‘If he could be patient he would only have needed to fire once.’ With her sharp eyes Andrea could see almost as clearly what was happening as the NCO with his aided vision. ‘Watch for a moment and you will see what I mean.’
The tank man appeared to be working himself to a frenzy, making extravagant gestures with the pistol. Suddenly the APCs commander crumpled onto the deck of his machine.
‘Oh jeez, will you look at that.’ Ripper heard the faint report of the shot. ‘What the hell can we expect from them if they do that to their own?’
TWELVE
‘The Reds can jam us for all they’re worth, use any electronic countermeasures that take their fancy. It won’t make the slightest difference. We’ll still hack them down as fast as they appear.’
Revell tried not to appear so, but he was sceptical of the claims made by the lieutenant in charge of the Rapier battery.
‘Come on, I’ll show you.’ From a corner of the main barn, Lieutenant Sutton pointed out the dispositions of his men and equipment. ‘I hate to disappoint you but I should tell you we don’t have a battery here, nothing like it, just part of two detachments.
‘Actually just two launchers, but God knows how many reloads. But we also scrounged a towed Vulcan system from that marvellous Aladdin’s cave down there. That’s over by those old hayricks. One of the launchers is by the tractor shed and the other at the edge of that little copse higher up the hill.’
‘Wouldn’t you be better throwing in your lot with us? ‘Very kind of you, Major, but no thanks.’ Sutton waved to one of his men who was leaving his sandbagged post. ‘I say, where are you...’ The man waved a shovel.
‘Oh, yes, all right. Well, have a good one.’ Again Sutton turned his attention back to Revell. ‘As you can see, we’re very well dispersed and the component parts of a towed Rapier system really do make a jolly small target when they’re spread about. Plus of course we’ve dug in the generators and roofed their little houses over with turf to reduce their IR signature to almost zero. Would have been nice of course to have had some of those lovely armoured mobile versions instead. Then we could have flitted about and confused the commies even more, but what we’ve got will do.’
‘How will you manage with our radar blinded, though?’ Revell was surprised by, could even admire the skill with which the launchers and their ancillary equipment had been blended into the countryside, but for days his men had been hit by Soviet air strikes when jamming had rendered useless the most sophisticated air-defence systems.
‘You infantry chaps are all the same - got this sort of blind faith in technology, and when you find out it’s not working for some reason you dash about like chickens with your heads off. No offence, of course.’
The slightly sheepish grin on Revell’s face was sufficient unarticulated evidence of the truth of that.
‘If they persist in jamming, then we’ll simply wait until we can actually see them. Jets right down on the deck or choppers actually touching down, it’s all the same. Boom, instant wreckage. Mind you, if they come at us mob-handed it might present the odd problem.’
‘What do you call mob-handed?’ He didn’t want to, but Revell had to ask the question.
Lieutenant Sutton considered for a moment. ‘Well,’ - he paused again -’when we were up near Hanover, with the same number of launchers, we did take out five of those damned noisy helicopters inside three minutes. We can certainly engage and make problems for that number. But I tell you what, I have an absolute maniac of a gun-layer on the Vulcan who’d make sure that if a chopper did touch down nothing would get out of it alive. Does that set your mind at rest in any way?’
Overwhelmed by the RAF officer’s aura of self-confidence, Revel could think of no answer. ‘Have you got land lines to the castle?’
‘No, but then they’d hardly survive your dropping a few thousand tons of brickwork on them, would they? If you get lonely you’ll just have to wave.’
The lieutenant’s sense of humour was beginning to wear somewhat thin on Revell, but he realized the young officer might be using it as cover for nerves. ‘You can take care of your own close-in defence?’
‘I’ve forty men altogether. Working the launchers with minimal crews I can put most of them into my perimeter defences, and of course I’ve got the Vulcan. My problem has been persuading my chaps that not all of them can have GP machine guns. They all came back from that dump toting M60s and draped with more ammo belts than an army of Mexican bandits.’
Across the valley the castle still stood intact. It looked as though it had been there forever and as if it would continue to be, as if the very landscape had been designed around it. But there was nothing in the Zone that could be regarded as permanent, not even the landscape itself.
‘I have to get back. Good luck.’ Revell held out his hand.
Sutton hesitated a second, then accepted it. ‘You too, but it’s the Russians I feel sorry for. You wouldn’t believe the number of rounds we’ve got for the Vulcan.’
The top of the hill had been raked by cannon and machine-gun fire that had pulverized the road and slashed the pines to ribbons. There had been no need for Sergeant Hyde to insist on fire discipline. It would have been instant death for any of them to raise their heads and attempt a puny retaliation.
The probing fire slackened, and then ceased. Cautiously Hyde looked out, the act made less dangerous by the masses of piled bark and cones. ‘Here they come.’
A dismounted squad of infantry were moving toward the bridge. They crouched low, automatics levelled. Behind them came a pair of tracked infantry carriers. Half out of the open rear-deck hatches stood more soldiers, tightly clasping rifles and grenade launchers.
‘I should think it will be ...’ Hyde gauged distances, ‘right about now.’
The second armoured personnel carrier was suddenly hidden by a shower of white sparks. Fire belched from the open hatches and its passengers were enveloped by scorching pillars of vivid flame. Hidden from sight within the pall of grey smoke, the APC shuddered off the road into the trees, and then simply dissolved in a tremendous explosion as its ammunition ignited.
Surging forward, the T84 opened up on the mill. A billowing mass of white dust marked the violence of the first impact. Slowly, a section of the building’s roof sagged and tiles slid from their place to shatter on the road and bounce from the roof of the bus. A second shell followed but passed clean through the structure without exploding.
Machine guns and light cannon lashed out at the mistaken target. Bullets raked the walls and the few windows. Glass shattered and lengths of scaffolding were wrenched away and thrown down to land in a wild tangle.
Another mine was triggered, and this time it was the squad of infantry who took the force of it, every man being mown down by the inescapable blast from a claymore.
Trying to press on, the Russians brought on their own destruction. A fragmented steel scythe swept away another squad.
The T84 stopped and its commander waved on more APCs. The mines concealed among the trees silently ticked off the numbers, and then the verges were lit with a series of yellow stabs of flame.
Pierced by a jet of molten metal, another tracked carrier began to burn, its fuel tank’s contents boiled by the stream of plasma. Hatches flew open, but by the pressure of furnace-hot gasses, not by human hand.
With a track blown off and its turret torn away, an APC swerved into another alongside, crushing its hull and riding onto it.
Surviving crew leaped clear and made for the supposed safety of the trees. The first to reach them found no safety there. Shotgun mines cut them down and left those who had been lucky enough to escape that fate, as well, cowering in confusion in the middle of the road.
Another tank that moved forward shuddered under an impact against its turret rear, but boxes of retroactive armour neutralized the missile warhead’s power and it kept going. It moved in alongside the first T84 and both began to pound the far bank of the river.
‘Come on, you bastards, make a try for the bridge.’ Hyde had forgotten time. Finger poised over the activating switch, he waited for an attempt to force a passage past the mill. ‘They want that bridge.’ He held up his hand and made a small gap between thumb and finger. ‘I want them to be that close to thinking they’ve got it.’
Revell knew that Hyde’s section would not be back on time. There was no mistaking the growing sounds of battle from the direction of the bridge. The sweep hand of his watch was brushing away the last moments to the expiration of the hour.
They were heard by Clarence also, and his thoughts as he listened were very different from the major’s. It was two weeks since he’d had a live target in his sights. He wished he were with the section getting to grips with the enemy, actually fighting, not forever standing about waiting for something to happen. And then fre- quently being disappointed.
The last fractions of the hour ticked by, and still Revell did not close the firing circuit. It was Andrea who made him delay. He couldn’t bring himself to be the one to cut her off from hope of survival.
All the men, pioneers and combat company, stood in the village street, turned to look at the castle. There was something else they were looking for as well, but it didn’t appear. A man had been posted to watch, to signal with a flare if he spotted the ambush group on their way back.
Handing the detonator box to Voke, Revell knew it could not be his act that sealed Andrea’s fate.
Voke lifted the safety cover. ‘It is a pleasure to do this for more than the reason you might think, Major. The castle was marked as an auxiliary storage facility for the main dump. Once it is destroyed I shall have no difficulty explaining what happened to a great deal of clothing and equipment. I shall write it off as lost in battle.’
Five minutes past the hour, and still no flare, nor any diminution of the cannon- and automatic-weapon fire. If anything it appeared that the tempo of the exchange was increasing.
‘It must be done, Major.’ Voke looked to the American for confirmation. He waited for an answering nod before crushing his thumb down hard.
There was a delay, a short one, as the impulse ran through the great length of wire. To Revell it was an eternity. A thousand times he’d wished he could be free of his obsession with Andrea, and now with this he was, and in his heart he knew it wasn’t what he really wanted. With this he was not just cutting himself off from her, he was signing her death warrant.
A long plume of dust was driven violently from an upper window of the castle. It came out horizontally, its formation making no concession to the wind and rain until it had sprouted fifty meters from the wall. Then in rapid sequence it was joined by a dozen more. Feathers and bursts of the same leaden cloud gouted out from between tiles on the roofs.
The crack of the firing of the first charge was lost among the ripple of others that followed. With an almost absurd slowness a massive featureless slab of wall began to bulge as turrets began to collapse. It burst outward and a monstrous pall of dust rose to engulf the whole structure. As it rose it was stirred to wild turbulence by turrets and towers plunging to destruction inside it.
It did not rise far, beginning to spread in the wind and be beaten down by the rain before it was twice the height of the now-scattered walls. Lighter particles fanned out to merge with the storm clouds; most of the airborne debris began to roll down the vertical walls of rock, following the huge slabs of shaped stone and giant splintered roof beams that were already settling at their foot. A dull rumbling was all that had accompanied the spectacular avalanche, and that died quickly, without echo.
Standing aside from the others of the audience, Boris pushed his balled fist against his mouth and bit hard on his knuckles until they bled.
He felt as though his mind were going to explode, it was in such a turmoil. Overriding everything though was fear. That was it: sheer, stark-naked terror. Always until now the communists had been in front of them in attack, or more often behind them in pursuit. With this action they had deliberately cut themselves off, locked themselves into a position that, no matter what delaying tactics were employed, would shortly be surrounded.
His hand went to his holster and unconsciously he unfastened it and felt the comforting bulk of the Browning automatic. He pulled it out and released the magazine. Ignoring the blood running down his fingers, he thumbed a round out, rolling it between his stained fingers. Deliberately he put the bullet into his breast pocket. He would save that one for himself.
THIRTEEN
From the scanty concealment of the litter on the road Sergeant Hyde watched the Soviet combat engineers working to clear the mines. Smoke from burning vehicles masked much of their activity, but twice he saw fountains of dirt that marked where two of them at least had not been using sufficient caution.
He could have slowed the process even more with a few well-directed bursts, but that would have drawn attention to him and his section. As it was, the T84s sometimes came uncomfortably close with the random suppressive shelling of their side of the river.
‘I think they’re doing that on a ‘just in case’ basis.’ Hyde spat soil that stank of raw explosive. ‘If they thought they were really facing an opposed crossing they’d have called down artillery support by now.’
Coming forward in short rushes from cover to cover, a squad of assault engineers reached the bridge and, edging along hugging the low parapet, they reached the back of the bus. The last few meters they came on more confidently, walking on the bodies of the dead. They all froze, and then laughed when one of their number slipped on a blood-covered arm and landed abruptly on his backside, without triggering any mine or booby-trap.
‘They’re getting a bit cocky.’ Burke checked that he had a round chambered in his rifle, then took out another magazine and laid it by his side.
Timing was everything. Hyde subdued the strong urge to trigger the fuel-air device immediately, and waited. It was then they heard the dull rolling rumble of the castle’s destruction. There was quite literally no going back now.