by John Gardner
‘In this weather?’ Boysie shrugged. ‘It’ll freeze their...’
‘Boysie?
‘Toes...off...I was going to say.’
‘Strip ‘em. Truss ‘em up and get into their uniforms as best you can.’
I pondered that things were far more simple back in the dead days of Dornford Yates when all women had small feet and the baddies could be identified by their castles.
The others leaped to their work with an almost lustful vigour. I had hardly got my guy’s boots off when Hester was slipping out of her skirt and into a tank man’s coveralls.
The business took us the best part of twenty minutes, ending with Mostyn making sure that we had secured the prisoners and tucked them far into the bushes. We used odd belts, the rope and straps for lowering Styles, and handker-chiefs to bind and gag the tank crew.
Boysie and I were detailed to carry the still recumbent Styles to the tank and stow him away.
Inside, the vehicle smelt of stale sweat, oil and more unpleasant odours of man. They had left the generator running so that the small green lights gave us some help. It was going to be a squeeze.
We tucked Styles away on a narrow ledge to the rear of the cabin and began to climb out.
‘Back, back, back.’ Mostyn pulled himself up and looked down at us from the hatch opening.
‘Clothes.’ He said without explanation. Our discarded gear came flying through the hatch.
‘Can’t go without them,’ chanted Mostyn.
‘Go where?’ asked Boysie dubiously.
‘Out of Moscow. We’ve got a few hours before they’ll discover we’ve purloined their tank. We can at least get out of the city and on to the Leningrad road.’
We stowed the clothes with Styles as Mostyn and Hester clambered into the cabin.
The hatch led straight down through the great ring mounting of the turret into the main cabin. Within the turret itself were seats for the commander and one gunner. The forward position of the cabin held the driver’s and observer’s posts.
You did not have to know a great deal about tanks to realize that this baby was full of some very sophisticated machinery.
Below the turret hatch and in front of the commander’s seat was an electronic console complete with television screen and a thing that looked like a Decca Navigator. A similar set was positioned in front of the observer’s post.
‘So we’re going to drive out of Moscow,’ said Boysie, sepulchral in the liverish light. ‘Who’s going to do the driving?’
Mostyn busied himself closing the hatch and strapping himself into the commander’s seat. ‘Who else but you, Oaksie? You’ve had experience in tanks.’
‘Not as a driver.’
‘But you have driven a tank.’
‘Way back. At the dawn of history. Nothing like this.’
‘Now’s the time to learn then. A bit close in here don’t you think.’
‘You need the air conditioning on.’ Grumbling, Boysie crawled forward and shifted his bulky figure into the driver’s seat. Hester was making herself comfortable at the gunner’s post so I squeezed up forward next to Boysie and started fiddling with the observation console. Boysie was doing the same with the driver’s controls. The motor started with the growl of forty-eight bulldogs aggressive in an echo chamber. It was far from good on the hearing.
‘Think it’ll wake up Styles?’ I yelled.
Boysie shouted something back which sounded like ‘Good luck to Styles.’
We jerked forward in a series of bounds just as I found the main switch for the console. An almost clear daylight picture of the road ahead came up on the screen moving with some violence.
‘Super picture but we seem to be turning on our own axis.’ I was being jolted heavily from side to side. Boysie grunted obscenities while Mostyn screeched ‘Control yourself. Show the brute who’s master.’
Boysie continued his man against machine competition for another minute. Slowly we straightened out and began to move along the road.
‘Limited view from here,’ panted Boysie. ‘Which way d’you want me to go.’
‘Head for Leningrad,’ called Mostyn with the authority of a dowager giving her instructions to the chauffeur.
‘Anything else?’
‘No. Hang on. Here we are. Go round the right of the hotel, cross the bridge, first right then left into Tchaikovsky Street. Then straight on until you get to Gorky Street. Left into Gorky Street and follow your nose keeping the Dynamo Stadium on your right.’
‘Nothing easier.’
We were moving in a reasonable state of control now, at a sedate pace.
‘You got your console working?’ I called to Mostyn.
‘Yes. Good reception but a pity it’s not in colour.’
Boysie poured on the coals. We must have been touching twenty-five as we trundled into Tchaikovsky Street.
‘You got your scanner working?’ shouted Mostyn after a while.
‘What’s a scanner?’
‘There’s a red dial directly in front of your screen. You should get a ninety degree scan by turning it to left or right. Get on the ball.’
‘And you,’ muttered Boysie.
I twiddled the knob and the picture moved dutifully to left and right. There were few people about and the area had the drab look which besets eastern European cities by day or night.
‘You don’t like him much do you?’ I inclined my head towards Mostyn.
‘Like him? You’re joking.’ Boysie narrowly missed an aged pedestrian. ‘He’d screw your Aunt Fanny for ten-pence.’
‘Why don’t you leave then?’
‘Leave?’
‘Get out. Eject. Abort.’
‘I’ve tried. Several times I’ve tried but he’s had me by the curlies for years. I just pretend it’s all one great fantasy now. I mean we aren’t really in a dirty great Russian tank with an unconscious defector in the back rolling through Moscow, are we?’
‘I’d prefer it if we weren’t.’
‘Then tell yourself it’s all a colour fantasy. You’ll wake up and it’s all gone, I’ve been doing it for years. That bastard back there’s nearly killed me. I mean the last fantasy I was in Maurice Richardson of the Observer said I seemed to be approaching some dire male menopause. What’s he expect with someone like Mostyn chasing you all the time? He’s had me in bloody aeroplanes, hovercraft, speedboats, trains, submarines, even a rocket. Now a damn great tank. I can’t take much more. I shall retire into a nice simple business. If I wake up.’
‘What do you really think Mostyn’s up to?’ I asked Boysie.
He hunched his shoulders and looked expressive.
‘Search me. I think he just wants time to think. We’d have been a bloody stupid sight less conspicuous in the car. Only it was low on gas.’
‘And at least we can shoot back in this thing.’
You could see that Boysie had gone stark white, even in this light. ‘Yes.’ There was a trace of queasiness in his tone. ‘We’re also a good slow moving target. You ever seen a tank that’s been hit by the old fashioned anti-tank shells?’
‘No.’ I had heard though.
‘The fragments go all over the place and share themselves out amongst the crew. Very unpleasant.’
‘Before we go any further.’ Boysie slewed round in his seat.
‘Can we have a glimmer of the intricate plot that is lurking in your mind?’
Silence for the count of five. Then Mostyn said, ‘I just want to put as many miles as possible between us and Moscow.’
‘Why towards Leningrad?’
‘It’s the quickest route to the Finnish frontier. And we have friends in Finland.’
‘Yeah. Friends who will finish it off.’ Boysie gurgled at the horrible pun. ‘In other words you haven’t got a bloody plan.’
The rumble of the engine. The constantly changing picture on my scanner.
Drowsiness.
*
So here we were. The spearhead of the army, advan
cing steadily to make what history would later come to know as the greatest pincer movement in modern military strategy.
As I rode in the lead tank I could not help but remember the words Winston had said to me only a week before in the green drawing-room at Number Ten — that drawing-room that is steeped in great moments. ‘Bushy,’ Winston had said, ‘tell your men that they must be forceful and resolute. That they must go forward, whatever the cost, until they have triturated the enemy under the iron heel of their boots. Some heel. Some boots.’
I handed on the Prime Minister’s message to my squadron commanders, adding my own words. ‘Our duty is to kill, blind, maim and cripple the forces of the opposing armies.’ (Major Cornish in his memoirs Less Than The Dust quotes General Upsdale as saying, ‘the forces of the bloody opposing armies.’)
They had taken it well enough. Nobody wavered. On we went rumbling through the darkened countryside.
It is easy to be wise after the event, but the fact that I, as Commanding General in the Field, had given a slightly incorrect compass bearing was not the full cause of the debacle which almost led to a major early setback.
It was dawn when we ran into the first opposition. A stick of HE shells which straddled the column.
‘Jesus what was that?’
I was in the Russian tank, Boysie by my side. My ears sang and my watch showed six fifty-five.
‘What? I’ve been...’
‘Snoring like an anaesthetized sperm whale. They’ve rumbled us mate. Someone’s started shooting and by rights this is the moment I quit.’ He was throwing the tank from side to side.
There came another series of muffled explosions: outside but near. I looked at my screen. We were in flat open country, on a dirt road flanked with plane trees. I twiddled the scanner knob. No sign of any troops or other tanks.
‘Bloody helicopter,’ yelled Mostyn. ‘Can you get elevation on your screen, Upsdale?’
‘Small black handle below your red knob. Here he comes again.’
I spun the handle and the picture began to tilt upwards. ‘Coming in to our right.’ Mostyn agitated.
Automatically I slid the picture right in time to glimpse the stubby green insect with tiny spurts of flame coming from its open belly. Once more the crack and thump of explosions.
‘It’s only a matter of time before he hits,’ shouted Mostyn.
‘Well, do something.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like they do on the movies. Show the white flag.’
‘We haven’t got a white flag.’
‘Well something white. Anything white. Hester?’
‘You can’t. They’re black and it’s too old a gag to use here.’
‘I did not quite see that. We seem to have been using old gags since page one.’
‘You can use my liver,’ shouted Boysie.
‘My shirt,’ I called up to Mostyn.
‘Quickly get the bloody thing up here.’
‘I saw a movie the other day.’ It was Boysie. ‘And they were in this tank being attacked by a helicopter, so they pretended that the game was up. Then when the chopper landed they all lay doggo. The crew approaches. They ups and bops the crew and away in the helicopter.’
Styles was still lying at the back of the cabin, peace sketched on to his features. I dragged my shirt from the pile of clothes and stumbled back to the centre, handing it up to Mostyn who was shouting back to Boysie.
‘All a shade melodramatic but we can try it that way. You come out last and try to make it look real.’
There was another set of bangs. Very near this time and followed by an unpleasant pattering sound on the metal outside. A jolt. The sensation of spinning.
‘Shit,’ said Boysie loudly. ‘I think he’s torn a track off.’
‘Good for the simulated surrender.’ Mostyn sounded as indomitable as the thin red line. ‘I’m opening the hatch now.’ Then to me, ‘Can you drag Styles up here? We can push him out first.’
I eased myself back along the cabin and took hold of Styles under the arms. He was the same old dead weight. As I crouched, pulling him towards the centre of the cabin, Mostyn opened the hatch and with an echoing clang. Boysie had stopped the engines and far away, from outside, you could hear the helicopter drone and stutter.
I pulled Styles into the centre and looked up through the main turret mounting. Mostyn was half out of the hatch waving my shirt and knowing his life depended on the chopper crew seeing it. Boysie unfastened himself from his seat and began to stoop his way towards me. The helicopter made a low pass. Stomach churn, waiting for the noise of fire. None. The chopper was over and away.
‘Pass him up.’ From Mostyn, now climbing from the hatch. Between us, Boysie and I hauled the sagging Styles up toward the opening. Hester leaned down and pulled.
Mostyn had him now, under the arms with me pushing from below. Slowly we emerged into the refrigerated light outside.
‘You get down and I’ll pass him to you.’ Mostyn stood by the side of the turret. Leaning down he called to Boysie. ‘Make it like real, Oaksie, as you come out. There’s a couple of spare cans of fuel on the outside of the hatch here. Use ‘em.’
‘Yes, sir, Colonel.’
Hester followed me out of the hatch and the three of us dragged Styles away from the tank. The road upon which we had been travelling was Grade X: a dirt track with the trees looking as if they were permanent residences for pests. The ground looked cold and hard, sloping away to a low horizon over which heavy grey clouds hung as though waiting to swallow us.
We dumped Styles, beat our hands against our bodies to help the circulation and tried to look subdued. Boysie was fiddling about at the top of the hatch, pouring fuel from the extra cans down the rear of the tank. The whole scene was sharp, in muted colours, silent except for the steady noise of the helicopter making its turn, hovering and descending behind us, crabbing in and closing with the ground.
‘Hi,’ I said to Hester, touching her hand. ‘Sleep well?’
‘Like it had just been invented. I always sleep heavily in tin boxes.’ She grimaced.
Boysie lifted himself out of the hatchway and slid down the far side of the vehicle, out of sight.
I turned and looked towards the helicopter which was very low now, green-grey, a figure poised in the opening of its belly.
‘A Hound, eh? Didn’t know they were using Hounds any more.’
‘Oh yes,’ a matter-of-fact tone to my voice. ‘The old Mil Mi-4 is still in service, complete with the two GTD-350 shaft-turbine engines.’
‘Expert,’ snarled Mostyn.
‘Expertise. I have my Jane’s All The World’s Aircraft like any other professional fiction writer.’
There was a pause pregnant with turbine noise.
‘What if it’s carrying more than three crew?’
‘You mean what do we do?’
‘Precisely.’
Hester smiled. ‘I offer my body to the brutes and when they line up and unbutton, the cold does the well-known monkey job and we train them all as boy sopranos, dress them in surplices and escape over the border disguised as The Little Choristers of St. Mostyn’s.’
The bang came as a surprise. Even the helicopter veered three degrees to port. The rear of the tank was swathed in flame : dark blood edged with thick black smoke.
‘I bet he singed his eyebrows doing that.’ Mostyn dropped to one knee beside Styles.
‘Let’s get closer.’ Hester rubbed her hands. We needed a fire.’
‘You stay right here,’ barked Mostyn. ‘There’s high explosives in that thing. And the rest of the fuel. Trust Oakes to go too far. A small, realistic blaze would have been enough.’
At that moment the helicopter landed and the rear of the tank blew out with a ripping thud, scattering the entrails of the engine in a black disorganized fifty foot trail followed by a billow of flame.
I tried to be a mole but the diamond hard earth was not having any. Raising my head I was pleased to see that Hester
and Mostyn had reacted to the danger in a similar manner. We were all roused by a shout from the direction of the helicopter.
They had stopped engines and the entire crew, three men, were approaching : one carrying a pistol, the other two armed with what looked to be A.K. automatic rifles.
‘Stick your hands in the air and look cowed,’ muttered Mostyn.
‘I am cowed, bloody cowed.’ Hester had both arms up. ‘And frightened.’
The situation, I felt, was fast becoming irredeemable. The fantasies and realities were being interwoven. I raised my hands and glanced towards Hester. She looked remarkably attractive, the slight freezing breeze stroking the small amount of hair that had blown forward from under the tank helmet. She should be backed by the strings of Henry Mancini, not by the harsh explosions of engines or the shouts of menacing helicopter crews. In the right light she could be the girl who advertised deodorant on the silver screen at your local Odeon. No, that one was a con girl. A teaser of men and women. You too can have a girl like this. You too can be a girl like this.
Henry Mancini stopped and Mostyn was speaking in English, gesturing towards Styles.
‘Our comrade is hurt. Can you help him?’
The three Russians were close now. Two of them looked quite young, boys of nineteen or so. The other one was around my age. Over the hill tovarich. He had a nasty wart to the left of his nose. Ought to see a wise woman about that. Disfiguring.
The older Russian holstered his pistol and went down on his knees beside Styles. Mostyn joined him. Hester and I still groped for the clouds, the pair of lads with the automatic rifles looked as though they had itchy fingers. Well, young lads don’t get the same opportunities in Russia: they can’t go around smashing up football trains or working off energy on protest marches like we can. Jesus I should not be thinking like that. Me in the full flood of the fornicating forties with the best years to come. As the man says — Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
‘I think he’s badly hurt.’ Mostyn spoke slowly, enunciating with great clarity.
‘Da,’ replied the Russian nodding violently. He began to feel the bones in Styles’ legs. Come to think of it, Styles did look damned ill. He had also been unconscious for a long time.
