James Rouch - Overkill

‘You’re not in the same class.’ Clarence didn’t take his eye from the image intensifier fitted telescope of his Enforcer rifle, as he panned through the trees. ‘But you might absorb another lesson they could teach you, the need for silence. Now shut up.’

It was a timely warning. A line of slouching soldiers were ambling along a path through the trees. An NCO in charge was making regular, half-hearted-sounding threats, but they had no impression on the file of Russian infantry who neither straightened up nor smartened their pace. Without looking to right or left, with eyes only for the broken surface of the path, they passed within thirty feet of Hyde and the hastily concealed members of the squad. As they vanished into the distance the platoon leader’s gruff voice could once more be heard raised in unenthusiastic exhortation to his weary men, still apparently without effect.

Boris had been the first to take over, and was the last to emerge. ‘This whole area is full of Russians. I was challenged; I had to kill a sentry.’ Although already wiped clean he continuously rubbed handfuls of grass over his palms and between his fingers to rid them of the very last traces of blood. ‘It is alright, I hid his body.’

‘Have we got a lead on those mortars?’ Hyde displayed no interest in the fate of the unlucky Russian, or the trauma suffered by their deserter in having to kill a fellow countryman with his bare hands.

‘Yes. It is like always. There are several fired, pre-surveyed and ranged sites from which it is fired in random rotation. The nearest is only two hundred metres from here.’

‘Right, so we’ll set an ambush for them. Let’s go.’ Hyde knew he need add nothing more.

The men fell into single file, each taking the position in the order of march that by custom and practice had become his. Dooley was rear guard and for his size moved with surprising stealth as they came out from the trees and crossed a wide road between the wreckage of a burned-out ammunition convoy. He was just across when a scout car sped past, the strips of tread from its worn tyres making a rippling sound as they flailed the surface. He looked back once before following the others into the ruins of an apartment block. Another Russian platoon was plodding through the trees they’d just left. Now there was no doubting what Boris had said, there were enemy troops everywhere, and some were now behind them.

‘We must not wait any longer.’ Inga began to pack her camera equipment away. ‘The new demolition party that has arrived may not know that we are up here. If they blow the tower early…’

Revell had been dozing, but when he looked over the edge and saw the men far below beginning to stack drums of cable near the entrance, he understood the urgency.

In places the stairs had ceased to exist, destroyed by the same hits that had bitten great pieces from the tower’s external fabric. When they reached one of these sections they had to improvise, sometimes using the handrail, still secured to the wall, like a fireman’s pole, and once having to make a drop of fifteen feet to the next intact flight, easing themselves down until they were holding on by their fingertips and then carefully aiming their fall on to the narrow strip of bare concrete that was all that stood between them and the eventual oblivion of a three hundred foot plummet to the ground level.

It might have helped had the staircase been as dark as had the interior of the lift, but there was sufficient light from the fires and star shells coming in through the many rents in the wall for every danger to be graphically visible.

Several times Revell wondered at the girl’s coolness. Though she might be frightened at some of the risks they were forced to take, and only a fool would not have been, still she kept going, without any hesitation, any holding back. It was an impressive display of willpower, and seemed so out of keeping with the aura of, if not helpless, at least dependent, vulnerability and femininity, that it gave rise in his mind to a first enigma about her.

They made it to ground floor level with only minutes to spare. Two men who were working to connect the last of the charges looked up in utter astonishment when the pair walked from the service stairway and out past them.

‘Do you want to stay and see it go down? In a world full of destruction, it must be considered something special.’

‘You’re the something special I’m interested in right now.’ He almost cringed. Had that sounded as school boyish to her as it had to him? It was an agony, waiting for her reaction.

‘That was a nice thing to say. Then shall we go?’

Past the still smouldering wreck of the generator truck, the crater, the almost invisible dark stains where the guard and the first demolition crew had lain, they walked away from the tower, striking out in a direction that Revell hadn’t been before.

Their way took them through what must once have been a beautiful park. Most of the flowerbeds and displays had been ploughed over by shell fire, but those that had survived the violent transplant bloomed on and filled the air with scents that for a while washed from the senses the memory of smoke and cordite and death.

The tracks of a miniature railway had been caught in the general upheaval and now made fantastic loops high off the ground, still bound as parallel ribbons of steel by their remaining ties, just like the full-scale tracks that arched above so many bridges and embankments across the city.

Exhibition halls in the park had been reduced to no more than steelwork frames, revealing their bombed interiors to the world, and a glass-topped observation tower lay stretched full length, still largely intact thanks to its reinforced construction, and half buried in the lawns that had given before its plunging weight.

Inga’s apartment was on the second floor of a building that looked as if it had been struck by the full force of a battery of Katyushas. She led him up a staircase that was only a little better than the one in the TV tower. At its top (for although the building went on, the stairs did not), she opened a smoke-stained door and they stepped through into total darkness.

Revell stood waiting as a match flared behind him. That slight light made mad shadows and reflections dance about it and robbed him of the chance to get a first sneak preview of the room. Dark shapes chased along the walls, darted to the ceiling and then were lost as the light dimmed to nothing, but it was like the pause between tuning-up and the overture.

Civilisation burst upon him as an oil lamp was turned up full. He had forgotten that there were rooms with curtains and carpets, with furniture, with paintings, with tables, with ornaments… with all the things that people beyond the Zone took for granted. In a brief instant he came to understand the full meaning of that pat intellectual phrase, culture shock. It must be like this for an aborigine, seeing his first house, his first automobile. Shock was the only word that described the sensation. War had done more than rob him of some of his life, it had obscured his memories until trenches and shelters and filth and hunger seemed the norm.

‘You like it?’

There was puzzlement in her voice, and Revell snapped out of his stupor to search for nice things to say. As she went through to the kitchen to find glasses he wandered round the room, running his hand over the backs of the polished chairs and finding no rough edges, no embedded shrapnel, over the fabric covering of the couch and finding no tears, no patches.

‘How do you keep it like this?’

‘It’s not all mine, I have had to move twice. Once because of a Russian advance, once because of an unexploded bomb. I like it here, but I do not know how long I will be able to stay. Here,’ she handed him a glass brim full of amber liquid. ‘It is peach wine. The very last bottle I have. After this I shall have to try to get some of the terrible potato wine that is made here. I do not drink much, but sometimes I need one.’