Showing as a pink glow drifting over the tree tops, it had registered with sufficient definition for a bearing to be taken. It had taken little thought on Revell’s part to elect himself to go and investigate, taking Andrea with him.
The enemy vehicles were parked haphazardly across the autoroute, but effectively blocked its full width, not more than a few hundred yards beyond where the detour rejoined it. A few troops had dismounted, mostly officers, and dressed in full NBC gear with the exception of respirators they strolled about casually.
Senior among them appeared to be an officer with a zoom-lens fitted Pentax slung by a cord about his neck. Every now and again he would lift it and squint down the road through its viewfinder.
‘That’s a reception party. I was expecting them to drag along a gaggle of news men and a film crew, but there’s no doubt who they’re waiting for. Looks like we managed to get in front of the civvies, but just a little late.’ A noise that Revell had at first attributed to an auxiliary charging engine or generator aboard one of the armoured cars, now began to intrude more upon his hearing. It was becoming louder, getting closer, and was joined by a second.
‘Helicopters!’ Through a gap in the leafless interwoven branches overhead, Andrea pointed to an orange stutter of exhaust flame in the sky. ‘They are circling.’
‘Either they’re lost, or they’re looking for something. Could be a few Party bosses come to spice up the welcome committee, or maybe the press contingent I was expecting. This lot’ll put up a flare for them in a moment.’
‘Then what is your plan? Do we sit here and wait until the traitors arrive, and then watch their Russian friends put their propaganda machine into action?’
‘You’d attack the roadblock I suppose, put a grenade into the gut of that Russian officer.’
‘No, I would put a grenade into the civilians’ transport when it arrived. From here it will be an easy target. Using an incendiary shell there will be no mistake, no survivors.’
Revell had noticed earlier the colour coded tip of the shell she’d loaded into the under-slung launcher. ‘And you’re all ready to do just that, aren’t you.’
‘Of course. There is not the time for us to get to them first. Our orders are to prevent them reaching the Russians. How else would we do that now?’
On the road the Russian drivers had remounted, and guided by directions from their officers were backing the cumbersome vehicles off the metalled surface and under the trees, except for a command version of an eight wheeled APC that was proving reluctant to restart.
The troop’s response to the approach of the aircraft didn’t make sense. Revell’s first reaction was to doubt his identification of the choppers, but he had been forced too often in the past to take cover from attacks by Soviet gunships to mistake their distinctive engine beat. With nothing logical on which to base a judgment, all he had was intuition, and a gut feeling told him what had to be done.
‘Put a shell into that stalled eight-wheeler.’ Of all the orders she might have received, that was the one that Andrea had been least expecting. She didn’t question it, but there was a perceptible hesitation before she fired, as though subconsciously she was giving the major an opportunity to countermand it.
With the range barely a hundred yards, the grenade’s trajectory was virtually flat and it skimmed the surface of the road to impact and burst on the side of the command vehicle low on its hull between its big rear wheels.
Spikes of white light engulfed the APC and spitting balls of phosphorus that failed to lodge in the deep treaded tires bounced off to form a carpet of blazing globules.
Amid shouting and confusion a Russian officer ran with waving arms to the other vehicles and hammered on their armour, trying vainly to attract the attention of their crews to get them to cease the heavy indiscriminate fire they were sending into the trees. He went unheard or ignored as the storm of zipping tracer ricocheted between the trunks and in their display dwarfed the already diminishing fire about the command vehicle.
‘Time to get out of here.’ Without further explanation Revell grabbed Andrea’s arm and began to tow her at speed back to the Marder.
‘They are not firing at us, let me go, I do more damage to them.’
‘Don’t argue, just run.’
Their way faintly and erratically illuminated by the flames from a tire that had taken hold, above the crackling and crashing of heavy machine gun and cannon fire came another sound. Passing directly above them, it reached a crescendo as a violent downdraft blasted pine needles, cones and twigs at them. Temporarily blinded by the stinging wind-born debris, Revell kept going, keeping a tight hold on Andrea and accepting the painful collisions with unseen trees as they blundered on.
He regained his vision as night was washed from the forest and replaced first by a glaring red and then by a brilliant white light that painted the lifeless ground with the sharp dark shadows of the pines.
The blast wave that struck them was a hundred times stronger than that from the helicopters’ spinning rotors, and it was hot, a lung-hurting roasting heat that made every breath a sharp sensation.
Without time to take cover, they were hit by a hammer-hard wall of fast-moving air that was pushing down trees before it and joined the splintered timber in crashing to the ground where a deluge of light material piled against them in a drift.
Close behind its leader, the second gunship dumped two more super-napalm canisters, but with greater accuracy, using the vivid fire among the trees caused by the first strike to correct its aim.
The tumbling petrol-jelly filled drop tanks hit the autoroute alongside the disabled eight-wheeler and by the glare of the orange and yellow flame that enveloped it, its companion vehicles could be seen.
From every hatch and door jumped their crews and infantry passengers but none of them made more than a couple of paces before the second stage ignition occurred. At the centre of the fireball, even as it began to rise and contract, to roll and suck in upon itself, the oxygen cylinders that had spilled from the canister on impact ruptured and multiplied the temperature and area of combustion.
White furnace flame enveloped the Russians and consumed them. Grenades and small arms ammunition exploded instantly, and those spitting heaps, topped by dense black smoke from burning gas capes and respirators were all that marked where each had fallen when the enhanced fireball lifted above the trees.
Each of the armoured cars and APCs blazed fiercely, spirals of fire coming from every -opening and the many splits in their overpressure ripped hulls.
There was little time for the helicopter pilots and gunners to congratulate themselves on the results of their strike. Perhaps the lead ship turned too sharply or the following craft a shade too late, but whichever it was the effect was as catastrophic for them both.
Whirling blades sliced apart a cabin and tail-boom as they came together. Sparks, in a rapid series of huge showers, marked the mid-air collision and at the moment of contact the tearing metal produced a noise that smothered that of the fires on the ground.
For the lead ship the end came fast. Rotor blades reduced to whistling stumps, it plummeted like a stone. The red mushroom that flared briefly to mark where it went in was puny compared to those it had helped create only seconds earlier.
Severely damaged but still under a degree of control the other gunship began a staggering descent, its progress marked clearly in the night sky by the long flare from an exhaust that had been stripped of its shielding cowl. That ceased abruptly when both engines cut out together, and from five hundred feet it side-slipped to destruction away to the east.
They back-tracked for six kilometres along the autoroute before they found where the civilians had turned off. Five minutes along that side road and they came upon the wreckage of the second gunship to crash.