Hunter-Killer tz-3

by James Rouch

  ‘Another update coming in, Major.’ York read the strip as it came out. ‘The number of escorts is up to forty, heavies total fourteen. That looks like the final count.’

  ‘That’s enough. What’s their ETA?’ Revell had already computed his own estimate of the fleet’s time of arrival, but with the benefit of near continual satellite surveillance, Command should be able to refine the probable error to within thirty minutes either way. Apart from anything else, it was better informed as to sea and ice conditions in the waters through which they must pass. ‘Six hours, Major. That’s two after first light.’

  ‘You getting anything special, Boris?’ The Russian had been so quiet that Revell had almost forgotten him. The man sat hunched at the side of the radio table, occasionally jotting a note down into his log, or attempting to adjust his ill-fitting headset.

  ‘Nothing of significance, no. There is some ship-to-shore chatter, and the helicopter pilot keeps making complaints about the poor landing guidance he is getting on the Rogov, but that is all.’

  ‘Well, stay on it. Let me know if they start moving about on the ground. Listen for anything about Hyde and the others.’

  ‘They must be dead, or in the bag by now, Major.’ Wiping his oil-streaked hands on his anorak, Libby came in from the kitchen. Burke could still be heard fussing and swearing over the erratically running generator.

  ‘If they were,’ Boris looked up, ‘then these would be burning my ears.’ He tapped the headphones. ‘And we could expect visitors at any moment.’

  ‘There’s a chance we’ll have some anyway, let’s reduce the odds as much as we can. Close down every active system… yes, everything.’ Revell waved his hand to quell the babble that greeted the order.

  ‘Major, me and Burke have just spent half the night getting that bloody generator to go, and keeping it going.’ Libby made the loudest protest. ‘Now you want us to stop it?’

  ‘That’s right. We’ll just keep a radio watch. That should give us ample warning of increased activity by our Commie neighbours.’ Even as he said it, Revell was all too well aware that it really didn’t matter just how much warning they got of any Soviet aggression towards them. They didn’t even have the men to provide an adequate defence of the house, let alone send reinforcements to aid the gunners at any of the three launch sites. The mission had been envisaged, by the most optimistic, as a hit and run affair: with their numbers so depleted, the very best that could be hoped for was hit and internment, and it was much more likely to be attempt-to-hit, and die. The continuing cold was making him feel ill, and lack of sleep didn’t help. His every movement was becoming an effort. When your body hurt and ached all over, the temptation to do nothing, to just sit and wait for the end, was very great.

  At this stage, inactivity might be a defence of sorts, but it offered no opportunity for rest. Perhaps some of the others might stand down for an hour at a time, but he couldn’t. Eventually it would get to him, perhaps not on this operation; but if he went on to more, then one day he would find his mind had a limit to what it could take. Every combat officer had a breaking point, a moment at which the strain or tension would become too much and his brain would simply switch off. Many others had gone that way before him. He’d seen some – who had refused to give in to increasingly obvious symptoms of an approaching nervous collapse until it was too late – go to pieces. A colonel who had burst into tears when only a dozen men out of a fresh battalion had rallied after a massed Russian attack, a young lieutenant who had beaten out the last flames on the shrivelled pain-wracked bodies of his baled-out crew and then calmly walked back to his blazing tank and climbed in a moment before its ammo detonated…so many different ways to go when a mind overruled the will that had been driving it too long, and tried to regain control. He was already watching himself for the first signs, watching and waiting.

  There was the sound of heavy, hesitant, footsteps on the stairs, a drumming double thump kept time. The medic appeared, dragging the body of a gunner.

  ‘Give him a hand, Clarence.’ A moment passed before Revell realised the sniper had made no move to leave the dark corner where he sat. ‘I said help him.’

  With slow deliberation, Clarence stood up still kneading his fingers, as he had been doing perpetually since the moment he’d recovered his senses after his brush with freezing death. Without the light from the tubes he couldn’t examine them to see if the faint discolouration had gone, but the tips didn’t hurt any more. ‘You want me to help carry a body?’

  ‘That’s it, got it in one. And why not? That poor guy would be happy to cart you, all around the island I should imagine, if that was the price of reversing your positions. Don’t make a fuss, just do it.’

  Teeth clenched, an expression of extreme distaste on his face, Clarence took hold of the body by the ankles and helped carry it out. It joined a row of six others beside the wall of the house…

  ‘Two more will join them soon.’ Private Fraser stared at the line. ‘Nothing I can do for them you see. Don’t matter what I cover them with, they can’t move about, the cold just creeps into them and they slip away.’

  ‘I know what it’s like.’ Clarence continually wiped his hands down his side to brush away the thought of the contact he’d just had to endure. He hated the feel of another person close to him, and physical contact forced him to fight the urge to lash out and end it, before he was sick. Handling the body, even though he’d only been touching the corpse’s stiffened boots, had been as repugnant to him as enduring the jostling proximity of a crowd. He knew the feeling was an abnormal one, but had long since ceased to try to curb or cure it. Somehow it was as if the manner in which he had cut himself off from all emotional contact with others had not been enough. ‘Let’s get back inside before we stay out here with him permanently.’

  The silence and near total darkness inside the house were oppressive, but that suited Clarence. Even the cold, after what it had almost done to him, seemed on his side; forcing each man to withdraw within whatever lagging-like bundle of rags and dead man’s clothes he could gather and hold about him. Feeling his way along the wall back to his place, Clarence squatted and picked up his Enfield. Even the sacking bindings could not hide its familiar detail from him. As though it were an extension of himself, the forged and machined metal slipped comfortably into his grasp. He held it close, bowing forward until he rested his forehead against the jute-draped barrel. Reaching out, he patted his pack and then pulled it closer. Not that there had ever been any danger of it being taken. He would find a use for those special rounds, he was sure of that, absolutely sure. The feeling was one he’d had before, and it had never been wrong yet.

  In the pitch-black of the interior Revell was also alone. Command did that for a man, and he did nothing to lessen it. Responsibility had brought him remoteness, as well as, respect and obedience. But it wasn’t just the rank: example and tough discipline had been the most important contributory factors. Other officers were able to combine that with an ability to mix, even to be familiar, with the men: but of his own choice Revell didn’t, or maybe it was nearer the truth to say he couldn’t. That was a hard thing to admit to himself. He’d not formed a stable relationship of any kind, not since his divorce. In a way, it was as if he didn’t trust people any more. It was OK to work with them, or in the case of his women, have a brief affair with them, but never anything closer. And here, in the Zone, getting to know someone well could be a mistake. The Zone had a way of ruthlessly breaking up partnerships, friendships… permanently.

  ‘I wonder where Hyde is now, and the lieutenant…’

  ‘And the girl.’ It was York who tacked on an end to Libby’s sentence.

  ‘Who knows.’ Burke’s voice floated in from the kitchen, where he was curled up against the warm metal of the generator. ‘All I know is that wherever I was with her, I could keep warm.’

  Revell almost snapped a slap-down, to put an end to the exchange, but administered one to himself instead, and said nothing.
He let the conversation flow on, only half-heard it as it degenerated into an obscene version of tennis, with the men’s dirty minds providing the rackets, and their speculations about Andrea, the balls. Upstairs he could hear Fraser moving about. The medic was having a tough time. All he could do was watch his patients die, and he was taking it hard. But at least he had that to keep him occupied. For the rest of them, there were hours to be passed in which there would be nothing to do but sit, or pace, and wait. Anything that prompted them to action before the ships came into range would be bad news, unless it was Hyde returning; and as the minutes ticked by, and the temperature continued to drop, the chances of that became more and more remote

  ‘…and if I know the Sarge,’ Burke was having the last say, concluding with a tone of authoritive finality, ‘he’ll have found somewhere nice and snug, and he’ll be waiting for the Ruskies to settle down before trekking back. I bet you, nice and snug…’

  ‘Frostbite.’ Fraser cut away the woman’s boot, rolled down her thick socks and pulled them off. To mid-calf, her leg was an ugly purplish-black. ‘That’s worse than anything I’ve ever seen.’ He tentatively touched the hardened skin. It was rough and cracked, like ill-kept parchment. ‘Come to that, it’s worse than anything I’ve ever heard of.’

  ‘Heck, it was hard enough keeping the rest of us from going that way, we couldn’t look after that Commie dame as well.’ Ripper was bent over, his arms crossed and his hands beneath his armpits, nursing feeling back into his limbs and fighting the pain as circulation gradually returned.

  ‘What about him?’ Hyde toed the Swede on the floor. The man was breathing badly, his chest heaving at each laboured breath, every exertion making his eyes roll to leave only the whites showing.

  ‘Looks like a heart attack. I haven’t got the time for him.’ With those words Fraser dismissed the dying man and went on attending to the woman. ‘Back at base hospital it was the MOs who had all the cases like that, all I did was splinters in the bum and routine pox treatment…’

  ‘Now he fucking tells us.’

  The medic went on, ignoring Burke’s interruption. ‘…but that’s the way my uncle went. Nothing we can do for him.’

  Using his elbow Burke gave Dooley’s ribs a hefty double-nudge. ‘Must’ve been the big cuddle-up with our German piece that made his ticker give out. A few hours close with her and I reckon mine would overheat as well.’

  ‘Fuck off.’ For once Dooley made the effort and kept his hair-trigger temper in check. ‘We kept together to keep warm, no one touched her, no one.’ If Revell had not been near by, he might have, he would have smashed their driver in the face, driven his nose out through the back of his head. OK, so maybe he hadn’t done all the things with her he’d boasted of to the others in the past, but she was still with him, and though from necessity Hyde and Ripper and the old Swede might have joined in the penguin-like huddle to stay warm, no one had touched her. No one would while he was around.

  For Andrea, the Swede’s collapse at the moment they reached the house had been a final irony. At every step the presence of the two Soviet agents had endangered them all. By increasing the size of the group they had made concealment more difficult, and in addition to slowing their return to a snail’s crawl, the sledge had forced them to wait for first light so that they had a chance of picking a manageable route. And now as events had turned out they could have, they might as well have, left them behind. There would be nothing gleaned from either.

  ‘Look’s like the fickle finger of fate has done gone and saved you the worry of playing executioner.’ Ice crusted Ripper’s face, and flaked away as he grinned at Andrea.

  ‘Kinda seems a shame when I bet you got yourself all. keyed up for it. Maybe the major will let you play with the bodies while they’re still warm.’

  ‘If he does, she can have this old Commie anytime.’ Clumsily using his mittened hand, Libby closed the Swede’s eyes. ‘Looks like he might have been a school teacher.’ He examined the dead man’s palms. ‘Doesn’t seem to have done much real work.’

  As the hand was released and flopped back to the floor, Andrea stepped on it, and twisted her boot to grind it until the bones began to crack. ‘It is more likely he was from a university. In Sweden, as in most so-called free countries, they are breeding grounds for his type. Strange that men of such intelligence should be so naive, so pathetic as to believe the lies they are fed. He in his turn would have become a recruiter, taking his cue from his KGB control as to which people to ask to his parties, how to slant any article or paper he might write, and how, when there was an important pro-East or pro-West decision pending, to help the men in power reach the conclusion that Moscow wanted.

  He is the sort whose whispers, whose carefully phrased suggestions, would make an official think he was learning what the people wanted. The people… worms, to be shovelled first in one direction, then in another, or crushed, or buried.’

  ‘There’s shit like them in every country. Sweden doesn’t have a monopoly.’ Hyde indicated to Libby and Ripper to remove the body. The hatred that poured from her never ceased to surprise him. All of them loathed the Communists, he had more reason than most to feel that way, but with Andrea it was an obsession. And yet when they’d first found her she’d been with a gang of Grepo deserters, ex-East German border guards, scum, the lowest of the low. Hatred she might have in her, but to survive she was capable of tempering it: even better than Clarence, in whom no compromise was possible. A savage, brutal killer with a high degree of base animal cunning, that was how Hyde saw her. And yet her face was incredible, the features such that a man who appreciated beauty for its own sake could look at it for hours. Hyde was well aware that looking was as close as he would ever get. It was probably as close as any of them would get, but while the others could entertain hopes, he couldn’t. Not with his appearance, not ever…

  Revell checked his watch. It was time to start living dangerously once more, really dangerously. Since the Ruskies had landed, there had been little chance of their being detected unless the enemy took the unlikely step of patrolling the whole island, but now they had to switch in all the systems again, and any detectors pointed their way, even by chance, would immediately pick up the emissions of their active radars. ‘Let’s have the generator going again. I want all systems functioning the moment the damned thing settles to a reasonably steady beat. Then get on to the gunners at the launch sites. I want status reports.

  The silky material of the dead Swede’s outer garments was making him difficult to lift, and the pair assigned to remove him had resorted to taking hold of a foot each, and dragging him unceremoniously. There was a dull thudding crack as the corpse’s head bumped over and down the step. Jolted open by the rough passage, the man’s locked stare contemplated the lightening sky. Walking to the door, Revell watched him being placed with the others.

  He would have almost certainly have succumbed to the weather, even without their intervention. The old Commie had probably waited most of his adult life for this day, when Soviet troops would set foot on Swedish soil. All that time the traitor had plotted and schemed and waited, and when the moment had finally arrived and he’d been here ready to see it, Hyde and his section had spoilt it for him. No wonder his heart had given out. For a while, as he travelled to the island and began to get ready, he must have believed that this was the dawning of his ambitions. He must have held the conviction that the limited landing was simply a first step that would eventually lead to Sweden falling into the Soviet net, and his assumption of some position of puppet power. Now there would be none of that. His body, stiffening but still showing a degree of elasticity, struck the frozen form of a gunner, and flopped off to sprawl untidily in the snow.

  Ripper paused before going back in, screwing up his face as he examined the unnatural colour of the sky. The dawn had been tinged a distinctive red, but now it was rapidly whitening. Ice formed on the rims of his nostrils and around his mouth as he peered at the phenomenon. ‘That’s kin
da pretty. I ain’t never seen a sky that colour.’

  ‘Most people who see it never see anything else ever again.’ Standing behind Revell, Boris had also seen the effect. ‘The red you saw first light was caused by all the dust and contamination in the air, that is nothing; what you see now though has been given many names, usually it is called diamond dust. Look at your sleeves, move them.’

  ‘Hey, I’m going solid,’ Not knowing what to expect, what to look for, Ripper flexed his arm. A white crust had formed on the surface, and as the coated material reluctantly creased, splits appeared in it. ‘Will you look at that, it’s like the damned stuff had been dipped in dry ice.’

  ‘My country sees the most severe of weather, but even there such a thing is a rarity.’ Boris moved aside to let the men in. ‘It only happens when the temperature drops below minus sixty. Ice particles form on the dust, they settle and cover everything they touch with a mantle of white death. In minutes a man can suffocate, even faster than the lieutenant did, as thicker and thicker deposits build up around the mouth. So it would seem we now face a new enemy.’

  ‘We’ve been facing that enemy since we landed.’ Carefully, but still painfully, Revell chipped, prised and peeled the frozen crust from his mouth. ‘Just seems like Jack Frost is getting reinforcements.’

  In the kitchen the generator fired at Burke’s first attempt, making an infernal racket until the covers were hastily replaced and it warmed to run at a steady pace that reduced vibration.

  ‘Everybody to stations. Sergeant Hyde, I want anyone who doesn’t have a specific task to be armed and ready to move at a moment’s notice. The intruder alarms don’t allow much of a margin, so you’ll have to be prepared to respond to any incursion immediately.’