James Rouch - Sky Strike

‘Hell, don’t be stopping now.’ Ripper looked around at the others, expecting the same reaction from them as their driver slammed on the brakes and slewed the vehicle to a sharp stop then turned off the engine.

Pushing his head up into the turret, Revell slowly cranked it round to take a look at their situation. Their driver had achieved the near impossible, found them a place of concealment in that featureless terrain.

Under cover of the smoke, Burke had parked them between a pair of damaged armoured personnel carriers: on one side a West German Marder, on the other an Ml 13 with Canadian markings. The little group of which they formed the, hopefully, anonymous centrepiece was among a concentration of twenty or more other similar wrecks.

‘Shit, what do we do now. Wait for them to fry us?’ Shifting position, Ripper tried to move nearer an escape hatch.

‘If they do, it will not be yet’ With nothing to do while Cline distrustfully worked the radio single-handed, Boris alone found time for the young American. ‘The gunship will for the moment have lost us among the battlefield litter. If it is a recent model, one of those that has been pared of sophisticated equipment in order that the Communists might indulge their love of numbers above all else, then there is a chance it may not find us before it is forced to break off.’

‘We’ll know soon.’ Stopped further back, and driven in among the gutted remains of a convoy, Revell was relieved to see that the Land-Rover seemed to have entirely escaped the notice of the gunship, which was continuing to beat back and forth above them. He turned his full attention back to it, in time to see it launch one of its four wire-guided antitank missiles.

By the flare at the base of its tail, Revell was able to track the fat-bodied rocket and saw its devastating detonation against the hulk of a burned-out Luch eight-wheeled armoured car. Already leeched by earlier fires of everything combustible, there was no chance that the strike would satisfy the chopper’s weapons officer. Without spotting a fire he would know he had not hit his target.

Twice more it circled, and at the end of each turn made a pass over the battlefield and sent down another missile; but lacking the ability to distinguish the live target from the wrecks, only succeeded hi further demolishing a pair of already unsalvageable armoured ambulances.

‘He’ll get tired of pissing about and bugger off in a minute.’ Lounging back in his seat, Burke jumped violently as a cannon shell exploded against the roof above his head.

In frustration the helicopter crew opened a near continuous fire with their gatling-type fixed armament. The chin-turret mounted weapon sent torrents of shells towards the ground; between bursts they released the last of the 57mm unguided rockets, most of which did no more than turn over ground that had already been churned to a fine filth by explosives.

‘The bastard is trying to flush us out.’ Dooley made a great show of nonchalantly cleaning his nails with the tip of his bayonet, but spoiled the effect when even he jumped as another round disintegrated on the turret top, and sliced into the tip of a finger. ‘If that fucker runs out of gas and has to land, I’ll fucking have him.’ He squeezed the base of the finger until its tip went pink then red, and a large bead of dark blood rose from the deep cut.

They listened as the helicopter circled once more, growing fainter as it did so, then at the moment the beat of its motors was on the threshold of their hearing, it began to grow louder, and louder.

‘I think he’s having one last go.’ Revell watched its head-on approach, saw its last anti-tank missile spurt from its rail, underslung from the end pylon on the starboard stub wing, saw the light glint briefly on the wires unreeling behind it.

This time he couldn’t see the tail flare, only the dark outline of the rocket against the shimmer of its exhaust heat. It took him an instant to realise why the view was so different from those before. He was seeing the warhead not as it homed in on some other target, but as it came at them.

There was no other action he could take. Shouting a warning he dropped to the floor of the compartment and huddled close to it, tucking his head into the crook of his arm.

A giant hammer blow shook the eight-wheeler as the Ml 13 alongside took the full force of a direct hit by the powerful warhead and was moved bodily sideways to crash into the APC. The fireball enveloped all three vehicles and their every external fitting was ripped off by the massive blast.

Feeling the sudden roasting heat on his back, Revell looked up. All trace of the turret had gone. It had been plucked out neatly, leaving just the ball race and part of the traverse mechanism.

White-hot shafts of molten explosive and metal had sought out every corner of the M113, and discovered a still intact fuel tank. Raised instantly to its flashpoint as it gushed from the leaking container, the fuel now fed a roaring furnace that licked over the squad’s partially roofless transport.

Using the top hatches was out of the question, a moment’s exposure to the flames would have incinerated them, and the side doors opened only a fraction before making contact with the wrecks between which they were parked.

Flickering tongues of red and yellow played past Burke’s vision port as he crunched the APC into gear to drive it out from the clutches of the trap. He pushed the power higher and higher as the machine strained to escape the vice-like hold of the wrecks between which it was now so tightly held. He tried reverse, and the hope the few inches of movement brought was immediately dashed as the vehicle locked solid once again.

The air was becoming unbreathable, and the luxury interior fittings that until now had added a welcome touch of comfort to the usually spartan interior, became an added danger as their varnished finish or foam filling began to heat up, and give off strong fumes.

Packs stowed against the wall licked by the adjoining fires began to smoulder and had to be tossed out through the open roof, some of them to add their content to the fires.

Sergeant Hyde could feel his throat closing, could feel it being constricted by the rasping bite of the poison-filled, oxygen-leeched air. He’d been through this once before and had escaped the flames, though at the terrible cost his deep-burned face revealed: but having cheated the fires once, he wasn’t about to let them get him now.

Drawing the pins from the two grenades he’d saved, he reached up until the skin of his hands was being peeled by the fire flaring over the roof, then dropped the steel-wrapped explosive down the carrier’s side.

‘Forward, hard forward.’

Only half-hearing the NCO’s order, Burke was already shifted back to first, and as he floored the accelerator two explosions blended into one beside the hull.

Like an animal freed from a trap, the APC bounded forward as the force of the detonations pushed the walls of armour apart, but they were taking some of the fire with them. Two of the huge centre tyres were alight and from each spun blobs of burning rubber and shreds of tread. Passage through a series of puddles failed to quench the twin blazes, the clinging mud peeling away with the softened rubber.

In a last desperate attempt Burke took the APC across the road and on to a patch of flat ground covered with a carpet of low green moss-like plants. Cascades of stinking slime and foul, brown water rose higher than the vehicle’s roof as it plunged across the flood. Broken crescents of steel mesh-reinforced concrete crunched under the steaming tyres as they rode over the fragments of the bomb-shattered sewage pipe.

The raw effluent extinguished the flames but brought a torrent of obscene condemnation down on Burke as he steered them back on to the road. Much of the filth thrown up by their wild progress had found its way in, and the stink of the cordite had been replaced by another stench more powerful and more obnoxious.