by James Rouch
“Just be ready to run when I say.” Revell clipped the radio back on his belt, and waited. There were no more shots; he hadn’t, expected any yet. There was no point in their sniper wasting ammunition raking the trailer. He would have a clear field of fire soon enough.
A storm of tracers burst with a frenzied clatter from the far side of the avenue and flashed across its broad width. The noise of the many impacts on walls and downspouts blended with the shattering ring of breaking glass.
“Move.”
Ackerman didn’t need the officer’s urging. Scrambling to his feet, he was on Revell’s heels as they jumped from the streetcar, and a pace ahead by the time they reached the sanctuary of the far buildings.
The instant they hurled themselves into concealment, the covering fire abruptly ceased.
“We were waiting a few yards further down. I figured you’d be here soon!” Sergeant Hyde hefted the machine gun onto his shoulder. A half-belt dangled from it. “The buggers are firing straight down the Schutzenstrasse, and the Palace of Justice route is too open. Didn’t think you’d chance that.”
“Is this your first brush with them?” Revell had to jog to keep up with the men of the covering group as they made their way back to the station.
“We had one drop right in on top of us, and we traded a few rounds not long ago with a group trying to use Bayerstrasse. That’s all so far.” Hyde called for a slowing of the pace as they prepared to cross the last road. “I think we winged at least a couple, but their mates dragged them off, back into the centre.”
“Might have been better if they’d got through. Our task is to root out and destroy any of them between here and the river.”
“The whole of the city centre? That’s the best part of a couple of hundred blocks. How are we supposed to do that with only one under strength and a lightly armed company?”
“I know it’s crazy.” They’d regained the station forecourt, and Revell made a swift appraisal of such defences as had been erected. The positions his men had taken were good, but Hyde’s machine gun was the only weapon heavier than a machine pistol or pump gun. “But if our mission is nuts, it’s only a shade more lunatic than the enemy’s tactics. They’ve dumped maybe a couple of companies on the city. I don’t know, what their commanders told them, but effectively they’re on a suicide mission.”
“Maybe they’ll realize that for themselves and give up.”
“I doubt it, Sergeant.” Revell had good reason to doubt such an outcome. He knew a great deal about communist indoctrination methods. They were thorough, and in the majority of cases highly successful. “Whatever line those Warpac paras have been fed, you can be sure they’ll believe it. And they’ll go on believing it until they’re finally cornered and killed.”
“So where do we start?” Resting the machine gun on the ground, Hyde looked out at the seemingly endless roads that radiated away from the railway station. Only one displayed any light, burning vehicles in the far distance. Clearing them was more than a daunting prospect, it was terrifying. Using every last man, they amounted to no more than three-platoon strength. Such a small force would have been stretched to take a defended village, let alone a couple of square kilometres of heavily built-up city.
“We need the weapons in the main police armoury. That has to be our first target. What weapons can we muster?”
Hyde was all too well acquainted with their meagre resources. “The MG with three-and-a-half belts, fifteen machine pistols with three magazines each, and ten pump guns with a hundred cartridges between them.”
“Couldn’t you get anything more out of the transport police?” Revell had been hoping there were more weapons available than those he had seen being carried by the sentries and the section that had provided covering fire.
“This is all they had; they couldn’t give them away fast enough. Mostly they’re old boys with no stomach for a fight. Can’t say I blame them. Bit different tackling Warpac paras instead of soccer hooligans. They’re shitting themselves. Oh, there was a stack of riot guns. Unlimited baton and CS rounds for those, and plenty of masks.”
“Get them, and all the gas grenades the men can carry.” It was little enough Revell knew, but with it they would have to do the job. In the Zone they had often had to raid enemy dumps for ammunition and fuel. He hadn’t expected to be doing something similar during the last hours of his leave.
Hyde shouted orders, then turned back to the Major. “Did you want to see the remains of that para?”
“Yes, while we’re waiting.” Revell followed the NCO to the booking hall. Spread-eagled on the floor, the dead man’s outstretched limbs and the dried rivulets of blood that radiated from him gave an absurdly picturesque sun-ray effect to the gruesome scene.
“Find anything on him?” Revell began going through the jumpsuit’s many pouches and pockets.
“No papers of any sort. He had a satchel full of explosives, mostly booby-trap ingredients. Otherwise his equipment was pretty near standard, apart from the silencer for his pistol and sufficient ammunition to start a war of his own.”
His search complete, and apparently confirming the sergeant’s findings, Revell began to wipe the blood from his fingers, when for some reason his attention was attracted to the man’s helmet.
The strap had been almost severed during his fall, and a hard tug parted it completely. Revell ran his fingers over its greasy interior padding. The hunch paid off, and he pulled out two neatly folded squares of flimsy paper.
Both sides of the sheet were covered with indecipherable Cyrillic scrawl. The smattering of spoken Russian he could understand was of no use to Revell.
“Where’s Boris?”
“I am here, Major. Are we going now, please. I am told that everyone in the city is to be evacuated through the subway. Shouldn’t we start moving?”
“What do these say?” Ignoring the Russian’s hopefully phrased question, Revell thrust the papers at him.
Squinting in the poor light provided by a shaded flashlight, Boris put on his glasses and skimmed the text.
“There is nothing of importance, Major. It is trivia, an unfinished letter to a girl.”
“I’ll make the judgments. What does it say?”
“Of course, Major, right away.” Turning back to the top of the first sheet, Boris reread more slowly. He stopped often to resettle his glasses on his broad Slavic features.
“Actually he writes obscenities about their last time together, and his plans for the next… he hopes the drugs he sent have arrived safely, and that she gets a good price on the black market. As I said, Major, it is all idle chatter, gossip…”
“Just fucking tell the Major what it says.” Hyde shone the torch in the translator’s face.
Boris did as he was told, hurriedly.
“He goes on to say that he will send her photographs they took in a refugee camp… they had used flamethrowers… he thinks she will find some of them funny. Here he says that he has not written for a while, as he was in detention for being drunk. He has been transferred from the naval brigade to an independent company… that is all there is, it ends there.”
“So now we know what we’re up against.” Revell accepted the return of the scraps and crushed them into his pocket. “Only Spetsnaz forces in the Warsaw Pact have naval brigades as well as independent companies.”
“We had to come up against them sometime. The wonder is it hasn’t occurred before this.” Hyde could see that the information had upset Boris, but then any prospect of his falling back into the hands of the army he had deserted had that effect. For himself, he was well aware of the Russian elite forces reputation, but you could be just as dead from a bullet fired by a shit-scared dolt of an infantryman, as by a highly trained commando.
Unclipping his radio from his belt, Revell broadcast his call sign. As he waited for an acknowledgement, he looked again at the corpse on the tiled floor.
An outstretched hand seemed to reach towards the bundle of torn panels and rigg
ing in a corner. It appeared almost a gesture of accusation, aimed at the chute that had failed him.
Briefly, Revell passed to control the information they had obtained. He signed off without waiting to hear their reaction. Not that there could be any doubt as to what it would be. At that very moment, the communication room in the bunker would have gone very quiet, as the news sank in.
Spetsnaz troops had an appalling record of atrocity, even gauged against the horrors that were everyday events in the Zone. This time though it was not helpless prisoners or even wretched refugees, this time they held a whole city in their bloodstained hands.
The police HQ had to be retaken quickly. Every weapon and every round the Special Combat Company could lay hands on was going to be needed in this fight.
TWELVE
The sniper fire from the area of the Karlstor Gate forced on Revell the decision to detour through the Stachus underground shopping, mall. They lost two men in the dash from cover to the nearest of the pedestrian ramps.
It sloped gently. The textured non-slip surface rasped beneath their shuffling feet as they edged down towards the entrance.
Revell kept a grip on the handrail, straining his eyes to make sense of the shapes that loomed ahead. He could hear a growing noise, like a magnified restless murmur.
“What’s the hold-up?”
At the bottom of the ramp, the major caught up with Carrington and the scout section. The corporal was in a heated argument — conducted in hushed undertones — with an armed civilian wearing an auxiliary-police armband.
By the faint illumination of a well-shielded flashlight, Revell saw the German energetically shaking his head. While he did so, he managed to keep a rifle levelled at them, blocking the way through the heavy blackout curtain.
“This old fool says we can’t go in. He says the place isn’t an authorized shelter, and it’s his job to keep everybody out. Shall I knock him down?” Carrington edged closer to the man as he asked.
Sensing rather than seeing her beside him, Revell told Andrea to speak to the sentry. “Tell him we know it’s not a shelter. We don’t want to stay in there, we simply want to cut through to reach the gunmen.”
Though she spoke too fast for Revell to catch all that she said, he knew she was putting the point across more brutally than he had dictated. The German took a nervous step back, but still kept the weapon aimed. He was opening his mouth to speak, when a fist caught him on the side of the face. His head cracked hard against the tiled wall, and he went down without uttering a sound.
Carrington caught the rifle as it fell. He rubbed his knuckles. “Boney little runt. I could have hurt my hand.”
“Keep the rifle. Search him for ammunition.” Revell took hold of the corner of the screening material. “Pass the word for every one to keep their wits about them. This place may be deserted, but it’s like a rabbit warren. I’ve gotten lost when the lights were on.”
Pushing through, Revell led the way into the complex of stores, and into a scene that could have come straight from a horror movie.
By the faintly glowing emergency lighting, he could see that every inch of floor space was occupied. Families and individuals sat or lay or slumped, as space about them dictated.
The air was hot, and stale with cigarette smoke and the reek of lager, vomit, and urine. Close inside the entrance, the floor was slippery with blood, and several imperfectly shrouded bodies lay there.
In a nearby corner two men were propped against a poster-decorated wall. Improvised bandages swathed their bare chests and supported their smashed jaws. Both were moaning and whimpering in pain.
The strangely sibilant sound that Revell had been only partially aware of, now grew in volume as the huddled masses of civilians recognized the newcomers.
From one woman came shrieks of fear as she mistook the NATO battle dress and weapons for Russian. Others hissed her to a sobbing silence.
“What the bloody hell was that old fool on about, not letting anyone in.” Sergeant Hyde surveyed the crowd. “There must be thousands here.”
“But they didn’t get in through his entrance.” It was a peculiar mentality that Revell had encountered before in West Germany. It seemed to be compounded of devotion to the rule book and pigheaded stubbornness.
As they moved forward, they were bombarded with questions and pleas from all sides. Further in, the press about them became worse, and Revell had to call Dooley up to the point, to force a way through.
In the confined space the hubbub grew to a head-aching din that nothing could quiet. The plate glass storefronts and their bright goods reflected such slight illumination as there was, mostly from ornate candles looted from a gift counter. Their flicker gave faces a spectral appearance that deepened the lines of worry and fear they displayed.
From a distant recess came singing and shouting, discordant and guttural. The blare of a portable cassette player carried clearly, but failed to drown the calls and pleas of the mob.
A beer can rolled away from Hyde’s boots, to be instantly trampled flat by the crush. “It’ll only take a fight among a handful of drunks to start a rush for the exits. Where the hell are the police?”
They passed an entrance to a subway. Surrounding it was a scrum of struggling people packed so tightly most could hardly move. Everyone who had seen what a death trap the shallow glass-filled mall would be in an air raid was trying to reach the greater safety of the rapid transit system.
Several caught among the throng looked terrified. Their eyes bulged, all colour had drained from their faces. Hyde was reminded of the appearance of the bodies he’d seen hauled from the tangle of dead at the other subway entrance.
Even as he noted the similarity, he saw a tall blonde woman in the middle of the crowd close her eyes and loll against those about her. As the mass shuffled and surged back and forth, she sank gradually lower until she was lost from sight.
There was nothing he could do. It would have taken the united efforts of the whole company to bring some degree of order to the mad scramble. The odd one or two at the back who did give up were instantly replaced by others prepared to try.
He didn’t like to think what it would be like lower down, in the passageways and on the stalled escalators. On the platforms, furious fights would be taking place as those already safe resisted the efforts of others to replace them.
The flashlight beam moved on to fresh scenes as they skirted the heaving jam of people. With every step they took, hands reached out of the crowd to try to detain them. It was as though their owners hoped to pluck answers to a hundred different questions from their sleeves.
Many of the accompanying voices conveyed anger, others terror. The majority had a sharp hysterical edge. None were satisfied, and they tried the same interrogation of one soldier after another as they filed past.
Twice Revell located exits, to find below them dead and-dying who had already tried — and failed — to leave by those routes. Everywhere the Russian snipers appeared to be waiting.
It was Garrett who discovered a service stairway, when he stepped aside to search the scattered cartons of a kiosk in the hope of finding a candy bar.
A padlocked steel grill barred their path. It did not resist their combined efforts for long. A hinge twisted and tore from the frame with a gunshot like crack. Quelling the local panic it created took several anxious moments.
The staircase spiralled as it climbed steeply. Revell could hear the quiet cursing of the men behind him, as he followed the silently moving scout section.
“So where the hell are we?” First to reach the head of the stairs, Ripper looked out into the narrow service road it connected with. He crouched low, using the cover of a stack of empty crates.
Carrington joined him. The rear of a building further along looked vaguely familiar.
“If that’s the rear of the multi-storey car park that I think it is, then we’re in the same block as the puppet theatre. That’s a bit north of Karlstor Gate. Looks like we’ve had a sl
ice of luck, and come out in the right place.”
“And since when have you been into marionettes, Corporal?” Garrett pushed the machine gun out through the door and sighted it in the direction of the Stachus. “Thought you liked more grownup entertainments than that.”
Ripper dived across the alleyway and into the concealment of wheeled garbage bins on the far side.
“Spent the week with a girl who’s got a couple of kids.” Carrington waited to see if there was any reaction, before waving Ripper to move on cautiously. “So most of the days we spent as a foursome, didn’t we.”
“Sounds fun.” Garrett thought of his own seven days. It had been a week of restless drifting from one tatty hotel to another, hoping to pick up a girl, anybody. He’d wandered the streets in the evenings until he’d got fed up. To dull the boredom he’d look for oblivion in the nearest cheap bar, and usually find it. Shit, any week had to be more fun than that. Even having a couple of brats in tow had to be more fun.
“Have you orientated yourself, Corporal?”
“I know the area, Major. Been dragged this way on a couple of shopping expeditions recently.”
“Right, then get us to St. Michael’s Church. We’ll want to get in the back way, not off the pedestrian precinct. You know it?”
“Opposite the police station? Big fat block of a building. Loads of statues all over the front.”
“That’s it.”
“What if the Reds are inside?”
“I don’t think they will be. They’re spread thin on the ground. If they are holding the police HQ, then I can’t see them also holding the place virtually next to it. They might be in the twin towers of the cathedral on the far side though, so keep us out of the line of sight of those.”
Revell watched the scouts move out. He allowed an interval, and then fed the rest of the company through the doorway after them.
When Sgt. Hyde came up with the rearguard, some civilians were already close behind them and had to be held back.
