James Rouch - Body Count

“This is all they had; they couldn’t give them away fast enough. Mostly they’re old boys with no stomach for a fight. Can’t say I blame them. Bit different tackling Warpac paras instead of soccer hooligans. They’re shitting themselves. Oh, there was a stack of riot guns. Unlimited baton and CS rounds for those, and plenty of masks.”

“Get them, and all the gas grenades the men can carry.” It was little enough Revell knew, but with it they would have to do the job. In the Zone they had often had to raid enemy dumps for ammunition and fuel. He hadn’t expected to be doing something similar during the last hours of his leave.

Hyde shouted orders, then turned back to the Major. “Did you want to see the remains of that para?”

“Yes, while we’re waiting.” Revell followed the NCO to the booking hall. Spread-eagled on the floor, the dead man’s outstretched limbs and the dried rivulets of blood that radiated from him gave an absurdly picturesque sun-ray effect to the gruesome scene.

“Find anything on him?” Revell began going through the jumpsuit’s many pouches and pockets.

“No papers of any sort. He had a satchel full of explosives, mostly booby-trap ingredients. Otherwise his equipment was pretty near standard, apart from the silencer for his pistol and sufficient ammunition to start a war of his own.”

His search complete, and apparently confirming the sergeant’s findings, Revell began to wipe the blood from his fingers, when for some reason his attention was attracted to the man’s helmet.

The strap had been almost severed during his fall, and a hard tug parted it completely. Revell ran his fingers over its greasy interior padding. The hunch paid off, and he pulled out two neatly folded squares of flimsy paper.

Both sides of the sheet were covered with indecipherable Cyrillic scrawl. The smattering of spoken Russian he could understand was of no use to Revell.

“Where’s Boris?”

“I am here, Major. Are we going now, please. I am told that everyone in the city is to be evacuated through the subway. Shouldn’t we start moving?”

“What do these say?” Ignoring the Russian’s hopefully phrased question, Revell thrust the papers at him.

Squinting in the poor light provided by a shaded flashlight, Boris put on his glasses and skimmed the text.

“There is nothing of importance, Major. It is trivia, an unfinished letter to a girl.”

“I’ll make the judgments. What does it say?”

“Of course, Major, right away.” Turning back to the top of the first sheet, Boris reread more slowly. He stopped often to resettle his glasses on his broad Slavic features.

“Actually he writes obscenities about their last time together, and his plans for the next… he hopes the drugs he sent have arrived safely, and that she gets a good price on the black market. As I said, Major, it is all idle chatter, gossip…”

“Just fucking tell the Major what it says.” Hyde shone the torch in the translator’s face.

Boris did as he was told, hurriedly.

“He goes on to say that he will send her photographs they took in a refugee camp… they had used flamethrowers… he thinks she will find some of them funny. Here he says that he has not written for a while, as he was in detention for being drunk. He has been transferred from the naval brigade to an independent company… that is all there is, it ends there.”

“So now we know what we’re up against.” Revell accepted the return of the scraps and crushed them into his pocket. “Only Spetsnaz forces in the Warsaw Pact have naval brigades as well as independent companies.”

“We had to come up against them sometime. The wonder is it hasn’t occurred before this.” Hyde could see that the information had upset Boris, but then any prospect of his falling back into the hands of the army he had deserted had that effect. For himself, he was well aware of the Russian elite forces reputation, but you could be just as dead from a bullet fired by a shit-scared dolt of an infantryman, as by a highly trained commando.

Unclipping his radio from his belt, Revell broadcast his call sign. As he waited for an acknowledgement, he looked again at the corpse on the tiled floor.

An outstretched hand seemed to reach towards the bundle of torn panels and rigging in a corner. It appeared almost a gesture of accusation, aimed at the chute that had failed him.

Briefly, Revell passed to control the information they had obtained. He signed off without waiting to hear their reaction. Not that there could be any doubt as to what it would be. At that very moment, the communication room in the bunker would have gone very quiet, as the news sank in.

Spetsnaz troops had an appalling record of atrocity, even gauged against the horrors that were everyday events in the Zone. This time though it was not helpless prisoners or even wretched refugees, this time they held a whole city in their bloodstained hands.

The police HQ had to be retaken quickly. Every weapon and every round the Special Combat Company could lay hands on was going to be needed in this fight.

The sniper fire from the area of the Karlstor Gate forced on Revell the decision to detour through the Stachus underground shopping, mall. They lost two men in the dash from cover to the nearest of the pedestrian ramps.

It sloped gently. The textured non-slip surface rasped beneath their shuffling feet as they edged down towards the entrance.

Revell kept a grip on the handrail, straining his eyes to make sense of the shapes that loomed ahead. He could hear a growing noise, like a magnified restless murmur.

“What’s the hold-up?”

At the bottom of the ramp, the major caught up with Carrington and the scout section. The corporal was in a heated argument — conducted in hushed undertones — with an armed civilian wearing an auxiliary-police armband.

By the faint illumination of a well-shielded flashlight, Revell saw the German energetically shaking his head. While he did so, he managed to keep a rifle levelled at them, blocking the way through the heavy blackout curtain.

“This old fool says we can’t go in. He says the place isn’t an authorized shelter, and it’s his job to keep everybody out. Shall I knock him down?” Carrington edged closer to the man as he asked.

Sensing rather than seeing her beside him, Revell told Andrea to speak to the sentry. “Tell him we know it’s not a shelter. We don’t want to stay in there, we simply want to cut through to reach the gunmen.”

Though she spoke too fast for Revell to catch all that she said, he knew she was putting the point across more brutally than he had dictated. The German took a nervous step back, but still kept the weapon aimed. He was opening his mouth to speak, when a fist caught him on the side of the face. His head cracked hard against the tiled wall, and he went down without uttering a sound.

Carrington caught the rifle as it fell. He rubbed his knuckles. “Boney little runt. I could have hurt my hand.”

“Keep the rifle. Search him for ammunition.” Revell took hold of the corner of the screening material. “Pass the word for every one to keep their wits about them. This place may be deserted, but it’s like a rabbit warren. I’ve gotten lost when the lights were on.”

Pushing through, Revell led the way into the complex of stores, and into a scene that could have come straight from a horror movie.

By the faintly glowing emergency lighting, he could see that every inch of floor space was occupied. Families and individuals sat or lay or slumped, as space about them dictated.

The air was hot, and stale with cigarette smoke and the reek of lager, vomit, and urine. Close inside the entrance, the floor was slippery with blood, and several imperfectly shrouded bodies lay there.