‘Or fuel,’ Thorne butted in. ‘Or maybe transport, for a fast retreat. We seem to have been doing that since the evening of the first day.’
‘Holy shit.’ Ripper was all toothy enthusiasm. ‘I don’t give a damn if it’s rumour or fairy story. Hey, if it’s no more real than that, maybe we can still trade on it. My Daddy used to make money out of stills that weren’t real. He used to tell the revenue about them, always collecting cash money up front. Then when they hit the site and there weren’t nothing there he used to swear they must just have moved on. By then he’d spent the reward so there weren’t nothing they could do.’
‘I’ve seen everything traded in the Zone, but never fairy stories.’ Thorne leaned back against the bare condensation-streaked metal of the hull, and by closing his eyes took himself out of the conversation.
‘There are plenty of refugees trapped in the Zone who’ve paid fortunes, for bogus maps of safe routes to the west, or handed over all they’ve got to so-called guides who dump their customers as soon as they’ve been paid. In advance of course.’ Clarence too had tired of what he saw as pointless speculation. Settling back, he sought what comfort he could in the vehicle’s hard shell, festooned as it was with sharp angles, projecting brackets and hanging equipment.
He flinched and his eyes flickered open as another body slumped against his. He relaxed his instantly tensed muscles when he saw that it was Andrea. With her alone he could bear any form of physical contact. Even that, by insinuating a pack between them, he kept to a minimum. Still he could not repress an involuntary shudder as the warmth of her breath on his shoulder permeated his layers of clothing.
Ripper was not so easily to be put down, and after a short pause made another attempt to draw one of the crew, anyone who could profess to some knowledge on the subject in which he’d taken such interest. ‘Well, if we do come across it we’d be sure to be able to take on extra gas, or maybe even swap these ancient wrecks for better transport.’ He looked around hopefully.
‘It’s a dream; forget it.’ As Revell hoisted himself into the command cupola he caught a glimpse of Andrea, where she snuggled against their sniper. Much as he loathed the sight of her with anybody else, it took an effort for him to pull his eyes away.
Through the mud-smeared thick prisms he viewed the road ahead. It twisted and turned constantly, sometimes flanked by shallow banks but fairly level, but then suddenly climbing with a broken rock wall to one side and a precipitous drop to the other. They passed through a tiny village, just fifteen half-timbered houses, a tiny combined store and gas station and a tall spired church. It had been looted and abandoned long ago. Except for fading paint on doors and shutters there was no colour about the scene, with even the defoliated trees adding to the impression that he was looking at a black-and-white photograph. The same drenching of chemicals that had killed shrubs and trees had also inhibited the growth of weeds that would otherwise have enveloped the road and paths, but though that facet of dereliction was missing, the drifts of dirt and other wind-blown debris more than compensated.
They slowed to negotiate a tangle of branches from an old elm that some storm had thrown down to partially block the road. The brittle timber snapped in a shower of water droplets, and then they were clear and picking up speed again when a hail of twenty-millimetre cannon fire lashed at the APC.
The tracer-towing high-velocity rounds smacked hard against and into the mass of spare track links, sandbags and scrap metal that crudely reinforced the front plates. They ricocheted wildly, leaving scraps of their phosphorous bases to smoulder among the shattered remnants.
Burke threw the APC into a skid turn to take them off the road and out of the line of fire, but the tracks only scrabbled at the loose shale of the bank. As he hurled the machine into reverse for a second attempt, another burst of armour-piercing and incendiary shells lashed out.
There was an ear-punishing crash as a round found a gap among the remains of the protective litter on the hull, penetrated the splashboard and almost punched its way through the hull. A semi-molten scab of aluminium flashed the length of the crew compartment to smash a first-aid box beside the rear ramp.
‘Make smoke.’ Revell wrenched at the door-control lever. ‘Out, out, out.’
As Burke scrambled from the driver’s position a third and longer burst of enemy fire put a round clean through the smoke-wreathed armour, smashing the instrument panel and shattering against a control stick. Flames licked from destroyed wiring and the padding of the seat covering.
Jamming in the half-lowered position, the ramp tore weapons and equipment from the crew’s grasp as they bailed out fast, with the fire already taking hold behind them.
THREE
Slewed at an angle across the narrow road, the boxlike bulk of the old APC gave the squad cover as they scattered among the flanking trees.
As he bailed out, Sergeant Hyde caught a glimpse of a four-wheeled Warpac armoured car barely fifty meters away, parked close against the bank at a bend in the road. Stabs of flame from the snout of its cannon marked another score of shells unleashed against the now abandoned M113.
Masked by the wreck, the driver of the second vehicle in their little convoy wrenched his machine into reverse and brought it into clanging collision with the last in the file. Track links snapped and both slewed to a stop with their drives broken.
Hyde’s swearing made him overlook the fact that the Russian gunners’ preoccupation with the hulks of their armour had given the company time to scatter into cover. But it was only a momentary lapse. Those few precious fractions of time wasted by the enemy when he failed to switch his fire to the fleeing crews were quickly made up for when a torrent of co-axial heavy machine-gun fire was hosed into the woods.
There was a brief pause as a belt or magazine was changed, and then the rapid-firing weapon probed again among the trunks for human targets. But already the best chance had been missed. Only three of the grenade dischargers on the lead APC had been fired but now they added their swirling clouds to the output of the fiercer blaze inside the APC.
The steadily falling rain prevented the smoke from rising and caused it to swirl in confusing wisps into the woods. Hardly diminished by the downpour, it wreathed the intervening ground in a fitful screen.
Again the air was full of metal from the high-velocity Russian cannon as tungsten-tipped shells smacked great scabs of bark from the trees. Where some lodged, their incendiary content added to the artificial fog.
In nervously erratic ripples the streams of bullets stitched across the timber, betraying the gunner’s lack of fire discipline, as he fired blindly, expending ammunition at a prodigious rate.
From inside the flame-and smoke-generating APC came the crackle of small-arms ammunition cooking-off. At the noise, the enemy turret-gunner reverted his attention back to the wreck.
‘This is our chance.’ Haying failed to find the major, Hyde grabbed Dooley, and then kicked out at Thorne to get his attention also.
Thorne gave up his elbow-armed conflict with Scully to get equal shares of the cover of a slim tree barely adequate for one, and joined the NCO behind an insubstantial holly bush. ‘I’ll strangle the shitty flier who sprayed this lot with crap and stopped them growing to a useful width. If I live to get the chance to look for him.’