‘Three hundred plus!’ About to whistle again, Ripper remembered the consequences last time and thought better of it. ‘Hang on, though; I thought they were trying to weed out all the guys who’d got to like the killing, rotating them out of the line.’
‘He doesn’t enjoy it.’ Giving up waiting, Burke determined to return later when perhaps Sampson wouldn’t be so vigilant. ‘I’ve seen him retch after putting a commie down with a clean headshot.’
‘Then how does he keep going?’ Finishing the last belt, Ripper flexed his blood-stained fingers and lounged back against the wall.
‘That’s a piece of information he’s never volunteered, but I can make a guess.’ Not wanting to go, Burke knew he’d soon be missed and Hyde would be hunting for him. ‘I think he’s set a price, in Russian lives, on his revenge. God only knows what it is, or if he’ll ever achieve it.’
‘Then what – he goes on killing? Like it’s become a habit?’
Reluctantly Burke began to move toward the stairs. ‘Could be, or perhaps when he decides he’s finally done hell stand up and make a target of himself, or put the barrel of that beautiful rifle in his mouth.’
The sniper waited, patient, unmoving; the rifle sights were aligned on a space between two trees where he knew the Russian would reappear. It was three minutes now, but still he maintained his unwavering pose. He ignored the dirt in which he lay, the cold, the rain trickling down the back of his neck.
At six hundred meters the gusting wind made the shot, with its short engagement time, a difficult one. If he missed, it could mean a long wait before another target presented itself.
Long experience of observing battlefield behavioural patterns had developed in Private Clarence almost a sixth sense, and for no obvious reason his trigger finger gently took up a fraction more of the precisely set one-kilo pull-weight.
He anticipated the recoil and the flash-hider saved his night vision. Panning downward he saw an indistinct hummock of camouflage material lying between the trees. It moved, sluggishly, and Clarence unconsciously made a mental calculation to make a further slight allowance for the wind.
Setting up again, this time the wait was much shorter. A figure appeared over the fallen man and the sniper saw a white face turned toward him as he lightly squeezed the trigger.
The bullet must have met minimal resistance, perhaps entering an eye, or the open mouth. In any event it was a killing headshot. But the target, his victim, didn’t fall.
Standing, and still appearing to stare up at the distant sniper, the soldier’s body wavered slightly from side to side as if held upright by a supernatural force.
Knowing that so strange a scene was certain to attract other targets, the sniper’s experience told him to wait, but he had three rounds remaining in the magazine and he emptied all of them into the standing corpse.
He didn’t watch the result, sliding back into concealment to reload. His hand was shaking as he slipped the carefully selected rounds into the magazine.
Nineteen targets to go, only that many more and he’d be free. It was a minute after midnight. This could be his last day. Even as the thought formed, his hands stopped shaking and a feeling of relief and calm flooded through him. It was nearly over.
EIGHTEEN
The first of the explosions came a little after two in the morning. They continued at erratic intervals until an hour before dawn. Sometimes they came singly, at other times in ripples. A few were from close at hand, most from various distances away in the circle of high ground about the valley. Often there were other sounds as well, the wail of pressure-driven flame, the stutter of automatic fire, and most frequently of all came the screams.
As Revell toured their positions atop the broken walls, he thought that he knew how the ancient Crusaders would have felt, waiting for first light and the onslaught of the Saracens. The weapons were more modern, could strike farther and harder, but you were just as dead from a hit by a crossbow bolt as from the lashing shrapnel of a Russian 155mm airburst.
The wind had abated and finally died away completely, and the rain had eased until it was no more than a feeling of saturating dampness in the air. Together the changes signalled the chance of a better day, but they threatened a danger as well.
By imperceptible degrees, fingers of mist began to creep between the hills and ridges. Thickening rapidly, they merged to form a fog that filled every dip and hollow and began to climb the confining slopes.
‘I don’t feel nature is on our side.’ For the tenth time in as many minutes, Dooley wiped condensation from the lens of the TOW sighting unit.
Scully passed him a mug of coffee and sat down to drink his own. ‘Be bloody fair. If you were Mother Nature and you’d been mucked about like she has in the Zone, would you be on anybody’s side?’
‘That’s not the point.’ Using his finger to draw the skin from the top of his drink, Dooley tried to flick it away, failed, and wiped it down his front. ‘We’re the fucking goodies. We didn’t go marching into commie territory; they came crashing in here yelling provocation. I’d love to know how that poor old granny they hung in Munzenberg had ever provoked them. They only had to kick her Zimmer away to do it.’
A sharp explosion, slightly muted by distance and the shroud of fog, was followed by a secondary detonation, and then another.
‘How many tries is that they’ve had at getting through the minefields?’ Scully listened intently. Faint shouts could be heard, shrill and panicky.
‘Lost count.’ Dooley wrung out his cloth and wiped the launch barrel once more. ‘What I can’t understand is why they haven’t had a crack at us yet.’
‘They don’t realize we’re here yet, not in numbers.’ Hyde crawled in beside them and tilted the can to examine the dregs of coffee. ‘Far as the commies are concerned there’s one sniper operating from here and that’s it.’ He waited to be offered the residue and when he wasn’t, took it anyway. That it was cold he didn’t care; it sluiced the taste of ground stone from his throat.
‘That’s better. I can swallow now without sandpapering my tonsils. One bit of good news. The major’s torn up standing orders and put Boris back on the radio. Garrett’s a bloody clown, worse than useless.’
‘No luck yet though, I take it.’ Scully dropped the mugs into the can, and cringed at the noise they made. ‘Sorry, Sarge.’ He hastened to change the subject. ‘So we’ve not got through then, yet.’
‘Picked up a few snippets from a Russian field commander in the area. Reception is terrible, but according to Boris the commies are having a rough time in those minefields. They were expecting to virtually walk in unopposed through the main entrance; seems we rather screwed that up for them.’
‘Shame.’
‘That’s not quite the word they’re using.’ Hyde watched Dooley wring drops from a cloth he’d have considered bone-dry. ‘They’ve lost two companies of assault engineers and four mine ploughs so far. Had to call for the divisional reserve. Boris says there’s a few threats flying about.’
‘So what they going to do next, bugger off and leave us in peace or start chucking nukes, like they usually do when they’re narked about something?’ He said it lightly, but Scully knew that when the Russians became upset and frustrated by unexpected reverses those were real options. The first was one rarely employed.
Dooley blew his nose, then swore when he realized he’d done it on his wiping cloth. ‘I know what they’ll fucking do, same as always. The man on the spot has tried the sledge-hammer tactic; now his boss will apply typical Russian logic and finesse and try an even bigger hammer.’