by James Rouch
‘You saying we ain’t popular?’ Dooley stuck his chin out in an aggressive fashion.
‘That’s just the point, you’re too damned popular. It’s been just us British, and the West Germans, in this sector for the whole of the war so far. We’re not exactly overburdened with luxuries to give away or barter, but the refugees think you lot are loaded with goodies. They’ll tear you apart looking for them.’
‘I’m still going, Sergeant. Pick our third man.’ Hyde knew before he looked round which of his own men would have his eyes locked on him. Sure enough it was Libby. Their turret gunner had ducked down from his perch and was sidling towards the old clothes. So why not? He had more experience than Collins, was more useful than Burke and more predictable than Clarence. And if he had a special reason for spending as much time as he could in the camps, what the hell, he didn’t let it interfere with his work.
With a slight inclination of his head Libby returned the nod that Hyde made to him.
‘Shit, why him, Major. What’s wrong with one of us, ain’t we good enough all of a sudden? You want I should make a list of our good points?’ Cohen’s protest was noisy.
‘Sure, if you’ve got ten seconds to spare. When you’ve finished you can do something useful. Open every hatch and port. I want this machine cooled right down. I don’t want it standing out like a come-and-get-us neon sign on the IR scanner of any Ruskie sky-spy.’
After a cursory inspection Revell put on the much repaired and ill-matched suit jacket and baggy worsted trousers he was handed. From their state he’d half expected them to be crawling, but they weren’t. After hitching the various components of the outfit closer about him, and fastening it together as best he could with a selection of rusty safety pins Hyde provided, he was satisfied that it adequately concealed the .45 automatic and grenades he carried.
This was the first time Revell had been into one of the big camps. In the Balkans the refugees had been scattered in thousands of tiny settlements, kept that way by the Yugoslav partisans despite the Communists’ efforts to the contrary, not herded together into carefully denned and controlled localities as they were here in the north.
The only advantage Revell could see in the ‘bigger is better’ policy, apart from the easing of distribution problems for the paltry amount of aid the relief agencies brought in, was the creation of large tracts of land that could be declared free-fire zones which particularly suited the Russian style of warfare. The only benefit to the NATO forces was that it released every gunner and bomb-aimer from the constraints imposed by the fear of unleashing barrages of bombs on to innocent heads.
Innocent heads. How easy the trite tailored phrases of the propaganda machine popped into his thoughts. There weren’t many innocents left among the refugees now, not after two years. Those who hadn’t been prepared to grab and cheat and lie and steal were gone: into mass graves, on to communal pyres. Those who were left were hardened by twenty-four months of deprivation, sharpened by the same length of time spent living by their wits. They could be as dangerous as the enemy to the unwary, the inexperienced, the soft-hearted. Revell had seen one of his own men die, trampled to death under the crush of women and children to whom he’d been trying to distribute spare rations.
That was what happened if you let the Zone get to you. He wasn’t about to let it happen to him, couldn’t afford to if he wanted to stay alive.
NATO Intelligence Report. 887G2]75756 GRADE ‘A’ For distribution to all Planning Staffs
The Soviet 97th Technical Support Battalion has now been positively identified in the northern sector of the Zone. Limited satellite surveillance time for this theatre has prevented precise location, but evidence indicates that the 97th have established a workshop among, or close to the refugee settlements near Gifhorn on the east bank of the river Aller, opposite the Hanover salient.
It is likely that the 97th is now engaged in a major re-fit and updating programme on the armoured vehicles of the Soviet 2nd Guards Army.
Under Major I. V. Pakilev the 97th has come to be regarded by the Russian High Command as their finest Field Workshop Unit. It has been featured on several occasions in Pravda, and in both national and international propaganda.
The destruction of this unit would be a severe blow to the 2nd Guards Army’s preparations for its next offensive against the salient, anticipated in late August, early September. Its loss would also constitute a grave embarrassment to the Soviet High Command.
SIX
‘What in fuck’s name made him leave you in charge?’ As his booming voice filled the interior, Dooley dug Cohen in the ribs with a finger made only marginally less filthy than his others by its having been up his nose a minute before.
Cohen completely ignored the sarcasm and physical emphasis and went on with his work at the console. He’d accepted the responsibility thrown to him by the major’s parting remark philosophically. So all of a sudden he had a squad of his own, big deal. He hadn’t the stripes or the extra money to go with it, so what was thereto get excited about -nothing. All he could get out of it was trouble. Now he didn’t have just himself to worry about, now he had this assortment of hard cases, head cases and stretcher cases. That was a favour? Favours like that he could do without. He had enough work to do trying to lace together what was left of the electronics, without playing nursemaid to punks and deviants.
Failing to get their temporary section leader to rise to his clumsy bait, Dooley sought other fish. He cast round and found Burke. ‘How’d your sergeant manage to barbecue himself like that, was he too slow backing off the heat and friction caused by you rushing about?’
‘Could be.’ Burke stretched slowly, and when he’d finished went back to dreamily gazing at the banded green landscape on the driver’s screen.
Though he wasn’t achieving what he’d hoped, Dooley persisted. ‘Don’t you do anything that might strain you, wouldn’t like you to wear yourself out before your time.’
‘No danger, mate, no danger.’ Between yawns Burke looked at his watch, shook it, held it to his ear and then, finding his arm made an adequate pillow on the bulkhead, went to sleep.
‘Give up, man. You ain’t gonna get any of this crowd going, you’ll have to work it off some other way.’
‘Piss off.’ Ignoring the black, Dooley tried willing the pain in his back to go away, it wouldn’t. Shit, it was always the same. The doc had said it was just tension, fuck him, what did he know. There was only one way to ease it, beside going into action. Had they been anywhere but in the centre of a minefield he’d have gone out and smashed to pieces the first inanimate object he encountered. That had worked before. He couldn’t do that here, instead he roughly barged to the front of the compartment, and stepped out on to the ramp.
Collins heard the massive roaring bellow, and shivered. -Long ago he’d come to the conclusion that the world must be mad to permit such an insanely dangerous conflict; now he felt he was fighting it with men who were dangerously insane.
The war had taken them all, and turned them inside out. It was as though every last human trait in them, whether for good or evil, was being forced to the fore as their only remaining defence against the totally dehumanising effect of the Zone.
As Dooley’s shout was first caught then mercifully smothered by the dense trees, it occurred to Collins, to wonder how long it would be before he became a shell, a husk, labelled only by extremes of mood as human. When Libby had been chosen to go with Hyde and Revell he’d thought himself lucky to be left behind. Now, as he watched Clarence’s legs continually circling as he laboriously hand cranked the turret round in a perpetual search of a target, he reconsidered.
The sun had been up an hour before the trio finally extricated themselves from the wooded graveyard of men and machines that hid their transport. Tracks that Hyde remembered had ceased to exist, reclaimed by the unchecked growth that also sought to conceal the wrecked and gutted remains of forty or more Russian armoured personnel carriers. Here and there, beside a t
rackless rusted hulk, the dull white bone dome of a fox-gnawed skull showed among the rank grass and weeds.
Close to the perimeter of the woods there was more recent evidence of violence. The rotting remains of bodies still bearing traces of civilian clothes lay inside the flimsy barricade that girded the lethal area.
There were already a few refugees about, some working in small groups gleaning missed corners of fields for a few ears of half-ripened barley: others, in twos and threes, staggered along under the weight of ill-trimmed logs. It was like viewing the periphery of a bizarre human ants’ nest, the object of whose workers was obscure and the result of whose labours were pathetic.
No one looked at the three men who trudged along the dusty well-worn path towards the camp, even though they passed quite close to some of the later risers.
The dress of most was as incongruous and ill matched as that of Revell and his companions. Among a group of middle-aged men squabbling and coming near to blows over a wormy sugar-beet, one wore a tattered raincoat over shorts and roll- neck jumper, another sported a paint-daubed pair of overalls and golf cap and a third, shoeless and carrying a rolled-up plastic cycle cape, had on a filthy T-shirt and the bottom portion of what might once have been an expensive tweed suit, a lady’s judging by the way the trousers fastened.
‘Almost there. It’s just over the next rise.’ For the last five minutes Hyde had been scanning the sky ahead, and now he saw it, the thin grey threads of smoke from countless numbers of meagre cooking fires. They rose up to blend together to form a dirty veil in the cloudless sky.
Now there were more people about, and a few of the shuffling figures threw curious glances at the three men who walked against the predominant flow of traffic away from the camp. Not many, though, after a glance at the sergeant’s gross disfigurement looked longer, or a second time.
They paused beside a hedge as a Russian Hind helicopter gunship lazily beat its way across the area at two thousand feet, and on out of sight into the thickening smoke haze over the camp.
‘Do the Reds take an interest in the camps?’ Revell felt less conspicuous when they started walking again, they’d been the only ones to stop.
‘Sometimes. A lot of Commie deserters find their way there, and usually end up banding together in a gang. After a while they get cocky and try raiding Ruskie supply dumps, then they get jumped on. The Reds move in, there’s a couple of days excitement, a few refugees get clobbered in the crossfire and then everything settles down again. Usually though they’re just content to keep an eye on the agency people, and maybe work a few foot patrols, plus of course they jam every frequency to stop news getting in or out. Normally in the five-mile so-called civilian area around a camp they keep out of sight, when it suits them.’
‘There’s the camp, Sarge.’ It looked bigger than Libby remembered if, had sprawled out across a few more hills. A straggling line of tiled rooftops and the jutting spire of a church marked at its centre the little village around which it had so explosively grown. Through a tear in the old coat he wore Libby put his hand into a pocket of his jacket. His fingers sought the familiar shape and feel of the small square of plastic covered photograph and his hand closed about it. Perhaps this time...
‘Where the hell do we start?’ They stood on ground a little higher than the camp, but even from that vantage point Revell could make out no pattern or system in the layout of the close-spaced huts and ramshackle shelters. Here and there a short stretch of path might be seen, but within a couple of yards it was lost to sight as it dog-legged around another of the randomly situated hovels.
Hyde didn’t answer, just started down towards the outskirts of the settlement. He knew precisely where to begin. No rearrangement or expansion of the camp could make him forget. If it had been fifty years since he’d last seen the ground, he’d still have been able to recall every inch of it.
The first structures they came to were skeletal affairs hastily erected by the most recent arrivals using only the scantiest supply of flimsy materials. As they threaded their way further in on an erratic course towards the brick-built core of the camp, the shelters became more elaborate. Ingenious use had been made of the most unlikely materials. Oil drums, tarpaulin, wooden pallets, dented jerry cans, anything that could be pressed into use. A clever few had even used fragments of aircraft fuselage looted from crash sites. The luckiest were those who had set up home in the ready-made residences supplied by the gutted shells of knocked-out armoured vehicles that the camp had grown to engulf.
A corner of Hyde’s mind saw the ground not as it was now, covered with a litter of human debris, but as it had been during those first wild battles when the Warsaw Pact forces had without warning hurled themselves through the Iron Curtain. Then this had been uncluttered rolling farmland, and the scene of ferocious armoured battles. For ten days the light of burning vehicles had been the only illumination in the smoke and dust that rose so thickly it had turned the days of midsummer into constant night.
Hyde recalled the morning when the battalion of Soviet infantry aboard armoured carriers had been forced into the cover of the woods by repeated air attacks, and totally destroyed by the combined destructive forces of several thousand hastily scattered mines and the firepower of five British anti-tank platoons. And then had come the order, ‘Board carriers’, and they’d charged out into the open to exploit the local victory.
Within a yard or two, Hyde knew he was walking very nearly the same course as his carrier had taken that day. For twenty glorious minutes they had rampaged through the flanks of Russian columns, wiping out one motor-rifle battalion and putting the survivors of two more to flight. Warning had just come through of approaching tanks when they’d collided with an overturned field kitchen trailer and shed a track. Even as the hatches had been thrown open for a bale-out, a sledgehammer blow had crushed in the side armour and a shaft of molten explosives and metal had blasted across the compartment. Hyde remembered the lieutenant’s head as it dissolved in the jet of plasma, and the searing terrible heat on his face.
For a moment Revell waited, not knowing why the sergeant had stopped, then he tried to nudge him forward and when that and the following dig in the ribs had failed, leant forward to whisper urgently into his ear. ‘What have we stopped for? Keep moving.’
There wasn’t much of it to be seen. A lean-to that had been erected at its rear left only a portion of its rust-streaked side visible between the crowd of sagging hovels that had sprouted up about it. No effort was needed on Hyde’s part to recall how it had looked when he’d last seen it, shortly before being picked up and whisked to safety by the crew of a Samaritan armoured ambulance from almost under the tracks of a Soviet T72. The spouts of flame had been boiling from every opening, and burning ammunition had fountained white streamers into the black smoke.
‘It’s nothing, nothing.’ He had seen enough, remembered too much. Hyde took his eyes from the sight and his mind from the memory. There were a few children running about, but not as many as Revell had expected. The camps in Yugoslavia had swarmed with them. Nor was there a single dog to be seen, usually so much a part of the refugee scene.
Attempts had been made by some of the inhabitants to inject if not a note, at least a reminder of civilisation. Plastic flowers, surely one of the few things these people could not put to a more useful secondary purpose, adorned a few of the huts. The one light touch did nothing to bide the utter squalor of the place, or mask its ugliness.
And there was one final aspect of the camp that could not be concealed, the stench from the crude overflowing lavatories spaced out across the area.
An old crone trotted from a side alley and collided heavily with Revell, dropping the large bundle of rags that she carried. Out of sheer habit the major bent down to pick them up for her, and for his trouble was almost slashed across the face by a claw-like wrinkled hand armed with five wicked talons.
The nails raked across his clothes, but the hag didn’t attempt a second blow; instead she
dived down on the bundle, gathered it up and scurried around the trio to depart down another narrow passageway. She tried to spit at Revell as she went, but succeeded only in dribbling down her stained print dress.
‘She thought you were going to nick her stuff. We’re lucky she didn’t start screaming her head off.’ Anticipating the crone’s reaction, Libby had stepped aside. If the Yank wanted to make bloody problems for himself then let him find his own way out of them. You couldn’t get through to those tough old women. They were hard as nails and crafty as foxes. Too old to sell themselves, too active to get the special Oxfam rations for the infirm, their lives were a continual race against death. Their every waking moment was spent in search of the means by which they might ensure enough to eat for just another day.
‘It’s round here, I think.’ In the middle of a tortuously winding alley Hyde paused and looked about. It would have been a more profitable exercise to map the shifting dunes of a desert than try to remember the layout of one of these metamorphic settlements. A mildewed structure of corrugated asbestos sheets looked familiar. ‘We’ll try down here.’
There was room to admit them only in single file, and frequent twists and turns made their previous route as good as an autobahn by comparison. Hyde raised his hand and they stopped before a rickety hut that was only kept upright by its neighbours. He clenched his fist to rap at the thin wood frame to which the canvas door was fastened, but didn’t. Instead he took his knife and, motioning the others to silence, proceeded to cut an opening in the thick fabric. As he cut the third side of a square a man-sized opening appeared and the material curled down. Stepping into the gloomy interior he signalled the others to follow.
The filthy face and grime-smeared hands, that were all that was visible of the curled form beneath the pile of rags and paper cement bags on the sagging camp bed, blurred into rapid action with an ugly snarl.