by James Rouch
Ahead lay a long wharf, and towering over it the rusting skeletons of conveyors and cranes and other coal-handling equipment. They in their turn were dwarfed by the stained sheer concrete walls of a derelict power station.
But it wasn’t the ugliness of the abandoned industrial scene that had caught Revell’s eye. He was watching the activities of Russian pioneers as, closely supervised by stick-wielding officers, they manhandled heavy loads from the wharf, across a precarious plank walkway constructed over barges moored out into the river and on to a floating platform at their end.
The loads were barrels and oil-drums, and even as the Iron Cow closed the range fast a dozen were pushed from the platform to start their havoc-creating journey downstream.
‘Oh boy, sitting targets.’ Ripper’s rebel yell died away as a multiple-barrelled Russian flak gun opened fire on them from the flat roof of the power station.
A torrent of fast-moving tungsten-tipped steel tore the river surface into a wild cauldron of spray all about them.
TWO
‘Take us in closer.’
Burke didn’t question the officer’s order, just corrected the turn he’d been starting to make and put the Iron Cow back on course for the wharf.
Their turret gunner had also been fast to identify the potential advantage and held his fire.
Hastily reloaded, the flak mount sent another hurricane of shells towards the hovercraft, but this time they all struck the river well behind it.
The compact design of the Rarden cannon enabled Ripper to elevate it to engage the flak gun when it was no longer able to depress sufficiently to reach them.
His first clip punched a line of holes in the concrete lip at the edge of the roof, the second group of three rounds tore into the four-barrel weapon and its crew.
A limp body flopped over the side of the building to be impaled on the projecting ironwork of a crane-cab, a hundred feet below, and no other member of the gun’s crew returned to it to tackle the spectacular blaze in one of its big magazines.
The pioneers, oblivious to the threats and blows being aimed at them by their officers, were streaming back across the walkway; an officer who tried physically to stem their panic, stepping into their path and waving his revolver, was brushed aside by the stampede, falling, with the two men he had shot, into the water.
Ripper helped them along by firing at a stack of drums on the platform, setting off an explosion that had an effect beyond that he’d intended or expected.
Thrown about by the blast, the barges strained at their moorings, and as one anchor chain gave, the walkways commenced a fast progressive collapse. Many of the Russians fell even before the planks beneath them gave as they were pushed aside by stronger or more determined men. Some managed to jump into the barges, but more tumbled into the water between them and were smeared from existence as the walls of steel came together.
Switching his fire to the wharf, Ripper used three clips of mixed armour-piercing and incendiary rounds against the stacks of drums, without doing more than smash them down and cause showers of sparks.
‘Maybe they’ve used up all the ones that go ‘boom’.’ Using a Colt Commando sub-machine gun, Dooley sprayed a cluster of drums that had rolled from the dock. Two began to sink, others spun lazily, fans of droplets rising from hoops and projecting end seams.
‘Try the pile by the shutter door.’ Making a fresh appraisal of the boxlike main building of the power station, Revell had noticed that several broken windows had been patchily repaired, and all of them covered in a thick coat of dark paint.
It was a difficult angle. Ripper could see the barrels referred to, but they were only partially visible behind a forest of crane legs and conveyor supports. When he did fire off a whole clip he thought he’d done pretty well to get a single shot past the tangle of struts and girders. He saw the tracer hit square on the top container, saw it jump and start to fall backwards, and then the whole side of the building was drenched in brilliant white light that sent spikes of smoke-tinged flame higher than the roof of the structure.
‘Hey, I got the jackpot.’
‘Very clever.’ Poising his hand over the throttle, Burke waited for the order to turn about and rejoin the comparative security of the convoy. It didn’t come; he gave the officer a moment longer. ‘Right, we’ve done the job, how about going home then?’ His fingers hovered above the control, almost touching it.
‘The major is wondering if we really have.’ Damn it, Andrea seemed to be reading his mind again. But she was right, that was exactly what he was wondering.
Now the smoke had drifted clear the power station appeared hardly to have been damaged at all. The doorway was a larger and less neat opening than it had been before, and the walls right to the top of the building were streaked with soot. Not more than a thousand pounds of explosives had been consumed by that single blast; he just couldn’t believe they’d come on the place at the very moment the Russians had exhausted their stocks of real mines, not when there were still so many of the bogus examples littering the area.
‘Take us in. We’re going to check.’
For Burke, it was a revenge of sorts to see the officer have to grab for a secure hold as the Iron Cow leapt forward under maximum acceleration.
There was a flight of concrete steps set into the wall of the dock. Burke set course for those, settling the craft onto the water just short of them and letting it drift in the last few feet until the front edge of the hull bumped gently against the cabin roof of a submerged launch. ‘Close as I can get.’
‘Right, soon as we’re off, take her back into midstream and wait for our signal. Keep zig-zagging. We don’t know who’s watching.’
‘Go teach your grandmother to suck eggs.’ Saying it under his breath, Burke hardly waited until Revell, Dooley, Andrea and Clarence were out before hitting the switch to actuate the closing of the front ramp and turning the HAPC in its own length to regain the centre of the river.
They could feel the heat radiating from the shattered surface of the wharf. Long cracks ran up and across the wall of the power station, and closest to the site of the blast it was bowed inward and shattered into hundreds of pieces held together only by the web of reinforcement rods inside it.
There was a mass of twisted ironwork to negotiate before they reached the opening, and in places the ground and some of the fallen cranes’ girders were made slippery by dripping human remains. The smouldering insulation on crushed and broken electric motors and wiring filled the air with the stench of burning rubber.
Little of the blast had passed into the vast building. Much of the generating equipment had been stripped out long ago, and walking was made more difficult in the gloom by the many projecting bolts in the floor, where machinery had been.
A heap of bodies lay against a wall. Revell glanced at them. They showed no external sign of injury, but he could tell by their blue-tinged lips, and bulging eyes that they had been killed by the wave of super-compressed air from the explosion. Beside them was a large beer cask, crushed and split open by its impact against a stanchion. It looked like no explosive he was familiar with.
Clarence bent down and rubbed some powder between his fingers. ‘I know what this is…’
Cautiously peering around an angle of the wall, Dooley beckoned the others to join him. ‘What’s this, the cook house?’
Lining either side of a wide aisle were stack after stack of plastic sacks. A few had split and from them a white powder had spilt to the floor. Every few yards stood an open barrel; some were partially filled, others were empty with more of the sacks stood beside.
‘This what I think it is?’ Revell had seen Clarence testing the contents of some of the split sacks.
‘In Northern Ireland we called it Co-op Mix. Usually it’s fertiliser and sugar, only the Reds don’t have sugar in these sort of quantities, or if they had it’d all be on their black market by now, so they must have found a substitute. Whatever it is, this certainly takes home-made bo
mbs out of the kitchen industry league.’
‘Looks fucking dodgy tome.’ Having picked up a fuse all ready for attachment to a completed mine, Dooley very carefully set it down again when his examination revealed a chunk of plastic explosive moulded around its base.
‘It can be. The IRA have had a few own-goals with this stuff, but I’ve never seen this much being mixed before, not all at once. There must be tons of it.’
‘Not for long.’ Revell slipped off his pack and began to take out the compact demolition charges. ‘Set these for ten, no better make that fifteen minutes. Bury them in the barrels that are already filled and among the sacks. I don’t want the Commies rushing back in after we’re gone and undoing all this.’
Taking six of the one-pound charges Revell went to the far end of the assembly line and began to place them among a group of finished mines, heaping loose powder about to conceal them. Out the corner of his eye he thought he saw a movement close to where Andrea was working. He casually edged that way, pretending to hitch his slung assault shotgun to a more comfortable position, then as he reached her side unslung it and pumped three rapid shots into a huge pile of empty sacks.
Echoes boomed about the cavernous interior, turning the three shots into a wild continuing fusillade.
While Andrea covered him, Revell ploughed through the punctured plastic and hauled out two Russians. One of them, an officer, died even as he was laid on the open floor. The pioneer who was with him was in a bad way, he’d taken a full charge in his back but he was still alive.
Swooping on the corpse, Dooley stripped it of pistol and insignia and everything else he considered of value.
‘What about this one, or are you going to have the decency to wait for him to die.’ Clarence watched the process with distaste.
With a sharp knife Dooley removed the officer’s buttons and ornate belt buckle. He didn’t even spare a glance for the dying man. ‘You’ve got to be joking. A Ruskie pioneer? A fucking cannon fodder conscript they haven’t even bothered to give a rifle. You got to be joking.’
Andrea looked from the officer’s dusty but mostly correct uniform, to the pioneer’s rags and tattered boots. ‘Another fine example of Communist equality; and that they would teach the world.’
The wounded man was moving, trying with movements he could hardly control to reach the mangled centre of his back. His questing fingers touched the area and dipped into the pulped flesh and oozing blood. He gave a despairing cry that turned to a choking cough and then an ugly rattle, as the terror of the extent of his injuries and his situation struck him, and died.
‘Eleven minutes, Major.’ Clarence had to duck back inside as he called from the doorway, on coming under fire from one of the barges. As he levelled his sniper rifle waiting for the Russian officer to pop up again, he heard the sharp crack of the Iron Cow’s Rarden and the shouts and screams that came from the barge as two shells passed through it from side to side. Above the cries of wounded he heard another commotion, and then a pistol was thrown over the side, followed by the limp and bloody body of an officer. A selection of off-white rags were waved from the craft.
They didn’t have to wait. Burke had the HAPC ready for them when they reached the steps. As they boarded, one of the charges they’d left behind went off prematurely. It was very muted, producing only billowing clouds of white powder that fountained from every vent and opening in the building.
The girl had said nothing to him about the incident in the power station. At the time Revell had thought he was saving her life. Alright, so the reality wasn’t as dramatic as that, but she must have known what was in his mind, and still she’d said nothing. She never spoke to him, she answered when he spoke to her, but she never initiated conversation. Sometimes being around her became so difficult for him, so frustrating, he felt he could almost lash out at her. If he did though she’d hit back, and despite her slighter build would probably manage to hurt him before he could pin her down. He could imagine a wrestle with her being exciting, the thought of it was rousing him…
All of the remaining charges blew together. Every door and window and ventilator was blasted from the power station as the whole structure swayed and bulged. For an instant it seemed as if it would remain intact, and then the wall facing on to the wharf, already weakened by the earlier explosion, crumpled away from the rest of the building and a thousand tons of razor-sharp rubble collapsed into the river and across the barges.
‘Tell them the job’s done, there won’t be any more mines.’ As their radio-man, watched by Sergeant Hyde, transmitted the message, Revell reached for his water bottle. It was empty. As he bent down for it, the letter fell from his pocket. He snatched it up and crumpled it into another whose zipper still worked. Now he was wishing he hadn’t brought it with him, what the hell, he wasn’t interested in what the bitch got up to now. When she’d remarried it was for more than mercenary reasons—he’d been happy to hear that she didn’t want any more money out of him. That, he’d thought, had severed the last link between them. There’d been no children, and now there wasn’t even alimony to bind them. But she’d kept writing and he’d kept on reading, and re-reading. He’d never yet had the willpower to throw one of them away unopened, and every time he wished he had. He could feel the bulk of the screwed-up letter in his jacket; if only it was that easy to crumple and put from sight his memories.
On his screen he could see the convoy was catching up to them. It was time to push on, before they were called back to assist with any more close fire-support missions. He used the internal communication system to talk to the crew.
‘According to Intelligence reports,’ Revell allowed a brief pause for the inevitable groan from Burke and sardonic laugh from Ripper, ‘we should be approaching the last ring of positions the Ruskies have around Hamburg. The fighting’s been fluid in the last few days, so things might have changed, but it shouldn’t amount to much…’
‘You inclined to put any money on that, Major? If you are I’d kinda like a piece of the action. The Sarge has got a stack of markers of mine I’d rather like to have settled before I go to meet my maker…’
‘Hey, Ripper, when is your appointment to see Franken Stein?’
‘Shut it, Dooley.’ Revell let their gunner work off his irritation at the interruption by firing on a four-wheeled Gaz armoured car trying to reverse into a firing position on the bank. A single shot started it burning.
Sitting with his back against the hull, Clarence didn’t bother to look out. There was nothing to be gained by knowing where they were, not for him. He didn’t give the orders, couldn’t fire with effect on any target he might glimpse. His rifle had the range, but not the hitting power. The handful of special rounds he had, those with the armour-defeating depleted uranium core, he’d save until he could be sure they weren’t being wasted. Some of the others always wanted to know what was happening, where the current danger lay, he didn’t. If he couldn’t influence what was going on, why concern himself with it.
If a shell or missile was coming at them they’d all know about it soon enough, for a brief pain-filled moment; and if the round missed then any worrying would have been for nothing. Clarence knew just about all there was to know about death, except what it was actually like, but he’d sent more than two hundred others to find out. The prospect of meeting it himself didn’t bother him. For ages now he’d been living on borrowed time. Some day, maybe today, he was going to have to pay back.
Sporadic mortar fire was sending geysers of water high into the air, and then it became suddenly heavier, until spray was continually drenching the Iron Cow. It was like motoring through torrential rain.
A light cannon joined in and the hull rang as rounds bounced from the armour. Machine gun fire was added, but only the speckled traces of light on the hostile fire locater betrayed the fact. Their flight was unseen, their impact unheard.
‘Where’s the heavy stuff?’ It was an involuntary reaction for Revel 1 to duck when the tracer shell ricocheted
from the dome of the cupola hatch. Damn it, if this was another of the Russian main positions then they should have run into opposition from weapons of far bigger calibre by now. Where the hell were they? Were the Commies keeping them concealed, saving them for the convoy? It was hard to believe, the lone HAPC was a tempting target for any enemy gunner. There were few who could resist the temptation to try and disable it, to earn the big bounty the Soviet High Command offered for one captured intact.
‘Something on the screen, Major. Dead ahead.’ Boris tried to make sense of the radar image. ‘I can’t make it out, it looks… it looks like they’ve built a wall across the river.’
‘Here, let me see.’ Hyde looked over the operator’s shoulder, and saw the same incomprehensible picture. ‘It’s bloody impossible.’ He tried the thermal imager, and all he got was a view of a great grey cliff that stretched almost from bank to bank.
‘Yeah, and why not a wall. Great at building walls the Commies.’ The three rounds he put into it made no impression. On his screen Ripper saw them impact, and then nothing. ‘Usually though they put ‘em up to keep their people in…’
‘That’s not a wall.’ Revell went for a wider view, and suddenly could see that the ‘wall’ was topped by superstructures and derricks. The Russians didn’t need heavy weapons, the convoy would be going no further.
The many block ships they’d encountered downstream, found in groups of two and three, paled before this. Across the full width of the Elbe thirty or more merchantmen had been scuttled to form an impassable barrier of steel.
‘So much for bloody satellite reconnaissance.’ Through the mist of water kept in permanent suspension by the deluge of bombs, Burke could see the overlapping hulls. ‘I wonder when they’ll get round to spotting this lot.’
‘It hasn’t been here long.’ Movement caught his attention, and Revell saw an ore carrier begin to take on a list. ‘They almost left it too late, it’s only just finished.’
