James Rouch - Plague Bomb

‘We’re nearly through…’

Revell didn’t know who it was who had tempted providence, and there wasn’t time to find out, there was just long enough after Ripper shouted a warning to tense themselves for the impact and then an antitank rocket struck the personnel carrier’s rear.

It was like being in a bucket being hammered by a madman. The thunder of the detonation was followed instantly by the squealing of scraping metal as a track broke apart and gouged scoops of metal from the armour. Crabbing first to the left as several road wheels were blown off by the explosion, the Marder swerved hard right as large pieces of wreckage jammed the other track, then stopped.

‘Flame all around, then every one out.’ Through the prisms in the command cupola Revell saw billowing gouts of fire pour death into every side alley and nearby window, then as the last burst fell short with the tanks exhausted, all the hatches were thrown open and they went out shooting. As he jumped, he tossed a thermite grenade back inside and heard it crackle into white hot life as they ran across the street.

A grenade from Andrea’s launcher blew in the door of a house, another tossed through a window by Hyde made sure it was cleared and they raced inside, barging through its musty hall, hurdling a grinning corpse and stampeding out through the kitchen and across its once neat vegetable garden.

Boris and Dooley set up a rear guard as the others climbed iron railing around a school yard, and caught a Russian following them too closely. He went down like a felled tree with a bullet through his neck.

An attempt to establish a machine gun post at the upper window of an overlooking house fared no better. Andrea put her first grenade in neatly through it and the resulting explosion threw an arm onto a greenhouse roof.

Bones and skulls and scraps of clothing were scattered as they dashed through the sun-dried bodies on the playground. Clarence couldn’t bring himself to go that way, and skirting it, ran straight into a section of Russian infantry coming around the side of the school building.

There was a rage inside of him that begged to be let loose, and he unleashed it on the lieutenant who led them, putting a bullet into his stomach and then two more into the chests of the men to either side of him. At that range, with the tip of the Enfield’s barrel almost touching them, the dum-dum bullets burst their targets apart and showered those following with blood and tissue.

The rest of the section turned and fled, and more shots followed them, each with neat precision tearing a chunk of vertebrae from the base of a spine or shattering the back of a cranium. Last of them to die was a slant eyed Mongol whose thick short neck was almost severed by a mushrooming soft cored round. His body toppled among those of the children and stained their faded clothes and bleached bones with vivid gouts of fresh blood.

‘They’re giving up, they ain’t following.’ Every pace brought new pain to Ripper as the scar tissue forming over his burns was stretched and broken by the jarring strain of keeping up with the others.

Only a smattering of single shots chased them across the strip of ploughed land behind the school, and even that petered out as they reached the steep slope of the valley wall.

‘It is not that they are giving up,’ blood trickled from beneath the cuff of Boris’s smock and over his hand to drip from his fingers, ‘it is that we no longer matter to them. They have what they want.’ There was only a dull sensation of discomfort from the bullet wound in his forearm, and when he reached for a handful of pliant branches of a young pine to pull himself up a difficult section between craggy boulders, he was relieved to find he had the unimpaired use of the limb, there was no fracture. Until now he’d been frightened to use it, expecting agony and the confirmation of its being shattered when he did. Inside his sleeve there was a growing damp stickiness.

‘I told you we should not leave them.’ Andrea didn’t care that her words might carry to others besides the officer. ‘You should have let me finish them. The Russians will make much use of them, and you will have failed.’

There was no one else Revell would have let speak to him like that, certainly no one else in the squad. He resented what she said, and for the first time realized that having her close was not always going to be fun. Her way of reducing all situations to black and white was not his. In the church he’d been presented with a far more complex decision ‘than she realized. It was not a simple choice between eliminating a few worthless traitors or letting the Russians win. She offered him the option of permitting an atrocity, of being party to a war crime and that he couldn’t do. Damn it, that was what they were fighting.

All of them at various times complained at how the NATO forces were forced to fight clean while the communists used every dirty trick in the book plus many more of their own invention, but when it came to it, when they had the choice of doing things that way themselves, inevitably they balked.

This wasn’t the time or place he could explain all that too her, that’s if she’d even been prepared to try to understand, and so he said nothing, exaggerating the difficulty of the scree slope he was negotiating and pretending absorption with that to the exclusion of all else.

The ground rose fast, near vertical in places and within a short while they were looking down on the roofs of the village, spread in a ribbon along the floor of the valley. Twice they had to call a halt to enable Ripper and Boris to catch up, and both times took advantage of the respite to gulp air into their into their aching lungs.

‘Either I’m getting old, or we’re a good way above sea level.’ Dooley eased the straps of his pack and rifle as they started up again.

‘Bit of both I expect, but mostly it must be the old dames you go with sucking the life as well as your spunk out of you.’ Burke looked at Dooley struggling to climb a difficult patch, a slope littered with shale-like stone that slid away from beneath his feet as he placed them. ‘Help a bit if you got rid of that pack. It could have cost you your bloody life if it’d snagged as we bailed out. Still could if it drags you off this fucking mountain.’

‘There ain’t no way I’m chucking this.’ Dooley hitched its straps more securely onto his shoulders, sliding back some distance as he did. ‘This is my shitty future in here, where I go it goes.’

‘Shut your gabbing and climb.’ They were becoming spread out, and Revell recognized the danger of their becoming separated in this broken country. The journey back on foot was going to be hard and long, tackling it as individuals they would stand no chance, sticking together for mutual support they would.

A last effort and they made the crest, to find themselves on a knife edge ridge that fell away as steeply before them as the climb they’d just completed. Away into the distance stretched a succession of similar features, interspersed with hills that were little more than piles of rock dotted with sparse stands of fir and pine. They were as devoid of colour as the bare hills, leached of life by the poisonous yellow rain the Russians used in such concentrations.

Before starting the descent, Revell looked back at the church. All he could see was the tower and a part of the roof, none of the activity that he knew there would be around it. Beyond the compact confines of the small settlement, still stranded amid the flood waters like beached whales were the Russian tanks. Tiny figures waded about them, working without sign of urgency.

As he was about to give the order to move, Revell caught a glint of bright reflected light further down the valley, and then heard the beat of the gunships’ blades thrashing through the thin air. The sun flashed again from the domed canopies of the tandem cockpits, and as the chopper banked he saw the weapons operator hunch over his sights.