There was a mass of twisted ironwork to negotiate before they reached the opening, and in places the ground and some of the fallen cranes’ girders were made slippery by dripping human remains. The smouldering insulation on crushed and broken electric motors and wiring filled the air with the stench of burning rubber.
Little of the blast had passed into the vast building. Much of the generating equipment had been stripped out long ago, and walking was made more difficult in the gloom by the many projecting bolts in the floor, where machinery had been.
A heap of bodies lay against a wall. Revell glanced at them. They showed no external sign of injury, but he could tell by their blue-tinged lips, and bulging eyes that they had been killed by the wave of super-compressed air from the explosion. Beside them was a large beer cask, crushed and split open by its impact against a stanchion. It looked like no explosive he was familiar with.
Clarence bent down and rubbed some powder between his fingers. ‘I know what this is…’
Cautiously peering around an angle of the wall, Dooley beckoned the others to join him. ‘What’s this, the cook house?’
Lining either side of a wide aisle were stack after stack of plastic sacks. A few had split and from them a white powder had spilt to the floor. Every few yards stood an open barrel; some were partially filled, others were empty with more of the sacks stood beside.
‘This what I think it is?’ Revell had seen Clarence testing the contents of some of the split sacks.
‘In Northern Ireland we called it Co-op Mix. Usually it’s fertiliser and sugar, only the Reds don’t have sugar in these sort of quantities, or if they had it’d all be on their black market by now, so they must have found a substitute. Whatever it is, this certainly takes home-made bombs out of the kitchen industry league.’
‘Looks fucking dodgy tome.’ Having picked up a fuse all ready for attachment to a completed mine, Dooley very carefully set it down again when his examination revealed a chunk of plastic explosive moulded around its base.
‘It can be. The IRA have had a few own-goals with this stuff, but I’ve never seen this much being mixed before, not all at once. There must be tons of it.’
‘Not for long.’ Revell slipped off his pack and began to take out the compact demolition charges. ‘Set these for ten, no better make that fifteen minutes. Bury them in the barrels that are already filled and among the sacks. I don’t want the Commies rushing back in after we’re gone and undoing all this.’
Taking six of the one-pound charges Revell went to the far end of the assembly line and began to place them among a group of finished mines, heaping loose powder about to conceal them. Out the corner of his eye he thought he saw a movement close to where Andrea was working. He casually edged that way, pretending to hitch his slung assault shotgun to a more comfortable position, then as he reached her side unslung it and pumped three rapid shots into a huge pile of empty sacks.
Echoes boomed about the cavernous interior, turning the three shots into a wild continuing fusillade.
While Andrea covered him, Revell ploughed through the punctured plastic and hauled out two Russians. One of them, an officer, died even as he was laid on the open floor. The pioneer who was with him was in a bad way, he’d taken a full charge in his back but he was still alive.
Swooping on the corpse, Dooley stripped it of pistol and insignia and everything else he considered of value.
‘What about this one, or are you going to have the decency to wait for him to die.’ Clarence watched the process with distaste.
With a sharp knife Dooley removed the officer’s buttons and ornate belt buckle. He didn’t even spare a glance for the dying man. ‘You’ve got to be joking. A Ruskie pioneer? A fucking cannon fodder conscript they haven’t even bothered to give a rifle. You got to be joking.’
Andrea looked from the officer’s dusty but mostly correct uniform, to the pioneer’s rags and tattered boots. ‘Another fine example of Communist equality; and that they would teach the world.’
The wounded man was moving, trying with movements he could hardly control to reach the mangled centre of his back. His questing fingers touched the area and dipped into the pulped flesh and oozing blood. He gave a despairing cry that turned to a choking cough and then an ugly rattle, as the terror of the extent of his injuries and his situation struck him, and died.
‘Eleven minutes, Major.’ Clarence had to duck back inside as he called from the doorway, on coming under fire from one of the barges. As he levelled his sniper rifle waiting for the Russian officer to pop up again, he heard the sharp crack of the Iron Cow’s Rarden and the shouts and screams that came from the barge as two shells passed through it from side to side. Above the cries of wounded he heard another commotion, and then a pistol was thrown over the side, followed by the limp and bloody body of an officer. A selection of off-white rags were waved from the craft.
They didn’t have to wait. Burke had the HAPC ready for them when they reached the steps. As they boarded, one of the charges they’d left behind went off prematurely. It was very muted, producing only billowing clouds of white powder that fountained from every vent and opening in the building.
The girl had said nothing to him about the incident in the power station. At the time Revell had thought he was saving her life. Alright, so the reality wasn’t as dramatic as that, but she must have known what was in his mind, and still she’d said nothing. She never spoke to him, she answered when he spoke to her, but she never initiated conversation. Sometimes being around her became so difficult for him, so frustrating, he felt he could almost lash out at her. If he did though she’d hit back, and despite her slighter build would probably manage to hurt him before he could pin her down. He could imagine a wrestle with her being exciting, the thought of it was rousing him…
All of the remaining charges blew together. Every door and window and ventilator was blasted from the power station as the whole structure swayed and bulged. For an instant it seemed as if it would remain intact, and then the wall facing on to the wharf, already weakened by the earlier explosion, crumpled away from the rest of the building and a thousand tons of razor-sharp rubble collapsed into the river and across the barges.
‘Tell them the job’s done, there won’t be any more mines.’ As their radio-man, watched by Sergeant Hyde, transmitted the message, Revell reached for his water bottle. It was empty. As he bent down for it, the letter fell from his pocket. He snatched it up and crumpled it into another whose zipper still worked. Now he was wishing he hadn’t brought it with him, what the hell, he wasn’t interested in what the bitch got up to now. When she’d remarried it was for more than mercenary reasons—he’d been happy to hear that she didn’t want any more money out of him. That, he’d thought, had severed the last link between them. There’d been no children, and now there wasn’t even alimony to bind them. But she’d kept writing and he’d kept on reading, and re-reading. He’d never yet had the willpower to throw one of them away unopened, and every time he wished he had. He could feel the bulk of the screwed-up letter in his jacket; if only it was that easy to crumple and put from sight his memories.
On his screen he could see the convoy was catching up to them. It was time to push on, before they were called back to assist with any more close fire-support missions. He used the internal communication system to talk to the crew.
‘According to Intelligence reports,’ Revell allowed a brief pause for the inevitable groan from Burke and sardonic laugh from Ripper, ‘we should be approaching the last ring of positions the Ruskies have around Hamburg. The fighting’s been fluid in the last few days, so things might have changed, but it shouldn’t amount to much…’