Hard Target

by James Rouch

  The farmhouse stood in isolation in a small fold just below the crest of a softly sloping hill. A single, substantial, stone building devoid of any frills, the area to its front was roughly paved, and beside and behind it stood, sagged or lay the weather- beaten remains of a collection of various sheds and outhouses. The whole was surrounded by a low stone wall.

  Kurt had sent his men to watch the back of the house, while he and Andrea with Libby, Hyde and Revell openly approached the front.

  Libby noticed the heaps of broken bottles below each window; the piles were substantial. The Russian visitors appeared to have found a fast and presumably amusing way of disposing of their empties. There was glass in every window of the house, and all the curtains were drawn. Even in bright sunshine it was a grim- looking place. The unwanted recollection of Old Mother Knoke’s words, ‘perhaps she’s at The Farm’ made anger rise inside him. This was one of the ugliest things about the Zone. Many of the women in there were carrying on the trade they’d practised before they’d come to the camp, before the war even: but a number would have been forced into it. He watched while Kurt sorted an intact bottle from the nearest heap and then hammered on the door.

  It was a good act, drawn most probably from considerable personal experience. Hyde watched as Kurt bawled and sang and slurred pathetic pleas to the unseen inmates. When he backed off a pace to see if the German’s performance had drawn anyone to an upstairs window, Hyde saw for the first time the rear end of a drab painted Mercedes saloon, just discernible in the gloom of a rotting tractor shed. As he drew Revell’s attention to it, the boot and knuckle-scarred door swung open.

  Before the dressing gown clad woman had time to launch fully into her tirade, Kurt had hurled himself past her and was dashing for the stairs.

  Andrea followed, unwrapping her submachine gun as she ran. As Revell and Hyde took one side of the ground floor Libby went to the other. The first two rooms he hurled himself into were empty. He crashed open the third to discover a pair of Russian officers hastily pulling on their pants. One of them already held a pistol, Libby gave him no chance to use it, his second and third shot tearing out the Russian’s throat. Blood splashed across the room as the 9mm bullets struck and the dying officer toppled back over a chair to crumple into an untidy heap.

  Neither Libby nor the surviving officer paid any attention to the ugly bubblings and rattlings coming from the expiring man. There was another sound in the room, an animal-like whimpering from the heavy breasted girl with thickly caked-on make-up who crouched under the dining table, trying at once both to make herself inconspicuous and frantically gather up and conceal her pendulous breasts.

  Insignia on the two crumpled jackets tossed carelessly over the arm of a small sofa indicated that both the visitors were captains. The remaining Russian slowly lowered to the ground the raised leg with which he had frozen, stork like, in the act of dressing on Libby’s precipitate entrance, and straightened up. He was well into middle age and the heavy flesh on his stocky body fell in multiple folds about his waist. A mass of dark hair covered his torso and upper legs, and overlong arms gave him an ape-like look that was accentuated by broad slab cheeks, a small nose and deep set eyes beneath thick eyebrows.

  The killing had drained Libby’s anger, most of it, then the girl whimpered again and he saw her mass of livid bruises and the white mess about her mouth. He retched, and levelled the Browning again.

  The Russian saw the look on his attacker’s face and clamped his hands in front of his genitals as though he could somehow protect them from what was coming. He saw the knuckle on the trigger whiten and his bowels emptied violently and noisily.

  ‘No… damn it... no.’ Revell’s shout blended with the roar of the weapon’s firing.

  All four bullets struck their target, the last two chasing a dead body as it was spun round and thrown back, fountaining urine and dark red vomit. A limp arm smacked into and cracked one of the panes as the punctured cadaver thumped down below a window, head lolling, sightless eyes contemplating a protruding rib.

  ‘What the hell do you think this is, a butcher’s shop?’ Revell crossed the room avoiding the stinking puddles and picked up one of the jackets. ‘You see this, you see this.’ He waved it under Libby’s nose. ‘These are, were, technical support troops, probably from the 97th. They could have told us everything we wanted. What bloody good are they now?’

  The sights and smells in the room did not bother Andrea. She stood in the doorway and looked at the bodies. ‘The only good Russian is a dead Russian. I would say that they are now very good.’ With no great gentleness she hauled the terrified girl from her hiding place and dragged her from the room. ‘I will put her with the others.’

  Libby offered no explanation, no apology.

  ‘Oh, what the hell. It’s too late now. Get yourself to an upstairs window and watch out for any Commies that look like they’re coming to investigate your executions. Don’t open fire until I say, just let me know if you see any. Have I spelt it out clear enough for you?’

  ‘Killing them has become a habit, Major.’

  Hyde appeared and stepped in fast to pre-empt any response from Libby. ‘It takes a lot of breaking. We haven’t taken prisoners for five months, not since we saw Commie tanks gunning down some of our blokes who ran out of ammo and tried to surrender.’ As the officer did not appear to have been placated, he changed the subject. ‘All the girls have been herded into one of the big front bedrooms. They’re a bit indignant about the whole business, but they’re keeping quiet so far.’

  ‘OK, let’s see if we can find anything out from them. There’s nothing to be learnt from these two, and this stink is incredible.’

  They closed the door after them, passed one of the East Germans who was standing guard by the partially open front door and mounted to the upper floor.

  ‘Girls’ was a rather generous description for the collection of variously aged whores who sat on the double-bed and bare boards under Kurt’s submachine gun and Andrea’s contemptuous glare. Their ages ranged from what might have been about twenty, but looked older, in the case of the girl they’d discovered downstairs, to what in one case might have been getting on for sixty. Most of them appeared to have been in bed, or undressing when the break-in occurred. Only two of the fifteen were wearing more than underclothes beneath the blankets and robes they had pulled about themselves.

  The girl who had witnessed Libby’s work was sobbing deeply, on the verge of hysterics. Her face had been cleaned up, and with the mess had gone most of her over-done makeup. Her unadorned face was pale and puffy, but not unattractive. Huge breasts and the partial crescent of one large pink nipple bulged over the top of the inadequate sheet with which she’d been provided.

  ‘I want to ask them some questions, Andrea. Tell them we won’t hurt them, and we’ll see the Russians don’t.’ That was an easy promise to make: Revell had no idea if he could keep it.

  The message, though not delivered by Andrea with any grace, or in a friendly tone, had the effect of calming the women. One or two even managed a coy smile at Revell.

  Hyde hadn’t expected any of them to try their allure on him, and he was right, they didn’t. One thing did please him though, he noticed a subtle change come over the major when he started to deal with the women. It wasn’t much, a slight softening of his manner and an almost imperceptible shading of his aggressively American accent. Well, well, well; so the stiff bastard did have a weakness, fancied himself as a ladies man, did he? He had to admit though, it did appear to be working. Although Revell had in most cases to work through a third party, he still contrived to give the impression that he was talking intimately and secretively with each of the whores. Not that Hyde felt himself in any position to criticise or comment on another’s man’s technique, not with the sort of silly-arse games he had to play before any but the roughest drunken scrubbers would have anything to do with him.

  ‘Any good, Major?’ The interest was genuine, but it wasn’t simply t
hat which prompted Hyde.

  ‘You know it wasn’t. They say they don’t know a damned thing, that they’ve never heard of the 97th.’

  ‘They probably haven’t. The Ruskies who come up here are after a good screw or whatever else it is they fancy, not polite conversation. Did you ask them if they’d heard any movement at night?’

  ‘Of course I damned well did.’ A note of irritability had crept into the officer’s voice. ‘They’ve heard trucks and tanks, but that doesn’t mean a thing; the Reds do all their re-supplying and troop movements at night, same as we do. Could be anything.’

  ‘So where do we go from here?’

  Revell jerked his thumb at the ceiling. ‘Up, into the roof. We’ll knock out a couple of roof tiles and see what we can from there. As soon as we’ve got a rough idea of the layout, we’ll sketch out a plan and you can go back for the others.’ ‘What about this crowd?’

  For a moment Revell gave it consideration. A leer he noticed on the face of one of the East Germans helped him to make a decision. ‘Get Libby in here. We’ll put the deserters on look-out. We don’t owe them anything much, no reason why we should lay on an orgy for them.’

  ‘What about her?’

  Andrea looked up sharply, ‘I go where I like, when I like.’

  It was a temptation, ridiculous but strong nevertheless, to Revell to put her over his knee and give that tight wrapped backside a couple of good hard slaps. Just the thought made his palm tingle as though he had, adding an extra thrust to the erection the scantily clad whores had already begun to excite. In any other than this dangerous situation he’d have found an excuse to get her alone for a while but there wasn’t time for that now. Shit, why was it that every attractive, and a lot of the not so attractive girls made him feel like that. His wife had told him his needs, his demands, were one of the main reasons for the break-up of their marriage, though she’d not had the courage to cite them as grounds. Well now she’d got what she wanted, a nice steady twice-a-month-and-have-you-had-a-bath-since-your-last- eh-eh-time-of-the-eh-month-dear. Was he over-sexed? Damn it, it was no time to be pondering that again.

  One of the women on the floor had been trying hard to catch Revell’s eye. So far he’d avoided it, but when Hyde went out, followed shortly afterwards by Andrea, he had no one to talk to and nowhere else to look.

  She was in her late thirties he guessed, with a face that was beginning to show heavy pouches under her eyes, which combined with too much liner made them startlingly dark and intense. A loosely tied gown revealed an ample cleavage, the big orbs jostling against each other at her every movement. The gaping garment didn’t meet until it had also revealed the upper of what looked like several rolls of flab about her middle. Her knees were partially drawn up in front of her, and the instant she saw she had the major’s attention she slowly parted them to expose a luxuriant mass of pubic hair that hid any detail.

  When she realised Kurt was also getting a good look, the limbs were hurriedly clamped together and the quilted gown once more draped across.

  The elbow that poked into his side was Kurt’s. The smell of unwashed flesh and dirty underwear made Revell take a pace to one side, not that the Grepo noticed the involuntary reaction, be was far too busy ogling the women. ‘ Sehrgut, eh? Sehrgut.’

  Laughter from the other men greeted Kurt’s crude pantomime translation as he put a hairy-backed hand to his crotch and simulated a masturbating motion.

  In a way though Revell agreed. In different circumstances the whore might have been attractive, but her lifestyle had aged her. To Kurt’s tastes doubtless she still was ‘very good’, not for him though. Not with the risk of disease she carried, and the record of the thousands of gross obscenities she had performed with regiments of men etched into her face.

  Another of the whores, the oldest one, with the beginnings of a moustache, was turning on her dubious charms for his benefit. To avoid having to look at the flaccid flesh being rearranged and heaved into view for his delectation he went to the door and called out to Hyde. As he did he heard Kurt’s throaty chuckle leading the other men into laughter. He suspected it was aimed at his back.

  ‘Sergeant Hyde. I want Libby in here now. Get a move on.’ Sat on the floor a little way along the corridor Andrea was checking the contents of four spare magazines for her submachine gun. She looked up at his shout.

  As her beautiful eyes flickered over his face Revell felt certain she could read his thoughts, understood his real reason for coming out of the room. What she said tended to confirm that impression.

  ‘There are ugly people in the Zone. Not all of them are Russian.’

  TEN

  ‘I love these.’ Dooley unsheathed the bayonet and held it up, so that the shafts of sunlight filtering in glinted on the mirror polished blade. ‘They make a fucking lovely sound as you pull them out, sort of a sucking noise. You can’t always hear it because of the fuss the crud you stuck it in is making, but sometimes the shits go dead quiet,’ he nudged Jango with his elbow. ‘You get it, dead quiet; dead ... dead quiet. Hey, that’s a joke. You like it? I just made it up.’ ‘We’d never have guessed.’

  ‘Go back to mending the tellie, Cohen, I weren’t talking to you. What was I saying?’ No one prompted him, but he managed to pick up the thread on his own. ‘There ain’t no other noise like it. Best one was when I stuck it in a fat Cossack captain…’

  Dooley had been droning on, rambling from one subject to another without pause, for almost an hour, and for the others in the skimmer, having failed to stop the monologue, it had now become just background noise, like the birds, or Burke’s atrocious wind.

  ‘It’s not my bloody fault.’ Their driver admitted responsibility for the most recent succession of rude sounds, after an indignant scowl he’d directed at Dooley had not succeeded in putting the blame for them elsewhere. ‘These bloody rations do it.’ He kicked at the litter of wrappers on the floor. ‘How do they expect a bloke’s digestion to work properly on muck like that; plays havoc with my gut.’

  ‘Don’t do our noses any good either.’ Jango flapped his hand in front of his face to waft away the smell.

  Collins had been watching Dooley as he burnished the bright killing edges of the bayonet. ‘Shouldn’t that be blued, or something, to stop it catching the light?’

  ‘What’s the point.’ Dooley’s face creased in another grin as he discovered another pun. ‘Hey, how’s that. I made another joke.’

  With a sigh of exasperation Cohen paused from re-securing a warped panel on the side of the console. ‘A clown you may be, a comic you are not. I tell you, if wit were shit you’d be constipated.’

  Pleased that in Collins at least he had an attentive audience, of sorts, the big man ignored the remark. He turned the weapon over to give it a final buff.

  ‘If I ain’t using it, it’s in here,’ he patted the sheath, ‘and when I am using it, I like the Commies to see it coming. Some of them freeze when they see it, makes it easier to stick ‘em. So why hide it, and anyway it slides in nice and smooth when it’s like this; as well as making that lovely slurping sound as it comes out.’

  ‘I thought this was going to be a push-button war.’ A loud bellow of laughter from Dooley brought an immediate rebuke from the others, and even he was taken aback at the volume he’d produced.

  ‘Laugh quieter, you fat-arsed crud.’ Cohen looked at his watch. ‘Will I be glad when the major gets back, so maybe he can shut you up.’ ‘I kinda get the impression you’ve amused our lump of lard.’ Jango had to pound Dooley on the back since he appeared in danger of choking.

  ‘It is a fucking push-button war, or hadn’t you noticed.’ He made a quick recovery.

  ‘Then why are we out here?’ Collins was puzzled. ‘What are we doing with these?’ He held up his assault rifle and bag of demolition charges.

  ‘What a fucking innocent.’ Dooley had his audience back. I’ll tell you how it works. The Heap Big General in Washington, the Pentagon no less, he presses a butt
on on his desk and his aide comes in. The General gives him a three-line order to send out. The aide goes out, presses a lot more buttons and the order goes off. It travels through maybe thirty or forty different command centres and headquarters and the like, and at every stage more buttons are pressed and a load more words get added. Finally it reaches our battalion, only now it ain’t three lines, now it looks like the New York telephone directory. Our CO reads the bit that’s for him, about sixty pages, and presses a button for our platoon commander. He reads his ten pages and presses a button to send for me. I go charging over, all keen and excited, he looks me in the eye, pokes me in the belly button and says ‘attack’.’

  Dooley sat back, pleased with the effect of his complex recitation, and looked smugly about him in a manner that suggested he was expecting at the very least a standing ovation. All he got was a thundering fart from Burke.

  ‘I’ll be glad when this waiting is over, when we know what’s going to happen.’

  ‘Listen to me, kid.’ Leaning forward and lightly resting his hand on Collins’ knee, Cohen put on his fatherly act. ‘Enjoy the waiting; to be bored is to be sure you’re still alive. It doesn’t feature in heaven or hell. As for what’s going to happen, the best we can hope for is .that we know what is supposed to happen. If we knew what was going to happen, we could cut straight to the end of the war and save a lot of misery.

  ‘I still wish I knew where Hyde and the others were right now.’ ‘You could always ask your friend Clarence.’ Jango tapped the feet which perpetually shuffled round and round on the gunner’s chair.

  Since a fighter-bomber had screamed across the tops of the trees at about midday, their stand-in turret gunner had abandoned the Rarden with its limited forty-degree elevation, and manned their anti-aircraft machine gun instead.

  ‘Man, he’s gone round so many times he’s just got to be in a trance by now. Ask him if he can see into the future.’

  Collins didn’t take up the black’s suggestion. Nor did Clarence respond in any way, though Jango had deliberately uttered the words loudly, for his benefit.