by James Rouch
Whether he was referring to his driver losing a limb, or himself losing a car, Revell couldn’t be sure. Most likely, the loss that concerned Lippincott was that of a driver who’d become used to his peculiar ways.
‘Yeah, we did a real beautiful job here. Had the shits under sky-spy surveillance from soon after they’d left you, knew exactly where to wait for them.’ Lippincott spat out slivers of wood and pieces of lead, examined the end of the pencil then went at it again. ‘I even had a battery of 155mm cannon south of Goldbach assigned to me, to give Blindfire support with rocket-assisted Copperheads, but I didn’t use them, didn’t need them. Yeah, my tanks did a real neat job, took out all eighteen of those commie wagons in under an hour.’
‘How many?’ It was a superfluous question, Revell knew he’d heard correctly. ‘I said eighteen. What’s the matter with you, you had your fingers elsewhere when they should have been in your ears?’ ‘No, my hearing’s OK, Colonel, and so is my counting. It was twenty-three tanks that kept going when we hit the rear of the column. If my subtraction is up to scratch as well, that leaves five commie tanks unaccounted for.’ ‘They could still be in there.’ Lippincott indicated the inky darkness of the Zone, to the east of the autobahn.
‘And maybe they’re not.’ Revell was looking westwards, where a broad glowing band across a wide arc of the horizon marked the city of Frankfurt. ‘And if they’re not, then all hell is about to break loose.’
FOURTEEN
‘They’ll do it.’ Lippincott took off the headphones and handed them to the major. ‘They don’t like it, but they’ll do it. As soon as Corps HQ have confirmation the commies are in the city, you’ll be given their location and a general nuke alert will be sounded.’
‘That should keep the civvies nicely tucked up underground, out of my way, while I get on with it.’ And Revell had thought the fighting over! ‘You’re not coming with us, Colonel?’
‘You trying to rile me? No I’m not fucking coming. Command want me to take what’s left of this rag-bag of armour and do a sweep in the Zone, just in case those commies are still stooging about near here... I ain’t gonna find the shitty buggers, all I’m gonna do is spend a long uncomfortable night hauling tanks out of ditches and streams and getting bad tempered. One thing’s for sure, no crappy arse ticker at HQ is going to think to call me off when those wagons do turn up elsewhere.’
There was nothing that Revell could say to that. The colonel was most probably right, and agreeing with him wasn’t going to help matters. ‘We’ll lift the moment that laser target designator is on board.’
‘OK, I’ll get out of your way.’ Deliberately not seeing the offer of assistance from Hogg, but looking at him as he turned to use the step, Lippincott paused. ‘You guys won’t have heard. Seems someone stole a general’s car today. There’s a hell of a witch-hunt going on at HQ. Haven’t seen a block long, big, black and shiny Caddy have you?’
‘Not us, Colonel.’ Hogg was a shade too fast with the denial. ‘Fine, fine. And I know you’re telling the truth, Lieutenant, cause you’re not smiling anymore.’ Taking another step down, Lippincott paused one last time. ‘I’ve always kinda hankered after a Cadillac. Fact is, I’m so keen to have one, I wouldn’t even mind if it’d had a re-spray.’ Hogg and Revell exchanged glances. A voice floated to them from the darkness outside.
‘Powder blue would be nice.’
‘What did happen to it?’ Curiosity got the better of Revell, when commonsense told him not to get involved.
‘It was Burke who’d been listening, and now chipped in. ‘You want to know about a black staff car.’
‘I’m not sure…’ Hogg thought about it. ‘You know, I can’t even remember where I left it... Yes, alright, tell me.’ ‘I saw the front end sticking out of an alley in Budingen, after the battle. There wasn’t a scratch on it’
‘Thank God. For a moment...’
‘…but that was all there was, Lieutenant, just the front.’ ‘You know this Colonel Lippincott.’ Hogg passed his hand over his eyes. ‘Think he’d like the car by instalments? Piece at a time?’ ‘Don’t worry about it. We have other problems at present’ ‘It’s here, Major.’ Dooley lifted in the laser designator, making tight work of the equipment’s forty-seven pounds.
‘Take us up.’ Slamming the door and securing it, Revell joined the flight crew. The pilot’s face was just visible, lit by the glow from luminous instruments. This bus isn’t equipped for fancy manoeuvring in the dark. I hope you’re not expecting any hot-shot flying.’
‘No, like before, take it easy. When we find our target you can drop us off ahead of it. From then on we’ll find our own transport, and you can go back to hauling freight, if that’s what you still want to do.’ ‘You mean I’ll be finished? Hey, now that’s good news. I’ve aged ten years today.’ The pilot touched his face ‘Does it show?’
‘In this light you look like you died last week.’ ‘Thanks, Major. That was a real tonic’
Above the cockpit the front engine faltered and ran raggedly for a moment. The nose dipped as the co-pilot played with a selection of fuel switches.
‘It’ll be that pump again.’ As the engine picked up, the pilot trimmed the Chinook back to an even keel. ‘Marvellous, isn’t it? All day I haul spares for tanks, guns and fixed wing aircraft; best part of a month I’ve been waiting for this old bus to be fixed.’
Cohen squeezed in. ‘I think this is it, Major.’ He pointed to a scribbled line of figures on his board. ‘That’s the map reference. There’s been no military confirmation, but the civilian switchboards have been jammed for the last five minutes, calls to the army and police.’
‘Where is this?’ Revell took the appropriate map from a rack and checked the references against it. ‘If it is them, then they’re lost, they’ve screwed up on the last lap.’
‘What’s at this place we’re going to; any girls?’ The pilot turned the Chinook on to the heading he was given.
‘No, it’s warehouses, not whorehouses. A nice industrial area, ideal for us. Long straight roads, with plenty of hiding places just off them.’ ‘So long as there’s room for me to put down without having my blades play cat’s cradles with power lines, I’m happy.’ As the pilot took the engines up to their maximum revolutions, the whole fuselage vibrated.
Dooley was happy too. Sitting close to Andrea, he could feel the warmth of her body gradually working through the several layers of clothing that separated them. The trembling of the craft made his backside tingle and kept his mind on the lower portion of his anatomy - and hers. He wondered if the sensation did anything for her.
It was rather like being inside a giant vibrator... now there was a thought. At intervals he would grin and grimace to the others, and nod to the girl as she rested with her head against a stack of empty pallets, mouth slightly open, moist lips framing perfect teeth, her closed eyes showing off the long dark lashes. She was younger than he usually went for, but a couple of quick ones would be so good. He could have murdered Ripper when he disturbed her by sitting down opposite, catching her feet with his.
‘Say, that was real clumsy of me. I’m sorry, I truly am.’ Andrea’s eyes opened and looked at Ripper, and then right through him. Hell, she was playing hard to get. Still PFC Billy J Ripper was not about to be put off. Show an interest, that was a ploy that had always worked back home. ‘You German?’ No answer, just the same unwavering gaze from those gold-flecked brown eyes. ‘You remind me of a girl I used to go with...’
‘Then you have had one?’
Now why’d she say that, was she getting at him? Heck no. Press on boy, she’ll weaken, try the experience trick. ‘Sure I’ve had one, had a whole load, why I’ve ...’ ‘Then you had best stay in practice, it would be a shame to see so much talent wasted.’
‘What are you suggesting then?’ He could see the big man glaring at him, as well as that strange limey. What the hell, go for broke, they couldn’t do nothing with a couple of officers present.
‘I sug
gest you do what I think you do best, what you have always done, abuse yourself.’
‘Abuse...? You mean... hey, that’s dirty.’ Ripper had never heard a woman talk like that before. Not even Charlene, and she’d been real fond of men, had sampled almost all of them around town, some said even her pa’s German shepherd. The big guy was welcome to this one, talking dirty like that. It weren’t decent.
Frankfurt was lit up below them. There was no blackout in force, it was only in the Zone that showing a light could bring down death in any of a dozen different forms. Beyond it, the illumination of the towns and cities on either side gave unmistakable warning to any bomber crew that it might have strayed too far from its target, and the gain from a single contrived ‘accident’ could not be worth the dislocation of transport and manufacturing that would come with the inevitable retaliation. But sometimes there were accidents, real ones, and then the hot lines would burn, ‘arrangements’ would be reached, notes exchanged through neutral countries and the incident buried as swiftly as its victims.
The pace was set by the war on the ground, a situation that suited the Russians with the huge reserves of armour and trained manpower they had built up during the sixties and seventies. And it suited the NATO command, all too aware of its relative weakness in strike aircraft after the near destruction of the air-arm at the beginning of the war, when planes and pilots had been thrown away in desperate attempts to stem the communist advance.
There was no traffic on the streets. With the odd exception, every vehicle had been pulled into the side of the road before its driver and passengers had sought the safety of the deep shelters.
The city was like a body that had recently been taken off a life support machine. All the organs functioned for the time being, but without the brain’s direction it would not be long before they faltered and stopped.
‘Close as I can figure, we should be about over them now.’ ‘What’s our altitude?’ Revell leant over the pilot’s shoulder to try to read the instrument himself.
‘Two thousand. You want me to circle?’
‘Yes, and can you take us down further.’ Pilot and co-pilot exchanged glances. It was the co-pilot who spoke for them both.
‘You know we’ve got no armour on this tub. All we’ve got is the flak-jackets we’re sitting on, and they’re staying there. They can shoot my head off, but I’m keeping my balls.’
‘Just a couple of passes should do it, then you can drop us and go home.’ ‘OK, a couple, and then off.’ Pushing the stick forward, the pilot put the Chinook into a steep spiralling dive to twelve hundred feet.
They beat across the industrial estate, over warehouses, light engineering works, a small chemical plant. A man was stationed at every window, every doorway, and still there was no sign of the Russian tanks.
‘I know they’re down there.’ Screwing up his eyes, Revell urged himself to greater concentration. ‘Start the second run.’ ‘Nothing.’ The pilot took time to look down at the well-lit metalled roads and floodlit storage yards laced with sidings. ‘Command must have given us the wrong references ... Shit, no they didn’t.’
From a service station forecourt gobs of fuzzy bordered luminescence climbed towards them, seeming to travel faster as they approached. A second stream joined the first as it cut the air behind them.
The Chinook’s airframe was shaken hard enough to fracture its welds, as the pilot opened the throttles and jinked the chopper away from the chasing tracer.
‘The buggers are refuelling.’ Dooley shouted as he replied to the hostile fire with short bursts from an M60 he held out of the open door. His targets were far beyond the weapon’s effective range, and the tracks of the tracer were lost against the service station’s floodlit forecourt.
‘Put us down as close as you can.’
On Revell’s instructions, the chopper executed a tight half-turn, came to a dead stop, and went straight down like an express elevator.
First out, Revell supervised the fast disembarkation of the others. Hyde was last, carrying the heavy designator. He waved to the chopper’s crew, his words inaudible through the thrashing of the blades above his head, and gave them a thumbs-up.
The pilot didn’t have to hear the order, he’d anticipated it as the last of the squad jumped clear. With a rising scream, the high set engines went to full power and lifted the Chinook into the air.
Three hundred feet above the car park in which it had dropped them, the chopper’s front engine gave out a series of flame-accompanied bangs from its exhaust stack. Its rate of climb slowed and stopped and it hung there, its underside clearly illuminated by the light from the street lamps.
Tracer flicked past it, one round flashing like a firework display as it burst against a rotating blade. Another joined it, then a third. Several of the bursts went into the cabin, or bounced from its curved sides, going off at wild angles.
Just when the faulty engine picked up once more, and the helicopter began to lift again, two of the lines of bullets found the front rotor assembly. Shedding blades and shining lengths of transmission shaft the Chinook staggered, then began to whirl around in a flat spin as it plunged earthwards. The point of impact was out of their sight, beyond a long low building flanked by rows of hoppers and silos. They heard the crash, and anticipated the bubble of flame that soared and flared briefly in the darkness.
Hyde put his arm out, and held Libby back. ‘Nothing you can do, not going in from that height.’
A shower of fluttering strips of burning paper rained from the sky. Charred pornography, fragments of maps, pages of logbooks made a fiery flurry of litter.
When the last pieces were consumed and their ashes fell and broke on the roads and rooftops, Revell tore his eyes from the scene as the sound of tank engines intruded. ‘Get on that radio. I want a link with our battery kept open all the time. All of you, stay close, remember our task is to provide covering fire for Sergeant Hyde with the laser, so I don’t want anybody starting a shooting war on his own account.’
One of the T84s was still at the pumps, its crew working frantically to complete the replenishment and join the other four tanks waiting along the road. The turret- mounted anti-aircraft machine gun of every one was manned.
While the others fanned out to either side, Hyde and Cohen took up positions among precarious stacks of weathered and much stencilled packing cases in a yard across from the gas station. Checking the laser projector was looked into the correct frequency, Hyde turned on the designator to warm it up.
‘I’m ready. One round to start.’ He settled behind the box and targeted on the T84. This was his own little world, where he could be God. Where he was God, dispensing death with precision. Anything within his field of vision he could destroy. Beside him, Cohen was droning the map reference into the radio; it wouldn’t be long now.
Hyde was counting down the seconds. Thirty; the Russian crew had almost finished. One of them threw aside the hose, letting the last gush of fuel spew across the forecourt. Twenty; he’d leave triggering the beam until the last moment. If the T84 had sensors aboard, he’d give its crew no time to act on their warning. Ten seconds; grey smoke spouted from the rear of the vehicle as it began a jerking turn that would take it out on to the road. Switch on ... now.
High above the city, at the apogee of its soaring, thirty thousand yard trajectory, the rocket-boosted Copperhead artillery shell began its hurtling descent towards its general target area. Its ultra-sensitive seeker instrumentation, activated by the violence of its 7,000g launch, began to search for sources of laser radiation.
Almost immediately, it detected that being bounced from the hull of the accelerating T84. The round checked the frequency code of the emission it was homing on, matched it with its pre-programmed information and deployed its stubby mid-body wings.
Travelling at incredible velocity, the tiny control surfaces only had to move fractionally to carry out the final course corrections and bring it to its target. The fifty pound high explosive squash-
head charge made a direct hit on the turret top beside the gunner’s hatch. The metal could offer no meaningful resistance to the forces unleashed against it...
As the service station’s high set canopy lifted off its girder supports and disintegrated, a roaring fireball engulfed the pumps and seared the front of the workshops behind them. The T84 rolled out of the flames, towing them with it, and minus every external fitting. It struck a row of cars and climbed on to them, bursting out their windshields and crushing their bodywork, before canting over and toppling on to its side.
A river of blazing fuel gushed from its ruptured hull, pouring down drains and into cracked-open inspection covers. Destruction became complete when the first of the underground storage tanks erupted and showered thousands of gallons of fuel across the area.
Tremors shook the ground as petrol ignited in the confines of the drains and sewers. A second storage tank blasted a hole in the forecourt and sent semi-molten brass valves and fittings and jagged lumps of concrete through the walls and roofs of nearby factories.
‘They’re coming after us.’ Cohen punched the sergeant’s shoulder to get his attention when shouting failed. ‘Look, they’re coming for us.’
Closed down, their co-axial machine guns sweeping the frontages to either side, the last four Soviet tanks were bearing down on them. Their leader fired its main cannon, and blasted a SeaLand container truck parked nearby.
‘Get me another round.’ Grabbing the radio-man’s wrist, Hyde pulled him back down.
