That was virtually the first time she had ever spoken to him directly, and then it had to be that. Shit, Burke had been happy with his delusion. Why the hell did that hard-faced bitch have to bring him back to the reality of this nightmare?
ELEVEN
With his hands cold and wet it took Hyde a while to strip the insulation from the ends of wire. He handed them to the Dutchmen fussing about the still sentient bomb and clambered over the wall to the road, unreeling the small cable drum as he went. ‘In theory this should stop those commies dead, for a while anyway.’
‘I had an uncle who was big on theories.’ From his lookout post on the cab roof, Ripper watched the sergeant carefully conceal the first few meters of twin wire along the base of the wall, weighting it with chunks of rock and other litter.
‘You want to hear about him?’
‘We’re going to anyway, aren’t we?’ Burke realized as soon as he’d said it that he’d made a mistake by drawing Hyde’s attention to him.
‘Since you’re not doing anything,’ - Hyde thrust the reel into their driver’s hands -’you can run this up the hill to the crest and connect it to this.’ He placed a small but heavy matt-black box on top of the drum.
‘Me? Run? All the way up there?’
‘Don’t piss about, move. And you can stay up there. I’ll bring the transport.’
Watching the ace goldbricker of the Special Combat Company break into an ungainly trot, Ripper tried hard not to giggle and almost succeeded. He failed completely to hide a laugh when a snag in the wire almost jerked Burke off his feet.
‘You boys can listen if you’re not too busy,’ Ripper called out to the pioneers.
‘Like I was saying,’- he shook his head and a bead curtain of raindrops flew from the brim of his helmet -’this uncle of mine, he used to screw with a crazy dame from the county funny farm. His theory was, if she ever upped and told on him, who was going to believe a crazy lady. And it worked a treat, for a couple of years. That is until the old shrink who ran the place got himself run over and squashed flatter than Scully’s tenderized cat.’
That he didn’t appear to have anybody’s attention didn’t bother Ripper. He ploughed on.
‘The new boy they brought in was fresh out of medical school, full of new ideas and fancy notions. First thing he did was to halve the number of pills being swallowed. The old boy had kept all the crazies doped so he could have a quiet life. So just after that my uncle comes sneaking around, looking for his weekly blow- job. First he knows that everything ain’t all it was is when his crazy lady throws a fit and bites the end of his pecker. I heard tell that his yell carried clear across to the next state.’
‘How did he explain that?’ Despite himself, Hyde had to ask, though he knew he’d regret it.
‘He kinda tied a bandage on it, only needed a little one, and goes staggering home. The fool tried telling my aunty that he lost it to a snapping turtle while crossing the creek. He must have been in shock because that was a mighty foolish story to come up with, seeing as how it had been dry for the best part of a month.’
Andrea looked over the parapet of the bridge. The water was churned white as it butted the piers. A coping stone she dislodged disappeared with a notice-able splash in the turbulence.
‘Destructive.’ Despite what they were about to unleash on this idyllic spot, Hyde resented the act of minor vandalism.
‘I have become used to destroying things. Perhaps it has become a habit.’ Shouldering her rifle, she sent a spray of tracer-laced bullets into a dovecote built in beneath the mill’s eves.
The flaking cream-painted woodwork burst apart in a welter of blood and feathers and tumbling bodies as the rotten structure disintegrated under the impacts.
‘You’re bloody mad.’ It was a moment before Hyde could bring himself to comment on the senseless action.
‘Of course. We all are, as insane in our decision to stay in the Zone as others are in their determination to get out. While we stay we kill. They would kill to leave. For me there is no distinction.’
There was no inflection in her tone, and Hyde saw no change in her expression either as she clipped in a fresh magazine. To her it was a simple statement of what she saw as fact. But he couldn’t debate it with her. Inside himself he could detect some of the same ingrained sense of combined resignation and determination to keep hurtling from one danger to another. As yet though, the urge had not stifled his instinct for self-preservation.
That he couldn’t argue with what she said made him angry.
‘I don’t give a fuck about your dangerous urges to destroy everything about you, but don’t do bloody stupid things that can drop the rest of the squad right in it, including me. If the commies have managed to push elements past that minefield they could be close enough to have heard that demonstration of mindless venom.’
His words were undercut by a ripple of blended cannon fire and secondary explosions. Though on that point his mind was put at rest, he still felt the rage burning inside him.
‘Get in the truck.’ If he couldn’t take it out on her, perhaps he could take it out on the enemy.
They needed a backup in case the fuel-air bomb didn’t function. He’d already fused several bar mines, and now he laid them on the bridge, just over the brow where an approaching vehicle wouldn’t see them until it was too late. Especially if they were closed down and racing to make up lost time.
But it wasn’t very likely they’d charge onto so obvious an ambush site without checking it first. There were times, though, when the obvious could be the hardest to deal with. The Reds wouldn’t be able to dispose of the bar mines by gunfire for fear of damage to the bridge, and removal by hand meant more delay. Even then he’d chosen mines with a variety of anti-handling mechanisms whose assorted difficulties would tax the ingenuity of the most experienced assault engineers.
The last in place, he ushered the pioneers on board and climbed into the high-set driver’s seat. ‘Right. We’re ready to start killing again.’
Looking straight ahead, Andrea’s lips hardly moved. ‘I did not know we had ever stopped.’
As the Scammel moved off, its tailboard clipped the brickwork and sent another of the coping stones end over end into the water.
With the truck parked just beyond the crest of the hill, they gathered about Hyde as he lifted the safety cover over the firing switch. His thumb was actually brushing the short slim stick of bright metal when they heard the approaching motor.
‘Say, someone has their foot hard down.’ Ripper screwed up his eyes to be first to see the lead element of the Russian column. ‘Hell, that ain’t no ...’
‘Oh God. No, no!’ Hyde screamed at the top of his voice, but the effort was wasted. They were too far away.
The luck that had brought the bus around the minefield on its wildly circuitous journey had finally run out, and brought it to the bridge. There was no attempt to check its speed as it started across.
A massive explosion erupted beneath the driver’s position. The front of the vehicle burst apart, propelled outward by a huge bubble of flame. Aluminium panels, seats and showers of glass fountained high in the air. A legless body soared in a slow cart wheeling arc to be lost in the river.
Its impetus carried the shattered bus onward and a second bar mine was triggered by the impact of the tangled metal. This blast hurled the vehicle sideways, to slew in a mass of sparks into and almost through the parapet.
Through his field glasses Hyde could see that half the length of the interior was piled with bodies, some moving feebly. The rear window had been forced out by the blast and lay in the road unbroken, complete even to its rubber and chrome strip surround.
Survivors began to climb from the wreck, some handing out blood-covered children to those who had been first to exit.
‘Someone get the dressing pack from the cab.’ Hyde put down the control box. ‘Come on, we can’t leave the poor buggers.’
‘No, we haven’t the time. They will slow us.’
‘Piss off.’ Hyde tore Andrea’s fingers from their grip on his arm. ‘They’re your bloody people. Now get that first-aid kit...’
As she grudgingly obeyed, he looked again at the distant scene. Panic appeared to have set in among the injured civilians; some tried to claw their way back into the bus, others ran in frantic circles. One of them collapsed and lay still, and then another and another.
‘What…?’ Panning the ground with binoculars he saw the cause. ‘The Reds are through the minefield; they’re shooting the poor bastards.’
From the partial concealment of a bend in the road, where it emerged from the woods, a lavishly camouflaged, squat-hulled tracked APC was hosing long bursts of machine-gun fire at the refugees.
Trapped on the bridge, their escape blocked by the hulk of their earlier transport, the women and children flopped to the ground. Even when the last was down the firing continued, sending hundreds of rounds into the heaped bodies until there was no more movement.
‘No! They haven’t seen us.’ Barking at Ripper, who was traversing the Browning, Hyde choked down his own urge to retaliate, but not his revulsion at what they’d witnessed. He checked his watch. They had still a few minutes to spare before they’d have to start back. So they’d be cutting it fine, so be it. He wanted to pay those shits back tenfold.
The reconnaissance vehicle edged cautiously forward. Very slowly and hesitantly the turret roof hatch opened and its commander appeared. He seemed unwilling to expose himself to danger and stayed so low that his nose appeared to rest on the turret top. The hatch made an angled roof over his head.
Traversing slightly, the turret brought its main armament to bear on the bridge, but it was not with its 73mm gun that it opened fire, but with the anti-tank missile mounted above it. The commander ducked back hurriedly only a second before the launch.
Riding a bright tail of flame, a threshing coil of fine wire unreeling behind it, the chunky broad-finned rocket soared along the road. Twice it veered abruptly to correct its trajectory.
Powerless to interfere, Hyde watched and recognized the lack of training or experience of the operator controlling the flight. A good man would have kept the transit time shorter by manipulating the controls more smoothly. The fact that he was going for a stationary target at short range should have made it a textbook exercise. He was not surprised when at the end of the missile’s erratic course its impact was several meters short of the bus.
Lashed by the hail of fragments, the grotesquely stacked bodies leaped into macabre animation as the powerful warhead pounded a hole through the road deck.
Reappearing, the commander surveyed the damage. As the smoke drifted to give him a clear view, the vehicle’s co-axial weapon again sent ripples of tracer at the bridge. A crew member climbed from the loader’s hatch and began to reload the launch rail.
‘A perfect target.’ Andrea sighted for her grenade thrower, then turned and snarled at the sergeant as he punched the weapon toward the earth. ‘Why?’
‘Because, you stupid cow, the major may love you but I don’t. With me you get away with nothing. You try something like that again and I promise I’ll see that you go in the cage with all the other rubbish, the other East German border guards. Understand?’
His fist stinging from the hard contact with the barrel, Hyde was forcing himself to bide his time. From what he had seen of the overcautious, even timid, performance by the Russian advance guard he concluded they were either from a freshly formed unit, or an old one so leavened by replacement drafts as to be little better. And if he was right in that, then the losses they sustained in their recent encounter with Voke’s minefield would also be having a marked restraining effect on them.
But still it took an effort to hold back. He again had the control box in his hand. He longed to throw the switch, but after what they’d done simply blocking their route was not enough. Not by a long way.
That the bus had driven onto mines he’d laid he would have to live with for the rest of his life, but he’d never intended that as the outcome. The communists’ act of shooting down those wounded women and children had been cold-bloodedly deliberate. It was not something he would shrug aside as a fortune of war.
‘Better keep our heads down. They’ll start a bit of probing in a minute.’
‘I’m already underground, Sarge. I’ll send you a postcard with a kangaroo on it.’ Using an entrenching tool with more energy than was usual for him, Burke had hollowed a scrap at the roadside. Sparks flew from the tip of the entrenching tool as it struck flint below the topsoil. ‘I hope they don’t use mortars. A couple of tree bursts and we’re all fucked.’
Ripper had to duck as heavy machine-gun fire stitched a path across the crest of the road. A ricochet zipped past, clipping the ring mount and sending splinters of fine lead particles into his hand. Blood welled instantly from the multiple flesh wounds.
‘Aw shit.’ Wiping the back of his hand on his jacket, Ripper examined the mass of almost invisible punctures. ‘I’m real cheesed off with using eyebrow pluckers. Last one like this was in my face and I was shaving out bits of metal for a week.’
He lowered himself into the cab and released the brakes, waiting for the Scammel to roll a little way before reapplying them. ‘Now the only thing they’re gonna see of me is the lead I’m throwing.’
Its tracks fanning spray and mud, a T84 rocked to a halt beside the APC. Hyde could make out the slab features of an officer who appeared immediately to start shouting at the APCs reluctant commander. The tank man unholstered a pistol and waved it wildly.
‘He’s giving the poor bugger hell, and I bet it’s not for killing civvies either.’
Perhaps it was his imagination, but Hyde thought he saw the commander’s face pale as he reluctantly climbed out and was clearly ordered to stand in full view on the tank’s engine deck.
‘Wouldn’t Clarence enjoy a target like that.’ Hyde could imagine the quick precision with which their sniper would have eliminated both men. He would hardly have needed to move to shift the graticle from his first victim to his second.