Sky Strike

by James Rouch

  Like an animal freed from a trap, the APC bounded forward as the force of the detonations pushed the walls of armour apart, but they were taking some of the fire with them. Two of the huge centre tyres were alight and from each spun blobs of burning rubber and shreds of tread. Passage through a series of puddles failed to quench the twin blazes, the clinging mud peeling away with the softened rubber.

  In a last desperate attempt Burke took the APC across the road and on to a patch of flat ground covered with a carpet of low green moss-like plants. Cascades of stinking slime and foul, brown water rose higher than the vehicle’s roof as it plunged across the flood. Broken crescents of steel mesh-reinforced concrete crunched under the steaming tyres as they rode over the fragments of the bomb- shattered sewage pipe.

  The raw effluent extinguished the flames but brought a torrent of obscene condemnation down on Burke as he steered them back on to the road. Much of the filth thrown up by their wild progress had found its way in, and the stink of the cordite had been replaced by another stench more powerful and more obnoxious.

  Some of the mess had dripped on to Libby, but he was hardly conscious of it, only making a half-hearted move to brush it off. Sitting deep in one of the bucket seats he could see out through the open top and, high above the vision-blurring haze of the permanently suspended dust particles, he saw the interwoven contrails of the helicopter’s fighter escort.

  It barely registered with him, but that portion of his mind still functioning on a professional level, told him the number of escorts was just too many for a single helicopter. He would have mentioned it, but felt the battle was no longer any business of his, he was taking no more part in it.

  Cline repeatedly struck the top of the radio, with his clenched fist before reluctantly letting Boris remove the side panel to examine it. There were beads of bright fresh metal hanging frozen from most of the components, where solder from the circuit boards had begun to drip in the heat from the tyres immediately below the vital equipment.

  ‘Did you get the major his air cover?’ Libby wasn’t really interested, just asked for something to say, to break the isolation he felt growing about him.

  ‘I don’t know. They were receiving, but I didn’t get an acknowledgement’ Cline entered the fact in his log, brushing aside the charcoal black ashes that spread from the edges of the small page across its neatly lined surfaces. He had to cover himself, nothing that went wrong was going to be down to him. The Russian, that was it, if there was an enquiry he’d blame it all on the enemy deserter. ‘What’s your interest, I didn’t think you cared any more, thought you were packing it in?’

  For a reason he didn’t understand, Libby found that funny. That was a good one, him not caring, not caring. The trouble was he cared too much; much too much. ‘There’s no need for me to pack it in.’ Standing, Libby stood looking out of the gaping hole where the turret had been, feeling the wind buffet past him as their driver piled on all the speed he could. The Land-Rover was following them again, though now keeping an even more respectful distance, sometimes out of sight half a mile behind them.

  Libby felt the laughter rising inside him once more, and fought it down. Him, pack it in? Oh, Cline could be so stupid, so ready to talk first and think afterwards! What need was there for him to give up, or give in? All he had to do was wait and others would do it for him. He had no need to end his battle, when the battle was about to end him.

  As he saw them skimming towards the APC at zero feet, their pylons loaded with masses of lethal ordnance, he felt like throwing his arms open wide to welcome, to symbolically embrace the four Soviet Hind helicopter gunships.

  Closing his eyes, Libby turned his face to the sky and waited for the obliteration of his existence. Helga was in his mind, on his lips...

  SIXTEEN

  Now they had broken from cover it no longer mattered whether or not the Soviet gunships had a hulk-discrimination capability. The APC marked itself out from all the other armoured vehicles strewn about the war-destroyed landscape by being the only one moving.

  His hatch had jammed, and Revell had to leave his seat and move back down the compartment to stand and look out through the circular hole where the turret had been. He did so in time to see the helicopters close to two thousand yards and move into line astern to commence their attack run. No manoeuvre their driver could throw the clumsy vehicle through could shake them off. They had only one chance.

  ‘Bale out and scatter.’

  Even before they stopped, the escape hatches were crashing open. This time it was Boris’s turn to be helping someone else, as with assistance from Hyde and Andrea he pushed Libby over the side of the hull, and joined with the others in dragging the protesting man away from the personnel carrier.

  From behind the inadequate protection of a curled length of T72 track, Revell could see the front seat weapons operator in the lead gunship hunched over his sights. At any second he would unleash a mass of steel and explosive towards the APC and surrounding area. He knew that by abandoning the carrier they had not avoided death, merely changed its timing and nature.

  Not wanting to see their moment of firing, Revell turned his attention to the weaving contrails high overhead, and saw the silver cruciform tip of one transformed by a fireball into a smoke-towing collection of odd-shaped sections of bright metal. Another went the same way. A third Soviet aircraft tumbled from the enveloping smoke of a near miss with dark smoke billowing from its shattered cockpit as it went into a flat spin that, by the violence of the centrifugal forces it imposed, began to wrench first the control surfaces, and then the wings from the stricken aircraft.

  The Soviet gunship fighter leader had released only two air to ground rockets when it ran into the solid wall of 30mm cannon shells. Caught by the converging fire from a pair of Thunderbolts, the chopper broke apart and fell out of the sky.

  There was little of the second and third helicopter in line to actually reach the ground, as the effects of the pounding fire and the detonation of their ammunition and fuel loads reduced them to little more than fluttering showers of torn and semi- molten debris.

  Seeing the fate of the others, the pilot of the last gunship tried to break away, but a snap burst from a high-velocity rotary action cannon sheared off its tail just forward of the rotor assembly. It came down like an autumn seed case, spinning around and around. Engulfed by flame as it crashed, none of the crew escaped.

  Above the dead scene of past battles the sky was coming alive, being knotted by looping vapour trails. As the Thunderbolts swept the squad’s immediate attackers out of the way, their covering fighters in turn engaged and harried the Soviet and East German escorts.

  Sometimes a parachute would billow close by the smudge of smoke that marked the place where an expensive piece of sophisticated technology had succumbed to the brute result of a warhead’s violent chemical reaction; more often there would be nothing to differentiate the falling bodies of the crew from the other broken parts among which they tumbled.

  ‘What the hell have we started?’ Open-mouthed, Cline watched a MIG-21 dive straight into the ground under full power, sending a geyser of flame a hundred feet above its point of impact. That dispersed instantly, and then apart from a shallow steaming crater and an odd sunlight-catching shred of metal there was no sign of the aircraft or its pilot.

  ‘Whatever, we’re taking advantage of it. Round up the squad, get them aboard, we’re still in with a chance.’

  The three-dimensional sky battle was becoming more complex, more destructive. Now being conducted at several quite clearly defined altitudes, its original cause was forgotten. While radar homing, TV guided and heat seeking missiles inflicted casualties at the longer ranges, where the opposing aircraft came into closer contact, heavy cannon played their part and sent their share of victims into terminal dives that ended only with devastating impact on the ground, or with the mid-air destruction of the aircraft as fuel tanks or ammunition were ignited by incendiary rounds.

 
Libby felt cheated, had prepared himself for death and it hadn’t come. It was others, thousands of feet above him, who were finding death. As Burke sent them racing for their lines he watched the aerial combat, had counted nine planes destroyed so far, and had seen as many again break off action and dive for the security of their home bases with flaring wing tanks or damaged jet pipes or gaping holes in their fuselages.

  He was aware of Revell watching him, knew the officer had not forgotten the incident at the foundry, and was adding that to what he had witnessed recently. It would be done kindly, Libby knew that, but he was going to be gently but firmly taken away.

  Away from the Special Combat Group was not important, had never mattered to him much, only ever being a means to an end; but away meant a destination outside the Zone, and that he couldn’t bear.

  It would be a place of firm discipline and soft beds, where men who only wore uniform for appearance would tell him they understood, men who had never been in combat, and whose worst loss had been their temporary removal from the comfortable consultancies they’d enjoyed in civilian life.

  For most of the others in the squad, getting out of the Zone meant rest and food and safety and sex for the woman in the Land-Rover still doggedly following it meant something less tangible, but to them even more precious, freedom. For Libby, leaving the Zone, with the danger that his departure might be permanent, meant either the destruction of his mind or the ending of his life by his own hand.

  Better he stay there dead, than live like a cabbage beyond the loose boundaries of the Zone. He let his hand stray to and rest lightly on the butt of the pistol tucked into his waistband. It was not time yet, but with the wheels eating up the road as they sped under the umbrella of the NATO air-cover towards the sanctuary of the West, he would not be leaving it a lot longer.

  How strange that someone like Boris, who had been through a crisis of fear, should emerge stronger from the experience; but then the Russian had seen only a year of war, and only a few months of combat. Libby had been through two years, most of it in combat save for a couple of short spells in military hospitals with painful and unglamorous wounds, and it was as though during the whole time his experiences had been diminishing him, taking something from him so that eventually his resistance to the pressures must fail.

  Hearing officer and NCO discussing their position, he knew that within the next few miles they would enter NATO-controlled territory. In the past he had accepted these short breaks, knowing that he was coming back, but without asking, without being told, he knew that this time he wouldn’t be. A label would be tagged to his clothing, a diagnosis applied to his mental condition, and he would be sent back to England.

  He felt the butt of the pistol warming in his grasp, and at that moment knew he wouldn’t be leaving the Zone.

  ‘They’re getting close.’

  While the major and the sergeant scrutinised the open ground ahead from the cover of the jumbled farmyard buildings, Clarence kept watch on the approaching Russian infantry patrol.

  ‘What do you make of them, Sergeant?’ Revell passed the binoculars.

  A mile away, a file of large-wheeled vehicles was moving across their front. Partially hidden by the hedge-topped sunken lane in which they travelled, it was difficult to identify them. Hyde panned ahead, and found a gap in the thick, ill- kempt growth, and waited for them to come into his field of vision. The cab of the first appeared, and he identified it immediately. ‘They’re ours. It’s a convoy of Stalwarts.’ He saw his observations confirmed as the line of trucks emerged into the open, the forward control, high sided six-wheelers instantly recognisable.

  ‘Then we’re almost home. Tell the women to rig a white flag on the Land- Rover, and have a couple put on ours. No point in getting blasted by our own side when we’re on the last lap.’

  A burst of machine gun fire hit a wall close by as Ripper secured a stained and tattered rag to the twisted remains of the radio aerial. ‘Can we get going now, I think we’ve been spotted?’ He dived head-first into the APC as another dozen rounds came even closer.

  Hyde didn’t move, he was watching the Stalwarts as they drew up in the open and their crews left the cabs to work on traversing box-like mounts in their cargo sections. At that distance it was difficult to make out... then he saw the sides of the high mobility load carriers drop, and their crews take cover, and he knew what those contraptions were.

  Smoke billowed about and almost hid the trucks as their Ranger anti-personnel mine throwers began to rapidly discharge masses of the self-arming devices. Within a minute thousands of mines had been laid in a hundred-yard-wide strip across the neglected fields.

  Even before the smoke had drifted clear, the vehicle’s crews had remounted and the trucks were pulling out.

  ‘Signal the women to stay in our wheel tracks.’ A mortar shell punched a hole in the partially collapsed roof of the farmhouse, and Revell knew they could delay their departure no longer. A fragment of slate sliced through his sleeve and he felt warm blood trickling down his arm, and looked to see it threading from beneath his cuff and snaking over the back of his hand.

  The enemy patrol was just getting the range, and several more shells fell on the farm as they pulled out, while machine gun fire raked its general area. For a few moments they would have the buildings between them and the Russians. They would have to make the most of it.

  Revell kept his eyes locked on the ground where he knew the mines lay concealed in the long grass. He had seen tanks being used to deliberately clear a path through anti-personnel minefields, and had seen them suffer no worse than broken tracks, but he’d never seen a wheeled vehicle attempt it, would until now have considered it too lunatic to contemplate - but they had no choice.

  Just as he thought they must have reached the danger area, there were explosions under the front wheels, and then almost immediately two more. The APC lurched on one side and Burke had to fight the steering to keep them going straight.

  ‘That’s one wheel gone.’ Burke’s words were drowned by more explosions and the nose of the vehicle dropped, and as it hit the ground another detonation lifted it up again for a brief moment before it crashed back down. Black smoke began to come in wisps through a rent in the floor plates. ‘We’ve now got the first five- wheeled APC. Anybody got any ideas as to how we do the last thirty yards?’

  It might as well have been thirty miles. Revell could see where the grass had been disturbed in a couple of places, but for the location of each mine he could see, there were ten he couldn’t. They were designed to maim and cripple, if they moved from the APC, now beginning to burn, then that was what would happen to them. The Land-Rover was still intact, but that too would be going no further. Mines that could blast the wheels from a tough armoured vehicle would instantly turn the soft- skin into a blazing death trap.

  The Russians had reached the farm and set up their guns and mortars. Although the range was extreme he could hear the bullets scything through the grass, and then a bomb landed right behind the Land-Rover.

  There was nothing he could do to stop them. As more shells blasted the meadow about them, the Land-Rover surged forward, steered around the stricken carrier and bucked and lurched at speed through the grass. It had by a miracle covered perhaps half the distance to safety when the inevitable happened.

  Several explosions blended together and the vehicle was lifted high into the air, spurting flame and sending bodies tumbling in every direction. Wreckage rained down and a chain-reaction rippled through the minefield. Some of the women’s remains were tossed again and again, suffering worse mutilation each time.

  The fire beneath the APC was gaining a hold despite the efforts of Dooley and Burke with extinguishers. Suddenly Dooley hurled the half-full extinguisher away and began to scramble about on the floor at the rear of the compartment.

  ‘What the hell are you doing? Come on, we’re making a run for it.’ Ignoring the sergeant, Dooley kept raking through the piles of equipment ‘It’s gone, it
’s fucking gone. Where’s my fucking pack?’

  Cline looked back in, as he stood on the hull steps, taking time to choose where he’d first put his feet. ‘I chucked it, it was one of those that went out when we were stuck between the two wrecks. Was it important?’

  The crud, he fucking knew. All that loot, if only he’d kept a bit in his pockets, spread it about a little ... Dooley thought, and remembered, He slid down the canted floor of the hull and reached for the jammed door of the safe. Shit, he’d get the damned thing open if he had to tear it apart with his teeth. Through a gaping corner he could see a glint of yellow metal.

  As he took a firm grip of the hot metal and started to pull, the interior of the APC was suddenly brilliantly lit as the flames reached the fuel tank and it began to burn in earnest. Dooley felt the heat on his back, and then suddenly there was a searing pain in his foot and he had to beat out the flames on his boot. Fire was all around him and he was forced back, feeling it scorching his face and hands.

  The major was the first to reach Cline, and dragged him to the side of the field where Andrea helped fix a tourniquet above the stump of his left leg. Deeply in shock, the bombardier was attempting to make a note of his injuries in his logbook.

  Apart from minor wounds caused by fragments from the stray mine Cline had stepped on, all of the others made it. Then Revell looked again, and counted. Libby was missing.

  Blazing wreckage and intense mortar fire obscured the minefield, and made returning to it out of the question. He’d last seen Libby staring at the remains of one of the girls, and had thought he’d been with them when they’d run for the shelter of the sunken road.

  It wasn’t possible to be certain, perhaps the smoke was playing tricks with his eyes, but briefly he glimpsed what looked like the figure of a man. Unarmed, bareheaded, it was walking back towards the farm, back into the Zone.