‘I expect he has problems, worries.’ At last Libby was satisfied with the strength of the belting he had made.
‘Him, never. Eating, fucking and fighting, that’s all he thinks about. His only problem is getting enough of them. He’s forgotten that woman already.’
‘Maybe not.’ Libby gave the belt a final test, and it passed. ‘Maybe not.’
The telephone kept slipping in General Pakovski’s moist grip. He could feel sweat trickling down inside his uniform, soaking the back of his jacket. ‘… Yes, Comrade Lieutenant General, they are the only ones who have broken out… Yes, every effort… I understand Comrade Lieutenant General, you have given Moscow assurances on the strength of those I gave you… Three more hours, thank you, Comrade Lieutenant General…’
Before he finished speaking, Pakovski heard the line go dead, but he completed the sentence for the sake of appearance; the colonel was in the room. ‘Where are they now?’
On the wall map the colonel circled a patch of forest on the western border of the Harz nature park. ‘They are here, Comrade General. The local commander says the ground is too difficult for armour, but he has managed to move two battalions of light infantry into the area, and they are attempting an encirclement. He says it will be difficult to take them alive if they should fight…’
‘They are getting too close to their own lines, now I want them dead.’ Pakovski could tell there was something else.
His snap made it no easier for the colonel to broach the subject. ‘Well, what is it?’
‘Eh, it is just that the infantry commander has questioned the authority of your orders, as have the air units you have ordered to join the search…’
‘Say what ever you have to, threaten, promise, bribe: I must have the group destroyed. That is all that matters. I will deal with the other problems afterwards.’
As the colonel went out, the general took his pistol from its polished holster and laid it on the desk in front of him. He had intended to use it on the survivors of the NATO group. Now, unless they could be wiped out, it would have to serve another purpose.
FIFTEEN
They were about to give the Land-Rover a tow start behind the APC when the first star shell ignited with a loud ‘crack’ several thousand feet above the tree tops.
Night was washed from the forest by the harsh glare and replaced by searing white light in which the boundaries of shadows were marked with knife-edged precision.
‘Russian infantry, bloody thousands of them. All around us.’ Cline was out of breath, and the fast passage he had made down the hillside to be sure of being the first to report had marked his face and hands with long livid cuts from whipping spike-tipped branches.
Standing half-out of a roof hatch, Revell sensed rather than saw the quality of the light diminish as the flare sank lower, and looked up in time to see it replaced by another high overhead. ‘How long before they reach us?’
‘Five minutes. They’re just coming on like a load of zombies.’
‘OK, pull the sentries back. We’ll have to try and crash out of here.’
As Hyde bent down to detach the wire hawser from the Land-Rover’s two-tiered front bumper he was pushed away by the dark-haired women. ‘You must take us with you.’
‘There’s no armour on your transport, you’ll be a big soft target for everything that misses us.’ In her voice Revell could hear a blend of begging and demanding and pleading. ‘You don’t know the risks.’
‘We do, but more than that we know what will happen if we stay, when those animals find us. Please, you must take us, we accept the risk: you cannot leave us for them.’
A star shell, its fiery magnesium filling not totally consumed, fell through the trees thirty yards away and as its parachute snagged, started a blaze among tinder-dry lower branches. White smoke began to wreathe the base of the trees about it, held down by the interwoven canopy above.
With the air filling with the sweet, biting scent of hot pine resin, Revell saw a chance. He tossed the vehicle’s signal pistol to the sergeant. ‘See what you can do to stoke that, but try not to fry us.’
Variously coloured balls of blinding fire bounced through the trees, and where they lodged became the seat of secondary blazes that began to merge into a single wall of smoke-shrouded flame.
Burke started forward cautiously, to put the minimum strain on the tow line, and even so felt the snatch as the weight of the Land-Rover was taken up. With the star shell at their backs, it was the Russian infantry’s long shadows he saw first, and then as he rounded the turn in the track they were only twenty yards in front. A snap-fired rocket toppled a tree alongside and as other launchers were levelled he threw the APC through a tight turn and drove it straight at the wood-fed inferno.
The roar of the flames blotted out the noise of the engines, the sound of trees going down before the armoured vehicle’s raked front. Smoke filled the interior and fire licked at vision blocks and weapon ports.
Emerging from that hell of their own creation, they immediately ran into straggling lines of enemy infantry that had been halted by the burning trees. Several were mown down, caught by the wide hull or crushed by evergreens snapped off by its pounding progress.
Every round for the heavy machine gun expended, Libby traversed the turret and used an AK74 from a vision port to give what cover he could to the Land-Rover.
Bucking and leaping over every obstacle, he could see the woman at the wheel wrestling to keep the sturdy vehicle in the APC’s wake. A body flopped about in the seat beside her, restored to life by every jolt and with each movement spattering the inside of the starred windscreen with pink-tinged brain matter from its bullet-smashed forehead.
Showers of anti-tank rockets flew past. Some impacted against the trunks of trees almost at the moment of launch and broke up to throw back in their operator’s face the blazing contents of their propellant section. The forest was made still more hellish by the staggering fiery apparitions those accidents created.
Other rounds ricocheted from tree to tree, until they self-destructed over some group of infantry, or found a mark among them.
A hand grenade detonated between the APC and its tow, and the Land-Rover came through the fireball stained with bars of soot and covered in forest litter. Tracer that failed to penetrate the eight-wheeler’s well-angled thick hull plates met no such resistance from the thin vertical walls of the Land-Rover’s hardtop.
Twice, Libby saw tracer whose source he could not engage plunge in through the drab painted aluminium; the second time a long burst that stitched a close-spaced row of neat holes the length of its side.
And then they were through, fresh clean air began to replace the choking cordite-tainted smoke and the chemically coloured fires and lines of tracer were being left behind. But there was one more obstacle.
Parked across the junction of track and road was a long nose-to-tail line of Soviet-made trucks. To either side of the track was a drop that in the dark Burke couldn’t be sure of negotiating, even without the women’s transport in tow. There was only one course open to him.
Drivers leapt from their cabs as the APC charged down on them. At forty miles an hour, the ten-ton machine ploughed into the line, tossing one truck into the air and turning it over, crushing the front of another and having its already damaged spill-board ripped away as it caught in the distorted metal of a vehicle it began to drag with it.
As the metal sheared and the truck was left rocking on its springs the Land-Rover just clipped it, but at that speed the violence of the impact was sufficient to burst open its flimsy rear doors and throw one of the young girls into the road.