by James Rouch
He was glad to be alone, even for this brief moment. His hand delved deep into an inside pocket, and he pulled out the photograph. For the hundredth time he thought what a good idea it had been to have the copies made. This one was becoming very creased, the corners dog-eared, and the picture itself blurred by his dirty fingerprints. A breath on it and a quick rub with his cuff brought a marked improvement. He liked to be alone when he looked at it, liked to keep even her image to himself. And when he had the real thing once more, when he held Helga again, then Revell and Hyde and all the others and the Zone and the war, they could go to hell, they would have served his purpose.
The subdued throbbing of the generator outside could just be heard above the rapid clicking of the miniature printer. Switching off the terminal, York separated the flimsy strip and handed it to Revell.
‘Are we in business yet?’ His nose swollen to grotesque dimensions and spread across his face, Lieutenant Hogg spoke with a heavy nasal intonation. The blood that constantly trickled around his mouth, and dripped from his chin, had stained his anorak dark red.
‘It’s getting more promising. They’ve spotted a lot of activity at Gdansk and a couple of other Polish ports where we can expect the escorts to come from. Still no firm figures, but I’m beginning to feel this breakout could be bigger than expected. A lot bigger.’ Extracting a clip, Revell took one of the message strips that had been tapped out earlier. ‘But at the moment I’m more concerned about this.’
Hogg took it, read, and attempted a whistle that failed and instead forced a large drop of blood from his nose. He wiped it away with the back of his glove. ‘If the met boys have got this right, then the great-grandaddy of all cold fronts is heading our way. Says here temperatures of below minus thirty can be expected. Hell, now that is low. It’ll freeze the nuts off the men.’
‘It won’t do Andrea a lot of good either, but there’s other equipment I’m more concerned about. With the temperature dropping to that level we’re bound to get an increased failure rate among the electronic gear, it’s inevitable.’ Through the largely glassless window Revell could see that the snow was definitely slackening. If the sky cleared then the mercury would plunge still further. ‘How long before all three sites are ready, and we can do a complete system check for bugs? We can’t be getting a true picture, testing each piece and link as it’s installed.’
‘Number one is ready now. Two will be at least a couple of hours yet. We could save time by stationing it closer in.’
‘No, we’re going for maximum dispersion within the perimeter of the intruder alarms. What about number three, the Lance.’
‘With its trailer, that scales better than two tons, Major. Even if we hitch all the men to it, I can’t see us shifting it far from the sledge. Once it’s in place all we have to do is fix on the wings, survey the site and connect up. I reckon if we stick to our original plan we’ve another five hours’ hard work, what with shifting all the reload rounds for the multiple launchers. Do we work during daylight?’’
‘Yes. No breaks until it’s all done. I might have to think about it again if this cloud starts to thin, but for the time being it’s full steam ahead, drive them hard.’ Revell ticked off items on his check-list. ‘What about the demolition charges?’
‘I’ll take care of them.’ Hogg dabbed at his running nose. ‘For the most part it’s just a case of connecting the wires, but there’s a fair bit of ground to cover, what with the remote decoy mortars and all. It’d be a help if I could have Libby. He knows what he’s doing with that sort of thing.’
‘Pick someone else. I’m not happy about our shortage of heavy weapons. We need at least one machine gun, and if anyone can salvage something from the junk pulled out from under that tractor, he can. Likewise I’ve got work here for York and Cline, otherwise you can take your pick.’ ‘The girl?’ .
Revell suspected an ulterior motive behind the lieutenant’s query; he suspected anyone who took an interest in Andrea. ‘Boris is with the working parties. He’s safe enough out there with the other men, even Clarence. They’ve had an order to lay off, and they’ll obey it. Andrea I can’t be so sure of, so she stays here, giving a hand with the casualties.’ That wasn’t really how Revell wanted it. He’d far rather have had her here, in the control room with him, instead of upstairs. But he felt he had to display at least that much disinterest, even so, his thoughts constantly veered to her.
‘Major, one of your men…’
‘Shut the damned door.’ Revell’s shout was as loud as the crash with which Cline had thrown it open.
‘Private Libby, he…’
‘If you can’t take care of it yourself, then learn to live with it. I’ll be damned if I’m going to play nursemaid. Now if you’ve fixed that camera, get to work on the hook-ups to the launcher sites.’
Cline shut his mouth fast. Bugger, bugger, bugger: the realisation that he’d made a cock-up by complaining occurred to him forcibly. From now on he’d have to think first every time, and then be very smooth. Still, if he did his job by the book he should be able to paper over the cracks he’d made in the image he’d been trying so hard to project. He’d have to, if he was going to turn the time spent on this harebrained mission to his advantage; and he would, or die in the attempt. Well maybe not die… but a neat and not too painful little wound would be in order.
The worst cases, those with multiple fractures or internal injuries, were laid on the bare floor. The other casualties sat propped against the wall, all around the room. All of them were encased in plastic-coated metal-foil survival bags, the shining cocoons helping them retain their precious body heat.
Libby had stuffed wads of paper into the broken panes of the single window, but it was only a gesture; there was scant difference between the temperature inside and outside the building. The day had brought no warmth.
As he worked to repair the salvaged weapons, his hands almost seemed to seize up with the cold. The metal of barrels and mechanisms stung and left cold- imprinted patterns on his palms and fingertips.
The men’s breath hung in fine clouds before them, dispersing slowly in the light draughts. It was a perfect at-a-glance indicator as to the more serious cases; they could be recognised by the thin plume of vapour surrounding them, their weakened bodies barely being capable of shallow breaths. In two instances that vestige of white mist was the only sign that the men in question were still alive.
Gunner Fraser, his own head bandaged, moved quietly from man to man, tucking the cold limbs of the semiconscious back inside their metallic wrapping, sometimes making a fractional adjustment to the position of a dressing or lighting a cigarette.
‘Daft, isn’t it.’ Libby slid across to sit beside Andrea, as she watched the young medic’s ceaseless fussing. ‘At the moment it’s the cold that’s keeping some of the poor devils alive, slowing them down, giving their bodies a chance to start to cope with the damage, but in the end it’ll be the cold that kills them. Why don’t you give the kid a hand? That’s why you’re supposed to be up here. Go on, a pretty face is always good medicine. Surprise me and give them a treat, smile.’
She had never talked to Libby before. There had never been any need, and she would not have done so for any other reason. But now it was easier to talk than to try to ignore him, and she could turn the occasion to good use. ‘Will the major order patrols, or are we to sit here and wait for trouble to come to us?’
‘The intruder alarm perimeter is far enough out to give us fair warning if some of the natives or someone less friendly should stumble our way.’ ‘Then I do not know why we need to be here. Why not let the machines do it all? If they can find the enemy, why not give them the capability to kill also?’
‘You don’t mean that.’ In spite of her German accent Libby had recognised the irony in her words. ‘You love the killing. I’ve seen you doing it.’ ‘I do it well.’
‘So does a nuclear bomb, but I wouldn’t cuddle up to that either.’ ‘About the bomb I do not know, bu
t there is no danger you would get the chance to do the other is there?’ Taking her grenade-discharger fitted M16 with her, Andrea moved away and went to the window.
‘And no bloody chance I’d want to.’ Sod her, sod all bloody women, except for Helga. Sod ‘em, sod ‘em, sod ‘em. When he deliberately moved to sit in the exact spot she’d occupied, he fancied he could feel something of her warmth. Sod her. Being near her, close to any woman, made his balls ache. He’d have to find a corner and work his frustration off in the same degrading way he always resorted to. Oh God, he did need a woman. He smiled to himself, a tight wry thing in the privacy of the grimy hands he rubbed over his face. He’d held out so long, but the next chance he got, he’d have to, he’d just have to. But he’d said that to himself the last time, and the time before that, and so it had been for all of two years. Perhaps when, if, it actually came to it, he wouldn’t be able to. Maybe lack of practice, or more likely his conscience, wouldn’t let him. But it did no good to indulge in such speculations. The problem was now.
He casually stood up and went out to the tiny bathroom. Quietly and carefully, he pulled the door shut behind him.
‘Fucking neutrals? I’d bomb the bloody lot of them, and all the shitty bleeding hearts and pacifists and fellow-travellers back home.’ The few daylight hours had gone, taking with them the low cloud that had offered some degree of concealment to their activities. In places, the first hard white points of light that were stars were already appearing.
Dooley turned from the kitchen window. With tight-clenched hands he was draining the last drop of warmth from the can of self-heating soup. ‘I don’t know how York does it. He reckons he’s a decent cook, but somehow he can even screw up this muck.’ His body ached, he could still feel where the harness straps had bitten into his shoulders and stripped the skin, even through his several thick layers of clothing. ‘Why the hell should some po-faced pacifist shit be sitting at home, with a full table and a warm butt, while I’m stuck out here?’
‘You’re not the only one who wants to go home.’ Burke had finished his soup and now crushed the double-skinned can and shied it into the sink.
‘Who said anything about going home? I want the cruds out here with me, so I can show ‘em just what it’s like.’ Dooley sent his can after Burke’s. Aimed less accurately it bounced from the drainer and on to the floor, to be flattened under the big man’s boot. ‘It’s the fucking neutrals I really hate, especially the fucking Frogs, I’d smear every last one of them.’ He demonstrated his. meaning by grinding the can hard into the boards.
Over in a corner, Clarence had built a nest of rags and paper and burrowed into it with his sleeping bag, but the noise Dooley was making was preventing him from sleeping. ‘Alright, so you don’t like them, does your continuing tirade mean I’m not to get any rest? Now be a good idiot and be quiet for a while will you, six hours will do nicely, but I’ll settle for two.’ He pulled a smelly, dog hair- smothered, threadbare rug over his head. It didn’t help, Dooley was like a record that had become stuck in a groove, going on and on. After a further five minutes Clarence could stand no more.
‘That does it. I have to tolerate this ghastly war, you loathsome oafs, this stinking ruin, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to put up with your simplistic all- embracing bigotry. Since when have you Americans been so fast off the mark in joining a war? Seems to me I remember a slight delay - of, what was it, three years? - before you came into the first World War. It took a reminder from the Japanese to get you into the second. You’re only in this one because half your troops were stoked up on drugs when the balloon went pop, and the Ruskies clouted seven thousand of your men on the first day.’
It was not going to be that easy to get Dooley away from his pet subject, even using provocation of that magnitude. So determined was he not to be sidetracked, he virtually ignored the sniper’s interruption except to glower in his direction and threateningly ball a huge fist. ‘They’re all the fucking same you know, the Swiss, the Swedes, the Finns, the Frogs; they’re all a fuck sight more neutral towards the Commies than they are to us. It’s only a couple of months since the Swiss shot down that Casevac transport. First thing I did when I heard about that was to go to a club I knew they used, to crack a few heads. When I got there I had to join a queue. Take the Swedes, smug bastards: free health care, free love and free coming and going for half the Red spies in Europe. And all the time they keep bleating about their neutrality while their factories keep supplying the fucking Ruskies with everything from telegraph poles to fur caps.’
‘They have the highest suicide rate in the whole of Europe you know.’ ‘Let me know when it reaches a hundred per cent, I’ll give a cheer.’ Dooley turned to see who had come in, it was Boris. He took in the man’s battered face and torn clothing, roughly held together by an assortment of improvised fasteners. ‘I’m glad to see those bricks made a real mess of you. I couldn’t be happier if it had happened to Burke. Nothing broken is there? No? What a pity!’
‘You do not have to like me, I do not expect you to, but you should try to remember that we are fighting on the same side. Would you have spoken in the same way to Solzhenitsyn, or any of the other dissidents from the pre-war days?’
‘There’s the world of fucking difference between a dissident and a deserter. Those guys thought that way from the start, and said so. They didn’t wait till they’d served a year in the Red Army, and had just been moved to the front before coming round to that way of thinking. I know your sort. Cruddy arse-licking party member while everything is going well in the motherland, then a whining shit- scared coward when your piddling little post at some factory suddenly comes off the exemption list.’
Shoving the Russian roughly aside, Dooley stamped out of the room. In passing, he kicked two of the bottom rails from the stairs and booted their splintered remains ahead of him.
‘You were lucky there, Boris.’ Burke listened to the American’s noisy progress to the control room. ‘Friend Dooley gets really worked up when he’s waiting to go into action, it ties him in knots. The only way he can let off steam is to lash out. If he’d swiped at you, you’d have snapped as easy as those rails.’
Boris sat on the corner of the wobbly pine table dominating the centre of the room. It creaked beneath him, but took his weight. Like the few other pieces of furniture remaining in the house it was too heavy and cumbersome for the owners to take with them in their rush to leave the place, and of too little value to be of interest to the looters who’d dared visit the island after the Swedish government had declared it a prohibited area on the outbreak of war, at the time of the first battles in the waters of the Kattegat.
‘I should tell you, I was not a combat soldier with the Red Army. I was, I am a technician. That is all.’ Boris took cigarette papers and a pinch of dark, almost black, tobacco from a stained leather pouch. He rolled the long ‘ shreds into the valley of white paper he made between thumb and forefinger, licked its edge and lit the finished cigarette with a lighter fashioned from a Russian 12.7mm heavy machine gun cartridge case. He toyed with it.
‘And neither was I an intellectual, with the protection of the interest of the world’s press. I am an ordinary Russian, not a party member. It took a long time for me to see, longer still even to summon up the courage to tell myself that what the Communists were doing to my country was terribly wrong. This lighter, it was produced, unofficially, at one of our second-line vehicle repair workshops, in East Germany. The men made and sold them so they would have the money to buy extra food. Their rations had been cut when their productivity fell. That happened because a senior officer, a member of the party of course, had diverted shipments of tools and spares to the black market. Without them they could not do their job.’ Boris flicked the lighter on and off. It emitted a strong smell of petrol.
‘The day after I bought this, the man who sold it to me was arrested, as were all the machinists and the junior officer in charge of the workshop. I think the machinists were sent
to the northern Chinese border. The officer and the salesman were shot. There was no trial, not as you would know one. They were charged, gave their names, and were taken out. That in Russia is a trial.’
‘For turning out a few crappy lighters?’ Hyde took the lighter and examined it. ‘Some of these parts have been cut by hand, you can see the marks of the saw. How many could they have made, ten, twenty?’
‘The charge would have been sabotage of the Russian war effort. Anything which in the eyes of an official or an officer, if he is a party member, can be construed as misuse of materials, is punishable by death. There is no appeal, in most cases there would not be the time unless there was some delay in mustering a firing squad, and usually there is one waiting. If they really wanted to get rid of you, then even wiping your nose on the sleeve of your uniform could provide the excuse. Usually they do not need one, but they have bureaucratic minds, and like to put a label to all that they do.’ Accepting the lighter back, Boris returned it to his pocket. ‘Your big friend was almost right. I had a secure position, actually it was at a small research centre. The pay was quite good and I rode with the tide, did nothing that would make ripples, attract attention to myself. I ignored what went on around me, even when an inoffensive colleague was arrested by the KGB. So long as I was untouched by it all, I closed my eyes, tolerated the shortages, pretended I did mot see the privilege of the party members. But there is a time when these things can no longer be ignored.’
‘Why the hell didn’t you chuck them out years ago, you could have saved all this?’ Sweeping his arm wide, Hyde took in the room, the island, the whole of the Zone.
Shoulders bowed, there was a weak attempt at a weary smile on Boris’s bruised face. ‘I was asked that by another British soldier during one of the interrogations after my desertion. My answer to you is, as it was to him, a question. Why did you not stand up to them years ago? Time after time the Free World let the Communists commit crimes that could have been prevented if the West had only stood up and shouted ‘enough’, and backed the demand with determination and the threat of force. Afghanistan and Poland and all the others since, you sat back and watched. And worse, you kept supplying them with grain to feed their armies and the materials to make the pipelines that now keep their army in the field.
