“There’s still an air raid warning in force.” Garrett avoided looking at the girl’s torn and mangled lower torso. “No one is going to be so stupid as to try and come in before the all-clear, are they?”
“A lot will have been on their way here overnight by road.” That was a point worrying Revell no less than Stadler. “They’ll be coming in by all the back routes to avoid the expected traffic. There’s no obvious signs of damage to warn them off.”
Hyde watched Sampson draw a sheet over the body. It was instantly drenched in blood. “If they haven’t heard anything on the radio, and manage to avoid all the checkpoints, there’ll be nothing to stop them.”
“Maybe this is the first.” Dooley pointed to the far end of the street. A BMW coupe, headlamps blazing, was accelerating fast towards them. Straight into the sniper’s killing ground.
FIFTEEN
A glance at the hotel from which the fire had come reassured Revell. It was well alight. Flames sprouted from several windows, and the canopies above were flaring brightly in the early morning light. The sniper must have been driven out.
The BMW did not check its speed as it closed on the rolling bank of smoke coming from the side street. Revell sent Dooley forward to flag it down, but even as he stepped off the curb, a weapon was aimed from a rear window and a wild burst was sprayed in his direction.
Dooley threw himself behind the parked cars, looking back to the major to see if he should return the fire. Before Revell could make that decision, the BMW was almost level with them.
Hyde had noted the inexperienced way in which the coupe was handled, was ready to fire, anticipating the command, but it didn’t come. It wasn’t needed.
Doing close to a hundred, the driver noticed the bodies in the roadway just too late. Throwing the wheel over, he tried to slalom around the prone forms. Broad tires being stripped of tread and squealing under the forces imposed on them, the BMW clipped the tailboard of a truck parked at an angle to the curb.
A fender was crushed into a wheel, and with its windshield shattered by the collision, the car went out of control. There was a succession of further impacts as the BMW wrecked a line of vehicles by concertinaing them. Then came a last torrent of noise as it pounded into, and partly demolished, the porch of a bank.
Steam gushed from the battered car as Hyde and Dooley tugged at its jammed doors. The driver’s side came open and an AK47 clattered out on to the road.
“Spetsnaz.” Reaching in through a glassless back window, Hyde retrieved a holdall from the crushed back seat. Delving into it, he pulled out a handful of assorted gold jewellery, then a second, then a third. “These boys were going freelance.”
As the steam and dust of the impact drifted clear, Revell could see that the three men in the coupe all wore Soviet paratroop coveralls and helmets. The crumpled floor was littered deeply with more jewellery and loose ammunition.
One of the three Russians was still alive. He was dragged out, semiconscious. Both his arms were obviously broken at wrist and elbow, where he had tried to brace himself by holding onto the back of the front seats. His face was covered in blood from a broken nose and more dripped down his front from his mouth.
Sampson pulled the man’s bottom jaw down, and more blood poured out. “Don’t hold out and hopes of interrogating this guy, Major.” Sampson bent down for a closer look. “He’s gone and bitten his tongue clean through. Must have some internal injuries as well, judging by the difficulty he’s having breathing.”
Propped against the side of the wreck, the Russian groaned as he tried to move his arms. His eyes were open startlingly wide, but he appeared to be looking through the men, unseeing. His mouth hung slack, blood pulsing from the back of his throat. Again in his pain he made a slight movement.
His left eye splattered apart as a shot rang out. The other closed abruptly, and a strong pulse of blood became instantly a trickle that soon stopped.
“He was going for a weapon.” Andrea saw the looks directed her as she holstered her pistol.
“Like hell he was.” Revell had been all but deafened by the report almost in his ear. “With two broken wrists?”
Andrea shrugged. “What would you have done? Bound his injuries and sent him for treatment? This way we waste no time on him.”
There was nothing, Revell knew, that he could say that would get through to her. The fact that the Russian was probably dying made no difference. If she could have cut short his life by half a second, then Andrea would have done it. The only time he had ever seen her spare a Russian who she could have finished, was when they were trapped in burning vehicles.
Dooley was looking longingly at the gold bracelets and rings brightening the gory interior of the BMW “Nice stuff, but it wouldn’t have gone far between three of them. Suppose they couldn’t resist it, never having seen anything like it back home.”
“You are very wrong about their not having seen such goods before.” Boris had been looking for ways to fill his own pockets, but was aware that Sgt. Hyde was watching him. He was also very aware of Andrea being close by. He knew that only the major’s presence prevented her from summarily executing him. “But correct about them not seeing such things in the USSR. Many Spetsnaz, like KGB men, travelled widely in the West before the war. Usually as members of sports teams. It helped them get to know their future targets.”
“So this lot will have already done a reconnaissance of Munich, got to know the ground.” Dooley reluctantly tossed a heavy gate-bracelet back into the wreck. “Pity they didn’t teach them to drive decently at the same time.”
As usual, Boris took the remark quite seriously at face value. “I do not think that instruction on a Moskvitch or Lada is good training for handling a BMW, but that and army vehicles is all they would have had.”
It was quite light now, and with the day was coming more evidence of attempts to tackle the Russian incursion. Small-arms fire could be heard coming from several directions. Some was clearly sniper fire, single shots at widely spaced intervals. That would mark enemy attempts to keep the civilians below ground. But there were also outbreaks of heavier exchanges, proof that police units were also getting involved on an organized scale.
As yet, there was nothing to indicate that the columns supposed to be working their way inwards, were as yet anywhere nearby. Revell hadn’t expected that there would be by this time, if there was to be any at all.
If Col. Klee’s men had his enthusiasm for their task, they might not even have left their barracks yet. As for the force coming in from the airport, their antiterrorist training hardly fitted them for the role of street fighting infantry. It was likely their progress would be very slow.
Re-forming the patrol, Revell had a brief word with control — to advise them of the burning hotel and the casualties — and then resumed their interrupted progress.
Every intersection, every open space, and every wide avenue was a potential death trap, but taking to side roads wherever they could, they encountered no more snipers.
There were more bodies to be seen. Individual police officers, emergency service vehicles with their crews dead in and around them, and a surprising number of civilians.
Most were near the entrances to air raid shelters. A few were scattered more widely. Some could be identified as looters by the goods they still clutched in a last greedy embrace. Others were there for less definable reasons. Perhaps they were drunks who had not heeded the sirens or possibly the more desperate of the many who found the shelters hard to endure.
Revell didn’t know how many shelters there were, but there had to be quite a number the enemy gunmen did not cover. From them would come a steady trickle of the more foolish or foolhardy. Perhaps the obvious sounds of conflict would convince the majority to stay under cover, even though no bombing had materialized.