Plague Bomb

by James Rouch

  There was hardly any smoke. The interior of the estate car filled with raging fire that blasted every window from the bodywork. An arm and a head topped by blazing hair were briefly visible before flame totally enveloped the vehicle with the explosion of its fuel tank.

  Another missile leaped from the elevated launcher.

  Throwing himself into the church to escape the concussion of its detonation against the steps, Revell ran into Clarence.

  ‘It’s going to get rougher, Major. There’s only those two made it so far, but there’s a troop of tanks struggling to get through that flood beyond the town and a couple of APCs trying to work their way around. They’re making heavy going of it, but they’ll be here inside of fifteen minutes or so.’

  Again the porch was blasted by the shock wave from a near miss, and both doors were ripped from their wrought iron hinges and toppled into the church, their landing adding to the dust already raised. ‘Clear the side door, we’ll get out that way.’

  ‘And what about them?’ Hyde had pulled the three sick civilians well inside to make sure they escaped the attention of the lethal fragments and chunks of debris beginning to find their way further and further inside the building as the Russian vehicles closed in for the kill. ‘We’re kidding ourselves if we think we can take them with us. The old guy has been near enough skinned alive by that mustard, the flesh is just peeling off him. That woman is running such a fever her heart could give out any moment and the fat bloke looks like he’s got cholera just as bad as he could have. He’ll never last, none of them will.’

  ‘Let me finish them.’ Pushing in front of the NCO, Andrea confronted the officer. ‘It is not possible to take them, mine is the only way.’ ‘No, no. We’ll leave them for the Russians to nurse and bury.’ Revell reached the side door as Boris and Thorne pulled the last of the barricade down. He stooped to leave through the low doorway, then hesitated and ushered the others through first. ‘You too.’

  Andrea had hung behind, and was fitting a fresh magazine to her M16 when the major beckoned. ‘Do you think I would risk being left behind just so that I could kill those animals?’

  ‘I know you would.’

  The alley was a dead end, and the buildings to either side were too substantial for the Marder to bulldoze its way to safety through them. Burke was left with only one alternative, a high speed run up the main street, offering the Russian gunners a clear shot at their light rear armour. ‘Hang on, you lot.’

  ‘Be ready for a fast bail-out if we take a hit.’ Checking the hatch above his head, Revell tried the quick release catch and was relieved to find it worked smoothly.

  ‘Fucking marvellous, ain’t it.’ Like the others Dooley was divesting himself of as many encumbrances as possible, anything that might impede a hurried exit.

  ‘Here we are whose shitty paper-thin armour is hard put to keep out a heavy machine gun round, and now we’re about to offer an easy up-the-arse shot to a commie tank destroyer.’

  ‘I’ve been watching it in action, its crew are not the world’s best.’ That was the only consolation Revell could offer. ‘Let’s go, and try to keep that fire and the wrecks between us and that tank-killer.’

  Burke took the engine revs as high as they would go before crashing the Marder into gear. The big machine leaped forward and carried away a corner of a building as it skidded through a canting turn into the main street.

  Using the remotely controlled rear mounted machine gun Ripper poured tracer and armour piercing rounds at the unmoving armoured cars, concentrating his fire on their vision ports and periscopes. ‘They ain’t following!’

  ‘They don’t bloody have to. Firing from a side ball mounting Dooley let fly with an Uzi at a Russian infantryman aiming an anti-tank rocket from his shoulder.

  Thrown back by the several impacts, the man sent the warhead on its way as he fell, but it flew wildly astray, taking the tiles from a distant shop roof. More of the squad were engaging infantry targets, and a long jet of red flame shot from the turret to splash and lick around the sides of a rusting bus. A section of Russian soldiers staggered into view wreathed from head to foot in rippling flame.

  ‘Those commie shits have left their battle taxis for once and come in on foot.’ Throwing the Marder in a lurching side swipe at a handcart, Burke succeeded in overturning it on the machine gun team using it as cover to pour a storm of bullets into the APCs front quarter.

  ‘We’re nearly through ...’

  Revell didn’t know who it was who had tempted providence, and there wasn’t time to find out, there was just long enough after Ripper shouted a warning to tense themselves for the impact and then an antitank rocket struck the personnel carrier’s rear.

  It was like being in a bucket being hammered by a madman. The thunder of the detonation was followed instantly by the squealing of scraping metal as a track broke apart and gouged scoops of metal from the armour. Crabbing first to the left as several road wheels were blown off by the explosion, the Marder swerved hard right as large pieces of wreckage jammed the other track, then stopped.

  ‘Flame all around, then every one out.’ Through the prisms in the command cupola Revell saw billowing gouts of fire pour death into every side alley and nearby window, then as the last burst fell short with the tanks exhausted, all the hatches were thrown open and they went out shooting. As he jumped, he tossed a thermite grenade back inside and heard it crackle into white hot life as they ran across the street.

  A grenade from Andrea’s launcher blew in the door of a house, another tossed through a window by Hyde made sure it was cleared and they raced inside, barging through its musty hall, hurdling a grinning corpse and stampeding out through the kitchen and across its once neat vegetable garden.

  Boris and Dooley set up a rear guard as the others climbed iron railing around a school yard, and caught a Russian following them too closely. He went down like a felled tree with a bullet through his neck.

  An attempt to establish a machine gun post at the upper window of an overlooking house fared no better. Andrea put her first grenade in neatly through it and the resulting explosion threw an arm onto a greenhouse roof.

  Bones and skulls and scraps of clothing were scattered as they dashed through the sun-dried bodies on the playground. Clarence couldn’t bring himself to go that way, and skirting it, ran straight into a section of Russian infantry coming around the side of the school building.

  There was a rage inside of him that begged to be let loose, and he unleashed it on the lieutenant who led them, putting a bullet into his stomach and then two more into the chests of the men to either side of him. At that range, with the tip of the Enfield’s barrel almost touching them, the dum-dum bullets burst their targets apart and showered those following with blood and tissue.

  The rest of the section turned and fled, and more shots followed them, each with neat precision tearing a chunk of vertebrae from the base of a spine or shattering the back of a cranium. Last of them to die was a slant eyed Mongol whose thick short neck was almost severed by a mushrooming soft cored round. His body toppled among those of the children and stained their faded clothes and bleached bones with vivid gouts of fresh blood.

  ‘They’re giving up, they ain’t following.’ Every pace brought new pain to Ripper as the scar tissue forming over his burns was stretched and broken by the jarring strain of keeping up with the others.

  Only a smattering of single shots chased them across the strip of ploughed land behind the school, and even that petered out as they reached the steep slope of the valley wall.

  ‘It is not that they are giving up,’ blood trickled from beneath the cuff of Boris’s smock and over his hand to drip from his fingers, ‘it is that we no longer matter to them. They have what they want.’ There was only a dull sensation of discomfort from the bullet wound in his forearm, and when he reached for a handful of pliant branches of a young pine to pull himself up a difficult section between craggy boulders, he was relieved to find he had the unimpair
ed use of the limb, there was no fracture. Until now he’d been frightened to use it, expecting agony and the confirmation of its being shattered when he did. Inside his sleeve there was a growing damp stickiness.

  ‘I told you we should not leave them.’ Andrea didn’t care that her words might carry to others besides the officer. ‘You should have let me finish them. The Russians will make much use of them, and you will have failed.’

  There was no one else Revell would have let speak to him like that, certainly no one else in the squad. He resented what she said, and for the first time realized that having her close was not always going to be fun. Her way of reducing all situations to black and white was not his. In the church he’d been presented with a far more complex decision ‘than she realized. It was not a simple choice between eliminating a few worthless traitors or letting the Russians win. She offered him the option of permitting an atrocity, of being party to a war crime and that he couldn’t do. Damn it, that was what they were fighting.

  All of them at various times complained at how the NATO forces were forced to fight clean while the communists used every dirty trick in the book plus many more of their own invention, but when it came to it, when they had the choice of doing things that way themselves, inevitably they balked.

  This wasn’t the time or place he could explain all that too her, that’s if she’d even been prepared to try to understand, and so he said nothing, exaggerating the difficulty of the scree slope he was negotiating and pretending absorption with that to the exclusion of all else.

  The ground rose fast, near vertical in places and within a short while they were looking down on the roofs of the village, spread in a ribbon along the floor of the valley. Twice they had to call a halt to enable Ripper and Boris to catch up, and both times took advantage of the- respite to gulp air into their into their aching lungs.

  ‘Either I’m getting old, or we’re a good way above sea level.’ Dooley eased the straps of his pack and rifle as they started up again.

  ‘Bit of both I expect, but mostly it must be the old dames you go with sucking the life as well as your spunk out of you.’ Burke looked at Dooley struggling to climb a difficult patch, a slope littered with shale-like stone that slid away from beneath his feet as he placed them. ‘Help a bit if you got rid of that pack. It could have cost you your bloody life if it’d snagged as we bailed out. Still could if it drags you off this fucking mountain.’

  ‘There ain’t no way I’m chucking this.’ Dooley hitched its straps more securely onto his shoulders, sliding back some distance as he did. ‘This is my shitty future in here, where I go it goes.’

  ‘Shut your gabbing and climb.’ They were becoming spread out, and Revell recognized the danger of their becoming separated in this broken country. The journey back on foot was going to be hard and long, tackling it as individuals they would stand no chance, sticking together for mutual support they would.

  A last effort and they made the crest, to find themselves on a knife edge ridge that fell away as steeply before them as the climb they’d just completed. Away into the distance stretched a succession of similar features, interspersed with hills that were little more than piles of rock dotted with sparse stands of fir and pine. They were as devoid of colour as the bare hills, leached of life by the poisonous yellow rain the Russians used in such concentrations.

  Before starting the descent, Revell looked back at the church. All he could see was the tower and a part of the roof, none of the activity that he knew there would be around it. Beyond the compact confines of the small settlement, still stranded amid the flood waters like beached whales were the Russian tanks. Tiny figures waded about them, working without sign of urgency.

  As he was about to give the order to move, Revell caught a glint of bright reflected light further down the valley, and then heard the beat of the gunships’ blades thrashing through the thin air. The sun flashed again from the domed canopies of the tandem cockpits, and as the chopper banked he saw the weapons operator hunch over his sights.

  During his pacing of the room Rozenkov had approached the radio a dozen times, and the telephone as often. He’d touched neither. If ever he got his hands on Major Morkov ... As far as Department A of the KGB was concerned the whole operation had become a disaster, and far worse than that for him personally. To think, only hours before such power had been not just within his reach but actually in his grasp, and now it was about to be torn from him.

  At least he had some small consolation in knowing that Military Intelligence was not likely to come out of it well either. The last intercepted message had shown them calling urgently for medical assistance. There would be no impressive press conferences, no television interviews. All that the GRU had gained was a trio of dying civilians. If they had any sense they would not try to make overmuch of that, the capitalist editorials would soon point out which side it was that had seeded the area with toxins and bacteria ...

  It came to him suddenly, and he knew it was the only solution, the only way by which he could hope to salvage something. He grabbed the phone. ‘Connect me with the Kremlin. I wish to speak with Comrade Politburo member Ivan Forminski.’ The wait seemed interminable. ‘Then put me through to him at his dacha, it is of the highest priority.’ Again there was a long delay as Moscow’s telephone system torturously routed the call through the several manual switchboards involved.

  ‘Rozenkov, Colonel Rozenkov, Head of Department…Yes, I’ll wait… Comrade Forminski? It is Rozenkov. Forgive my asking, Comrade, is this a secure line? …Then I shall try to be as clear as I can, Comrade Forminski. It is about the deal that was discussed recently at the meeting… yes Comrade, the one that is of special interest… Yes,’ he changed hands and wiped his sweaty palm on the side of his jacket, ‘I have to tell you that the foreign goods have become spoiled... I understand your disappointment, Comrade… The contamination is due to interference and clumsy handling by another member of our cooperative… Then would our customer rather wait for another consignment?’

  The minute he waited for the reply was the longest of Rozenkov’s life, dragging on forever. It came, a single word. ‘Thank you Com…’

  He was talking to himself. As he shakily replaced the receiver he had to sit, he was shattered, utterly drained.

  He would not be getting that immediate confirmation of his appointment, it and the promotion would have to be gained the hard way by three months’ grinding slog at petty detail. But at least he had that second chance, if he tidied the loose ends in a satisfactory manner, discreetly, thoroughly. And in doing just that he could extract a measure of revenge on Military Intelligence, whose meddling had almost cost him his career. He reached for the radio ...

  On that bare ridge, with no scrap of cover, they were a sitting target. Revell pulled Andrea into a shallow cleft in the rock and used his own body to block it.

  As the gunship dipped closer he could see the heavy weapon load slung from its stub wings and the cluster of cannon barrels projecting from its chin turret.

  The range closing, Revell sensed the moment had passed when the chopper would use its missiles or cannon, now his attention was on the tear-drop shaped canisters nestling among the rocket pods. All he could hope was that the napalm hit them square on, then it would be fast. If the weapon operator’s aim was a little off then instead of being engulfed by the heart of the fireball they would be spattered by fist sized blobs of the burning mixture that would adhere to them and transform them into writhing human torches.

  Others of the squad were firing, emptying the magazines of their rifles and sub- machine guns toward the gunship. Andrea tried to push past Revell to use hers, but he kept her pinned inside the narrow crevice. Though many must have struck, the gunship’s titanium armour shrugged aside the small calibre rounds.

  Closing his eyes, Revell awaited the sheet of flame, but the wall of air that buffeted him was cool, carrying with it not the deluge of blazing petrol-jelly he’d anticipated, but sharp grit and stinging dust
.

  Banking away, the helicopter began a wide turn down into the valley. Relaxing his grip on the rock, Revell was pushed aside by the girl as she took hasty aim and sent a long burst after the gunship.

  That fire was as ineffectual as the rest had been, and unharmed the chopper maintained its wide descending turn. At two hundred feet above the valley floor it levelled out and raced in over the village from the west.

  Against the eye-confusing clutter of the rooftops Revell didn’t see the drop tanks go, but the gash of red flame along the main street was clear enough, and its twin that engulfed the houses behind the church.

  ... two, three, four ... To himself Revell counted off the second then watched the expanding white fire envelop every inch of the centre of the village, only the very tip of the bell tower showing above the intensely bright bubble of flame. Many of the houses, their walls bursting under the intense pressure created by the searing blast, seemed to implode, falling in on themselves. Others^ beyond the circle of devastation wrought by the super-napalm, steamed and smoked and began to burn.

  A huge ball of black smoke rose over the village, to reveal blow-torch like feathers of red and yellow roaring from the church’s every door and window.

  Only one of the bogged down T-84s brought its anti-aircraft mount into action against the gunship as it flew over, and then only in hesitant bursts, that signalled the gunner’s confusion as to what was happening.

  ‘Looks like you got what you wanted after all. The Russians have done it for you.’ As the sound of the helicopter’s engines faded into the distance, Revell held out his hand to assist Andrea over the last few feet to the crest of the ridge.

  He hadn’t expected her to, but she took it, and her fingers enmeshed with his as she hauled herself up. For a moment he forgot what he was going to say. ‘Right ... So let’s put in some distance. There’s a long way to go.’

  That was an understatement, but Revell could have made light of anything. As they started down he was aware that Andrea was close by him, even when the going became so treacherous that the descent called for all his attention.