“He is accusing the driver of sabotage, he is threatening her.” Andrea levelled her M16 at the tall cab. “I can just see him…”
Before she could finish her sentence a single shot rang out and the drivers door swung open. The guard jumped from the passenger side, stalked round the front of the truck and dragged out his bruised and bleeding victim. But the woman still had fight left in her and she clung to the door handle. The Russian cracked her across the head with a heavy automatic pistol and when she continued to cling to the truck brought it up again but this time levelled it at her face. Surrendering her grip, the civilian fell out, hitting her head hard on the ground.
“No, I want him.” Preventing Andrea from firing, as the Russian thug brought up the pistol again Revell jumped forward and hurled a half brick he had picked up, straight into the face of the soldier.
At the last instant the Russian must have seen it coming and tried to shy away from the projectile but it caught him on the side of the head, drawing a spurt of blood as it tore his ear. Before he could recover from the shock Revell had jumped through the hole in the wire, grabbed the guard’s jacket and deliberately thrown himself down on top of the short but heavily built soldier, Twisting as he fell, Revell let the stunned and surprised man take the force of the impact and unleashed a pile driver hard blow straight between his eyes.
Revell had deliberately chosen the unorthodox attack to take the Russian down into the tall weeds as the second to last truck came grinding past. Its driver and guard took a casual look out at the dump truck but after a glance ignored it. Breakdowns must have been that common. Certainly they had seen nothing of the action when Revell delivered two more crashing blows before the guard was fully subdued and gave up the fight, almost unconscious. Andrea too saw the other crew lean forward to take a cursory glance at the stationary vehicle but then sit back, unseeing, uninterested as they drove past.
Waiting until the other vehicle had gone, Revell grabbed the lapels of the Russians coat and dragged him through the long roadside growth and back through the hole in the fence to behind a pile of tar stained oil drums. There he wrenched the mans arms behind his back and bound him with a thick length of sticky rope.
“The woman is dead.” Andrea returned from checking on the driver. “She has an enormous wound in her side, just under the arm. I cannot imagine how she lived long enough to resist being pulled from the truck.”
The man was fast resuming consciousness. Blood ran from a broken nose and his eyes were already puffed and showing heavy bruising. The Russians first reaction was to struggle, to wrench himself around and try reach for his holster but the major had already taken his pistol and now waved it in his face.
“Andrea, ask him where they are going.” Keeping the Russian covered, Revell enjoyed the man surprise as Andrea conducted the interrogation in her barely adequate Russian.
His initial reaction was to sneer, and he was about to spit but a sharp crack on the side of his head across the wound he already had, with the barrel of the pistol, spelt out to him the potential danger of his position. It took several questions and another threatening move by the officer but eventually and highly begrudgingly he faltered out responses to repeated queries.
“This is the second journey he has made.” Andrea passed on the information as she got it. “The delivery of foodstuffs is to a refugee site that is a few kilometres south of Bayreuth.”
“What did he see the first time. He knows this is not normal behaviour for the Commies.”
Andrea pressed the point but Revell could see the prisoner was sweating, obviously more afraid of divulging something than of the consequences of not telling them what he knew.
As Andrea turned to pass on the latest refusal to talk, the Russian launched himself to his feet and bolted, pushing them hard together so that they fell in a tangle of arms and legs.
At the fence he was snagged for a moment by the sharp edges of the broken wire and then as he ripped himself clear and fell in the process Revell fired a hasty shot.
The bullet plucked at the Russians collar and grazed his neck as he tried to recover from his fall. Then an expanding ball of white and pink tissue enveloped the lower half of his face and he went down making ugly gurgling noises.
They reached the Russian to see that what was left of his head was lolling from side to side. His eyes bulged, blood poured freely from mouth and nostrils He quivered, went into a convulsion and died.
Examining the pistol, Major Revell exchanged looks with Andrea. Her eyes were shining.
She plunged her hands into the corpses pockets and extracted two magazines for the pistol, then held out her hand for the automatic. “Explosive bullets. I can use those.”
Revell smacked the gun in to her outstretched palm and then put his hand on her shoulder to push her down in to cover as the last truck lumbered past, almost coming to a stop as its driver sought a lower gear for the last stretch of the incline. The broken exhaust pipe it trailed made a horrendous racket that must have drowned the sound of the shot. Certainly the crew didn’t even bother to look at the parked vehicle.
“You’re welcome to it. Just don’t have it on you if the Russians take you prisoner.”
“While I have this I am certain that is unlikely to happen.” Tucking the pistol in to the waistband of her jeans, Andrea went back to the Iron Cow, feeling the reassuring bulk of her new weapon.
As soon as he was back aboard their transport, Revell put on his headset and spelt out what they had learnt.” The Russians are running supplies of food to some refugee camp that must be across our route. From the position I was given it seems to be far closer to the front than is usual. The most likely source of the stuff is Nurnberg. Everywhere else their troops have already looted.” Revell looked across to Andrea. She had taken the bullets from the magazines and was carefully wiping each with a lightly oiled scrap of rag before slotting it back, savouring the smell of gun oil on her hands.
“I don’t see how we can go around it.” Sergeant Hyde listened to the officer and made his own calculations and estimates of time, direction and distance. “If it’s covering the area the Russian alleged, and reasonable assuming that their units as usual will be thick on the ground around it, then doing a detour would drive us far into the Warsaw Pacts territory before we could swing back in to the Zone. We’ll be adding twenty kilometres or more to the journey and a whole lot of risk.”
They had sat for an hour among the heaps of gravel, spent tarmac and yellowing piles of salt waiting for nightfall. At irregular intervals other enemy vehicles had passed along the road, always coming up the hill and occasionally including armoured vehicles. With only one exception no one took any interest in the parked truck. That was a lone military policeman on a powerful motorcycle. He took a brief look at the abandoned tipper truck not dismounted for a closer examination, only writing down the vehicles registration number on a note pad and then had gone on his way.
Musing over the complications that seemed to be mounting, Revell knew that the first one was to get across the road. The night when it fell was jet black and held the danger of motoring out of the compound and straight into the sights of a prowling Soviet armoured column. It was Ripper who came up with an idea, as so often it was with anything that involved motive power.
With the handbrake released and the gradient in their favour it took only three of them, Dooley, Burke and the major, shoving hard on the front of the truck to set it moving backwards, across the narrow strip of vegetation and then on the road. Within its own length it had been swallowed by the darkness. They heard a brake shoe scraping for a while and then silence. They were turning away, thinking it must have run off the road and quietly buried its wheels in soft soil when they heard the first collision. A shower of sparks showed it had struck another vehicle at the foot of the climb, just where approaching trucks would be doing their best speed as the took a run at the incline. Seconds later there was a second crash, much louder, and a spurt of flame revealed a six-wheeled truck towing a howitzer slowly falling over on its side. After that and out of sight came the sound of brakes being applied, the hiss of air reservoirs emptying and the echo of another heavy collision.