Blind Fire (2 page)

‘I’ll try, Major, but I’m getting the same answer every time. Everything with wings or rotors apart from this old rust bucket is committed to the big battle south of the city - there’s nothing to spare.’

‘Then tell them if we can’t call on air, and we’re not able to hold those Ruskies on our own, there’s going to be T84s competing for road space with the trams on Kaiser Strasse damned soon.’

As he followed Cohen back to his improvised communication board midway down the cabin, and waited for the corporal to squeeze his small frame into the even smaller space so he could get past, Revell watched Dooley.

The big man was trying to fold a couple of sheets of glossy paper quietly. There were two gaps in the wall covering near him. Revell felt his eyes being irresistibly drawn to the succession of big breasts and glistening vaginas. There certainly were a lot of whores in the world. It was crazy, some of them had really beautiful faces. He could never understand why a woman whose looks would enable her to get anything she wanted in life should squat, open her legs and play with herself in front of a camera and, effectively, a couple of million masturbating males.

There were still lots of pretty girls in Frankfurt too. For the last twelve months the city had carried on virtually as normal, with the fringes of the Zone barely forty kilometres away. Now it was even closer and still an air of normality reigned. But in the last two or three weeks there had been a subtle change in the general mood. Somehow, it was as if the population was enjoying one last fling, attempting to ignore the underlying feeling of growing tension. The euphoric veneer was brittle, it would take little to crack it and release panic.

They were over the Zone now, and before going forward, the major looked out. There was little to betray the fact to the untrained eye. The small villages strung out along the winding roads and clustered about intersections^ appeared perfectly normal, as did the scattered farmsteads. The first detail that jarred was the total absence of traffic; there should have been some even on these rural roads. Careful inspection revealed other, more ugly evidence.

It was early September, yet large areas of woodland were already stripped of autumn colour and any vestige of leaf canopy. And broad swathes of land that marched across the rolling hills had a uniformly sickly yellow appearance. Less obvious were the seemingly random clusters of circles of churned bare soil. From an altitude, they looked to be the work of a demented ploughman. Revell knew better, they were the massive craters made by long-range artillery rockets. Early on in the war, this area of the Hesse had been one of the principal assembly points for the NATO counterattack that had pushed the Russian forces back beyond Fulda, almost to the East German border.

The ferocity of the Soviet chemical and conventional barrage had crippled the planned West German and American follow-up attacks. Though the Russians had been content to let the NATO troops hold the territory, its contamination had made it a hollow victory, setting the pattern for battles that were to follow, and the formation of the Zone.

When the battles spilled beyond the Zone, then it grew accordingly, spreading out to engulf the newly-ravaged ground. The loss of Frankfurt, if it followed so soon after Wurzburg and Nurnberg, would be a crippling blow to morale and strengthen the re-emerging lobby in the West that believed the time had come to attempt a negotiated peace.

The rest of the squad were sitting behind the pilot’s position. Kurt was pencilling additional obscenities on the black and white illustration of a mud-spattered magazine featuring women and animals. While the grossness of his drawings was almost beyond belief, Revell had to admit the Grepo did have a degree of warped talent.

As usual, Clarence and Andrea were sitting side by side, close but not quite touching. They were working together, using triangular needle files to cut tiny nicks into the sides of 5.56mm rifle rounds. The work was being done with expert precision and loving care, each converted dumdum bullet being carefully checked before being slotted into a magazine.

‘Make sure we don’t take any of those back with us.’ Revell counted the number of filled mags, and worked out the total of modified rounds. A sufficient number had already been finished to keep the whole squad firing on automatic for thirty seconds or more. ‘There’s news hawks around who’d love to get something like that for the antiwar press back home. That’s one load of ammunition the General Staff wouldn’t like them to have.’

‘Only the Russians will know of them.’ Andrea turned her dark brown eyes to the officer. ‘I do not think those we hit will be in a position to make a complaint.’

That was a face Revell could have looked at all day. He’d moved heaven and earth to retain her in the squad, despite the violent opposition from I-Corps, and even though keeping her had also meant keeping Kurt. Hell, he still didn’t really understand why he’d done it.

It wasn’t as though there was anything between them. Clarence was the only one she associated with, and even their relationship seemed to be strangely a-sexual, the only visible link between them being hatred of the Russians.

But then everyone who fought the communists soon learned to loathe them; for their atrocities, their sheer barbarity. In Clarence and Andrea though, the depth of feeling went far beyond that. For them the killing of Russians was their whole life, the very essence of their existence. Clarence’s score was close to two hundred. Andrea didn’t keep a tally, the most important thing to her was how soon the next chance would come.

‘Smoke up ahead.’ The pilot leant out into the aisle and called back. So Andrea’s next chance would come soon. Revell stepped into the cockpit. Peering through the wiper-swept glass, he looked towards the several thin pillars of black smoke that rose to the cloud base and spread beneath it.

‘Better take us down as low as you can. We’ll hedge-hop from now on.’

‘Already doing it.’ The pilot indicated the altimeter, steadily dropping past the thousand feet mark. ‘There’s no armour on this bus, not even the blades.’ He jerked his thumb towards the Lycoming engine above their heads. ‘One cannon shell through them and we’re gonna be aboard an olive drab carousel, going nowhere but down. You ain’t expecting me to dump you right on top of the commie column are you? Cause I ain’t too keen on that.’

Now they were right over the source of the smoke. Below, Revell could make out the burning tanks and trucks. A bubble of flame rose from a ditched command vehicle as its fuel ignited, mushrooming in the air behind them, before the wash from the helicopter’s passage scattered and dispersed it.

‘Looks like those poor shits took a hammering.’ The co-pilot unwrapped a piece of gum and popped it into an already full mouth.

‘Yeah, the babies we’re looking for sure passed this way.’ At fifty feet the pilot levelled out, and the countryside flashed past beneath the chopper. ‘You ain’t answered me yet, Major. I said how close? It ain’t that I’m pressing, it’s just that I’ve got kinda attached to this body of mine. I’d like to keep it in one piece for a mite longer, like ‘til I kick off through old age.’

‘Just keep us as low as you can. Give it another ten minutes at this speed and then let’s take it real easy. So long as we don’t overshoot, we should stay out of trouble. They’ll be concentrating their radar watch forward.’

A glance was enough to tell Revell that Sergeant Hyde had everything under control in the back. The British NCO had woken Burke by the simple expedient of whipping away a vital component of his nest, causing the remainder to collapse and deposit him on the floor.

The others were already gathering their equipment together. With every move that Dooley made, small squares of folded paper fluttered out of the bottom of his jacket, until he fastened it tighter. His plunder of the decorations had been extensive.

Twelve times in fifteen kilometres they flew over wrecked NATO supply trucks, and once glimpsed the blazing guard shack of a small roadside dump.

‘We were pretty fast off the mark.’ With unconscious skill the pilot skimmed the unwieldy helicopter over the telephone wires and occasional power lines. ‘But those Reds must be going like bats out of hell to have got this far. They ain’t being held up by anything, just smearing anybody who gets in their way.’

They whirred over a lone Mack tank transporter. It looked as if it had been bulldozed off the road. A fire was growing in the cab and the bodies of its crew lay beside it.

‘That fire hasn’t got a hold yet. We’re right on their tail.’ Straining to catch a glimpse of the enemy column, Revell spotted it as the Chinook banked round the side of a wooded hill. ‘Down, put us down.’ At the shout, the pilot brought the helicopter to a virtual standstill, then let it drop fast until it hovered only a few feet off the road. ‘So what now, and remember, this ain’t no gunship.’

‘There are no important intersections for about fifteen kilometres.’ Revell studied the map. ‘Then the road forks and they could go either way. Get us ahead of the column, well wait for them there, and in the meantime we can drop a few presents.’

A loud groan from Cohen was smothered by the howl of the engines, as the chopper soared vertically into the cloud before whirling on to a fresh heading, then, nose down, began to pick up speed. ‘So can we go back for my stomach later?’

‘Never mind your gut, get on that radio. I want that ECM platform now. The rest of you, we’ve got work to do.’ Scanning the various loads that had been hurriedly thrown aboard before their rushed departure, it was with relief that Revell saw the crate he wanted was the one nearest the rear door. ‘Get it ready for a drop.’

A blast of cold damp air struck at them as Hyde lowered the ramp. ‘Are we letting the whole lot go at once, or a handful at a time?’

‘We’ll make four drops at irregular intervals. That’ll stop them anticipating and keep them nervous. Put down a hundred at a time, on my signal.’ The view the major had out of the open rear of the chopper was unreal. The whole world was a uniform grey, devoid of any feature that would serve as a reference point. That insubstantial wall of cloud could be a hundred yards away, or just at the end of the ramp.

Dooley used a swing of his boot to free the final reluctant catch, and the side of the case fell away to reveal the loaded racks within. ‘All ready, Major.’

‘Right, make sure they go down on the road...’ Revell saw the puzzled expression on Dooley’s face. ‘Well there wouldn’t be any damned point in hiding the things in the fields if the Reds are barrelling straight down the road, would there? I want them nice and conspicuous.’

‘Funny thing war, isn’t it, Sarge?’ Dooley watched the officer making his way to the cockpit. ‘Some dumb shits back home must have spent years developing these, figuring out how to make them camouflage themselves when they’re dropped. Just when they’ve got it right, we come along and start scattering the bloody things out in the open.’

‘He’s not getting fucking philosophical again is he, Sarge?’ Burke yawned. ‘The last thing I want after a rude awakening from you is a load of bleeding waffle from him.’

‘Just get ready to drop two racks when I tell you.’ They were descending again, Hyde could tell that, as he waited for the signal, by the feeling in his stomach and the colour of Corporal Cohen’s face. It went from flushed pink to white to green in as many seconds, then disappeared as the radio-man ducked down, stuck his head in a paper bag and made repulsive noises while his shoulders heaved.

Suddenly they were out of the cloud and only a hundred feet above the road. Rain swept in gusts at them, stinging their eyes. The chopper levelled out and its speed fell rapidly, so that the road was no longer a blurred black ribbon. Details could be made out. The patches of old repairs, sprouting clumps of weeds, individual puddles and longer flooded stretches where neglected ditches and field drains had overflowed.

‘Now.’
Hyde’s hand slapped down on Dooley’s shoulder as he saw Revell wave
from the cockpit.

In swift succession Dooley tripped two releases, and a pattern of bowling ball sized objects arced over the ramp and down towards the road. Some of the spheroids landed on the verges but most, prevented from bouncing and brought immediately to rest by their special ribs and fins, settled on the road.

As the Chinook disappeared into the distance the antitank mines sat quietly ticking, mindlessly counting the seconds to the moment when they would arm themselves. It came, and a brief tinny buzzing signalled the activation of fuses and booby trap devices.

From that moment, until they self-destructed twelve hours later, nothing was going to get past that stretch of road while they sat there.

TWO

‘For the last twenty bloody minutes the Sarge has had me rushing about like a ruddy blue-arsed fly, lugging these fucking heavy missiles around until the sweat’s pouring off me. Now he wants me to sit down in the wet grass.’ After aiming a savage kick at the droplet-laden seed heads, Burke squatted down beside the mortar and began unpacking rounds.

‘I wouldn’t worry too much if I were you.’ Dooley took off his helmet and wiped the rain from his face with a scrap of filthy rag. ‘Chances are you’re not gonna live long enough to catch a cold.’

‘Piss off. How do you want these fused?’

Dooley considered the question. ‘Well there’s not much fucking chance of knocking out armour with 60mm HE, so let’s go for air-bursts. Might knock some bits off the flak-wagons and…’ he grinned, ‘...besides, they look pretty.’

‘You all ready here?’ Major Revell stood behind the two men and looked down on the gentle slope of the meadow to the stretch of road a thousand yards away.

‘Checked and double checked, Major. Any Ruskie who sticks his head out of a hatch for a look-see after the action starts is going to get his ears pierced the hard way.’ As the officer departed, Dooley sighted again through the RCA laser rangefinder.

From the far side of a belt of defoliated woodland came the dull boom of a powerful explosion, followed by the crackling ripple of multiple mine detonations.

‘Not long now.’ Burke rested his hand on the mortar’s barrel cover. ‘Christ, I’m cold now. This bloody rain is going right through me.’