Shells and tracer rounds of every calibre flashed past them, but only a few rounds of machine gun fire actually found their target, rapping on the sides of hull and turret without noticeable effect.
‘We’ve caught the buggers on the hop.’ Burke was enjoying himself. For the first time since they had started out he was able to use the machine’s remarkable performance to the full, now that he no longer had to pace himself by the slow-moving transports and rafts of the convoy.
Their turret gunner was not enjoying himself. For Ripper it was bitterly frustrating. He’d done plenty of shooting, but not once had he seen the target. Usually he’d been firing in support of a landing, firing into a cloud of smoke or at a spray-shrouded bank. He didn’t count the barrels, that was no different from popping off at tin cans in his own back yard. So the Rarden cannon was a mite more interesting than a BB rifle, it still wasn’t war, not the sort he’d expected. ‘Major, just what the hell are we looking for?’
For the fourth time in as many minutes he had to hold his fire and let the chance of engaging juicy soft targets go. Mostly it was just trucks unloading ammunition, but Revell even refused him permission to open up on a pair of field cars surrounded by a crowd of gaping Soviet officers.
‘We’ll know it when we see it.’
They rounded a bend in the river, and for the first time, in the extreme distance, Revell could just make out the skyline of Hamburg. It had a jagged, uneven look. He wondered what it would be like closer to, after a year or more of siege by the Warsaw Pact forces. Only for an instant did it hold his attention. There was something closer to hand of much more immediate interest.
Ahead lay a long wharf, and towering over it the rusting skeletons of conveyors and cranes and other coal-handling equipment. They in their turn were dwarfed by the stained sheer concrete walls of a derelict power station.
But it wasn’t the ugliness of the abandoned industrial scene that had caught Revell’s eye. He was watching the activities of Russian pioneers as, closely supervised by stick-wielding officers, they manhandled heavy loads from the wharf, across a precarious plank walkway constructed over barges moored out into the river and on to a floating platform at their end.
The loads were barrels and oil-drums, and even as the Iron Cow closed the range fast a dozen were pushed from the platform to start their havoc-creating journey downstream.
‘Oh boy, sitting targets.’ Ripper’s rebel yell died away as a multiple-barrelled Russian flak gun opened fire on them from the flat roof of the power station.
A torrent of fast-moving tungsten-tipped steel tore the river surface into a wild cauldron of spray all about them.
TWO
‘Take us in closer.’
Burke didn’t question the officer’s order, just corrected the turn he’d been starting to make and put the Iron Cow back on course for the wharf.
Their turret gunner had also been fast to identify the potential advantage and held his fire.
Hastily reloaded, the flak mount sent another hurricane of shells towards the hovercraft, but this time they all struck the river well behind it.
The compact design of the Rarden cannon enabled Ripper to elevate it to engage the flak gun when it was no longer able to depress sufficiently to reach them.
His first clip punched a line of holes in the concrete lip at the edge of the roof, the second group of three rounds tore into the four-barrel weapon and its crew.
A limp body flopped over the side of the building to be impaled on the projecting ironwork of a crane-cab, a hundred feet below, and no other member of the gun’s crew returned to it to tackle the spectacular blaze in one of its big magazines.
The pioneers, oblivious to the threats and blows being aimed at them by their officers, were streaming back across the walkway; an officer who tried physically to stem their panic, stepping into their path and waving his revolver, was brushed aside by the stampede, falling, with the two men he had shot, into the water.
Ripper helped them along by firing at a stack of drums on the platform, setting off an explosion that had an effect beyond that he’d intended or expected.
Thrown about by the blast, the barges strained at their moorings, and as one anchor chain gave, the walkways commenced a fast progressive collapse. Many of the Russians fell even before the planks beneath them gave as they were pushed aside by stronger or more determined men. Some managed to jump into the barges, but more tumbled into the water between them and were smeared from existence as the walls of steel came together.
Switching his fire to the wharf, Ripper used three clips of mixed armour-piercing and incendiary rounds against the stacks of drums, without doing more than smash them down and cause showers of sparks.
‘Maybe they’ve used up all the ones that go ‘boom’.’ Using a Colt Commando sub-machine gun, Dooley sprayed a cluster of drums that had rolled from the dock. Two began to sink, others spun lazily, fans of droplets rising from hoops and projecting end seams.
‘Try the pile by the shutter door.’ Making a fresh appraisal of the boxlike main building of the power station, Revell had noticed that several broken windows had been patchily repaired, and all of them covered in a thick coat of dark paint.
It was a difficult angle. Ripper could see the barrels referred to, but they were only partially visible behind a forest of crane legs and conveyor supports. When he did fire off a whole clip he thought he’d done pretty well to get a single shot past the tangle of struts and girders. He saw the tracer hit square on the top container, saw it jump and start to fall backwards, and then the whole side of the building was drenched in brilliant white light that sent spikes of smoke-tinged flame higher than the roof of the structure.
‘Hey, I got the jackpot.’
‘Very clever.’ Poising his hand over the throttle, Burke waited for the order to turn about and rejoin the comparative security of the convoy. It didn’t come; he gave the officer a moment longer. ‘Right, we’ve done the job, how about going home then?’ His fingers hovered above the control, almost touching it.
‘The major is wondering if we really have.’ Damn it, Andrea seemed to be reading his mind again. But she was right, that was exactly what he was wondering.
Now the smoke had drifted clear the power station appeared hardly to have been damaged at all. The doorway was a larger and less neat opening than it had been before, and the walls right to the top of the building were streaked with soot. Not more than a thousand pounds of explosives had been consumed by that single blast; he just couldn’t believe they’d come on the place at the very moment the Russians had exhausted their stocks of real mines, not when there were still so many of the bogus examples littering the area.
‘Take us in. We’re going to check.’
For Burke, it was a revenge of sorts to see the officer have to grab for a secure hold as the Iron Cow leapt forward under maximum acceleration.
There was a flight of concrete steps set into the wall of the dock. Burke set course for those, settling the craft onto the water just short of them and letting it drift in the last few feet until the front edge of the hull bumped gently against the cabin roof of a submerged launch. ‘Close as I can get.’
‘Right, soon as we’re off, take her back into midstream and wait for our signal. Keep zig-zagging. We don’t know who’s watching.’
‘Go teach your grandmother to suck eggs.’ Saying it under his breath, Burke hardly waited until Revell, Dooley, Andrea and Clarence were out before hitting the switch to actuate the closing of the front ramp and turning the HAPC in its own length to regain the centre of the river.
They could feel the heat radiating from the shattered surface of the wharf. Long cracks ran up and across the wall of the power station, and closest to the site of the blast it was bowed inward and shattered into hundreds of pieces held together only by the web of reinforcement rods inside it.