James Rouch - Civilian Slaughter

Again he fired and this time kept firing. He saw strikes on the rear starboard quarter, about where the fuel should be. A single shot went slightly wide, smacking into the base of the rotors.

Then he could only watch as it continued to gain height and move across in front of him. Without warning the helicopter yawed violently, practically going into a roll. The rotors were breaking from the hub, filling the sky with whirling blades of metal.

It fell like a stone, the tail boom distorting and almost breaking away before the chopper hit the meadow. The fuselage burst in a shower of torn panels, telescoping to half its length.

A truck bumped out of the farm toward the crash site. Before it was halfway there, smoke began to filter from the crushed cockpit. An instant later fire raged across the wreckage, starting secondary blazes among the surrounding swaths of wild barley.

Habit, almost amounting to instinct, caused Clarence to replace the magazine and methodically pump carefully aimed shots at the vehicle and its passengers. The truck stalled. Leaving two men dead in the cab, those riding on the open back jumped off and dove underneath for cover.

At that range, fifteen hundred meters, the sniper knew his bullets could pass clean through the truck’s chassis and still find them. Or he could flush them into the open by igniting the gas tank. But he didn’t.

He had, quite simply, had enough of killing. Pushing the rifle to one side, he stretched out and turned over on his back. It was good to at last take the pressure off his elbows, and to straighten the crick in his back, neck and shoulders. Almost as an afterthought, he removed his earplugs.

By now the sun would almost have set behind the hills. Very little light was finding its way in. He lay there, in the semi-darkness, trying to come to a decision he knew he could no longer put off.

“Anybody care to explain what’s happening here?” Revell left it to Sampson and some of the pioneers to carefully remove the casualties from the top of the APCs. The unloading of the stunned and bewildered refugees from the trucks he delegated to Sergeant Hyde.

Close to the children’s graveyard was parked an immaculate M-34, two-and-a-half-ton truck. Revell didn’t have to look at its insignia to know to what outfit it belonged. Standing in front of it were twenty MPs. In front of them, a pile of new pick handles.

Lieutenant Vokes had them covered with his pistol. He was flanked by two of his men holding levelled SA-80s, and Old William with his shovel.

With his Walther, Vokes waved forward a big sergeant from among the group. Revell recognized his face from the earlier incident. “Ball seems to be in your court.”

“We’ve been threatened. We are now. You’re a witness.” Selecting a pick handle, Revell hefted it, and made an experimental swing. “Nice of you to bring us these. That’s what they are, isn’t it? Presents?”

“My men were attacked last time. They were for our self-protection.” The sergeant was almost purple with suppressed fury at his situation. “We came here to take you in, under close arrest.”

“What’s the charge?”

“You got all day?”

“Major,” Vokes had been listening intently to the conversation. “If you go with these men, I believe something will happen to you on the way to headquarters.”

“I won’t be going with them.”

“Going to do a runner?”

Revell read the contempt on the sergeant’s face, and then wiped it off. “I’m going in OK, but not with you. For two reasons. First, like my lieutenant says, there’s a chance I might be in less than perfect health by the time I get there, if I do. Second, your transport has been commandeered.”

“The hell it has, who by?”

“Me. We’ve got wounded civilians here. Your truck is just the right size to take them in comfort, of a sort. You and these other thugs can walk. I’ll give you an armed escort part of the way. To see you come to no harm, naturally. I’d get going right away if I were you. It’s going to be as black as hell tonight. My men have torches but I doubt they’ll lend them to you.”

“I’ll herd them, Major.” Carrington pushed himself forward. “I haven’t forgotten that crack about baby killers.”

“OK, take three men with you. Ride in one of the APCs, and set a fast pace. I don’t want these specimens in these parts a moment longer than necessary. About six kilometres should give them a good workout.”

For a moment it looked as if the MPs were considering non-cooperation, then they saw the faces of their escorts and thought otherwise.

“Get the injured on board. I’ll hitch a ride with them.”

“You want your own escort, Major?”

Revell declined Dooley’s offer, and a dozen more from others as he got his kit together. While he was gathering and packing it he noticed Andrea watching. Already she had changed back into battledress. He was jamming the last items into a borrowed kit-bat when she sauntered over.

“You watched me, in the woods?”

“I hadn’t intended to, but when I saw what you were doing…”

“You saw everything?”

“Yes.”

“When, if you come back, I will do it again, for you to watch. You will enjoy that, as you enjoyed the last time.”

Her hand sought and found his erection. She squeezed it hard, trying to hurt, failing because of the thick folds of material. “Perhaps I will let you help me. Perhaps.”

He said nothing. There was nothing he could say. Did he hate her or love her? Shit, as if he didn’t have enough on his mind.

Try as he did though, full as he was of worries about the situation he’d got himself into, he couldn’t get her out of his thoughts. From the cab of the truck, as it pulled out, she was the last one he saw.

“I don’t like you, Major Revell.” The general leaned back in his chair, sucking hard on his pipe as he applied a match. “You shouldn’t be in the army. You should be out their wandering the Zone with one of those renegade bands. Orders mean nothing to you. Discipline means about the same. You boss, because you certainly don’t command, you boss a rag-tag outfit of misfits who wouldn’t last five minutes in a decent military unit.”

“A lot of soldiers wouldn’t last five minutes in my combat company, general.”

“Always the smart answer. Well let’s hear your smart answer to this one. How did we find out so fast that you were pulling a stunt? You’ll never guess. We got it from the Reds. That’s it, they spotted it on satellite before the 717th could report in themselves. Not nice finding that out from them. Spoiled the President’s day, sort of.”

“Are they breaking the truce?”

“What the hell do you care? You know why it spoiled the President’s day? Because he was on the hot line yesterday. Seems T Corp had put that file of yours and the films into a real special package. Yesterday they made a present of it to the Reds, with a note saying we’d show it to the up-coming Conference of Neutral Nations. The Reds don’t need any more bad press at the moment, especially not while those gents are in meeting. So we were going to hold it over them, get some sort of useful deal out of them. One that would be in our favour.”

“What sort of deal?”

“How the hell should I know. I don’t get invited to the White House that often. I’m told we’d have got something we wanted real bad. Would have got it too, whatever it was, only your raid screwed us up. The Russians are saying that if we forget those graves, they’ll forget the raid. Seems they weren’t that keen on that character Tarkovski, any more than we were. Word is, they’re going to take care of him, if you haven’t yet.”

“So in the eyes of everyone, our knocking about a KGB punishment battalion who are known to be guilty of mass murder and worse, is about the equivalent of their war crimes against a few thousand civilians. Men, women and children.”