“Likely or not, that’s what it must have been…”
“A regular Warpac unit? Never. No, what I reckon we’ve got here is a hit by an armed refugee mob. After your food, or ammunition. Or maybe it was one of those renegade bands, you know the type. Made up of assorted deserters of every nationality. They’ll take on any thing if there’s a profit in it.”
“For anyone who wasn’t here, that’s a plausible explanation. For anyone who wants the truce kept going it’s also a damned convenient one.” Revell felt he was crashing his head against a brick wall. He tried to keep the frustration and resentment out of his tone.
“It was bad enough to find cast iron evidence of a war crime and be told to do nothing about it, even be threatened with drastic consequences if I so much as dared to breathe a word about it. And now this. Six of my men dead, two of Lieutenant Vokes’s pioneers as well. We’ve ten wounded, including one who won’t see again and another with his bottom jaw shot off. And there’s those poor bloody Ruskies. They weren’t even armed.”
“You’ve made your point, but your orders stand. You stay here, you keep your heads down. That way, given time, maybe I can sort of rehabilitate you in the eyes of the general, but for God’s sake give me a bit of cooperation.”
On the road the ambulance convoy was getting ready to move out. Doors were being secured. Its heavy escort of military police outriders were jockeying into position.
“Where are you taking them?” Revell felt he had to change the subject or he’d explode with frustration. Ten years of taking orders had never prepared him for this.
“I said your casualties were causing problems. Take a look at that convoy and believe it. Strings were pulled that I didn’t know existed to assemble that inside of four hours. Couldn’t evacuate them by chopper in case one went down somewhere and tales got told. Had to be an overland job, where we could keep an eye on everyone.
I’ve lined them up a whole wing of a high-security isolation hospital, other side of Hanover. Never thought I’d be back bossing a convoy at this rank.” Lippincott started on another pencil.
“Sure as hell I didn’t think my butt would be on the line if I screwed up.” While they’d talked, the dead had been body-bagged and now the last of them was slid into the back of a large closed truck.
“I’ve still two men unaccounted for; we had sentries down the road a half kilometre.” As they walked to convoy, Revell kept an eye on the direction by which his patrols would return.
“Not much chance you’ll find them alive.” Lippincott climbed up into the Saxon’s open rear doorway. “When they turn up, bury them here. Make a note for graves registration…”
“I’ll radio it in.”
“The fuck you will. As of now you’re under strict radio silence. If the Warpac 3rd Shock Army come steaming this way, you run and tell us.”
“If this keeps up, the only one of us to leave here will have patted down the soil on all the others.” Sampson turned away from the two graves.
Grigori had appointed himself overseer of the grave-diggers. He now fussily supervised the filling in of the two excavations.
Revell made no reply to their medic. He felt worn out, pulled down by the utter futility of their situation. The bodies had been found shortly after the ambulances had departed. They had been buried with the minimum of ceremony in a small clearing away from the site of the enemy position, where the trees and ground were undamaged by fire and explosion.
Though it was still an hour to midday the sun was already making them uncomfortable. The dust that had percolated through their clothing mixed with their sweat into a kind of grinding paste that itched mercilessly.
Revell looked forward to a chance to strip and wash later in the day. If the patrols had found no sign of their attackers, other than a lot of empty cartridge cases, at least one of them had found a small lake. Largely free of contamination, it was only a couple of kilometres away. Dooley had been sent out with a couple of the pioneers to find and mark a direct route to it.
If they were to be stuck here for a considerable length of time, Revell saw no reason why they shouldn’t at least be as comfortable as possible. It would be some, if a very small, consolation.
Dooley appeared, running at his best speed. He had to gasp and gulp air before he could articulate.
“We’ve found a wounded civvy. Could be one of the hit men from last night. He’s in a bad way.”
“How far?”
“About ten minutes, on foot. No hope of getting a truck there.”
“Right, lead the way.” Revell called to their medic. “Sampson, bring two stretcher bearers. At the double.” A thought occurred to him. Carrington was close by. “Corporal, grab Grigori, follow as fast as you can.”
The route was through virgin forest, a compass course that detoured only around the most impenetrable tangles of undergrowth.
Despite having already run the journey once, Dooley set a fast pace, stumbling through and crushing down any shrubbery that had sprung upright since his last passage.
When they reached him, the wounded man had been hauled to a half-sitting position against the trunk of a tree. Apart from that, the two Dutchmen standing guard had done nothing to help him.
“Where did we get him?” The reclining man’s clothes were so saturated in blood that Revell could not determine where he had been wounded. He waited for the corpsman to complete a hurried examination.
“Not us, Major.” Turning the man half to his side, Sampson pulled a long, slim bladed knife from just beneath his right shoulder blade. “Nice crowd he was mixing with.”
Conscious, but white-faced with pain and shock, the man looked up at the officer. His mouth opened and closed soundlessly as he tried to form words. He succeeded only in producing pink bubbles that trickled down the sides of his chin to drip slowly onto his chest.
“Someone really wanted him dead.” Sampson stood up. “I count three stabs wounds in the back, another through the throat. He’s dying fast, Major, only a few minutes at most. You want me to give him a shot, help him go easy?”
Beckoning Grigori forward, Revell knelt down beside the dying man. “Tell him he is dying…”
“Hasn’t he had enough…”
Revell shut off Sampson’s protest and signalled to Grigori to go ahead. Limply, without change of expression the man acknowledged what he was told. “Tell him we want to get the men who hit our camp last night, and that it means we’ll get the backstabber who did this to him.”
That took longer, and Revell listened to the largely incomprehensible flow. The dying man appeared to have trouble grasping what was said to him, and the major had their interpreter repeat his words twice more.
After a moment, the effort bringing bubbles of pink blood to his lips, the man began to splutter a reply, each word accompanied by audible bubblings from his chest. It took time, with frequent pauses to gather what little strength and breath he had left. Finally his words were reduced to an incoherent mumble. He sagged lower against the tree, gasping like a fish out of water. What air he did manage to suck into his pain-wracked frame could be heard whistling out through the holes in his lungs.
Grigori appeared indifferent to the man’s suffering, looking on him with contempt. “He is a senior lieutenant in the KGB, I did not catch his name, but it is unimportant. His unit is the 717. They are at a farm ten kilometres down the road, right on the edge of the demilitarized Zone.”
“Is that all?” Revell had been only able to understand the odd word or two, and was unsure how much he could trust their interpreter, or if he should at all. “There seemed to be more than that.”