Innocent heads. How easy the trite tailored phrases of the propaganda machine popped into his thoughts. There weren’t many innocents left among the refugees now, not after two years. Those who hadn’t been prepared to grab and cheat and lie and steal were gone: into mass graves, on to communal pyres. Those who were left were hardened by twenty-four months of deprivation, sharpened by the same length of time spent living by their wits. They could be as dangerous as the enemy to the unwary, the inexperienced, the soft-hearted. Revell had seen one of his own men die, trampled to death under the crush of women and children to whom he’d been trying to distribute spare rations.
That was what happened if you let the Zone get to you. He wasn’t about to let it happen to him, couldn’t afford to if he wanted to stay alive.
NATO Intelligence Report. 887\G2]75756 GRADE ‘A’ For distribution to all Planning Staffs
The Soviet 97th Technical Support Battalion has now been positively identified in the northern sector of the Zone. Limited satellite surveillance time for this theatre has prevented precise location, but evidence indicates that the 97th have established a workshop among, or close to the refugee settlements near Gifhorn on the east bank of the river Aller, opposite the Hanover salient.
It is likely that the 97th is now engaged in a major re-fit and updating programme on the armoured vehicles of the Soviet 2nd Guards Army.
Under Major I. V. Pakilev the 97th has come to be regarded by the Russian High Command as their finest Field Workshop Unit. It has been featured on several occasions in Pravda, and in both national and international propaganda.
The destruction of this unit would be a severe blow to the 2nd Guards Army’s preparations for its next offensive against the salient, anticipated in late August, early September. Its loss would also constitute a grave embarrassment to the Soviet High Command.
SIX
‘What in fuck’s name made him leave you in charge?’ As his booming voice filled the interior, Dooley dug Cohen in the ribs with a finger made only marginally less filthy than his others by its having been up his nose a minute before.
Cohen completely ignored the sarcasm and physical emphasis and went on with his work at the console. He’d accepted the responsibility thrown to him by the major’s parting remark philosophically. So all of a sudden he had a squad of his own, big deal. He hadn’t the stripes or the extra money to go with it, so what was thereto get excited about -nothing. All he could get out of it was trouble. Now he didn’t have just himself to worry about, now he had this assortment of hard cases, head cases and stretcher cases. That was a favour? Favours like that he could do without. He had enough work to do trying to lace together what was left of the electronics, without playing nursemaid to punks and deviants.
Failing to get their temporary section leader to rise to his clumsy bait, Dooley sought other fish. He cast round and found Burke. ‘How’d your sergeant manage to barbecue himself like that, was he too slow backing off the heat and friction caused by you rushing about?’
‘Could be.’ Burke stretched slowly, and when he’d finished went back to dreamily gazing at the banded green landscape on the driver’s screen.
Though he wasn’t achieving what he’d hoped, Dooley persisted. ‘Don’t you do anything that might strain you, wouldn’t like you to wear yourself out before your time.’
‘No danger, mate, no danger.’ Between yawns Burke looked at his watch, shook it, held it to his ear and then, finding his arm made an adequate pillow on the bulkhead, went to sleep.
‘Give up, man. You ain’t gonna get any of this crowd going, you’ll have to work it off some other way.’
‘Piss off.’ Ignoring the black, Dooley tried willing the pain in his back to go away, it wouldn’t. Shit, it was always the same. The doc had said it was just tension, fuck him, what did he know. There was only one way to ease it, beside going into action. Had they been anywhere but in the centre of a minefield he’d have gone out and smashed to pieces the first inanimate object he encountered. That had worked before. He couldn’t do that here, instead he roughly barged to the front of the compartment, and stepped out on to the ramp.
Collins heard the massive roaring bellow, and shivered. -Long ago he’d come to the conclusion that the world must be mad to permit such an insanely dangerous conflict; now he felt he was fighting it with men who were dangerously insane.
The war had taken them all, and turned them inside out. It was as though every last human trait in them, whether for good or evil, was being forced to the fore as their only remaining defence against the totally dehumanising effect of the Zone.
As Dooley’s shout was first caught then mercifully smothered by the dense trees, it occurred to Collins, to wonder how long it would be before he became a shell, a husk, labelled only by extremes of mood as human. When Libby had been chosen to go with Hyde and Revell he’d thought himself lucky to be left behind. Now, as he watched Clarence’s legs continually circling as he laboriously hand cranked the turret round in a perpetual search of a target, he reconsidered.
The sun had been up an hour before the trio finally extricated themselves from the wooded graveyard of men and machines that hid their transport. Tracks that Hyde remembered had ceased to exist, reclaimed by the unchecked growth that also sought to conceal the wrecked and gutted remains of forty or more Russian armoured personnel carriers. Here and there, beside a trackless rusted hulk, the dull white bone dome of a fox-gnawed skull showed among the rank grass and weeds.
Close to the perimeter of the woods there was more recent evidence of violence. The rotting remains of bodies still bearing traces of civilian clothes lay inside the flimsy barricade that girded the lethal area.
There were already a few refugees about, some working in small groups gleaning missed corners of fields for a few ears of half-ripened barley: others, in twos and threes, staggered along under the weight of ill-trimmed logs. It was like viewing the periphery of a bizarre human ants’ nest, the object of whose workers was obscure and the result of whose labours were pathetic.
No one looked at the three men who trudged along the dusty well-worn path towards the camp, even though they passed quite close to some of the later risers.
The dress of most was as incongruous and ill matched as that of Revell and his companions. Among a group of middle-aged men squabbling and coming near to blows over a wormy sugar-beet, one wore a tattered raincoat over shorts and roll-neck jumper, another sported a paint-daubed pair of overalls and golf cap and a third, shoeless and carrying a rolled-up plastic cycle cape, had on a filthy T-shirt and the bottom portion of what might once have been an expensive tweed suit, a lady’s judging by the way the trousers fastened.
‘Almost there. It’s just over the next rise.’ For the last five minutes Hyde had been scanning the sky ahead, and now he saw it, the thin grey threads of smoke from countless numbers of meagre cooking fires. They rose up to blend together to form a dirty veil in the cloudless sky.
Now there were more people about, and a few of the shuffling figures threw curious glances at the three men who walked against the predominant flow of traffic away from the camp. Not many, though, after a glance at the sergeant’s gross disfigurement looked longer, or a second time.
They paused beside a hedge as a Russian Hind helicopter gunship lazily beat its way across the area at two thousand feet, and on out of sight into the thickening smoke haze over the camp.