‘Forward a little more, left, left; a little more. Steady. Put her down.’ The engine note remained the same. Burke made no move to follow the last instruction, maintaining the same ride height. ‘I said put us down.’
Their driver still made no move to comply, finely balancing the controls to keep them hovering in the same spot.
‘Do as the sergeant says.’ Revell added his weight. ‘You do know where we are, don’t you, Major?’ With a slight movement of the left steering pedal Burke corrected a tendency on the part of the machine to drift to the right. ‘This is a bloody minefield. The place is stiff with the ruddy things. Those are wrecks out there.’ He pointed at the screen, to a vague squat outline some yards ahead of them.
Revell looked at Hyde. There was nothing in the man’s face to give him any clues, there was hardly any face, but the sergeant’s manner didn’t suggest he was contemplating suicide and intent on taking them all with him. ‘So put us down gently.’
For a couple of seconds Burke still stubbornly resisted, then began very gradually to reduce engine power to enable the craft to settle. All the time he made minute adjustments to keep the position Hyde had indicated.
Like all of the others Rinehart held his breath until the Iron Cow was safely grounded, then let it out in a sigh of relief. ‘What do you want us to do now, Sarge. Go for a stroll through the woods?’
‘This is the only place the refugees don’t come foraging for metal. They’re like a load of jackdaws, pinch anything…’
‘Hey, Dooley, you got a load of relatives around here some place?’ It was Cohen who interrupted the British NCO.
‘…that’s the reason the Commies don’t lace this area with ground radar surveillance dishes. They’d all be turned into frying pans by the end of the day. About the only things the refugees won’t go near is mines. These derelicts have been here two years and they haven’t been touched in all that time.’
‘How well do you know this camp, Sergeant?’ Revell got in first, before Dooley could take up Cohen on his remark.
‘Pretty well. I expect it’s changed shape a bit since the last time I was here, about four months ago, but the Reds don’t like them to get above a hundred thousand so overall it’ll be much the same. Certainly the inner areas will be. It’s the later additions, the most recently tacked on shelters that alter the appearance and can get you lost.’
‘At that size it’s going to be too big to scout on foot, even if we weren’t spotted as we roamed about. Do you have any contacts in there, who might be helpful with the right persuasion?’
He’d have to answer carefully, Hyde was fully aware of that. Both sides, in theory at least, enforced the Red Cross’s rules about no military interference in the camps beyond minimum policing; but Soviet commanders broke them when it suited them, and few soldiers on either side could resist the obvious attractions of the various ‘entertainments’ the camps offered. Many NATO troops made a point of carrying extra rations and similar temptations that could be exchanged for the frequently desperate refugees’ gold, or jewellery, or bodies. He didn’t know the major’s standpoint on the matter so he played safe, he wasn’t about to lose his stripes or get himself slung out of the army, just because he spoke without thinking.
‘I’ve heard of a couple of places where we might get information about any new activities the Reds have started in the area. I expect I can find them.’
‘Don’t be cute, Sergeant Hyde. I know what goes on in the camps, I’m not trying to catch you out. Considering the mayhem we hope to let loose before the day is out, bending a few rules isn’t going to bother me. Now, yes or no ?’
‘I’ll give it an hour. My best cover will be to mix and merge with the civvies. Better break out the rags, Collins.’
From a locker Collins dragged out a kitbag, and started to extract various articles of patched and faded clothing.
‘Fuck that.’ Dooley moved away. ‘I kept thinking someone had wind. It weren’t, it were those, phew.’ He held his nose.
Clarence toed a garment that was dropped. ‘If you go into the camps you not only have to look right, you have to smell right. You should feel completely at home.’
‘Don’t aggravate him, Clarence. You know he’s got a temper worse than yours.’ From the heap Hyde picked a large soiled windcheater. ‘Scruffy so it won’t draw attention, bulky enough to hide a weapon. Soap doesn’t figure anywhere on the list of priority supplies the Red Cross and Oxfam bring in, so it’s no good walking about with a well scrubbed look smelling of bloody violets.’ He pulled on an oversized pair of Levi cords.
‘You can pick me an outfit too, Sergeant. I want to see the ground for myself; and we’ll take one other man, your choice.’
About to secure the top of the jeans with a grubby polka-dot necktie improvised as a belt, Hyde paused. ‘That’s not a good idea, Major. The civvies won’t give us away if they spot us; the Ruskies never pay for information and in the camps everyone wants to be anonymous, not draw attention to themselves. But if they heard your accent… Well, they’d be down on us like a swarm of locusts and the Reds will spot a riot a mile away.’
‘You saying we ain’t popular?’ Dooley stuck his chin out in an aggressive fashion.
‘That’s just the point, you’re too damned popular. It’s been just us British, and the West Germans, in this sector for the whole of the war so far. We’re not exactly overburdened with luxuries to give away or barter, but the refugees think you lot are loaded with goodies. They’ll tear you apart looking for them.’
‘I’m still going, Sergeant. Pick our third man.’ Hyde knew before he looked round which of his own men would have his eyes locked on him. Sure enough it was Libby. Their turret gunner had ducked down from his perch and was sidling towards the old clothes. So why not? He had more experience than Collins, was more useful than Burke and more predictable than Clarence. And if he had a special reason for spending as much time as he could in the camps, what the hell, he didn’t let it interfere with his work.
With a slight inclination of his head Libby returned the nod that Hyde made to him.
‘Shit, why him, Major. What’s wrong with one of us, ain’t we good enough all of a sudden? You want I should make a list of our good points?’ Cohen’s protest was noisy.
‘Sure, if you’ve got ten seconds to spare. When you’ve finished you can do something useful. Open every hatch and port. I want this machine cooled right down. I don’t want it standing out like a come-and-get-us neon sign on the IR scanner of any Ruskie sky-spy.’
After a cursory inspection Revell put on the much repaired and ill-matched suit jacket and baggy worsted trousers he was handed. From their state he’d half expected them to be crawling, but they weren’t. After hitching the various components of the outfit closer about him, and fastening it together as best he could with a selection of rusty safety pins Hyde provided, he was satisfied that it adequately concealed the .45 automatic and grenades he carried.
This was the first time Revell had been into one of the big camps. In the Balkans the refugees had been scattered in thousands of tiny settlements, kept that way by the Yugoslav partisans despite the Communists’ efforts to the contrary, not herded together into carefully denned and controlled localities as they were here in the north.
The only advantage Revell could see in the ‘bigger is better’ policy, apart from the easing of distribution problems for the paltry amount of aid the relief agencies brought in, was the creation of large tracts of land that could be declared free-fire zones which particularly suited the Russian style of warfare. The only benefit to the NATO forces was that it released every gunner and bomb-aimer from the constraints imposed by the fear of unleashing barrages of bombs on to innocent heads.