His complaint went unheard, as had all those before. Cotton from a first aid locker plugged the ears of those of the squad who didn’t have headsets. Clarence was one. Without a turret or remote controlled weapon to man he had wedged himself into an angle of the interior and concentrated on avoiding being jolted about the compartment. Occasionally an item of equipment that had been insecurely stowed, or a member of the squad who had relinquished a handhold at the wrong moment would bump into him. Inanimate objects he threw aside, bodies he fended off as best he could with the minimum of contact. He had to shout at the top of his voice to make himself heard to Revell, who stood with head and shoulders out of sight in the command cupola beside the turret.
‘Can’t we ease off on the speed? This old wreck just isn’t fit for it.’
‘It’s okay, we’ll be slowing soon.’ Ducking down to mime the words to the sniper, Revell pushed his throat microphone closer to communicate with the driver. ‘There’s a sharp right up ahead, take it.’
The sheer bulk of the vehicle meant that several times they had to take to the side as they negotiated the narrow winding side road as it began to climb. Overgrown hedges were crushed beneath the churning tracks, and great lumps of bark torn from trees, fences and gates half hidden by the brambles and vines entwined about them were splintered and flattened into the soft ground.
Gradually the hill steepened, until their forward progress was little better than a walking pace. Not that it brought any diminution in the decibel level, that stayed high as the engine strained to move the twenty-eight tons of men and weapons and armour up the twenty-two percent gradient. Seven of the eight available gears had been used by the time they reached the top.
‘I hope the fucking view was worth it.’ Dooley disentangled himself from ribbons of springy steel strip cut to open the packing cases. ‘For a shitty minute I thought we were going to have to get out and fucking push.’
The rear door had to be opened manually when the hydraulics developed a leak and sprayed a high pressure jet of fluid at the floor. The others learned by Dooley’s mistake when he slipped in the puddle, and stepped over it and him.
They’d stopped right on the brow of the hill, where a clearing gave them a panoramic view across the countryside. Dooley took one glance and then ignored it, choosing instead to concentrate on a detailed inventory of the contents of his pack to see if anything was missing after its several tumbling trips about the Marder’s interior. He’d hardly begun when Sergeant Hyde ordered him to help the Russian unload the electronic apparatus.
Revell swept the ground below through binoculars. ‘This is useless, worse than trying to look for a needle in a haystack.’ Despite his pessimism, he kept quartering until in exasperation at the futility of trying to visually search mile upon mile of thickly wooded country, he switched to checking at random the few stretches of road that were visible.
A few towns and villages showed against the mass of gently undulating green, but the roads running through them were masked by the multi-story buildings. ‘Is that gadget working yet? It’s our only hope.’
‘Ready, Major.’
Faster than could have seemed possible with Dooley’s assistance handicapping him, Boris had assembled the modules of the surveillance equipment and linked it by twin cables to a display tube and small control console he set on top of a stack of rotting fence posts. A final adjustment to the compact parabolic dish, supported by a thin legged tripod, aimed toward the low ground and then he activated the system. Immediately the self-checking circuits confirmed their condition by lighting a row of green bulbs below the screen.
‘Do a magnetic sweep first.’ Revell watched the screen come alive with a thousand glowing dots. Though randomly sprinkled, several distinct clusters showed, and when he looked up he realized they corresponded with the positions of the towns and villages. Farms in particular showed clearly, as the sensors registered the metal of the corrugated steel sidings of barns, and large feed and grain silos.
‘Try infra-red.’
This time the whole screen came alive with colour, but there were far fewer individual images. Against the dominant pink of the foliage, the soft white and pale blue of the concentrations of uninhabited buildings showed. In the middle distance a compact cluster of red dots had almost a pattern to their layout, while further away a solitary dark red trace was less sharp, fuzzily indistinct and pulsating.
‘Radar now.’
Again it was predominantly the metallic objects that registered, but it was more than that Revell was looking for. ‘Okay, shift back to IR again… now radar.’ There was no mistake, he’d read the screen correctly. ‘Got them.’ The lone distant trace was exactly the right size for a small vehicle without shielding around its engine or exhaust. With the picture rocking back and forth it became possible to see that the blurred infra-red image was like that because it alone of all those on the screen was moving, as the radar confirmed.
‘Stay on it long enough to get an accurate fix and a plot of the route they’re using, then dismantle this lot and get back on board as fast as you can.’
‘I think you should look at this, Major.’ Waiting until he had the officer’s attention, Boris indicated the pattern-like cluster of traces. ‘These are interesting.’ He slid his finger across the bevelled glass surface of the screen to point to some of the other dark marks. ‘Most of these hot traces I can identify. If you use your binoculars you will see that they correspond with the positions of fuel storage tanks, or oil cooled electricity sub-stations, places that accumulate heat and hold on to it, so that they register more noticeably on infra-red, but these,’ he brought attention back to the pattern, ‘they are at the centre of a patch of thick woodland, there is nothing there, no houses, no farms, nothing.’
‘Refugee camp? Cooking fires?’
‘At first I thought so, yes, but watch when I rock the image between IR and magnetic.’
The identical pattern showed in both modes. Revell didn’t need to ask if the equipment was functioning correctly, he could see the row of low intensity hooded green lights for himself. ‘Only one thing that can be; it’s the Russian battle group that’s been rampaging around here. And they’re right between us and those damned civilians.’
‘I’ve blown open too many of these tin cans to like the idea of doing my fighting from within one.’ Thorne had exchanged his cumbersome flamethrower for a compact Uzi sub-machine gun from the vehicle’s own weapons rack.
‘If this detour takes us around that gaggle of Soviet armour then we shan’t have to.’ For once discarding his Enfield Enforcer sniper rifle, impractically long for use from the confines of the APC, Clarence had also helped himself to one of the stubby ugly Uzis, and prepared to use the sub-machine gun from the next hull side ball-mount to the sapper.
With the drive disengaged and the engine being run only to power the auxiliary systems, the Marder plunged down the hillside, carving its own path through the trees and undergrowth.
Masses of foliage were caught and churned by the tracks. Pliant branches whipped the hull as they were stripped of their leaves before being hurled aside. For a while the vegetation and flayed bark that wrapped itself about the return rollers and drive sprockets, and the rich leaf mould and loam adhering to the tracks almost silenced the din they had been producing.