“We must have copped a bit of damage.” Burke was having increasing trouble keeping the craft on course. “I think the ride skirt’s taken a hit. We’re spilling air.”
“There’s a railroad overpass two kilometres dead ahead.” Hyde checked his map, though he had hardly any need. They had fought over this area, to the east of Hanover, many times before. “Take us down into it. Turn south, there’s a road bridge, we’ll tuck in underneath it. No point in advertising where we are.”
As the hovercraft nosed over the edge of the embankment and slewed sideways down to the track bed, they became aware of a steady leathery drumming against the left-front of the hull. The machine had taken on a definite and uncorrectable list to that side.
“Must be that Land Rover that got in the way.” Burke examined the chunk of aluminium. “Looks like a part of his wheel arch.”
“I don’t give a damn if it’s a part of the driver’s crotch.” Hyde surveyed the ride-skirt. “How long to replace those panels?”
Burke shrugged. “Maybe thirty minutes. Quicker to do both than mess about patching the one that’s still hanging on.”
“I want it done in twenty.” Hyde reached into the craft and pulled a Stinger missile from under the driver’s seat. “Give me a whistle when you’re ready. And for Christ’s sake do something about him.” He indicated the body entangled with the components Ripper and Garrett were trying to free. “Cover him over.”
Looking from the Stinger the sergeant held nonchalantly, Burke found himself involuntarily scanning the sky. “No chance of us being pounced on, is there? The truce is in force now, isn’t it?”
“Why take chances? I’ll be up on the bridge. Remember, twenty minutes.” The bank was steep and with his awkwardly bulky load Hyde was sweating profusely by the time he reached the top. He threaded his way through the rusted remains of a wire fence and walked to the centre of the bridge.
A wrecked West German civilian ambulance and a couple of well bleached skeletons stood at the far end. The vehicle’s front was crushed flat where it had been bulldozed aside by a tank. He hoped that the knocked out T72 in the distance was the one that had done it. Both tableaus dated from the first days of the war.
Then the Warpac forces had rampaged across this part of West Germany. It had seemed like nothing could stop them. On the first day, heedless of losses, they had made forty miles in places. Hyde remembered being at a HQ, the first evening, seeing the red flags sprouting on the situation map as Russian reconnaissance elements and Spetsnaz units turned up in places they had no right to be, far behind the NATO front line.
But as the markers of NATO units had been steadily moved farther and farther west and grown steadily fewer in number, although they weren’t to know it, the Warpac advance was already in deep trouble.
It had been a totally unexpected factor that had first dislocated and then stopped the pell-mell assault. Soviet satellite troops, mostly Polish and Hungarian but with a few East German also, had mutinied.
Months later, when NATO forces had begun to re-capture odd pockets of territory, they had come across mass graves. In one Hyde had counted over a thousand bodies in the top layer alone. The stench had driven him off from completing even that crude estimate. But not before he had recognized the uniforms.
The pit had contained the rotting remains of a whole East German infantry battalion. Slaughtered to a man, with no pretence of selection or discrimination. Officers, drivers, medics, all had been mowed down and dumped like so many bags of garbage.
Since then they’d seen countless other examples of the Communist way of instilling loyalty and discipline. What an ugly farce it made of all the disarmament talk of the 1980s. All of Gorbachev’s “glasnost” had counted for nothing when the Russian military chiefs judged it had gone too far and taken over the reins.
There was no real danger of their coming under air attack. Hyde had used that as an excuse to get away on his own for a few minutes. He could hardly believe that this truce meant the end of the war. There had been five others before it, none had lasted more than a couple of weeks. The average was six days.
But if it was, what then? When the war had started he’d dreaded a disabling wound. Well, he’d got a disfiguring one, and now because of it, he dreaded the peace.
The chemical level indicator was registering a low reading, he took off his helmet and lifted his respirator. Flakes of graft tissue came with it, adhering to the straps.
Thorne had been unlucky to pick up something so deadly, even on that poison-riddled tract of land. But he’d been lucky not to have suffered. The pain didn’t have to continue for you to suffer from a wound.
With the tips of his gloved fingers Hyde pressed the spongy tissue of his face. There was no sense of feeling, in the same way as he had no sense of smell or taste. All that had gone in the fire, with his face.
From below in the overpass came the stuttering note of a klaxon, and he started back. At the fence he paused, sighted on the T72 and sent the missile on its way. It was a direct hit where the turret sat on the hull.
Where was he going to use that skill in civilian life? It was a joke. For him there was only the war. For him it had to go on.
FIVE
From the roof of the hotel Major Revell had a good view of the grounds and the countryside for several kilometres all around.
The battles that had surged back and forth had largely spared the impressive old building. A couple of solid shots, tungsten-tipped misses from a distant tank versus tank engagement, had punched holes in the walls and a single five hundred pound iron bomb had cratered the garden and destroyed the serried precision of much topiary work, but that was all.
Even looting had been on a very minor scale. It was a good choice for the Special Combat Company’s base. Close enough to the rear bases to enable Carrington and his team of brilliant scroungers to prey on the dumps, and too far forward to be of serious interest to higher commands who might otherwise have appropriated it for themselves.
Beyond the perimeter fence had sprung up the inevitable clusters of refugee tents, huts, and shelters. Wisps of smoke rose from them, and the copses nearby already showed the usual sprinkling of fresh stumps where fuel had been cut.
Lieutenant Vokes climbed out through the skylight and joined him. They watched as a pale blue Jaguar XJS executed a high speed dry skid in through the tall wrought iron gates at the far end of the long drive. Twin fans of gravel marked the sports car’s savage acceleration and it fishtailed slightly on the loose surface.
“Andrea?” Vokes admired the vehicle’s handling as it left the drive and tore across the overgrown lawn to be lost from sight among the wide spaced lines of military vehicles parked beneath camouflage netting.
“Who else? She’s developed a passion for the exotic. It was a Ferrari yesterday.”
“Where does she find them?”
“There are some big houses tucked away in these parts. I suppose most had two or more cars. When the civvies pulled out they were more likely to take the Rolls or the Range Rover. Can’t carry much in a Ferrari.”
“True.” Vokes sighed. “I must say, I wish it was me she had her small warm hand around rather than a gear shift.”
“Take my advice, don’t try it. She’s capable of pulling either out by the root.” There was a time, not long before, when Revell would have jumped on any one talking about her like that. But he’d changed. What he had felt for her she had burned out of him. “Garrett was the last to try. He was wearing his balls in a sling for a week. He’s scared witless of her now.”