by James Rouch
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.
Carpet bombing, saturation chemical attacks, super-napalm drops, all had contributed towards the utter sterilisation of the landscape. Hardly a plant grew, and the few trees that survived were gouged and splintered by the bombs and shells that had embedded thousands of metal fragments in their bark. The transformation had been so violent it was virtually impossible to tell where the countryside had ended and town had begun. Now the two merged into one, an endless series of crater-scarred low hills.
At the side of the road sat hundreds of burned-out trucks and cars of every description, most of military origin. They lay rusting where the engineers had dumped them, some showing the marks of the heavy bulldozer blades that had shoved them aside when route clearance had become more urgent than salvage.
‘Off the road.’ Even the slamming of the heavy hatch behind him failed to drown out Dooley’s shout as he ducked inside.
Burke didn’t hesitate, wrenching the steering over and sending the APC into a lightly cratered field that was criss-crossed with the gouge marks of hundreds of sets of tank tracks.
Even as the back wheels hit the mud-surfaced loam, the road behind them erupted in pounding flame as a salvo of air to ground rockets ploughed into it.
‘Get us air cover.’ Revell had to bellow at the top of his voice to be heard by Cline, as the Soviet helicopter gunship banked and rippled another twenty rockets at them.
Fragments rattled and banged against the armour as the close spaced shock waves threatened to push the speeding vehicle over. Having overshot, the chopper had to go into a wide stalling turn to bring it back on target again, and this time Burke was able to watch its head-on approach.
At the first spurt of flame from the launch pods on the gunship’s stub wings, their driver put them into a turn that for a moment threatened disaster as they side-swiped a wrecked Abram tank. As the grating sound of the long scraping contact died, he sent them the other way and into the mass of smoke and slowly settling debris from the near misses,
‘Hell, don’t be stopping now.’ Ripper looked around at the others, expecting the same reaction from them as their driver slammed on the brakes and slewed the vehicle to a sharp stop then turned off the engine.
Pushing his head up into the turret, Revell slowly cranked it round to take a look at their situation. Their driver had achieved the near impossible, found them a place of concealment in that featureless terrain.
Under cover of the smoke, Burke had parked them between a pair of damaged armoured personnel carriers: on one side a West German Marder, on the other an Ml 13 with Canadian markings. The little group of which they formed the, hopefully, anonymous centrepiece was among a concentration of twenty or more other similar wrecks.
‘Shit, what do we do now. Wait for them to fry us?’ Shifting position, Ripper tried to move nearer an escape hatch.
‘If they do, it will not be yet’ With nothing to do while Cline distrustfully worked the radio single-handed, Boris alone found time for the young American. ‘The gunship will for the moment have lost us among the battlefield litter. If it is a recent model, one of those that has been pared of sophisticated equipment in order that the Communists might indulge their love of numbers above all else, then there is a chance it may not find us before it is forced to break off.’
‘We’ll know soon.’ Stopped further back, and driven in among the gutted remains of a convoy, Revell was relieved to see that the Land-Rover seemed to have entirely escaped the notice of the gunship, which was continuing to beat back and forth above them. He turned his full attention back to it, in time to see it launch one of its four wire-guided antitank missiles.
By the flare at the base of its tail, Revell was able to track the fat-bodied rocket and saw its devastating detonation against the hulk of a burned-out Luch eight-wheeled armoured car. Already leeched by earlier fires of everything combustible, there was no chance that the strike would satisfy the chopper’s weapons officer. Without spotting a fire he would know he had not hit his target.
Twice more it circled, and at the end of each turn made a pass over the battlefield and sent down another missile; but lacking the ability to distinguish the live target from the wrecks, only succeeded hi further demolishing a pair of already unsalvageable armoured ambulances.
‘He’ll get tired of pissing about and bugger off in a minute.’ Lounging back in his seat, Burke jumped violently as a cannon shell exploded against the roof above his head.
In frustration the helicopter crew opened a near continuous fire with their gatling-type fixed armament. The chin-turret mounted weapon sent torrents of shells towards the ground; between bursts they released the last of the 57mm unguided rockets, most of which did no more than turn over ground that had already been churned to a fine filth by explosives.
‘The bastard is trying to flush us out.’ Dooley made a great show of nonchalantly cleaning his nails with the tip of his bayonet, but spoiled the effect when even he jumped as another round disintegrated on the turret top, and sliced into the tip of a finger. ‘If that fucker runs out of gas and has to land, I’ll fucking have him.’ He squeezed the base of the finger until its tip went pink then red, and a large bead of dark blood rose from the deep cut.
They listened as the helicopter circled once more, growing fainter as it did so, then at the moment the beat of its motors was on the threshold of their hearing, it began to grow louder, and louder.
‘I think he’s having one last go.’ Revell watched its head-on approach, saw its last anti-tank missile spurt from its rail, underslung from the end pylon on the starboard stub wing, saw the light glint briefly on the wires unreeling behind it.
This time he couldn’t see the tail flare, only the dark outline of the rocket against the shimmer of its exhaust heat. It took him an instant to realise why the view was so different from those before. He was seeing the warhead not as it homed in on some other target, but as it
came at them.
There was no other action he could take. Shouting a warning he dropped to the floor of the compartment and huddled close to it, tucking his head into the crook of his arm.
A giant hammer blow shook the eight-wheeler as the Ml 13 alongside took the full force of a direct hit by the powerful warhead and was moved bodily sideways to crash into the APC. The fireball enveloped all three vehicles and their every external fitting was ripped off by the massive blast.
Feeling the sudden roasting heat on his back, Revell looked up. All trace of the turret had gone. It had been plucked out neatly, leaving just the ball race and part of the traverse mechanism.
White-hot shafts of molten explosive and metal had sought out every corner of the M113, and discovered a still intact fuel tank. Raised instantly to its flashpoint as it gushed from the leaking container, the fuel now fed a roaring furnace that licked over the squad’s partially roofless transport.
Using the top hatches was out of the question, a moment’s exposure to the flames would have incinerated them, and the side doors opened only a fraction before making contact with the wrecks between which they were parked.
Flickering tongues of red and yellow played past Burke’s vision port as he crunched the APC into gear to drive it out from the clutches of the trap. He pushed the power higher and higher as the machine strained to escape the vice-like hold of the wrecks between which it was now so tightly held. He tried reverse, and the hope the few inches of movement brought was immediately dashed as the vehicle locked solid once again.
The air was becoming unbreathable, and the luxury interior fittings that until now had added a welcome touch of comfort to the usually spartan interior, became an added danger as their varnished finish or foam filling began to heat up, and give off strong fumes.
Packs stowed against the wall licked by the adjoining fires began to smoulder and had to be tossed out through the open roof, some of them to add their content to the fires.
