‘Who said we’re ever going to make it to the water?’ Throwing aside a huge sodden clump of soil, wrenched from the cloying ground around the deep-sunken front wheel, Dooley took a hard look at the excavations around the vehicle’s other tyres. ‘Bloody incredible, isn’t it? They have the whole of the fucking riverbank to chose from and Burke drives us straight into a shitty swamp.’ He grabbed a bundle of brushwood from the pile Clarence and Hyde had deposited beside him and stamped it under the wheel, splattering himself in the oozing black mud.
‘Heck, this ain’t no swamp. You want to see a swamp, I’ll take you home with me next time I go.’
‘What makes you think you’re ever going to see home?’ Burke dropped another big armful of twigs, then made a hurried retreat back to firmer ground as Dooley deliberately smacked the flat of his shovel hard on to the glutinous surface. It sprayed the driver from head to foot, and he had to spit out some of the foul-tasting mud.
‘You fucking did that on purpose. What you bloody mad at me for? I didn’t chose this ruddy place to cross.’
‘ No,’ Dooley loaded his spade with a generous portion of dripping, rotting vegetation, ‘no you didn’t chose the place, but if you’d bloody been awake you’d have thought to use this crate’s tyre pressure regulation system. All you had to do was flick a switch, let a few pounds out and we’d have sailed across. Now piss off before I shove you under one of the wheels.’
‘Like I was saying…’
‘I heard what you were saying.’ Using the edge of the shovel, Dooley rammed more of the brushwood beneath the tyre. ‘After today I don’t ever want to see another swamp. This one may be only fifty yards square but it’s plenty big enough to last me for life. I can’t think of one good use for a swamp, what you hicks spend all your time in them for, fuck knows.’
‘They ain’t all bad.’ Taking off his helmet, Ripper set it upside down in a patch of surface water, where it floated, dragging a chinstrap anchor cable. ‘Hell, some of the best times I’ve ever had have been in swamps…’
‘You’ve got to be kidding.’ Pausing after dumping more wood, Libby listened.
‘Honest I ain’t. One time me and my cousin Billy we went and sneaked up on this sort of hideaway Ellen Jane had built right out in the wilds; she was my aunt, sort of, she’d been married to my Unc’ Jeb before he got himself put away for a long stretch when he got caught with a load of ‘shine, only he weren’t really my uncle…’
‘Forget the family tree and all the monkeys in it, get on with the story.’ Dooley’s patience was wearing thin. He’d slipped for the third time, and now didn’t bother to get up again, sitting sunk to the waist in the stinking waterlogged ground.
‘I was about to. Anyway, Ellen Jane being not much more than sixteen, she’d gone back home to live with her Ma and Pa after Jeb went inside. You know that Pa of hers was a real bible freak, holiest man I ever saw, even the Reverend Smith used to say ‘oh God’ when he saw him coming. OK, I’m getting on with it…’ Ripper had seen Dooley reaching for the shovel.
‘Me and Billy we reckoned she’d started up a little still on her own, on account of her having got a taste for it from Jeb, only when we peered through those bushes… I got a hard on that damned near burst my zip. She’d finished the best part of a bottle of real Scotch and were poking the neck of the bottle up between her legs. Hell, she sure was enjoying herself, but Billy thought it were a bit dirty to keep taking the bottle out to have another swig.’
‘What happened,’ Dooley was now all attention, ‘did you get in on the action?’
‘Well after a while she spots us, and acts all flustered, then she says she’ll do things for us if we’ll keep quiet about what we seen. She sure knew what it were all about. She started sucking me while Billy tried to take her doggy-style. Only trouble was, he’d not had any practice and he got kinda careless and shoved into the wrong hole. Sure must have surprised her. Next thing I know she’s clamped down on my equipment and I’m thinking she’s bit it through. I tell you, I still got the marks.’
‘You’ll have some from me in a minute.’ Revell pushed Ripper aside, so that he staggered back, and sank his helmet ‘In case you’ve forgotten, we’re still a long way behind enemy lines, and we’ve the Zone to cross as well. I want us on the other side of this river before dark. That’s one hour. Are we ready to try again yet?’
Dooley looked at the wheels. Pieces of wood, leaves and dried grass kept floating to the surface to form miniature rafts that broke and reformed at every splash and ripple. ‘Shit, Major, I don’t even know if there is a solid bottom under this muck. Maybe we could go on dumping brushwood into it forever without doing a bit of good. One thing is for sure, the APC is still sinking. Another ten minutes and it’ll be up to the belly plates, and then no one will ever shift it.’
‘Then let’s try now.’
As Burke scrambled up the front of the hull and dropped down through a rooftop hatch into the driver’s seat, the rest of the squad positioned themselves around the other three sides of the vehicle.
The engines rumbled into throbbing life, and at the back Dooley and Hyde had to turn away from the choking clouds of unburnt, fuel-saturated exhaust gas.
Its engine revs increasing steadily, the APC nudged forward and the squad threw their efforts behind its attempt to break free.
Away to their left the cloying surface erupted with a roar into a towering geyser of mud, water and vegetation. A second explosion punched a bubbling white cascade from the river, close to the bank.
‘Mortars. Keep pushing.’ Revell put every ounce of strength he had into the attempt to shove their transport clear.
With its broad tyres deliberately deflated so that they flattened further to spread the vehicle’s ten-ton weight on the flimsy causeway, it began to inch forward, as two more high explosive bombs, falling almost vertically at the end of their soaring trajectory, bracketed them.
The soft ground that had caused all the trouble in the first place now worked in their favour, as the projectiles’ insensitive fuses failed to detonate the explosive filling until the rounds had buried themselves a foot or more, when their deadly fragmentation effect was smothered.
‘Keep it rolling.’
Now moving unaided, and seemingly likely to maintain its forward momentum, the squad grabbed any projection on the APC’s hull to haul themselves aboard, closing the last hatch as a barrage of shells plastered the ground they had left and beat to foam the water about them as Burke drove the APC into the Elbe.
Cutting in the water-jet propulsion the instant the movement of the hull told him they were afloat. Burke still couldn’t move quite fast enough to prevent the current from sweeping them downstream.
Through his sights Libby saw each bank in turn as they whirled round, before they came under a degree of control and began to head for the far side.
The mortaring ceased almost immediately as their speed of drift took them out of range, and Libby never even glimpsed the position from which they had come under fire.
‘Aren’t you going to give them a parting present?’ dine peered up into the turret.
‘No one to give it to. I’ll save these belts until I can see a target.’ Despite his answer, Libby almost had unleashed a burst in the direction from which it was almost likely the mortars had been fired, but had recognised the futility of the gesture.
It took seven attempts at five different sites before Burke succeeded in driving the APC from the water, and wouldn’t have managed it then if there had not been a small concrete slipway at the bottom of a garden attached to an imposing house.
Gouging deep furrows in the immaculate lawns, Burke drove them around the side of the great gothic structure and on to the raked gravel drive. Past a long line of parked staff cars, they headed for a distant gate, while several lounging East German and Russian Airforce drivers watched with gaping mouths, some of them half-saluting as they recognised the bedraggled flag flapping heavily from its miniature mast.