‘Give me a grenade.’ Ripper held out his hand. ‘Are you thinking of doing something silly?’ Without giving it a second thought, Libby had reached for one of the fragmentation grenades attached to his webbing. He paused, and didn’t unclip it.
‘I’m gonna get me a commie battle taxi. I owe it.’ The long thin bony fingers were still held out towards him, making opening and closing grasping gestures. ‘You can’t take out an APC with one of these. The best you’ll manage is to stir up a bloody hornet’s nest.’
‘OK, so tell me how I do it then.’ He’d withdrawn his hand and was now stripping Wilson’s body of its spare ammunition. ‘I reckon it’d please him if I used some of his lead for this job. That’d be a kinda justice, don’t you think?’
‘I suppose so. Alright, we’ll do it together, but we do it my way.’ Libby handed over two grenades. ‘You remember that. My way.’
‘Don’t matter a cuss to me which way, so long as it gets done.’ Before standing up, Ripper removed Wilson’s dog-tags. They were wet and sticky with congealed blood. ‘I sure do wish I could take him home to Sally, for a decent Christian burial. Don’t seem right, leaving him here, like this.’
‘You can tell graves registration. Make a note of the address, otherwise he might lay here for years. They’ll take care of him. He’ll have a proper burial, eventually.’
‘Yeah, I’ll do that.’ Ripper flicked the edge of a dust sheet over the pale face. ‘Now how about we go kill ourselves a whole parcel of commies?’
All the houses on the road had been locked, a symbol of the touchingly hopeful faith of the town’s fleeing inhabitants in the possibility of returning one day. It was difficult to quietly gain access to one close by the scene of the collision, and when they at last resorted to breaking a pane of glass, the sound of its falling on to a tiled kitchen floor seemed monstrously loud, coming as it did during a short lull in the battle.
There was a smell of decay in the house, strongest near the expensive fitted units in the kitchen. Green mould filled the shelves of an open fridge and spread across the floor, following the course the melted ice had taken. On a worktop, there was evidence that a meal had been in the midst of preparation when the alert had sounded.
‘You looking for something?’ Expecting to head straight for the front of the building, Ripper couldn’t work out what was going on, when Libby lingered in the kitchen to rake and rummage through every cupboard.
Stuffing an assortment of clinking bottles and various garish plastic containers into a pedal bin liner he hastily emptied of stale rubbish, Libby ignored the question, then led his companion at a fast pace through the dining room and lounge and up the stairs to the top floor. They barely made it in time.
Some of the Russians had begun to take an interest in the contents of the houses about them, and one after another front doors were collapsing before determined shoulder charges.
‘Better get ready. They could try here soon.’ Taking one of the containers from the bag, Libby ripped a sheet into strips and began to bind a grenade to it. ‘Give me a hand then.’ He pushed a selection across the double bed to Ripper. ‘Now what’s this supposed to do?’ Ripper examined the label on a two litre bottle of lavatory cleaner, an illustration making its application obvious. ‘You want to make them clean round the bend?’
‘Funny, ha, ha. Just bloody do it.’ Finishing the first, Libby picked up a bottle of bleach and gave that similar treatment. Tm fed up with being on the receiving end of that chemical muck the Ruskies are forever chucking about, it’s our turn to have a go with the stuff. Or at least make the buggers think we are. Soon as they catch a whiff of this, you watch them panic’ Cautiously, he moved to the window.
The Russians were beginning to emerge with their booty from the houses they had already looted. As they sorted it, deciding what to keep and what to abandon, their decisions were frequently peculiar, prompted more by whether or not it was possible to get a particular object aboard their transport than by the value of the article.
Their officer strolled about with an affected attitude of disinterest, but now and again he would pounce on one of the piles and appropriate some piece for himself, handing them to a private staggering along in his wake, burdened with a bulging valise.
As a pair of junior sergeants approached the house, there came a shout from the men working on the damaged track. They had completed the repairs. With their officer deeply occupied with gaining a larger than fair share of the strangely assorted loot, the enemy machine gun teams began a hasty and incautious withdrawal back to the APC.
‘There won’t be a better chance than this.’ Libby took a grenade and attached bleach container, and pulled out the pin. ‘Lose that window when I tell you.’
Down below, spurred on by the continuing sounds of bitter fighting from elsewhere in the town, the Russians were forgetting rank and manners as they made a crush at the carrier’s rear doors.
‘Now!’
Twenty rounds from Ripper’s assault rifle shattered the still rain-dotted panes and broke apart the peeling frames. Through the hail of spinning fragments the ill-balanced contrivance tumbled end over end. It struck the road a few yards short of the carrier and went off immediately in a great cloud of steam and spray.
The sudden and overpowering stench sent the Russians into a panic as it washed over them. The scramble to get into the carrier ceased abruptly and every man snatched frantically at the pouch holding his respirator, elbowing others aside to lift it to his face.
A fight broke out as a soldier without his mask tried to snatch another’s. The struggle was short and violent and the respirator’s new owner stood on his victim’s body to put it on.
The deception was reinforced by two more of the devices. Both exploded in the air, sending a drenching cloud of pungent household chemicals towards the Russians. At that their nerve broke, those already aboard slammed the doors on the men still trying to get in, and the APC began to lurch through an ill-judged turn that brought it into collision with several houses in turn. The succession of jarring impacts gave its turret gunner no chance to bring his weapons to bear, and as the carrier completed the manoeuvre it passed right under Libby’s window.
Concentrating on bringing down the last of the abandoned infantry, Ripper only caught a glimpse of the bundle of grenades Libby tossed out. He brought up his rifle after fitting a fresh magazine, and levelled it an officer who appeared hesitant, uncertain whether to seek cover, or chase after his vehicle. A group of five bullets aimed at the Russian’s chest went wildly astray as Ripper was bowled over by a heavy tackle about his knees.
‘What are you up to? You made me miss the bastard.’
‘Keep your bloody head down.’ Cradling his head on his arms, and opening his mouth wide Libby waited for the blast. The air was thick with the fumes of diesel exhaust and bleach, then it was broiling hot as well, as a huge shock caught the building and shook it. First the floor slammed up into them, then as a fireball passed the windows the walls shed great slabs of plaster and the ceiling fell in. It became almost impossible to breathe in the choking dust that reduced visibility virtually to nil.
‘Jesus, what was that, you got some pocket-size nukes?’ Dazed, spitting out dust and pieces of carpet pile, Ripper needed the support of an overturned coffee table as he got shakily to his feet. ‘Hey, those commies ain’t the only ones who play for keeps.’ He stuck his head out of the window. At first glance the APC, now immobile with its motor still running raggedly, hadn’t been all that badly damaged. Most of the force of the blast had been borne by the hull top, just to the rear of the turret. But as he looked harder he could see strips of rubber beading hanging down the armoured side of the vehicle. They came from the bottom rim of the turret, now lifted off its ring. There were dents and buckles in the roof of the carrier and it had been holed in several places.