James Rouch: Hard Target

‘The Ruskies in that tin can out there are using detectors.’

‘What sort?’ Hyde didn’t bother to look up.

‘Electro-magnetic.’

Hyde grunted, and continued to scrutinise his cards.

Collins, on his first active patrol, found it impossible to affect the same casual air as the others. There was none of the tension or drama he’d expected. Nor the state of alertness that his instructors had demanded of him in every exercise during his basic training, and on the demolition course he’d subsequently attended. All that was totally lacking in these combat veterans.

There was another explosion, much closer than the last. The corporal swore, thumped the side of the radar set and swore again.

‘Trigger-happy shits. They’ve clobbered the bloody dish. We’re blind.’ Hyde fanned out his hand to reveal a full house of jacks and queens, pocketed the modest pile of coins and notes and went over to join Howard. ‘Your gadget might be, but I’m not. Move over, I’ll take the bugger on visual.’

He knelt on the compacted soil at the bottom of the excavation and pressed his face against the rubber surround of their periscope sight. Friction peeled a flake of purple scar tissue from his brow. He gradually adjusted the magnification until the stencilled red stars on the tank’s turret stood out clearly, as did the slapped-on illegible slogans on its skirts of side armour.

He lined up the cross hairs of the sight on the front of the tank at the base of its turret. ‘Right, I’ve got him. Transfer control.’ Howard unlooped an extension cable from the back of the radar set and plugged its loose end into the small black box attached to the side of the periscope. A pea-bulb flashed green to signal a good connection and the state of the batteries.

‘It’s all yours, Sarge.’

‘Let’s cook some Commies, then.’

Hyde’s left thumb strayed to the end of the periscope handle and flipped open a hinged yellow cap to reveal a red button set in the shallow recess beneath it. The thumb hovered for a moment, then crushed down.

At the fringe of a copse of defoliated oaks, a hundred yards to the right of the trench, there was a brief stab of flame as a sharp-nosed broad finned rocket jumped from the ground. A moment later, a longer flame spurted from the rear of the anti-tank missile as it accelerated towards its target.

Five seconds into its flight and three-quarters of its journey completed, the missile veered suddenly to the left, lurched back almost on to course, then turned again more sharply and tumbled out of the air. A plume of soil and smoke marked its point of impact.

‘The sods are jamming us. Give me an old-fashioned wire-guided system any day.’ Hyde jabbed his finger at the corporal. ‘You’re the wizard with these bloody gadgets. We’ve got one round left, rig it so those fuckers can’t knock it down.’

While Howard broke a seal to open a small inspection panel on the side of the black box, the sergeant kept tracking the Soviet vehicle.

Already made cautious by the radar location dish they had detected and destroyed, and now alarmed by the abortive attack, the crew of the T84 played safe, and rather than use the tank’s exceptional high speed to escape, drove it into cover. Amid a cloud of grey exhaust from its V12 diesel, it backed through the remains of a hedge and took up a position among the gaunt soot-stained walls of what had once been a half-timbered barn.

Twice in swift succession, white fire tipped the snout of its cannon and balls of flame roared through the naked oaks, starting blazes among the heaped brown leaves and peeling trunks.

‘That should do it.’ Howard moved out of Hyde’s way. ‘It’ll take faster reflexes and better electronic counter-measures than that Commie crew has got, to stop the next one.’

‘I hope you’re right.’ Libby was putting away the cards, making ready for a hurried departure. ‘I’d hate to get smeared all over the Hanover salient just because you got a couple of wires crossed.’

‘It’ll work.’ Howard’s tone suggested that he resented the implied slur. ‘Give it a rest, you two.’ Hyde pulled his face away from the viewfinder. The edge of the rubber had left an indentation in the spongy tissue of his multiple grafts, a bizarre pattern that circled his eyes. ‘Save your bickering for later.’ He took up position again.

This time a missile jumped and fled from a patch of sickly yellow bracken, and for the first two and a half seconds of its flight executed the same pre-programmed gentle evasive manoeuvres as its unsuccessful predecessor. Then it soared almost vertically into the low cloud and disappeared.

From bitter painful experience Hyde knew the panic the Russian tank men would be feeling at that moment, as the rocket’s violent change of course jerked it off the screen of their hostile-fire locator an instant before they could take effective measures against it. Even if they kept their heads there was nothing they could do now, it was even too late to bale out.

Ignoring every distraction, the sergeant kept the crossed black filaments of the periscope sight locked firmly on to the small portion of dusty armour that was all he could see of the T84, tucked away among the distant piles of rubble.

At a height of four hundred feet above the tank, the missile’s own seeker system detected the vehicle’s metal mass and engine noise. It was already diving to rejoin the line-of-sight flight path dictated by the command unit in the trench, and only had to fractionally steepen the angle of its five-hundred-mile-an-hour descent to deliver its lethal cargo to the vulnerably thin armour of the T84s engine deck.

Nine pounds of shaped explosive charge, generating a colossal temperature, blasted the engine from its mounts and punched through an internal bulkhead to project a stream of vaporised steel into the crew compartment, setting off every round of ammunition in the automatic loader simultaneously.

Seconds after the muted echo of the explosion, the men in the trench felt the faint, short-lived tremor of the shock wave.

‘Well, don’t bloody hang about, then. We’re out of missiles and those buggers might have squawked for help before we took them apart.’

It didn’t need Hyde’s urging to speed up the rate at which the equipment was being made into compact loads for carrying. Collins would have helped, but every time he thought of a job he could do it was already being done, and usually faster and better than he could have managed. He could only watch in amazement as the sergeant wrenched the periscope from the trench wall, stamped it into scrap and then pulled earth down to bury it completely.

Libby saw the expression of incredulous disbelief on Collins’ face, and winked at him. ‘It’s on limited issue for evaluation, field modifications aren’t allowed. We take it back with the seals broken…’ He made a cutting motion with his finger across his throat. ‘Better to mark it down as lost in action.’

As Hyde reached up to remove a section of the turf roof, a grotesque figure plunged through, bringing it all down. The unexpected arrival tore off his respirator so that it hung down by one strap across the front of his anti-contamination suit, and jabbed the long slim barrel of a sniper’s rifle into Hyde’s stomach. The powerful weapon looked top-heavy with its mass of complicated sighting aids. As the sergeant swept the rifle aside the intruder glowered at him, his face colouring with the intensity of emotion that he had difficulty finding words to express.

‘You rotten bugger. You fucking ugly bastard. You’ve done it again, you scar-faced lump of shit.’

Libby tugged at the rifleman’s arm. ‘Take it easy, Clarence.’ The sniper wrenched himself free. He didn’t bring the Enfield up again, but his blazing eyes stayed locked on Hyde. ‘You knew I was bloody out there and what did you do, you blew those cruddy Reds to atoms. How can I get a crack at them if they don’t bale out of those tin cans ? What am I supposed to do, take pot shots at the pieces flying through the air?’