Killing Ground (17 page)

Reaching the steps he had to be patient for a while longer as a ghostly file of sludge-coated pioneers trooped down. The door at the top was open but when he stepped through it the atmosphere was no better. Not until he had climbed the well- worn path through the rubble to the top of the ruins was he able to gulp a reviving breath quite free from taint.

‘Welcome back to the land of the living, Sarge.’ Garrett had jumped at the NCO’s sudden appearance, and pushed his half-eaten chocolate bar into a crack between two blocks. Inwardly he cringed as he heard it slide smoothly far beyond hope of retrieval. It was his last.

‘What’s been happening?’ Hyde experienced an unidentifiable type of shock. His first words had been barked; now he added, almost in a whisper, ‘What the fuck is happening?’

The quiet was unnerving, so totally unexpected. As he’d climbed up he’d been speculating with himself on what he’d find, but this he hadn’t even considered. It had never entered his thoughts.

Without the distant glow of artillery fire to offer reference points, the stump of the castle seemed to be an ugly pale grey island in a matt-black sea that stretched to eternity. Save for the gentle patter of rain, and that further muted by the universal coating of soft mud, there was no sound at all.

‘How long has it been like this?’ As though in a church or library, Hyde felt he had to keep his voice lowered.

‘Since about ten minutes after you were brought in.’ Fishing for the lost candy, Garrett gave up when his watch followed it. ‘Could be the war’s over, couldn’t it?’

‘Wishful thinking.’

As though reluctant to prove the sergeant’s pessimism correct, there came a hesitant low rumble of sporadic rocket artillery in action. The missile flame-tails made brief shooting stars of white light as they zipped skyward. It petered out apologetically, the last round to be launched departed like an afterthought, barely visible, hardly audible.

Making a round of the defences, Hyde came across Revell in a strongly roofed TOW position overlooking the road. The burning armour was almost extinguished, only occasionally giving off brief showers of silver sparks or a white smoke-ring from an open hatch. ‘Are they up to anything?’ He slid into the small irregular-shaped pit between the officer and Dooley.

‘Take a look for yourself. There’s movement, but not enough to present a target worth our giving away our positions for.’

Hyde could make out individual and small groups of Russians flitting between the trees. They represented too fleeting an opportunity for the missile weapon they possessed. If they’d been able to call down artillery fire ... ‘I suppose they’re still jamming?’

‘Yes, but they’re being rather more selective now.’ Revell stared out into the night. ‘I would imagine that our lot have managed to smear one or more of their big transmitters by this time. Those remaining are having to be a bit picky about what channels they choose to fuck up.’

Dooley unclipped a handset from a radio and passed it to the sergeant. ‘Here, have a listen.’

The frequency-hopping agility of the set was still being defeated by the colossal output of the enemy’s electronic countermeasures, but just as Hyde was about to hand it back he heard the radio find a clear channel. Before he could mention it, the jamming resumed across the wavelength. In that brief moment he’d heard a score of voices break in, and then be swept away.

‘If the interference stopped this minute,’—Revell clipped the handset back in place—’the backlog of radio traffic must be enormous. We aren’t the only ones cut off. Everyone is going to be screaming for priority. It’ll be like the Tower of Babel brought up to date by high technology.’

‘What happened to the barrage?’ After days of being drenched with the sight, sound and smell of shellfire, Hyde was having difficulty adapting to a world without it.

‘I don’t know.’ It was a question that had been burrowing in Revell’s brain, but he had as yet come up with no answer. ‘Perhaps the Reds’ jamming really is working against them as well. You know what they’re like for setting a timetable for an advance. If the barrage was prearranged and they got too far behind, they’d lose much of its advantage. And if they were steamrolling forward too fast, then it’d be landing on their own heads. In either case, without reliable communication they’d have problems. might have been simpler to stop it for a while until they got themselves sorted.’

‘Or maybe they’ve cleared our guys out all the way to the river and are digging in on this bank and don’t need it anymore.’ Spitting loudly, Dooley panned the launcher across the countryside below. ‘Not that I find that any sort of comfort, because if that’s the case then we’re a few kilometres and a wide, river away from home. Not to mention the mass of Warpac troops we’d trip over on the way.’

He jerked the mount back to examine an area more closely, but failed to identify a target. ‘It’s just an idea, Major, but if I let them have one of these down their throats,’-Dooley patted the fat barrel of the tube containing the missile—’it’s just going to make them dig in. Chances are anyway that I’ll more likely get one of them by having him run into the trailing wires afterward than by tearing him apart with a direct hit.’

‘Make your point.’

‘Well, I was thinking, one Red in exchange for a few thousand dollars’ worth of equipment seems pretty poor value. I guess that Clarence could achieve the same at a fraction of the cost.’

Revell could have kicked himself. Would have done if there’d been sufficient room. It made it worse that it was Dooley, of all people, who had brought the obvious to his notice. ‘Get him over here.’

‘... six so far.’ Ripper kept working on the machine-gun belts, adding tracer to some, substituting armour -piercing incendiary rounds in others. ‘One he hit right through a couple of bandoleers he was wearing. Turned him into a miniature Fourth of July.’

Frustrated at not being allowed up top to join the action, Ripper could at least enjoy the involvement of passing on stories he heard from the non-stop procession of ammunition haulers.

‘Shit, what must that take his score to?’ He began to strip tracer from a long belt of fifty-calibre bullets, replacing them with ball. ‘It’s a good thing he don’t carve notches in his stock; he’d be on his tenth by this time.’

‘More like his twenty-fifth.’ Burke had been only half listening. Sent out of the dispensary by the medic, he hung around in the corridor. ‘I lost count when his score passed three hundred, just after he turned down that medal.’

‘Is that for real?’ The reverberations of Ripper’s shrill whistle brought trickles of fine powder from between crumbling brickwork. ‘Pity we can’t infiltrate him into the Kremlin. War would be over in a day or two.’ He blew dust from a round and slid it home. ‘What the hell keeps him going?’

‘Hatred, pure and simple.’ Hearing footsteps, Burke hoped Sampson was about to leave the nearby room, but was disappointed.

‘That is a lot of hatred. Is that anything to do with the way he can’t bear anybody touching him? I’ve seen him scraping himself with a dry cloth fit to draw blood after someone brushed against him.’

‘Possibly.’ Burke had his hopes dashed again by the sound of more movement that came to nothing. ‘He puts up with Andrea though, but she’s the only one I know of. He’s been a one-man army since a commie bomber came down on his married quarters in Cologne, right back at the start of things. It killed his wife and kids. After that he was a machine, good one though.’

‘Three hundred plus!’ About to whistle again, Ripper remembered the consequences last time and thought better of it. ‘Hang on, though; I thought they were trying to weed out all the guys who’d got to like the killing, rotating them out of the line.’

‘He doesn’t enjoy it.’ Giving up waiting, Burke determined to return later when perhaps Sampson wouldn’t be so vigilant. ‘I’ve seen him retch after putting a commie down with a clean headshot.’

‘Then how does he keep going?’ Finishing the last belt, Ripper flexed his blood- stained fingers and lounged back against the wall.

‘That’s a piece of information he’s never volunteered, but I can make a guess.’ Not wanting to go, Burke knew he’d soon be missed and Hyde would be hunting for him. ‘I think he’s set a price, in Russian lives, on his revenge. God only knows what it is, or if he’ll ever achieve it.’

‘Then what - he goes on killing? Like it’s become a habit?’

Reluctantly Burke began to move toward the stairs. ‘Could be, or perhaps when he decides he’s finally done hell stand up and make a target of himself, or put the barrel of that beautiful rifle in his mouth.’

The sniper waited, patient, unmoving; the rifle sights were aligned on a space between two trees where he knew the Russian would reappear. It was three minutes now, but still he maintained his unwavering pose. He ignored the dirt in which he lay, the cold, the rain trickling down the back of his neck.

At six hundred meters the gusting wind made the shot, with its short engagement time, a difficult one. If he missed, it could mean a long wait before another target presented itself.

Long experience of observing battlefield behavioural patterns had developed in Private Clarence almost a sixth sense, and for no obvious reason his trigger finger gently took up a fraction more of the precisely set one-kilo pull-weight.

He anticipated the recoil and the flash-hider saved his night vision. Panning downward he saw an indistinct hummock of camouflage material lying between the trees. It moved, sluggishly, and Clarence unconsciously made a mental calculation to make a further slight allowance for the wind.

Setting up again, this time the wait was much shorter. A figure appeared over the fallen man and the sniper saw a white face turned toward him as he lightly squeezed the trigger.

The bullet must have met minimal resistance, perhaps entering an eye, or the open mouth. In any event it was a killing headshot. But the target, his victim, didn’t fall.

Standing, and still appearing to stare up at the distant sniper, the soldier’s body wavered slightly from side to side as if held upright by a supernatural force.

Knowing that so strange a scene was certain to attract other targets, the sniper’s experience told him to wait, but he had three rounds remaining in the magazine and he emptied all of them into the standing corpse.

He didn’t watch the result, sliding back into concealment to reload. His hand was shaking as he slipped the carefully selected rounds into the magazine.

Nineteen targets to go, only that many more and he’d be free. It was a minute after midnight. This could be his last day. Even as the thought formed, his hands stopped shaking and a feeling of relief and calm flooded through him. It was nearly over.

EIGHTEEN

The first of the explosions came a little after two in the morning. They continued at erratic intervals until an hour before dawn. Sometimes they came singly, at other times in ripples. A few were from close at hand, most from various distances away in the circle of high ground about the valley. Often there were other sounds as well, the wail of pressure-driven flame, the stutter of automatic fire, and most frequently of all came the screams.

As Revell toured their positions atop the broken walls, he thought that he knew how the ancient Crusaders would have felt, waiting for first light and the onslaught of the Saracens. The weapons were more modern, could strike farther and harder, but you were just as dead from a hit by a crossbow bolt as from the lashing shrapnel of a Russian 155mm airburst.

The wind had abated and finally died away completely, and the rain had eased until it was no more than a feeling of saturating dampness in the air. Together the changes signalled the chance of a better day, but they threatened a danger as well.

By imperceptible degrees, fingers of mist began to creep between the hills and ridges. Thickening rapidly, they merged to form a fog that filled every dip and hollow and began to climb the confining slopes.

‘I don’t feel nature is on our side.’ For the tenth time in as many minutes, Dooley wiped condensation from the lens of the TOW sighting unit.

Scully passed him a mug of coffee and sat down to drink his own. ‘Be bloody fair. If you were Mother Nature and you’d been mucked about like she has in the Zone, would you be on anybody’s side?’

‘That’s not the point.’ Using his finger to draw the skin from the top of his drink, Dooley tried to flick it away, failed, and wiped it down his front. ‘We’re the fucking goodies. We didn’t go marching into commie territory; they came crashing in here yelling provocation. I’d love to know how that poor old granny they hung in Munzenberg had ever provoked them. They only had to kick her Zimmer away to do it.’

A sharp explosion, slightly muted by distance and the shroud of fog, was followed by a secondary detonation, and then another.

‘How many tries is that they’ve had at getting through the minefields?’ Scully listened intently. Faint shouts could be heard, shrill and panicky.

‘Lost count.’ Dooley wrung out his cloth and wiped the launch barrel once more. ‘What I can’t understand is why they haven’t had a crack at us yet.’

‘They don’t realize we’re here yet, not in numbers.’ Hyde crawled in beside them and tilted the can to examine the dregs of coffee. ‘Far as the commies are concerned there’s one sniper operating from here and that’s it.’ He waited to be offered the residue and when he wasn’t, took it anyway. That it was cold he didn’t care; it sluiced the taste of ground stone from his throat.

‘That’s better. I can swallow now without sandpapering my tonsils. One bit of good news. The major’s torn up standing orders and put Boris back on the radio. Garrett’s a bloody clown, worse than useless.’

‘No luck yet though, I take it.’ Scully dropped the mugs into the can, and cringed at the noise they made. ‘Sorry, Sarge.’ He hastened to change the subject. ‘So we’ve not got through then, yet.’

‘Picked up a few snippets from a Russian field commander in the area. Reception is terrible, but according to Boris the commies are having a rough time in those minefields. They were expecting to virtually walk in unopposed through the main entrance; seems we rather screwed that up for them.’