James Rouch - Plague Bomb

She didn’t answer, but walked away, to sit by Boris as he set about boiling water on a small field stove he had scrounged the use of from the young conscript crew of the West German recovery vehicle. Squatting on a wheel blasted from a nearby Mercedes six-wheeler she cradled her grenade discharger fitted Ml6, her finger hooked casually around the trigger.

Her proximity obviously made the Russian nervous. It took him several attempts before he succeeded in getting the unfamiliar equipment to function correctly, and twice his fumblings almost upset the water.

Hyde had seen her have that effect on others; but then she had some effect on everyone she came in contact with. Among men it varied from manifestations of lust to abject fear, and sometimes both within the space of seconds.

With women the band of emotive reaction was not as broad, but was within it, if anything, even more pronounced. It was at moments like this, as Hyde caught a good view of her beautiful profile, as even the bulky equipment festooned combat outfit failed to entirely conceal her superb figure, that he could understand their officer’s obsession with her. Not that she had ever done anything to encourage the major, the reverse in fact, but the American had fallen in a big way. There were times when it was beginning to have a detrimental effect on the unit’s efficiency.

‘I been thinking…’

‘Thought I could smell burning.’ Ignoring the sapper’s interruption, Dooley went on, ‘…you know I reckon we could have a worse job than this.’ He grinned and waited for the inevitable response from the expected direction, and wasn’t disappointed.

Conscious of being older than the others, Burke had begun to see himself as a father figure. With the pronouncements he made on any and every subject being for the most part ignored by his companions, he’d come to see their silence as unquestioning acceptance of his wisdom, and expected such as his due. Dooley’s disagreement with his assessment of-their task’s lowly status was not well received and he set about unintentionally providing yet more ammunition for the big man’s lumbering wit.

‘Tell me then, go on, tell me. Here we are, stuck miles forward of our own lines, in an area where we know there’s a commie armoured battle group operating,’ sweeping his arms wide he indicated the ambushed and shattered re-supply column, ‘where we could get clobbered ourselves at any moment, and have nothing bigger than a bloody grenade to hit back with, here we are hauling wrecks and shovelling shit. You think you can come up with something worse?’

‘Course I can. For a start, we could be ten miles east of here.’

‘So what’s so kinda special about that chunk of the Zone. Seems to me that one piece of this godforsaken land is pretty much the same as any other.’ Under cover of the squad’s interest in the baiting of their driver, Ripper had rolled and lit a joint. Taking a series of quick draws before extinguishing it and adding it to his meagre stock, he saw their sergeant watching him, and almost dropped the tin as he replaced it in his pocket.

‘That’s where the contamination starts.’ Clarence knew, like he knew everything there was to know about the Zone.

‘A year back the communists had a lot of trouble with refugees in that area, too many of them for a start, so word was sent out that they were to be dealt with, reduced to manageable numbers. The local commander must have been short of men and ammunition for his artillery, but he did have two dumps he hadn’t used until them, so he emptied them, threw the whole lot into the camps and at any civvies who got in the way. We know that one of the dumps held chemical weapons, nerve gas shells, defoliants, toxins, you name it…’

‘And the other?’

‘No one has any idea, at least no one in the west. Must have been batches of experimental weapons. Inside of a week just about every disease you can name, and a lot that haven’t even got names yet, was killing the civilians in the hundreds of thousands, All we could do was cordon the sector, treat the few who made it to our side.’

‘I never read anything about it in the press back home, you sure you got your facts right? Since I’ve been with your crowd, I’ve heard some awful tall tales.’

‘And spun a few yourself.’ Hyde tapped the medical kit making a prominent bulge in a readily accessible pocket in his jacket. ‘It’s true enough, we were issued with these just after it started. Why it never made the papers God only knows. Probably because we’re not so slick at manipulating the world’s press, or perhaps some boot licking toady in the British foreign office thought it might upset the Russians, make the negotiated peace that much harder.’

‘The only thing that happened far as I can see,’ Burke thought it time he restored some of his authority, ‘is that we got turned into ruddy pincushions by all those booster shots we started having. Not that I’ve got any faith in the damned things working, it must be like a bloody germ soup in there. You won’t catch me going near the place. If the medics want those injections given field trials they can send some other mug, I won’t even go and have a peep over the perimeter wire.’

‘It ain’t right, leaving good land to rot; why don’t somebody have a go at it with napalm, or phosphorus, clean it up.’

With Burke retreating to a quiet spot to drink his tea, Dooley was happy to shift his attention to Ripper. ‘Because it’d take forever. We’re not talking about a chunk of land the size of a football field, it’d J>e like trying to sterilize a couple of decent sized counties.’

A thousand feet overhead a pilotless sky-spy droned for a while in large circles, chased by lines of flashing orange tracer from the ARV’s anti-aircraft machinegun. None of Hyde’s squad made any move to copy the aggression and, unharmed, the remotely controlled miniature aircraft went on its way.

‘Waste of ammo.’ With casual interest Hyde tracked the Russian craft, noticing how rarely the tracer came within even a hundred feet of the small camera equipped plane. ‘On a live firing range back home I watched a whole battalion of armour take turns to have a go at one of those things. For an hour, on and off, it whizzed about sounding like an amplified dentist’s drill. They all missed it.’

‘If the major doesn’t get us off this crappy job, and soon, I’ll be popping off at the fucking things myself, just to relieve the boredom. Come to that, I’ll have a go at anything that beats the monotony of trotting about this truck graveyard.’ Pulling a face as he tasted his drink and realized it was coffee, Dooley slung it away. ‘Are we out of the decent stuff again? You know I can’t stand this old ladies brew.’

‘Heck, now I just can’t figure that at all.’ Taking the precaution of stepping beyond Dooley’s reach, Ripper displayed his pale green teeth in an ingratiating smile. ‘From what I hear it kinda seems as how you find the old ladies themselves pretty tasty.’

Also expecting retaliation, but far enough away to not to have to take avoiding action himself, Burke waited and watched for it to happen, then swore loud and long as a battle-scarred armoured vehicle came clattering down the road toward them, to provide a distraction and diversion. ‘Bloody hell, I thought I’d seen everything this war had to offer.’

The last to do so, even Clarence got to his feet to witness the approach of the Marder personnel carrier. ‘What on earth is keeping that ancient wreck moving? It looks as if it’s spent the last five years as a target on the ranges.’

Many of the vehicle’s rubber track pads had been worn to pitted wafer-thin shreds, many had gone altogether, and the racket made by the bare metal thrashing the road surface and squealing over the distorted and unlubricated return rollers almost matched that from its rusty and holed exhaust.