‘I’m not, but I am bothered about dying. I’ve too much to do, I don’t want to go just yet. Your trouble is the same as the Major’s, you’re too keen, you take unnecessary risks. He fancies you, did you know that?’
‘Of course.’ Taking off her helmet, Andrea let her dark chestnut hair fall to her shoulders, making no attempt to straighten it. ‘Does it bother you? It should not. I know men find me attractive, I do not seek to have that effect, but sometimes it can be useful. Would the Major have fought to keep me in his unit if I had been ugly? Of course he would not.’
‘If ever any of them bother you too much, go too far, I’ll take care of them. I know there are always some who try it on, but…’
‘Of myself I can take care, but why do you offer?’ Using the butt of her rifle, she smashed one of the wooden slats to make a wider firing aperture. ‘You are not interested in me. You have never tried to touch me.’
‘I… I don’t really know. Perhaps I just want someone to care about again. That must sound rather weak, and silly.’
‘No, I can understand. You have lost much, and though’ you would like to, you have not been able to cut yourself off from your emotions completely. Everyone has a need, even the Russians, though with them it is a need to oppress, enslave.’
‘What’s your need? Some of the men think you are a lesbian. As I won’t talk about our relationship they’re making up their own stories.’
‘If you told them how it was between us, they would not believe you. For them a man and a woman together means only one thing. I am not concerned by what they think. Let them weave their fantasies, they do me no harm.’ Over the iron sights of the M16 Andrea took in every detail of the town spread out below, searching for the likely places where baled-out tank crews might first seek shelter.
‘You avoided the question. Come on, you’ve analysed me, tell me what your need is; why the hell are you in this war?’ Clarence took out a small square of cleaning cloth and began to polish the lens of his telescopic sight. ‘Why? Because the communists started a war and I could not help being involved in it. If I had not joined the Workers Militia I might have been forced into a labour battalion, perhaps sent to the armament factories beneath the forests of Siberia. Many East Germans were.’
‘But why stay in?’ Clarence pressed the point. ‘When you deserted you could have mingled with the refugees, tried to work your way west. Why join Kurt and that band of cut-throat border guards?’
‘I joined the Grepos because they were better armed than the other gangs infesting the camps, because with them I could be sure of getting food, of living. How many refugees ever make it across the Zone? I tell you, one tenth of one per cent, and as a woman alone my chances would have been lower than that.’
She had avoided the question again. He wouldn’t try a third time. Perhaps she would tell him eventually. Although they’d been working as a team for a month now, it was the first time they had exchanged any words other than those essential to whatever they were doing. She was right about Dooley and the others not understanding how it was between them.
The fact that Andrea was attractive in all the right places would have made it even less possible for them to comprehend the non-physical nature of their relationship. Perhaps if they knew about his impotence… but that wasn’t something he was going to shout about. That concerned no one but him.
They’d told him at the hospital he’d get over it. So soon after his wife’s death it hadn’t been important, had even been a help. Now he’d adjusted to it, accepted it. There might be a time in the future when it would worry him, but he couldn’t really believe he had a future. How many of the combatants in the Zone had?
‘Everything is ready.’ Andrea watched the last of the preparations in the main street. ‘We must hope that the Major is correct.’
‘I should think that he is. The Russians have to come this way, unless they take to the side roads, and that’s not too likely. They’ll have lost enough time already, they daren’t risk getting lost.’
‘It is strange that men who are going to die should be in a hurry.’
‘Not really. Everything the commies have ever done is based on bullying. When you do that hard enough the result is terror, and that is apt to make you blind before it kills you.’
‘Let me do it.’ After watching for a couple of minutes Libby grew exasperated with the youngster’s ineffective attempts to secure the tripod clamp, and did it himself. He tested the mini-gun mount for stability, then switched on the power. The cluster of barrels spun smoothly, almost silently. An adjustment to the rate of fire control and they blurred into rushing grey invisibility.
‘Too fast.’ Altering the fire selector to one thousand rounds a minute, Libby also pre-set the burst control at one hundred. ‘No point in using up all the goodies at once. Might as well be generous and spread these about a bit.’
He lifted the end of the snaking belt of linked rounds and fed it into the side of the weapon. ‘All you two have to do,’ he stabbed a finger at the young clerks who’d been appointed his loaders, ‘is to bring up fresh boxes as I call for them, get the empties out of my way as fast as you can and relay any instruction to that heavy-footed clown in the cab. You,’ he pointed to the younger of the pair, ‘what’s your name?’
‘Ripper, eh… This here is Wilson, we’re both from…’
‘I don’t want your life history. Just one of you tell lead-foot to stop gunning that bloody engine. I don’t want it to damned well seize just when we need it.’ While Wilson went off to pass on the message through the hatch in the cab roof, Ripper examined the gun, being careful not to touch it, wary of Libby’s critical glare. ‘Sure is a fancy iron. Beats the old fowling piece I had back home. I come from…’
‘Bring up another box and have it ready will you.’ The southern drawl grated on Libby. Until the war had come along, the only contact he’d had with Americans, if it could be called that, was via the TV. Of the mass of imported programmes, just two had made him grind his teeth and reach for the channel tuner. Until now he’d never really believed there actually were people who talked like the characters in Barnaby Jones or Dallas. And now he had two live specimens working with him.
At least, he thought he had two. He couldn’t be sure about Wilson. The gangling carrot-top with galloping acne was just a shade less chatty than Kurt, and he averaged only three grunts a day, on good days.
‘I’ve not seen one of these before, how do they handle? I mean, are they difficult, what with vibration an’ all?’
‘Not if they’re carefully mounted. This is a bit makeshift, but at this rate of fire it’ll do.’ If Ripper was angling to sit behind the Gatling-type gun, Libby was going to disappoint him. The last thing he wanted was a hick clown tampering with things he didn’t understand. Ripper still hovered, he was chewing his lip and contriving to somehow give the impression that he was hopping up and down while he hunched over the gun’s barrels. He kept giving Libby weird smiles, in which only the bottom half of his face participated, mainly by exposing masses of tiny teeth. There appeared to be enough for several normal mouths. The youngster was painfully thin, and his helmet, perched above sharp bird-like features, looked about three sizes too large, slumping first over one ear, then the other, then down over his eyes.
‘Could you knock out a tank with one of these, for real?’
‘Only if I was firing it inside.’ Oh bugger it, it was a serious question, not too intelligent, but serious. ‘No, I’ll be going for the personnel carriers. Concentrating bursts on one section of their armour, I should be able to put a few rounds into them, and that’s all it takes.’