the women’s transport in tow. There was only one course open to him.

Drivers leapt from their cabs as the APC charged down on them. At forty miles an hour, the ten-ton machine ploughed into the line, tossing one truck into the air and turning it over, crushing the front of another and having its already damaged spill-board ripped away as it caught in the distorted metal of a vehicle it began to drag with it.

As the metal sheared and the truck was left rocking on its springs the Land- Rover just clipped it, but at that speed the violence of the impact was sufficient to burst open its flimsy rear doors and throw one of the young girls into the road.

Libby saw her tumble and come to rest beside the damaged truck, then reach for the torn metal to pull herself to her feet, one arm hanging limp at her side. He recognised the splint-reinforced bandage about her wrist, and then saw the squat Russian coming around the back of the truck towards her.

Taking very careful aim, Libby loosed off the whole magazine, and saw almost every single round reach its target Thrown back against the flattened cab, the girl jerked spastically, made her slim body into a high arch, then collapsed and lay still.

He didn’t replace the magazine. Instead he unclipped the three spares from the turret wall and let them drop to the floor of the crew compartment, where Andrea swooped on them, before reluctantly having to part with two.

His hands were shaking, and the effect seemed to be spreading to his whole body. He felt sick, but not in a way that could be explained by his hunger or exhaustion. It was in his mind, and it was as if his brain was whirling around inside his skull. This had to be rock bottom, it couldn’t get worse than this, it just couldn’t

The interior of the Land-Rover was like a charnel-house. Both of the men had been hit again, and six of the females had been wounded. Three of them were dying.

Libby knew he was crying, knew that racking sobs were shuddering through his body, but somehow it was as though it was happening to someone else. He felt strangely detached. Even when Sergeant Hyde took him by the shoulders and steered him away from the scene to sit on the parapet of the old stone bridge close by, he felt as if it was another person who was submitting to the hands, taking the steps, sitting on the moss-cushioned hardness of the stone.

A never-ending line of bodies was being formed from the constant stream being carried from the back of the Land-Rover. Through eyes that weren’t his own, Libby watched the last dying struggles of the wounded and Dooley covering their faces when all movement finally ceased. First it was the two men, and then one of the women.

Red light filtering weakly from the early dawn picked out and matched the predominating colour of the roadside scene. Everything was red, It stained clothing and hands, covered the road and grass verge and dripped from the vehicle and the injured it had disgorged.

Dooley moved forward to cover another face and as he did was hosed with blood from a rupturing artery deep within a spasm-racked limb. He waited a moment while the fountain subsided to a sluggish welling, then ceased altogether, before drawing the scrap of grubby cloth across the fragment-shattered face.

‘Don’t drink it.’ Clarence held a helmet brimful of water in front of Libby. ‘No way of knowing where it’s come from, might have some chemical muck in it.’

Libby heard the words, but they weren’t for him. They were for the poor devil sitting slumped on the bridge. The face was familiar, but he didn’t know anybody who had been through so much that they could look like that. Sunken dark-ringed eyes, made pink and puffy by crying, smoke-stained face barred by streaks of uncontrolled tears. No, he didn’t know that person, but he could feel pity for him.

‘Splash your face with it. You’ll feel better.’ Clarence felt the helmet being taken from his hands, he looked, and it was Andrea, who dipping in a cloth that tinged the water pink, began to sponge the grime from Libby’s hands before rinsing the cloth and starting on his face.

It felt good, cold and clean and fresh. For a moment Libby shared the pleasure of the sensation with the hunched figure, then as the cloth moved over his face it was as though it wiped the confusion from his mind and he knew he was that pitiful creature. As the realisation hit him, so did all the pressures and fears and memories and frustrations that had brought him to that state and his head bowed slowly forward to rest between Andrea’s breasts and he cried again.

‘Get him aboard.’ Hyde took Libby’s left arm. ‘We’ve got to keep moving.’

Clarence couldn’t do it, took a step back, recoiling from the prospect of physical contact, and it was Andrea who started to take his other arm, before Dooley gently moved her aside and took her place.

Having plugged the several leaks in the Land-Rover’s radiator, and refilled its cooling system from the stream, Burke had at last managed to get the vehicle moving under its own power, though it now produced loud metallic noises from an extravagantly buckled front wheel.

Only three of the wounded women had to be put back on board. When at last they pulled back on to the road, with the Land-Rover trailing the APC by a good quarter of a mile, they left five bodies behind, laid in a neat row beside the road, their open wounds still steaming in the cool morning air.

The area of the Zone through which they were now passing had been fought over quite recently, within the last three months. Wrecked guns and tanks and other vehicles were everywhere.