‘All I know is that I was told to get the wounded up to the first floor, ready for evacuation at first light or soon after. Won’t take so long to get them into a chopper from here. Guess, as usual, the casevac boys don’t want to be on the ground longer than they can help.’
Checking the pulse of the last man brought up, Sampson felt it falter, pick up again, and the cease.
‘Oh shit. I lost him, and I really thought he was in with a chance. You never can tell.’
‘That all you know?’
‘Look, Dooley, you’re so keen to find out, go ask the major. I’m busy, trying to stop people from dying.’
Sampson disconnected the drip. He knelt beside the body and pulled the blanket up to cover the face. ‘Yeah, I’m trying, dear God I’m trying, but I’m not always succeeding.’
There was no doubt he’d heard the orders clearly, but in the short transmission time he’d been allowed, Revell had been given no more than the barest facts. They were brutally brief and precise. Stay put, don’t destroy the dump, casualty pick-up at first light. That was it.
It wasn’t orders, it was a death sentence. They were a tiny NATO island in the middle of a surging communist sea. At best from now on they could be of no more than nuisance value to the Russian troops intent on capturing the valley and its contents.
By this time the communists would be confident that the handful of troops holed up in the ruins did not possess the means to destroy the dumps. Their mine-clearing effort had only to remain beyond the reach of the comparatively short-range weapons emplaced among the ruins and shortly all would be theirs.
It was only the fate of the wounded that deterred Revell from disobeying orders. Once they were away he would take matters into his own hands. It was more than likely that HQ did not understand the implications of the situation. Just because he’d had an acknowledgment of his signal did not mean that the staff officer dealing with it had fully understood precisely what was at stake. Shit, how could he? He wouldn’t have seen the lives lost, the bodies broken and torn apart…
‘The Reds have lost another bulldozer, by the look of it.’
On the far side of the valley a bubble of flame rose through the piled smokescreen. Hyde watched it tuck in its tail as it climbed until it was a disembodied ball of dull fire, and then it was gone.
‘Yes.’ Revell noted it absently. ‘But they haven’t far to go.’
‘They’ll have thrown away a lot of lives.’ Hyde beat his arms across his body to combat the cold. ‘Did the powers-that-be say if we’d be reinforced after the wounded are away?’
Flecks of sleet blew in the wind and Revell pulled his collar higher. ‘They didn’t say anything. I don’t know whether they don’t know what they’re doing or won’t say what they’re doing. We stay, that’s all I got.’
‘You going to speak to the men? There’s a lot of rumours flying about.’
‘They can’t be any worse than the truth. Pass on what we know. I’ll talk to them after the casualties are lifted out.’
‘There won’t be a lot you can say, will there, except to tell them to check they’ve filled in their will forms.’
Revell knew his sergeant was right, echoing his own thinking. Perhaps they were being left behind purely for their nuisance value. They could tie up quite a few Russian troops for some time. It was a tactic the Russians themselves had frequently used. Stay-behind parties could inflict damage out of all proportion to their numbers.
Hell, and he’d thought by defending this place they were making a real contribution to the NATO effort, giving the Russians a hard kick in the teeth. The truth was they were no more than pricking them with a pin, and would be brushed aside and destroyed as an afterthought of the main Warpac advance. Perhaps the NATO staff wanted the tempting stores in the valley to remain intact for the time being so as to act as a honey-pot, drawing more and more troops onto them.
Another airburst cracked overhead. The flak tank that had been quiet for an hour joined in, hoping to catch anyone going to the assistance of wounded. Orange tracer flashed above the ruins to arc away in the distance and finally self-destruct at the limit of their range in tiny points of light.
‘Sunrise in thirty minutes,’ Revell had to brush a snowflake from his watch to read it. ‘We’ve got about six-tenths cloud. Let’s hope it stays that way.’
‘I’ll get Scully to pass ‘round hot drinks.’ Hyde wiped his face with the back of his glove. The leather was sodden.
‘Good idea. might be the last chance for a while. Then I want all weapons manned. When we hear that chopper coming in I want to hit every commie flak position with all we’ve got.’
‘What the fuck’s going on?’ Dooley scrambled up on top and hurled himself into the nearest weapon pit. He had to bellow at his loudest to make himself heard by Clarence.
‘How should I know? I’m only fighting this war, not running it; that’s if anybody is…’
‘Shit.’ Dooley threw himself flat as a flight of Harriers screamed past so low that they felt the blast of their slipstream and tasted the exhaust from their jet pipes. ‘The whole world has gone fucking mad…’
The rest of his words were lost as a pair of MIGs followed the Harriers. Tracer was coming up from among the trees, among them the 30mm from the flak tank.
‘Hit it.’ Revell jumped up and yelled to the mortar crews. ‘Take it out now.’
‘Fire!’ Thorne and his men dropped bombs down the waiting tubes in a never-ending procession, pausing only to realign on fresh targets as they were called. Every location in turn was drenched by the deluge of explosives, and the anti-aircraft fire rapidly diminished.
Masses of tracer and whole swarms of anti-tank missiles ploughed through the trees, and soon there were several fierce fires sprouting from unseen sources, and the crackle of exploding munitions.
More NATO ground-attack aircraft were visible in the distance, peeling out of formations to make diving attacks with rockets, bombs and cannons. Almost every time they were rewarded with dense pillars of black smoke denoting burning vehicles. The columns rose straight up in the still, pale dawn.
‘This is fantastic. I thought we didn’t have any aircraft left.’ Dooley sent yet another TOW missile on its way and gave it his full concentration until it blasted the camouflage from a self-propelled gun. He grabbed a reload.
‘Some clever shit has been saving a few by the looks of things.’ Carrington had hefted his mini-gun onto the top of a broken wall and was expending ammunition at an incredible rate against a distant ridge. After a thousand rounds, showers of random tracer marked the destruction of his target.
From close at hand came the distinctive heavy double beat of a Chinook. The downdraft from his blades accelerated the sleet to stinging speed that hurt exposed hands and faces. As it reduced forward momentum and began to drop toward the ruins, its gunners were putting down a massive weight of fire from four mini-guns and as many grenade launchers. The machine was plastered with red-cross emblems.
The rear loading ramp was already half-lowered when it made an uneven touchdown. By the time it made contact with the broken stone the first of the wounded were lining up to board.
A loadmaster, linked to the flight deck by the umbilical of his intercom lead, did a double-take as he saw the girls. ‘Can’t have been all that bad, Major. I wouldn’t have minded…’ His words tailed off as the line of wounded kept coming in a never-ending line from an opening among the piles of rubble.
‘It’s not been a party.’ Revell ducked as a cannot shell passed through the arc of the forward rotors and a shower of metal and carbon fibre fragments slashed past. ‘Have you got a combat air patrol? Can you get hold of them?’