Death March

by James Rouch

  Injured soldiers and civilians with horrific burns and severe radiation sickness had turned up for a week afterwards. It had been mostly civilians. The British attack had been stopped even before it had formed, when the troops were passing through a town on the way to their start line.

  At night, though her post had been almost nine kilometres away, the whole area about the site of the airbursts had glowed. As the firestorm had died so that eerie dull orange haze had shown in the night sky. She had woken up one morning to find that in the night, and that a full ten days after the strike, a dying woman had made her way to her barracks. She had opened her eyes to look into the melted face of a corpse propped against the side of her bed. Down on its knees and only a fraction from her, the corpses hand, burnt to a talon and frozen in death, reached out for her.

  Within an hour Carson announced himself content with what ever it was he had done and they reloaded the bomb, without enthusiasm.

  * * *

  The sweep out in to the country should have taken them well clear of enemy activity. Revell knew that the Russian advance had centred on the two main routes from the east in to the city of Nurnberg, with little activity to either side of that main corridor. That was particularly so in the south where roads were mostly on a north-south axis, of little use to them except for communications. The Zone here was scrappy, a ragged bordered strip of land that the Russians held more by fortifying easily defended areas rather than by forming a regular front line. Their only aggressive until recently, when they had launched their attack on the city, had been patrolling, sometimes in company strength. It had enabled them to dominate broad swathes of territory.

  The Czech and Polish forces that had been responsible for this front in the first days of the war had quickly been reduced to less than fifty percent strength by mutinies. Only the rapid injection of reserve Russian units had stabilised the situation.

  That miss-employment of valuable reserves had played havoc with Warpac plans. The long term consequences had been that the Zone in this sector was partially within original Warsaw Pact territory, the only place where it was, and it was the narrowest point in the whole of the Zone. It was to create room for manoeuvre before the spring offensive that the Communists had started this current push, intending to increase the Zone far beyond its present width.

  As they drove east Revell was surprised to encounter several groups of refugees heading in the same direction. That just had to be wrong, even though they had witnessed what looked like Russians attempts to herd them back, away from the NATO front line. Usually the civilians made every effort to move west, in to NATO territory. Twice they had to cut across country to avoid slow moving east bound truck convoys loaded down with dejected looking non-combatants.

  The vehicles occupants were for the most part well dressed, their clothes clean. Only a few had bandages on wounds and those were neatly done, evidence that they had come from the city and been attended to before the medical resources had been stretched too far. They also narrowly avoided another Russian convoy; a straggling line of impressed civilian vehicles, mainly open trucks, piled high with colourful broken and water stained boxes. They almost ran in to it at a hill top cross-roads, just managing to drive off road and hide in a rough paved area holding various heaps of road mending materials.

  As the convoy climbed closer Revell could see through his binoculars that most of the heaped cargo appearing to be salvaged food stuffs, obviously looted from supermarkets and cash and carry warehouses, and none too carefully. Virtually all of the visible cans and packets were buckled or torn. The contents oozed from many and mixed with masses of dried pasta and the defrosting contents of ready- meal and bulk freezer cartons There were six vehicles in all and on the long steep hill they had become widely spaced, some of them struggling on the gradient, clearly overloaded.

  Revell took Andrea with him when he left the Iron Cow and stole up to the road to look through a gap in a high mesh fence. The bottom half was smothered in vine-like weeds and closely flanked by tall thistles. He chose Andrea not because he particularly wanted her company but he knew that if she stayed then even Sergeant Hyde would have trouble preventing the men from having a go at her over the shooting of the Russian on the bike. In truth Revell had to admit to himself he had found that distasteful. All of them had killed, most could recall instances where they had shot down unarmed men, even in the back, but the incident in the gated estate had been different. There had been something poignant about the solitary Russian they had encountered. He had posed no threat, was befuddled by drink and the nature and volume of what he had been looting strongly suggested he was taking the booty back to share. For those reasons and others the men found her murderous reflexes unpleasant, certainly in this instance.

  Crouching low and parting the bindweed they monitored the traffic. Each vehicle betrayed its civilian origins, though a handful had been roughly sprayed with camouflage colours. In no case did it conceal the names of transport companies and manufacturers that adorned them. In the cab of every truck sat a stone-faced Russian guard, a rifle between his knees. The only animation they displayed was when a vehicle began to fall behind on the hill as it reached the steepest gradient opposite the resurfacing material depot. Then they could be seen waving their arms shouting and threatening, successfully intimidating their press-ganged civilian drivers, urging them on.

  “Where the heck are they going with that lot?” Revell watched the third vehicle approach, a small dump truck with a quarrying company logo on the cab door. He could make out the assortment of foodstuffs the truck carried. There had clearly been no selection involved. Every conceivable type of food had been thrown aboard. Smashed ketchup bottles leaked their contents over tinned fish, cellophane wrapped bread rolls and even a carton of drain cleaner. The Russians who had supervised the loading had been more interested in the quantities rather than the actual content. Language problems had very likely not helped the choosing of what was heaved aboard. They must have emptied the shelves of a cash and carry.

  “Perhaps the food is to feed the refugees they are rounding up.” Andrea watched a woman driver respond with a scream and shield her head with her arms to avoid a second hard slap from her escort. Her hands removed from the steering wheel, their truck swerved towards the roadside and the Russian had to cease his assault as the Scania threatened to fall over sideways on the soft verge.

  “They don’t ship in food for those, you know that. The Commies wouldn’t lift a finger to help refugees.” Approaching them was another yet another dump truck, obviously hi-jacked from a quarry or motorway building project. It was piled higher than any of the others. Revell heard the engine spluttering and watched the vehicle constantly stall and make an erratic jerking progress. Eventually it had to pull off the road close by them, its wheels flattening broad tracks in the rank growth.

  The motor cut out with a long over-run and after the sound of the fierce application of the parking brake, applied only just in time to prevent the over-laden wagon from rolling back, all that could be heard was the screaming of the Russian guard.

  “He is accusing the driver of sabotage, he is threatening her.” Andrea levelled her M16 at the tall cab. “I can just see him…”

  Before she could finish her sentence a single shot rang out and the drivers door swung open. The guard jumped from the passenger side, stalked round the front of the truck and dragged out his bruised and bleeding victim. But the woman still had fight left in her and she clung to the door handle. The Russian cracked her across the head with a heavy automatic pistol and when she continued to cling to the truck brought it up again but this time levelled it at her face. Surrendering her grip, the civilian fell out, hitting her head hard on the ground.

  “No, I want him.” Preventing Andrea from firing, as the Russian thug brought up the pistol again Revell jumped forward and hurled a half brick he had picked up, straight into the face of the soldier.

  At the last instant the Russian must have seen it coming
and tried to shy away from the projectile but it caught him on the side of the head, drawing a spurt of blood as it tore his ear. Before he could recover from the shock Revell had jumped through the hole in the wire, grabbed the guard’s jacket and deliberately thrown himself down on top of the short but heavily built soldier, Twisting as he fell, Revell let the stunned and surprised man take the force of the impact and unleashed a pile driver hard blow straight between his eyes.

  Revell had deliberately chosen the unorthodox attack to take the Russian down into the tall weeds as the second to last truck came grinding past. Its driver and guard took a casual look out at the dump truck but after a glance ignored it. Breakdowns must have been that common. Certainly they had seen nothing of the action when Revell delivered two more crashing blows before the guard was fully subdued and gave up the fight, almost unconscious. Andrea too saw the other crew lean forward to take a cursory glance at the stationary vehicle but then sit back, unseeing, uninterested as they drove past.

  Waiting until the other vehicle had gone, Revell grabbed the lapels of the Russians coat and dragged him through the long roadside growth and back through the hole in the fence to behind a pile of tar stained oil drums. There he wrenched the mans arms behind his back and bound him with a thick length of sticky rope.

  “The woman is dead.” Andrea returned from checking on the driver. “She has an enormous wound in her side, just under the arm. I cannot imagine how she lived long enough to resist being pulled from the truck.”

  The man was fast resuming consciousness. Blood ran from a broken nose and his eyes were already puffed and showing heavy bruising. The Russians first reaction was to struggle, to wrench himself around and try reach for his holster but the major had already taken his pistol and now waved it in his face.

  “Andrea, ask him where they are going.” Keeping the Russian covered, Revell enjoyed the man surprise as Andrea conducted the interrogation in her barely adequate Russian.

  His initial reaction was to sneer, and he was about to spit but a sharp crack on the side of his head across the wound he already had, with the barrel of the pistol, spelt out to him the potential danger of his position. It took several questions and another threatening move by the officer but eventually and highly begrudgingly he faltered out responses to repeated queries.

  “This is the second journey he has made.” Andrea passed on the information as she got it. “The delivery of foodstuffs is to a refugee site that is a few kilometres south of Bayreuth.”

  “What did he see the first time. He knows this is not normal behaviour for the Commies.”

  Andrea pressed the point but Revell could see the prisoner was sweating, obviously more afraid of divulging something than of the consequences of not telling them what he knew.

  As Andrea turned to pass on the latest refusal to talk, the Russian launched himself to his feet and bolted, pushing them hard together so that they fell in a tangle of arms and legs.

  At the fence he was snagged for a moment by the sharp edges of the broken wire and then as he ripped himself clear and fell in the process Revell fired a hasty shot.

  The bullet plucked at the Russians collar and grazed his neck as he tried to recover from his fall. Then an expanding ball of white and pink tissue enveloped the lower half of his face and he went down making ugly gurgling noises.

  They reached the Russian to see that what was left of his head was lolling from side to side. His eyes bulged, blood poured freely from mouth and nostrils He quivered, went into a convulsion and died.

  Examining the pistol, Major Revell exchanged looks with Andrea. Her eyes were shining.

  She plunged her hands into the corpses pockets and extracted two magazines for the pistol, then held out her hand for the automatic. “Explosive bullets. I can use those.”

  Revell smacked the gun in to her outstretched palm and then put his hand on her shoulder to push her down in to cover as the last truck lumbered past, almost coming to a stop as its driver sought a lower gear for the last stretch of the incline. The broken exhaust pipe it trailed made a horrendous racket that must have drowned the sound of the shot. Certainly the crew didn’t even bother to look at the parked vehicle.

  “You’re welcome to it. Just don’t have it on you if the Russians take you prisoner.”

  “While I have this I am certain that is unlikely to happen.” Tucking the pistol in to the waistband of her jeans, Andrea went back to the Iron Cow, feeling the reassuring bulk of her new weapon.

  As soon as he was back aboard their transport, Revell put on his headset and spelt out what they had learnt.” The Russians are running supplies of food to some refugee camp that must be across our route. From the position I was given it seems to be far closer to the front than is usual. The most likely source of the stuff is Nurnberg. Everywhere else their troops have already looted.” Revell looked across to Andrea. She had taken the bullets from the magazines and was carefully wiping each with a lightly oiled scrap of rag before slotting it back, savouring the smell of gun oil on her hands.

  “I don’t see how we can go around it.” Sergeant Hyde listened to the officer and made his own calculations and estimates of time, direction and distance. “If it’s covering the area the Russian alleged, and reasonable assuming that their units as usual will be thick on the ground around it, then doing a detour would drive us far into the Warsaw Pacts territory before we could swing back in to the Zone. We’ll be adding twenty kilometres or more to the journey and a whole lot of risk.”

  They had sat for an hour among the heaps of gravel, spent tarmac and yellowing piles of salt waiting for nightfall. At irregular intervals other enemy vehicles had passed along the road, always coming up the hill and occasionally including armoured vehicles. With only one exception no one took any interest in the parked truck. That was a lone military policeman on a powerful motorcycle. He took a brief look at the abandoned tipper truck not dismounted for a closer examination, only writing down the vehicles registration number on a note pad and then had gone on his way.

  Musing over the complications that seemed to be mounting, Revell knew that the first one was to get across the road. The night when it fell was jet black and held the danger of motoring out of the compound and straight into the sights of a prowling Soviet armoured column. It was Ripper who came up with an idea, as so often it was with anything that involved motive power.

  With the handbrake released and the gradient in their favour it took only three of them, Dooley, Burke and the major, shoving hard on the front of the truck to set it moving backwards, across the narrow strip of vegetation and then on the road. Within its own length it had been swallowed by the darkness. They heard a brake shoe scraping for a while and then silence. They were turning away, thinking it must have run off the road and quietly buried its wheels in soft soil when they heard the first collision. A shower of sparks showed it had struck another vehicle at the foot of the climb, just where approaching trucks would be doing their best speed as the took a run at the incline. Seconds later there was a second crash, much louder, and a spurt of flame revealed a six-wheeled truck towing a howitzer slowly falling over on its side. After that and out of sight came the sound of brakes being applied, the hiss of air reservoirs emptying and the echo of another heavy collision.

  Dooley did a little dance of celebration in the road “I think it’s all clear to cross the road now Major.”

  * * *

  Slewing sideways but raising the minimum of dust from the road material depot, the Iron Cow swept over the tall weeds, across the momentarily empty road and into the plantation of young spruce trees on the far side. The slope became steeper and Burke had only to keep the engines at a power level sufficient to keep the skirts partially inflated for them to maintain momentum. At the bottom they splattered across a muddy stream and then collided with a close spaced plantation of mature firs that resisted the hovercrafts weight and power. Burke turned the machine and they began to run along the edge of the tree line.

 
“Is the bomb OK?” Simmons watched Andy checking the straps that restrained both the thermite pack and the bomb, keeping them lashed against the edge of the seats.

  “Our Russian friend here,” he indicated their prisoner, “is a bit ham fisted and it is now a tad more fragile than it was, but its what a couple of bullets did to it rather than anything else I’m worried about.”

  “Will it make the journey back?” Major Revell had watched Carson as he regularly made checks on the bomb, taking readings from a small liquid crystal display beneath a buckled inspection cover and regularly checking the temperature of the casing with the back of his hand. He kept the Geiger counter on the floor between his feet and it didn’t escape any ones notice that he kept it turned on. Every few minutes it gave a weary ‘tick’.

  “Earlier I could have given you a definite answer.” Carson straightened up after his second inspection in ten minutes. “Now though I am beginning to think that there may have to be a change of plan. If we can get back within the next ten hours though, then no problem.”

  “And if we are likely to take a bit longer than that?”

  “Well I hate wasting a good bomb.” Carson began to deal out a hand of cards on top of the thermite pack, to have a game of poker with Dooley and Ripper and Samson. “ Major, can you contact NATO HQ and see if there is a target of opportunity any where in the vicinity.”

  “I take it they would never give you that sort of decision making opportunity.” Revell handed Carson a slim cross head screwdriver that had rolled beneath his feet.

  “Thanks. No, they don’t give us that sort of discretion.” Carson refastened the thin metal of the hatch, ramming the screw in at an angle to get it to bite and hold.

  “So what is the position with the bomb? Are we in real danger that it might become unstable?” Watching Lieutenant Andy dealing with practised ease, Andrea sensed there was much the specialists were not telling.