by James Rouch
TWO
They were too late, by just a matter of seconds. The bridge was blown even as they came in sight of it.
At first, for a few tantalizing moments, it had seemed as if the charges had failed in their work. Revell had urged their driver on, but even as Burke had floored the pedal without consideration for the surge of fuel consumption by the straining motor, the long pre-cast concrete structure had twisted, sagged and fallen to ruin in the broad churning river far below.
There was no time for the luxury of self-recrimination. With dawn only an our away Revell knew they had to find a crossing, to find shelter beneath the protecting umbrella of the main forces anti-aircraft defences. This side of the river they had no chance. Once light they would be unable to move by road, and on foot it would only be a matter of time before they were mopped up by Warpac recon units.
Even as the last massive chunks of steel-reinforced debris were plunging beneath the turbid waters, Revell was turning the column in a fresh direction.
The heavy overcast was holding back the morning, but it was growing perceptibly brighter when they topped a hill overlooking the river once more.
‘It hasn’t been blown, yet.’ Scanning the lattice steel structure, Hyde first used binoculars and then an image intensifier.
‘So? It is still of no use to us.’ Andrea sat beside the sergeant on the edge of the roof hatch. She leaned an arm on the barrel of the TOW launch tube and rested her cheek against the cold wet metal. ‘That is not a bridge. It is a long slaughterhouse.’
Revell hardly heard her. Barely a kilometre away, the bridge might as well have been a hundred. Its full length and the approach roads were choked with an unmoving jam of military and civilian transport. Tanks, APCs and armoured cars were inextricably mixed with every nationality and type of soft-skin transport, and between every one of them were locked masses of refugee carts. There were even one or two civilian motor vehicles, doubtless their gas tanks holding the last few dregs of carefully hoarded and precious fuel. But nothing was moving.
As he watched, Revell saw a pair of Hind gunships sweep the length of the stalled traffic with cannon and rocket fire. They took no evasive action during the run, not even to the extent of releasing decoy flares against AA missiles. The degree of their complacency was illustrated by the second machine even displaying its navigation lights.
Fires leaped from a score of locations and added their jet smoke to those already rising into the predawn light. A ruptured fuel tank flared a brief bubble of flame and a bursting tire made a small fountain of blazing rubber.
A single broken line of tracer curled toward the second gunship. Well-aimed, it was shrugged aside by the armoured belly of the machine. Turning tightly, the pair swept back and saturated with a storm of fire and steel the location from which the weak resistance had come.
Only a few hundred feet above the Russian helicopters a single MIG fighter flew top cover for them, sometimes lost to sight in the low cloud.
A gasoline tanker stalled in the centre of the bridge exploded and liquid fire poured toward the river far below. Ammunition aboard trucks close by began to detonate and made sparkling fountains of white, red and green.
Spreading a map on the wet metal of the hull top, Revell screwed up his eyes in the half light to trace a path with a grimy finger. ‘We’ve fuel for maybe another thirty kilometres, if we go easy on it. We’ll have to drop the cripple and pack everyone into the other three.’
Hyde craned over the major’s shoulder to look at the point he was indicating. ‘A railway bridge. What are the chances of it still being intact?’
‘Wish I knew.’ Revell refolded the map. ‘But it’s the only one we have a chance of reaching.’
Stretching her arms above her head, Andrea watched without real interest as the Hinds soared to skim the bottom of the clouds and then dived to commence another strafing run. She turned away as the gunships tore into and pounded to scrap a dozen more vehicles. Fresh fires erupted. ‘We will be crossing the front of the Russian advance. It is likely we will run into their reconnaissance units.’
‘Maybe.’ There was nothing else Revell could add.
‘We’ll be travelling by side roads.’ It was Hyde who found a crumb of comfort.
‘That country is rough; unless the Reds are trying to sneak around the side it’s not very likely we’ll encounter a main axis of their advance.’
‘Only one way to find out.’ Patting the anti-tank missile launch tube, Revell took a last glance at the bridge. ‘So let’s be on our way before those commie fliers get cheesed off with hammering wrecks and start looking for stragglers, like us.’
Bracing himself behind the major’s seat, Sergeant Hyde took out the map and examined the route the officer had chosen. In the dim light of the APCs interior, and with it swaying and jolting over the poor track roads, it took him a while to orient himself. He studied it for several minutes before an indistinct nagging doubt crystallised into coherent thought.
‘Doesn’t seem to have been a lot going on around here, not up until now.’ Revell almost let the point go as a chance remark, then had second thoughts and re-examined the area. He was surprised he hadn’t noticed the fact himself. It was further indication of just how tired he was.
While all of the remainder of the eighty square kilometres displayed by the map were covered in a mass of additional symbols, denoting old battlefields, dumps, contaminated areas and minefields, the area they were traversing was entirely free of such information.
‘Printing error?’ It hardly rang true, but Revell had to consider it, even as he dismissed it from his mind.
With a shake of his head Hyde discounted the idea. ‘I’ve never been this way before, but I’ve always had a feeling that it’s about where Paradise Valley should be.’
‘No such bloody place, Sarge.’ Driving gingerly to conserve fuel, Burke was for once able to take part in a conversation. His first in days, since the intercom had broken down. ‘That’s a bleeding fairy story, put about by staff officers and base barnacles, so we’ll live in hope and go on defending the bastards.’
With supreme delicacy and skill Burke nursed the GM V-6 over a rise without having to change down, and saved another spoonful of diesel. ‘Hell, Sarge, you don’t believe those stories do you? They’ve been going the rounds as long as the Zone has been in existence.’
‘Hey, can someone clue me in on this?’ Ripper stepped on toes as he hauled himself forward and into the exchange. ‘What the heck is Paradise Valley?’
‘It’s a fiction.’ Clarence gave up trying to sleep, and flexed his fingers around the long slim barrel of the sniper rifle propped between his knees. ‘Like Burke says, it’s a fairy story. But if you have to know, think of it as the Quartermaster’s version of the elephants’ graveyard. It’s supposed to be a fabulous dump where they keep all the goodies and essentials that are permanently in short supply. The rumour of its existence probably sprang into being after the first Warpac attack, when some poor devil on the NATO side ran out of what he needed most. You know, little things, like ammo, or morphine.’
‘Or fuel,’ Thorne butted in. ‘Or maybe transport, for a fast retreat. We seem to have been doing that since the evening of the first day.’
‘Holy shit.’ Ripper was all toothy enthusiasm. ‘I don’t give a damn if it’s rumour or fairy story. Hey, if it’s no more real than that, maybe we can still trade on it. My Daddy used to make money out of stills that weren’t real. He used to tell the revenue about them, always collecting cash money up front. Then when they hit the site and there weren’t nothing there he used to swear they must just have moved on. By then he’d spent the reward so there weren’t nothing they could do.’
‘I’ve seen everything traded in the Zone, but never fairy stories.’ Thorne leaned back against the bare condensation-streaked metal of the hull, and by closing his eyes took himself out of the conversation.
‘There are plenty of refugees trapped in the Zone who’ve paid for
tunes, for bogus maps of safe routes to the west, or handed over all they’ve got to so-called guides who dump their customers as soon as they’ve been paid. In advance of course.’ Clarence too had tired of what he saw as pointless speculation. Settling back, he sought what comfort he could in the vehicle’s hard shell, festooned as it was with sharp angles, projecting brackets and hanging equipment.
He flinched and his eyes flickered open as another body slumped against his. He relaxed his instantly tensed muscles when he saw that it was Andrea. With her alone he could bear any form of physical contact. Even that, by insinuating a pack between them, he kept to a minimum. Still he could not repress an involuntary shudder as the warmth of her breath on his shoulder permeated his layers of clothing.
Ripper was not so easily to be put down, and after a short pause made another attempt to draw one of the crew, anyone who could profess to some knowledge on the subject in which he’d taken such interest. ‘Well, if we do come across it we’d be sure to be able to take on extra gas, or maybe even swap these ancient wrecks for better transport.’ He looked around hopefully.
‘It’s a dream; forget it.’ As Revell hoisted himself into the command cupola he caught a glimpse of Andrea, where she snuggled against their sniper. Much as he loathed the sight of her with anybody else, it took an effort for him to pull his eyes away.
Through the mud-smeared thick prisms he viewed the road ahead. It twisted and turned constantly, sometimes flanked by shallow banks but fairly level, but then suddenly climbing with a broken rock wall to one side and a precipitous drop to the other. They passed through a tiny village, just fifteen half-timbered houses, a tiny combined store and gas station and a tall spired church. It had been looted and abandoned long ago. Except for fading paint on doors and shutters there was no colour about the scene, with even the defoliated trees adding to the impression that he was looking at a black-and-white photograph. The same drenching of chemicals that had killed shrubs and trees had also inhibited the growth of weeds that would otherwise have enveloped the road and paths, but though that facet of dereliction was missing, the drifts of dirt and other wind-blown debris more than compensated.
They slowed to negotiate a tangle of branches from an old elm that some storm had thrown down to partially block the road. The brittle timber snapped in a shower of water droplets, and then they were clear and picking up speed again when a hail of twenty-millimetre cannon fire lashed at the APC.
The tracer-towing high-velocity rounds smacked hard against and into the mass of spare track links, sandbags and scrap metal that crudely reinforced the front plates. They ricocheted wildly, leaving scraps of their phosphorous bases to smoulder among the shattered remnants.
Burke threw the APC into a skid turn to take them off the road and out of the line of fire, but the tracks only scrabbled at the loose shale of the bank. As he hurled the machine into reverse for a second attempt, another burst of armour-piercing and incendiary shells lashed out.
There was an ear-punishing crash as a round found a gap among the remains of the protective litter on the hull, penetrated the splashboard and almost punched its way through the hull. A semi-molten scab of aluminium flashed the length of the crew compartment to smash a first-aid box beside the rear ramp.
‘Make smoke.’ Revell wrenched at the door-control lever. ‘Out, out, out.’
As Burke scrambled from the driver’s position a third and longer burst of enemy fire put a round clean through the smoke-wreathed armour, smashing the instrument panel and shattering against a control stick. Flames licked from destroyed wiring and the padding of the seat covering.
Jamming in the half-lowered position, the ramp tore weapons and equipment from the crew’s grasp as they bailed out fast, with the fire already taking hold behind them.
THREE
Slewed at an angle across the narrow road, the boxlike bulk of the old APC gave the squad cover as they scattered among the flanking trees.
As he bailed out, Sergeant Hyde caught a glimpse of a four-wheeled Warpac armoured car barely fifty meters away, parked close against the bank at a bend in the road. Stabs of flame from the snout of its cannon marked another score of shells unleashed against the now abandoned M113.
Masked by the wreck, the driver of the second vehicle in their little convoy wrenched his machine into reverse and brought it into clanging collision with the last in the file. Track links snapped and both slewed to a stop with their drives broken.
Hyde’s swearing made him overlook the fact that the Russian gunners’ preoccupation with the hulks of their armour had given the company time to scatter into cover. But it was only a momentary lapse. Those few precious fractions of time wasted by the enemy when he failed to switch his fire to the fleeing crews were quickly made up for when a torrent of co-axial heavy machine-gun fire was hosed into the woods.
There was a brief pause as a belt or magazine was changed, and then the rapid-firing weapon probed again among the trunks for human targets. But already the best chance had been missed. Only three of the grenade dischargers on the lead APC had been fired but now they added their swirling clouds to the output of the fiercer blaze inside the APC.
The steadily falling rain prevented the smoke from rising and caused it to swirl in confusing wisps into the woods. Hardly diminished by the downpour, it wreathed the intervening ground in a fitful screen.
Again the air was full of metal from the high-velocity Russian cannon as tungsten-tipped shells smacked great scabs of bark from the trees. Where some lodged, their incendiary content added to the artificial fog.
In nervously erratic ripples the streams of bullets stitched across the timber, betraying the gunner’s lack of fire discipline, as he fired blindly, expending ammunition at a prodigious rate.
From inside the flame-and smoke-generating APC came the crackle of small-arms ammunition cooking-off. At the noise, the enemy turret-gunner reverted his attention back to the wreck.
‘This is our chance.’ Haying failed to find the major, Hyde grabbed Dooley, and then kicked out at Thorne to get his attention also.
Thorne gave up his elbow-armed conflict with Scully to get equal shares of the cover of a slim tree barely adequate for one, and joined the NCO behind an insubstantial holly bush. ‘I’ll strangle the shitty flier who sprayed this lot with crap and stopped them growing to a useful width. If I live to get the chance to look for him.’
‘If we don’t do something about that scout car you won’t.’ Hyde hugged the ground as a random burst scythed through the shrub and showered them with fragments of dead leaves and wood. ‘The fucker’s ammo won’t last much longer at this rate, but I’m not prepared to sit on my arse in the hope I’ll still be in one piece when he runs out.’
They ran crouched low, ignoring the cuts and scratches inflicted by low branches and thorns as they made a wide detour around the ambush site.
They threw themselves down as another wild burst slashed slivers of bark from standing timber only inches overhead.
‘What the fuck is that thing doing here?’ Almost dropping his M16, Thorne hitched the three-pack of rocket-launchers more firmly onto his back after a series of jarring collisions with low-hanging branches and the tearing effect of the several dense thickets they had passed through.
‘It’s a fucking scout car. What would it be doing? It’s fucking scouting, that’s what.’ Carefully moving aside a tangle of undergrowth, Dooley still succeeded in drenching himself with the mass of droplets of water it discharged.
The trio’s circuitous route had brought them to a point level with, and slightly above, the Russian armoured car. Inching forward farther, into the heart of a long-dead briar patch, they made their preparations.
‘There’s a Hummer behind it.’ Whispering, although there was no chance of their being heard at fifty meters distance, and above the rattle of automatic fire now returned at the four-wheeler, Thorne pointed to the much-holed vehicle close by the scout car.
Along its doors and side panels
showed the close-stitched holes of a burst of machine-gun fire, each dark centre surrounded by the bare metal ring where impact had smacked away the paint. Against the starred windscreen lolled the head of its driver, his face barred with blood that streaked the shattered glass.
Reaching across, Hyde helped Thorne slip the heavy pack from his shoulders, and taking one launch tube for himself, withdrew a second for Dooley. His actions being mirrored, the sergeant extended the firing tube, not bothering to raise the sights at so short a range.
‘Why are the fuckers hanging about?’ Shouldering the rocket-launcher, Dooley instinctively waited for the sergeant’s fire order. ‘Those little shits haven’t got any armour, so why’s he hanging about when he got lucky and kicked our wheels from under us?’ The four-wheeler filled his field of vision, and his finger took up the slack on the trigger. ‘It don’t make any sense, those recce wagons of theirs usually avoid a scrap.’
‘Who cares…?’ Hyde took a moment longer over his aim, and then whipped his launcher sideways to clout Dooley’s downward and prevent his firing. ‘There’s one of our blokes down there.’
For the first time Thorne noticed two men huddled against the embankment for its protection from the incoming small-arms fire skimming past the Warpac armoured car.
One of them wore the distinctive latest pattern NATO camouflage jacket and helmet. An obviously Russian officer had him covered with a pistol.
Pinned there by the fire from the woods about the disabled armoured personnel carriers, they could neither board nor scramble to the comparative safety of the trees.
The scout car began slowly to reverse, turning slightly to offer the Russian and his captive the protection of its flank, and set low in that side was a small hatch that swung open.
As the scout car began to move, the fire aimed at it increased dramatically. Hyde knew he could do nothing as the captive was propelled toward the opening. Everything told him he should fire, let the NATO man take his chances, but still he held back, willing the man to make a break for it, do something.