James Rouch - Overkill

He was quite mad. Sat here on his own he had gone quietly insane. Hyde left him to his wild theory. As he went, the man was taking a small piece of greyish bread from a dirty cloth and chewing on a corner of it. He splashed his feet in the sewage and watched the slow-motion rise of the bubbles about him. The laugh followed the NCO as he negotiated the route back to the car park and into the open street.

‘…No, honest, my great uncle Frank, he worked in the sewers most of his life, said it never did him any harm, even claimed it were good for him.’ Ripper took in all the disbelieving faces around him. ‘Hell, you guys don’t ever believe anything I tell you. I ain’t kidding, forty years he worked down the sewers, he’d still be working down there if he hadn’t broke his watch.’

There was suspicion written large in Dooley’s expression. ‘I’m going to regret this. What’s breaking his watch got to do with it?’

‘Everything. See, he were down there doing overtime on a Saturday night and he kinda lost track. He sorta got caught when the commercials came on.’

‘Leave him, Dooley.’ Revell stopped him from delivering a second pile driver blow to the top of Ripper’s helmet. ‘One day he’ll choke on his own lies.’ ‘Only if I don’t choke him first.’

‘I said forget it, Dooley.’

‘Forgotten, Major, whatever it was.’ Grinning, Dooley was very pleased with himself at having got in the last word, until the butt of an assault shotgun landed between his shoulder blades and sent him reeling forward to sprawl on his hands and knees.

‘Anything else to say?’

Dooley took the point, he shook his head. As they scrambled over a pile of masonry from a wall that had collapsed across the road, Revell saw that the girl was watching him. He would have given anything to be able to read what was in her mind, know what she thought of him. Andrea had not attached herself to anyone since Libby had deserted.* If she was going to, and on past form she would, he could only hope it would be him. He had never been able to determine what it was that guided her choice, so it was no good putting on an act, he could only be himself.

Be himself. That was a laugh, what commander in wartime could ever be himself. Everything he did was an act, for himself, for others. The war was his play, the Zone his scene, Hamburg the set. At times it all seemed unreal, but the danger and sometimes the pain helped bring reality.

A salvo of heavy mortar bombs blasted buildings away to their right, starting a fire among the upper floors of two. Molten metal and glass dripped in cascades down their facades as the evening breezes fanned the flames.

Caught by the draught a spark flew and landed on Revell’s cheek. The ember bleached a blister into his sunburnt skin, and reality was restored with a vengeance.

With the defection of General Shpagin, who was Commandant KGB Forces East Germany at the outbreak of war, a more accurate picture is emerging of the last days of the NATO troops in the city. Until now the only complete version of events has been the official Soviet account and that has conflicted on many points with information gained from radio intercepts at the time. The Soviet line has always been that mopping up was completed on the third day. General Shpagin states that elements of the American 3/6th Infantry, with a self-propelled howitzer of C Battery, 94th Artillery, and an M60 tank of the HQ platoon, 40th Armoured, were still tying down large numbers of Russian troops on the twenty-second day. In the British Sector men from 247 Provost Company and 229 Signals Company held out in the Olympic stadium until the afternoon of the twenty-eighth, after the British HQ nearby, in which they’d previously barricaded themselves, had been set on fire by an air attack. General Shpagin has told his British interrogators that all Allied prisoners, including wounded, were executed on the direct orders of the Soviet President. Also that Allied civilians who were rounded up after the city fell were not sent to camps on the Black Sea, as the Soviet press announced, but to the closed city of Gorky where many have died of disease and malnutrition while working as slave labour. Large numbers were killed during, and executed after, an abortive rebellion in the camps, made in protest at the harsh treatment. At present General Shpagin is helping compile a list of Soviet officers, officials and Communist Party members who will later be tried for war crimes. It now appears that the stubborn resistance by the NATO forces in West Berlin was a major contributory factor in the breakdown of the Warsaw Pact advance into Western Europe at the outbreak of war. Outnumbered ten to one, the NATO garrison prevented the Russians from redeploying over 90,000 troops, with armour, who could have been used to fill the gaps left by mutinies among the front-line East German and Polish units. Only the abandonment of their neutrality by the French, allowing Russian troops to pass through their sector and attack the lightly defended British flank, prevented the NATO Berlin Field Force from holding out much longer and possibly changing the whole course of the war. Attempts by the French government to suppress, and by the French press to discredit, the general’s statements, have failed to stem the rising tide of anger in that country, and across the world, at the betrayal. Allegations that the decision was made by the French commander in Berlin have been strenuously denied by the officer concerned, and cabinet papers that have been ‘leaked’ strongly suggest that in fact the course was decided on at the very highest level.

‘Fucking students are a pain in the arse.’ Burke unslung his rifle and took a pick-handle in its place. ‘Naive lot of silly sods. Like bloody sponges they are, soak ‘em in a silly idea like Marxism and they suck it in without thinking, then they keep dribbling it over everyone else.’

‘You finished?’ Revell gave his assault shotgun into the care of a civilian police officer, but declined to take one of the clubs. ‘Right, they’ve planted the flag on the roof. The police want it down before it gets light and the city wakes up and thinks it’s been taken.’

‘Are any of the shits still up there?’ Ripper twirled the pick-handle like a baton.

‘Could be. We’ll know soon enough.’

As they walked towards the entrance Revell noticed a tall blonde standing half in the shadows across the street. She wore a light-meter slung from a cord around her neck and held a complex long-lensed camera. Revell swore to himself as an electronic flash ruined the night vision he’d been so careful to preserve. Everywhere he looked all he could see was a milky echo of that searing white light.

The main door was barricaded, and the major led the squad round the side of the building to an emergency exit. It was locked, but two ounces of plastic explosive dealt with that and it swung open at a touch when Revell tried it.

A service stairway took them up two floors before they came upon the obstruction. Filling the whole of a landing were Formica-covered dining-room tables and metal-framed chairs. Tight packed together they were a more complete barrier than a tangle of barbed wire.

‘It would be easier to find another way.’ Giving a chair leg an exploratory tug, Boris succeeded only in wedging the whole mass more firmly together.

‘He’s right.’ Clarence had already come to that conclusion. ‘Use a small charge and the heap will settle back pretty much as it is. Tackle it with sufficient to tear the stuff apart and there’s a fair chance we’ll bring down this whole wing.’

Ripper made his contribution while the major was making his own inspection. ‘I guess what we really need is a bulldozer.’ ‘Or a dozy bull.’ Revell beckoned Dooley forward. ‘Get at it.’