Since the Russians had launched their offensive ... how long ago was it, four days, five…? They had been steadily falling back before the relentless pressure of mass attacks. The Warpac forces had been using ammunition as though they had a limitless supply, and every thrust had been preceded by devastating barrages, like the one that had virtually wiped this inoffensive little place from the map.
Revell could only be thankful that his Special Combat Company had been operating on the flanks. In the centre, whole NATO divisions had been obliterated. And even so, in the course of less than a week’s fighting they had sustained losses of nearly seventy percent. Of a reinforced company he now had thirty-five men left. Of the sixteen APCs he had begun with he now had four, and one of those was being towed.
But he knew in his heart it was wrong to say they had been fighting. Almost from the start they had been denied that opportunity. Time after time they had prepared positions, road blocks, ambushes, and every time they had been ordered to withdraw before enemy attacks had developed.
It was the massive Soviet air superiority that had caused their losses. Now it had reached the stage when any movement by daylight was inviting destruction. Fighter bombers and helicopter gunships were roaming at will, and to be seen on the open road was an invitation to a series of attacks. The onset of the bad weather twenty-four hours earlier had bought some slight respite, but neither low cloud nor night could completely halt the attacks. With the wealth of sophisticated targeting devices carried by the gunships and bombers it was most likely only a shortage of experienced pilots that had brought about the slight respite.
It was bitterly frustrating to take such punishment and not be able to strike back. What Revell and his men wanted was something real to fight for, not some anonymous ridge or railway cutting from which they were ordered to withdraw without even sighting the enemy.
Sharply, above the more distant rumble of the barrage, came the punching crack of cannon fire.
‘Let’s get moving, sergeant. That’s the Reds taking out the barricades on the edge of town. Their tanks won’t take long to smash through. Are we still being jammed?’
‘On all frequencies. They’re pumping out that mush at tremendous power. If any of our fliers were in the air the transmitter would be standing out on their screens in 3-D.’ Hyde stepped onto the rear ramp of the M113. ‘So we’re still pulling back?’
‘That was the last word we had, as soon as we finished here.’ Revell scanned the hellish scene in the square, now filled with the stench of the burning bodies. ‘Why they wanted this done though, God only knows. Is this any more decent than decomposing under a pile of rubble?’
Shrugging, Hyde ducked into the tracked carrier. ‘Probably the home village of some German politician who pulled a few strings…’
‘Don’t fucking wait for us, will you.’ Running and shouting, Dooley charged from an alleyway. He put on a spurt as he saw the last of the company boarding, was overtaken by Scully who had followed him but now reached sanctuary first.
‘Move over, you shits.’ Scully scrambled inside, shouting down the complaints from others who objected to being sprayed with the muddy water escaping from the cloudy plastic sack he carried. He sneered answers to his noisy and rude greeting. ‘Piss off. This is important stuff. You want to fuck up your guts on army rations, then that’s your bloody lookout. It took me an hour to grub up this lot. I’m not chucking them out now. I volunteered to cook when you lot wouldn’t do it, and if I’m going to do it then I want some decent veggies in the pot.’
‘You reckon they’re decent?’ Ripper watched the little man contort himself to push the soil-blotched turnips and carrots into an under-seat locker.
‘Of course they bloody are.’ Rearranging various bottles of soy sauce and ketchup and scooping back handfuls of stock cubes, Scully succeeded at his second attempt to fasten the improvised catch. ‘It’s the stuff grown above ground that glows in the dark.’
Seated by the rear door of the APC, Ripper suddenly stuck his leg across the opening to prevent Dooley entering. ‘Now you ain’t bringing them in here, boy.’
‘Don’t fuck about. It took me bloody ages to catch this lot.’ Supported in both arms Dooley carried a highly ornate gilt cage filled with a mass of twittering bright blurs.
Shrill cheepings and showers of multi-coloured feather and millet husks accompanied his attempts to push it inside ahead of him.
Other voices joined Ripper’s drawl in protest and Dooley reluctantly backed off.
‘You miserable load of cruds. Don’t you ever tell me I haven’t got no soul again. Shit, I’ve got more feeling in my head than you’ve got in your little fingers.’ For a moment, at the back of Dooley’s mind there lurked the doubt that he’d got that a bit wrong, or at least not quite right. ‘Oh sod the lot of you. Someone sling me an empty kit bag then.’
Catching a bundle of frayed and stained canvas, Dooley crammed the cage into it. In the process he almost disappeared within a screeching cloud of flying plumage. With elaborate care he fastened the bundle to a broken tool rack on the hull’s exterior.
Sluggishly the tired hydraulics closed the ramp and sealed the troops within their armoured cocoon. With a bellow from holed exhausts and some misfiring, the old battle-worn APCs pulled out of the square, the last in the line starting off with a jerk as its towline tautened.
As they clanked and crunched over the rubble their passengers fell into an exhausted sleep. Only Dooley stayed awake. He stared at the spot where only a thin slab of aluminium armour separated him from his prize. For a moment the hell that was the Zone could be forgotten, and he smiled, to fall asleep with a look of smug satisfaction on his face.
TWO
They were too late, by just a matter of seconds. The bridge was blown even as they came in sight of it.
At first, for a few tantalizing moments, it had seemed as4f the charges had failed in their work. Revell had urged their driver on, but even as Burke had floored the pedal without consideration for the surge of fuel consumption by the straining motor, the long pre-cast concrete structure had twisted, sagged and fallen to ruin in the broad churning river far below.
There was no time for the luxury of self-recrimination. With dawn only an our away Revell knew they had to find a crossing, to find shelter beneath the protecting umbrella of the main forces anti-aircraft defences. This side of the river they had no chance. Once light they would be unable to move by road, and on foot it would only be a matter of time before they were mopped up by Warpac recon units.
Even as the last massive chunks of steel-reinforced debris were plunging beneath the turbid waters, Revell was turning the column in a fresh direction.
The heavy overcast was holding back the morning, but it was growing perceptibly brighter when they topped a hill overlooking the river once more.
‘It hasn’t been blown, yet.’ Scanning the lattice steel structure, Hyde first used binoculars and then an image intensifier.
‘So? It is still of no use to us.’ Andrea sat beside the sergeant on the edge of the roof hatch. She leaned an arm on the barrel of the TOW launch tube and rested her cheek against the cold wet metal. ‘That is not a bridge. It is a long slaughterhouse.’
Revell hardly heard her. Barely a kilometre away, the bridge might as well have been a hundred. Its full length and the approach roads were choked with an unmoving jam of military and civilian transport. Tanks, APCs and armoured cars were inextricably mixed with every nationality and type of soft-skin transport, and between every one of them were locked masses of refugee carts. There were even one or two civilian motor vehicles, doubtless their gas tanks holding the last few dregs of carefully hoarded and precious fuel. But nothing was moving.
As he watched, Revell saw a pair of Hind gunships sweep the length of the stalled traffic with cannon and rocket fire. They took no evasive action during the run, not even to the extent of releasing decoy flares against AA missiles. The degree of their complacency was illustrated by the second machine even displaying its navigation lights.
Fires leaped from a score of locations and added their jet smoke to those already rising into the predawn light. A ruptured fuel tank flared a brief bubble of flame and a bursting tire made a small fountain of blazing rubber.
A single broken line of tracer curled toward the second gunship. Well-aimed, it was shrugged aside by the armoured belly of the machine. Turning tightly, the pair swept back and saturated with a storm of fire and steel the location from which the weak resistance had come.
Only a few hundred feet above the Russian helicopters a single MIG fighter flew top cover for them, sometimes lost to sight in the low cloud.
A gasoline tanker stalled in the centre of the bridge exploded and liquid fire poured toward the river far below. Ammunition aboard trucks close by began to detonate and made sparkling fountains of white, red and green.
Spreading a map on the wet metal of the hull top, Revell screwed up his eyes in the half light to trace a path with a grimy finger. ‘We’ve fuel for maybe another thirty kilometres, if we go easy on it. We’ll have to drop the cripple and pack everyone into the other three.’
Hyde craned over the major’s shoulder to look at the point he was indicating. ‘A railway bridge. What are the chances of it still being intact?’
‘Wish I knew.’ Revell refolded the map. ‘But it’s the only one we have a chance of reaching.’
Stretching her arms above her head, Andrea watched without real interest as the Hinds soared to skim the bottom of the clouds and then dived to commence another strafing run. She turned away as the gunships tore into and pounded to scrap a dozen more vehicles. Fresh fires erupted. ‘We will be crossing the front of the Russian advance. It is likely we will run into their reconnaissance units.’
‘Maybe.’ There was nothing else Revell could add.
‘We’ll be travelling by side roads.’ It was Hyde who found a crumb of comfort.
‘That country is rough; unless the Reds are trying to sneak around the side it’s not very likely we’ll encounter a main axis of their advance.’
‘Only one way to find out.’ Patting the anti-tank missile launch tube, Revell took a last glance at the bridge. ‘So let’s be on our way before those commie fliers get cheesed off with hammering wrecks and start looking for stragglers, like us.’
Bracing himself behind the major’s seat, Sergeant Hyde took out the map and examined the route the officer had chosen. In the dim light of the APCs interior, and with it swaying and jolting over the poor track roads, it took him a while to orient himself. He studied it for several minutes before an indistinct nagging doubt crystallised into coherent thought.
‘Doesn’t seem to have been a lot going on around here, not up until now.’ Revell almost let the point go as a chance remark, then had second thoughts and re-examined the area. He was surprised he hadn’t noticed the fact himself. It was further indication of just how tired he was.
While all of the remainder of the eighty square kilometres displayed by the map were covered in a mass of additional symbols, denoting old battlefields, dumps, contaminated areas and minefields, the area they were traversing was entirely free of such information.
‘Printing error?’ It hardly rang true, but Revell had to consider it, even as he dismissed it from his mind.
With a shake of his head Hyde discounted the idea. ‘I’ve never been this way before, but I’ve always had a feeling that it’s about where Paradise Valley should be.’
‘No such bloody place, Sarge.’ Driving gingerly to conserve fuel, Burke was for once able to take part in a conversation. His first in days, since the intercom had broken down. ‘That’s a bleeding fairy story, put about by staff officers and base barnacles, so we’ll live in hope and go on defending the bastards.’
With supreme delicacy and skill Burke nursed the GM V-6 over a rise without having to change down, and saved another spoonful of diesel. ‘Hell, Sarge, you don’t believe those stories do you? They’ve been going the rounds as long as the Zone has been in existence.’
‘Hey, can someone clue me in on this?’ Ripper stepped on toes as he hauled himself forward and into the exchange. ‘What the heck is Paradise Valley?’
‘It’s a fiction.’ Clarence gave up trying to sleep, and flexed his fingers around the long slim barrel of the sniper rifle propped between his knees. ‘Like Burke says, it’s a fairy story. But if you have to know, think of it as the Quartermaster’s version of the elephants’ graveyard. It’s supposed to be a fabulous dump where they keep all the goodies and essentials that are permanently in short supply. The rumour of its existence probably sprang into being after the first Warpac attack, when some poor devil on the NATO side ran out of what he needed most. You know, little things, like ammo, or morphine.’
‘Or fuel,’ Thorne butted in. ‘Or maybe transport, for a fast retreat. We seem to have been doing that since the evening of the first day.’
‘Holy shit.’ Ripper was all toothy enthusiasm. ‘I don’t give a damn if it’s rumour or fairy story. Hey, if it’s no more real than that, maybe we can still trade on it. My Daddy used to make money out of stills that weren’t real. He used to tell the revenue about them, always collecting cash money up front. Then when they hit the site and there weren’t nothing there he used to swear they must just have moved on. By then he’d spent the reward so there weren’t nothing they could do.’
‘I’ve seen everything traded in the Zone, but never fairy stories.’ Thorne leaned back against the bare condensation-streaked metal of the hull, and by closing his eyes took himself out of the conversation.
‘There are plenty of refugees trapped in the Zone who’ve paid fortunes, for bogus maps of safe routes to the west, or handed over all they’ve got to so-called guides who dump their customers as soon as they’ve been paid. In advance of course.’ Clarence too had tired of what he saw as pointless speculation. Settling back, he sought what comfort he could in the vehicle’s hard shell, festooned as it was with sharp angles, projecting brackets and hanging equipment.