Six of the high velocity shells smashed into its port engine, two more gouged their way across the skimmer’s roof behind the turret. An explosive round self-destructed amid a tangle of externally stowed equipment, sending saws and hawsers and shovel handles spinning away into the night. The last three armour-piercing shells plunged in through the vehicle’s rear plate, between the engine exhausts, their impacts marked by showers of white sparks.
Its remaining engine screaming at full power the hovercraft, towing thick white smoke, careered through a wild tight turn and thundered into the front of a boarded-up store. Its speed took it right inside and clouds of dust hid where it came to rest. A massive explosion lifted the building and bright flame bubbled from every window. The roof sagged, and then the whole property crashed down to bury the wreck.
‘You’ll have to pull forward. I can’t see the bugger.’ Burke made no move to do as their turret gunner urged, and drive the Iron Cow from the cover of the derelict cottage so that Libby could retaliate with their cannon armament.
Revell was standing looking out of the command cupola, just forward of the main turret. He watched as the other remaining skimmer took up a position across the street, nestling against a row of deserted houses. ‘We’re not going anywhere while he’s out there.’
Hyde had been watching the scanner console over Howard’s shoulder. ‘Might be an idea to try though, Major. That flak tank is calling for help.’
Revell surveyed the country ahead. It was half a mile to the next substantial cover, a belt of woodland flanking the road.
‘Aw, Major,’ Dooley had been listening, ‘we ain’t gonna get in a fire fight with a flak wagon, are we? Jesus, that thing fires four thousand rounds a minute. All we’ve got is one barrel against their four, and three-round clips against their belt feed.’
Now that he had at last realised that they had stopped moving, Cohen began to take an interest in what was going on. ‘Yeah, and they’ve got micro-wave radar. So it’s not too hot in the ground mode, but we ain’t got any.’
The mound of blazing rubble that marked where the last skimmer had come to rest illuminated a considerable and expanding area in the centre of the settlement. Buildings adjoining it were already steaming and were liable to add their fuel to the conflagration at any moment.
‘I don’t think we have any choice.’ Even as Revell made up his mind, there was a massive detonation and the cottage alongside dissolved inside a roaring ball of fire. Bricks and slates crashed on to their hull and turret and rained down in the road.
Two more similarly massive concussions cratered the road behind them and blasted out the end wall of the church.
There was just time to grab a handhold before, on the major’s command, Burke sent the machine surging forward. Like the others, they knew that those first gigantic blasts were just the ranging shots, the precursors of a much larger salvo of 240mm rockets to come.
Through a rear-facing periscope Revell saw that Windle’s skimmer, though slower off the mark, was following.
More of the huge fin-stabilised rockets began to fall as they cleared the last of the straggling buildings. The houses were torn apart, their roofs lifted off and their contents scattered across the streets and gardens. Trees and telegraph poles caught by the blast were scorched, shredded and toppled to the ground. The air was filled with flying leaves and whipping lengths of wire.
Libby opened up with the cannon an instant after the last obstructing corner of a house was cleared, so fast it seemed he could hardly have had time to sight his target, let alone take aim.
Slower by a couple of seconds, the flak tank replied to the three armour-piercing incendiary rounds sent against it with a ripple of twenty of its own.
The skimmer’s wild gyrations, as Burke threw it through a rapid succession of sharp turns to avoid craters that suddenly gaped in front of them, proved no problem for the stabiliser holding the 30mm Rarden on target. Libby got off another clip as the last shell from the flak tank scooped a gob of metal from an angle of the roof, before exploding with an eardrum punishing roar on the side of the turret.
At the moment he mentally predicted, and at precisely the correct range, Libby saw on his thermal imager the pinkish shimmer of a distant angular outline blossom into a tall column of chasing shades of bright red. A check through the day-sight confirmed that, seven hundred yards away, the edge of a small wood was being brilliantly lit by a rising shower of incandescence, as the Russian vehicle’s ammunition burned in spectacular fashion.
‘It’s just there, at the side of the road, by the burning tree.’ Hyde backed off the periscope and let Revell look. ‘I knew this was going to be a shitty job.’ Dooley smacked a large fist into a dirty palm, as he and Cohen waited to hear what had happened to the other skimmer. ‘Is it a direct hit, Major?’
‘Pretty close. There’s a hell of a big hole in the road, right under their front end.’ The other carrier lay a good three hundred yards back along the road. It was prominently lit by the fires among the branches of the tall tree, and stood in the middle of a tract of featureless land that didn’t offer a scrap of cover. There was the possibility that it was under enemy observation already. Taking the Iron Cow back there could kill them all.
‘There’s no sign of movement.’ It was at moments like this that Revell felt the full weight of command responsibility.
‘Two or three men might make it safely on foot, just to check it out.’ Hyde realised what was going through the officer’s head, and offered an alternative. ‘We’ll send two.’ The choice as to which two took Revell only a moment. ‘Dooley and Clarence, off you go. And move. I don’t want to be hanging about here for long.’
The flames from the distant houses threw long tongues of light and shadow across the fields, and the road stood out as a curling grey ribbon against the mixed and shifting shades of the farmland.
Hugging the hedgerow, the pair worked their way towards the stricken vehicle. The erratic circle of light from the guttering flames in the oak showed it standing just the other side of a wide steaming crater. One of the engine pods had been ripped off and whirled away by the blast.
‘Christ, it’s taken a belting.’ As they drew nearer, Dooley could see where the near miss by the powerful missile had shattered the vehicle’s front as far back as the commander’s cupola. The ride-skirts had been slashed and holed by fragments, and a couple of panels had gone altogether. There was a strong smell of kerosene, and hydraulic fluid spurted from a distorted ram attached to what was left of the ramp.
Smoke was curling from beneath the hull as Clarence crouched and kept watch, while Dooley tackled the buckled metal barring entrance to the crew compartment. Above them the breeze fanned sparks from the burning tree. With a loud creaking and rending the warped panel suddenly ceased its resistance. The floor was slippery, and the passengers lay locked together in a tangle of arms and legs. Dooley tugged at a limb and someone groaned. ‘Give me a hand.’
Together they hauled out a tall black. He was covered in blood from a mass of cuts, but apart from being dazed appeared to have no other injuries. They sat him at the crater’s edge, where he rapidly began to recover, and went back in to investigate another source of groaning, nearer the back.
Several of the passengers had been decapitated by the scything hunks of metal that had come in through the front. A head rolled under Clarence’s foot as he climbed over the heaped bodies to reach the other survivor. He had to grit his teeth and close his mind to what it was he was clambering over. He hated any form of physical contact, loathed the feel of other flesh on his. Even a handshake was more than he could abide.
The proximity of others when travelling in the skimmer was something he’d forced himself to tolerate, but only because it served his purpose. He regarded it as a battle taxi; it took him to the killing ground so he put up with the crowding and jostling and smell. But it took a great effort for him to touch the still warm bodies, slippery and stinking of blood and vomit and half-digested food spilled from opened stomachs.
The second survivor was in a bad way, with an ugly gaping wound in the side of his head that their largest field dressing couldn’t completely cover. Leaving him with the black, they returned for a last check.
Clarence stood and concentrated. ‘Do you hear something?’ He listened, but all Dooley could hear was the tree crackling outside, and an occasional ticking from the remaining engine as it cooled. ‘Let’s get out, this can is brewing up.’
As he went to leave, Dooley stopped abruptly and looked at a tangle of wire and distorted metalwork. He reached in and pulled a couple of loose sheets of aluminium aside. ‘It’s the Sarge!’
Master Sergeant Windle was still alive. He had fallen from the commander’s seat and been almost completely hidden by the mass of metal that the external explosion had forced back and wrapped around him. His injuries were terrible, but he retained a measure of consciousness and limply gestured with his remaining hand to Dooley.
Even uniting their efforts, there was no way Clarence and the big man could free the sergeant from the tangled metal. Smoke was filtering into the compartment, and the pool of blood on the hull floor was beginning to boil. The stink of burning rubber now swamped all other smells.
A gaping wound in his throat had deprived the sergeant of speech, but he pointed repeatedly to Dooley’s slung Colt Commando submachine gun and then to himself. His meaning was abundantly clear. Understanding that he was trapped, and aware that the craft was burning, he didn’t want to be still alive when the flames reached him.
‘Shit. I can’t do that. What the hell does he want to go getting himself into a mess like this for?’ Dooley half-raised the short-barrelled version of the M16, then lowered it again.
‘It’s that or leave him to burn. We’ve still got to get the other two back to the Cow.’ Clarence looked at his watch. They’d already been gone too long. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘Oh Jesus. Killing him would be like killing our luck.’ The Colt was heavy in Dooley’s hands, its metal and plastic wet with the sweat of his palms. He looked at Clarence, sensing that the sergeant’s eyes were still on him.
‘You want me to do it?’
Small spurts of red flame came from an electronics panel at the back, adding further urgency. Dooley snatched up a .45 automatic from the floor and tried to fit it into Windle’s hand, moulding the stained fingers around it. The moment he let go, it fell from the nerveless grasp and clattered back to the floor.
‘Yeah, yeah you do it.’ The big man stepped aside. Clarence borrowed Dooley’s submachine gun, refraining from using his own rifle for a task such as this. He pushed the tip of the flash suppressor to within an inch of the dying man’s open mouth, and fired. The noise in the small metal compartment was painful.
As the back of his head flew off, Windle’s body arched forward in a spasm. The dead man’s teeth clamped hard on the barrel as the muscles of his jaw locked.
At the moment of firing Dooley was already going out, now he looked back to see the sniper struggling to extract the weapon from the face of the corpse.
‘Come on, it’s burning.’
‘Do you damn well think I don’t know that. Your blasted sergeant won’t let go.’
Acrid smoke from burning wiring filled the skimmer with fumes that made breathing difficult. A section of the floor was taking on a wrinkled semi-molten look. Grey brain matter boiled like foam in a never ending stream from the eyes of a severed head.
Hurrying back in, Dooley put his foot on the dead sergeant’s face and, as Clarence wrenched the weapon back and forth, teeth snapped and splintered and it was suddenly free.
Pushing one and carrying the other survivor they raced back to their transport. Even as Dooley, last to board, was stepping on to the ramp the craft lifted and they were under way again.
‘Rinehart, you’re a lucky shit.’ Abe Cohen kept saying it as he watched Hyde binding two field dressings arranged side by side to cover the gaping hole in Nelson’s head. ‘When a clean-living boy like that gets hit, and even old Windle buys it, how come a bum like you sails through with only a few scratches ? Hell, this shitty war is all mixed up.’
‘Must be on account of my fine and wholesome nature. I guess God is just smiling down on one of his favourite children.’
Dooley leant across and leered into the black’s broad features. ‘Oh yeah, then how come you had treatment for a dose of the pox last year. Tell me, Jango, where does that fit in with ‘wholesome’?’
‘That’s a damned lie. I ain’t used that weapon in such a long time I don’t reckon it could fire any more.’ His leer matched Dooley’s.
‘Let’s have some quiet in here. This is Indian country, we could run into trouble anytime.’
‘Hey, Major, that weren’t no boy scout troop we tangled with back there.’
Dooley was ignored. Officer and sergeant were busy conferring over a large scale map.
‘We should be able to cross the river here.’ With his little finger Hyde indicated a spot seven miles down stream from Gifhorn. ‘If we do it there we avoid having to cross the Oker as well. If we travel parallel with the bank, once we’re over it’ll bring us to the camp.’
‘OK everybody.’ Revell reached for his 12 gauge assault rifle. ‘I want you all on your toes. We’ll be slowing for a river crossing in about ten minutes. I’m hoping we can make it without trouble but…’
The skimmer shuddered and lurched sideways under the impact of a massive blow. As the lights went out, the last thing Collins saw was Corporal Howard arching back from the radar console with a huge hole in his chest.