Killing Ground

by James Rouch

  Cover illustration:

  The T-72 employs the same armament, ammunition, and integrated fire control as the T-64. The low, rounded turret mounts a 125mm smooth bore gun with a carousel automatic loader mounted on the floor and rear wall of the turret. The 125mm gun common to all the T-72 models is capable of penetrating the M1 Abrams armour at a range of up to 1,000 meters. The more recent BK-27 HEAT round offers a triple-shaped charge warhead and increased penetration against conventional armors and ERA. The BK-29 round, with a hard penetrator in the nose is designed for use against reactive armor, and as an MP round has fragmentation effects. With three round natures (APFSDS-T, HEAT-MP, ATGMs) in the autoloader vs four, more antitank rounds would available for the higher rate of fire.

  The infra-red searchlight on the T-72 is mounted on the right side of the main armament, versus on the left on the earlier T-64. The 1K13-49 sight is both night sight and ATGM launch sight. However, it cannot be used for both functions simultaneously. A variety of thermal sights is available. They include the Russian Agava-2, French SAGEM-produced ALIS and Namut sight from Peleng. Thermal gunner night sights are available which permit night launch of ATGMs.

  THE ZONE Series by James Rouch:

  HARD TARGET

  BLIND FIRE

  HUNTER KILLER

  SKY STRIKE

  OVERKILL

  KILLING GROUND

  PLAGUE BOMB

  CIVILIAN SLAUGHTER

  BODY COUNT

  DEATH MARCH

  KILLING GROUND

  James Rouch

  THE ZONE 7

  Copyright © 1988 by James Rouch

  An Imprint Original Publication, 2005

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission of the publishers.

  First E-Book Edition 2005

  Second IMRPINT April 2007

  The characters in this book are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  THE ZONE

  THE ZONE E-Books are published by

  IMPRINT Publications, 3 Magpie Court

  High Wycombe, WA 6057. AUSTRALIA.

  Produced under licence from the Author, all rights reserved. Created in Australia by Ian Taylor © 2005

  I cried when I saw so many good things. The whole regiment went on an orgy of eating and drinking. Even the officers. When a detachment of the Commandants Service tried to stop us we turned our machine guns on them.

  Private Ivan Yesualkov, the only survivor of Motor Rifle regiment 191, nuked while looting an abandoned NATO warehouse.

  All the fuss about you guys in the infantry makes me sick. Where’d you be without me and my boys? I’ll tell you, chucking stones and sharpening sticks for spears, that’s where.

  Quartermaster Sergeant Gary Ball, 66th Infantry Division.

  Some of our most important storage facilities inside the Zone are extremely vulnerable, following the latest Warpac advances. If a vital dump, such as the one at (censored) were to fall into their hands when their offensive operations had slackened due to materiel losses, it would be like a transfusion to them. We must make better provision for their defence now.

  Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Taylor, in a submission to the Joint Chiefs (Allocation of Army Manpower sub-committee, sitting 127. Decision deferred.)

  ONE

  The flamethrower’s roar echoed back from the buildings around the square. For a moment it died away, and then the squirting yellow flame arced above the cobbles again. Its savage glare was reflected by the wet stones and illuminated the facades of the shattered stores and houses.

  ‘That should do it.’ Thorne slipped the wide straps from his shoulders and lowered the tanks to the ground. They were empty and rang hollow as he dropped the projector and hoses on top of them. ‘You know, that’s the first time I haven’t enjoyed using the bloody thing.’ Thirty meters away a growing fire crackled and lit his face with a ruddy glow.

  In other corners of the square two more of the huge bonfires were already well alight and beginning to push the night back into the surrounding windowless ruins.

  Retreating from the growing waves of heat, Burke looked critically at the stack of civilian corpses topping the untidy pile of timber. ‘Might not. The skinny ones are always difficult to burn, and there’re no fat civvies left in the Zone now.’

  But even as he said it several of the mutilated corpses began to add their dripping body fats to the pyre’s rough fuel. As their blotched and bruised flesh roast and split further, the drops became streams that burned a vivid yellow, sharp contrast to the dark red flame curling from beneath.

  Grouped around their patched and battle-scarred armoured personnel carriers, the rest of the company displayed no interest in so common a scene. Hunched beneath helmets and rain capes, their gruesome work complete, they awaited the order to re-board.

  As the area became lighter it illuminated the exhausted, stress-lined faces of the men, and revealed that some who leaned against the shell-gouged hulls had their heads bowed and eyes closed in fitful sleep.

  Major Revell and Sergeant Hyde stood a little distance away, beside a mud- spattered Volvo bus. They flanked a fussily dressed elderly German official who was making notes.

  A young woman, haggard and dishevelled and clutching an ill-wrapped coughing baby, stammered names and addresses as she waited, last in the queue to board. She hesitated in her nervous recital as the administrator imperiously raised his hand to signal a halt while his painstaking writing tried to keep pace.

  His slim silver pen was the only metallic object to catch the light in that tableau. The bus had long since lost the glamour and colourful livery of its earlier days. Evidence of its widely travelled pre-war past showed in the ghosts of old sign writing beneath a thin and heavily scratched layer of drab olive paint.

  A row of faces pressed against the dirty windows of its interior. Tears made streaks down the panes but were lost against the beads of rain washing mud from their exterior.

  ‘Hold it, lady.’

  Too surprised to resist immediately, the young mother hesitated as she made to climb aboard and just looked blankly at the tall black medic who had stopped her. Only when he reached into the bundle she held to expose a child’s arm, painfully thin and almost translucently white, did she try to recoil.

  In a single well-practiced movement, Sampson wiped a swab over the tiny limb, pressed firmly but gently home the tip of a hypodermic, cleansed the area a second time and stepped back.

  Numbed, frightened and confused, the woman made to board again. It was Revell who put out his hand to steady her when she threatened to slip from the worn step, after she’d shied from the sergeant’s offer of help.

  Hyde moved away, averting his face. What would have been a face if the grafts and reconstructions had left him with more than mere openings for mouth, nose and eyes.

  Above the sound of the rain and the flames came a new sound. Revell recognized the thunder of a Russian rocket barrage, 240mm judging by the powerful concussion of the distant overlapping detonations. They were getting uncomfortably close if they were able to employ such comparatively short-range weapons. It was doubtless such an onslaught that had devastated this hamlet. Now the enemy had switched their attention to some other modest collection of homes and businesses, again where the only claim to legitimacy as a target was that they were grouped about a crossroads.

  ‘You’d best get moving, Herr Klingenberg. It’s bad enough you’ve kept these civvies here to watch what we’ve been doing, without keeping them hanging about to wait for the Russkies’ artillery to sweep back this way.’ It was difficult to check a tight smile as Revell noticed the official abandon his sl
ow, almost pompous manner and replace it with a twittering burst of nervous activity.

  ‘Ya, ya. I am going now.’ Klingenberg shouted to the bus driver, ‘Schnell, schnell.’

  After several ineffectual stabs at a control, the driver had to haul himself, with obvious irritation, from his seat and kick the doors closed. As he resumed his place, started and gunned the engine, the clattering growl of the big diesel was almost drowned by the growing roar and crackle of the fires. That in its turn was smothered by a grief-stricken wail coming from within the bus.

  It soared above all other sounds, going on and on, louder and higher than it should have been humanly possible to sustain. The distinctively dressed body of a child, a little blond girl, had rolled from the top of a stack and flopped untidily to rest on the steaming cobblestones.

  An arm and part of the torso had been burned away; what remained gave off clouds of foul vapours. Sparks scudded, wind whipped from the smouldering frayed edges of clothing. They made tiny spiral points of light that were quickly lost against the more dramatic outpourings from the main pyre.

  Heavy drops of rain began to fall.

  Impatiently Revell watched the haughty German as he, with meticulous care, stowed pen and notebook in the proper compartments within his document case. A perceptible shade faster than was strictly in keeping with his earlier demeanour, he made for his own transport. He forced himself to slow when a glance back revealed that the big medic was grinning broadly. Then a stray round blasted the edge of the village and Klingenberg threw away all pretence at dignity and scuttled the last few steps.

  Throwing the case onto the back seat of the Mercedes Estate, Klingenberg wrenched at the door when his first attempt to slam it shut was prevented by the buckle of his raincoat becoming jammed in it. His pinched face reddened as it took several tries before he managed to release his clothing and secure the door.

  The amusement Revell experienced, though, was not directed at that but at the vehicle itself. Whoever had executed the complex disruptive camouflage paint job on the vehicle had failed to extend their painstaking handiwork to the chromed fenders or full-length roof rack.

  Its heavy-duty tires crunching over broken brick and shards of glass, the Mercedes led the bus out of the square. Spectral faces were indistinctly visible inside the big vehicle. None remained pressed to the windows. They were leaving hell and daren’t turn back for a last look.

  ‘I hope he goes over a mine.’ Sergeant Hyde watched the shrouded taillights of the little convoy disappear from sight.

  ‘No chance, Sarge.’ Sampson shied the hypodermic into an anonymous ruin. ‘Infantry and marines die, civvies just get slaughtered, but German civil servants, they’re immortal. Man, when I buy my farm, if I’m reincarnated then all I want to come back as is some poor-paid boring little filing clerk in some piddling hick town hall.’

  ‘Get them on board, Sergeant.’ Revell turned his back on the noxious pillars of flame and black smoke rising into the predawn sky of another ugly day inside the Zone. Now that the job was done and the surviving civvies were on their way to safety he felt the return of the sapping exhaustion that had been dragging at his mind for days. Or perhaps it had been weeks. Time had almost ceased to have meaning. There were times when it took conscious effort to recall what month, or even what year it was. It was with only half his attention he watched his men lethargically climbing into the APCs, and the others, who had been watching approach roads, return. He should have injected a note of briskness into the proceedings, but it was no more in him than it was in his company, or what was left of it.

  Since the Russians had launched their offensive ... how long ago was it, four days, five…? They had been steadily falling back before the relentless pressure of mass attacks. The Warpac forces had been using ammunition as though they had a limitless supply, and every thrust had been preceded by devastating barrages, like the one that had virtually wiped this inoffensive little place from the map.

  Revell could only be thankful that his Special Combat Company had been operating on the flanks. In the centre, whole NATO divisions had been obliterated. And even so, in the course of less than a week’s fighting they had sustained losses of nearly seventy percent. Of a reinforced company he now had thirty-five men left. Of the sixteen APCs he had begun with he now had four, and one of those was being towed.

  But he knew in his heart it was wrong to say they had been fighting. Almost from the start they had been denied that opportunity. Time after time they had prepared positions, road blocks, ambushes, and every time they had been ordered to withdraw before enemy attacks had developed.

  It was the massive Soviet air superiority that had caused their losses. Now it had reached the stage when any movement by daylight was inviting destruction. Fighter bombers and helicopter gunships were roaming at will, and to be seen on the open road was an invitation to a series of attacks. The onset of the bad weather twenty-four hours earlier had bought some slight respite, but neither low cloud nor night could completely halt the attacks. With the wealth of sophisticated targeting devices carried by the gunships and bombers it was most likely only a shortage of experienced pilots that had brought about the slight respite.

  It was bitterly frustrating to take such punishment and not be able to strike back. What Revell and his men wanted was something real to fight for, not some anonymous ridge or railway cutting from which they were ordered to withdraw without even sighting the enemy.

  Sharply, above the more distant rumble of the barrage, came the punching crack of cannon fire.

  ‘Let’s get moving, sergeant. That’s the Reds taking out the barricades on the edge of town. Their tanks won’t take long to smash through. Are we still being jammed?’

  ‘On all frequencies. They’re pumping out that mush at tremendous power. If any of our fliers were in the air the transmitter would be standing out on their screens in 3-D.’ Hyde stepped onto the rear ramp of the M113. ‘So we’re still pulling back?’

  ‘That was the last word we had, as soon as we finished here.’ Revell scanned the hellish scene in the square, now filled with the stench of the burning bodies. ‘Why they wanted this done though, God only knows. Is this any more decent than decomposing under a pile of rubble?’

  Shrugging, Hyde ducked into the tracked carrier. ‘Probably the home village of some German politician who pulled a few strings…’

  ‘Don’t fucking wait for us, will you.’ Running and shouting, Dooley charged from an alleyway. He put on a spurt as he saw the last of the company boarding, was overtaken by Scully who had followed him but now reached sanctuary first.

  ‘Move over, you shits.’ Scully scrambled inside, shouting down the complaints from others who objected to being sprayed with the muddy water escaping from the cloudy plastic sack he carried. He sneered answers to his noisy and rude greeting. ‘Piss off. This is important stuff. You want to fuck up your guts on army rations, then that’s your bloody lookout. It took me an hour to grub up this lot. I’m not chucking them out now. I volunteered to cook when you lot wouldn’t do it, and if I’m going to do it then I want some decent veggies in the pot.’

  ‘You reckon they’re decent?’ Ripper watched the little man contort himself to push the soil-blotched turnips and carrots into an under-seat locker.

  ‘Of course they bloody are.’ Rearranging various bottles of soy sauce and ketchup and scooping back handfuls of stock cubes, Scully succeeded at his second attempt to fasten the improvised catch. ‘It’s the stuff grown above ground that glows in the dark.’

  Seated by the rear door of the APC, Ripper suddenly stuck his leg across the opening to prevent Dooley entering. ‘Now you ain’t bringing them in here, boy.’

  ‘Don’t fuck about. It took me bloody ages to catch this lot.’ Supported in both arms Dooley carried a highly ornate gilt cage filled with a mass of twittering bright blurs.

  Shrill cheepings and showers of multi-coloured feather and millet husks accompanied his attempts to push it inside ahea
d of him.

  Other voices joined Ripper’s drawl in protest and Dooley reluctantly backed off.

  ‘You miserable load of cruds. Don’t you ever tell me I haven’t got no soul again. Shit, I’ve got more feeling in my head than you’ve got in your little fingers.’ For a moment, at the back of Dooley’s mind there lurked the doubt that he’d got that a bit wrong, or at least not quite right. ‘Oh sod the lot of you. Someone sling me an empty kit bag then.’

  Catching a bundle of frayed and stained canvas, Dooley crammed the cage into it. In the process he almost disappeared within a screeching cloud of flying plumage. With elaborate care he fastened the bundle to a broken tool rack on the hull’s exterior.

  Sluggishly the tired hydraulics closed the ramp and sealed the troops within their armoured cocoon. With a bellow from holed exhausts and some misfiring, the old battle-worn APCs pulled out of the square, the last in the line starting off with a jerk as its towline tautened.

  As they clanked and crunched over the rubble their passengers fell into an exhausted sleep. Only Dooley stayed awake. He stared at the spot where only a thin slab of aluminium armour separated him from his prize. For a moment the hell that was the Zone could be forgotten, and he smiled, to fall asleep with a look of smug satisfaction on his face.

  TWO

  They were too late, by just a matter of seconds. The bridge was blown even as they came in sight of it.

  At first, for a few tantalizing moments, it had seemed as4f the charges had failed in their work. Revell had urged their driver on, but even as Burke had floored the pedal without consideration for the surge of fuel consumption by the straining motor, the long pre-cast concrete structure had twisted, sagged and fallen to ruin in the broad churning river far below.

  There was no time for the luxury of self-recrimination. With dawn only an our away Revell knew they had to find a crossing, to find shelter beneath the protecting umbrella of the main forces anti-aircraft defences. This side of the river they had no chance. Once light they would be unable to move by road, and on foot it would only be a matter of time before they were mopped up by Warpac recon units.