He made a final slight adjustment to the laser’s point of aim, centring it on the mid-section of the tanker. A telltale white dot on the lens of the designator told him precisely the place on the hull being turned into a laser emitter whose coded frequency would bring the warhead of the first cruise exactly to it.
Already he had risked a hurried glance through the turret’s periscopes to determine which should be his second and third choices. The cramp in his arm and fingers was forgotten, he slowed his breathing so as not to cause any deviation in the beam.
The cruise came in low over their heads and dived on to the tanker, in vision for only a tiny fraction of time as no more than a blurred white flash.
A huge fireball hid the tanker and from it soared giant portions of fabricated steel. Bow and stern of the ship were propelled in either direction, and lifted by the blast from the mud, were caught by the heaving water and born downstream until they turned over and sank.
Identifying his second target as the obscuration cleared, Revell was only just fast enough in switching aim to it. A deck cargo of rusted freight containers was thrown high into the air as the second missile struck, but unaided by the pent-up forces of unflushed gases that had rendered the tanker’s destruction so complete, this same sized vessel was not destroyed utterly.
Bridge and superstructure gone, its hull torn open to the water line, the vessel wallowed sideways from the line and settled once more into the bed of the river, still almost on an even keel. Revell saw the implication even as he laid the white spot on the side of an ore carrier. One more missile, one more ship, but even if its destruction was as total as that of the tanker, there still remained the hulk of the container ship obstructing the channel.
The explosion of the last of the cruise missiles failed even to envelop the container ship as it broke the back of the ore carrier, then as the broken ship began to heel over, Revell saw it heave and shudder as though being attacked by massive forces.
A wall of water had been building up behind the blockade, and now the Elbe set about clearing a way for itself. What three swiftly delivered ship-killing blows had failed to do, millions upon millions of gallons of pent-up water set about, re-opening its route to the sea.
They might only have been plastic boats in a bathtub for all they mattered in the face of that irresistible onslaught. The crack of the cruises’ detonations, the booms of their following sonic waves, were nothing compared to the din of metal on metal as one after another the block ships were tossed aside and into each other. Bows were lifted by the surge and sent like monstrous spears through the sides of other vessels. A large tug that rolled over offered its propellers like a can-opener to the side of a ferry and sliced a fifty-foot gash in its plates.
‘Get them back on board. We’re in business again.’ Without stripping down the designator, Revell hand-cranked the turret round until the barrel of the Rarden faced the direction from which an increasing volume of Russian machine gun fire was coming. It was a temptation to stay, to use it, but he vacated the chair for Ripper as the others backed aboard, returning the enemy fire as they came.
Rockets scored near misses on the debris beside them, and the laser bucked and twisted on its mount as an armour-piercing machine gun round found the aperture from which it had been aimed and destroyed the glass prism protecting it, and its complex lens.
Difficult to manoeuvre in the confined space with the power of only one engine to tap, the Iron Cow was taking more and more punishment. An antitank rocket scored a direct hit on the disabled engine, and only its tough construction stopped the jet of white-hot plasma generated by the hollow-charge warhead from penetrating the hull itself.
‘Cut in the air conditioning, clear these fumes.’ It was going to take them a couple of minutes more to get back on to the water; at their reduced speed, a couple more after that before they were out of range of the intense fire. Revell knew they didn’t have that much time. ‘Use the cannon.’
‘Now you’re talking, Major.’ Ripper pushed a clip of incendiary shells into the Rarden, and gave the pumps only a few seconds to begin flushing the stink of fuel from the interior before firing them.
Egged and bullied on, giving half-hearted cheers in ragged time with the cue from a few field-police pushing them, the ragbag assortment of Russian troops kept up their furious firing, as if they were eager to exhaust their ammunition as quickly as possible. Grenades were thrown, often over the heads of the front ranks of the advancing men, and they were the devices’ only victims.
‘Look at them go, you ever see anyone move that fast before?’ To complete the rout his first burst had started, Ripper unleashed a second. It was hardly needed. Throwing down their weapons the Russians turned and ran, trampling down the hardy few who tried to press on, and those foolish enough to try to stop them. Bodies smouldered and burned where the burst had plunged into the packed ranks. Not all of them lay still.
The recoil forces added another difficulty as Burke tried to steer the now underpowered machine around the many obstructions in its path. Jagged stacks of scrap metal plucked and tore at the reinforced rubberised fabric of the ride skirt, and each tear meant air spilt and another slight reduction in their hover height.
A cloud of spray told him they were over the water as he fought to correct a dangerous sideslip towards a buckled tower crane.
‘Take us straight through the middle. I think the Russians have just played their last card.’
Wrecked ships towered over the Iron Cow as they negotiated the channel between them. Masts and bows and funnels stuck up from the water like so many bizarre tombstones, and some of the bodies whose graves they marked floated beside them, those of the Russian scuttling crews and anti-aircraft artillerymen who had still been aboard when the missile impacted.
‘We sure did show those Ruskies, did you see me make ‘em run. I’ll beta few of them are halfway home to Moscow already.’ Ripper’s feet did a little soft-shoe shuffle as they dangled in the centre of the cabin. ‘I just can’t wait to sample the delights of Hamburg, I sure heard a lot about that place. I been given a few addresses.’
‘It will be interesting to see if you can find them.’ Through her periscope Andrea was watching the approaching fringes of the city centre.
All along the water’s edge there was nothing but heaps of rubble, with here and there the stumps of legs of a crane giving some reference point.
‘Doesn’t look like you’ll be needing a roadmap.’ Dooley had seen the same. ‘Looks like they haven’t got any roads.’
‘Aw, and I was looking forward to seeing the place. Hey, what the hell, I’m here, I’ll make the best of it. I’ll find something when I get ashore.’
‘Don’t put any money on it.’ Burke was watching his bank of dials and gauges.
‘Course I will. Hell, I could find fun down a sewer.’
‘From the smell of you, you may have; but I didn’t mean that. I meant getting ashore.’ A dial that Burke had been watching, and that had been hovering just above zero, quivered and dropped suddenly to register just that. As it did, the remaining engine died and the craft settled gently on to the water and began to rock in time with its motion. ‘We’re out of gas. Unless someone has got a couple of paddles tucked away that I don’t know about, then the only place we’re going is back downstream. Into the waiting arms of the Ruskies.’
FOUR
‘Here, Clarence. What was that word you used?’ Standing on the lowered ramp, Dooley watched the small motorboat struggling to tow them towards the dockside.
‘Ignominious.’