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“Think? You think? I want to bloody well know!” Tarkovski waved the cringing orderly’s excuses aside. “Never mind, stop wetting yourself.”

Leaning back against the wall, Tarkovski felt the room beginning to rotate about him. It was a feeling he loved and he savoured the first moments of disorientation.

“The few lazy shits we’ve rounded up so far are worse than useless. I want this place bomb-proof this week, not next year. Have more rounded up. A couple of hundred adults should do it.”

The orderly made to leave, hesitating in the doorway when he thought he caught a fragment of mumbled instruction. “Did the colonel want something more?”

“Are you deaf? I said date that arrest for tomorrow. I’ll let the major enjoy tonight. If all goes well, hell think he’s sitting pretty for a while. I’d like the turnaround in his fortunes to be all the more upsetting.”

“Is that all, Comrade Colonel?”

“Yes, wait, no.” Tarkovski braced his legs, to stop himself from sliding down. “It’s Tuesday today. Have all those filthy refugees collected. Every last one. I’m in the mood for a bit of fun. Have them all here on Saturday. We’ll have another of our parties.”

SIXTEEN

Night exploded into sharp stark white light as a star-shell burst high above the clearing. By contrast the surrounding woods were all the darker. Curving lines of green and orange tracer flashed out from among the depths of the trees.

Shouts and screams came from a tent as bullets punched close spaced holes in the canvas at waist height. Another was already alight, and men reeled from it, flapping at blazing clothing.

A mortar shell detonated behind the Hummer, slashing its adjoining lean-to into ribbons and starting a fire among spare fuel cans lashed to the back.

Shocked awake by the concussion, Revell rolled clear as the flames engulfed the tinder dry material. He was scrambling to his feet five meters away when the transport’s fuel tank erupted in a ball of flame and he was put down again. The body he landed beside still clutched an M16. Revell grabbed it, and loosed off the whole magazine toward the source of the tracer.

There was no noticeable effect. A second magazine achieved no better result. He looked around. The clearing was lit like day. Although the flare had sunk from sight, the fires more than compensated for its disappearance.

Others were returning the fire, but there was no diminution in the bursts of lethal incoming. On the far side of the Russian compound a truck took a direct hit and scything slivers of cab and engine casing brought down more tents. They collapsed, like shrouds, over the dead and dying within.

Several bodies hung on the surrounding wire. The only men moving were the wounded, who did so involuntarily, and those who crawled and hugged the ground in search of cover.

“They’re using dark ignition tracer. Shift your fire further in among the timer.” Revell had to shout to be heard, but his information was passed on.

Andrea crashed to the ground beside him, seeking the slight shelter offered by the corpse. She levelled her rifle and used its underslung grenade launcher to launch a succession of 40mm rounds into the woods.

Watching the flat trajectory of the incoming tracer, Revell made a mental projection back to its probable point of origin. With its tell-tale flare not visible until it was fifty meters or more from the weapon firing it, he could only at best make an educated guess.

The first half-dozen rounds he fired from the third magazine bounced harmlessly from an unseen tree. Then he got lucky. There was no sign to give away a point of impact, but suddenly a line of tracer flicked skyward.

Updrafts generated by the several fierce fires were sending a rain of fiery scraps into the trees, starting secondary conflagrations that threatened to merge and spread.

A last mortar bomb exploded among a tangle of bodies close by the wire, and then Revell realized the attack had ceased. It was over. As abruptly as it had started. Gradually at first, and then rapidly, the returning fire petered out and finally ceased.

An eerie, momentary silence ensued. Then against a background of crackling small arms ammunition cooking off, came the all too audible cries and moans of the wounded.

“These poor sods caught the worst of it. Sergeant Hyde walked with the two officers through what was left of the Russian compound.

Only two tents still stood. The growing illumination of dawn revealed the other previous sites marked by blackened circles of ground. Thirty bodies lay in a close spaced row. Most were roughly draped with greatcoats. A couple had only their faces covered. One with a piece of cardboard from a ration box, the other a gouged and dented door panel from a truck.

The fires aboard the vehicles had burned out, but in among the trees men could be heard beating at the still smouldering underbrush.

Vokes examined a large tattered piece of what looked like red and black chiffon caught on the wire. He was glad he had not instinctively reached to touch it, when he realized what it in fact was.

He twanged the wire, and the patch of burnt skin that had sloughed from some victim of the blazing encampment fluttered to the ground.

“It could have been much worse.” Vokes wrinkled his nose as they repassed the line. Fluids from the dead were soaking into the ground about several of them. Large numbers of flies were already being attracted. “I have lost only two men killed. And that because, against my orders, they were sleeping aboard their vehicle.” He looked to where attempts were being made to lever free the remains from metalwork fire had welded them to.

“We lost six.” Revell paused by the wire, close by the bodies of his men. “Would have been less, but they tried to keep the Ruskies from getting out. They must have stood out like range targets, standing with those fires behind them.”

“Have the sentries been found yet?” Vokes slapped at a large blue-bottle that persisted mindlessly in repeatedly buzzing his face.

“No. One of the patrols will find them.” Constantly Revell was interrogating himself. What had he failed to do, and how many lives had each omission cost?

His own men, and Vokes’s, had dug slit trenches almost as a matter of habit. But nothing they’d tried could induce the construction battalion to do the same. They had paid dearly for their lethargy. Beside the thirty dead were another fifty injured. A high proportion had serious burns. Many of them would not survive. He saw that Lippincott was beckoning him over to his high-sided Saxon command vehicle.

“There was nothing more you could have done, Major,” was the only support Vokes could offer as he left them. Under his breath, to himself, he added, “but in their eyes it will not have been enough.”

“Hell, you really do seem to find trouble just about everywhere you go, don’t you, Major.” Lippincott drummed his teeth with the well-chewed end of a pencil.

“I’d say this time it found us.”

Lippincott ignored the rejoinder. “You have no idea how much trouble these casualties of yours are causing us. It was a good Idling I was already on my way here when I got the call. If I hadn’t been on hand to smooth matters, then no powers on earth could have saved your commission. Just at the time the best thing you and your maniacs can do is to lie low, you’ve got to try and create another damned incident.”

“I won’t accept that, Colonel. We can’t take the blame for a sneak attack by some Warpac outfit.”

“There you go again.” Pausing to chew hard for a moment. “Whatever you do, Major, when the war is over, if you survive it, don’t go into the diplomatic corps.”

“Do you have some other explanation, then?”

“A thousand that will go down better with the generals and politicians than that. Any case, what makes you think that in all the Zone, packed as it is with tanks and dumps and troops, the Reds are going to risk a truce they want by hitting your tin-pot outfit?”