‘Do the Reds take an interest in the camps?’ Revell felt less conspicuous when they started walking again, they’d been the only ones to stop.
‘Sometimes. A lot of Commie deserters find their way there, and usually end up banding together in a gang. After a while they get cocky and try raiding Ruskie supply dumps, then they get jumped on. The Reds move in, there’s a couple of days excitement, a few refugees get clobbered in the crossfire and then everything settles down again. Usually though they’re just content to keep an eye on the agency people, and maybe work a few foot patrols, plus of course they jam every frequency to stop news getting in or out. Normally in the five-mile so-called civilian area around a camp they keep out of sight, when it suits them.’
‘There’s the camp, Sarge.’ It looked bigger than Libby remembered if, had sprawled out across a few more hills. A straggling line of tiled rooftops and the jutting spire of a church marked at its centre the little village around which it had so explosively grown. Through a tear in the old coat he wore Libby put his hand into a pocket of his jacket. His fingers sought the familiar shape and feel of the small square of plastic covered photograph and his hand closed about it. Perhaps this time…
‘Where the hell do we start?’ They stood on ground a little higher than the camp, but even from that vantage point Revell could make out no pattern or system in the layout of the close-spaced huts and ramshackle shelters. Here and there a short stretch of path might be seen, but within a couple of yards it was lost to sight as it dog-legged around another of the randomly situated hovels.
Hyde didn’t answer, just started down towards the outskirts of the settlement. He knew precisely where to begin. No rearrangement or expansion of the camp could make him forget. If it had been fifty years since he’d last seen the ground, he’d still have been able to recall every inch of it.
The first structures they came to were skeletal affairs hastily erected by the most recent arrivals using only the scantiest supply of flimsy materials. As they threaded their way further in on an erratic course towards the brick-built core of the camp, the shelters became more elaborate. Ingenious use had been made of the most unlikely materials. Oil drums, tarpaulin, wooden pallets, dented jerry cans, anything that could be pressed into use. A clever few had even used fragments of aircraft fuselage looted from crash sites. The luckiest were those who had set up home in the ready-made residences supplied by the gutted shells of knocked-out armoured vehicles that the camp had grown to engulf.
A corner of Hyde’s mind saw the ground not as it was now, covered with a litter of human debris, but as it had been during those first wild battles when the Warsaw Pact forces had without warning hurled themselves through the Iron Curtain. Then this had been uncluttered rolling farmland, and the scene of ferocious armoured battles. For ten days the light of burning vehicles had been the only illumination in the smoke and dust that rose so thickly it had turned the days of midsummer into constant night.
Hyde recalled the morning when the battalion of Soviet infantry aboard armoured carriers had been forced into the cover of the woods by repeated air attacks, and totally destroyed by the combined destructive forces of several thousand hastily scattered mines and the firepower of five British anti-tank platoons. And then had come the order, ‘Board carriers’, and they’d charged out into the open to exploit the local victory.
Within a yard or two, Hyde knew he was walking very nearly the same course as his carrier had taken that day. For twenty glorious minutes they had rampaged through the flanks of Russian columns, wiping out one motor-rifle battalion and putting the survivors of two more to flight. Warning had just come through of approaching tanks when they’d collided with an overturned field kitchen trailer and shed a track. Even as the hatches had been thrown open for a bale-out, a sledgehammer blow had crushed in the side armour and a shaft of molten explosives and metal had blasted across the compartment. Hyde remembered the lieutenant’s head as it dissolved in the jet of plasma, and the searing terrible heat on his face.
For a moment Revell waited, not knowing why the sergeant had stopped, then he tried to nudge him forward and when that and the following dig in the ribs had failed, leant forward to whisper urgently into his ear. ‘What have we stopped for? Keep moving.’
There wasn’t much of it to be seen. A lean-to that had been erected at its rear left only a portion of its rust-streaked side visible between the crowd of sagging hovels that had sprouted up about it. No effort was needed on Hyde’s part to recall how it had looked when he’d last seen it, shortly before being picked up and whisked to safety by the crew of a Samaritan armoured ambulance from almost under the tracks of a Soviet T72. The spouts of flame had been boiling from every opening, and burning ammunition had fountained white streamers into the black smoke.
‘It’s nothing, nothing.’ He had seen enough, remembered too much. Hyde took his eyes from the sight and his mind from the memory. There were a few children running about, but not as many as Revell had expected. The camps in Yugoslavia had swarmed with them. Nor was there a single dog to be seen, usually so much a part of the refugee scene.
Attempts had been made by some of the inhabitants to inject if not a note, at least a reminder of civilisation. Plastic flowers, surely one of the few things these people could not put to a more useful secondary purpose, adorned a few of the huts. The one light touch did nothing to bide the utter squalor of the place, or mask its ugliness.
And there was one final aspect of the camp that could not be concealed, the stench from the crude overflowing lavatories spaced out across the area.
An old crone trotted from a side alley and collided heavily with Revell, dropping the large bundle of rags that she carried. Out of sheer habit the major bent down to pick them up for her, and for his trouble was almost slashed across the face by a claw-like wrinkled hand armed with five wicked talons.
The nails raked across his clothes, but the hag didn’t attempt a second blow; instead she dived down on the bundle, gathered it up and scurried around the trio to depart down another narrow passageway. She tried to spit at Revell as she went, but succeeded only in dribbling down her stained print dress.
‘She thought you were going to nick her stuff. We’re lucky she didn’t start screaming her head off.’ Anticipating the crone’s reaction, Libby had stepped aside. If the Yank wanted to make bloody problems for himself then let him find his own way out of them. You couldn’t get through to those tough old women. They were hard as nails and crafty as foxes. Too old to sell themselves, too active to get the special Oxfam rations for the infirm, their lives were a continual race against death. Their every waking moment was spent in search of the means by which they might ensure enough to eat for just another day.
‘It’s round here, I think.’ In the middle of a tortuously winding alley Hyde paused and looked about. It would have been a more profitable exercise to map the shifting dunes of a desert than try to remember the layout of one of these metamorphic settlements. A mildewed structure of corrugated asbestos sheets looked familiar. ‘We’ll try down here.’
There was room to admit them only in single file, and frequent twists and turns made their previous route as good as an autobahn by comparison. Hyde raised his hand and they stopped before a rickety hut that was only kept upright by its neighbours. He clenched his fist to rap at the thin wood frame to which the canvas door was fastened, but didn’t. Instead he took his knife and, motioning the others to silence, proceeded to cut an opening in the thick fabric. As he cut the third side of a square a man-sized opening appeared and the material curled down. Stepping into the gloomy interior he signalled the others to follow.