‘Hope not.’ After counting his spare magazines twice, Ripper replaced all three in his pouch. ‘We tackle anything more than a bunch of wild dogs and we is gonna be in real big trouble. Anybody else noticed we’re getting a mite short on ammo?’
The APC frequently brushed both sides of the road at once. Grass and weeds were making a strong bid to reclaim the road and had already carpeted large patches. Every gate, every wall and abandoned farm was the object of an assault by nature. Winter might have imposed a temporary halt to the encroachment, but the first days of spring were bringing reinforcement and fresh vigour to the one-sided contest.
Only rarely were there any signs of the violent warfare that had ranged and raged across the fields and hills in the early days of the war. The most obvious were the occasional glimpses of rusting tanks and other armoured vehicles, and once, the tail plane of a MIG-21, suspended by the scorched branches of a giant elm, above a wide, shallow, water-filled crater, at the edge of which some of the tree’s roots were exposed.
As they drove further in though, they began to come across more recent evidence of fighting, or of bombardment. Such an instance was the small town of Liebenburg. It had virtually ceased to exist.
On the outskirts a few buildings survived, most without roofs, and none with windows or doors, but as they drove further in, bricks and splintered window frames crunching under the wheels, there was less and less to see: less and less that was even recognisable as the remains of what had once been a prosperous and bustling town.
Ground zero of the nuclear demolition device was marked by the fused stump of a church tower, standing only a couple of feet high, with the runs of molten stone, now long solidified, radiating from it. Every tombstone of the graveyard that had flanked it on all sides echoed the star-like pattern, pressed down into the baked earth by the irresistible blast, their deep etched inscriptions wiped away by a heat greater than the heart of the sun that now glinted on the glassy slabs.
There seemed no reason for the destruction, the town had not lain in the path of any major axis of the first Soviet advances, no river or road or railway gave the place strategic or even tactical importance. Then as they drove out on the far side, they understood, and could only wonder at the courage, and the fate of the atomic demolition troops who had returned to the town after the first disorganised retreats and set the device that had inflicted such a blow on the Warsaw Pact armies.
In street after street, or where the streets had been, sat the rusting fire-ravaged hulks of Soviet missile launchers, more than they could count. Tracked launch and reload vehicles with their attendant mass of support equipment, even mobile radar units had been caught and now rested on their axles or padless tracks.
It was as the APC cleared the desolation of Liebenburg that they saw the feather-like contrails, and were warned in time to change course.
Revell saw them first, and knew they weren’t those of aircraft. The lines of vapour made three upright dashes in the clear sky, and each was hooked at its top, marking the apogee of each bombardment rocket’s trajectory. He ordered their driver to pull over, and with the engines switched off, they waited.
Impact must have been all of five miles away, but the missile’s conventional warheads delivered a crashing punch. Bright crescents flared over the hills, followed by the distinctive frosty-white haloes of blast waves. A short count later there came the crack and rolling boom of each explosion, one fast upon another.
‘NATO Command doesn’t drop Pershings on road repair gangs.’ From the rear hatch Libby watched the mushrooms of smoke soar upwards. Almost immediately they were chased by other darker clouds that could only come from burning fuel and ammunition. ‘Those three babies have stopped us from running into a Ruskie armoured regiment or battle group.’
He dropped back down to let Boris and Cline take his place. The pair kept jostling each other for most room and the best position. The major had already taken a heading on the explosions, and was consulting his map.
‘There’s a decent route through here, Major.’ With his little finger Libby traced a path into the Harz nature park area. ‘Means striking south for a while, but we’ll avoid whatever’s ahead, and north is no alternative, that’ll only take us towards the Hanover salient. Things are still pretty hot up there, it’d be easy to drive into trouble.’
‘It couldn’t be that you have an interest in going south, could it?’ Hyde had overheard the suggestion. ‘Wouldn’t be because you know there’s a few refugees that way, would it?’
Libby didn’t respond, just watched the officer, intensely, as though by concentration of sheer willpower he could hope to influence his thinking. He hung on his words as he spoke.
‘Whatever, it makes sense. We turn south.’
Relief surged through Libby, though he didn’t understand himself why the decision was so important to him. It was a feeling he had; no, not even as concrete a concept as that, it was just something inside him, telling him to go there.
At the sound of the engine starting, as they began to move and he returned to the turret, for the first time in two years he felt his spirits lifting, a heady almost drunken feeling. There was no way he could tell, nothing to go on, but he felt now he was drawing nearer to Helga. The sickeningly bumpy vehicle that he had come in two days to hate now seemed the sweetest, smoothest conveyance ever made. Taking him the way he wanted to go, he would not have complained, would hardly have noticed, if it’d been fitted with square wheels.
Now they were passing through an area that had repeatedly seen heavy fighting. No field was without its quota of abandoned Leopard, Chieftain, M60 or T84 tanks. Most had burned, and those that hadn’t the engineers had destroyed.
From the first day this had been an unrelenting war of attrition, and as the fortunes of battle swept back and forth neither side had allowed the other to capture its vehicles, or recapture its own. If a. tank was knocked out, then the special squads of either side raced to be first to reach it. What could not be immediately towed to the rear for repair was blasted apart. Battle damage or breakdown, it made no difference, all that mattered was that nothing salvable should be allowed to fall into enemy hands.
As the war had progressed the engineers of both sides had grown highly proficient, as the extravagantly twisted metal-work of the hulks testified.
And it wasn’t only tanks that littered the fields and roadsides. For each knocked-out tank, three or four armoured personnel carriers and twenty or more soft-skin vehicles fell victim to close range attack, or missile or gun bombardment, or to the fighter-bomber and helicopter gunships.
In places where no one had bothered, or had time to deal with route clearance, long sections of highway were blocked by burned-out or overturned transport of every description.
There were other indications also, of how fast and fluid the battles had been, and how the sites had not been visited since. Everywhere there were rag-garbed skeletons, in jeeps, draped from tank turrets, laid about guns and collapsed in the bottom of shallow slit-trenches. Only a few of the dead had found even the temporary haven of a roadside grave, and by one unnatural hummock lay several spade-clutching corpses in the last stages of decomposition. On the modern battlefield it was dangerous, often lethal, to delay even long enough to bury a fallen comrade.
After a third nerve-racking halt to take on water for the overheating engine, Burke watched the temperature gauge needle climbing even more rapidly than before.
‘If you don’t let me stop, Major, and have a look for the trouble, then we are going to lose an engine. It’s rough now, and burning oil, another ten miles and either something is going to melt or we’re all going to fry. I’ve got the heater turned up full to circulate the water as much as possible, and I don’t know about you, but I’m already to tuck up me toes with heat prostration.’