Civilian Slaughter

by James Rouch

  Cover illustration:

  The Chieftain mounts a long barreled 120mm cannon as well as 2 7.62mm machine guns, one coaxial and one anti-aircraft. The Chieftain solved the problem of ranging the main gun by using a ranging machine gun with similar ballistic characteristics as the cannon. When the machine gun rounds hit the target, the gunner could be reasonably assured that his cannon round will hit.

  The Chieftain succeeded the Centurion and was in turn replaced by the Challenger. Early Chieftains and some later modified tanks mount the 50. Cal M2HB machinegun over the main gun as a ranging gun. The HESH round is used for antitank chemical-energy (CE) antiarmor missions, and for HE effects against personnel and materiel. A variety of fire control systems and thermal sights are available for Chieftain. At 324 Chieftains have been upgraded with the Barr and Stroud TOGS thermal sight system. The 1R26 thermal camera can be used with the 1R18 thermal night sight. It has wide (13.6°) and narrow (4.75°) fields of view, and is compatible with TOGS format. GEC Sensors offers a long list of sights including: Multisensors Platform, Tank Thermal Sensor, and SS100/110 thermal night sight. Marconi, Nanoquest, and Pilkington offer day and night sights for the Chieftain. Charm Armament upgrade program, with the 120-mm L30 gun incorporated in Challenger 1, is available for Chieftain.

  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

  CIVILIAN SLAUGHTER

  James Rouch

  THE ZONE 8

  For Celia

  Copyright © 1989 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

  A war crime is a breach of the laws or customs of war. —Dictionary definition.

  The only crime in war is getting yourself killed. — Sergeant-Major Patrick Wilson.

  It is only a war crime if it is discovered. —Colonel Boris Tarkovski.

  When we do it, it's an operational necessity. When they do it, it's a war crime. — Peter Manteuffel. Journalist.

  All war is crime. — Pacifist leaflet.

  ONE

  “But Comrade Commissar, my orders ...”

  “Screw your orders.” Colonel Tarkovski reached out and gripped the corner of a filing cabinet to steady himself. Vodka slopped from the tumbler in his free hand, running down his wrist to soak the cuff of his soiled jacket. “Your tanks stay here until I've finished with them. Understand?”

  “Yes, Comrade Commissar.”

  The young tank major of the Soviet 3rd Shock Army offered no further dissent. It would have been pointless and dangerous to argue with a senior officer, especially one as drunk as the colonel, but literally suicidal with one who also wore the insignia of a KGB political officer.

  “Then clear out and have those clanking wrecks of yours do that little job for me. When my battalion pulls back I don't want so much as a scrap of used toilet paper to be found by the NATO troops.”

  “They will find nothing of value, Colonel.”

  “I don't care if they get their hands on the treasures of the Kremlin.” Tarkovski swilled the contents of the glass around, watching the last struggles of a large fly in the clear alcohol. He drained it, without bothering to remove the insect. “What I don't want them to find is evidence of a little going away party held by me and my men. Now get on with it.”

  Ignoring the tank major's salute, Tarkovski replenished his glass. He did so from a near empty bottle that stood on a long table crudely improvised from oil drums and rough planks. Setting the bottle down again, he had difficulty finding a space for it among the clutter of chains, wire, and tangles of stained rope. The unplaned timber was further littered with sticky heaps of pliers, metal shears, and knives.

  The heavy chemical-screen curtain at the entrance to the dug-out had hardly ceased flapping from the major's abrupt exit when a junior sergeant entered.

  “What do you want?” Almost losing his balance, Tarkovski lurched a half step sideways and collided heavily with the cabinet. Its top drawer slid open. He slammed it hard shut but it opened again.

  “All the other bunkers have been cleared, Colonel. Shall we remove this equipment now?”

  Absently Tarkovski rippled his stubby, dirt-ingrained fingers along the tops of the exposed close-packed index cards. “Yes, you may as well. Have it put in the back of my field car.”

  The sergeant waved two men into the room and they began to gather up the tools. One of them reached beneath the table and lifted onto it a large truck battery. From its terminal posts trailed long leads that ended in rusted crocodile clips. It was heavy, and he almost dropped it.

  “Watch what you're doing, shithead.” Dribbling saliva as he snarled, Tarkovski glared at the soldier. “You, I can replace in minutes. Good batteries take forever.” “Shall I have the bodies removed, Colonel?”

  “Hmm?” Making the effort to switch his bleary focus to the corner the sergeant indicated, Tarkovski took a moment to collect his thoughts. “Oh, them. I'd forgotten them.”

  The naked body of a middle-aged man was sprawled in contorted fashion on the tamped dirt floor. Masses of burns, deep cuts, gouges, and contusions showed on his pallid and slightly blue-tinted flesh. His wrists were almost severed by the fine wire tightly binding them, and his eyes were gone. Wedging open his toothless mouth was a piece of splintered timber and filling the cavity between the bloody gums was a ragged wad of torn tissue and matted hair.

  Beside that corpse hung that of a woman. The razor wire by which she was suspended from a hook in the wall had bitten deep into the skin beneath her arms and across the tops of her big breasts. The tips of her toes just brushed the floor.

  She had been a disappointment to the colonel, a great disappointment. He'd had his eye on her for weeks, had been saving her. Then, when she'd witnessed a little bit of routine work before her own turn, she'd thrown up, and choked. He'd tried to save her, shoving his fingers down her throat to clear the obstruction, but it had done no good. She had drowned in her own vomit. Her bladder had emptied all over him as she'd died, but that thrill was small compensation for the loss of what he'd actually been looking forward to.

  Even in death she'd still managed to spoil things. First washing her down with vodka and crumpled pages from Pravda, he'd tried cutting her, but she'd hardly bled. When he did things to them he liked to slide about on their blood but even that had been denied him. He'd had to finish himself off by hand, be content with doing it over her.

  “Shall we remove them, Comrade Colonel?” Putting off a reply with a negligent wave of his hand, Tarkovski squinted into the open drawer. Riffling through the dog-eared cards he finally extracted two. Slowly and deliberately he tore them into tiny pieces and let the scraps run through his fingers.

  “No. No need to bother with them. They do not exist any more.”

  TWO

  The tree line was a wild tangle of broken branches, interspersed with splintere
d stumps and the battered empty cases of cluster bomb dispensers.

  Sergeant Hyde's squad had dug themselves in along the fringes of the war- ravaged woodland. Several times he had walked out into the open to check their concealment. At last he'd been satisfied with their camouflage and they'd settled down to wait.

  There was no movement, no conversation. Each man was encased in the private stifling world of his respirator and NBC suit. Laid mostly in individual shallow holes, they were so still that even from close up mere was little to reveal that they were not just another small group of, forgotten bodies, left over from some minor action.

  A rare slight movement as a cramped muscle was carefully flexed, or as a fractional adjustment of position was made, to further improve a field of fire, was all that there was to betray that they were not corpses.

  Before them the ground sloped gently down toward a long straight stretch of Autobahn three hundred feet away. The road surface was sprinkled liberally with the craters of direct hits by bomb, rocket, and shell, and smothered in soil and lumps of clay thrown from near misses in the fields alongside. At irregular intervals, sometimes singly, sometimes in small clusters, stood the fire-seared wrecks of trucks and trailers. All rested on their axles, tires burnt away. Most had been reduced to virtually unidentifiable condition. Only the occasional outline of a partially intact cab gave any clue as to their origin.

  On the far side of the broad highway, flat meadow-land had become a sodden morass where drainage ditches had been obliterated by a carpet of explosives.

  Gradually sinking into the cloying mire were the flame-ravaged hulks of a troop of T84 Warpac tanks that had attempted to escape the carnage on the road. Their thick composite armour had offered scant protection from top-attacking terminally guided munitions. Now, minus tracks and every external fitting, even turret and gun in one case, they were gradually disappearing into the mud. They were taking with them the charred remains of the crews.

  But it was not the pounding and the churning of high explosives that had killed every last blade of grass in the fields. After that violent tilling the soil had been drenched with toxic and defoliant chemicals. It was those ugly, indiscriminate weapons that had crudely sterilized the land.

  In the remains of a drainage ditch alongside the Autobahn the still water was coloured not with the green scum of stagnant growth, but with the life-leeching taint of a cocktail of chemical agents.

  “We're in business.” Sergeant Hyde gave Dooley a jab with his elbow. He pointed to where indistinct dark outlines were beginning to emerge from the smoke-filled air a kilometre away.

  Swinging the thermal imaging sight of the Milan rocket launcher to bear, Dooley was able to make out the distinctive bulk of a heavy truck, and then more as others followed it into vision. “All right! I owe you fifty marks.”

  Without taking his eye from the target, Dooley reached out. His gloved hand patted across the two-round reload case to check it was unfastened. No matter how much they wore the all enveloping NBC suits it was never possible to become completely used to them. They made every action clumsy, restricting vision and hearing and communication. Even the cologne doused muffler he kept tucked inside couldn't mask all the other odours from the long hours, sometimes days, they were forced to wear them. He'd have given anything to rub his eyes, scratch his nose, but that meant lifting the respirator, and that was out of the question. The contamination monitor strapped to his wrist was showing a reading almost off the scale. Contact with any twig or stone, or any unfiltered breath could prove quickly lethal.

  The drifting perpetual pall that so reduced visibility in the Zone had been thickened in this sector in the last month by non-stop battles, as the NATO forces had maintained pressure on the retreating Warpac forces rear guards.

  Dust and smoke had combined to the point where now, at midday, it reduced the orb of the July sun to a blurred orange patch. That was the only relieving colour in the otherwise monochrome landscape.

  “How did you know that they'd be moving equipment by this route? They've a dozen to chose from in our patrol area.” Dooley had the cross-hairs aligned dead- centre on the lead tractor unit of the approaching convoy. He had only to make fractional adjustments to track it as it steered a slow cautious path between the craters and the litter of wreckage.

  “The Reds have kept their forward airstrips in use until this morning.” Hyde made a mental note about the fifty mark bet. It was always difficult to collect from Dooley. Most likely he'd end up having to add it to the other three hundred already outstanding. “Airlift capacity is too stretched and precious to let them haul out graders and dozers that way, but a complete airfield repair battalion is too valuable to abandon. So I figured they'd make a run for it close to the cease fire, when our gunships would be back at base. This route is the most direct and being metalled it's not as chewed up as some.”

  Lifting his head from the Milan, Dooley made a quick scan of the rest of the column. While the lead elements would soon be level with their position, the tail end was only just emerging from the fog. He counted ten slab-sided tracked towing vehicles, as many trailers bearing heavy plant and several huge-wheeled power shovels and multi-wheeled cranes. Mentally ticking off the squad's weapons, even adding in the Milan's reloads, he knew they didn't have the fire power to do telling damage to so many large targets. Sergeant Hyde must have been thinking on the same lines, as he sighted down the barrel of his SA80.

  “Pity we can't call down artillery. Any request for it now is going to be referred all the way up.”

  “And all the way down will come a 'get your fingers off the trigger' type order.” Switching the sight to normal vision, Dooley could see the Russian driver of the lead truck labouring at his heavy steering. Beside and behind him sat other drab NBC suited men. They sat motionless, like ugly dummies.

  “You're all too right.” Hyde checked the time again. “We're cutting it fine. I make it thirty minutes. No staff officer is going to stick his neck out at this late stage, not for any target.”

  Not for a moment did it occur to Dooley to ask why they were, that wasn't the way the squad operated. They just got on with the killing. They were very good at it. They'd had a lot of practice.

  For him at this moment it was enough that his back was itching and driving him mad just where he couldn't reach it. He welcomed anything that would take his mind off it.

  The convoy had slowed to an agonizingly slow pace. Hyde could see a distinctive blemish on the lead vehicle's front wheel. He watched it, mesmerized, willing it to rotate faster.

  So close to the deadline for the cease-fire, the Russians obviously thought themselves immune from attack. Another couple of kilometres to go, and then they'd be safely into the Warpac side of the intended demilitarized territory.

  Mentally he urged the Soviet driver to put his foot down. Gradually the rest of the transports had begun to bunch behind him as impatience overcame convoy discipline.

  A line, of prime movers and semi-trailers rested between the clusters of rusting derelicts. Hyde searched among them for any armour or towed weapons, but found none. There were, though, several tarpaulin-shrouded loads that could have been automatic weapons of any calibre. Several of the trucks' cabs had anti-aircraft machine guns mounted above them, but none were manned.

  “They're worried about time as well.” Hyde heard the blare of a klaxon. About halfway along the column, dwarfed by the machinery about it, a command car was trying to overtake. A figure leaning out of the open passenger door was making sweeping urgent gestures.

  The Russian officer must have been looking at his watch, and worrying. His concern, though, would be a different one entirely. A principal clause in the published truce terms was that any military equipment remaining in the cease fire area after zero hour must be immobilized and abandoned. A Warpac commander who allowed that to happen could expect, at best, to be demoted to the ranks of a disciplinary unit on mine clearing.

  The message was obviously understood
. Immediately the Zil eight-wheeler in the lead began to pick up speed. Its powerful twin engines plumed black fumes from its high mounted big-bore exhausts.

  Over the sights of his rifle, Hyde tracked it as it neared the skeletal remains of a radio truck. The Zil's stake-sided load deck was crammed with men, so many that the press appeared to be bowing the wooden rails outward.

  It was doing about thirty when the road erupted beneath its cab, between the first two pairs of wheels. A tongue of flame drove up through the billowing cloud of smoke and debris and engulfed it.

  THREE

  The roar of the mine explosion reached the tree line as the Zil emerged from the smoke. Front end collapsed on broken axles, it ground great sheets of sparks from the road. Flames were already licking from the shattered windshield and engine hatches.

  As it slewed to a halt, the sides restraining its human cargo snapped under the weight of bodies thrown violently against them, and a flailing cascade of men toppled to the road.

  With short precise bursts Hyde swept the load deck clear of the few who had kept their balance. That done, he hosed a whole magazine at the Russians seeking to crawl and drag themselves to safety beneath the canted chassis. The sudden eruption of a fuel tank engulfed those who made it.

  Blocked by the wreck, the remainder of the convoy slammed to a halt and their crews bailed out. Several stumbled, or fell and lay still, as other lines of tracer from the woods targeted them.

  Its arcing flight marked by its vivid tail-flare, the first of the Milan missiles swept over the broken ground and impacted dead centre on a stalled tractor unit. A fountain of white and silver globules of molten metal marked the point of penetration.

  The missile was designed to defeat the thickest armour to be encountered on Warpac main battle tanks, and the sheet metal of the tracked vehicle offered virtually no resistance. A shaft of vaporized metal and explosive bored deep into the engine compartment. Instantly there spouted from the entry point a gout of bright yellow fire and a blazing figure tumbled from the cab, followed by a red bubble of fuel-fed flame.