Killing Ground (21 page)

As suddenly as they had appeared, the gunships departed, racing for the cover of the hills and woods. They trailed smoke and dropped a shower of external fittings and torn panels as they went. Unable in that condition to execute wild evasive manoeuvres, they had to soak up more damage from the tracer that chased after them.

It had been a crazy tactic. Revell couldn’t begin to understand what the Russians had hoped to achieve. They’d been trying to land troops in what had to be a suicide mission. Unless ... unless Burke was correct and the whole episode was a diversion from some other piece of nastiness they were hatching.

A monstrous explosion rocked the whole fabric of the castle. Smoke and dust belched from every entrance to the lower levels in a raging blast that threw him over.

TWENTY ONE

Pushing himself to his feet, he heard screams coming from below—girls’ screams. Grabbing his shotgun and waving Hyde and Voke to stay, Revell raced for the cellars.

Burke was already ahead of him, Colt automatic in one hand, the other clenched tight about a grenade from which the split ring attached to the pin dangled brightly.

On the ground floor several men had been mowed down by the blast, mostly those who had been in direct line with the cellar entrance. Some lay still, heads shattered, but most still moved, hugging themselves against the agony of broken bones. Others stood dazed, stupefied by the powerful concussion. Andrea was among them, nursing her left wrist.

Pushing in front, Revell led down the steps. By a miracle the lights still functioned, but they served little purpose. He strapped on his respirator as some protection against the thick choking dust as he groped his way down.

At the bottom they stopped and listened. From roughly in the direction of the dispensary came the muted sobs of a terrified girl. Sensing rather than seeing what was happening, Revell held out his arm to check Burke’s impulse to go straight toward the sound.

Revell was frightened at the prospect of the terrifying game of blindfold hide- and-seek that lay ahead. It would be as dangerous and deadly a fight as any he’d ever taken part in, as could ever be imagined.

Hugging the wall they stumbled forward, with Revell trying desperately to recall every turn, every doorway, every side passage.

He could see perhaps a matter of inches, six perhaps, not more. The air was hot and carried a strong scent of partially consumed explosive. His foot made contact with an object that rolled away. Still keeping the shotgun trained ahead, he stooped to feel about. His searching fingers found several of the items, grenades.

A few steps farther and another forced investigation brought about the discovery of the remains of the man who had been carrying them. Underfoot the floor was slippery with blood. From a helmet he touched, Revell determined that the bodies they were encountering were members of the Dutch ammunition detail. Groans came from a body he stepped on. Attempting to move it aside, he found it had no arms; both were off at the shoulder.

The clattering fire of a Kalashnikov punished their ears in the confined space, but Revell took no account of that when he replied with a three-round burst. There was no response to the hail of flechettes that filled every inch of the passageway with a quota of needle-sharp steel.

Wafting past, a current of cool air brought an improvement in visibility. Silhouetted against a circle of light haze dead ahead was a dark blur. It was slowly crumpling, and as he went down a second slumped from the shadows across it.

‘Two down; how many more to go?’ Burke felt the grenade warming in his hand, and knelt to roll it in the dust, to make sure it wouldn’t stick to his damp palm.

Resolving itself gradually into the outline of the shattered postern door, the patch of light enabled Revell to orient himself. ‘They must have climbed up and put a charge on it, while we were occupied upstairs.’

Before he could fire, Burke had snapped off a shot and a figure sidling through the opening was thrown back and screamed for a long time as he fell down the cliff face.

From the chunks of flesh and small splinters of wood to which the door and its surround had been reduced, Revell was sure that at the moment the demolition charge exploded the passageway must have resembled hell.

Men caught in the blast had been torn apart, and the loads they carried scattered. It was a miracle that none of the ordnance had gone off at the same time. With every other room packed with ammunition from floor to ceiling, a chain reaction of secondary detonation would have blasted the stump of the castle across the countryside and left nothing but the bare rock.

A small round dark object was tossed in through the doorway. They threw themselves down, but the Russian grenade burst between the bodies and, beyond bringing down more dust into the already heavily laden atmosphere, did no harm.

There was a tugging at Revell’s foot, and he looked down. The Dutchman Old William was sprawled on the floor, his hair matted with blood and his face lined with cuts. Unable to talk, he gestured toward a door.

Burke cautiously pushed it open. It was the wine vault. The air was almost clear. There was a cage of songbirds on the table, but they were the only occupants.

‘The fucker’s skipped.’ Burke took a tighter grip of his pistol.

‘He might not have got far.’ The smell of death and the slimy mess beneath his feet offered the hope to Revell that the deserter, whether he had mistimed an escape or taken advantage of the confusion of the attack, was dead.

‘That bloke is a survivor. I’ll put money on his still being alive.’

A heavy figure blundered into them from behind, and after the start it gave him, the major was glad to see Dooley. Even with his respirator on, his great bulk made him unmistakable.

Revell motioned toward the opening. ‘Dooley, stay here. Anything comes in through there you know what to do. Same goes if we flush someone out and he makes a bolt for it.’

‘What if he come this way instead? You want prisoners?’ Straightening the belt of the M60, Dooley undraped another three from around his neck. He settled himself in the doorway of the wine cellar, after a quick glance inside to reassure himself that his feathered friends were all right.

‘They were trying to kill your birds, weren’t they?’

Nothing more was needed to settle Dooley’s determination. He reached out and began to gather sandbags about himself. Noticing Old William, and after a cursory examination concluding from his shallow but steady breathing that he was still alive, he dragged him in behind the barricade as well.

The temptation to slip into the vault and extract a bottle was strong, almost overwhelming, but there was in his mind a more powerful reason, besides self- preservation, for not stirring from his position.

From within the cellar came a sad whistle of half-hearted song. He thought of the hard work it had been to gather the colourful birds in their aviary, with it almost encircled by burning sheds and garages. They’d been panicking, and he knew he must for certain have missed some that were hiding in nesting boxes. 

‘Miserable shits.’ Dooley talked aloud, but to himself. ‘Not bad enough they don’t believe in God, they’ve got to go around trying to kill all his little creatures as well.’

He was in that frame of mind when a grenade popped in through the opening. It bounced once, almost playfully, then detonated harmlessly among the tattered corpses. Holding his fire he let three of them enter, ducking low to avoid the long bursts they directed down the passageway. Only when they paused to reload did he open up.

Coming from what must have been to them an impenetrable dark, the Russians were caught by surprise. It must have been an agonizing shock when the heavy- calibre bullets smashed into their legs and brought them down hard.

Taking time to count how many belts he had, Dooley decided he could spare one. His victims were writhing and moaning, plucking at their ruined limbs, from which sharp white shards of bone projected.

Casually, standing so he could fire from the hip, he emptied the rest of the belt into the tangle of flesh and weapons.

Dooley listened. All sound and movement had ceased. ‘See, you commie shits. I’m a humanitarian as well as a nature-lover. Maybe I should join Green Peace.’

Patting his pockets, he counted the number of spare magazines he had for his pistol, and checked that he still had his little hoard of jewellery and dental fragments. The simple action brought back memories of how he’d come by each item, the death he’d witnessed, and shared in. ‘Yeah, well, maybe not Green Peace.’

Little of the draft clearing the main passageway was clearing the side corridor that led to the aid post.

Within a few steps Revell found visibility again down to nil. They were forced to inch forward, not daring to lose contact with the wall. There were two other rooms to pass before they reached their objective at the end of the passageway.

Revell tried hard to recall the distances involved, and compare them with their present slow progress. In steps he could roughly calculate it, but how many shuffles were equivalent to one normal pace?

He tried using his thermal imager, but the invading Russians must have employed grenades whose smoke masked the wavebands on which it functioned, and he got virtually no picture at all.

His fingertips found the first doorway, and splintered wood where it had been forced open. It was tempting simply to hurl in a grenade, but some of the girls might have escaped or been herded into there. He had to be more discriminating in his tactics than he would have liked.

Making sure of the type of cartridge he had chambered, he hurled himself across the opening, blasting a shell at the cellar ceiling. There was no answering fire and he ducked inside, closely followed , by Burke. They were hardly in before a hail of bullets ripped past the door.

The room was comparatively free of smoke. Lined with steel ammunition boxes, many of them displayed evidence of having been sprayed with automatic fire.

‘You think they did the same all the way along?’ Burke could picture the scene as a Russian had braced himself in the doorway and swept every corner with blasts of high-velocity rounds.

‘Not if they saw what they’d hit in here. They must have shit themselves^’ Mentally Revell ticked off the shots he had fired. He didn’t need to reload, yet. ‘What’s in the next room?’

‘Karen…that is, they were clearing it to take the overflow of wounded.’ Burke remembered something. ‘The stuff they’d hauled out they dumped in the passageway.’

‘Were they stacking it both sides, or just one, and which?’

Closing his eyes, Burke tried to recall a detail that had been too trivial to note at the time. ‘This side… yes, this side. Against the wall between the next door and the sick bay.’

‘Right. We’ll make a dive for the next cellar. Same tactics as before. You still got that grenade?’
‘If I lose it you’ll know soon enough. The pin’s out.’

As he dashed for their next objective, Revell snapped off three fast shots that were rewarded with a muffled yelp of pain and the sound of a body falling.

Again there was no reply to the single flechette shot the major put into the ceiling, and when more bullets hosed along the passage they were already tumbling inside to a soft landing on rows of sleeping bags.

‘How far now?’ Pulling off his respirator, Revell gulped the tainted air. Before he had an answer to confirm his own estimate, they had to throw themselves to either side of the door as a grenade bounced past.

Fragments from it slashed through the opening, ripping apart the bedding and creating showers of down and lint.

‘By my reckoning, three steps to the stack of boxes, then five, no, six to pass it and then an immediate sharp left will put you facing the door of the dispensary.’

Revell drew a mental picture of what he expected to see when he got there. The trapped Russians would have herded their hostages to the far end of the room, to keep them out of the way and permit unobstructed action. Unless, that is, the troops were Spetsnaz.

There came the sound of a girl crying, and ugly grunted threats in Russian. The words might not have been understood, but their obvious menace was, and the crying ceased in a series of choking sobs.

‘They’re still alive.’ Burke said it to reassure himself, and then the hairs on the back of his neck prickled as there came a long wailing scream of sheer agony. The lunge he made for the door was blocked by the major.

‘Not yet.’ Revell heard Sampson’s distinctive voice raised in protest, more shouting in Russian, the thud of a heavy blow and then a silence that could be almost felt.

‘What the fuck are they doing?’ Again Burke attempted to push past. ‘All I want to do is get in there and sort them out...’

‘Stay calm. Lose your temper and you’ll make mistakes.’ It was taking an effort for Revell to keep himself under control, and was harder still when another scream, of shorter duration this time, came from someone in the last extreme of agony.

From that he knew they had to be facing the elite Russian Spetsnaz troops. Coming in with no knowledge of the underground layout, and-quickly disoriented by the blinding smoke and dust, they must have blundered into this dead end, to be trapped by his and Burke’s fast arrival on the scene.

Like the hate-indoctrinated automatons they were, even at the moment when they should have been scheming to survive, the Spetsnaz had turned on helpless victims, perhaps seeking confidence by falling back on the skills in which they were most practiced.

Another random burst from an AK flashed past the door. Revell knew the Russians were carrying on a reconnaissance by fire, probing to see what the opposition would be like when they broke out. The moment they decided to do that, they would slaughter their hostages, except perhaps for one or two they might utilize as human shields, a standard Spetsnaz tactic.

At present, while they were sorting themselves out, they had most likely only one man on guard. He would probably be crouched low by the door, taking full advantage of any cover. Likely he’d built himself a rough barricade of boxes that were within his reach. He’d present a small enough target in perfect visibility; the chances of putting him down with a first-round disabling shot in these conditions was nil.