by James Rouch
Still audible, the echo of the Russian barrage reminded some of them of the danger of completely dropping their guard. Nearly all of them had seen friends killed in an unwary moment.
Gradually though, as they walked silently forward, experience reasserted itself through their awe, though they could savour what they saw. Ahead of them, a blackbird scavenged among the dead leaves, flicking them aside as it searched for insects. It held out until the last moment before flying off ahead of them.
‘Everything I know tells me this place just shouldn’t be here.’ Try as he could, Revell could see no evidence at all that this oasis of life and colour had ever received any dose of the poisons that drenched every other part of this great swath of German territory.
‘It’s like finding the Garden of Eden in the middle of the Utah salt flats.’ Garrett picked a flower and finally succeeded in entwining it among the sparse dead foliage adorning the netting on his helmet.
‘More like the eye of a storm.’ Sampson shrugged his sixty-pound pack of medical supplies higher, but otherwise his gangling frame showed no discomfort under the crushing load. ‘Listen, man, the Zone is a killing ground that’s been well turned over. The Reds push us, we dig in, then we push them and they dig in. The next time we just push and dig in different places. Result, everything gets turned over, blown up, killed off. Only we found a slice of real estate that they’ve all missed. You got one guess where all hell is going to break loose next.’
Garrett looked at the radiation counter on his belt. It registered little more than background, as if it too was reluctant to admit what they’d found. His chemical-level indicator was reading an unflickering zero. He double-checked with Thome’s meter before he could bring himself to believe it.
‘They wouldn’t do anything to mess up this place, would they? Hell, they just couldn’t, could they?’
It was as if being among the fresh greenery had revitalized them. Even Andrea caught something of the mood. She accepted a flower that Dooley half jokingly offered. To his ill-concealed surprise she picked another to go with it and threaded both through the pin of a phosphorus grenade at her belt.
Their luck changed also. They struck a road that with only minor and brief deviations kept them headed in the right direction. And it was just as well. The country through which they passed now became more rugged with each kilometre. Frequently the road was flanked by the precipitous walls of a gorge of steeply rising hillsides that were plentifully littered with outcrops of rock and scree slopes.
They emerged from a belt of dense woodland into a patch of open meadow and the sudden silence, without the patter of rain on leaves, was strange.
Before crossing, Revell made a careful sweep through his binoculars. The road was dead straight for a half kilometre, and almost level. Where there was a slight dip a shallow flood was creeping over the asphalt. On the far side of the open ground the way plunged between near-vertical slopes lightly grown with stunted firs.
‘Shit, what was that!’ Burke jumped and several rifles were levelled at a patch of tall grass. ‘Bloody hell, it’s pigs.’
A small herd of wild boar broke from cover and plunged into the concealment of the trees.
‘There goes breakfast.’ Fast as his reaction had been, Sergeant Hyde saw only a glimpse of the rump of the last animal to disappear.
‘Not to mention bacon butties for lunch and pork chops for dinner.’ Reluctantly, Burke lowered his M16 and set it to safe.
‘Would have gone a treat with these veggies.’ Scully slapped the plastic of the bulging bag slung over his shoulder.
‘You are mad dragging those along.’ Sampson had taken advantage of the halt to seat himself on a rotting stump. ‘When you ever gon’ to get the time to cook them?’
‘You’ll see. Anyway, why are you dragging about enough medicine and bandages for a battalion?’
‘He sells them, I’ve…’ Ripper stopped abruptly as he saw the anger in the black’s face.
‘You shut your mouth.’ Effortlessly, despite his load, Sampson got to his feet and advanced a step toward Ripper. ‘And you keep it shut when you don’t know what it is you’re talking about.’ With a last glare he turned and resumed his seat. ‘I was only saying that’s what I heard.’
‘Well, you heard wrong, so forget it, okay?’
‘Yeah, fine.’ Moving away, Ripper passed their sergeant. ‘Shit, that must have been a real sore corn I stood on then. But if he’s not putting them out in the black market, why bother carting them around?’
‘He gives them away.’ Hyde noticed the PFC’s look of blank incomprehension.
‘To refugees who need them. I’ve seen him stay up two nights in a row when we’ve been camped near one of their settlements. And he doesn’t just do basics either; he’ll tackle surgery, even an amputation on a couple of occasions.’
Altering the focus a fraction, Revell again turned his attention to where the road left the far side of the open ground. There was something there, but he couldn’t quite make it out… small white objects, of no uniform size or shape. Just scattered at random…
‘We’ll cross in extended file.’ Revell returned the glasses to their case. ‘I want thirty meters between each man.’
‘Any reason to expect trouble, major?’ Hyde checked that he had a full clip, and unfastened a pouch that held two more.
‘Not that’s obvious. Let’s go.’
FIVE
The leading man was halfway across and the last of them leaving the cover of the trees when they heard a vehicle coming up from behind. It was motoring fast and there was only just time for them to throw themselves down in the wet grass beside the road.
Every weapon was aimed toward the gap in the trees, as the harsh note of a diesel engine being pushed to its limit came to them. Rounds were chambered, grenades clenched, and then in rapid sequence each of them held their fire as a Mercedes Estate flashed past at high speed. The station wagon’s camouflage paint was topped by a chromed roof rack.
Only Garrett snapped off a single shot, that missed, before he recognized the Mercedes.
‘Crazy shits.’ Scully jumped up and shied a stone at its rear window. It missed and bounced sadly along in the mist of spray to roll apologetically back to the fields. ‘I hope you fucking…’
Flame and smoke erupted beneath the rear of the Merc. Its sheer speed, so much faster than the target for which the anti-tank mine had been intended, almost defeated the device. Almost but not quite.
The powerful blast lifted the back of the Estate, rupturing and igniting its fuel tank. The flaming wreck turned a complete somersault to crash back down on its side. Echoes of its pounding impact rolled through the meadow.
‘Don’t move. Don’t anyone fucking move.’ Hyde’s drill-sergeant bellow checked Sampson as he stood to go forward.
A figure crawled from the wreckage. Hoops of flame rippled its length, then turned it to a pillar of flame as it lurched to its feet. It reeled forward a half pace, staggered sideways, and then there was a second, smaller explosion. The effect was no less horrific. A limb spun through the air, and the debris cloud of the anti-personnel mine detonation cleared to reveal the smouldering hulk of what had been a human being.
‘Where the hell is the bus?’ Using extreme caution, Burke retraced his footsteps to the road, as the company moved forward using the faintly visible wheel marks as safe paths.
When they came to the partially flooded section, those who walked in the nearside track had the nerve-wracking experience for several meters of being unsure whether or not they were still precisely on course.
Garrett stood retching for a minute after safely regaining the barely visible trail beyond the ankle-deep water. ‘Fuck the bus. I’m just thankful that old bastard Klingenberg showed us we were in a mine field.’
‘Yeah, it was very kind of him.’ Dooley was having to sweat more than the others as his large feet with each step came dangerously close to overlapping the safe lane. ‘I’ll tell you somethin
g, though. I don’t think the old guy meant to do it.’
Revell paused a moment to wipe water from his eyes. As he did his fingers brushed the edge of the camouflage cloth covering his helmet, and the part of the brim that felt brittle, and broke into dark flakes at his touch. It was a reminder of how close a twenty-millimetre cannon shell had come to scattering his brains. The cloth still held the pungent tang from its brush with the tracer base of the shell.
‘If I was feeling charitable I’d say that Klingenberg got separated by accident from his wagon-load of civvies.’ While he was speaking Revell did not for an instant take his eyes from the narrow path he followed. ‘But having had to deal with that old louse a few times, I’d say it’s much more likely he ran out on them.’
Speculation on the fate of the civilians, though, Revell knew to be pointless. What mattered now, all that mattered now, was getting the survivors of his company back to the new NATO defence line. Wherever that might be. But still he could regard it as some small mark in his favour, a sign that there remained a spark of humanity within him, that he could feel a fleeting moment of sadness at what might be the fate of those civilians.
Death, fast and painless if they were hicky. If they were not, then months of gradual starvation, disease and lingering death in a squalid refugee camp. And there were a thousand gradations of suffering and degradation between those two unsought options.
‘So that’s what they were!’ Almost saying it to himself, Revell filed one more snippet of knowledge of the Zone into his mental survival kit. The white objects that had puzzled him were bones. Not with the readily recognizable outline of human shape, but the scavenger-scattered remains of several boar. The automatic killing devices that had slaughtered those lumbering wild hogs had not been triggered again by the foxes, rats and carrion feeders that had alighted on the feast.
‘A little more speed and he might have got away with it.’ Thorne had reached the edge of the shallow crater that marked the end of the tire tracks.
‘I don’t think so.’ Clarence pointed to a dull-coloured tube supported on tripod legs.
The blast from the explosion had blown camouflage from it and now the off-road mine stood fully revealed.
Scanning the slopes on either side of the road, Revell identified ten more of the sophisticated self-activating weapons, and as many claymore mines. Several trip-wires criss-crossed the road and laced the trees on the lower slopes. Immediately beyond the crater, at random intervals, slim antennae marked the position of more buried mines. They waited only for the brush of a tank’s belly plates passing overhead to unleash their huge charges and the semi-molten slugs of super-hard steel into the weakly defended underside of the fifty-ton machines. Igniting ammunition and fuel, they worked with devastating effect.
‘Get Carrington up here.’ For Revell it had not been a difficult selection to make. No other among them knew as much about mines, but Carrington had another, special talent. He appeared not to have a nerve in his body. Revell had seen others spring the most diabolical stunts on him, in an effort to make him jump, or lose his temper, or show some reaction, but they’d always failed. Even a thunder flash under his bunk had failed to elicit much of a response. According to Dooley, who’d been present, if not the actual instigator, Carrington had opened his eyes, watched the thick smoke drift to the ceiling, then turned over and gone back to sleep.
‘Problem, Major?’ With the tip of the barrel of his Colt Commando, Carrington scratched his tangled black beard.
‘You might say that. We need to get past this lot, fast.’ Borrowing the binoculars, Carrington examined the various evidence of the extensive minefield. ‘Very amateur. What we are faced with here is a massive overkill situation. That makes it harder. A regular minefield would be more logical and so predictable, give or take the odd new wrinkle some genius manages to introduce.’
‘So?’ Revell didn’t find it easy to cope with Carrington’s laid-back manner. ‘I said we want to keep moving.’
‘Quickest way would be to lay down a firestorm. But that depends on how much ammo we’ve got to waste, and even then there’s always something that gets missed. Or maybe aimed fire. Clarence could take out everything we could see with single shots, but it’d take longer.’
There was sense in both suggestions, but Revell was forced to take into account another factor. He shook his head.
‘It’s tempting, but the way that scout car was operating we’ve got to reckon the Reds are interested in coming this way. We can’t take out what might be the only decent roadblock likely to slow them.’
Lips pursed in thought, Carrington again examined the road, and the nature of the ground around it. ‘There’s another option. That Merc bounced a good way. I’d say there is a fair chance that we’d be all right as far as that. Just past it there’s about the only section I’ve seen that we’ve got a chance of scrambling up without resorting to rock-climbing techniques.’
‘That still leaves us in the middle of a minefield.’
‘Maybe not, Major. From the way it’s laid I’d say this load of nastiness was emplaced in a hell of a hurry. If I’m right, then they wouldn’t have had time to do the mountain goat bit and do the higher slopes. Once that climbable section is cleared we can scoot around the rest. That’s the best I can offer.’
‘What do you need?’ There was no decision to make. They had no choice.
That was underlined by a stray shell from the barrage constantly passing high overhead. Tumbling far off course, it plummeted down among the trees of a distant hillside. A mushroom of grey-streaked black smoke soared above the treetops. The reverberation carried clearly and its echo took seconds to die away.
‘Just someone to follow and improve the route markings I make, as we haven’t any tape.’
‘Take Taylor. And as we haven’t got tape, get a few rolls of bandage off Sampson, to mark the worst places.’
Glad to be lightened of his pack for a while, Taylor otherwise showed no emotion; not so Sampson. It took an order from Revell to get him to surrender four large rolls of cellophane-wrapped bandage.
As the medic handed them over he scowled at Taylor. ‘You get yourself blown up, you’re going to be sorry you laid these in the dirt.’
Scanning every inch of ground before taking a step, the pair started off. Through the crater and its litter, past a scorched door torn from the Estate, they edged forward. A slim silver pen lay among sodden scraps of paper. Carrington ignored it and knew his follower would do likewise.
Both had seen too many men killed or maimed in the course of mindless or even pointless looting. In the Zone the art of mine warfare and booby-trapping had reached new heights of ingenuity and calculated frightfulness. But never before had either of them seen such lavish use of the weapons. Well-sited and concealed, a dozen assorted mines spread out over a half kilometre of road could stall an armoured column for hours, unless they were determined to press on regardless of the casualties. Here at a glance they could identify three times that number.
They were nearing the Mercedes. Waves of fierce heat and smoke swept over them with an eddy of wind trapped between the hills. They froze as the acrid cloud bit into their eyes arid blinded them, not moving on until they had blinked them clear of tears.
Several of the automatic anti-tank launchers stared from among the lower heaps of boulders and from among sparse clumps of firs. Carrington knew that the little logic boxes bolted to each tube would be registering their progress, electronically gauging what they were by shape, size, infra-red signature or any one of a whole host of methods. Right this instant they would be crossing at least one beam, maybe sonic or laser. Or perhaps the careful impact of their steps was being compared with the memory bank of a seismically activated mine
The anti-tank mines would not be interested in them, but buried at the roadside or lodged on a rock shelf there might be a shotgun mine silently ticking off their progress. Many now were set to detonate only when several bodies had passed, calculated
to knock out patrol commanders, who rarely took the point and could be caught farther down the line. Well, there was nothing he could do about them. That was down to luck.
That word played a big part in the so-called science of mine clearance, but Carrington had never had any time for it. He was a fatalist. He didn’t court death, even took what steps he could to avoid it, but he saw no point in worrying at every turn, every time a shell passed by so close he felt the draft of its passage, or when a grenade fragment rapped hard against his helmet or flak jacket. No, when it was his turn it would happen, and until the instant it happened he could savour every pain-free breath he took.
Through the roar of the flames Carrington thought he heard another sound, but couldn’t place it. As he took another step it came again, but once more just too indistinct to label.
He unslung his weapon and looked around. There was nothing. Just the rocks and trees and the blazing auto. The slopes held nothing he hadn’t observed previously. Those mines in sight were exactly as he’d noted them only thirty seconds before.
There were the pair of launchers by the big rock with the prominent quartz seam, another propped in the lower branches of a gnarled pine, the claymore mine at the bottom of the scree slope just below that chunk of panel from the Merc… ‘Down!’
It was pure instinct that made Carrington hurl himself full length, even then though with the presence of mind to turn and dive into his own footsteps.
A sheet of flame erupted from the concave cast face of the claymore. It unleashed thousands of fragments at a broad arc of the road, while it’s less powerful but still devastating backlash made multiple perforations in the sliding wreckage that had triggered its anti-handling device.
Carrington felt a numbingly heavy blow in his side, and an instant drenching in warm, pulsing blood.
SIX
The blood that soaked him was not his own. Carrington lifted his head to look at the savagely torn remains that had been thrown against him. A wisp of steam rose from ribbons of bowel that trailed from the legless torso.