An airburst seeded the weapon pits with razor-sharp slivers of steel. One carved a long groove in the Kevlar material of Dooley’s helmet; two more punched effortlessly through the launch tube of the TOW and crudely stapled it to the body of the missile itself, reducing them effectively to scrap.
Dragging a replacement forward, he noticed the lieutenant was pushing a wad of dressing inside the shoulder of his jacket.
‘You hit?’
‘I felt it pass right through.’ Withdrawing the pad, Voke showed that it had only a tiny spot of blood on it. ‘There was a burning sensation. Perhaps it has cauterized itself. That will save our overworked medic more work.’
‘Better get it checked.’
‘I shall, later, when there is time.’
Dooley made no response to that. If an officer wanted to be a hero, then he was quite prepared to let him. But if he got a scratch himself, he’d be down those cellar steps before you could say ‘napalm.’ As yet he’d not been that lucky; all he wanted was a little nick, just a cut that looked worse than it was, anything that would get him down there among those girls.
There were several columns of smoke rising from various locations in the circle of hills. Working through the night to find or push a path through the minefields, the Russians must have taken fearful casualties. When the sun had broken through the midmorning it had revealed the main enemy effort. A freshly bulldozed track led from the road to the area flattened by the gunship’s fuel-air bombs. The scar of turned earth had swarmed with Warpac assault engineers and their tracked and wheeled equipment, presenting a dream target.
Every weapon for which a space could be found on that side of the castle had fired until its barrel became too hot to touch.
Trapped by the mines ahead and to either side, the enemy’s stampede back to the road had turned into a slaughter. The safe track became a killing ground as mortar bombs, anti-tank rockets and streams of fire from Brownings and mini-guns and grenade launchers saturated the area.
When Revell had finally called a halt there were no more targets to be seen. The armour and earth-moving machinery was wrecking and blazing and bodies were sprawled in literally a carpet of camouflage material across the bare soil.
Retaliation had come quickly, but by then most had made it to the comparative safety of the lower rooms and cellars before the first deluge, of artillery rockets, had plummeted down.
For half a minute they’d received the undivided attention of a battery of multiple launchers. Half a minute in which a pounding blasting, searing five tons of high-explosive drenched and pulverized the exterior walls and the layer of rubble overhead.
A single nineteen-kilo 122mm warhead had detonated against a lower floor window. The full force of the blast caught a group of pioneers on their way to the cellars. Those directly in line with the opening had stood no chance. Seven had died instantly, four more been so desperately injured that they lived only minutes, and another three were terribly wounded.
Mercifully for the first rescuers on the scene, the worst of the carnage had been hidden behind a swirling maelstrom of dust and smoke.
NINETEEN
Anticipating the Russian commander’s next move, the instant Revell sensed the barrage was finished, he rushed a heavy machine gun to their best-protected position and had it range with tracer on the partially completed route.
He was only just in time. Smoke shells began to fall and rapidly masked its location. The near-silent eruptions of burning phosphorus fell so close to the truck that they must have caused casualties among the first of the combat engineers sent to restart the work, and the asphyxiating pall, forcing the men to wear respirators, must have made their dangerous work that much more difficult.
As the concealing cloud began to spread and thicken, the Browning began to fire short bursts on fixed lines.
Now death came upon the toiling Russians when they thought they were safe. Those hit by the blind-fire died without hearing or even realizing they were under attack.
They couldn’t stop the work completely. Revell knew that, regardless of the cost in lives, but the MG fire, combined with such heavier concentrations as they could put down during lulls in the shelling, would reduce the pace of the work to a costly crawl.
As an added touch, he had the tracer rounds removed from the fast-consumed belts of fifty-calibre slugs, to enhance the demoralizing effect on the Russian troops. Now the powerful armour -piercing rounds would arrive and slice through men, trees and light armour without warning.
In answer to the harassing fire, the communists replied with their own, turning some of their biggest guns on the castle. Only the sheer scale of the target they were punishing enabled it to soak up the bombardment. The big artillery shells impacting on the enormous table of rubble could do little more than grind it into smaller and smaller pieces.
A near miss blasted the abandoned transport parked short of the gate and started fires that made an acrid cloud full of floating particles of lampblack from tires and synthetic cab fittings and upholstery. Gas tanks ruptured and sent showers of blazing fuel over the walls, but their great thickness made them impervious to the ferocious heat generated.
The hot black smoke hung about the site in the still air, and the first the garrison knew of the Russian attack was the distinctive sound of several Rapiers being fired and the crackling report of a Vulcan firing long bursts.
At the same moment the incoming artillery fire ceased, and to shouts from Hyde and the officers, men poured up to man every position along the walls. Hugging the contours of the hills, about thirty blurred dots against the sky began to resolve themselves into the outlines of Hind gunships and larger troop-carrying helicopters.
The lead machine fell apart under a direct hit from a Rapier and another following closely fell out of control, its rotors reduced to splintered stumps by wreckage from the first.
A third Hind bucked and began a lurching turn out of formation as a Rapier passed through its cabin without detonating. The forty-kilo missile, travelling at Mach 2, wiped away both door gunners and sent the sliding doors and other sections of fuselage panel fluttering into the valley.
‘Strikers engage as they come in range. The rest of you hold your fire.’ Revell saw the puffs of white smoke from the chin turrets of the gunships as their rotary cannons opened up, and then the flashes of flame beneath their stub wings as their missile racks emptied.
The range was too great and the few hits struck the base of the walls at their thickest point. Another Rapier scored a hit and a troop transport disintegrated and spilled its infantry cargo from a height of three hundred feet.
‘They’re bloody windy.’ Recognizing the ill-timed firing for the caution it was, Burke crouched over his mini-gun and began to wonder if they’d come close enough for him to have the chance to use it.
Spreading out as pilots jockeyed to put more distance and other machines between themselves and the Rapiers, the formation began to lose cohesion. Viewed from the castle, the machines appeared to overlap, masking each other’s fire, and presented a perfect target for the deadly Stingers.
‘Look at them run.’ Finger still on the trigger, Burke raised his head from the sights to watch the helicopters break in all directions as a salvo of ten missiles lashed into them. ‘They’ve never seen fire like that.’ If the approaching squadron was employing any sort of electronic countermeasures they proved no more successful than the showers of physical decoys they were scattering.