Plague Bomb

by James Rouch

  It bucked in his hands as a three second burst squirted a mushrooming jet of yellow fire, filling his ears with its distinctive wailing screech and washing away the stench of rotting tissue and replacing it with the familiar pungent fumes of unconsumed petrol-jelly.

  ‘Salvage detail, who’d bloody have it. Must be the worst sodding work there is in the whole of the ruddy Zone.’ A single small arms round cooked off inside, and Burke ducked, expecting more, but there was only the one. ‘Well isn’t it?’

  ‘You don’t hear any of us arguing, do you?’ Cautiously Dooley approached the combined ramp and door and put his boot onto its warm metal. Using all his weight he tried to force it down further, but it moved only a fraction before its damaged hydraulics locked and prevented any more movement.

  Smoke came from scraps of cloth smouldering among the remains inside. Soot stained the metal walls of the interior and coated much of the surface of the sluggish mess oozing toward them.

  A neat circular hole marked where the Russian tank shell had penetrated, the APCs bulging and distorted aluminium armour indicated that its explosive filling had detonated inside the crew compartment. Of the driver and commander and their eleven infantry passengers all that remained was the gelatinous layer of pulped flesh on the floor and bench tops. Fragments of larger bones made it lumpy, as did broken rifles and submachine guns, and crushed helmets holding the pulverized remains of skulls.

  A tidy row of boots along either side added a touch of gruesome absurdity. From some protruded the stumps of ankles and from a pair at the far end, untouched by the roaring flame, came a non-stop cascade of squirming white maggots as they overflowed from the heaving food gorged mass that filled them.

  ‘I thought the hygiene squads were supposed to take care of this sort of thing.’ Not making the mistake of coming too close again, still Ripper had to fight to suppress the urge to retch.

  Thorne slipped from the harness of the flame thrower and lowered its triple cylinder pack to the ground, laying it carefully before leaning the hose-linked projector and trigger group against it. A gentle hiss of escaping propellant nitrogen gas came from a pressure tank until he gave its valve an extra half turn. ‘You’re joking. Half the battle damaged armour being back loaded for repair at base workshops has bodies or bits on board. The poor devils from REME who do that job can’t cope with it all. Anyway, does the rear-area warriors good to see how mucky the war can be. I’m surprised you’re not hardened to it by now. Must be those weird hand-rolled fags you smoke, upsetting your stomach.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, and what makes you an authority on everything. Seems to me you ain’t so clever, you only just got out after doing twenty-eight days and losing your stripes for impersonating an officer.’ There was more Ripper would have added, but in his anger at the sapper for mentioning his joints within hearing of the major, he took a step forward too far, and the smell hit him again. He was forced to retreat with his hand clamped tight over his mouth.

  ‘I wouldn’t have if your precious major had kept his word and dropped the charges after I knocked out that commie anti-tank position.*

  ‘He’s your major as well, now.’ Sergeant Hyde picked up the flame thrower and thrust it back at the sapper. ‘You remember that. He’d have willed his soul to the devil, and ours as well, in exchange for the destruction of those Ruskie guns; just be grateful that he spoke up for you at the court martial. You could have gone down for a lot, lot longer.’

  ‘Like forever.’ Setting his head on one side, Dooley let his coated tongue loll from his mouth and made a pantomime of tugging a noose tight about his neck.

  ‘You’re not expecting us to shovel this mess, are you.’ The sentence was phrased precisely by Clarence. It was not a question, it was a statement, a refusal in advance of any order.

  ‘Heaven forbid that our aseptic sniper should ever be compelled to do such a nasty thing.’ Using the butt of his rifle, Hyde pushed the door shut as far as it would go. I heard you turned down a medal because you were scared you might have to shake hands with a general at the presentation. If you can’t even stand contact with the living then who am I to force you to consort with the dead. Anyway, it’s not worth bothering with, it’s a write-off.’

  Those words came as a relief to their Russian deserter. Since Major Revell had gone off to headquarters to try and get their assignment altered, Boris had been given all of the worst duties by their NCO. In anticipation of being told to climb into the carrier he had already begun to assemble his entrenching tool, now he quietly, and hopefully unobtrusively, stowed it once more. His actions did not entirely escape the sergeant’s notice.

  ‘Go tell the ARV crew they can stand down, there’s nothing for us here. We’ll have a brew then get on to the next site. You know where the tea things are.’ All of them stopped, turned and looked as they heard the personnel carrier’s door being lowered again. It was Andrea who was surveying the ghastly interior. Her sharp dark eyes met Hyde’s.

  ‘Was it like .this when your face was destroyed?’ Her expression didn’t alter as she glanced from the horrors of the vehicle to the sergeant’s mask-like graft-built features.

  Hyde knew there were few men who could have looked at either without registering at least revulsion.

  ‘No, it was the plasma jet from a hollow-charge warhead that took my face. This looks like it was done by an armour-piercing high explosive round. From the size of the entry hole I’d say about a hundred and twenty-five millimetre. That would make it from a T72 or T84, or maybe an up-gunned T64. That what you wanted to know?’

  She didn’t answer, but walked away, to sit by Boris as he set about boiling water on a small field stove he had scrounged the use of from the young conscript crew of the West German recovery vehicle. Squatting on a wheel blasted from a nearby Mercedes six-wheeler she cradled her grenade discharger fitted Ml6, her finger hooked casually around the trigger.

  Her proximity obviously made the Russian nervous. It took him several attempts before he succeeded in getting the unfamiliar equipment to function correctly, and twice his fumblings almost upset the water.

  Hyde had seen her have that effect on others; but then she had some effect on everyone she came in contact with. Among men it varied from manifestations of lust to abject fear, and sometimes both within the space of seconds.

  With women the band of emotive reaction was not as broad, but was within it, if anything, even more pronounced. It was at moments like this, as Hyde caught a good view of her beautiful profile, as even the bulky equipment festooned combat outfit failed to entirely conceal her superb figure, that he could understand their officer’s obsession with her. Not that she had ever done anything to encourage the major, the reverse in fact, but the American had fallen in a big way. There were times when it was beginning to have a detrimental effect on the unit’s efficiency.

  ‘I been thinking…’ ‘Thought I could smell burning.’ Ignoring the sapper’s interruption, Dooley went on, ‘…you know I reckon we could have a worse job than this.’ He grinned and waited for the inevitable response from the expected direction, and wasn’t disappointed.

  Conscious of being older than the others, Burke had begun to see himself as a father figure. With the pronouncements he made on any and every subject being for the most part ignored by his companions, he’d come to see their silence as unquestioning acceptance of his wisdom, and expected such as his due. Dooley’s disagreement with his assessment of-their task’s lowly status was not well received and he set about unintentionally providing yet more ammunition for the big man’s lumbering wit.

  ‘Tell me then, go on, tell me. Here we are, stuck miles forward of our own lines, in an area where we know there’s a commie armoured battle group operating,’ sweeping his arms wide he indicated the ambushed and shattered re-supply column, ‘where we could get clobbered ourselves at any moment, and have nothing bigger than a bloody grenade to hit back with, here we are hauling wrecks and shovelling shit. You think you can come up with something
worse?’

  ‘Course I can. For a start, we could be ten miles east of here.’ ‘So what’s so kinda special about that chunk of the Zone. Seems to me that one piece of this godforsaken land is pretty much the same as any other.’ Under cover of the squad’s interest in the baiting of their driver, Ripper had rolled and lit a joint. Taking a series of quick draws before extinguishing it and adding it to his meagre stock, he saw their sergeant watching him, and almost dropped the tin as he replaced it in his pocket.

  ‘That’s where the contamination starts.’ Clarence knew, like he knew everything there was to know about the Zone.

  ‘A year back the communists had a lot of trouble with refugees in that area, too many of them for a start, so word was sent out that they were to be dealt with, reduced to manageable numbers. The local commander must have been short of men and ammunition for his artillery, but he did have two dumps he hadn’t used until them, so he emptied them, threw the whole lot into the camps and at any civvies who got in the way. We know that one of the dumps held chemical weapons, nerve gas shells, defoliants, toxins, you name it…’

  ‘And the other?’

  ‘No one has any idea, at least no one in the west. Must have been batches of experimental weapons. Inside of a week just about every disease you can name, and a lot that haven’t even got names yet, was killing the civilians in the hundreds of thousands, All we could do was cordon the sector, treat the few who made it to our side.’

  ‘I never read anything about it in the press back home, you sure you got your facts right? Since I’ve been with your crowd, I’ve heard some awful tall tales.’

  ‘And spun a few yourself.’ Hyde tapped the medical kit making a prominent bulge in a readily accessible pocket in his jacket. ‘It’s true enough, we were issued with these just after it started. Why it never made the papers God only knows. Probably because we’re not so slick at manipulating the world’s press, or perhaps some boot licking toady in the British foreign office thought it might upset the Russians, make the negotiated peace that much harder.’

  ‘The only thing that happened far as I can see,’ Burke thought it time he restored some of his authority, ‘is that we got turned into ruddy pincushions by all those booster shots we started having. Not that I’ve got any faith in the damned things working, it must be like a bloody germ soup in there. You won’t catch me going near the place. If the medics want those injections given field trials they can send some other mug, I won’t even go and have a peep over the perimeter wire.’

  ‘It ain’t right, leaving good land to rot; why don’t somebody have a go at it with napalm, or phosphorus, clean it up.’

  With Burke retreating to a quiet spot to drink his tea, Dooley was happy to shift his attention to Ripper. ‘Because it’d take forever. We’re not talking about a chunk of land the size of a football field, it’d J>e like trying to sterilize a couple of decent sized counties.’

  A thousand feet overhead a pilotless sky-spy droned for a while in large circles, chased by lines of flashing orange tracer from the ARV’s anti-aircraft machinegun. None of Hyde’s squad made any move to copy the aggression and, unharmed, the remotely controlled miniature aircraft went on its way.

  ‘Waste of ammo.’ With casual interest Hyde tracked the Russian craft, noticing how rarely the tracer came within even a hundred feet of the small camera equipped plane. ‘On a live firing range back home I watched a whole battalion of armour take turns to have a go at one of those things. For an hour, on and off, it whizzed about sounding like an amplified dentist’s drill. They all missed it.’

  ‘If the major doesn’t get us off this crappy job, and soon, I’ll be popping off at the fucking things myself, just to relieve the boredom. Come to that, I’ll have a go at anything that beats the monotony of trotting about this truck graveyard.’ Pulling a face as he tasted his drink and realized it was coffee, Dooley slung it away. ‘Are we out of the decent stuff again? You know I can’t stand this old ladies brew.’

  ‘Heck, now I just can’t figure that at all.’ Taking the precaution of stepping beyond Dooley’s reach, Ripper displayed his pale green teeth in an ingratiating smile. ‘From what I hear it kinda seems as how you find the old ladies themselves pretty tasty.’

  Also expecting retaliation, but far enough away to not to have to take avoiding action himself, Burke waited and watched for it to happen, then swore loud and long as a battle-scarred armoured vehicle came clattering down the road toward them, to provide a distraction and diversion. ‘Bloody hell, I thought I’d seen everything this war had to offer.’

  The last to do so, even Clarence got to his feet to witness the approach of the Marder personnel carrier. ‘What on earth is keeping that ancient wreck moving? It looks as if it’s spent the last five years as a target on the ranges.’

  Many of the vehicle’s rubber track pads had been worn to pitted wafer-thin shreds, many had gone altogether, and the racket made by the bare metal thrashing the road surface and squealing over the distorted and unlubricated return rollers almost matched that from its rusty and holed exhaust.

  Hardly a vestige of paint was to be seen on the gouged and patched armour of its hull and turret. The West German APC bore no unit insignia, nor any other identifying mark, save a partially obliterated white-outlined black Bundeswehr cross on its front. Slewing to a rocking halt, its clattering diesel raced on after the vehicle had stopped until it at last reluctantly spluttered into clicking silence after a series of gradually diminishing over-runs.

  ‘It will be interesting to see what kind of men would go to war in such a machine.’ Running his hand over a rough finished irregular patch that only partially concealed a deep hole in the sharply raked upper body, Boris cut his fingers on embedded fragments of tungsten, splinters from the armour-piercing round that had so narrowly failed to penetrate. Fresh blood speckled the metal as he pulled away, and he did so barely in time. The driver’s hatch flew open to crash down where his hand had been.

  ‘Then get a mirror, take a good look at yourself.’ Major Revell pulled himself up until he sat on the hull with his legs dangling, into the driving compartment. ‘Get your gear together, we’re moving out.’ ‘In this?’ Burke had completed a slow circumnavigation of the Marder, and the curled lip with which he silently signalled his contempt for the transport had grown more pronounced with each step taken and every component investigated.

  ‘That’s right, in this. Sorry I couldn’t get one with white-walls and a custom paint finish.’

  ‘You know me better than that, Major. I don’t give a bugger what my wagons look like. They can be papered with candy stripes or stripped to bare metal, doesn’t make any difference to me. It’s the mechanics I bother about. What I’d like to know is did this crate come to a stop like it did because that’s the way you drive, or because its suspension brakes and running gear are knackered?’

  ‘Seen the tracks? The rest of this clunker just about matches them.’ He was talking to Burke, but Revell was looking at Andrea.

  ‘How long can I have to work on it?’ In the APCs condition Burke saw a chance to keep himself out of the firing line for a day or two longer. It’d mean getting dirty, but what with waiting for spares and spinning out the work maybe he could even spin it out to three, or even four, days. So he’d get his hands grubby; better than being shot at.

  ‘You can’t. It’ll have to do as it is.’ Revell tried, but he couldn’t catch Andrea’s eye. She had to be avoiding him deliberately. He heard but didn’t pay any heed to their driver’s litany of complaint, until he went on too long. ‘There’s a choice. Either we use this heap or we walk. Okay, so if you see it my way, help the others load.’

  ‘What have you got us, Major?’ Giving up an attempt to wedge a pick and shovel into blast-distorted brackets on the hull side, Sergeant Hyde threw them toward the back of the vehicle where the packs and weapons were being passed in through the wide rear door.

  ‘Not quite what I was after.’ Revell shrugged. ‘It’s a mi
ssion more suited to a field security unit I’d have thought, but we’re furthest forward in this sector so we got it. Seems a bunch of civvies are trying to cross the Zone to reach the Russian lines...’

  ‘That’s a switch, ninety-nine percent of the traffic is the other way...’

  ‘…The word is they’re a self-appointed peace mission, making a gesture for the world’s press. If they do link up with the commies then the KGB’s propaganda boys will have a field day. We’re to grab them first, prevent it happening.’

  ‘Why not send in a squadron of air-cavalry,’ Burke’s gruff disapproval floated from within the transport, ‘they’d soon locate the buggers, have them back within an hour. Save us a lot of pissing about.’

  Lifting his legs out to make room for their driver to lake his seat, Revell jumped to the ground, landing beside Andrea. Now she was looking at him, and the same question was in her eyes.

  ‘Could be the Soviets don’t know they’re coming; If that’s the case we don’t want to put on a big show that’ll alert them. And if they do know about it, and we don’t manage to catch the civvies after mounting a maximum effort, then they’ll capitalize on it all the more. So the approach is low key.’

  ‘And when, if, we find these ...’ Andrea sought the words, and finding them, filled their every syllable with loathing and hatred, ‘…these pathetic blinkered innocents, these Russian pawns, traitors, what then?’

  ‘Kid gloves all the way. Orders are we’re to gently turn them around and give them an escort back.’

  ‘You know the sort of people they will be, don’t you.’ Andrea turned her contempt on Revell.

  ‘I can guess. A worn-out union boss doing the last bit of harm he can before someone discovers he’s been dipping into the pension fund, a member or two of the World Peace Committee or some other commie front organization, an elderly faggot from a respectable British university, and others on the same line, the usual assortment.’