Reaching the top, Dooley paused before attempting the final heave that would pull him on to level ground. ‘I’ve already been up and down the fucking thing a couple of dozen times, shoving that crappy seat and its passengers. Shit, even I run out of puff sometimes.’ The sergeant’s boot hovered above his fingers, threatening to crush them into the frozen soil. ‘But maybe I can summon up a little extra,’ he added as he saw the danger to his precarious handhold.
Still clutching the rope, unable to climb past Dooley’s obstructing bulk, York started complaining.
‘Shut your racket.’ Hyde reached down and jerked the radio-man to his feet as soon as Dooley was out of the way. ‘Useless pair of buggers, join the others.’ For a moment York thought he might risk a reply, but Revell was close by, and though he might have chanced it with the British sergeant, there was no way he’d take the same risk with his own officer. Hyde was hard, but Revell was just plain cruel. Even a tough nut like Dooley never tried anything with the major around.
Before he started out for the house, York made a final examination of their handiwork. That was a good job they’d made of camouflaging the sledge and cabin. With the snow beginning to fall heavily, sprinkling the mottled fabric strips sewed to the net, the whole thing was starting to merge with its surroundings. It would already be virtually invisible to the naked eye at more than a few yards.
For the next couple of hours there would be sufficient residual heat from the bodies for the cabin’s temperature to remain above that of the terrain surrounding it. Revell knew it wouldn’t be much, but it would be enough to stand out on the infra-red screen of any patrolling Swedish or Russian craft doing a sweep of the islands. It was no longer sufficient to hide an object from sight, and camouflage of that sort was not always worth the vast effort frequently involved.
Multi-spectral surveillance made it virtually impossible to keep anything from the prying lens and sensors of the latest photographic and electronic detectors. It was crazy, but maybe the time had come when it would be better to leave important installations such as radar sites and headquarters out in the open. With an enemy like the Communists, who never took anything at face value and who attributed the same evil cunning to others that they practised themselves, maybe they’d get away with it. It was a tempting idea…possibly a bright-eyed young staff officer back at the Pentagon was already pushing such a proposal… but as he stood beside York surveying the cabin, he was well aware it was an experiment they dare not try here and now. As it was, in this frozen landscape their every move would stand out like a neon sign. The odds stacked against them were long enough already, there was no reason to help them lengthen.
Eight dead and nearly twice that number injured, with the severity of their wounds varying in degree from Lieutenant Hogg’s broken nose to the gunner who’d lost his forearm. Revell knew the calculations as to the minimum numbers of men necessary to carry out the mission had been finely worked out. Now there was a double, a triple workload for those still fit to do it. As he turned into the wind, felt his face smart and his eyes start to water, he could only hope that the worst misfortune likely to befall them before they went into action was now out of the way.
It was their sniper, Clarence, who blamed a malevolent God for everything that went wrong. Not that he had much time for religion himself, but Revell had a feeling that in this war God was neutral, had seen the horrors of the Zone and washed his hands of it. There were many mere mortals inside the Zone who wished they could do the same.
‘I’ve had it. I’ve fucking had it up to here.’ Burke picked up a piece of track plate and shied it at the growing pile of broken weaponry. ‘You just wouldn’t fucking credit it, would you. I get dropped from the back of a ruddy plane, watch blokes getting smashed to bits all around me. I flog meself to bleeding death carting the poor sods to cover, get dragged out into the wilds of bloody Scandinavia to hunt the sledges before I’ve even had time for a sodding fag, and now I bloody find the reason I’m bloody here in the first place don’t ruddy exist any more.’
‘The rocket launchers and the electronics equipment is intact, that is all that is important.’ Andrea had hardly paid any attention to the shattered remains of tractor unit. She was sorting through the scattered debris of the sled and its load, joining the others in search of the squad’s support weapons and ammunition.
‘We’re lucky the whole lot didn’t just go up on impact.’ Dragging aside a .twisted girder that had braced the underside of the sledge, Libby scrutinised the battered contents of a crushed ammunition box by torchlight. ‘If this stuff alone had gone off,’ he removed a mangled anti-tank missile from the tangle of two others, ‘the Swedes or their Commie mates would have been down on us like a ton of steaming shit. They’d have had us pinpointed in seconds.’
Burke took in the overturned tractor and the splintered remnants of its packing case load, sticking out from beneath the broken track-festooned wreck. ‘Sod it. What am I going to do?’ To Burke’s mind the sole redeeming feature of a mission concerning which he’d always had the very deepest misgivings had been torn from him. He wasn’t about to find consolation in Libby’s words.
‘How’s about you stop blubbering over that old bus that you can’t put together again anyhow, and start giving a hand with some of the chores. This stuff gets kinda heavy after the first three.’ Staggering under the weight of the cased ammunition already in his arms, Ripper had to accept a fourth heavily-dented box from Hyde before he was allowed to totter off towards the house.
‘It’s no good, Sarge.’ Hardly bothering to glance at it, York tossed a machine gun on to the stack. ‘This is just a waste of time. What wasn’t mashed on impact got bent when the tractor broke loose and turned over. Look at it.’
He held up one of the decoy mortar-discharger?, all six barrels were now decidedly oval.
‘Keep looking. Everything repairable must be salvaged, and everything else must be gathered up into one place, so we can get it ready for effective demolition. We can’t go round sticking a couple of ounces of plastic on each individual chunk of rubbish.’ Diving on the butt of a machine gun, Hyde dragged it from beneath the crushed tractor cab: but that was all there was, the barrel and body of the weapon had been torn off and pounded into the ground.
‘It was the chutes.’ Carrying part of the rigging, Re veil led Clarence and Dooley into the clearing.
The two men were having difficulty with the huge bundle of canopy silk. It kept trailing and snagging on the ragged stumps of silver birch that had been felled by the sleds’ high-speed impact.
‘One of the shits didn’t deploy properly, must have wrapped itself around the others.’ Dumping the voluminous folds of fine fabric on the pile, and weighting them down with anonymous hunks of metal, Dooley pulled a face. ‘Good job this set weren’t on our rig, we’d have gone straight through that fucking house and on out to sea.’
‘We’d have been alright with York around.’ The radio-man treated Libby’s comment with suspicion. ‘And why’s that?’
‘With that big mouth of yours, you could have drunk it dry and we’d have been able to walk home.’
‘Piss off.’
‘That’s what you’d have been doing, for fucking years and years and years.’ Dooley might have added more, but the major’s torch beam flicked his way, and he caught its warning.
Andrea heard, but didn’t listen. The conversations, the jokes, the arguments, all washed over her, she took no part and no interest in them. It wasn’t contempt that made her ignore the men, not even fear that familiarity of any description might be interpreted as encouragement – to her they were simply not important.