James Rouch - Killing Ground

Hauling himself to his feet, Sampson tentatively felt the large contusion at the base of the back of his neck. He knuckled his eyes to clear them of double vision. Gathering himself to take over from Burke, opening Boris’s jacket and cutting away his undershirt to examine the tight cluster of exit wounds below his left shoulder. ‘They grabbed him on the way in. The stupid little guy was so scared he called out in his own language. Those animals started on him without warning. I tried to stop them and they must have swiped me a hard one from behind. They weren’t even questioning him. It was like it was normal practice, just started cutting him.’

There was a rattle of M60 fire from the corridor. Revell looked around the room. The smoke and dust were clearing. It looked like a charnel house. One of the attackers was still moving, and he crushed his boot down hard on a hand that was too near a discarded automatic for comfort. Looking up at him, the Russian tried to spit, but succeeded only in dribbling. It was an effort that proved fatal. Somewhere inside him a blood vessel ruptured and filled his throat to drown him.

The scene in the room was overwhelming. Several of the wounded had been trampled or hit by fragments or ricochets.

‘I’ll send you some help.’ Revell got no reply. ‘Old William and some other wounded are in the passageway.’

‘Okay.’ Sampson set upright a drip that had been knocked over, and hauled the corpse of a Spetsnaz off the girl with the head wound. ‘I’ll be there in a moment. Hell and shit! I thought I’d seen everything in the Zone, but this is just plain horrible. Why the hell do we go on doing this?’

‘To stay alive.’ Revell had seen enough; he started to leave.

‘You call this living?’ Sampson picked up the body of a girl. The side of her head had been blown away and white brain matter dripped from her shattered skull. ‘This is fucking butchery.’

Revell had no reply. On his way out he checked Dooley. Old William sat beside him, cradling an M16 and grinning a toothless grin. He made his customary nod at the major.

‘Added a few more to the collection.’ Dooley patted the M60. ‘Three more and I can send them off and get a set of storage jars.’

There were at least eight bodies lying half inside the postern doorway. Wisps of smoke rose from tracer lodged in them.

Mounting the cellar steps, Revell crossed the ground floor, past the row of dead whose numbers would shortly be swollen. Already those killed by the blast were being hauled aside to join them. Andrea was helping, using one hand.

He would have sent her down to be attended to, but she studiously ignored him, and he passed on without comment.

There was sporadic incoming artillery fire, but it was arriving at predictable one-minute intervals, indicating that it was an East German battery employed. Though the air was full of the dust and smoke they pounded from the ruins, after the cellars it tasted clean and wholesome.

It was tempting to take advantage of the set intervals to take a shortcut across the rubble, but instinct made Revell choose the safety of the more difficult route under cover. That saved his life, when a twin-barrelled 30mm flak tank blasted the top of the ruins with a thirty-round burst.

On the far side of the valley another smokescreen was forming. Out of range, another attempt was being made to breach the minefield. There were comforting reports of explosions to indicate that the work was going slowly or badly.

Voke was fussing with the sterile pad inside the shoulder of his jacket, but stopped when Revell came into the dugout. ‘You have noticed the timing of the shells?’ He nodded knowingly to himself. ‘East Germans, always so precise. Their employment against us would explain why there have been no chemical rounds. The Russians do not trust them with them, since that time when a whole regiment tried to defect to the West, after hitting the Russian divisions to either side of them with Sarin and VX.’

‘Not many of them made it though, did they?’

‘True, the Reds bombed them to pieces as they crossed the Zone. But at least when we fight them it is one less factor to worry about.’ Voke grinned, glanced at his watch and held his helmet down hard as a 155mm shell crashed into the wall below their position. ‘Right on time.’

‘I think we’re going to have to blow the dump. They’ll be through into the valley by tomorrow morning.’ It was bitter for Revell to have to admit that defeat, but he had to be realistic. At least he would have the satisfaction of blowing apart the Russian’s prize even as they reached for it.

‘There is a problem, Major.’ Voke was apologetic. ‘I have tested the circuit, and there appears to be a slight fault.’

‘How slight is slight?’

Sweeping his arms wide and shrugging in a resigned gesture, Voke was no longer smiling. ‘The link was deeply buried, and was still working after the castle fell, but it is not now. I think it would be unlikely we could trace the fault; it could be anywhere between here and the complex.’

‘Shit.’ Gauging the distances involved, Revell estimated the nearest of the dumps would just be within range of their TOW missiles.

He was suddenly aware of Andrea by his side. Her wrist was bandaged and splinted. Reading his mind once again, she handed him a laser rangefinder.

The reading was three thousand six hundred meters. ‘There’ll be a bit of wire to spare.’

Voke shook his head. ‘The installation is hardened. With what we have I do not believe we could penetrate several meters of earth and then a meter of steel-reinforced concrete. And in any event, the munitions and fuel are on the far side. A direct hit anywhere else would do no more than very localized damage.’

Revell sat back and thought about it. His eyes met Andrea’s. There was no expression in hers. For the first time he could recall, he felt no wave of sympathy for her, as he invariably had when she’d been injured in the past.

‘Can it be done manually, from down there?’

‘I was afraid you would ask that, Major.’ Despite his words, Voke’s smile had returned. ‘The answer is yes. There is such an emergency system. When it was installed a joker hung on it a notice saying ‘suicide switch.’ There would be little chance of getting clear.’

‘We don’t have a choice.’ For Revell now there was a lot of planning to be done. ‘It’ll take the Reds the best part of the night to break through into the valley. By then we should be long gone, most of us. A small stay-behind group will have to blow the dumps at the last moment. Once they go up all hell will break loose. They’ll know we’ve done a runner.’

An airburst detonated overhead and chunks of shell-casing drummed against the roof of the strongpoint.

Brushing dust from his shoulder, Voke winced as the movement aggravated his wound. ‘If you are taking the wounded with you then you will need as long a head start as possible.’

Andrea looked up at the words. ‘It would be madness to burden the escape group with wounded.’ She glanced at her wrist. ‘With the more serious cases, that is…’

‘We are not leaving anyone behind; you know what they can expect at the hands of the Russians. This unit has never left wounded to fall into their murdering hands.’

‘I’m telling you, Major-Revell, sir, that it don’t matter what you say – it can’t be done.’

Forcing down his instinctive response to the medic’s insubordination, Revell waited for the explanation, drumming his forefinger against the stock of his shotgun.

‘There’s two down there with head wounds who’ll die if we try to move them, three with open chest wounds who’ll die when we move them, three real bad gut wounds who won’t make it any distance at all, a double amputee who’s hanging on by a thread and eight cases of multiple fractures of the hip and leg who are going to be hell to move. And that’s not counting all the walking wounded who will either need help, like Ripper, or who are in no state to give a hand with the others, like the lieutenant here, or Andrea.’