The level of acid was now only about one inch from reaching the nearest digit of Svetlana’s left hand. She was in fact being pulled in four different directs by the rubber bindings on her wrists and ankles, as close to immobile as any struggling person could be. Her screams were unnoticed by any person outside of the derelict industrial unit. She could not see any of her tormentors but could feel their presence.
Raised, angry voices filtered through to her brain. The one she thought of as ‘Oxford accent’ stood and shouted in an angry torrent until the sound of an automatic pistol being cocked made him pause.
“Cut her loose and then stand with your friends, where I can see you” A man’s voice ordered in accented English, obviously for the benefit of the Irishman and Co.
She heard the words and felt hope emerge. There was a pause followed by the soft click of a safety catch being thumbed off.
“DO IT!” A shuffle of feet followed the shouted instruction in its very threatening tone, and she felt the bindings on her ankles tugged as fingers sought to untie them.
Major Bedonavich crouched into a gun fighters stance, the pistol aimed and his finger taking up the first pressure on the trigger. “Wrists first, if you please!” he hissed in warning.
Her ankle bindings were let go and Svetlana realised that had her ankles been freed first she would have been catapulted face first into the acid by the wrist’s rubber straps.
With a snort of frustration Oxford accent released her wrists and then her ankles and Svetlana scrabbled backwards frantically until clear of the acid vat, still sobbing and attempting to cover her nakedness with her hands.
On the far side of the vat stood three men in their twenties wearing jeans. A woman of about thirty with striking Slavic features, and a tall man in his late thirties. The pin stripe suit and a British Regimental tie looked out of place worn under the rubber apron, boots and heavy rubber gauntlet’s he also wore.
All had their hands ostentatiously in plain view and were looking at some point behind her. She turned as the controller she had never seen before was transferring a handgun to his left hand in order to finish the removal of his suit jacket. The gun was still carefully pointed in the direction of her tormentors as he held out the jacket to the side of his body. She still had wits enough left to avoid coming between the man and the group, going around behind him she took the jacket, draping it over her shoulders. Her body was still trembling. At his feet lay an AKM-74 assault rifle, from its extra pistol grip below the stock she knew it to be of a Rumanian pattern.
“We are leaving now” he addressed the group as a whole. “You two… ” he directed at the woman and the svelte male. “Be at the house in two hours’”.
Anger was replacing the fear and humiliation Svetlana had felt, “Wait, please” she asked Constantine in a weak voice. She looked very docile as she padded barefoot around the vat towards the group. Lessons never previously put into practice were now about to be.
Constantine gestured at the younger men with the Glock to move away, and bumping into one of several large blue containers bearing Hazchem warnings, they duly did as instructed.
Svetlana was looking at the ground as she approached the man and woman; the jacket held closed in front. ‘Distract and Disarm’ was the phrase in her mind but to the man with the cultured accent her humble demeanour made him guess at whether she was now in his thrall, thoroughly dominated.
Svetlana stopped just in front of him; she released the jacket which tumbled to the factory floor with her still meekly looking down. Her right hand moved up and across to cup her left breast, finger and thumb squeezed the nipple. The man’s eyes started to widen in gloating satisfaction when the hand released the breast and lashed, backhand, upwards and out. He had a split second to jerk back his head but his face was not the target. The full blow failed to connect but the end joint of her middle finger struck against his Adams apple and his throat immediately began to constrict as he staggered backwards fighting for air, hands going to the injured area. His back peddling feet struck a protruding metal machinery bracket and he fell, gasping and turning blue.
Distracted and taken unawares the woman turned, mouth opening, to follow her partners’ stricken passage when Svetlana spun and in a fluid movement grabbed her by the shoulders and drove her right knee into her groin. Women also have delicate equipment in that region, and it hurt like hell, leaving the woman doubled up on the floor with hands between her legs.
Retrieving the jacket, Svetlana folded it over one arm and strode away naked without a backward glance.
Constantine picked up the assault rifle in his free hand and backed up until he judged he was beyond effective range of the group before turning to follow the girl.
At the large hangar-like doors at the end of the building another jean-clad male was just sitting up from where he had been sprawled, blood pouring from a broken nose and a scalp wound. He was just groping about for the AKM 74 he had been holding at the time he had encountered the angry Russian major. It had been this man who had shoulder charged Svetlana in her hallway. Through the veil of pain he gaped as he saw Svetlana, a naked goddess with waist length auburn tresses but otherwise devoid of body hair from the neck down, striding purposefully toward him. He blinked to clear his eyes.
Her foot lashed out at his face, the heel connected and he was again unconscious.
Twenty paces behind the girl Constantine witnessed her final expression of anger and chuckled as he put away the handgun and unloaded the AKM which he dropped on the man’s still form.
He thought his day a lot more pleasant than it had started out.
A fairly nondescript patch of scrub and stunted trees was home to some fairly nondescript wildlife but for one snake whose brief appearance centre stage had been the highlight of the late afternoon for twenty odd infantrymen and a dozen tankers whose homeland boasted nothing more deadly than Adders.
Four British Mk2E Challenger main battle tanks, four British Warrior armoured personnel carriers of RTR, 1st Royal Tank Regiment, 3 RGJ, 3rd Battalion Royal Green Jackets, and four Americans from Fort Hood’s training centre with their ‘Humvee’had taken up temporary residency.
The armoured fighting vehicles, AFVs and support troops of the British 1st Armoured Brigades tiny contribution to the US Army’s ‘Commanche Lance’ training exercise were now laagered up for the night. The tanks were spaced out at tactical bounds in the centre with the Infantry providing protection for them against other infantry who may be bent on causing them mischief. The days when the foot soldier was helpless against these behemoths had been and gone, it had gone full circle in fact.
In the First World War Germany produced its own tanks to counter Britain’s invention, against which the German infantry had no choice but to get out of the way. This is not to say that the first tanks were lords of the battlefield, far from it. The crews were more likely to become ineffective from the sweltering heat and exhaust gases their inefficient engines produced in abundance, and mechanical failure than a lucky enemy shell.
Tanks do not live long unaccompanied amongst enemy infantry since those days; they need their own ‘Grunts’ to keep away the nasty men with hand held anti-tank weapons.
With the American logistics train the Brits also had a small detachment of REME, Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, or ‘Rough Engineering Made Easy’, to grateful customers. The RTR and RGJs Challengers and Warriors 1500hp and 550hp Perkins diesel engines were hardly compatible with anything in the Americans spares inventory.