Libby saw her tumble and come to rest beside the damaged truck, then reach for the torn metal to pull herself to her feet, one arm hanging limp at her side. He recognised the splint-reinforced bandage about her wrist, and then saw the squat Russian coming around the back of the truck towards her.
Taking very careful aim, Libby loosed off the whole magazine, and saw almost every single round reach its target Thrown back against the flattened cab, the girl jerked spastically, made her slim body into a high arch, then collapsed and lay still.
He didn’t replace the magazine. Instead he unclipped the three spares from the turret wall and let them drop to the floor of the crew compartment, where Andrea swooped on them, before reluctantly having to part with two.
His hands were shaking, and the effect seemed to be spreading to his whole body. He felt sick, but not in a way that could be explained by his hunger or exhaustion. It was in his mind, and it was as if his brain was whirling around inside his skull. This had to be rock bottom, it couldn’t get worse than this, it just couldn’t
The interior of the Land-Rover was like a charnel-house. Both of the men had been hit again, and six of the females had been wounded. Three of them were dying.
Libby knew he was crying, knew that racking sobs were shuddering through his body, but somehow it was as though it was happening to someone else. He felt strangely detached. Even when Sergeant Hyde took him by the shoulders and steered him away from the scene to sit on the parapet of the old stone bridge close by, he felt as if it was another person who was submitting to the hands, taking the steps, sitting on the moss-cushioned hardness of the stone.
A never-ending line of bodies was being formed from the constant stream being carried from the back of the Land-Rover. Through eyes that weren’t his own, Libby watched the last dying struggles of the wounded and Dooley covering their faces when all movement finally ceased. First it was the two men, and then one of the women.
Red light filtering weakly from the early dawn picked out and matched the predominating colour of the roadside scene. Everything was red, It stained clothing and hands, covered the road and grass verge and dripped from the vehicle and the injured it had disgorged.
Dooley moved forward to cover another face and as he did was hosed with blood from a rupturing artery deep within a spasm-racked limb. He waited a moment while the fountain subsided to a sluggish welling, then ceased altogether, before drawing the scrap of grubby cloth across the fragment-shattered face.
‘Don’t drink it.’ Clarence held a helmet brimful of water in front of Libby. ‘No way of knowing where it’s come from, might have some chemical muck in it.’
Libby heard the words, but they weren’t for him. They were for the poor devil sitting slumped on the bridge. The face was familiar, but he didn’t know anybody who had been through so much that they could look like that. Sunken dark-ringed eyes, made pink and puffy by crying, smoke-stained face barred by streaks of uncontrolled tears. No, he didn’t know that person, but he could feel pity for him.
‘Splash your face with it. You’ll feel better.’ Clarence felt the helmet being taken from his hands, he looked, and it was Andrea, who dipping in a cloth that tinged the water pink, began to sponge the grime from Libby’s hands before rinsing the cloth and starting on his face.
It felt good, cold and clean and fresh. For a moment Libby shared the pleasure of the sensation with the hunched figure, then as the cloth moved over his face it was as though it wiped the confusion from his mind and he knew he was that pitiful creature. As the realisation hit him, so did all the pressures and fears and memories and frustrations that had brought him to that state and his head bowed slowly forward to rest between Andrea’s breasts and he cried again.
‘Get him aboard.’ Hyde took Libby’s left arm. ‘We’ve got to keep moving.’
Clarence couldn’t do it, took a step back, recoiling from the prospect of physical contact, and it was Andrea who started to take his other arm, before Dooley gently moved her aside and took her place.
Having plugged the several leaks in the Land-Rover’s radiator, and refilled its cooling system from the stream, Burke had at last managed to get the vehicle moving under its own power, though it now produced loud metallic noises from an extravagantly buckled front wheel.
Only three of the wounded women had to be put back on board. When at last they pulled back on to the road, with the Land-Rover trailing the APC by a good quarter of a mile, they left five bodies behind, laid in a neat row beside the road, their open wounds still steaming in the cool morning air.
The area of the Zone through which they were now passing had been fought over quite recently, within the last three months. Wrecked guns and tanks and other vehicles were everywhere.
Carpet bombing, saturation chemical attacks, super-napalm drops, all had contributed towards the utter sterilisation of the landscape. Hardly a plant grew, and the few trees that survived were gouged and splintered by the bombs and shells that had embedded thousands of metal fragments in their bark. The transformation had been so violent it was virtually impossible to tell where the countryside had ended and town had begun. Now the two merged into one, an endless series of crater-scarred low hills.
At the side of the road sat hundreds of burned-out trucks and cars of every description, most of military origin. They lay rusting where the engineers had dumped them, some showing the marks of the heavy bulldozer blades that had shoved them aside when route clearance had become more urgent than salvage.
‘Off the road.’ Even the slamming of the heavy hatch behind him failed to drown out Dooley’s shout as he ducked inside.
Burke didn’t hesitate, wrenching the steering over and sending the APC into a lightly cratered field that was criss-crossed with the gouge marks of hundreds of sets of tank tracks.
Even as the back wheels hit the mud-surfaced loam, the road behind them erupted in pounding flame as a salvo of air to ground rockets ploughed into it.
‘Get us air cover.’ Revell had to bellow at the top of his voice to be heard by Cline, as the Soviet helicopter gunship banked and rippled another twenty rockets at them.
Fragments rattled and banged against the armour as the close spaced shock waves threatened to push the speeding vehicle over. Having overshot, the chopper had to go into a wide stalling turn to bring it back on target again, and this time Burke was able to watch its head-on approach.
At the first spurt of flame from the launch pods on the gunship’s stub wings, their driver put them into a turn that for a moment threatened disaster as they side-swiped a wrecked Abram tank. As the grating sound of the long scraping contact died, he sent them the other way and into the mass of smoke and slowly settling debris from the near misses,
‘Hell, don’t be stopping now.’ Ripper looked around at the others, expecting the same reaction from them as their driver slammed on the brakes and slewed the vehicle to a sharp stop then turned off the engine.
Pushing his head up into the turret, Revell slowly cranked it round to take a look at their situation. Their driver had achieved the near impossible, found them a place of concealment in that featureless terrain.
Under cover of the smoke, Burke had parked them between a pair of damaged armoured personnel carriers: on one side a West German Marder, on the other an Ml 13 with Canadian markings. The little group of which they formed the, hopefully, anonymous centrepiece was among a concentration of twenty or more other similar wrecks.
‘Shit, what do we do now. Wait for them to fry us?’ Shifting position, Ripper tried to move nearer an escape hatch.