by James Rouch
‘What’d he do? What’d he do?’ Burke couldn’t believe it. He saw the kneeling figure crumple and watched as the body was shoved with boots and rifle butts into the turbulence close to the bank.
For an instant the corpse bobbed among the white water, then was swept into the main channel, and under.
‘He need not have done half so much.’ Boris felt the fears returning as he recognised the guilty troops. ‘They are KGB, at once judge, jury and executioners. I doubt whether they bothered to tell him, but that driver would to them have been guilty of sabotage…’ he paused a moment’… no, not even that. It is habit to put labels to what the KGB do, find for them even some glimmer of excuse for their barbarity. Perhaps it was only that he was responsible for delaying them, nothing more than that. Perhaps they are on an urgent mission, but as they are travelling away from the front that is unlikely. The probability is that they are on their way to a brothel, or to pick-up some black-market goods…’
‘And for that they shot the poor shit?’
‘They have killed men, and women and children, for far less reason; often for none. If they are prepared to torture prisoners, clear hospitals for their battle casualties by shooting cripples and mental defectives, what chance has some inconsequential East German driver of avoiding their brutality?’
Spurred on by the example they’d witnessed, the recovery section hurried to clear the bridge. Boris watched them risking their lives to complete the task as fast as they could, taking enormous chances above the flood that built to a two-foot wave against the anchored components of the roadway, at times lapping on to them. Steam and smoke billowed from the twin rear wheels of the tow truck as it took up the slack and strained to drag the field car clear.
The moment the obstruction had been hauled from its path the tracked APC drove on to the bridge, forcing members of the recovery section to jump for their lives, several of them landing on the slippery bank, and having to fight and claw their way up it to avoid being carried away by the debris-laden water lapping at their waists.
For what reason, on what whim, Libby couldn’t tell, but the carrier didn’t drive off the bridge at their end, instead parking itself on the sandbag and tree trunk constructed exit ramp and disgorging its crew once more.
Led by a young and grim-faced lieutenant, the KGB troops began to check the papers of everyone aboard the waiting vehicles, pushing aside the three bridge sentries who had been content until now to sit by the comfort of the small stove beside their guard tent. An unconvincing protest by the senior of the three, and then his offer of help, were brushed aside.
Over his headphones Libby heard the discussion between Revell and Hyde as to their best course of action, and then the sergeant’s swearing as their driver reported they were now boxed in by a tank transporter that had pulled up behind them.
The lieutenant, flanked by the whole of his section, had started towards the eight-wheeler. ‘They won’t bother with us if they see the general’s pennant, will they?’
‘The power of the KGB is without limit, and they enjoy it. Look at him.’ Boris indicated the lieutenant.
Burke could see the young officer’s face very clearly, could read in it arrogance and total lack of feeling, but there was something else. The grim look was still there, but something had been added to it. His mouth had drawn up in a tight smile of malicious satisfaction as he approached the captured APC.
‘That crud is looking for trouble.’
Libby heard Burke’s under-the-breath comment, and tightened his grip on the heavy machine guru ‘Then let’s give him some.’
EIGHT
The KGB officer barked a demand for papers, displaying immediate impatience when the APC remained closed-up.
‘Sounds as ugly as he looks. What is it about the Commie party that attracts people like that’ Unable in the restricted space to level the M60 from the crew weapon ports, Dooley discarded the machine gun in favour of a highly polished AK74 he took from a rack of five behind the driver’s seat.
‘He’s not going away.’ As he watched, dine saw the lieutenant summon the rest of his squad. ‘What’s likely to happen next?’
‘In a moment he will lose his temper.’ Boris listened as the shouts were delivered with greater fury. ‘When that happens he will order his men to open the vehicle and drag us out. What will most likely occur then, you have recently seen.’ The realisation struck him that he wasn’t afraid any more. Even the tirade from beyond the sloped wall of thin armour did not bother him. He had passed through the worst he could ever experience, and it was his turn to feel anger -and it was a monstrous towering thing compared with the petty frustration of the KGB man outside.
All these years it must have been growing within him, held back by the wall of fear every Soviet citizen learned to live with from his earliest days. Now the wall was crumbling and the lieutenant was in the path of what was being released.
Forced to the conclusion that his will was not going to triumph, and aware that the incident was making him look a fool in front of his own men, the lieutenant finally snapped, wrenching a grenade from his belt. He took a step towards the APC.
‘OK, hit them…’
Revell’s words were lost in the massed crash and clatter of every weapon aboard the carrier opening fire simultaneously. The lieutenant was hurled backwards by thirty or more impacts that tore chunks of flesh from his body and burst apart the bones of his skull, unimpeded at such short range by the thin steel of his helmet.
Using the turret’s heavy armament Libby sent a long burst raking along the side of the file of waiting vehicles ahead of them, and then concentrated his fire on the tracked vehicle blocking their route.
A figure briefly appeared behind a pintle-mounted machine gun on the carrier’s roof, then disappeared inside as the stream of tracer-towing rounds smashed into the mount and its shield and ignited the attached box of ready-use belts. Twice Libby swept his fire across the vehicle’s hull front, watching rounds bounce from the armour and rip apart every external fitting.
Another Russian appeared from behind the carrier, and was half-hidden by smoke as he sent a shoulder launched anti-tank rocket at the eight-wheeler. He ducked back, chased by a line of bullets, as the rocket’s warhead struck short, scattering bloody scraps of cloth and hunks of raw meat as it destroyed a body in the road.
Two of the trucks had began to burn, and as thick smoke from them and the first few oily black wisps from the KGB vehicle wreathed the road, Burke rammed the APC into gear and sent it surging through the hedge and into the field alongside.
Small-arms fire made a metallic hail on the hull, beat thumping tattoos on the self-sealing tyres. As they pulled clear, a second rocket soared across the ground they had previously occupied and exploded in the cab of the tank transporter.
Once they left the paved surface it was impossible for anyone aboard the APC to fire with any degree of accuracy.
Even Libby, with his machine gun firmly mounted, could not stay on a target for more than a second or two as the vehicle’s inadequate suspension failed to dampen the effects of the field’s undulations.
Burke’s evasive driving made no concession to the discomfort of those in the back, as he pushed the speed as high as he could. The APC jumped a wide drainage ditch, landing with a jarring crash, and then still without check to its mad career, crushed a path through a plantation of tree seedlings, the deep-treaded tyres churning broad tracks as they slewed back and forth.
Before a belt of woodland took them from sight of the road a last rocket-propelled anti-tank shell blurred past, missing by only inches, and going on to self-destruct in the unseen distance.
Holding tight to a metal bracket that had twice tried to scoop out his left eye, Boris clutched his rifle in his free hand. The wild ride suited his mood of elation. He could still see the KGB lieutenant’s face as he took the first fusillade in the stomach and chest, before the other bullets struck and there was no face left to see. It had felt good, ve
ry good. With luck there would be more chances, many many more.
‘Ah just love messing about in boats, but shit, paddling across a goddamned river in this old bucket, that just ain’t my idea of fun.’ Ripper stood on the bank surveying the rushing water, as Dooley took his turn with the shovel.
‘Who said we’re ever going to make it to the water?’ Throwing aside a huge sodden clump of soil, wrenched from the cloying ground around the deep-sunken front wheel, Dooley took a hard look at the excavations around the vehicle’s other tyres. ‘Bloody incredible, isn’t it? They have the whole of the fucking riverbank to chose from and Burke drives us straight into a shitty swamp.’ He grabbed a bundle of brushwood from the pile Clarence and Hyde had deposited beside him and stamped it under the wheel, splattering himself in the oozing black mud.
‘Heck, this ain’t no swamp. You want to see a swamp, I’ll take you home with me next time I go.’
‘What makes you think you’re ever going to see home?’ Burke dropped another big armful of twigs, then made a hurried retreat back to firmer ground as Dooley deliberately smacked the flat of his shovel hard on to the glutinous surface. It sprayed the driver from head to foot, and he had to spit out some of the foul-tasting mud.
‘You fucking did that on purpose. What you bloody mad at me for? I didn’t chose this ruddy place to cross.’
‘ No,’ Dooley loaded his spade with a generous portion of dripping, rotting vegetation, ‘no you didn’t chose the place, but if you’d bloody been awake you’d have thought to use this crate’s tyre pressure regulation system. All you had to do was flick a switch, let a few pounds out and we’d have sailed across. Now piss off before I shove you under one of the wheels.’
‘Like I was saying…’
‘I heard what you were saying.’ Using the edge of the shovel, Dooley rammed more of the brushwood beneath the tyre. ‘After today I don’t ever want to see another swamp. This one may be only fifty yards square but it’s plenty big enough to last me for life. I can’t think of one good use for a swamp, what you hicks spend all your time in them for, fuck knows.’
‘They ain’t all bad.’ Taking off his helmet, Ripper set it upside down in a patch of surface water, where it floated, dragging a chinstrap anchor cable. ‘Hell, some of the best times I’ve ever had have been in swamps…’
‘You’ve got to be kidding.’ Pausing after dumping more wood, Libby listened.
‘Honest I ain’t. One time me and my cousin Billy we went and sneaked up on this sort of hideaway Ellen Jane had built right out in the wilds; she was my aunt, sort of, she’d been married to my Unc’ Jeb before he got himself put away for a long stretch when he got caught with a load of ‘shine, only he weren’t really my uncle…’
‘Forget the family tree and all the monkeys in it, get on with the story.’ Dooley’s patience was wearing thin. He’d slipped for the third time, and now didn’t bother to get up again, sitting sunk to the waist in the stinking waterlogged ground.
‘I was about to. Anyway, Ellen Jane being not much more than sixteen, she’d gone back home to live with her Ma and Pa after Jeb went inside. You know that Pa of hers was a real bible freak, holiest man I ever saw, even the Reverend Smith used to say ‘oh God’ when he saw him coming. OK, I’m getting on with it…’ Ripper had seen Dooley reaching for the shovel.
‘Me and Billy we reckoned she’d started up a little still on her own, on account of her having got a taste for it from Jeb, only when we peered through those bushes… I got a hard on that damned near burst my zip. She’d finished the best part of a bottle of real Scotch and were poking the neck of the bottle up between her legs. Hell, she sure was enjoying herself, but Billy thought it were a bit dirty to keep taking the bottle out to have another swig.’
‘What happened,’ Dooley was now all attention, ‘did you get in on the action?’
‘Well after a while she spots us, and acts all flustered, then she says she’ll do things for us if we’ll keep quiet about what we seen. She sure knew what it were all about. She started sucking me while Billy tried to take her doggy-style. Only trouble was, he’d not had any practice and he got kinda careless and shoved into the wrong hole. Sure must have surprised her. Next thing I know she’s clamped down on my equipment and I’m thinking she’s bit it through. I tell you, I still got the marks.’
‘You’ll have some from me in a minute.’ Revell pushed Ripper aside, so that he staggered back, and sank his helmet ‘In case you’ve forgotten, we’re still a long way behind enemy lines, and we’ve the Zone to cross as well. I want us on the other side of this river before dark. That’s one hour. Are we ready to try again yet?’
Dooley looked at the wheels. Pieces of wood, leaves and dried grass kept floating to the surface to form miniature rafts that broke and reformed at every splash and ripple. ‘Shit, Major, I don’t even know if there is a solid bottom under this muck. Maybe we could go on dumping brushwood into it forever without doing a bit of good. One thing is for sure, the APC is still sinking. Another ten minutes and it’ll be up to the belly plates, and then no one will ever shift it.’
‘Then let’s try now.’
As Burke scrambled up the front of the hull and dropped down through a rooftop hatch into the driver’s seat, the rest of the squad positioned themselves around the other three sides of the vehicle.
The engines rumbled into throbbing life, and at the back Dooley and Hyde had to turn away from the choking clouds of unburnt, fuel-saturated exhaust gas.
Its engine revs increasing steadily, the APC nudged forward and the squad threw their efforts behind its attempt to break free.
Away to their left the cloying surface erupted with a roar into a towering geyser of mud, water and vegetation. A second explosion punched a bubbling white cascade from the river, close to the bank.
‘Mortars. Keep pushing.’ Revell put every ounce of strength he had into the attempt to shove their transport clear.
With its broad tyres deliberately deflated so that they flattened further to spread the vehicle’s ten-ton weight on the flimsy causeway, it began to inch forward, as two more high explosive bombs, falling almost vertically at the end of their soaring trajectory, bracketed them.
The soft ground that had caused all the trouble in the first place now worked in their favour, as the projectiles’ insensitive fuses failed to detonate the explosive filling until the rounds had buried themselves a foot or more, when their deadly fragmentation effect was smothered.
‘Keep it rolling.’
Now moving unaided, and seemingly likely to maintain its forward momentum, the squad grabbed any projection on the APC’s hull to haul themselves aboard, closing the last hatch as a barrage of shells plastered the ground they had left and beat to foam the water about them as Burke drove the APC into the Elbe.
Cutting in the water-jet propulsion the instant the movement of the hull told him they were afloat. Burke still couldn’t move quite fast enough to prevent the current from sweeping them downstream.
Through his sights Libby saw each bank in turn as they whirled round, before they came under a degree of control and began to head for the far side.
The mortaring ceased almost immediately as their speed of drift took them out of range, and Libby never even glimpsed the position from which they had come under fire.
‘Aren’t you going to give them a parting present?’ dine peered up into the turret.
‘No one to give it to. I’ll save these belts until I can see a target.’ Despite his answer, Libby almost had unleashed a burst in the direction from which it was almost likely the mortars had been fired, but had recognised the futility of the gesture.
It took seven attempts at five different sites before Burke succeeded in driving the APC from the water, and wouldn’t have managed it then if there had not been a small concrete slipway at the bottom of a garden attached to an imposing house.
Gouging deep furrows in the immaculate lawns, Burke drove them around the side of the great gothic str
ucture and on to the raked gravel drive. Past a long line of parked staff cars, they headed for a distant gate, while several lounging East German and Russian Airforce drivers watched with gaping mouths, some of them half-saluting as they recognised the bedraggled flag flapping heavily from its miniature mast.
A long Zil limousine, its black paint shining in the rays of the setting sun, had to take a detour through a rose border as the APC refused to give way, showering its gleaming paintwork with stones and dirt.
Taken totally by surprise the guards on the gate hesitated, uncertain whether to present arms or make a challenge, then decided something else had to come first as the eight-wheeler charged through, clipping one of the carved lion-topped pillars, and ripping away its ornamental wrought-iron gate.
‘First he drives us into the middle of a Russian camp, then he takes us for a tour of a Staff College or something. You got any other tricks saved up for us?’
Swerving the APC on to the main road, Burke half-turned and winked at Dooley.
‘That’d be telling.’
‘Just drive.’
‘Yes, Major, driving now, Major.’
‘We are leaving a trail of incidents behind us.’ Removing his boot, Boris wiped it with a piece of cloth that was instantly stained black.
‘That’s one way to put it.’ Hesitating before slipping a half-bar of chocolate back into his pocket, Clarence proffered it to the Russian, who accepted it with a nod of thanks.
‘If somewhere they are being plotted, if pins are being stuck in a map, then by now the Communists will know which way we are heading.’
‘More than likely I would say. I think we got off to a bad start by stealing a general’s personal battle-taxi, especially as it turned out he had his nest-egg hidden in it. Didn’t he, friend Dooley.’
‘How did you… I haven’t… what’re you on about?’
‘Thanks for the confirmation. I was wondering what was in that safe. It had to be code books or valuables.’