The Jaguar reappeared from between a pair of dapple painted Saxon wheeled APC’s. It made a high speed hand brake turn onto the drive, shredding thousands of miles from the tires, and rocketed back out onto the road.
As the roar of the high revving motor died away it was replaced with another familiar sound. The distinctive thumping beat of a Huey grew steadily louder.
Vokes shaded his eyes and looked in the direction. “Twin door guns. That will be the colonel, will it not.”
’That I could do without. What does Ol’ Foul Mouth want with us?” A thought struck Revell. “Where’s Hyde and his squad?”
“Still in decontamination, over by the lake.”
“Right, keep them there, or at least out of the way until you see that chopper lift off again.”
Not asking or waiting for an explanation, Vokes hurried back down from the roof. Revell followed at a more leisurely pace, mentally equipping himself for the trouble he was expecting.
The colonel was stalking into the lobby as he reached the bottom of the elegant staircase.
“What the bloody blue fuck are you up to, Major?” Revell waited for the first blasts to wash over him. He knew from experience there was no earthly hope of having his say at this stage.
“Shit. I get you boys a nice easy number in a quiet sector, so you can build up to strength again after your last blood bath, and what do you do? I’ll tell you what you do, you near get me busted all the way back down to civilian convict. And seeing as I start as a full-blown colonel, that’s a piss awful long way.”
“Is it about the patrol?” Revell thought it best to determine that up front. The colonel had been known to spring the odd surprise by blowing up over a less than obvious matter. But this time Revell had it right.
“You call that a patrol? A patrol?” Colonel Lippincott extracted a sheaf of photographs from his pocket and waved them above his head. “With a runaway regiment of maniacs in kamikaze tanks I couldn’t have stirred more shit than you’ve done with one lousy APC.”
“Is that a compliment, Colonel?”
“That is not a damned compliment, and it wasn’t when I got it in exactly the same words from a two-star general. Have you the faintest idea how much work went into laying on this truce?” Lippincott waved any potential answer aside. “No, course you haven’t. Nor have I, but you can bet your ass it was one hell of a lot. And so while all along the Zone, from the Baltic to the Med even the most head-banging gung-ho bomb happy shit is cheerily putting aside his rifle and taking up knitting, you go out and try to queer it for everyone, and me in particular.”
Face red, Colonel Lippincott paused for breath. “Let’s get some air. This place stinks like a stale morgue.” Not waiting to see Revell tagging along behind him, he strode through the overturned tables of the opulent dining room and out through the elegant conservatory on the back of the building.
Broken glass crunched under their boots. As they stepped out onto the broad terrace a light breeze wreathed them in wood smoke and they moved to the far end to get out of it.
“Just what the blue blazes is that guy doing?” Lippincott pointed to the long shallow pit in the middle of the lawn. Tending the red-hot filling of wood ash, and replenishing it constantly from a nearby stack of logs was a sweating smoke-stained figure in grubby shorts, army boots, and chefs hat.
“That’s Scully, the company cook.”
“Is he not used to civilization?” Lippincott jerked his thumb over his shoulder to the hotel. “Back in there must be one hell of a catering kitchen. Does he always do things the hard way?”
“We’re having a barbecue.”
Resignedly Lippincott sprawled on a stone bench. “Of course, I should have known. One minute you’re fucking up the truce, next you’re having a sing-song around the campfire.”
Revell was waiting to see the photographs. They were becoming gradually more crumpled in the colonel’s grasp. “So is it… rucked?”
“See for yourself.”
They were aerial shots, with the slightly grainy effect that showed them to be unenhanced frames from a sequence obviously taken by an RPV. All ten were of the convoy ambush. It was the recorded time printed in white in the top left-hand corner of each that interested Revell most.
“See the HAPC in some of the shots? Know whose it is?”
“I’m not denying it’s ours, Colonel. We’ve got the only one in this whole sector. I presumed that was why we were chosen to carry out patrolling up until the last moment.”
“Precisely my damned point.” Accepting the return of the prints, Lippincott crammed them into the breast of his jacket when he couldn’t get them into his pocket. “You were to patrol, not do a cannon-armed simulation of the caped crusader at work. Who the hell told you to cream that Russian outfit?”
“Nobody said we couldn’t.” Absently Revell watched their cook dragging a soil encrusted tree stump toward the pit. “Those timings, on every picture, show my men turning away before zero hour for the cease fire.”
“Yeah, but thirty fucking seconds. I’ve been in action, Major,” Lippincott waved the empty sleeve of his jacket. “You can’t tell me that in the middle of a red-hot action your vehicle commander was doing some sort of crazy NASA countdown.”
“Whether he was or not, they finished in time. Are the Russians complaining?”
“Don’t they always; never known a people for bellyaching like they do. This time, though, you got lucky. Again. As we were flying in I heard over the radio that the Swedes who are policing the truce caught some of the sneaky sons of bitches trying to extricate supplies after the deadline. That about makes us even by all accounts.”
“So why the visit?” Turning, Revell half sat on the stone balustrade. He knew there had to be more coming. The colonel was very much a hands-off commander, only made special visits for special reasons.
Taking a pencil from a top pocket crammed with them, Lippincott began to chew, keeping up a spitting hail of pieces as he gradually reduced its length. “You know your outfit isn’t liked by the big chiefs. They’re still beefing about ‘private armies’ and dilution of resources. If I didn’t get you the odd mission too mucky for the Guards or the Air-Cav to tackle…”
“Seems like all our tasks are like that.”
“As I was saying, if I didn’t volunteer the Special Combat Company for a few of the more distasteful jobs I wouldn’t be able to justify your existence. Right now, though, they’re after blood. I’ve made my peace by saying we’ll do penance…”
“I get the feeling most of it is going to be done by my men.”
“What the hell do you expect?” Lippincott pushed himself to his feet with the stump of his arm against the back of the bench. “You knew the form. You were around for the other truces, you know how fragile the damned things are. Only takes one stupid mistake and it’s total war again. We need this breathing space. Sure, we’ve been chasing the tail of the Reds for five weeks, they’re on the ropes, but I tell you, so are we.”
Revell remained sitting as the colonel stalked back and forth on the neatly interlocked slabs of soft-coloured sandstone. “The men reckoned, I do, that one last push and we’d have had them back over the East German border, maybe well on the way to their own.”
“You don’t see it, do you? All you’ve got is your own little slice of the action. To the top of the next hill, the end of the next street, that’s your war. Well it’s bigger than that, there’s a lot more to it.” Lippincott snatched out one of the photos.
“This Russian engineers outfit you burned up. How many of the vehicles used to be ours? Three-quarters? It’s usually around that isn’t it. Of course it is, without captured equipment they’d have been back to horses and carts a long time ago. Come to that, some of their units are already. So are some of ours. The Zone is the biggest battle of attrition the world’s ever seen, bigger than you can ever imagine from the little bits you see. Another week, maybe less, and more than two thirds of our armour would have been immobilized by lack of spares or ammunition or both.”