by James Rouch
‘Course I will. Hell, I could find fun down a sewer.’
‘From the smell of you, you may have; but I didn’t mean that. I meant getting ashore.’ A dial that Burke had been watching, and that had been hovering just above zero, quivered and dropped suddenly to register just that. As it did, the remaining engine died and the craft settled gently on to the water and began to rock in time with its motion. ‘We’re out of gas. Unless someone has got a couple of paddles tucked away that I don’t know about, then the only place we’re going is back downstream. Into the waiting arms of the Ruskies.’
FOUR
‘Here, Clarence. What was that word you used?’ Standing on the lowered ramp, Dooley watched the small motorboat struggling to tow them towards the dockside.
‘Ignominious.’
‘Yeah, that’s the word. That’s what this is, fucking ignominious.’ Dooley moved back inside to make way for the major and their NCO.
‘I wasn’t expecting masses of bunting and a band,’ Hyde surveyed the empty wharfs, ‘but even so, the welcoming committee is a bit thin on the ground.’
As the Iron Cow’s sharpened wraparound fender bumped the pockmarked stone, Revell reached for a set of steps and clambered up onto the dock. The motorboat crew cast off the towline and departed without a word or wave being exchanged, leaving the squad to make fast its own mooring lines.
Revell looked around. The only person in sight was a small boy, holding a cycle, and wearing a blue armband. Resting the machine against what was left of a railway wagon, he walked over.
‘You are in the wrong place. The convoy is to berth in the Zoll-kanal.’
‘We have no power, we can’t reach it, and we have no heavy cargo to unload. Here will have to do.’ He found it hard to believe, he was defending himself against what had the sound of criticism from a boy of twelve or thereabouts.
The lad thought a moment, then nodded sagely, as if conceding the argument and accepting the excuses. ‘It will do for the moment. I have been sent to guide you, but here, take these.’ He handed over a thin sheaf of pocketbook-sized flimsy pieces of paper. ‘In case you get lost, these are maps. You must avoid streets or areas marked in red.’
‘Why’s that?’ Dooley took a sheet.
‘You will find out. It need not concern you yet.’
‘We can’t leave our transport, she’s valuable, and there are some stores on board.’ Revell was finding it hard to handle the situation. The obvious impulse was to swipe the arrogant little bastard across the side of the head and then find an adult to talk to, but there weren’t any about. The boy’s next remark increased the strength of the urge to knock the cockiness out of him.
Glancing over the edge of the door, the lad took a long slow look at the HAPC. ‘I think it unlikely you could carry sufficient of anything in there to be of material use to us, but I will summon a guard unit.’ From a deep pocket in the oversized sports jacket he wore, he took a compact walkie-talkie, and spoke into it. ‘They will be here soon. Be ready to leave when they arrive.’
‘You want me to knock his block off, Major?’ Burke’s hand itched with the urge to cuff the kid. ‘Better not.’ Hyde indicated an approaching group wearing similar armbands. ‘Here come some of his mates.’
‘Shit,’ Dooley rubbed his eyes in disbelief, ‘is Hamburg being held by a division of shitty little munchkins?’
The average age of the members of the guard who now posted themselves along the wharf and on the roof of the hovercraft was only a year or so more than that of their guide.
In their ill-fitting clothes it was difficult for Hyde to gauge just to what degree the members of the youthful unit were suffering from malnutrition, but some mark of it was in their faces. Their eyes were dark ringed, sunken into their young faces. Only their faces weren’t young. War had aged them, individual and collective experiences had contrived to make them men before they had hardly begun to be boys. The casual but competent way in which they held captured Russian weapons betrayed long familiarity with them.
‘Where will our wagon be taken for repair?’ Burke was loath to leave the Iron Cow, they’d only just got her back after two long months in the workshops.
‘It will not be repaired.’ With undisguised disinterest the lad took another half-glance at the HAPC, hardly giving himself time to take in its battered appearance, the hundreds of bullet and shell scars on the scorched and mud-spattered armour. ‘If it has to be, then it will be taken to a secure place, but we’ve neither the manpower nor materials to repair it, or if it could be then the fuel to run it. We will strip it of its armament though, and put that to good use.’
The battle damaged remnant of the convoy was passing. Less than half the vessels that had started out had made it, and most that had were in sad condition. A fire blazed on the foredeck of a tug, and two of the five barges it still had in tow were riding low in the water. Several of the ships were listing, or down by the stern or bow, and nearly all had a row of sheet-draped forms on deck.
In the distance a high-pitched siren began to wail, and the sound was taken up by another close by.
‘We must be going. The Russians have not yet finished with the convoy.’ Pushing his cycle, the boy led Revel 1 and the squad away from the dockside.
As he shouldered his pack to follow, Hyde saw the youths left on guard tearing at the heaps of rubble with their bare hands as they fashioned improvised shelters against whatever it was that was coming.
Two minutes after they had left, as they picked their way between the raised rims of gaping craters, a pair of Soviet Su-20 ground attack jets screamed past overhead at a thousand feet, the clacking 30mm cannon in their wing roots leaving a row of smoke smudges in the sky behind them.
Immediately above the docks they released the entire load of their wing pylons and pulled up and away as the retarded cluster bombs split apart and disgorged and scattered a mass of individual bomb-lets.
There was no time to seek cover, the squad could only throw themselves to the ground and claw a hold on that against what they knew was coming.
The cluster munitions burst across the area. Those close enough for their seeker-heads to register the engine noises, exhaust emissions or movement of the convoy homed on that. Those that weren’t, or couldn’t manage the gross alteration in trajectory necessary, just fell and delivered their hollow-charge warheads on to whatever lay below.
Not even the still-shrieking sirens could blot out the whistling screech of the approaching bomb. Revell covered his head with his hands and willed his body, his every fibre, to pull in upon itself, to constrict and occupy the smallest possible space.
At the moment it seemed the rising shrill must bust their eardrums from their heads, the bomb impacted and the ground smacked up into their bodies and cradled faces. Fragments of concrete smashed down around them.
Beyond the line of warehouse roofs that hid it from them, thick smoke rose from the dock, but it was the fresh crater immediately in front of them that took Andrea’s attention. She knelt at its side and picked up a shred of metal, a part of the bomb’s miniature wings. ‘It did not go off.’
‘Just as bloody well. Any fucking closer and we’d be looking at holes that size in ourselves.’ Dooley stepped over the shallow depression. ‘I wonder what poor sod doing slave labour in a Commie munitions works we have to thank for that.’
‘Sure is going to be a lot of dodgy crap to clear up after this war is over, if it ever is.’ More cautiously than the big man, Ripper went around the new indent in the already heavily pockmarked surface.
‘Not as much as you might think.’ The boy rummaged among a precarious pile of debris. ‘We can find a use for this in Ivan’s Gift Shop.’
‘What the hell is Ivan’s Gift Shop?’ Burke watched the boy drive a length of angle-iron into a fissure, one of many, that radiated from the point of impact, and tie a piece of rag to its top.
‘You will find out, it…’
‘Yeah, we know… it need not concern us
yet.’ Ripper jabbed the boy in the chest with an oily finger. ‘One more riddle, one more smart arse remark and I’ll hog tie you to the next dud that comes down. I’d rather have this map than your mouth.’
His fists opening and closing, the boy’s face flickered through a spectrum of emotion, and fixed on sullen anger. He picked up his bike and led them at a fast pace away from the docks.
‘Bye now. You all come along and see us some time, y’hear?’ Ripper waved a farewell to the boy’s back as he pedalled off.
It was a little cooler now as the sun set, and the glare was no longer reflected from the masses of broken glass filling every street. They might as well have been walking through a city of the invisible. They had seen no one on the streets, but ample evidence that there had been. The deep drifts and layers of dust were imprinted with the marks of many footprints and cart tracks.
Across the city rolled the sound of artillery fire, and once, only a few blocks away, the massive crash and roar of a long-range bombardment missile impacting, followed by the rumble of its sonic boom.
Weakened by the intervening buildings the blast wave arrived as a swirling wall of dust that scoured the flesh of their face and hands with stinging wind-whipped particles.
‘This don’t seem to be too healthy a place.’ Dooley spat ground mortar and plaster. ‘How about we find somewhere with a spot of top cover. I’m getting the feeling that brat has dumped us in bomb alley.’
‘We’ll try in here.’
Revell led them down a ramp into the artificial cavern of an underground car park. The collapse of the buildings above had brought much of the roof down, but a route of sorts appeared to have been cleared between some of the crumbling pillars, and he struck that way.
At long intervals sputtering oil lamps had been strung up, and they headed from one to another, frequently stumbling as they reached the near pitch black area halfway between each.
For a moment it seemed that their journey ended abruptly at a blank wall, then Hyde spotted a tunnel opening in it, partially hidden by the wrecks of flattened Volkswagens to either side. He ducked to enter, and the barrel of a Russian pistol was stuck into his face.
‘I’ve been expecting you. Sorry I didn’t meet you up the top, but my telephone line has just been repaired for the first time in a week and I wanted to use it before it was put out of action again. I thought you’d manage to find your way here alright.’
The stench was almost overpowering. Raw sewage moved sluggishly past their boots, and every movement brought fat bubbles to its surface that burst and threw particles of the stinking effluent over them.
‘You’ll have to forgive the pong. I think I must have grown rather immune to it, but I expect you find it a bit ripe.’
By the dim light from a single oil lamp, Revell looked at the speaker. His age, under caked filth and in a face deep-lined by hunger, was impossible to determine with any precision, but around thirty might have been about right. He sat on a plastic bottle-crate behind a table constructed of several planks supported by more of the brightly coloured compartmented mouldings.
‘You’re British?’
‘Oh yes, very.’ His mouth opened in what might have been a smile, but the few teeth left that might have signalled it were no more than blackened stumps, rotted by disease. ‘I was secretary to a trade mission that was over here when the Ruskies did their Red Indian imitation and circled us in the night. The others tried to get out, never saw them again. I thought I’d stay on and do my bit.’
‘What do you want us for?’ Holding a cloth over his nose and mouth didn’t help, but Boris kept it there anyway.
‘I issue identity papers. The Ruskies have got up to all sorts of tricks to try and infiltrate the city. People are suspicious. You’re Russian aren’t you?’
Boris looked to the major, before nodding. ‘Not now you’re not. I’ll put you down as Polish. You won’t get past the first security check if I put the truth. You’d be lucky if they just shot you, bit at a time.’ From a small stack he took eight pieces of thick card and on each filled in their name, rank and number. On the reverse he jotted their country of origin.
Clarence queried the last entry.
‘Quite simple really. Such a lot of bodies to bury, it was beginning to get complicated, especially as all the non-combatants such as priests and the like are busy full time at the hospitals. The living have to come first. Nobody was too keen on indiscriminate mass burial, we leave that sort of callousness to the Reds, so we eventually plumped for plots determined by nationality as the best we could do. Catholic, C of E, Buddhist; now they’re all the same. Death is a great leveller.’ He jerked his pen towards the ruined city-above, and laughed at his own little joke. It was a brittle laugh, of short duration.
‘Where do we go now?’ Revell didn’t join in, doing nothing that would force him to take deeper breaths of the fetid atmosphere.
‘Baptism of fire actually for you. You’re earmarked for our fire-brigade… No, hold it, let me explain.’ He held up a hand to quell the sudden outbreak of argument. ‘That’s what we call our mobile squads. It helps confuse the Ruskies if they manage a radio intercept. It means you’ll be doing rather a lot of rushing about. In the next week or so you should see more of the city, what’s left of it, than I have in the last year. You’ll find yourselves rather in the thick of things I’m afraid. Hope you like fighting. Are you sure you want the woman with you, there’s plenty of other work for her…’
‘That is my work.’ Bending forward Andrea put her face close to the man’s. ‘You have no objection?’
‘No… none… I just thought I’d mention…’ He cleared his throat. ‘Yes, well, eh, that’s about it. If there’re no questions…’
‘The other troops from the convoy, what will they be doing?’ Not for the first time, Burke was getting the feeling that of all the jobs being handed round, they’d got the rough one.
‘Not really my province, I’m not really privy to the master plan, if there is such a thing. I suppose, though, the ships’ crews will be formed into labour battalions and the armour and infantry held for the big breakout, whenever that may be. I’m only processing units that don’t really fall into any definable category. If that answers your question…?’
‘It tells me we won’t be out of the shit when we leave here.’ The brittle laugh was of even shorter duration this time. ‘Very good, yes… Do you have torches? No? Oh dear, I was going to say that you could use the sewers and the underground railway tunnels to get to where you’ve got to go, but you’d need flashlights…’
‘Just mark it on my map. We’ll take our chances on the overland route.’ Revell held out his already crumpled piece of paper.
‘Here, the university building on Bundes Strasse. Can’t imagine what they want you there for, the Reds have never tried anything from that direction. Still, whatever it is, good luck.’
Sergeant Hyde held back a moment as the others filed out. ‘You don’t take up much room, couldn’t you find somewhere else to work, somewhere healthier?’
‘I expect so, in fact I’m sure I could, after all there’s fewer of us each day. We’re down to less than half a million, plenty of elbow room now, but I’ve got my reasons.’ He stirred his foot in the filth and provoked a series of large bubbles that doubled the strength of the pungent odours filling the tunnel. ‘The Reds haven’t used gas yet, they know there’s still a lot of neutrals trapped in the city, embassy staff and the like. It wouldn’t look good if they started using chemicals. But they might, eventually they just might.’ Again he dragged his foot through the glutinous stream. ‘If I really tried, I could generate a lot of gas of my own, I might be able to produce sufficient overpressure to keep the Commies’ muck out.’ The laugh came again.
He was quite mad. Sat here on his own he had gone quietly insane. Hyde left him to his wild theory. As he went, the man was taking a small piece of greyish bread from a dirty cloth and chewing on a corner of it. He splashed his feet in the s
ewage and watched the slow-motion rise of the bubbles about him. The laugh followed the NCO as he negotiated the route back to the car park and into the open street.
‘…No, honest, my great uncle Frank, he worked in the sewers most of his life, said it never did him any harm, even claimed it were good for him.’ Ripper took in all the disbelieving faces around him. ‘Hell, you guys don’t ever believe anything I tell you. I ain’t kidding, forty years he worked down the sewers, he’d still be working down there if he hadn’t broke his watch.’
There was suspicion written large in Dooley’s expression. ‘I’m going to regret this. What’s breaking his watch got to do with it?’
‘Everything. See, he were down there doing overtime on a Saturday night and he kinda lost track. He sorta got caught when the commercials came on.’
‘Leave him, Dooley.’ Revell stopped him from delivering a second pile driver blow to the top of Ripper’s helmet. ‘One day he’ll choke on his own lies.’ ‘Only if I don’t choke him first.’
‘I said forget it, Dooley.’
‘Forgotten, Major, whatever it was.’ Grinning, Dooley was very pleased with himself at having got in the last word, until the butt of an assault shotgun landed between his shoulder blades and sent him reeling forward to sprawl on his hands and knees.
‘Anything else to say?’
Dooley took the point, he shook his head. As they scrambled over a pile of masonry from a wall that had collapsed across the road, Revell saw that the girl was watching him. He would have given anything to be able to read what was in her mind, know what she thought of him. Andrea had not attached herself to anyone since Libby had deserted.* If she was going to, and on past form she would, he could only hope it would be him. He had never been able to determine what it was that guided her choice, so it was no good putting on an act, he could only be himself.
Be himself. That was a laugh, what commander in wartime could ever be himself. Everything he did was an act, for himself, for others. The war was his play, the Zone his scene, Hamburg the set. At times it all seemed unreal, but the danger and sometimes the pain helped bring reality.
