At fifteen hundred feet the twin rotors of the elderly transport helicopter chopped through the passing wisps of the lowest clouds. The Chinook banked slightly as it turned on to a new heading.
Hyde’s burn-scarred mask looked up as Major Revell came back from the flight deck. ‘Do we have a fix on those Ruskies yet?’ He added nothing to the question. Since the time he’d learnt he and his section were to stay with the American outfit, the sergeant had made up his mind to treat the Yank officer with cold civility. Revell, for his part, appeared unbothered, and that irritated Hyde. All he wanted was out – to get back to his own battalion, or any British unit. Anything was better than being attached to this rag-bag squad, being treated with contempt or ignored by every Command in whose area they operated, until there was a really dirty job to do. Christ, they even had an ex-East German border guard among them, one of the despised Grepos, and the girl…
‘No location as yet. I’ve told the pilot to do a wide sweep, so we come up behind their last known position. I’d rather we tracked them than suddenly found ourselves flying over them, a target for the mass of SAMs and flak they’ve got.’
‘And when we do find them, what then? Hop on ahead and set up an ambush?’
‘That’s about it. The orders say we stall them, and keep on stalling them while the Staff try to scrape together a blocking force that can finish them off.’
Corporal Cohen staggered back to join them. The twin chevrons on his sleeve were still clean and bright against his soiled and faded jacket. There were new contours to the bulging pockets in the flak-jacket he wore, evidence of shrewd deals with the chopper’s crew. ‘I just got word, Major. We can have an ECM platform tasked to us within fifteen minutes of finding the Reds.’ He sat down heavily and fanned himself with his clipboard. His pallid features confirmed that his most recent travel sickness cure was ineffective.
He wasn’t capable of expression, but Sergeant Hyde snorted his disgust. ‘One unarmed aircraft, stooging about overhead, doing a spot of jamming. Is that the best they can come up with?’
‘Well it’s better than nothing.’ Revell watched the rotor-blade misted rain travelling in horizontal lines across the window. ‘It’ll stop the Ruskies squawking for close air support, and if the crew of that jammer are any good, maybe they can even screw up the column’s short-range sets, force them to close up on the road.’
Hyde brightened at the prospect of the target that would present. Bloody hell, he’d had little enough to feel happy about since he’d been roped in with Revell. The Yank wasn’t like any officer he’d ever known, you could never tell when he was making a bleeding suggestion and when he was giving an order. It kept Hyde on edge; he’d have been happier with an officer who kept a bit of distance. You knew where you stood then.
Revell jotted a signal on the radio-man’s clipboard. ‘OK, send that acknowledgement and arrange for one frequency to be left open. Have it confirmed by whoever’s tasking the ECM mission. Electronic countermeasures are fine, so long as they don’t blanket us as well. And keep trying for that promise of air-support. Tell them anything will do. Hot air balloons, a couple of hang gliders, anything.’
‘I’ll try, Major, but I’m getting the same answer every time. Everything with wings or rotors apart from this old rust bucket is committed to the big battle south of the city – there’s nothing to spare.’
‘Then tell them if we can’t call on air, and we’re not able to hold those Ruskies on our own, there’s going to be T84s competing for road space with the trams on Kaiser Strasse damned soon.’
As he followed Cohen back to his improvised communication board midway down the cabin, and waited for the corporal to squeeze his small frame into the even smaller space so he could get past, Revell watched Dooley.
The big man was trying to fold a couple of sheets of glossy paper quietly. There were two gaps in the wall covering near him. Revell felt his eyes being irresistibly drawn to the succession of big breasts and glistening vaginas. There certainly were a lot of whores in the world. It was crazy, some of them had really beautiful faces. He could never understand why a woman whose looks would enable her to get anything she wanted in life should squat, open her legs and play with herself in front of a camera and, effectively, a couple of million masturbating males.
There were still lots of pretty girls in Frankfurt too. For the last twelve months the city had carried on virtually as normal, with the fringes of the Zone barely forty kilometres away. Now it was even closer and still an air of normality reigned. But in the last two or three weeks there had been a subtle change in the general mood. Somehow, it was as if the population was enjoying one last fling, attempting to ignore the underlying feeling of growing tension. The euphoric veneer was brittle, it would take little to crack it and release panic.
They were over the Zone now, and before going forward, the major looked out. There was little to betray the fact to the untrained eye. The small villages strung out along the winding roads and clustered about intersections^ appeared perfectly normal, as did the scattered farmsteads. The first detail that jarred was the total absence of traffic; there should have been some even on these rural roads. Careful inspection revealed other, more ugly evidence.
It was early September, yet large areas of woodland were already stripped of autumn colour and any vestige of leaf canopy. And broad swathes of land that marched across the rolling hills had a uniformly sickly yellow appearance. Less obvious were the seemingly random clusters of circles of churned bare soil. From an altitude, they looked to be the work of a demented ploughman. Revell knew better, they were the massive craters made by long-range artillery rockets. Early on in the war, this area of the Hesse had been one of the principal assembly points for the NATO counterattack that had pushed the Russian forces back beyond Fulda, almost to the East German border.
The ferocity of the Soviet chemical and conventional barrage had crippled the planned West German and American follow-up attacks. Though the Russians had been content to let the NATO troops hold the territory, its contamination had made it a hollow victory, setting the pattern for battles that were to follow, and the formation of the Zone.
When the battles spilled beyond the Zone, then it grew accordingly, spreading out to engulf the newly-ravaged ground. The loss of Frankfurt, if it followed so soon after Wurzburg and Nurnberg, would be a crippling blow to morale and strengthen the re-emerging lobby in the West that believed the time had come to attempt a negotiated peace.
The rest of the squad were sitting behind the pilot’s position. Kurt was pencilling additional obscenities on the black and white illustration of a mud-spattered magazine featuring women and animals. While the grossness of his drawings was almost beyond belief, Revell had to admit the Grepo did have a degree of warped talent.
As usual, Clarence and Andrea were sitting side by side, close but not quite touching. They were working together, using triangular needle files to cut tiny nicks into the sides of 5.56mm rifle rounds. The work was being done with expert precision and loving care, each converted dumdum bullet being carefully checked before being slotted into a magazine.
‘Make sure we don’t take any of those back with us.’ Revell counted the number of filled mags, and worked out the total of modified rounds. A sufficient number had already been finished to keep the whole squad firing on automatic for thirty seconds or more. ‘There’s news hawks around who’d love to get something like that for the antiwar press back home. That’s one load of ammunition the General Staff wouldn’t like them to have.’