James Rouch - Overkill

‘Here, Clarence. What was that word you used?’ Standing on the lowered ramp, Dooley watched the small motorboat struggling to tow them towards the dockside.

‘Ignominious.’

‘Yeah, that’s the word. That’s what this is, fucking ignominious.’ Dooley moved back inside to make way for the major and their NCO.

‘I wasn’t expecting masses of bunting and a band,’ Hyde surveyed the empty wharfs, ‘but even so, the welcoming committee is a bit thin on the ground.’

As the Iron Cow’s sharpened wraparound fender bumped the pockmarked stone, Revell reached for a set of steps and clambered up onto the dock. The motorboat crew cast off the towline and departed without a word or wave being exchanged, leaving the squad to make fast its own mooring lines.

Revell looked around. The only person in sight was a small boy, holding a cycle, and wearing a blue armband. Resting the machine against what was left of a railway wagon, he walked over.

‘You are in the wrong place. The convoy is to berth in the Zoll-kanal.’

‘We have no power, we can’t reach it, and we have no heavy cargo to unload. Here will have to do.’ He found it hard to believe, he was defending himself against what had the sound of criticism from a boy of twelve or thereabouts.

The lad thought a moment, then nodded sagely, as if conceding the argument and accepting the excuses. ‘It will do for the moment. I have been sent to guide you, but here, take these.’ He handed over a thin sheaf of pocketbook-sized flimsy pieces of paper. ‘In case you get lost, these are maps. You must avoid streets or areas marked in red.’

‘Why’s that?’ Dooley took a sheet.

‘You will find out. It need not concern you yet.’

‘We can’t leave our transport, she’s valuable, and there are some stores on board.’ Revell was finding it hard to handle the situation. The obvious impulse was to swipe the arrogant little bastard across the side of the head and then find an adult to talk to, but there weren’t any about. The boy’s next remark increased the strength of the urge to knock the cockiness out of him.

Glancing over the edge of the door, the lad took a long slow look at the HAPC. ‘I think it unlikely you could carry sufficient of anything in there to be of material use to us, but I will summon a guard unit.’ From a deep pocket in the oversized sports jacket he wore, he took a compact walkie-talkie, and spoke into it. ‘They will be here soon. Be ready to leave when they arrive.’

‘You want me to knock his block off, Major?’ Burke’s hand itched with the urge to cuff the kid. ‘Better not.’ Hyde indicated an approaching group wearing similar armbands. ‘Here come some of his mates.’

‘Shit,’ Dooley rubbed his eyes in disbelief, ‘is Hamburg being held by a division of shitty little munchkins?’

The average age of the members of the guard who now posted themselves along the wharf and on the roof of the hovercraft was only a year or so more than that of their guide.

In their ill-fitting clothes it was difficult for Hyde to gauge just to what degree the members of the youthful unit were suffering from malnutrition, but some mark of it was in their faces. Their eyes were dark ringed, sunken into their young faces. Only their faces weren’t young. War had aged them, individual and collective experiences had contrived to make them men before they had hardly begun to be boys. The casual but competent way in which they held captured Russian weapons betrayed long familiarity with them.

‘Where will our wagon be taken for repair?’ Burke was loath to leave the Iron Cow, they’d only just got her back after two long months in the workshops.

‘It will not be repaired.’ With undisguised disinterest the lad took another half-glance at the HAPC, hardly giving himself time to take in its battered appearance, the hundreds of bullet and shell scars on the scorched and mud-spattered armour. ‘If it has to be, then it will be taken to a secure place, but we’ve neither the manpower nor materials to repair it, or if it could be then the fuel to run it. We will strip it of its armament though, and put that to good use.’

The battle damaged remnant of the convoy was passing. Less than half the vessels that had started out had made it, and most that had were in sad condition. A fire blazed on the foredeck of a tug, and two of the five barges it still had in tow were riding low in the water. Several of the ships were listing, or down by the stern or bow, and nearly all had a row of sheet-draped forms on deck.

In the distance a high-pitched siren began to wail, and the sound was taken up by another close by.

‘We must be going. The Russians have not yet finished with the convoy.’ Pushing his cycle, the boy led Revel 1 and the squad away from the dockside.

As he shouldered his pack to follow, Hyde saw the youths left on guard tearing at the heaps of rubble with their bare hands as they fashioned improvised shelters against whatever it was that was coming.

Two minutes after they had left, as they picked their way between the raised rims of gaping craters, a pair of Soviet Su-20 ground attack jets screamed past overhead at a thousand feet, the clacking 30mm cannon in their wing roots leaving a row of smoke smudges in the sky behind them.

Immediately above the docks they released the entire load of their wing pylons and pulled up and away as the retarded cluster bombs split apart and disgorged and scattered a mass of individual bomb-lets.

There was no time to seek cover, the squad could only throw themselves to the ground and claw a hold on that against what they knew was coming.

The cluster munitions burst across the area. Those close enough for their seeker-heads to register the engine noises, exhaust emissions or movement of the convoy homed on that. Those that weren’t, or couldn’t manage the gross alteration in trajectory necessary, just fell and delivered their hollow-charge warheads on to whatever lay below.

Not even the still-shrieking sirens could blot out the whistling screech of the approaching bomb. Revell covered his head with his hands and willed his body, his every fibre, to pull in upon itself, to constrict and occupy the smallest possible space.

At the moment it seemed the rising shrill must bust their eardrums from their heads, the bomb impacted and the ground smacked up into their bodies and cradled faces. Fragments of concrete smashed down around them.

Beyond the line of warehouse roofs that hid it from them, thick smoke rose from the dock, but it was the fresh crater immediately in front of them that took Andrea’s attention. She knelt at its side and picked up a shred of metal, a part of the bomb’s miniature wings. ‘It did not go off.’

‘Just as bloody well. Any fucking closer and we’d be looking at holes that size in ourselves.’ Dooley stepped over the shallow depression. ‘I wonder what poor sod doing slave labour in a Commie munitions works we have to thank for that.’

‘Sure is going to be a lot of dodgy crap to clear up after this war is over, if it ever is.’ More cautiously than the big man, Ripper went around the new indent in the already heavily pockmarked surface.

‘Not as much as you might think.’ The boy rummaged among a precarious pile of debris. ‘We can find a use for this in Ivan’s Gift Shop.’

‘What the hell is Ivan’s Gift Shop?’ Burke watched the boy drive a length of angle-iron into a fissure, one of many, that radiated from the point of impact, and tie a piece of rag to its top.

‘You will find out, it…’

‘Yeah, we know… it need not concern us yet.’ Ripper jabbed the boy in the chest with an oily finger. ‘One more riddle, one more smart arse remark and I’ll hog tie you to the next dud that comes down. I’d rather have this map than your mouth.’