James Rouch: Killing Ground

Cover illustration:

The T-72 employs the same armament, ammunition, and integrated fire control as the T-64. The low, rounded turret mounts a 125mm smooth bore gun with a carousel automatic loader mounted on the floor and rear wall of the turret. The 125mm gun common to all the T-72 models is capable of penetrating the M1 Abrams armour at a range of up to 1,000 meters. The more recent BK-27 HEAT round offers a triple-shaped charge warhead and increased penetration against conventional armors and ERA. The BK-29 round, with a hard penetrator in the nose is designed for use against reactive armor, and as an MP round has fragmentation effects. With three round natures (APFSDS-T, HEAT-MP, ATGMs) in the autoloader vs four, more antitank rounds would available for the higher rate of fire.

The infra-red searchlight on the T-72 is mounted on the right side of the main armament, versus on the left on the earlier T-64. The 1K13-49 sight is both night sight and ATGM launch sight. However, it cannot be used for both functions simultaneously. A variety of thermal sights is available. They include the Russian Agava-2, French SAGEM-produced ALIS and Namut sight from Peleng. Thermal gunner night sights are available which permit night launch of ATGMs.

I cried when I saw so many good things. The whole regiment went on an orgy of eating and drinking. Even the officers. When a detachment of the Commandants Service tried to stop us we turned our machine guns on them.

All the fuss about you guys in the infantry makes me sick. Where’d you be without me and my boys? I’ll tell you, chucking stones and sharpening sticks for spears, that’s where.

Some of our most important storage facilities inside the Zone are extremely vulnerable, following the latest Warpac advances. If a vital dump, such as the one at (censored) were to fall into their hands when their offensive operations had slackened due to materiel losses, it would be like a transfusion to them. We must make better provision for their defence now.

The flamethrower’s roar echoed back from the buildings around the square. For a moment it died away, and then the squirting yellow flame arced above the cobbles again. Its savage glare was reflected by the wet stones and illuminated the facades of the shattered stores and houses.

‘That should do it.’ Thorne slipped the wide straps from his shoulders and lowered the tanks to the ground. They were empty and rang hollow as he dropped the projector and hoses on top of them. ‘You know, that’s the first time I haven’t enjoyed using the bloody thing.’ Thirty meters away a growing fire crackled and lit his face with a ruddy glow.

In other corners of the square two more of the huge bonfires were already well alight and beginning to push the night back into the surrounding windowless ruins.

Retreating from the growing waves of heat, Burke looked critically at the stack of civilian corpses topping the untidy pile of timber. ‘Might not. The skinny ones are always difficult to burn, and there’re no fat civvies left in the Zone now.’

But even as he said it several of the mutilated corpses began to add their dripping body fats to the pyre’s rough fuel. As their blotched and bruised flesh roast and split further, the drops became streams that burned a vivid yellow, sharp contrast to the dark red flame curling from beneath.

Grouped around their patched and battle-scarred armoured personnel carriers, the rest of the company displayed no interest in so common a scene. Hunched beneath helmets and rain capes, their gruesome work complete, they awaited the order to re-board.

As the area became lighter it illuminated the exhausted, stress-lined faces of the men, and revealed that some who leaned against the shell-gouged hulls had their heads bowed and eyes closed in fitful sleep.

Major Revell and Sergeant Hyde stood a little distance away, beside a mud-spattered Volvo bus. They flanked a fussily dressed elderly German official who was making notes.

A young woman, haggard and dishevelled and clutching an ill-wrapped coughing baby, stammered names and addresses as she waited, last in the queue to board. She hesitated in her nervous recital as the administrator imperiously raised his hand to signal a halt while his painstaking writing tried to keep pace.

His slim silver pen was the only metallic object to catch the light in that tableau. The bus had long since lost the glamour and colourful livery of its earlier days. Evidence of its widely travelled pre-war past showed in the ghosts of old sign writing beneath a thin and heavily scratched layer of drab olive paint.

A row of faces pressed against the dirty windows of its interior. Tears made streaks down the panes but were lost against the beads of rain washing mud from their exterior.

‘Hold it, lady.’

Too surprised to resist immediately, the young mother hesitated as she made to climb aboard and just looked blankly at the tall black medic who had stopped her. Only when he reached into the bundle she held to expose a child’s arm, painfully thin and almost translucently white, did she try to recoil.

In a single well-practiced movement, Sampson wiped a swab over the tiny limb, pressed firmly but gently home the tip of a hypodermic, cleansed the area a second time and stepped back.

Numbed, frightened and confused, the woman made to board again. It was Revell who put out his hand to steady her when she threatened to slip from the worn step, after she’d shied from the sergeant’s offer of help.

Hyde moved away, averting his face. What would have been a face if the grafts and reconstructions had left him with more than mere openings for mouth, nose and eyes.

Above the sound of the rain and the flames came a new sound. Revell recognized the thunder of a Russian rocket barrage, 240mm judging by the powerful concussion of the distant overlapping detonations. They were getting uncomfortably close if they were able to employ such comparatively short-range weapons. It was doubtless such an onslaught that had devastated this hamlet. Now the enemy had switched their attention to some other modest collection of homes and businesses, again where the only claim to legitimacy as a target was that they were grouped about a crossroads.

‘You’d best get moving, Herr Klingenberg. It’s bad enough you’ve kept these civvies here to watch what we’ve been doing, without keeping them hanging about to wait for the Russkies’ artillery to sweep back this way.’ It was difficult to check a tight smile as Revell noticed the official abandon his slow, almost pompous manner and replace it with a twittering burst of nervous activity.

‘Ya, ya. I am going now.’ Klingenberg shouted to the bus driver, ‘Schnell, schnell.’

After several ineffectual stabs at a control, the driver had to haul himself, with obvious irritation, from his seat and kick the doors closed. As he resumed his place, started and gunned the engine, the clattering growl of the big diesel was almost drowned by the growing roar and crackle of the fires. That in its turn was smothered by a grief-stricken wail coming from within the bus.