This time Clarence didn’t hesitate, bringing up the rifle to fire. Andrea’s hand clamped hard on the barrel and forced it down. ‘No, let him live while he can.’ She snatched the weapon back. ‘He has done it to others, let him feel what it is like.’
An imploring talon reached out for the sniper and he fended it off with a sweeping blow. It was too much for the furnace-roasted limb and the forearm snapped off at the elbow, eliciting a shrill screech from the Russian.
Clarence retched, thinking for a moment that he was going to throw up. Frantically, he scraped the wrist of his suit against the wall to wipe away the adhering blood-dappled soot-stained tissue. This wasn’t how he wanted to fight his war: he was a sniper, his war was clinically clean, precise, remote. It didn’t involve contact with walking corpses, loathsome spectres that had no right to be alive. Death for him was always at a distance, only on that messy job in the Hanover salient had he ever seen, close to, the faces of the men he was killing. Even then the action had been so wild, so fast, that the faces had blurred and merged until he couldn’t recall any individual one.
The burn victim took another tottering step forward, and before Andrea could move again to stop him Clarence unslung his rifle and pumped three fast shots into the sufferer’s upper chest and face. Blackened flesh and shards of bone burst from the Russian under the devastating impact of the big dum-dum bullets. They instantly and thoroughly completed the work of destruction the fire had started. Pink foam bubbled from the scorched cavity where the bottom jaw had been. A remaining eye stared accusingly at Clarence, made grotesquely large by the shrivelling of the skin about it, bulging out over the protruding splinters of cheekbone, restrained only by a fire-welded lid.
Shooting from the hip, Clarence put a last round into the unseeing eye. That entire side of the cadaver’s head ruptured and broke open, scattering lumps of white sponge and matted tissues of crisped hair. Andrea tugged at his arm. ‘We have little time…’
Beside them, the wall bulged and shed flakes of brick and mortar as a shell exploded inside the house.
Their escape route through the farmyard had been turned into an assault course. The deluge of high explosive had crudely dismantled and scattered the remains of tractors and harvesters, cluttering the area with razor sharp sheets of steel and blazing tyres. A row of silos spouted feed-pellets and fertiliser from irregular holes. Oil and fuel from split drums added another hazard. They passed between the dismembered components of a grain conveyer and then they were clear, racing across the pockmarked fields for the far trees.
As they ran and stumbled across the shell-churned ground the distinctive discordant sounds of a Soviet V6 diesel came to them, spurring them to greater effort. The engine note rose to a thundering bellow, accompanied by the grinding squeal of abused tracks. They were just halfway when bullets began scything the long grass beside them.
‘Hold it.’ Revell had to shout to make himself heard to the others, who were already plunging into the dense undergrowth. He’d held back on reaching the fringe of the trees, waiting for Dooley and Cohen to catch up, now he hurriedly brought his binoculars into use.
‘Damn it, I know they’re there, I saw them.’ Again and again he quartered the ground where he’d seen the two figures go down. Only the regular stabs of flame from the secondary turret armament of a troop carrier, partly concealed by the farm buildings, kept him searching after he’d otherwise have given up. The fact that the Ruskies were taking an interest in the same strip of pasture was all he needed to reassure himself that he could still trust his senses.
‘How much smoke can we make?’
‘Nothing like enough.’ Hyde too had seen the mud-plastered forms crouched in the shallow crater, and had anticipated the officer’s question. ‘Just three 40mm grenades. Even if we put them down right on the button, with this breeze…’ He didn’t need to elaborate.
‘Maybe they’ll get fed up waiting, and piss off.’ Having failed to beg the use of the sergeant’s binoculars, Dooley now hovered about the major. ‘Somehow I don’t think so. That load of Reds must be good and bloody sore at us by now. Looks like this bunch are staying behind to do a thorough job.’ He knew it was no more than a gesture, the weapon was useless at that range, but Burke set up the M60 anyway.
Having annoyed Dooley immensely by obtaining a loan of the glasses first, Libby examined the distant couple. ‘They’re not moving.’
‘There’s not much room for them to move, not without offering themselves as a target.’ There was no question of pulling out now, Revell knew that. Even when he’d felt certain Andrea and the sniper were dead, he’d been reluctant; now he was positive they were still alive, there was no way he was going to leave until he was sure she was safe.
And all the time the rest of the enemy column would be bulldozing its way towards Frankfurt. In two hours it could be out of the Zone, and by spreading terror among the West German civilian population, be clogging every road and railway and airport with refugees. The hand to mouth logistical support for the NATO forces fighting south of the city would be cut to a trickle virtually immediately. Defeat, and a further extension of the Zone, would follow fast. ‘We’ll wait for them to make a break, then we’ll try to draw the APCs fire and give what cover we can.’
‘Sounds good in fucking theory,’ Dooley kept his voice down as he spoke to Cohen, ‘but unless those Reds are gonna be obliging enough to get out of their battle taxi and stroll our way, it ain’t actually gonna amount to a whole lot. I’m as keen to save that broad’s sweet fanny as the Major, and even that head-case limey sniper has his uses, ‘Dooley glanced at Libby, watching for any reaction to that remark, finding none, ‘but I can’t see what we can do, not with these pea-shooters.’ The M60 looked toy-like in his huge hand.
‘What we could do with is a miracle.’ Taking a last look through the binoculars before passing them to Dooley, Libby could see the trapped pair attempting to leave the crater and being forced to duck back as the slight movement attracted machine gun fire.
‘I think maybe we’ve got one.’ Without offering an explanation, Cohen picked up the radio and ran to dump it beside Revell. ‘Major, one of the Thunderbolts is still hanging about. He don’t want to take no eggs home and wants to know where you’d like ‘em laid.’
‘Tell him thanks; dead centre on the farm. Tell him we’ve troops close-by.’ The jet was in sight before the noise of its approach could be heard. It flashed across the fields towards the cluster of buildings, now partially hidden by drifting smoke. As it closed it lifted to roof-top height and, two hundred metres from its target, released an unpainted silver pod from each outer wing-pylon.
Tumbling end over end, the big elongated teardrop-shaped canisters fell away from the aircraft and arced towards the farm. Their impact was invisible to the distant watchers, but the wall of yellow fire that rose beyond the house wasn’t. To a man, they stood and waited, watching the giant bubble of flame as it grew to its full size and began to rise and turn boiling black at the edges.
Libby counted the seconds to himself… two, three… the ‘four’ was only part formed in his mind when the moment came. The instant the fireball began to shrink it was suddenly transformed, becoming a searing white and doubling, tripling, to envelop the whole farm, as the miniature cylinders of oxygen within it released their pressurised contents simultaneously. House, barns, silos, everything disappeared within the all-devouring glaring maelstrom of white fire.
He’d seen it all, there was not a weapon that Libby had not witnessed in action, nuclear, conventional or chemical, but there was something overpoweringly awe-inspiring about super-napalm. Whenever it was used on the battlefield men would stand and watch, thanking God, or whatever they believed in, that this time it was not going down on them. How many times had he walked through the ashes of those on whom it had, and the ashes of how many men? A hundred, a thousand? He didn’t know because there was never enough left to form even a rough estimate, just a crumbling fragment of bone here, a fused rifle mechanism there, and that would be all that was left of a section, a platoon, even a company.