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Slowly and deliberately, Clarence aligned the cross-hairs on the man’s thorax, at the base of his breastbone. A bullet there would do terrible damage, smashing ribs and driving them through the stomach and into most of the essential organs. Very gently, the sniper crooked his finger around the trigger. At the instant he exerted the slight pressure necessary, he jerked the tip of the barrel upwards.

Its velocity unimpeded by the padded helmet through which it first passed, the bullet stoved in the top of the Russian’s head as he bent down. Coming out of the back of his neck, the now deformed round splattered hair and tissue and lumps of starred cranium across the wall on which he was leaning. The body slumped to a crouched position, head on knees, arms folded around them.

There was nothing special about number two hundred, nothing to mark the corpse as any different from the hundred and ninety-nine that had gone before, except that for a brief moment Clarence had come close to forgetting his real reason for doing it. Damn it, she had almost got to him. Well to hell with her, let her latch on to one of the others, he didn’t need her. He didn’t need anybody.

A movement in the graveyard caught his attention, and the faces of his children were before him as he took aim. He was remembering again, prepared to collect another payment.

TEN

‘We can’t just let him bleed to death.’ Ripper swabbed the deep red blood bubbling from the row of punctures in Wilson’s chest with an already saturated field dressing.

Libby made a quick inspection of the ground-floor front lounge of the little house into which they had dragged the wounded man. With the exception of the locked door they’d kicked in to gain entry, it must have looked exactly the same as it did the day its owners had been forced to hurriedly abandon it. A large polished dresser appeared promising. Keeping low, and wedging the damaged door back into place as he passed it, he crossed the sculptured bronze-coloured carpet and tried each drawer in turn. From the third and fourth he took handfuls of napkins and a large white cotton tablecloth.

‘Here,’ he tossed them to the young American, ‘use these. Bind them tight around his chest. It might help.’

As Ripper stripped off the soaked jacket and shirt, Libby went to the window, and standing back from it, using the cover of the partially drawn curtains, watched the Russians working to separate the truck from the carrier.

They had not bothered with a pursuit. Apart from posting a few nervous-looking machine gunners in various doorways, they seemed far more interested in getting mobile again. While they worked with sledgehammers and crowbars to part the entangled metal, the vehicle’s turret constantly rotated to cover them with its heavy cannon.

With a final rain of massive blows, delivered by a hulking senior sergeant who had grabbed the hammer from a fast tiring private, the Russians were at last able to push the truck clear. A captain, who until now had not stooped to manual work, stepped forward and taking the implement from the sergeant, prodded the carrier’s broken track.

‘They’re not going anywhere in a hurry.’ Leaving the window, Libby went to where Ripper had at last succeeded in fastening the improvised bandage. A huge white bow stood up on Wilson’s chest, rapidly turning from pink to red, as it absorbed the continuing flow.

Wilson was unconscious. Each laboured breath brought another trickle of blood from the side of his mouth. The vivid streak running down his chin was in stark contrast with his pallor.

‘What d’yer reckon. He gonna make it?’

‘No.’ It was brutally abrupt, but Libby knew he’d be doing no favours by saying anything else, by holding out false hope. God only knew what had kept the Yank alive so far. He was hit in the lungs and must have lost the best part of four pints of blood already. It was everywhere, staining the carpet and Ripper and him.

‘Aw shit. This weren’t supposed to happen.’ Ripper made minor adjustments to the absurd bow, now losing its shape and collapsing as it blotted up more and more blood. ‘We only came out here for a spot of fun, to get a medal. What am I gonna tell his wife? He only got married just afore he came out here. Sally’s expecting in the spring.’

‘You want to tell her anything you better concentrate on keeping yourself alive, that’s unless you want to end up like him.’ It wasn’t the casualty on the floor Libby was referring to. He jerked his thumb towards the scene of the collision. ‘Did you know him as well?’

Not taking his eyes off his friend, Ripper shook his head. ‘First time I seen him was today. They gonna do that to Wilson as well?’

It always came as a shock to the new men, the first time they saw the treatment meted out by the Russians to the bodies of NATO troops. Libby had seen it too often to still be deeply affected, but now and again some communist NCO or officer would come up with a new idea, and then the atrocities listed against the Warsaw Pact forces would be lengthened by yet another degrading obscenity.

The body of the truck’s driver had been extricated from the crushed metal of the cab, and a couple of Russians, directed by the hammer-wielding senior sergeant, had roughly nailed it to a door before dousing it in fuel and setting it alight.

Now the corpse’s bullet-shattered head drooped to contemplate with empty soot-filled sockets the charred ruin of its body, dose-by, the APC’s crew worked on their damaged track, apparently oblivious to the appalling stench.

‘If they find him, I expect they’ll make the time. They don’t ever get leave, or much free time come to that, so they look on it as a sort of entertainment, light relief. That’s nothing to what they get up to if they get hold of our wounded.’

‘That’s sick. Hell, where I’m from we got some real mean guys. The sort of fellas who’d stamp you into the ground, then come back and sue yer for damaging their boots, but that lot out there, they’re sick. I heard the stories, but that…’

‘That’s nothing.’ Libby got out another tablecloth and pulled dust sheets off the furniture to make blankets. A spasmodic shaking gripped the wounded man and his hands and forearms were cold to the touch. He draped them over him, tucking them in about his chin.

‘Ever since the revolution, they’ve been doing a bugger sight worse things to their own people. How many did Stalin get through, twenty million? And how many was it that Brezhnev starved in the labour camps, or had tortured in the Lubianca, or turned into cabbages by sticking them in. mental wards and pumping them full of drugs? The civvies back home think they’re such a fucking clever crowd, keeping the war in the Zone. All they’re bloody doing is giving the commies more time to practise. If they gave us the weapons and the men to do the job once and for all, we could shove them all the way to bloody Siberia, and back into the fucking dark ages.’

‘Seems to me as some of them reckon they’re still there.’

‘They are.’ Slowly and carefully, Libby slid another cushion beneath Wilson’s head as pink bubbles formed at his nostrils. ‘The commies are at about the same level as the Japs were at the start of World War Two, and you know what they got up to.’

‘He feels awful cold.’

Libby moved Ripper’s hand, and felt for a pulse. It was hard to find, weak and fluttery. ‘Not long now. Better get ready to move out. Sounds like there’s still plenty of fighting going on in the centre of town.’

‘I’m not leaving him, no way.’ There was aggression in Ripper’s abrupt announcement.

‘That wasn’t what I said…’ The bubbles had stopped growing and popping at Wilson’s nostrils. Libby sought the pulse again. ‘…but there’s no point in staying now. He’s gone.’