Very gently Karen brushed his hair back from his eyes and closed them. She pulled the blanket up over his face and slowly got to her feet. Pausing to make a mental adjustment to the situation, without a backward glance she went to sit beside the girl in the deep coma.
‘That is one special little lady.’ With the officer, Sampson had watched in silence. He took in the swell of her hips and her narrow waist and back, but his next words held no sexual connotation. ‘I’d have her to Andrea any day.’
Although he couldn’t agree, Revell knew what the marine meant. There was no humanity in Andrea. Only a few years older than this girl, she seemed to have gone through so much that all feeling had been leeched from her by her experiences. But maybe, at the start, she’d been like Karen…
‘Major!’
There was urgency in the shout and Revell was already dashing toward the stairs when a giant concussion shook the very fabric of the rock and jarred his ankles so hard that his next few steps were awkward, until the numbing effect began to wear off.
Visibility when he reached the ground floor was almost zero, and the air was roasting hot. His arms were grabbed by Voke, and together, hobbling like cripples, they groped their way toward the open air. They were stopped by Clarence.
‘There’s nothing left up there. All the Striker teams have been wiped out.’
‘What did they hit us with?’ The air was clearing with the draft from the broken windows, but Revell still found each breath scorching to his throat.
‘A couple of MIGs popped over a hill and dumped napalm and retarded bombs right across the top. The Strikers took out one, but that was too late.’
‘The Rapiers!’ The new Russian tactic had worked on them; if the same blind-side approach was used against the farm it might succeed. Revell knew they daren’t let that happen. If it did, then almost half of the valley would fall outside the protective umbrella of the shorter-range weapons they deployed from the ruins. A proper defence of the complex would no longer be possible.
‘Get every automatic weapon up on top.’ He turned to Voke. ‘I want everyone who knows how to point a rifle. No exceptions, walking wounded as well. Tell them to grab anything that will accept a mag or belt.
There were not even piles of cinders to mark where the Striker teams had perished. Blast and fire had obliterated them completely.
Small pools of jellied petrol still burned and the very stones were hot to the touch. All their careful work had been utterly destroyed. Every sandbagged position had been flattened, leaving only the smouldering shreds of jute among their scattered contents.
‘You fire at anything that hasn’t got its feet on the ground.’ Revell’s shout carried. ‘You open fire when you see it, you stop when you can’t.’ He swapped his combat shotgun for a well-worn M60, draping a spare belt over his shoulders and laying two more at his feet. He looked at the neat coils, and wondered if they would be enough. That’s if he got the chance to fire off any of them.
TWENTY
The air was heavy with petrol fumes and shimmered with the heat rapidly being surrendered by the fabric of the castle. They found what cover they could, braced themselves and strained to hear the approach of the next attack.
A roaring blast of noise assaulted their ears as three MIG 27s screamed over a ridge and hurtled toward them. Streams of multicoloured tracer hosed skyward and the massed clatter of the weapons drowned the rattle of the cascade of shell cases pouring onto and between the stones.
Firing its six-barrel gatling cannon, the lead aircraft flashed over the ruins, straight into and through the arcing lines of steel and phosphorus.
Five of the aircraft’s external pylons were hung with ordnance, and as he poured a whole belt into the MIGs belly, Voke wondered almost absently what the chances were of their massed barrage detonating all or part of that lethal cargo.
Pieces fell from the plane but it didn’t deviate from its course, and swooped down into the valley heading directly at the farm, trailing a thin filament of fuel vapour.
It ran head-first into a Rapier missile and dissolved in an incandescent ball of flame.
The following fighter bombers sheered away from the wall of flak, and only a couple of broken lines of tracer came close as they veered back on course and bore straight for the farm.
Twin stabs of flame marked the takeoff of more missiles, but even as they hurled themselves toward the MIGs, the jets were using maximum thrust, afterburners glowing white hot, in a wild jinking series of sharp turns to lift out of the valley.
As they ran, their under-wing stores of high-explosive and napalm tumbled toward the farm, some of the iron bombs falling in a different trajectory as their miniature parachutes slowed their headlong plunge.
Flame, smoke and tall showers of debris hid the distant cluster of buildings and smothered the fields about them. But the Rapier crews had a belated revenge.
Above a distant hill reappeared one of the MIGs. A tongue of red and yellow flame licked from the root of a partially swept wing and it towed a growing trail of black smoke.
‘He’s trying to make height for a bailout.’ Watching, Carrington hoped the jet would complete its turn over them.
The damaged aircraft never made it that far. Immediately after its pilot had ejected, it was riven by a fuel tank explosion that tore away the burning wing and sent the fuselage into a flat spin toward the valley floor.
Snatched away from it by his deployed parachute, the pilot and his armoured seat separated. Instead of popping open into a life-saving canopy, though, the chute remained a crumpled tangle of nylon.
There was a ragged cheer from the onlookers as the crewman impacted murderously hard not far from the remains of his fighter.
‘We’re on our own now.’ Thorne set down the thirty-calibre MG, and the unexpended portion of the belt swung to drape across his feet.
They reloaded, and waited, but there was no third raid. Revell stood most of them down and set those remaining to construct new air-defence positions.
Carrington found a hand, blackened, with the flesh hanging from it like the tatters of a thin glove. Casually he tossed it over the side. ‘Someone is going to get a telegram saying ‘Regret to advise you, your beloved has been almost completely lost in action.’’ He didn’t bother to wipe off the adhering scraps of bloody tissue.
‘You’re bloody insane.’ Dooley had watched the act with an expression of extreme disgust.
‘Did you expect me to keep it as a souvenir? Come off it. I’ve seen you chucking bits and pieces about without being too bothered.’
‘I don’t care about that.’ Dooley resumed shovelling clear the floor of a weapon pit. Much of the debris had been fused together by a sticky black residue. ‘What’s pissed me off is that it was wearing a ring, a gold signet ring.’
Close by, Voke heard the exchange and flashed his metallic smile. ‘It is a comfort to me to know that when I am killed I shall not die alone. I am sure you will be close by, with pliers in your hand.’
‘Everybody’s a fucking comedian.’ Changing the subject, Dooley called to the major. ‘How come they were content with just two passes? They didn’t hang about to watch results; for all they know the Rapiers are still in one piece.’
Revell had been thinking along the same lines himself. Using various vision aids one after another, he swept the valley and surveyed it thoroughly. From a window below, the Browning was again lacing the Russian smokescreen with short punching bursts, now employing a high proportion of tracer. From the large number that ricocheted from unseen targets within the screen it now looked certain that the enemy were employing mostly armoured clearing devices for the task.