‘What are you suggesting then?’ He could see the big man glaring at him, as well as that strange limey. What the hell, go for broke, they couldn’t do nothing with a couple of officers present.
‘I suggest you do what I think you do best, what you have always done, abuse yourself.’
‘Abuse…? You mean… hey, that’s dirty.’ Ripper had never heard a woman talk like that before. Not even Charlene, and she’d been real fond of men, had sampled almost all of them around town, some said even her pa’s German shepherd. The big guy was welcome to this one, talking dirty like that. It weren’t decent.
Frankfurt was lit up below them. There was no blackout in force, it was only in the Zone that showing a light could bring down death in any of a dozen different forms. Beyond it, the illumination of the towns and cities on either side gave unmistakable warning to any bomber crew that it might have strayed too far from its target, and the gain from a single contrived ‘accident’ could not be worth the dislocation of transport and manufacturing that would come with the inevitable retaliation. But sometimes there were accidents, real ones, and then the hot lines would burn, ‘arrangements’ would be reached, notes exchanged through neutral countries and the incident buried as swiftly as its victims.
The pace was set by the war on the ground, a situation that suited the Russians with the huge reserves of armour and trained manpower they had built up during the sixties and seventies. And it suited the NATO command, all too aware of its relative weakness in strike aircraft after the near destruction of the air-arm at the beginning of the war, when planes and pilots had been thrown away in desperate attempts to stem the communist advance.
There was no traffic on the streets. With the odd exception, every vehicle had been pulled into the side of the road before its driver and passengers had sought the safety of the deep shelters.
The city was like a body that had recently been taken off a life support machine. All the organs functioned for the time being, but without the brain’s direction it would not be long before they faltered and stopped.
‘Close as I can figure, we should be about over them now.’
‘What’s our altitude?’ Revell leant over the pilot’s shoulder to try to read the instrument himself.
‘Two thousand. You want me to circle?’
‘Yes, and can you take us down further.’ Pilot and co-pilot exchanged glances. It was the co-pilot who spoke for them both.
‘You know we’ve got no armour on this tub. All we’ve got is the flak-jackets we’re sitting on, and they’re staying there. They can shoot my head off, but I’m keeping my balls.’
‘Just a couple of passes should do it, then you can drop us and go home.’
‘OK, a couple, and then off.’ Pushing the stick forward, the pilot put the Chinook into a steep spiralling dive to twelve hundred feet.
They beat across the industrial estate, over warehouses, light engineering works, a small chemical plant. A man was stationed at every window, every doorway, and still there was no sign of the Russian tanks.
‘I know they’re down there.’ Screwing up his eyes, Revell urged himself to greater concentration. ‘Start the second run.’
‘Nothing.’ The pilot took time to look down at the well-lit metalled roads and floodlit storage yards laced with sidings. ‘Command must have given us the wrong references… Shit, no they didn’t.’
From a service station forecourt gobs of fuzzy bordered luminescence climbed towards them, seeming to travel faster as they approached. A second stream joined the first as it cut the air behind them.
The Chinook’s airframe was shaken hard enough to fracture its welds, as the pilot opened the throttles and jinked the chopper away from the chasing tracer.
‘The buggers are refuelling.’ Dooley shouted as he replied to the hostile fire with short bursts from an M60 he held out of the open door. His targets were far beyond the weapon’s effective range, and the tracks of the tracer were lost against the service station’s floodlit forecourt.
‘Put us down as close as you can.’
On Revell’s instructions, the chopper executed a tight half-turn, came to a dead stop, and went straight down like an express elevator.
First out, Revell supervised the fast disembarkation of the others. Hyde was last, carrying the heavy designator. He waved to the chopper’s crew, his words inaudible through the thrashing of the blades above his head, and gave them a thumbs-up.
The pilot didn’t have to hear the order, he’d anticipated it as the last of the squad jumped clear. With a rising scream, the high set engines went to full power and lifted the Chinook into the air.
Three hundred feet above the car park in which it had dropped them, the chopper’s front engine gave out a series of flame-accompanied bangs from its exhaust stack. Its rate of climb slowed and stopped and it hung there, its underside clearly illuminated by the light from the street lamps.
Tracer flicked past it, one round flashing like a firework display as it burst against a rotating blade. Another joined it, then a third. Several of the bursts went into the cabin, or bounced from its curved sides, going off at wild angles.
Just when the faulty engine picked up once more, and the helicopter began to lift again, two of the lines of bullets found the front rotor assembly. Shedding blades and shining lengths of transmission shaft the Chinook staggered, then began to whirl around in a flat spin as it plunged earthwards. The point of impact was out of their sight, beyond a long low building flanked by rows of hoppers and silos. They heard the crash, and anticipated the bubble of flame that soared and flared briefly in the darkness.
Hyde put his arm out, and held Libby back. ‘Nothing you can do, not going in from that height.’
A shower of fluttering strips of burning paper rained from the sky. Charred pornography, fragments of maps, pages of logbooks made a fiery flurry of litter.
When the last pieces were consumed and their ashes fell and broke on the roads and rooftops, Revell tore his eyes from the scene as the sound of tank engines intruded. ‘Get on that radio. I want a link with our battery kept open all the time. All of you, stay close, remember our task is to provide covering fire for Sergeant Hyde with the laser, so I don’t want anybody starting a shooting war on his own account.’
One of the T84s was still at the pumps, its crew working frantically to complete the replenishment and join the other four tanks waiting along the road. The turret-mounted anti-aircraft machine gun of every one was manned.
While the others fanned out to either side, Hyde and Cohen took up positions among precarious stacks of weathered and much stencilled packing cases in a yard across from the gas station. Checking the laser projector was looked into the correct frequency, Hyde turned on the designator to warm it up.
‘I’m ready. One round to start.’ He settled behind the box and targeted on the T84. This was his own little world, where he could be God. Where he was God, dispensing death with precision. Anything within his field of vision he could destroy. Beside him, Cohen was droning the map reference into the radio; it wouldn’t be long now.
Hyde was counting down the seconds. Thirty; the Russian crew had almost finished. One of them threw aside the hose, letting the last gush of fuel spew across the forecourt. Twenty; he’d leave triggering the beam until the last moment. If the T84 had sensors aboard, he’d give its crew no time to act on their warning. Ten seconds; grey smoke spouted from the rear of the vehicle as it began a jerking turn that would take it out on to the road. Switch on… now.
High above the city, at the apogee of its soaring, thirty thousand yard trajectory, the rocket-boosted Copperhead artillery shell began its hurtling descent towards its general target area. Its ultra-sensitive seeker instrumentation, activated by the violence of its 7,000g launch, began to search for sources of laser radiation.