The centre section of the peaked roof of the second armoured car began to elevate, and beneath it as it rose could be seen the snouts of a row of anti-tank rockets. Flame spurted from the rear of that mounted on the far left and the missile shot from its launch rail.
Thrashing filaments of wire snaked behind it as it dipped and arced along the road. Webb had his head down, was trying to ram home the gearlever with both hands, and never saw it coming. At the instant before impact the missile rose and almost soared over its target, but the side of the warhead clipped the roof of the Range Rover and that grazing impact was enough.
There was hardly any smoke. The interior of the estate car filled with raging fire that blasted every window from the bodywork. An arm and a head topped by blazing hair were briefly visible before flame totally enveloped the vehicle with the explosion of its fuel tank.
Another missile leaped from the elevated launcher.
Throwing himself into the church to escape the concussion of its detonation against the steps, Revell ran into Clarence.
‘It’s going to get rougher, Major. There’s only those two made it so far, but there’s a troop of tanks struggling to get through that flood beyond the town and a couple of APCs trying to work their way around. They’re making heavy going of it, but they’ll be here inside of fifteen minutes or so.’
Again the porch was blasted by the shock wave from a near miss, and both doors were ripped from their wrought iron hinges and toppled into the church, their landing adding to the dust already raised. ‘Clear the side door, we’ll get out that way.’
‘And what about them?’ Hyde had pulled the three sick civilians well inside to make sure they escaped the attention of the lethal fragments and chunks of debris beginning to find their way further and further inside the building as the Russian vehicles closed in for the kill. ‘We’re kidding ourselves if we think we can take them with us. The old guy has been near enough skinned alive by that mustard, the flesh is just peeling off him. That woman is running such a fever her heart could give out any moment and the fat bloke looks like he’s got cholera just as bad as he could have. He’ll never last, none of them will.’
‘Let me finish them.’ Pushing in front of the NCO, Andrea confronted the officer. ‘It is not possible to take them, mine is the only way.’
‘No, no. We’ll leave them for the Russians to nurse and bury.’ Revell reached the side door as Boris and Thorne pulled the last of the barricade down. He stooped to leave through the low doorway, then hesitated and ushered the others through first. ‘You too.’
Andrea had hung behind, and was fitting a fresh magazine to her M16 when the major beckoned. ‘Do you think I would risk being left behind just so that I could kill those animals?’
‘I know you would.’
The alley was a dead end, and the buildings to either side were too substantial for the Marder to bulldoze its way to safety through them. Burke was left with only one alternative, a high speed run up the main street, offering the Russian gunners a clear shot at their light rear armour. ‘Hang on, you lot.’
‘Be ready for a fast bail-out if we take a hit.’ Checking the hatch above his head, Revell tried the quick release catch and was relieved to find it worked smoothly.
‘Fucking marvellous, ain’t it.’ Like the others Dooley was divesting himself of as many encumbrances as possible, anything that might impede a hurried exit.
‘Here we are whose shitty paper-thin armour is hard put to keep out a heavy machine gun round, and now we’re about to offer an easy up-the-arse shot to a commie tank destroyer.’
‘I’ve been watching it in action, its crew are not the world’s best.’ That was the only consolation Revell could offer. ‘Let’s go, and try to keep that fire and the wrecks between us and that tank-killer.’
Burke took the engine revs as high as they would go before crashing the Marder into gear. The big machine leaped forward and carried away a corner of a building as it skidded through a canting turn into the main street.
Using the remotely controlled rear mounted machine gun Ripper poured tracer and armour piercing rounds at the unmoving armoured cars, concentrating his fire on their vision ports and periscopes. ‘They ain’t following!’
‘They don’t bloody have to. Firing from a side ball mounting Dooley let fly with an Uzi at a Russian infantryman aiming an anti-tank rocket from his shoulder.
Thrown back by the several impacts, the man sent the warhead on its way as he fell, but it flew wildly astray, taking the tiles from a distant shop roof. More of the squad were engaging infantry targets, and a long jet of red flame shot from the turret to splash and lick around the sides of a rusting bus. A section of Russian soldiers staggered into view wreathed from head to foot in rippling flame.
‘Those commie shits have left their battle taxis for once and come in on foot.’ Throwing the Marder in a lurching side swipe at a handcart, Burke succeeded in overturning it on the machine gun team using it as cover to pour a storm of bullets into the APCs front quarter.
‘We’re nearly through…’
Revell didn’t know who it was who had tempted providence, and there wasn’t time to find out, there was just long enough after Ripper shouted a warning to tense themselves for the impact and then an antitank rocket struck the personnel carrier’s rear.
It was like being in a bucket being hammered by a madman. The thunder of the detonation was followed instantly by the squealing of scraping metal as a track broke apart and gouged scoops of metal from the armour. Crabbing first to the left as several road wheels were blown off by the explosion, the Marder swerved hard right as large pieces of wreckage jammed the other track, then stopped.
‘Flame all around, then every one out.’ Through the prisms in the command cupola Revell saw billowing gouts of fire pour death into every side alley and nearby window, then as the last burst fell short with the tanks exhausted, all the hatches were thrown open and they went out shooting. As he jumped, he tossed a thermite grenade back inside and heard it crackle into white hot life as they ran across the street.
A grenade from Andrea’s launcher blew in the door of a house, another tossed through a window by Hyde made sure it was cleared and they raced inside, barging through its musty hall, hurdling a grinning corpse and stampeding out through the kitchen and across its once neat vegetable garden.
Boris and Dooley set up a rear guard as the others climbed iron railing around a school yard, and caught a Russian following them too closely. He went down like a felled tree with a bullet through his neck.
An attempt to establish a machine gun post at the upper window of an overlooking house fared no better. Andrea put her first grenade in neatly through it and the resulting explosion threw an arm onto a greenhouse roof.
Bones and skulls and scraps of clothing were scattered as they dashed through the sun-dried bodies on the playground. Clarence couldn’t bring himself to go that way, and skirting it, ran straight into a section of Russian infantry coming around the side of the school building.
There was a rage inside of him that begged to be let loose, and he unleashed it on the lieutenant who led them, putting a bullet into his stomach and then two more into the chests of the men to either side of him. At that range, with the tip of the Enfield’s barrel almost touching them, the dum-dum bullets burst their targets apart and showered those following with blood and tissue.
The rest of the section turned and fled, and more shots followed them, each with neat precision tearing a chunk of vertebrae from the base of a spine or shattering the back of a cranium. Last of them to die was a slant eyed Mongol whose thick short neck was almost severed by a mushrooming soft cored round. His body toppled among those of the children and stained their faded clothes and bleached bones with vivid gouts of fresh blood.