Risking a look, Ackerman was in time to see the upper floors of the restaurant collapsing into the ruins. Then the remainder of the roof caved in, to complete the work of destruction. The place where they’d recently been resting had ceased to exist. Where it had stood, there was only a ragged gap in the row. A thick pall of dust billowed about the street.
“Shit. The old girl would never believe he’d had a hand in that. Talk about overdoing it!”
Overhead the gunship was still circling, searching for movement on the streets. Against such firepower an attempt to move would be suicidal. Ackerman was thinking that nothing would induce him to go out on that street again, when Revell ordered him to do just that.
“Find the others. Tell them to stay under cover, well dispersed. Let Sgt. Hyde know that I’m going to try the subway. If the civvies got away, then the tunnels will be clear, and we can get to Marienplatz.”
Revell watched his messenger get safely to the other side of the road, then had one last go at getting through on the radio. He could get no response from the bunker. It appeared to be off the air completely.
He made his way into the subway. He took no special precautions, didn’t expect anybody to be there. By this time in the morning, the evacuation should be well underway, even nearing completion. But if it was, then the effort had not reached this station as yet.
His entrance into the packed ticket hall created an electric reaction. A large part of the crowd cowered fearfully away, trampling each other and crushing some people against the walls and barriers. Another, smaller, section of the mass became aggressive, standing their ground, even edging forward.
A tall blond boy stepped to the front, waving a passport. “I am Swedish. I am a neutral, see, I have -”
Even as he opened the document, he was grabbed and hauled back into the throng. Many of the mob held improvised weapons, and they began to move towards the officer, threateningly.
Broken bottles, lengths of piping, pieces of timber were all displayed as they shouted.
“You’ll have to kill us all…”
“Come on then…”
They were beginning to surround him. Revell tried to fall back towards the entrance. He shouted to them, in English and in German, but they weren’t in a mood to listen.
“I’m with the NATO forces-”
“We know your tricks…”
That’s how Spetsnaz operate…”
Revell sensed that fear was prompting — among some of the civilians — a suicidal last stand against what they thought was a Russian paratrooper.
Rapidly they were becoming more confident as he failed to take positive action. They had managed to surround him and began to close in. Nothing he could say would get through to them, convince them of who he was.
He was the enemy, that was their only thought. The mob rushed at him.
NINETEEN
Revell felt the mass of hands grabbing at him, trying to wrest his submachine gun away from him. A length of timber was swung down at his head. It grazed the side of his helmet and landed hard on his shoulder, numbing his arm. Only the thickness of his padded flak vest prevented it from doing worse harm.
He shouted as loudly as he could, but neither his imperfect German, or English, made any impression on his attackers. Blows rained against his arms and hands where he clung to the MP5. Fingers were plucking at his holster, trying to remove his pistol.
It was the struggling and tussling of the mob itself that prevented their immediate success. Several though had fastened strong grips on his submachine gun, and he could not resist their efforts much longer.
There was a face at the back that Revell recognized. It was Sophia. She was trying to pull the men off, calling to them, but failing to have any effect. Constantly she had to pick herself up after being knocked aside by the mad scramble.
A shot rang out, deafeningly loud in the confined space. The bullet penetrated the suspended ceiling and brought down a light fitting and a shower of fragments of plastic. Still lit, the neon swung back and forth, making wild shadow patterns on faces.
Two more shots rang out and destroyed other panels and neons above them before the crowd finally backed off. The shouting and baying halted, and Sophia took advantage of the lull to tell everyone she could reach that she knew Revell.
Andrea had her MP5 levelled at the attackers, who were now slowly pressing back into the main body of the crowd. Apart from them a little, stood a police officer, not knowing which side to join.
Crossing to Revell, Sophia looked as if she would have put her arms about him, but she saw Andrea’s expression and stopped short in front of him.
“I am sorry. We are all frightened. There have been shots at some who tried to leave, to see what was happening. We thought the Russians had taken the city.”
“Well, they haven’t, not all of it. Are things bad down here?”
“It is getting worse. There have been fights. There is talk that one man was killed on the platform, and that others were wounded by knives and bottles. How much longer shall we be down here?”
He could hear the strain in Sophia’s voice. For the first time he was conscious of being able to hear a constant undercurrent of groaning and crying coming from the crowd. Occasionally there would be an aggressive demand for silence, followed by a loud slap and then more shouting from several voices, accompanied by ever louder wailing.
“I understood they were going to get you all out through the subway system. Has nothing been done?”
“A few have been seen to go into the tunnels. Most are too frightened to make the attempt. I believe it is far worse down there. They have no sanitation for such numbers.”
I’ll see if I can find out what’s supposed to be happening. As I understood it, everything was organized.”
Accompanied by both women, Revell went to the entrance and a few steps up towards street level, to get better radio reception. Though he tried for several minutes, he had no better luck than earlier.
His men wouldn’t like it, but they could cope with being hunted by one of their own gunships, until the situation was brought under control somehow. But the civilians below needed reassurance. There was none he could give them. It wasn’t even wise to mention the evacuation plan, in case it had been dropped. A false hope could be as dangerous as a real fear in these conditions.
“Does no one care? They can have no idea what conditions are like in the shelters.” Sophia was near to tears.
“I expect everything is being thrown in to the effort to clear the Russians out first.” Revell could think of no other excuse to make. “It’s unpleasant I know, but they are safe.”
In truth though, that wasn’t something that Revell could be certain of at all. He thought again of those senior officers he’d seen in the bunker. There might be those among them who were brilliant at organizing logistics — the nuts and bolts of running and feeding an army — but this was a situation they were hardly equipped to handle.
The comfort of the air-conditioned bunker, with its generous allocation of space, gave them no insight into what it was actually like for the other half million in the city. Very likely they had not even given it a thought, taking it for granted that the conditions that prevailed for them were universal.
The general’s bunker had been built long before the war. Originally it had been solely intended for use as a civil defence operations centre, in a post nuclear strike scenario.
Shelters built at the start of the war, for the mass of the population, had few of the same refinements. Civilian administrations had balked at the high expenditure involved in fitting all of them out to that standard. In the majority of cases, air-filtration, sanitation, and the necessary stocks of food and medical supplies had been given scant attention.