Gunion had stayed with the remaining APC, and then escorted it back. The vehicle was now in the shadow beside the tumbled farm building, and the men were stationed in the rubble. The two Scimitars were parked in what had been the farm’s orchard and a carpet of apples covered the ground.
Hinton was angrily discussing the tragedy. ‘It was a Leopard! A bloody Heer Leopard. Hull-down in the wreckage of a supermarket.’
A Leopard! Good God, thought Sache-Worrel, we lost all our men to a NATO tank. Is war all mistakes? It was beginning to look like it.
‘You sure it was a NATO crew?’ asked Gunion. ‘It might have been captured!’
‘It should have been bloody captured,’ growled Hinton disgustedly. ‘It would have been better for us. I lost eleven men, good men… you’ve lost six… every one dead.’
‘Who were the Leopard crew?’
‘There was a 7th German Armoured Division flash on the back of the tank,’ said Hinton. ‘And what I could see of their equipment afterwards was all West German.’
‘What did they say when you told them we were British?’ asked Sache-Worrel.
‘I’m afraid we didn’t have time for a conversation. They were fighting with the commander’s hatch wedged partly open… we dropped them a message and shut the hatch.’
‘A message?’
‘A British ordinance mark on a grenade!’
The second transmission from HQ, due to be made at 02.23 hours, did not materialize. Again the men experienced the now familiar feelings of uncertainty. Had the radio message been transmitted an hour earlier than they had expected? Would it be transmitted an hour later? The message was supposed to give a new target for the unit. But even more important, it was a form of contact with their comrades. Gunion had decided against any further attempt to pursue the first target of the Soviet Division’s HQ, by now they would probably have been moved, and there was less than four hours until dawn. He didn’t want the last two Scimitars caught in the centre of the main Russian troop movements in broad daylight.
The SAS were free to operate as an independent unit after the first night, and Hinton had already explained his plans. He intended to abandon the APC and work on foot. Men were easier to conceal than vehicles, and he would travel for the remainder of darkness into the sector occupied by the Soviet logistics column and operate there. He had a potential rendezvous with a Bundesgrenzshutz unit in forty-eight hours, and would link up with them if they still existed. Supply points of additional weapons and explosives were already available to him when he needed them, and he would be organizing a guerrilla force.
Hinton could make it all sound so casual and easy, thought Sache-Worrel. The man was much harder than himself, brutal in his attitude even to friends, though there weren’t more than three of four years’ difference in their ages. Listening to him made Sache-Worrel feel like a new boy at prep’ school.
He realized now that everything he had ever done in his military training had only been a game. Of course it had been tough and essential… the best that could be given to the officers and men. But behind every training action was the knowledge that someone somewhere was giving the orders and knew what they were doing; within a very few hours you were always clean, warm, and ensconced back in the comfort of the mess with your friends, laughing over a few gin and tonics. And in the background were your families, girlfriends, wives, keeping the whole thing in perspective.
Ireland? It had felt dangerous at the time, but it had been a pushover; border patrols in the open countryside south of Armagh, and the faintly hostile attitude of the people, which you knew was seldom genuine but enforced by the IRA activity in the area. In resrospect, the former tour of duty seemed like a holiday.
He remembered a conversation with his father a few days before he had left for Ireland. ‘Don’t try to be a hero,’ his father had said.
He had laughed at the well-meant advice which was almost a cliche. ‘Chance would be a fine thing.’
‘That’s exactly what I mean. Don’t look for the opportunity. Heroes have a tendency not to survive.’
‘It’s not a war, Dad.’
‘It’s active service, and the nearest thing to a war you may ever have to fight. Don’t be tempted to use your tour of duty to test your courage. That’s not its purpose.’
‘Things have changed in the army, Dad. It’s a lot more organized than in your day; modern communications are very sophisticated… satellites, advanced radio techniques. We have computers… we just feed in the information, and the instruments come up with the answers. Our intelligence is first-class… radar… infra-red detectors… electronic sensors… we know every move an enemy can make. It’s all very organized and technical. About the only decision I have to make, is when to clean my teeth.’
Everything had seemed so neat and orderly. Then. Clean smart uniforms, instructors who fed you their information lucidly and with assurance, orders given and immediately obeyed.
‘This is a Scimitar.’ The usual army practice of treating everyone in training, even young officers, as complete idiots. ‘Welded aluminium construction. Fast, light and manoeuvrable. Pretty, gentlemen, very pretty. First-class reconnaissance vehicle. Crew three. Length 4.743 meters, width 2.184 meters, height 2.115 meters. Maximum road speed eighty-seven kilometers an hour. Range, six hundred and forty-four kilometers. It will climb a vertical object of half a meter, or a trench two meters wide. No nasty habits, well-bred, and a little on the fancy side. A nice smart charger for a Lancer gentleman. Treat her right, and she’ll look after you. And what appears to be a punt-gun on her turret, is a Rarden cannon; ninety to a hundred rounds a minute. Single shots, or bursts of up to six rounds. Case ejected outside the vehicle, so they don’t scrape the burnish off your toecaps. Interesting ammunition, the round doesn’t arm until it is twenty meters from your barrel, and if it doesn’t hit the target in eight seconds, blows itself to pieces. Very convenient… tidy. You are going to learn everything about it, gentlemen, and I am going to teach you.’
‘This is your ammunition: TP; TP-T; MINE HEI-T; SAPHEI, APIC-T.’
‘A Helmgard helmet, Mister Sache-Worrel. And what is it fitted with? Accoustic valves to protect your delicate eardrums! And what else? Right! Your communications facilities. And these are part of…? Yes, Clansman… your communications system. Eight hundred and forty channels available, gentlemen; HF and VHF; frequency coverage from one point five to seventy-five point nine seven five MHz, and two hundred and twenty-five to three hundred and ninety-nine point zero MHz.’
‘This gentlemen, is the ZB 298 battlefield surveillance radar, which can be fitted to reconnaissance vehicles… the thermal imaging sight… lasar range-finder… the night vision gunner’s sight… you need to know about mines, gentlemen; this is a film of the Ranger mine discharger system; the discharger holds one thousand two hundred and ninety-six mines in one load, and can fire out eighteen mines a second… bar mines are laid by ploughs; seven hundred an hour… note the angles of your smoke grenade dischargers; a full hundred and eighty degree smoke screen… gentlemen, this is not a cage for the display of baboons, though I sometimes wonder, this is the Morfax gunnery simulator…’
So much information, but still confusion…
Would his father have been confused, too, wondered Sache-Worrel? His own war had lasted less than twenty-four hours and he had no idea what was happening. His father’s war had lasted five years. Could doubt and uncertainty last that long, or was it eventually overcome? And fear? War had not really begun for him yet… it was early days… hours… and yet he had already been terrified. He had seen death at a distance but not yet touched it. He realized how condescending he must have sounded to his father… wars were all the same. You might fight them with different weapons, in different places, but they were the same.