by James Rouch
‘Clever, if it works.’
‘It’ll work, Major. See, I’m probably the most efficient mass-murderer you’ll ever meet, because the way I kill, it sure isn’t war.’
THE OTHER SIEGES
KABUL
With the taking of the Soviet Air Force’s main base in Afghanistan, at Bagram, by the Mujahideen, the position of the Russian garrison in Kabul now appears hopeless.
Only strenuous efforts by the few remaining ground attack aircraft have deterred the encircling freedom fighters from launching a final assault. They have already rejected several appeals from the commander of the garrison for the acceptance of a conditional surrender.
It is likely that the Russians will decide to fight to the last man, rather than allow themselves to fall alive into the hands of the Mujahideen who are extracting a bloody revenge for past Russian atrocities, the worst of which are only now coming to light.
From a peak strength of 110,000 troops, the Russian forces had been reduced to under sixty thousand by the drafting of units to Europe to reinforce sectors of the Zone. Another twenty thousand were air-lifted out when the population rose against them, before aircraft losses became unacceptably high. Only a handful of the remaining forty thousand are thought to have reached the border and crossed safely into Russia.
Behind them the Soviets have left vast quantities of arms and ammunition, including thousands of vehicles, among which are whole regiments of tanks and self-propelled artillery.
With the retaking of Kabul the abandoned Russian troops will have been killed to a man.
EIGHT
Through the image intensifier Revell could see the enemy troops filtering into the street. Those with bulky packs would be the engineers. Behind the troops came the squat bulk of a self-propelled gun. The squeal of its tracks and the crunch of stone and brick being crushed carried clearly.
To either side of the APC the rest of Thome’s men had dug in. They crouched below their rubble parapets, waiting for the device’s detonation, to open fire immediately afterwards on any survivors.
The nearest Russian was only yards from the mouth of the pipe. There was a faint whirring sound as the handle on the detonator was pulled out to its fullest extent, and then a whine as it was pushed home.
Bricks and concrete smashed into the far side of the APC, as a portion of the charge blew back, but most of it belched forward, bursting apart the last ten feet of the pipe as if it were a paper straw and scattering rocket warheads down the length of the street.
Masses of secondary explosions marked their impacts and the road was lit like day. As the echo of the last died away, Revell looked out round the side of the APC. He didn’t need the intensifier. Flames were coming from the front-mounted engine of the self-propelled gun and illuminating the scene. Every fitting had been blasted from the vehicle and both its tracks were broken. Smoke boiled from holes in the armour, but there was no sign of the crew.
And there was no sign of the Russian engineers or infantry either, at first. Of the hundred and fifty men who had been there, not one remained on the road. The few bodies that were visible were draped over mounds of rubble or heaped against walls some distance off.
Shouldering his obviously unneeded shotgun, Revell brushed the dust from his sleeves and shoulders, and as he did saw that Andrea was still sitting down. Thome was bent over her, examining a long gash in her thigh.
Revell thought his heart had stopped as he saw the blood oozing sluggishly from the wound, and then flowing faster as the limb was pulled away from the jagged spear of metal projecting from the armour of the APC. The piece of rocket motor casing had been blown back to penetrate the armoured troop carrier’s floor and almost its roof, finding Andrea’s leg as it lodged in the thick aluminium that had failed to stop it quite soon enough.
‘It’s severed an artery.’ The field dressing that Revell applied only slowed the flow, it didn’t stop it no matter how much pressure they applied.
‘We’ll use my transport. There’s a hospital on the corner of Altonaer Strasse that won’t be too busy at this time.’ Thorne picked the girl up and started back to the Jaguar.
Revell followed, and almost tripped at every other pace. He had eyes only for the arm she had thrown round Thome’s neck. In him was fear for her and hate for him, and both grew stronger with every step.
Over a thousand casualties had been packed into the boiler room and the adjoining store. Several hundred more had to take their chances above ground, lining the corridors and entrance hall on the ground floor and covering every inch of space in the administration offices.
New cases were being admitted all the time, and were put into one of three categories: those who could be patched up and sent on their way, those who needed surgery that would require a period of immobilisation afterwards, and those for whom no treatment could hold out any hope.
The terminal cases were sent straight to the hospice across the street where everything possible was done to make their passing easier. Patients who fell into the other two groups were allotted a place on the surgeons’ lists. On admission Andrea went immediately to the top of the list and was given a local anaesthetic within a minute of being carried through the doors.
Thorne hung about long enough to check that she was going to be alright and then went off to visit members of his group in the hospice. For a while, Revell tolerated being harried and shunted about by the overworked and tired nurses, then after being told to go for the fifth time, he went to give blood. It was the only way he could think of staying near to her.
Even patients about to be discharged were there. Many of them looked far from well, but they insisted on donating at least a half-litre. Often they must have been giving back what they had themselves received by transfusion only days before. Afterwards he sipped without tasting a lukewarm cup of tea, before leaving it half drunk and going back to the theatre.
She wasn’t there, but he managed to corner a charge nurse long enough to discover that Andrea had been moved to what had been the porter’s locker room at the back of the building, and would be there for two or three days while the wound began to heal.
It took some doing, but he managed to evade the determined efforts of the nursing staff to let no visitors into the crowded makeshift ward and found her wrapped in a bright yellow sleeping bag between an old woman who had lost a hand, and a little girl whose bowels lay in a bag beside her.
In that room was all the misery of the war. The whole spectrum of violent injury was there: amputations, chest wounds, disfigurement. She’d had only the local anaesthetic for the operation but tranquillisers administered afterwards had put her to sleep. Her face had been washed hurriedly and her fringe left wet and pushed back. It gave her a childlike appearance, very touching, and he wished he could stay there and look after her. He’d have done anything for her, anything, but he couldn’t stay. Already a nurse had spotted him and from the doorway was trying to catch his eye.
Revell knelt beside Andrea. With just the tips of his fingers he stroked her fringe back into place and saw that even by that light touch he had soiled her smooth suntanned skin. There was a small dark mark on her cheek that no washing would have removed, it was a shadow of the extensive bruising she’d received from a wound on their last mission. Then he’d been tempted to leave her behind, but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to exclude her, to exclude himself from her company.
She’d never allowed him near, given any hint of encouragement or indication that she was ever likely to, and still he hoped… There was a faint smile on her face, it played at the corner of her lips and fractionally accentuated the curve of her cheekbones. He could only wish that it was a real one, and directed at him. He was very tired. It would have been good just to lie down beside her and hold her hand, and sleep. He was tired and lonely .The war; command; frustration; they towered over him, crushing him down and he felt his will to resist the pressures crumbling.
A hand was on his shoulder, and he turned to see
the nurse making an urgent pantomime of ejection towards the door. One last look at Andrea, and he complied. He didn’t know if he would ever see her again. Thome was not at the hospice. No one remembered seeing him, or knew where he was. For the second time in a day, Revell had no unit. He sat on the steps of the building, fighting the temptation to lie down and sleep. It was hunger as much as willpower that prevented him doing just that. Even the condemned man ate a last meal, a pathetic act under those circumstances, as if it mattered when death was only a little way off, but the sensation was not about to be allayed by the application of reason, and he looked around for the kitchens. ‘Are you hungry?’
It was the blonde with the camera. She stood in front of him, proffering a piece of sausage and a half-loaf of bread. ‘I am, yes, but those are your rations.’ ‘I can get more, here, take it.’
Just to hold it felt good. Revell took a bite from the sausage. It was full of meat and rich with flavour. ‘Where do you get food like this?’ ‘Friends. I have lots of them. My name is Inga. Come with me, there is something I would like to show you.’
Revell stood up and followed without question, like a schoolboy called from the dinner table by the headmistress. He didn’t know where she was taking him, and at that moment he didn’t really care. She laid a hand on his arm to caution him against some inert power lines drooping low across an alleyway and the slight pressure of her long slim fingers made him tingle. The sensation remained for a moment after she later, and slower than she need have, let go. She chatted as they walked. There was a trace of accent in her voice, but he couldn’t place it. Swedish, Swiss? Something about it was familiar, but precisely what escaped him. Apparently the city-fathers of Hamburg had decided to record history in the making, she was to chronicle on film every detail of the siege. Her job meant a pass that would take her anywhere, extra food, and if she needed it a car with petrol.
As they walked she linked her arm through his. It seemed an innocent gesture, but he sensed a fraction too much pressure for it to be quite that. Being with her made him feel good. The distant, and sometimes not so distant, hammer of the guns was a barely heard background noise.
With a genuine-sounding interest she asked him about his family, and he talked of his parents, and as her gentle probing prompted, about the bitch, and the divorce, and about Andrea. He had known her only minutes and already he had told her about years out of his life. She wasn’t Andrea, but she was attentive and attractive, and as he felt through the sleeves of their clothing, warm. There was such a lot he had kept bottled inside him, now there was someone who really seemed to want to listen and the pent-up thoughts and emotions became words and he talked as he had never talked to anyone. He wanted their walk to continue, until the burden he’d made for himself was lightened by being shared.
Star shells lit the city. Shells pounded whole suburbs, but Revell heard and saw nothing as Inga guided him through a labyrinth of ruins, occasionally commenting noncommittally, but mostly just listening. For this duration, however short it might be, he’d escaped the war.
‘Fucking half rations! Half fucking rations!’ Dooley looked at the miniature pool of potato soup swilling about at the bottom of his bowl, and hurled it and its contents at the nearest wall. ‘I’ll tell you, fucking Colonel fucking Horst, what you can do with your fucking half rations!’
‘Yes?’ Horst was unmoved by the impressive display of temper by the giant American.
‘I fucking took out a shitty T72 with my fucking bare hands. I jammed a fucking log in its fucking tracks then broke the fucking necks of the fucking crew as they came out, and you stand there like some fucking comic opera general from Ruritania and tell me I’m on half fucking rations? Piss off!’
‘Why did you have to kill the,’ Horst paused, ‘the crew with your bare hands?’ ‘You know fucking why. Because my fucking weapon had jammed, that’s fucking why.’
‘And your weapon jammed because you fired a burst. A burst! You used more ammunition in three seconds than my unit has done in the last three days. If we have no food to spare, we have even less ammunition. That is why you are on half rations.’ Dooley made to say more, but didn’t. He sat beside Burke against the cellar wall and watched his meal trickling down until it had absorbed so much dust it could run no further, but stopped, and began to harden.
‘If it’s any consolation, mate,’ Burke slurped noisily on his soup, ‘the Ruskies are a bugger sight worse off than we are, even you, on half rations.’ With the last of his bread he mopped every drop of moisture from the bowl. ‘I stuck my bayonet through a Commie who weren’t anything but skin and bone. I’ll swear the bugger looked almost happy to die. He couldn’t have weighed above eighty pounds, and I saw others who weren’t no better. If what we’re getting ain’t good, what they’re getting ain’t nothing.’
Pushing the last morsel into his mouth, he licked his spoon, and then the crumbs from his fingers. ‘This bread tastes ruddy awful, real bitter. Wonder what they been doing to it?’
‘Shit, that sure isn’t no mystery.’ Ripper was taking longer over his food, and had more than half of his three ounces of bread left to eat. ‘During vacation I used to work in a bakery, and taking an interest I had a chat with the guys who work the ovens here. Seems they can’t afford to use a few tons of cooking oil each week, greasing the tins, so they made an artificial substitute, using a soap base. That’s why the crust tastes kinda bitter. Won’t do you no harm though, less you drunk a gallon of the stuff.’
‘Such things have had to be accepted a long time in Russia, since before the war.’ Boris pointed at Clarence and Burke. ‘Perhaps one more election and your country would have started down the Socialist slope towards food substitutes, food rationing and uncomplaining acceptance.’
‘Well, I sure ain’t accepting, and sure as hell I’m complaining.’ Chewing the last mouthful, Ripper pulled a face at the coarse flavour of the lukewarm drink with which he tried to wash it down. ‘What we just had, well all excepting Dooley that is,’ he ducked the flake of damp-stained plaster shied at him, ‘weren’t fit for hogs. Now isn’t there some place hereabouts where a guy can get decent food that at least bears some resemblance to the real thing?’
‘I heard they got a black market.’ Burke prised gristle from between his teeth, then pressed his stomach with the palm of his hand and produced a rapid sequence of spectacular belches. ‘But if what I’ve seen in the Zone in the past is anything to go by, then I’d say our chances of scraping enough together to find the price of a can of beans is pretty remote. Especially as the only thing they’ll accept in payment is hard currency, around eighteen carat.’
‘Who do we know who’s in the habit of carrying around chunks of gold?’ From Sergeant Hyde the question had a rhetorical air, but he was looking direct at Dooley.
‘Oh no.’ Conscious that all eyes were on him, Dooley hugged his pack close. ‘What’s mine is mine, and it stays that way. There’s nothing you can say is going to make me part with my hard-earned savings.’
‘Savings shit.’ A snort was added to Burke’s repertoire of revolting noises. ‘You’ve been trying your hand at a bit of wheeling and dealing. Remember that quartermaster sergeant who had all those blankets go missing? Only a direct hit that burned his store to the ground saved the poor worried bastard from a court martial. That was when I first saw you with those Krugerrands.’
‘Lies. It’s all fucking lies. You won’t bloody blackmail me. I told you. Nothing you can say is going to get me to part with what’s mine by rights.’
‘You sure about that?’ Hyde made no threatening move, but the big man backed into a corner and balled his fists.
‘Give up, Sarge.’ Burke shook his head. ‘When he says we can’t get him to change his mind and pool what he’s got, I believe him…’
With a smug expression, Dooley nodded his pleasure at their acceptance of his refusal.
‘… Even if we told him the black market is on the Reeperbahn…’ ‘Where?’ His grip on the
pack relaxed as Dooley became instantly interested. ‘Did you say the Reeperbahn? Where all the hookers… and the strip clubs… Jesus, why didn’t you tell me, what are we waiting for?’
‘Keen, isn’t he.’ Clarence came from the shadows of an alcove. ‘But knowing friend Dooley, might I suggest you check first on just what funds he does have available. In the past he has been known to exaggerate, just a little.’
With savage ill-grace, and a glare at their faintly smiling sniper, Dooley dug a grubby hand into the depths of his pack, and withdrew a small, garishly patterned plastic case that might once have held a woman’s toilet things. Unfastening its zipper, he emptied the contents onto the floor.
The flickering light from their single oil lamp illumination found a thousand facets on which to reflect as it lit the pile of assorted rings and other jewellery.
‘And the other?’ Burke tapped an angular bulge in the side of the pack.
‘Bloodsucker.’ From a faded blue velvet covered case that a second rummage in the pack produced, Dooley tipped a dozen gold coins into his hand. The pair of sovereigns looked insignificant among the nest of large South African pieces. ‘You satisfied now? That was going to be the down payment on a pig breeding unit when this was all over.’
‘We’re doing you a favour; save you from a life of toil and shit shovelling.’ Scooping up the jewellery and taking the coins, Burke handed them to Clarence. ‘You look after them. You’re distrusted less than anyone else.’
