by James Rouch
‘I’ve blown open too many of these tin cans to like the idea of doing my fighting from within one.’ Thorne had exchanged his cumbersome flamethrower for a compact Uzi sub-machine gun from the vehicle’s own weapons rack.
‘If this detour takes us around that gaggle of Soviet armour then we shan’t have to.’ For once discarding his Enfield Enforcer sniper rifle, impractically long for use from the confines of the APC, Clarence had also helped himself to one of the stubby ugly Uzis, and prepared to use the sub-machine gun from the next hull side ball-mount to the sapper.
With the drive disengaged and the engine being run only to power the auxiliary systems, the Marder plunged down the hillside, carving its own path through the trees and undergrowth.
Masses of foliage were caught and churned by the tracks. Pliant branches whipped the hull as they were stripped of their leaves before being hurled aside. For a while the vegetation and flayed bark that wrapped itself about the return rollers and drive sprockets, and the rich leaf mould and loam adhering to the tracks almost silenced the din they had been producing.
That changed as they reached the bottom of the slope and Burke increased the revolutions of the idling six hundred horsepower engine, crashed through the gearbox to engage the drive and transformed the quiet burble of the exhaust into a raging bellow.
Their route lay cross country, the Marder taking every ditch and other obstacle in its stride, slackening speed only to cross embankment enclosed roads, where for a few brief yards the bare metal of the worn tracks would once more produce the maximum amount of noise as they pounded over asphalt.
From the vantage point of the command cupola Revell enjoyed three hundred and sixty degree vision, and he needed it when they broke from a belt of woodland into a series of rough fields lined with rows of seedling conifers. There was hardly any need for him to remind their driver to zigzag. The Marder’s erratic handling, combined with the yawing caused by the deep plough cut furrows of the rows, was in itself sufficient to make any enemy gun-layers task difficult.
A minute or two more and they would be crossing the Russian battle group’s trail a mile to its rear. That should leave an adequate safety margin. Through his forward vision block Revell could make out the churned ground and broken hedges that marked the enemy armour’s route.
They crossed the steel cut and crushed avenue and plunged into the gloom of the tall trees beyond. Instinctively Revell ducked as a branch smacked into the block. As he looked again they ran into trouble, literally.
FOUR
There was the thunder and shock of heavy collision as the Marder piled at full speed into the side of a Soviet scout car parked beneath camouflage netting.
It was no contest. The much lighter four wheeled vehicle was rammed aside with its armour crushed in, and caught a second time. As the APC charged past it slowly toppled over onto its roof, fuel spouting through rents in its plates.
‘Keep your foot down.’
Burke didn’t need the major to tell him that, he’d have done it even if he hadn’t seen the other components of the battle group’s rear guard.
The range was point blank. Using the cannon’s maximum depression Ripper had the tip of the slim barrel almost touching the turret of a Russian personnel carrier when he put a ten round burst into it.
With no chance to note the effect of the hits, they tore on. A spray of heavy calibre machine gun bullets whined off the turret and hull, instantly followed by a wild fusillade of cannon fire that brought down masses of leaves and branches on the Marder’s roof. Another rapid burst was more accurate, one shell punched a hole clean through a road wheel and a second exploded on the turret front. Detonating among the bank of eight smoke dischargers, it tore some away, and ignited the grenades in others.
Smoke billowing from and over it, the Marder raced through the forest, chased by balls of green fire marking the tracer tails of armour-piercing rounds of larger calibre.
Ripper loosed a long burst in the direction of their source, but an accurate sighting of the tank from which they must have come was rendered impossible by the swirling white fog they involuntarily laid behind them, and its reinforcement of thick black smoke from a burning APC.
Fifteen minutes later, safely out of range, they stopped to take a bearing. Hyde could hear the crash and clatter of cannon and automatic fire continuing as the Russians vented mindless retaliation on the inoffensive trees. ‘If the civvies have heard that commotion they’ll be going like bats out hell. We’ll have job catching them.’
Reaching over their driver’s shoulder, Revell activated the air conditioning to rid the compartment of fumes. Empty shell cases from the Uzis and the twenty millimetre rolled under his feet. ‘Most likely they did, but I’m pretty sure we’ll get up to them. Even if whatever they’re using has four wheel drive they’re still near certain to stick to the roads all they can. We’ll cut across country every chance we get and head them off.’
‘They sure can’t have seen that commie battle group, otherwise they’d have gone straight to them, saved themselves a longer journey.’
‘You are an innocent, and a fool.’ Andrea didn’t spare Ripper’s feelings. ‘Whoever leads that delegation does not want to contact the first Warsaw Pact unit they happen to run into, especially not after having gone so short a distance. He is looking to make a grand gesture, and for that he must drag those with him all the way to the main Soviet defence line on the far side of the Zone.’
Dooley dropped in through a roof hatch, into the rear of the compartment. He stank of smoke and the gloves he took off were singed and smouldering. ‘Don’t I get some god-damned fucking awful jobs. It’s taken me bloody ages to put out those shitty smoke candles. That hit made a right fucking mess of them, only a couple left that are still serviceable.’
‘You didn’t put them out, it’s impossible to smother phosphorus. All you did was wait until they’d near enough finished on their own and then kicked away the bits that were left.’
‘Oh yeah Mister Clever, and how do you reckon that?’ Not intimidated by the aggressive sneer, Thorne pointed to the big man’s boots.
‘Well I got a clue from the fact that your feet are on fire.’ Looking where the sapper had indicated, Dooley saw bright specks trapped in the seams and stitching around his toecaps. From each issued a thin streamer of white smoke. Prevented by a chorus of protest from the others from making use of the mouthful of spit he generated with sickening noises, he had to go out again and sit on the roof to pick at each piece of spontaneously burning chemical with the point of his bayonet. While he did it, he swore continuously as the heat and charred material discoloured the mirror finish of the blade.
Examining their large scale map of southern Germany, Sergeant Hyde noticed that the several plots their Russian had made of the civilians’ progress had been linked by a solid red line that continued in broken form as a projection of their expected course. ‘If our commie deserter’s prediction is right, those civvies must be completely out of their skulls. They’re heading straight toward the most heavily chemically saturated and bug infested part of that contaminated territory. Do we go in after them, or wait on the fringes, knowing that poisonous toxin soup or a mob of bacteria are going to do our work for us?’
‘They go in, we go in.’ Revell had already made his decision. ‘If they keep moving fast, and have a slice of luck, one or two of them might make it. Those lab bred germs work quickly, but the KGB disinformation experts will only want those civvies in usable, not perfect condition. Even if they only survive an hour or two after their reception that’ll be enough to give their Department A a field day. In that time they’ll get all the footage they need. Best do a check on our NBC gear, I want us to be prepared if we have to go in.’
‘I did this morning. Regulations…’
‘Just tell me the position. Is everyone fully equipped for operating under those sort of conditions?’
‘No.’ It took an effort, went against his nature and training, bu
t Hyde answered in the same abrupt manner the officer used. ‘What do we need?’
‘Eye pieces for the respirators, gauntlets, filter pads… It’s this work we’ve been on. We haven’t been using the suits but they’ve been taking a battering all the same.’ Bugger the major, he wasn’t a bloody telex, he’d tell it his way. He wasn’t about to leave a damn Yank officer with the impression he’d been neglecting his duty. ‘Being carted about, thrown in and out of transports… That microparticle-proof material can’t take it for any length of time. I’ve put in for replacement items, but officially we’ve been non-combatant for a month, we’re right at the bottom of the priority list.’
‘There’s no time to go back and find a dump, requisition what we need. We’ll have to patch and make do with what we’ve got, take our chances.’
‘You can count me out then.’ Burke had been listening with growing unease. ‘I’ve had to drive you lot into some bleeding stupid and dangerous messes, but I’ve never been expected to drive to me own funeral before. With the tear I’ve got in the hood of my suit I won’t last above an hour.’
‘Another word and you’re on a charge.’
Burke declined to be put off by the NCO’s threat. ‘So what? Order me in there and I won’t be around to serve any time in the glasshouse. Damn it, all around here there’s masses of places where the bloody Ruskies have dumped loads of chemical shit or bugs on other poor cruds. At least some of them must have had the right gear in good nick. If they copped a dose and tucked up their toes what ruddy chance do you think I’ve got?’
‘Say that again?’
He pushed his luck past the limit with the sergeant, but Burke felt rather differently about trying the same thing with the major. ‘Well… I was just saying
Rummaging in his map case, Revell wasn’t listening. He sought something he’d thought they’d not be needing anymore, certainly not for a while and with luck never again. Pushed right to the bottom, the crumpling had not helped the grease and dirt stained special salvage map’s clarity.
In seemingly haphazard fashion various colour coded symbols had been superimposed on the snaking contour lines, roads, towns and villages. Some were grouped close together, other stood in total isolation. Having overcome the chart’s almost wilful attempts to defeat his efforts to fold it the way he wanted, Revell finally managed to bring the sheet to sensible proportions with their present location roughly at the centre of the exposed portion.
The map had been given to him on the day they’d commenced their unpopular salvage work. Only a handful of symbols had been added to it since then, those marking the sites of the depredations of the raiding Russian battle group.
Each blob of colour indicated the location of a past skirmish or battle, or where, in one of the rare air strikes in this part of the Zone, a convoy or mobile workshop or salvage detail had fallen prey to attack by fighter bombers seeking targets of opportunity.
The eastern edge of the map was shaded lime green, marking the boundary of the contaminated territory for which the civilians were heading. A faint echo of that bilious colour surrounded some of the symbols elsewhere, including that closest to them.
‘Look this one up, will you, sergeant.’
It took Hyde a moment to find the relevant entry in the notes. As a possible candidate for salvage work the site was graded so low as to be near the bottom of the last page of the glossary. The information was cryptically brief, dismissing lives and events in three short sentences. Practice made it possible for him to garner more from those few lines than an inexperienced person would have thought possible.
‘Not a nice one, Major. Cordoned area, suspected biological attack. A road gang, pioneers, went down without warning, to a man. Couple of field ambulances went in to mop up and they got clobbered to by whatever it was. Decontamination team followed, and when they went off the air the area was quaran-tined until it could be investigated.’
Their NCO was right, it wasn’t a nice one, not nice at all. So many ghastly new strains of bacteria and virus were being employed by the Russians to keep NATO on the hop that it was becoming possible to believe anything. Only a few months before, stories about a super bug capable of killing near instantly, even of finding a way to attack and destroy men as experienced and protected and prepared as medical and decontamination crews would have been utterly unthinkable, now it wasn’t. And the isolated use of a new strain wasn’t improbable either. The Russians’ near indiscriminate use of chemical and biological weapons, even those whose potential lethality and risk was largely unknown, had brought a whole new meaning to the term ‘field trials.’
It was a combination of the few vehicles involved, and the dangers attached to their recovery that prompted the site being classified so low in the list of priorities, but Revell saw the date of the incident when he glanced at the entry, and that changed a mind he’d thought already made up.
‘This was four months back. If it is a bug, and there’s no proof it is, then there’s a fair chance it’ll be neutralized by this time, otherwise the area would have expanded. The automatic sensors would have spotted it. A lot of the newer stuff has a short life. We’ll have to take the chance. We need the equipment those trucks and ambulances will have on board.’ Leaning forward he pressed the engine starter button, and motioned Burke to drive, propping the map beside him. ‘That’s where we’re going first.’
‘Oh that’s just fucking great, I get the chance to practice dying before having a go at the real thing.’ Though he spoke aloud, Burke took the precaution of switching off his throat microphone first, and the words were lost among the loud mechanical noises from the APCs engine, transmission and tracks as it accelerated.
Enough of the rest of the squad had overheard or been listening to the discussion for word to spread quickly. Without word having to be passed they began to put on the drab coloured NBC suits and overshoes, pulling the draw strings tight at cuff and ankle. For the moment they left off the more restricting respirators, gloves and hoods, those of them who had them, but they kept them near, very near.
Resuming his place in the command cupola, next to their turret gunner, Revell kept watch as they entered close country. The road was hemmed in by dense forest on either side. Branches that overhung the road made a gloomy tunnel, at times making it so dark that he was tempted to turn on their white searchlight.
It needed little to prompt the imagination to run riot, conjure horrors, unseen dangers among the forbidding ranks of close set oaks and elms. At first Revell had been prepared to keep an open mind, heavily tempered by scepticism, on the question of what had killed the pioneers and their would-be rescuers. It could be that the information was no more than fanciful embroidery on an already embellished report that was perhaps in itself only cobbled together snippets from alarmist sources, but as they drove on he had to strive to keep the dictates of his common sense predominating over flights of fancy.
Damn it, it could be accurate. If the Russians had a super bug that could act so fast with one hundred percent fatal results, then they would not have confined its use to a single instance, and that against an unimportant road maintenance unit. But weird things happened in this war, and went on happening. And so did mistakes and gross errors of judgment, like the one that had led to the saturation use of chemical and biological munitions that had created the vast contaminated area the civilians were heading for.
The Russian commander who had used those means to rid himself of the problem refugees had first received a promotion and citation from Moscow for a job well done, and then when it had hit the headlines worldwide he’d become an un-person and had disappeared, doubtless to a strict regime labour camp, or medical experimental establishment.
Perhaps the elimination of the pioneers had been such a mistake, the premature use of a weapon being saved for greater things, or perhaps it had been a combat evaluation test that had been unsatisfactory and the Russian scientists had decided against its further employment. Whatever, they’d be there
soon, and then they’d find out soon enough.
A red and white striped barrier pole was smashed and flung aside by the raked frontal armour of the Marder as it charged through the unmanned checkpoint. A faded warning notice was splintered beneath the tracks along with a rusted concertina of barbed wire.
They covered another kilometre before they came upon a second and far more substantial roadblock. A huge Faun six-wheeled truck was stopped broadside on across the entire width of the road.
‘Stop here.’
Already having slackened speed considerably in anticipation of the difficulty of negotiating the narrow gap between the tailboard of the truck and the big trees growing right to the road’s edge, Burke had only to touch the brakes lightly to bring the Marder to rest a few yards short of the lane-straddling vehicle.
None of the APCs several automatic air sampling devices had detected anything approaching dangerous levels of pollution outside. Revell would have been surprised if they had. Most chemical agents could persist in their harmful state only a matter of hours after exposure to the atmosphere and the sun’s ultra violet rays at this time of year. Had there been snow on the ground it might have been very different. Nerve agents like Soman, or VX could have been expected to remain lethal for weeks, in freak conditions even longer. But he could take no chances and had the others put on all their protective clothing before having the air conditioning turned to maximum.
He went out through the smallest top hatch, feeling the firm draft of the overpressure gusting past him as he did. Closing it after him he heard it being firmly locked from the inside.
Testing the short range radio link as he went, Revell walked to the truck. Passing its open back he saw that it was filled with drums of decontamination fluid, pumps and sprays, as well as bundles of body bags, a box of identification tags and a heap of unmarked wooden crosses.