James Rouch - Killing Ground

Other voices joined Ripper’s drawl in protest and Dooley reluctantly backed off.

‘You miserable load of cruds. Don’t you ever tell me I haven’t got no soul again. Shit, I’ve got more feeling in my head than you’ve got in your little fingers.’ For a moment, at the back of Dooley’s mind there lurked the doubt that he’d got that a bit wrong, or at least not quite right. ‘Oh sod the lot of you. Someone sling me an empty kit bag then.’

Catching a bundle of frayed and stained canvas, Dooley crammed the cage into it. In the process he almost disappeared within a screeching cloud of flying plumage. With elaborate care he fastened the bundle to a broken tool rack on the hull’s exterior.

Sluggishly the tired hydraulics closed the ramp and sealed the troops within their armoured cocoon. With a bellow from holed exhausts and some misfiring, the old battle-worn APCs pulled out of the square, the last in the line starting off with a jerk as its towline tautened.

As they clanked and crunched over the rubble their passengers fell into an exhausted sleep. Only Dooley stayed awake. He stared at the spot where only a thin slab of aluminium armour separated him from his prize. For a moment the hell that was the Zone could be forgotten, and he smiled, to fall asleep with a look of smug satisfaction on his face.

They were too late, by just a matter of seconds. The bridge was blown even as they came in sight of it.

At first, for a few tantalizing moments, it had seemed as if the charges had failed in their work. Revell had urged their driver on, but even as Burke had floored the pedal without consideration for the surge of fuel consumption by the straining motor, the long pre-cast concrete structure had twisted, sagged and fallen to ruin in the broad churning river far below.

There was no time for the luxury of self-recrimination. With dawn only an our away Revell knew they had to find a crossing, to find shelter beneath the protecting umbrella of the main forces anti-aircraft defences. This side of the river they had no chance. Once light they would be unable to move by road, and on foot it would only be a matter of time before they were mopped up by Warpac recon units.

Even as the last massive chunks of steel-reinforced debris were plunging beneath the turbid waters, Revell was turning the column in a fresh direction.

The heavy overcast was holding back the morning, but it was growing perceptibly brighter when they topped a hill overlooking the river once more.

‘It hasn’t been blown, yet.’ Scanning the lattice steel structure, Hyde first used binoculars and then an image intensifier.

‘So? It is still of no use to us.’ Andrea sat beside the sergeant on the edge of the roof hatch. She leaned an arm on the barrel of the TOW launch tube and rested her cheek against the cold wet metal. ‘That is not a bridge. It is a long slaughterhouse.’

Revell hardly heard her. Barely a kilometre away, the bridge might as well have been a hundred. Its full length and the approach roads were choked with an unmoving jam of military and civilian transport. Tanks, APCs and armoured cars were inextricably mixed with every nationality and type of soft-skin transport, and between every one of them were locked masses of refugee carts. There were even one or two civilian motor vehicles, doubtless their gas tanks holding the last few dregs of carefully hoarded and precious fuel. But nothing was moving.

As he watched, Revell saw a pair of Hind gunships sweep the length of the stalled traffic with cannon and rocket fire. They took no evasive action during the run, not even to the extent of releasing decoy flares against AA missiles. The degree of their complacency was illustrated by the second machine even displaying its navigation lights.

Fires leaped from a score of locations and added their jet smoke to those already rising into the predawn light. A ruptured fuel tank flared a brief bubble of flame and a bursting tire made a small fountain of blazing rubber.

A single broken line of tracer curled toward the second gunship. Well-aimed, it was shrugged aside by the armoured belly of the machine. Turning tightly, the pair swept back and saturated with a storm of fire and steel the location from which the weak resistance had come.

Only a few hundred feet above the Russian helicopters a single MIG fighter flew top cover for them, sometimes lost to sight in the low cloud.

A gasoline tanker stalled in the centre of the bridge exploded and liquid fire poured toward the river far below. Ammunition aboard trucks close by began to detonate and made sparkling fountains of white, red and green.

Spreading a map on the wet metal of the hull top, Revell screwed up his eyes in the half light to trace a path with a grimy finger. ‘We’ve fuel for maybe another thirty kilometres, if we go easy on it. We’ll have to drop the cripple and pack everyone into the other three.’

Hyde craned over the major’s shoulder to look at the point he was indicating. ‘A railway bridge. What are the chances of it still being intact?’

‘Wish I knew.’ Revell refolded the map. ‘But it’s the only one we have a chance of reaching.’

Stretching her arms above her head, Andrea watched without real interest as the Hinds soared to skim the bottom of the clouds and then dived to commence another strafing run. She turned away as the gunships tore into and pounded to scrap a dozen more vehicles. Fresh fires erupted. ‘We will be crossing the front of the Russian advance. It is likely we will run into their reconnaissance units.’

‘Maybe.’ There was nothing else Revell could add.

‘We’ll be travelling by side roads.’ It was Hyde who found a crumb of comfort.

‘That country is rough; unless the Reds are trying to sneak around the side it’s not very likely we’ll encounter a main axis of their advance.’

‘Only one way to find out.’ Patting the anti-tank missile launch tube, Revell took a last glance at the bridge. ‘So let’s be on our way before those commie fliers get cheesed off with hammering wrecks and start looking for stragglers, like us.’

Bracing himself behind the major’s seat, Sergeant Hyde took out the map and examined the route the officer had chosen. In the dim light of the APCs interior, and with it swaying and jolting over the poor track roads, it took him a while to orient himself. He studied it for several minutes before an indistinct nagging doubt crystallised into coherent thought.

‘Doesn’t seem to have been a lot going on around here, not up until now.’ Revell almost let the point go as a chance remark, then had second thoughts and re-examined the area. He was surprised he hadn’t noticed the fact himself. It was further indication of just how tired he was.

While all of the remainder of the eighty square kilometres displayed by the map were covered in a mass of additional symbols, denoting old battlefields, dumps, contaminated areas and minefields, the area they were traversing was entirely free of such information.

‘Printing error?’ It hardly rang true, but Revell had to consider it, even as he dismissed it from his mind.

With a shake of his head Hyde discounted the idea. ‘I’ve never been this way before, but I’ve always had a feeling that it’s about where Paradise Valley should be.’

‘No such bloody place, Sarge.’ Driving gingerly to conserve fuel, Burke was for once able to take part in a conversation. His first in days, since the intercom had broken down. ‘That’s a bleeding fairy story, put about by staff officers and base barnacles, so we’ll live in hope and go on defending the bastards.’

With supreme delicacy and skill Burke nursed the GM V-6 over a rise without having to change down, and saved another spoonful of diesel. ‘Hell, Sarge, you don’t believe those stories do you? They’ve been going the rounds as long as the Zone has been in existence.’