‘My one little luxury.’ Lippincott ran his hand over the beautifully waxed wood. ‘Had to slip a couple of fifties to a horse-faced master sergeant to get it in, but I feel happier with it down here, tucked away nice and safe.’
‘There must be a lot of German civvies up above who’d like to feel the same about themselves.’
‘Shit, they’re safe enough.’ Lippincott jerked his thumb towards the rock ceiling. ‘They’re a good twenty of their crappy kilometres from the Zone. Unless the Commies start breaking the rules again, and sling a few nukes around outside of it, they’re safe. Give or take a spot of shitty fallout, that is.’
‘What about my command?’ Revell was growing impatient with the drawn-out preliminaries.
Taking a file from the neat stack barely lining the bottom of a wire basket, Lippincott flicked it open and smoothed the top sheet of crisp white paper. ‘Before we get to that, I got the Staff verdict on that little j ob you did for me.’
‘Verdict?’ There’d been no special emphasis on the word, but it warned Revell to be on his guard.
‘That’s what I fucking said. Seems the good citizens of Frankfurt got their knickers a mite twisted over that… shall we call it ‘adventure’, of yours.’ The colonel’s finger found a particular line on the double spaced report. ‘As I read it, seems like they could have forgiven you for scaring the crap out of them with that false Nuke alert while you flattened one of their showpiece industrial estates; but what stuck in their craw was coming back out of their shelters to find you’d done a hell of a demolition job on a key power station, and fucked-up who knows how many millions of man-hours of war effort.’
‘I did the job I was given. My men destroyed the Ruskie armoured column…’
‘Yeah, and that’s probably what saved your hide, otherwise by now you’d be a shit-house cleaner, tenth class.’
‘Are you telling me I don’t get the Special Combat Company I was promised three months back, is that it?’ Revell leant forward and the top back rail of his chair clanged against the stone. ‘I’ve got just seven men, seven. A couple of the survivors from that other group we absorbed might be worth hanging on to, but that’s it.’ He included Andrea in the number, counting her among the men. Judging by her ability to take care of herself, there was no reason why he should do otherwise.
‘Sit still. Hell, there ain’t the room to get excited and start jumping about in here.
OK, so that’s how it is at the moment… now will you fucking sit, shut it, and listen…’ Lippincott forestalled the objections and protest he sensed coming. ‘Jesus, you bastards with the combat commands think you’re the only ones fighting this shitty war. All you got to fight is sneak-punching Russians; me, I’ve got to do battle with a dozen different cruddy Staff whiz-kids every day. Every damned day. You know the latest bee they got in their swollen heads? Course you fucking don’t. Private armies.’
A crudely secured extension vent, from the main air-conditioning trunk in the passageway, gave a sudden shudder and a tinny clatter of vibration at a distant impact and vomited a spoonful of fine dust that floated down to settle on the desk top. It had hardly touched before Lippincott was deftly brushing it to the floor with a soft yellow cloth he took, neatly folded, from a top drawer. Only when the oak surface was once again without blemish did he flap the residue from his shoulders and his stump-encasing sleeve.
‘You any idea how many brigade, divisional, even army commanders are trying to grab the headlines by forming special units? It’s a hell of a lot. Word has come down that it’s got to stop. Too much dilution of effort is the reason given. Me, I reckon it’s pressure from the guys running the Rangers and Commandos and the SAS. They don’t want their thunder stolen.’
‘So my new outfit gets its wings clipped even before it takes off.’ The news wasn’t a complete surprise to Revell. He’d been half expecting something like it.
‘Yeah, but only clipped. A lot of others have been plucked, stuffed and cooked.’ Closing the file, Lippincott replaced it, and took a second from a locked centre drawer. ‘I got something else for you here, just to keep you ticking over. It’s a toughie, but tailor-made for the size of your squad.’ He paused a moment before going on. ‘How you feel about starting a war?’
For a second Revell thought he must have misheard him. ‘Damn it, Colonel, what have we got now? A two-hundred-mile wide no-man’s-land running the length of Europe; ten million dead civvies, four times that number of refugees… what more do you want?’
‘We want Sweden in the war, on our side. Finland could be forced into the Russian camp at any time, it’s practically in it now. Like bloody Frog-land it’s more fucking neutral to the Commies than it is to us.. Shoots at us if we only look that way, and meantime supplies the Ruskies with everything from ice-breakers to bootlaces and pyjama cords. If Sweden comes in on our side it would give us a good base from which to try and get back into the Baltic. Command aren’t too happy about it having become a Russian lake, and with the Finns having to worry about the Swedish army they wouldn’t be able to spare men to help the Russians in Norway.’
‘The country’s armament industry would be useful, too.’ The attractions of the possibility were obvious to Revell.
‘That’d be a bonus.’
‘How is the miracle going to be worked? The Swedes are firmly neutral, they’ve been treading very careful with the Russians.’ Lippincott smiled. ‘The Ruskies are going to help us, but they don’t know it yet. Come to that, they won’t know until after they have. What’s the weather like outside? I haven’t been above ground for a week.’
To Revell the question seemed an irrelevance. ‘Very cold, threatening snow. Why?’
‘The weather boffins reckon all the little old ladies are being proved right at last. All those tactical nukes both sides have been so cheerfully chucking about inside the Zone have screwed the climate. Winter will be early this year, stay longer and bite a lot harder. Satellites tell us that the Russians are already having to do round-the-clock ice-breaking to keep Leningrad and the other northern Baltic ports and yards open. There’s seven-tenths pack as far south as Gdansk and if they’re going to get all the hardware their yards have been building or updating out into the Atlantic, then they’ll have to be moving it real soon…’
‘Where does my squad fit in, and how’s Sweden going to be dragged in?’
‘The Swedes have given the Commies the OK to make the passage to open sea through their territorial waters, so we lose our chance to hit them in the narrows of the Baltic approaches. Once they reach the Skaggerak and the North Sea they’ll spread out, have more room to manoeuvre, and altogether be a fucking tough target. Any we miss will be able to play havoc with either the Brits’ oil-rigs or our convoy routes. Just when it begins to look like we got the measure of their subs, they’re going to chuck surface units our way.’ Spitting with machine-gun rapidity and accuracy, Lippincott sent fragments of soggy pencil wood into an ashtray…
‘We’re going to dump you and your men on a small island inside Swedish territorial waters, where the Russians will have to pass close. You’ll be given enough firecrackers to scare the shit out of the Commies as they come racing out of the narrows between Sweden and the occupied Danish islands. If our Russian friends perform as per usual, they’ll plaster the nearest Swedish territory with everything they’ve got. You should have a nice ringside seat for the first battle between the Commies and our newest ally.’
‘And what if they’re not so obliging?’ The many problems the thumbnail sketch of the mission presented crowded in upon Revell. ‘If the Ruskies don’t lash out, then you’ll have a multiple warhead Lance missile to stir them into action yourself. Nothing that’ll do them any real harm, but it should get the party going.’ Swivelling back and forth in his chair, and chewing furiously, Lippincott waited for the major’s reaction.