When they looked up only one man was still at the vehicle. Hands tight-locked on the steering wheel, the driver stared rigidly ahead, oblivious of the fire on the back seat. Blood spurted from a hole in the side of his head, then slowed to a trickle, then stopped as he fell forward.
Two others lay dead, but a third, a captain, had only been dazed by the blast and as he shook himself back to full consciousness the first thing he saw was the barrels of two rifles.
He screamed as his elbows were smashed, then without stopping shrieked louder still as more bullets did the same to his kneecaps. His agony ended abruptly as his heart failed and he vomited blood, went blue in the face and died.
‘I hate the Communists for what they are doing to me.’ Turning away from the body, it was an automatic action for Clarence to reload his Enfield Enforcer.
Taking a last look at the Russian officer, Libby trailed behind the sniper. ‘I hate them for what they’re doing to everyone.’
‘Any luck?’ Hyde joined their radio operators.
‘Luck doesn’t enter into it, Sarge, this is skill I’m using.’ Cline winced as loud static assaulted his ears. ‘Well, is your skill getting us anywhere then?’
‘Eh, not yet’ Thinking to salvage something of his self-proclaimed reputation, Cline added, ‘It’s this Russian equipment, we can’t use it to broadcast because it’s incompatible with the Jaguar sets NATO uses, and it’s hoping for a bit much to expect our radio intercept units to monitor it by chance.’
‘So what are you tinkering about with?’ Cline held up their man-pack radio. ‘We’re, I’m,’ seeing no reason to share any laurels, Cline changed from the plural to the singular, ‘using the Ruskie equipment to boost this thing’s short-range.’
‘A combination of British brains and Russian brawn, I like it. OK, keep at it.’ Hyde hauled himself from the vehicle, and joined Revell at the edge of the copse in which they’d concealed the APC. ‘Quite a view, Major.’ He ducked into the undergrowth and accepted the field glasses from the officer.
On the NATO side the Zone tended to peter out, with only the insubstantial barbed wire fences to mark its boundary, but on the Soviet side it was precisely and starkly marked by the old Iron Curtain; the snaking tract of wire and steel and concrete that had separated East Germany from the Free World in pre-war days. The walls and towers and some of the tank obstacles were still visible, but the ploughed strip to either side had long been overgrown, though beneath the breeze-swayed grass, flecked with the first spring flowers, still nestled the anti-personnel mines and man-traps. Once denuded of trees, even the first of those was making a comeback and the pliant young trunks hid some of the directional mine-topped stakes that had been the last cruel innovation, before the Russian armies had swept into West Germany and made them obsolete.
‘You said this was a quiet sector, Major.’ Hyde panned the glasses from one enemy concentration to the next, ‘I’m glad we’re not going to be busting through one of the busy ones.’
‘I’ll admit it looks a lot, but look again. Most of the vehicles are soft-skins and the camps are for the pioneers working all the dumps you can see.’
‘That’s still a lot of Ruskies. There’s only one road through the minefields and the wall and it’s blocked to traffic’ Adjusting the focus, Hyde concentrated his attention on a checkpoint where the road passed an observation tower.
Apart from a dozen or more armed military police and a couple of scout cars, a troop of T62s sat at the foot of the ribbed concrete column.
As he watched, Hyde saw the troops swarm about an eight-wheel APC that had halted at the barricade. A T62 nudged forward, its cannon aimed at the vehicle’s hull front. The crew were rousted out and searched, and their papers taken for examination at a nearby hut.
‘It’s for certain we won’t be able to force our way through that, not as it stands now.’ Hyde returned the glasses.
Boris came up behind them. ‘Bombardier Cline’s compliments, Major. He says he has established the link you required.’
‘Don’t you want your share of the credit?’
A shake of the head and a small smile was Boris’s only reply.
Revell knew what the Russian was up to. The bombardier would be in his debt now, and in war if you can’t have friends, people who owe you favours can be just as valuable. Boris was building up a stock.
‘Wait ‘til the major puts in our request. He’ll soon regain his old form.’
‘Colonel… Colonel,’ Revell was having trouble breaking into the flow. ‘Yes, Colonel… Like you say, Colonel, I must be a real crafty fucker. Colonel… I want a sky strike…’
The swearing from the other end intensified four-fold and Revell was able to reduce the volume still further.
‘He’ll get us one.’ Dooley sat back, nodding sagely. ‘I know OF Foul Mouth, he’d have got nasty if he weren’t going to do it.’
Listening to the language being used, Cline couldn’t understand how Dooley knew that their commanding officer hadn’t turned nasty. He asked.
‘That? That’s nothing. When the colonel gets into his stride he can go on for twenty minutes without repeating himself, but with him what you’ve got to watch out for is when he stops cussing. Then he gets really dangerous. If he ever smiles at you and says a polite good-morning, you might as well go back and shoot yourself.’ Dooley leant close again to catch a few words. ‘Oh yeah, we’re getting our sky strike, he’s still going strong…’
While Cline made a great show of fussing about with minor and mostly unneeded adjustments, Revell put on the headset. The voice on the other end was instantly identifiable. He turned down the volume against the torrent of shouted obscenity, and even then had to hold the earphones away from his head.
‘That’s our colonel Lee J. Lippincott, OP Foul Mouth himself,’ Dooley offered to an astounded Cline, by way of explanation, as the bombardier’s mouth dropped open on hearing the tirade come over the air. ‘He must be glad we’re still alive, must be all choked up; he’s usually a lot more fluent than that.’
Hyde joined Dooley in craning forward to listen in. ‘Just himself obvious as it was. No, if there had to be another with her then he’d pick a man he could trust…
ELEVEN
‘They want us to mark the target. What have we got?’
‘Nothing with the range to do it from here.’ Hyde was already aware of the Airforce’s requirement, and had been working on it. ‘The three closest dumps are the best part of fifteen hundred yards off. We could hit them with the turret machine gun, but there’s not much chance of starting fires at that sort of range. What it needs is a grenade or two plonked into the middle of each one.’
Andrea pushed between the officer and NCO. ‘From the bottom of the hill I could hit them with this.’
She held up her grenade-launcher-fitted M16. Her words were slightly slurred as she tried to talk with her damaged mouth.
He really did admire her; Revell just couldn’t help it. Even the puffiness of her face around the injured cheek couldn’t detract from her basic beauty, and her determination clearly came through her painful impediment.
It was more than admiration though, perhaps not love yet, desire definitely, but not love. But the word love was always one that figured in his thinking about her.
‘Well, do I go?’
Her piercing blue eyes were on him, startlingly pale when the sun was directly on her face, adding to her intensity of expression. He didn’t like her being away from him, but couldn’t deny she was the best they had with that weapon and could do the job if anyone could. Someone would have to go with her, to give supporting fire if she was spotted. If only it could be him, but it couldn’t be. He felt he was making. They slipped and slid on the damp grass of the steep hillside from one patch of sharp-needled hawthorn to the next Being lighter and nimbler, Andrea set a fast pace for each sprint, and Libby had to work hard to keep up.