James Rouch - Sky Strike

‘I cannot raise any of the other groups, Major.’ Before reporting that fact, Boris had taken the precaution of checking that the radio was working perfectly. Forestalling the officer’s inevitable question.

‘Probably too busy to answer, that’s all. Keep trying.’ A burst of machine gun fire came in through the window above Revell’s head, and he hunched up to protect himself from the shards of glass that rained on to his helmet and shoulders. ‘How’s the work going? I want us out of here.’

Having used his bayonet to prise off the access panels beneath the room-wide diagrammatic train indicator board, Libby was placing lumps of explosive against the thick, variously coloured, multi-stranded cable runs threading their way through the floor. Fuse wire linked them to those already set beneath the switch-laden control console. ‘Almost finished here.’ Gathering the wires together, he began to lead them towards the stairs. ‘I’ve saved some for those racks in the room below. When this lot goes they won’t be controlling any more trains from here, not for a long time. Be easier to start fresh than unscramble the fry-up I’m planning.’

All the time he’d been working, Libby had been conscious of the fact that the East German cabin staff were watching his every move. One of them, he couldn’t tell which, but thought it was the oldest of the men, had urinated. A yellow puddle spread sluggishly over the boot-imprinted floor.

‘These dumb buggers are shit scared.’ dine stood over the prisoners, his rifle aimed at each in turn.

‘So would I be if I were them.’ Stripping the insulation from the ends of the wires, Libby started splicing them together. ‘Fifteen minutes ago the poor sods were non-combatants in cosy reserved jobs, now they’re front line cannon fodder and probably think we intend to leave them here when we blow this lot.’ A thought struck him, and he glanced at Revell. Will we?’

‘No, the orders say minimum civilian casualties. We’ll herd them clear before we go.’

Burke clumped up the stairs, not coming all the way into the room, but stopping about halfway, so that his face was on a level with the floor of the control room. He ducked as a spent cannon shell crashed through the last intact pane, pounded a dent into the top of the indicator board and bounced to the floor, to spin to a stop inches from his nose. ‘This place is a ruddy death trap. How soon before we get out? I’d rather take me chances in the open.’

A heavy explosion rocked the cabin, sending a hail of metallic debris clanging off the outside walls, and tumbling Burke back down the stairs. As the thunder of the shock wave passed, his aggrieved voice floated up to the control room, his words bracketed by obscenities.

‘And then again, maybe not.’

‘Didn’t get far, did they?’ As Ripper watched from behind the cover of the pile of prefabricated gantry sections, one of the East German signal cabin staff staggered to his feet, trying ineffectually to stem the gush of blood from the stump of his left arm. He tottered a few steps away from the fragment-slashed and mutilated bodies of his companions, violently spewed an arc of bright red blood and collapsed!

‘Perhaps they are better off like that.’ Andrea had seen the grenade burst among the group. Lobbed by an unseen hand from behind a hopper wagon, it had exploded at shoulder height, tearing them apart. An eyeless head decorated the top of a junction box and sightlessly contemplated her disembowelled torso through broken spectacles. ‘Better that than be rounded up by the KGB after this is over. Their involvement would have been assumed automatically. Their deaths would have been as bloody but not as swift.’

The rapid series of explosions had cracked the walls of the signal cabin, and from the long fissures and its roofless top came flames of every colour as cables and electrical components burned, the copper and plastics running molten down the concrete.

‘Don’t bother watching for the second wave.’ Revell knuckled his eyes in an attempt to counteract the itching caused by the sulphurous smoke. ‘They must have seen the beating we took, sustained heavy losses themselves and turned back. We’re on our own, and the word is that includes finding our own transport home.’

‘Has Boris been able to make contact with any of the other groups?’ The reams of figures that had been thrown at them during the briefings came back to Hyde. ‘We can’t be the only assault group on the ground. There were thirty choppers in the first wave, that’s better than three-hundred and sixty men.’

‘Maybe there’s a few others milling about down here, but listening to Sky Control, and reading between the lines, I’d say we made one of the better landings.’

‘Is there to be no pick-up? We are stranded here?’

Revell could read the fear in Boris’s face. The Russian had good cause to be terrified. For the others in the squad, if they were taken prisoner, it would be a quick bullet in the back of the neck, or if they were lucky, if that was luck, six or seven months of forced labour in a Soviet mine or quarry before they died of malnutrition and mistreatment. For the Russian deserter it would be worse: given the skilful barbarity of the Communists, immeasurably worse.

‘Right first time.’ Having stripped the protective seals from the tube ends of an M72 rocket launcher, Dooley extended it and flipped up the sights. ‘You saw the shit we came through, and then they were just warming up. They’ll be thoroughly awake now. Those flak and missile battery crews would just love another crack at our whirlybirds.’

‘I wasn’t expecting this to be a milk run, but Christ…’ Replying to a short burst of submachine gun fire from the vicinity of a burning refrigerated wagon, Burke was gratified to see a brown-clad body topple forward and start to steam in the heat of the conflagration close by…someone, somewhere has screwed us good and proper. We flew over a couple of complete air defence regiments at least. How come they hadn’t been spotted and the warning passed on to us? I tell you, it’s like fucking Arnhem all over again.

‘Forget the history lesson, though maybe for you it ain’t history, you’re old enough to have been there: what I want to know is where do we go from here, and how soon?’ Putting down the launcher, Dooley used the M60 to send a spray of bullets towards the roof of a distant warehouse ‘Shit, missed the bastard.’

Taking a little longer to aim, and firing only a single shot from his Enfield Enforcer sniper rifle against Dooley’s twenty, Clarence brought down the Russian.

The man held on to his binoculars as he fell the sixty feet, legs kicking wildly, to land out of sight. Another who had been climbing along the ridge to join him, panicked, lost his grip, and disappeared over the far side.

Their Russian radio-man was still waiting for an authoritative answer. Revell could feel Boris’s eyes on him, could feel their intensity like a physical thing. ‘They would just be throwing the crews’ lives away.’

‘What of our lives, what of ours?’ Boris thumped himself in the chest, striking hard with the inside of his closed fist. ‘They sent us first, to test the danger, and now they leave us… don’t they know what that means?’

‘Take it easy.’ Revell had to hold the frightened man down when he would have leapt to his feet. ‘OK, so we’re not going home by the quickest route, but I still intend us to get there.’

‘Hey, you kidding us, Major?’ Ripper ignored Cline’s attempt to stop him from butting in. ‘This is Indian territory, and we’re plumb in the middle of it. Apart from the lil’ ol’ fact that an army of Reds must be surrounding us by now, and starting to close in, we’re a hell of a long way from the Zone, let alone our own lines. We’ve the best part of a hundred and fifty miles of badlands to cross. By the time we’ve made it I’ll have worn my boots down to the stumps of my ankles. That’s if we ever do.’