“The ramblings of a dying man.” Grigori shrugged. “There was talk of hashish, and another officer, and of a junior sergeant. That name I did catch, he repeated it many times, Ivanov.”
“Anything else?”
“Only that it is his wish we kill them all.”
“Not much loyalty among Communists, is there.”
“Oh, no, Major,” Grigori took the remark at face value, missing the irony. “Absolutely none.”
SEVENTEEN
“Fucking creeps.” Dooley kicked out at a Russian who had stopped work to scratch his backside, and missed.
“I thought they were working quite well today.” Scully accepted the end of the hawser and passed it to a pioneer who stood on top of the felled tree.
“No, not this lot. I mean those animals back at HQ. The major has told them who did that dirty work over at the camp, and where they are now. And what do they do, fuck all.”
Taking the end of the wire as it was pushed back beneath the timber, Dooley made it fast to form a loop about the thick trunk.
“I suppose they know what they’re doing” Scully began shepherding the Russians clear before the slack was taken up. The cable had already parted once and they’d been lucky not to have any serious injuries from the incident.
“Do they? Letting the Reds get away with the murder of a couple of thousand civvies don’t seem right to me, no way. They did in Afghanistan, no reason why they should get away with it here.”
From a safe distance they watched the truck edging forward. Gradually the coil of steel straightened out. In his cab, Burke kept a close watch on the door mounted rear view mirror. Guided by hand signals from Lieutenant Vokes, he applied the brakes as soon as the full length of the plaited wire was suspended above the ground. It vibrated, with a low pitched twanging sound, in time with the slow throb of the idling motor.
Vokes went forward to the cab door, shouting in through the open window. “Take it very slowly. Stay on the line I showed you, across the road, then between those two trees and over the little clearing beyond. The going is soft, but I think it is just the deep layer of leaf mould. Try not to stop, or you may dig-in.”
This was the first of the trees to be tackled by the towing method and a crowd was gathering to watch. For the NATO soldiers it was pure curiosity; the Russian labourers though had a more specific interest. If it worked there would be less heavy work for them to tackle.
There was almost an air of excitement as the truck edged forward, accompanied by the creaking of the hawser, the splintering of wood and the deep bellow of the straining engine.
For a long moment there was no apparent movement, and a half-derisive cheer went up from the assembled audience. It was repeated when the truck began to crab sideways on the dusty surface.
A sharp crack was accompanied by a fountain of bark as the wire slipped a meter along the trunk, cutting cleanly through the stumps of several small branches. The truck’s exhaust boomed louder and almost imperceptibly the obstacle began to move. It pivoted slowly around the soil-encrusted mountain of its roots, moving steadily.
Attention switched abruptly back to the truck as its motor suddenly cut out. Sunk to its axles on one side, half way across the clearing, it rested at an angle of forty-five degrees.
Burke jumped down from the elevated cab step. “That’s the first bloody crash I’ve ever had at two miles an hour.”
Vokes circled the stranded vehicle. “No harm done. We’ll pull it out. It just means that for the next go we shall have to lay some sort of roadway, then…”
He stopped talking and bent down to examine where a large chunky treaded tire had scooped away the top-soil.
“Give me something to dig with, quickly.” He accepted the bayonet that was offered and began to carefully scrape more of the loosened material away.
Pushing his way through to the front rank, Revell looked down. The arm and shoulder, and then the head of a young child were exposed.
Reaching out, Revell pulled the lieutenant back. His work had already revealed another arm, to a body crushed beneath the wheel.
“Children.” There was a deep, choking sadness in Vokes’s voice. “In heavens name, how many will there be.”
“There are two too many already.” Leaving the encircling crowd, Clarence knelt beside the find and brushed soil from a small dirt-ingrained hand. “It just goes on and on, doesn’t it.”
For a while Revell had thought the men quite capable of bodily lifting the three-ton Bedford off the grave. It had taken considerable effort by himself and Hyde to push the others back.
“I want a guard on this site. No one is to touch anything.”
“Right, Major. I’ll put Clarence on first.” Hyde knew there was no way he would be able to get the sniper to leave the scene in any event. “If he’s going to be hanging about, he might as well be doing something useful.”
“This an experience that will be good for him.” Andrea ran his fingers along the ribbon that had been tied between the trees to mark off the ground.
“You really are a callous bitch.” Hyde had no time for the girl, when she was drunk, or as now, surprisingly sober. She had a face men would kill for, but the mind behind it was filled with death, and needed no more. “It reminds him of his kids. He found them buried under what was left of his married quarters in Cologne.”
“I know that.” Untwisting a kink in the tape, Andrea flicked a moth from it. “Do you know that he has set himself a target? He is killing a hundred Russians for each of them, and for his wife. At that last count he told me he had only a few to go. Perhaps now he will start again. It will give him something to go on living for.”
It was not what the major had expected her to come out with. His instinctive reaction to the discovery of the little bodies was to rush to headquarters and throw his news at them. A moment’s calmer consideration told Revell it could achieve nothing. Next he wanted to get on the radio and tell the world, well as much as he could reach, what was happening. It was more than likely though that any calls he made would be monitored, and rapidly jammed.
Either course of action would fail to get worthwhile results, except maybe to bring down a storm of trouble on the whole unit.
He spent an hour thinking the situation through, then made his decision. It took another hour to write out the messages, then just a few minutes to get together couriers and escorts.
Armed with passes that would get them to their various destinations, the six teams departed, taking with them the best of the transport and all the fuel they had.
He was taking a huge gamble, but at least this way, at this stage, any repercussions would come back on him alone. It was too late, even now to have second thoughts. There was no way he could pursue and turn back the dispatchers even if he’d wanted to. For all his determination though, he felt inside an unpleasant hollow, sick feeling.
Casting his thoughts back to what lay within the little, ribbon-enclosed clearing banished his doubts, and replaced it with anger and impatience.
“You getting married, and want me to make up an album? Is that it?” Swanson unslung his camera bag from his shoulder. “The boys you sent for me weren’t exactly the chatty sort. Come to that, I thought they were a tight-lipped pair of miserable bastards.”
Revell had to smile at the thought of Ripper being described as tight-lipped. “That was their orders. You’ll pick up the background as you go along. The basics are that I want a complete photographic record of something that’s happened here.”
“No problem. Why all the mystery. Is it being sat on? Are you?”
“Yes to both, heavily. Will your boss miss you if you’re missing for a half a day.”