The bullion had been cut in half in order to fit the hiding place, and the residue from that operation had been carefully preserved in a corked test-tube. Tm rich I’m rich I’m rich. Oh, I’m rich…’
‘Shut up you big oaf.’ Revell was interested in the find, but not for the same reason. His interest lay in the fact that the discovery of the handsome nest-egg tended to confirm the mental image of the vehicle’s owner that was forming in his mind.
The pennant already told him the man was a general, but the way the APC was fitted out with luxury touches told him that the Russian officer was also a man of ambition, who wanted the good things in life. His cache of various currencies also betrayed the fact that he was a realist, and not the sort to go down with a sinking ship. Not that the Warsaw Pact forces were losing the war, but this man was prepared for any eventuality.
Having examined the compact but powerful radio equipment on board, Revell also knew that the general had some Western tastes. A radio operator, perhaps one with a less than perfect memory, who did not want to incur the commander’s wrath by being slow, had carefully marked certain frequencies on the dial. Revell knew them, they were British and West German civilian radio station frequencies.
‘I get to keep it, don’t I, Major?’
‘Take the notes and jewellery if you want, but leave the bar where it is. Even you can’t tote that much extra weight around with you.’
Like a child who had just had the cherry stolen off the top of his cake, Dooley looked very unhappy. He pocketed the other items. ‘Maybe just one half, Major?’
‘Don’t get greedy, Dooley. You’ve enough there to get that pig-rearing farm when you get out, with something left over to treat your jaw.’
Although he brightened a little at the thought, Dooley still cast wistful glances at the safe as the portions of bullion were replaced and the buckled door slammed to wedge it tight closed.
‘Truck coming, Major.’
In response to Clarence’s call through the open hatch, Revell climbed out, in time to see Hyde steering a trailer-towing fuel tanker down the track. Andrea rode on the front fender, holding on to a headlamp bracket. Her jacket was open and her breasts bounced noticeably at each bump.
While a hose from the bowser was being unreeled to the APC, Revel took the sergeant aside.
‘Fast work. How did you do it?’
‘I didn’t, she did.’
As he moved to walk away, Revell tackled Hyde on the subject again, trying desperately to be casual, not too insistent, and knowing he was failing.
‘What did she do?’
‘She took off the combat gear and ran in front of the first truck that was travelling on its own. It just happened to be a bowser.’
‘And?’
‘It stopped.’ Hyde tired of the game, he’d known what the officer was after all along. ‘She had on just a pair of white knickers and a tight white T-shirt; she doesn’t wear a bra, and what do you think? It stopped, a bloody armoured regiment in full cry would have stopped. She’s the most beautiful bloody thing I’ve ever seen; I nearly went to help her.’ Hyde couldn’t keep the bitterness from his voice. ‘Next time you want her to do something like that, send her with someone else, not me. I got a face that still upsets nurses in plastic surgery wards. I don’t want to see what I can’t have.’
Hyde turned away, then back. ‘Oh yes. When the truck stopped she jumped on to the step and cut the driver’s throat from ear to ear. He’s still in there, that’s why she rode on the front.’
They had turned off before what looked like a security checkpoint about a mile ahead, and on the quiet side road were now making better speed, and at last heading in the right direction.
Ripper had fastened the general’s pennant to the front of the APC, and the few military vehicles they met coming the other way on the narrow road went to extraordinary lengths to get out of the way. In the case of an Airforce truck that included a hundred-yard detour through a freshly ploughed field.
Their better progress was having a therapeutic effect on Boris. He still looked ill, appeared to have aged ten years in the last few hours, but had now gathered himself sufficiently to try mumbling apologies for his previous behaviour to anyone who would listen.
‘…you do not know what it is like,’ Boris kept shifting position so that he could keep looking Clarence in the face, ‘to live every moment of your life in fear, and then after once making a decision that takes courage, to find yourself hurled into the clutches of the monster that gave rise to the terror in the first place.’ He caught hold of the sniper’s arm, to prevent him from moving away, and then had to nurse the bruised hand that was knocked aside by a sweeping blow with a rifle barrel.
‘I am sorry, it is just that I want you to understand. I deserted during an air-raid. It is likely that I am listed as killed. If I now fell into the hands of the KGB, then my family… my family…’
Clarence watched the Russian as his head dropped into his cupped hands and he broke down and cried. He put his hand forward, to touch the man on the shoulder; for him, so loathing physical contact, it was an unnatural action. His fingers stopped just short of contact, and went no further.
The poor devil. Clarence had been wrapped in his own memories of sorrow and thirst for revenge for so long, he had almost forgotten that the war, the Zone, had brought the same to others. Perhaps for Boris it might even be worse. Clarence had already suffered his loss, there was nothing else that could touch him after that Russian bomber had crashed on his wife and children, nothing that could inflict greater misery, greater torment of mind. But Boris, he knew the Communist system, knew what it could inflict, and knew that he could be the cause of those horrors touching his loved ones. It was a cruel refinement, worthy of the KGB itself.
‘Everybody to your position.’ Revell left his seat and went back to the Russian. ‘There’s some sort of traffic snarl-up ahead. Looks like a queue waiting to cross a bridge. I want you up front. If there’s any talking to be done then it’s down to you. We’re relying on you.’
The members of the squad stationed themselves at the firing ports either side of the hull, as they slowed to stop fifty yards short of the tail-end of the waiting line of mixed civilian and military transports.
The single lane pontoon bridge across the Elbe had been blocked by a field car that had jumped the guide rails, and now hung over the swirling muddy water, in imminent danger of falling in.
A recovery crew had backed a truck as close as they could, and were in the process of securing a tow-rope, while the endangered vehicle’s driver was being pushed and prodded to the far bank under armed guard.
Burke had closed down his front port, and now with Boris looked out at the scene through the thick, scratched and dirt-smeared armoured glass prism filling the vision slit in its metal shutter.
On the far side of the river a group of smartly uniformed Russian soldiers had jumped from a tracked armoured personnel carrier, and as prisoner and guards approached they grabbed the man under escort, forced him to his knees, and a single shot rang out.
‘What’d he do? What’d he do?’ Burke couldn’t believe it. He saw the kneeling figure crumple and watched as the body was shoved with boots and rifle butts into the turbulence close to the bank.
For an instant the corpse bobbed among the white water, then was swept into the main channel, and under.
‘He need not have done half so much.’ Boris felt the fears returning as he recognised the guilty troops. ‘They are KGB, at once judge, jury and executioners. I doubt whether they bothered to tell him, but that driver would to them have been guilty of sabotage…’ he paused a moment’… no, not even that. It is habit to put labels to what the KGB do, find for them even some glimmer of excuse for their barbarity. Perhaps it was only that he was responsible for delaying them, nothing more than that. Perhaps they are on an urgent mission, but as they are travelling away from the front that is unlikely. The probability is that they are on their way to a brothel, or to pick-up some black-market goods…’