by James Rouch
SIXTEEN
Night exploded into sharp stark white light as a star-shell burst high above the clearing. By contrast the surrounding woods were all the darker. Curving lines of green and orange tracer flashed out from among the depths of the trees.
Shouts and screams came from a tent as bullets punched close spaced holes in the canvas at waist height. Another was already alight, and men reeled from it, flapping at blazing clothing.
A mortar shell detonated behind the Hummer, slashing its adjoining lean-to into ribbons and starting a fire among spare fuel cans lashed to the back.
Shocked awake by the concussion, Revell rolled clear as the flames engulfed the tinder dry material. He was scrambling to his feet five meters away when the trans- port's fuel tank erupted in a ball of flame and he was put down again. The body he landed beside still clutched an M16. Revell grabbed it, and loosed off the whole magazine toward the source of the tracer.
There was no noticeable effect. A second magazine achieved no better result. He looked around. The clearing was lit like day. Although the flare had sunk from sight, the fires more than compensated for its disappearance.
Others were returning the fire, but there was no diminution in the bursts of lethal incoming. On the far side of the Russian compound a truck took a direct hit and scything slivers of cab and engine casing brought down more tents. They collapsed, like shrouds, over the dead and dying within.
Several bodies hung on the surrounding wire. The only men moving were the wounded, who did so involuntarily, and those who crawled and hugged the ground in search of cover.
“They're using dark ignition tracer. Shift your fire further in among the timer.” Revell had to shout to be heard, but his information was passed on.
Andrea crashed to the ground beside him, seeking the slight shelter offered by the corpse. She levelled her rifle and used its underslung grenade launcher to launch a succession of 40mm rounds into the woods.
Watching the flat trajectory of the incoming tracer, Revell made a mental projection back to its probable point of origin. With its tell-tale flare not visible until it was fifty meters or more from the weapon firing it, he could only at best make an educated guess.
The first half-dozen rounds he fired from the third magazine bounced harmlessly from an unseen tree. Then he got lucky. There was no sign to give away a point of impact, but suddenly a line of tracer flicked skyward.
Updrafts generated by the several fierce fires were sending a rain of fiery scraps into the trees, starting secondary conflagrations that threatened to merge and spread.
A last mortar bomb exploded among a tangle of bodies close by the wire, and then Revell realized the attack had ceased. It was over. As abruptly as it had started. Gradually at first, and then rapidly, the returning fire petered out and finally ceased.
An eerie, momentary silence ensued. Then against a background of crackling small arms ammunition cooking off, came the all too audible cries and moans of the wounded.
“These poor sods caught the worst of it. Sergeant Hyde walked with the two officers through what was left of the Russian compound.
Only two tents still stood. The growing illumination of dawn revealed the other previous sites marked by blackened circles of ground. Thirty bodies lay in a close spaced row. Most were roughly draped with greatcoats. A couple had only their faces covered. One with a piece of cardboard from a ration box, the other a gouged and dented door panel from a truck.
The fires aboard the vehicles had burned out, but in among the trees men could be heard beating at the still smouldering underbrush.
Vokes examined a large tattered piece of what looked like red and black chiffon caught on the wire. He was glad he had not instinctively reached to touch it, when he realized what it in fact was.
He twanged the wire, and the patch of burnt skin that had sloughed from some victim of the blazing encampment fluttered to the ground.
“It could have been much worse.” Vokes wrinkled his nose as they repassed the line. Fluids from the dead were soaking into the ground about several of them. Large numbers of flies were already being attracted. “I have lost only two men killed. And that because, against my orders, they were sleeping aboard their vehicle.” He looked to where attempts were being made to lever free the remains from metalwork fire had welded them to.
“We lost six.” Revell paused by the wire, close by the bodies of his men. “Would have been less, but they tried to keep the Ruskies from getting out. They must have stood out like range targets, standing with those fires behind them.”
“Have the sentries been found yet?” Vokes slapped at a large blue-bottle that persisted mindlessly in repeatedly buzzing his face.
“No. One of the patrols will find them.” Constantly Revell was interrogating himself. What had he failed to do, and how many lives had each omission cost?
His own men, and Vokes's, had dug slit trenches almost as a matter of habit. But nothing they'd tried could induce the construction battalion to do the same. They had paid dearly for their lethargy. Beside the thirty dead were another fifty injured. A high proportion had serious burns. Many of them would not survive. He saw that Lippincott was beckoning him over to his high-sided Saxon command vehicle.
“There was nothing more you could have done, Major,” was the only support Vokes could offer as he left them. Under his breath, to himself, he added, “but in their eyes it will not have been enough.”
“Hell, you really do seem to find trouble just about everywhere you go, don't you, Major.” Lippincott drummed his teeth with the well-chewed end of a pencil.
“I'd say this time it found us.”
Lippincott ignored the rejoinder. “You have no idea how much trouble these casualties of yours are causing us. It was a good Idling I was already on my way here when I got the call. If I hadn't been on hand to smooth matters, then no powers on earth could have saved your commission. Just at the time the best thing you and your maniacs can do is to lie low, you've got to try and create another damned incident.”
“I won't accept that, Colonel. We can't take the blame for a sneak attack by some Warpac outfit.”
“There you go again.” Pausing to chew hard for a moment. “Whatever you do, Major, when the war is over, if you survive it, don't go into the diplomatic corps.”
“Do you have some other explanation, then?”
“A thousand that will go down better with the generals and politicians than that. Any case, what makes you think that in all the Zone, packed as it is with tanks and dumps and troops, the Reds are going to risk a truce they want by hitting your tin- pot outfit?”
“Likely or not, that's what it must have been...”
“A regular Warpac unit? Never. No, what I reckon we've got here is a hit by an armed refugee mob. After your food, or ammunition. Or maybe it was one of those renegade bands, you know the type. Made up of assorted deserters of every nationality. They'll take on any thing if there's a profit in it.”
“For anyone who wasn't here, that's a plausible explanation. For anyone who wants the truce kept going it's also a damned convenient one.” Revell felt he was crashing his head against a brick wall. He tried to keep the frustration and resentment out of his tone.
“It was bad enough to find cast iron evidence of a war crime and be told to do nothing about it, even be threatened with drastic consequences if I so much as dared to breathe a word about it. And now this. Six of my men dead, two of Lieutenant Vokes's pioneers as well. We've ten wounded, including one who won't see again and another with his bottom jaw shot off. And there's those poor bloody Ruskies. They weren't even armed.”
“You've made your point, but your orders stand. You stay here, you keep your heads down. That way, given time, maybe I can sort of rehabilitate you in the eyes of the general, but for God's sake give me a bit of cooperation.”
On the road the ambulance convoy was getting ready to move out. Doors were being secured. Its heavy escort of military police outriders were jock
eying into position.
“Where are you taking them?” Revell felt he had to change the subject or he'd explode with frustration. Ten years of taking orders had never prepared him for this.
“I said your casualties were causing problems. Take a look at that convoy and believe it. Strings were pulled that I didn't know existed to assemble that inside of four hours. Couldn't evacuate them by chopper in case one went down somewhere and tales got told. Had to be an overland job, where we could keep an eye on everyone.
I've lined them up a whole wing of a high-security isolation hospital, other side of Hanover. Never thought I'd be back bossing a convoy at this rank.” Lippincott started on another pencil.
“Sure as hell I didn't think my butt would be on the line if I screwed up.” While they'd talked, the dead had been body-bagged and now the last of them was slid into the back of a large closed truck.
“I've still two men unaccounted for; we had sentries down the road a half kilometre.” As they walked to convoy, Revell kept an eye on the direction by which his patrols would return.
“Not much chance you'll find them alive.” Lippincott climbed up into the Saxon's open rear doorway. “When they turn up, bury them here. Make a note for graves registration ...”
“I'll radio it in.”
“The fuck you will. As of now you're under strict radio silence. If the Warpac 3rd Shock Army come steaming this way, you run and tell us.”
“If this keeps up, the only one of us to leave here will have patted down the soil on all the others.” Sampson turned away from the two graves.
Grigori had appointed himself overseer of the grave-diggers. He now fussily supervised the filling in of the two excavations.
Revell made no reply to their medic. He felt worn out, pulled down by the utter futility of their situation. The bodies had been found shortly after the ambulances had departed. They had been buried with the minimum of ceremony in a small clearing away from the site of the enemy position, where the trees and ground were undamaged by fire and explosion.
Though it was still an hour to midday the sun was already making them uncomfortable. The dust that had percolated through their clothing mixed with their sweat into a kind of grinding paste that itched mercilessly.
Revell looked forward to a chance to strip and wash later in the day. If the patrols had found no sign of their attackers, other than a lot of empty cartridge cases, at least one of them had found a small lake. Largely free of contamination, it was only a couple of kilometres away. Dooley had been sent out with a couple of the pioneers to find and mark a direct route to it.
If they were to be stuck here for a considerable length of time, Revell saw no reason why they shouldn't at least be as comfortable as possible. It would be some, if a very small, consolation.
Dooley appeared, running at his best speed. He had to gasp and gulp air before he could articulate.
“We've found a wounded civvy. Could be one of the hit men from last night. He's in a bad way.”
“How far?”
“About ten minutes, on foot. No hope of getting a truck there.”
“Right, lead the way.” Revell called to their medic. “Sampson, bring two stretcher bearers. At the double.” A thought occurred to him. Carrington was close by. “Corporal, grab Grigori, follow as fast as you can.”
The route was through virgin forest, a compass course that detoured only around the most impenetrable tangles of undergrowth.
Despite having already run the journey once, Dooley set a fast pace, stumbling through and crushing down any shrubbery that had sprung upright since his last passage.
When they reached him, the wounded man had been hauled to a half-sitting position against the trunk of a tree. Apart from that, the two Dutchmen standing guard had done nothing to help him.
“Where did we get him?” The reclining man's clothes were so saturated in blood that Revell could not determine where he had been wounded. He waited for the corpsman to complete a hurried examination.
“Not us, Major.” Turning the man half to his side, Sampson pulled a long, slim bladed knife from just beneath his right shoulder blade. “Nice crowd he was mixing with.”
Conscious, but white-faced with pain and shock, the man looked up at the officer. His mouth opened and closed soundlessly as he tried to form words. He succeeded only in producing pink bubbles that trickled down the sides of his chin to drip slowly onto his chest.
“Someone really wanted him dead.” Sampson stood up. “I count three stabs wounds in the back, another through the throat. He's dying fast, Major, only a few minutes at most. You want me to give him a shot, help him go easy?”
Beckoning Grigori forward, Revell knelt down beside the dying man. “Tell him he is dying...”
“Hasn't he had enough...”
Revell shut off Sampson's protest and signalled to Grigori to go ahead. Limply, without change of expression the man acknowledged what he was told. “Tell him we want to get the men who hit our camp last night, and that it means we'll get the backstabber who did this to him.”
That took longer, and Revell listened to the largely incomprehensible flow. The dying man appeared to have trouble grasping what was said to him, and the major had their interpreter repeat his words twice more.
After a moment, the effort bringing bubbles of pink blood to his lips, the man began to splutter a reply, each word accompanied by audible bubblings from his chest. It took time, with frequent pauses to gather what little strength and breath he had left. Finally his words were reduced to an incoherent mumble. He sagged lower against the tree, gasping like a fish out of water. What air he did manage to suck into his pain-wracked frame could be heard whistling out through the holes in his lungs.
Grigori appeared indifferent to the man's suffering, looking on him with contempt. “He is a senior lieutenant in the KGB, I did not catch his name, but it is unimportant. His unit is the 717. They are at a farm ten kilometres down the road, right on the edge of the demilitarized Zone.”
“Is that all?” Revell had been only able to understand the odd word or two, and was unsure how much he could trust their interpreter, or if he should at all. “There seemed to be more than that.”
“The ramblings of a dying man.” Grigori shrugged. “There was talk of hashish, and another officer, and of a junior sergeant. That name I did catch, he repeated it many times, Ivanov.”
“Anything else?”
“Only that it is his wish we kill them all.”
“Not much loyalty among Communists, is there.”
“Oh, no, Major,” Grigori took the remark at face value, missing the irony. “Absolutely none.”
SEVENTEEN
“Fucking creeps.” Dooley kicked out at a Russian who had stopped work to scratch his backside, and missed.
“I thought they were working quite well today.” Scully accepted the end of the hawser and passed it to a pioneer who stood on top of the felled tree.
“No, not this lot. I mean those animals back at HQ. The major has told them who did that dirty work over at the camp, and where they are now. And what do they do, fuck all.”
Taking the end of the wire as it was pushed back beneath the timber, Dooley made it fast to form a loop about the thick trunk.
“I suppose they know what they're doing” Scully began shepherding the Russians clear before the slack was taken up. The cable had already parted once and they'd been lucky not to have any serious injuries from the incident.
“Do they? Letting the Reds get away with the murder of a couple of thousand civvies don't seem right to me, no way. They did in Afghanistan, no reason why they should get away with it here.”
From a safe distance they watched the truck edging forward. Gradually the coil of steel straightened out. In his cab, Burke kept a close watch on the door mounted rear view mirror. Guided by hand signals from Lieutenant Vokes, he applied the brakes as soon as the full length of the plaited wire was suspended above the ground. It vibrated, with a low pitched
twanging sound, in time with the slow throb of the idling motor.
Vokes went forward to the cab door, shouting in through the open window. “Take it very slowly. Stay on the line I showed you, across the road, then between those two trees and over the little clearing beyond. The going is soft, but I think it is just the deep layer of leaf mould. Try not to stop, or you may dig-in.”
This was the first of the trees to be tackled by the towing method and a crowd was gathering to watch. For the NATO soldiers it was pure curiosity; the Russian labourers though had a more specific interest. If it worked there would be less heavy work for them to tackle.
There was almost an air of excitement as the truck edged forward, accompanied by the creaking of the hawser, the splintering of wood and the deep bellow of the straining engine.
For a long moment there was no apparent movement, and a half-derisive cheer went up from the assembled audience. It was repeated when the truck began to crab sideways on the dusty surface.
A sharp crack was accompanied by a fountain of bark as the wire slipped a meter along the trunk, cutting cleanly through the stumps of several small branches. The truck's exhaust boomed louder and almost imperceptibly the obstacle began to move. It pivoted slowly around the soil-encrusted mountain of its roots, moving steadily.
Attention switched abruptly back to the truck as its motor suddenly cut out. Sunk to its axles on one side, half way across the clearing, it rested at an angle of forty- five degrees.
Burke jumped down from the elevated cab step. “That's the first bloody crash I've ever had at two miles an hour.”
Vokes circled the stranded vehicle. “No harm done. We'll pull it out. It just means that for the next go we shall have to lay some sort of roadway, then...”
He stopped talking and bent down to examine where a large chunky treaded tire had scooped away the top-soil.
“Give me something to dig with, quickly.” He accepted the bayonet that was offered and began to carefully scrape more of the loosened material away.
