Sky Strike (8 page)

Gradually the traffic flow built up speed once more. As the APC neared the top of a gradient it gave a jolt, and the note from one of the twin rear engines faltered. As they topped the crest it happened again, and this time both units cut in and out erratically.

‘Hang on.’ As Burke called the warning he wrenched the steering wheel hard over and the APC rolled on its suspension as it left the road to turn on to a deeply rutted and potholed farm track.

With the squad all shouting, and trying to secure handholds to prevent themselves being hurled about, their driver put the eight-wheeler through another tight turn.

Bodies and equipment crashed about filling the crew compartment with noise and confused movement and loud cursing and swearing. Only Libby in the turret gunner’s seat managed to hold on, and he made several hard contacts with the many angles and projections in the steelwork about him.

With a final pounding bounce the APC stopped. ‘Everybody alright?’ Burke had to duck a barrage of water bottles, magazines, helmets.

‘You mad sod.’ It took three attempts before Cline managed to regain his sense of balance, his feet and something of his dignity. ‘What the bloody hell were you trying to do?’ ‘Don’t fucking blame me. The major said to get off the road when we ran out of fuel. Just be grateful we’d made it to the top of the hill. It would have been a bugger sight more hairy if I’d had to do it backwards.’

‘OK, quiet. Let’s see where we are.’ Revell unfastened the hatch above his seat and stood to look out.

Considering they’d had little choice in its selection, their situation was quite a good one. They were out of sight of the highway, in the centre of a strip of woodland running beside a dirt track, that led to a cluster of neglected barns and machinery sheds grouped about an old stone farmhouse, lower down the steep hillside. He was about to duck back when he heard the squeal of approaching tracks, and the creak and crack of trees going down before a heavy vehicle.

‘Diesel. Wouldn’t you know it’ Dooley tossed the filler cap away, not bothering to replace it on the elderly Blaw-Knox bulldozer.

Utterly confused, and obviously not understanding a single word that was said to him, the machine’s equally ancient driver at last got some glimmering of the meaning of Cline’s urgent pantomime and climbed down from his roll cage protected seat to join the two middle-aged surveyors who were already having their hands tied.

Andrea was doing a thorough job of securing their bonds. She felt a tap on her shoulder, it was Revell.

‘Go with Sergeant Hyde. I want you to get us some gas. We can hardly trot along to the nearest Commie fuel dump and ask for a few cans, so you’ll have to try a spot of highway robbery. It’ll have to be done without attracting attention. You’ve the equipment that should enable you to sucker a couple of truckers.’

‘Shall I expose my ... equipment, or do you prefer I simply flaunt it.’ She was taunting him, Revell knew that. ‘Just get the gas, I don’t care what you do.’
‘I do not believe that, but I will get it for you.’ The bitch. The damned bitch. She must by now know how he felt about her and yet, at best, she still treated him with mild amusement. More often she ignored him, though he’d never known her refuse or be slow to act on any order he gave. There were some he’d like to give her that weren’t in any drill manual. Probably, though, she’d end up ordering him. Maybe that would be ... No. No, his thoughts had strayed that way before and he didn’t like the dark depths to which they led. He didn’t go in for that sort of thing, hadn’t ever... wouldn’t... but if he did...

There was a loud excited whoop from the APC. Damn it, what the hell was Dooley up to now? He hurried over, before the big clown made more noise. I’m rich, Major. I’m rich. Oh, look at it, look at it.’ Dooley was huddled beside a small safe that had been concealed behind a false locker front. From it he had taken, and spread on the map table beside him, several large bundles of bank notes, each a different currency and most from the neutral nations around the Zone; a small collection of stone-jet jewellery, among which a superb diamond cluster ring stood out; two shin carved figures in what looked like near-flawless jade, and a gold bar.

The bullion had been cut in half in order to fit the hiding place, and the residue from that operation had been carefully preserved in a corked test-tube. Tm rich I’m rich I’m rich. Oh, I’m rich...’ ‘Shut up you big oaf.’ Revell was interested in the find, but not for the same reason. His interest lay in the fact that the discovery of the handsome nest-egg tended to confirm the mental image of the vehicle’s owner that was forming in his mind.

The pennant already told him the man was a general, but the way the APC was fitted out with luxury touches told him that the Russian officer was also a man of ambition, who wanted the good things in life. His cache of various currencies also betrayed the fact that he was a realist, and not the sort to go down with a sinking ship. Not that the Warsaw Pact forces were losing the war, but this man was prepared for any eventuality.

Having examined the compact but powerful radio equipment on board, Revell also knew that the general had some Western tastes. A radio operator, perhaps one with a less than perfect memory, who did not want to incur the commander’s wrath by being slow, had carefully marked certain frequencies on the dial. Revell knew them, they were British and West German civilian radio station frequencies.

‘I get to keep it, don’t I, Major?’
‘Take the notes and jewellery if you want, but leave the bar where it is. Even you can’t tote that much extra weight around with you.’

Like a child who had just had the cherry stolen off the top of his cake, Dooley looked very unhappy. He pocketed the other items. ‘Maybe just one half, Major?’

‘Don’t get greedy, Dooley. You’ve enough there to get that pig-rearing farm when you get out, with something left over to treat your jaw.’

Although he brightened a little at the thought, Dooley still cast wistful glances at the safe as the portions of bullion were replaced and the buckled door slammed to wedge it tight closed.

‘Truck coming, Major.’

In response to Clarence’s call through the open hatch, Revell climbed out, in time to see Hyde steering a trailer-towing fuel tanker down the track. Andrea rode on the front fender, holding on to a headlamp bracket. Her jacket was open and her breasts bounced noticeably at each bump.

While a hose from the bowser was being unreeled to the APC, Revel took the sergeant aside.

‘Fast work. How did you do it?’
‘I didn’t, she did.’

As he moved to walk away, Revell tackled Hyde on the subject again, trying desperately to be casual, not too insistent, and knowing he was failing.

‘What did she do?’
‘She took off the combat gear and ran in front of the first truck that was travelling on its own. It just happened to be a bowser.’

‘And?’

‘It stopped.’ Hyde tired of the game, he’d known what the officer was after all along. ‘She had on just a pair of white knickers and a tight white T-shirt; she doesn’t wear a bra, and what do you think? It stopped, a bloody armoured regiment in full cry would have stopped. She’s the most beautiful bloody thing I’ve ever seen; I nearly went to help her.’ Hyde couldn’t keep the bitterness from his voice. ‘Next time you want her to do something like that, send her with someone else, not me. I got a face that still upsets nurses in plastic surgery wards. I don’t want to see what I can’t have.’

Hyde turned away, then back. ‘Oh yes. When the truck stopped she jumped on to the step and cut the driver’s throat from ear to ear. He’s still in there, that’s why she rode on the front.’

They had turned off before what looked like a security checkpoint about a mile ahead, and on the quiet side road were now making better speed, and at last heading in the right direction.

Ripper had fastened the general’s pennant to the front of the APC, and the few military vehicles they met coming the other way on the narrow road went to extraordinary lengths to get out of the way. In the case of an Airforce truck that included a hundred-yard detour through a freshly ploughed field.

Their better progress was having a therapeutic effect on Boris. He still looked ill, appeared to have aged ten years in the last few hours, but had now gathered himself sufficiently to try mumbling apologies for his previous behaviour to any- one who would listen.

‘…you do not know what it is like,’ Boris kept shifting position so that he could keep looking Clarence in the face, ‘to live every moment of your life in fear, and then after once making a decision that takes courage, to find yourself hurled into the clutches of the monster that gave rise to the terror in the first place.’ He caught hold of the sniper’s arm, to prevent him from moving away, and then had to nurse the bruised hand that was knocked aside by a sweeping blow with a rifle barrel.

‘I am sorry, it is just that I want you to understand. I deserted during an air-raid. It is likely that I am listed as killed. If I now fell into the hands of the KGB, then my family... my family...’

Clarence watched the Russian as his head dropped into his cupped hands and he broke down and cried. He put his hand forward, to touch the man on the shoulder; for him, so loathing physical contact, it was an unnatural action. His fingers stopped just short of contact, and went no further.

The poor devil. Clarence had been wrapped in his own memories of sorrow and thirst for revenge for so long, he had almost forgotten that the war, the Zone, had brought the same to others. Perhaps for Boris it might even be worse. Clarence had already suffered his loss, there was nothing else that could touch him after that Russian bomber had crashed on his wife and children, nothing that could inflict greater misery, greater torment of mind. But Boris, he knew the Communist system, knew what it could inflict, and knew that he could be the cause of those horrors touching his loved ones. It was a cruel refinement, worthy of the KGB itself.

‘Everybody to your position.’ Revell left his seat and went back to the Russian. ‘There’s some sort of traffic snarl-up ahead. Looks like a queue waiting to cross a bridge. I want you up front. If there’s any talking to be done then it’s down to you. We’re relying on you.’

The members of the squad stationed themselves at the firing ports either side of the hull, as they slowed to stop fifty yards short of the tail-end of the waiting line of mixed civilian and military transports.

The single lane pontoon bridge across the Elbe had been blocked by a field car that had jumped the guide rails, and now hung over the swirling muddy water, in imminent danger of falling in.

A recovery crew had backed a truck as close as they could, and were in the process of securing a tow-rope, while the endangered vehicle’s driver was being pushed and prodded to the far bank under armed guard.

Burke had closed down his front port, and now with Boris looked out at the scene through the thick, scratched and dirt-smeared armoured glass prism filling the vision slit in its metal shutter.

On the far side of the river a group of smartly uniformed Russian soldiers had jumped from a tracked armoured personnel carrier, and as prisoner and guards approached they grabbed the man under escort, forced him to his knees, and a single shot rang out.

‘What’d he do? What’d he do?’ Burke couldn’t believe it. He saw the kneeling figure crumple and watched as the body was shoved with boots and rifle butts into the turbulence close to the bank.

For an instant the corpse bobbed among the white water, then was swept into the main channel, and under.

‘He need not have done half so much.’ Boris felt the fears returning as he recognised the guilty troops. ‘They are KGB, at once judge, jury and executioners. I doubt whether they bothered to tell him, but that driver would to them have been guilty of sabotage...’ he paused a moment’... no, not even that. It is habit to put labels to what the KGB do, find for them even some glimmer of excuse for their barbarity. Perhaps it was only that he was responsible for delaying them, nothing more than that. Perhaps they are on an urgent mission, but as they are travelling away from the front that is unlikely. The probability is that they are on their way to a brothel, or to pick-up some black-market goods...’

‘And for that they shot the poor shit?’ ‘They have killed men, and women and children, for far less reason; often for none. If they are prepared to torture prisoners, clear hospitals for their battle casualties by shooting cripples and mental defectives, what chance has some inconsequential East German driver of avoiding their brutality?’

Spurred on by the example they’d witnessed, the recovery section hurried to clear the bridge. Boris watched them risking their lives to complete the task as fast as they could, taking enormous chances above the flood that built to a two-foot wave against the anchored components of the roadway, at times lapping on to them. Steam and smoke billowed from the twin rear wheels of the tow truck as it took up the slack and strained to drag the field car clear.

The moment the obstruction had been hauled from its path the tracked APC drove on to the bridge, forcing members of the recovery section to jump for their lives, several of them landing on the slippery bank, and having to fight and claw their way up it to avoid being carried away by the debris-laden water lapping at their waists.

For what reason, on what whim, Libby couldn’t tell, but the carrier didn’t drive off the bridge at their end, instead parking itself on the sandbag and tree trunk constructed exit ramp and disgorging its crew once more.

Led by a young and grim-faced lieutenant, the KGB troops began to check the papers of everyone aboard the waiting vehicles, pushing aside the three bridge sentries who had been content until now to sit by the comfort of the small stove beside their guard tent. An unconvincing protest by the senior of the three, and then his offer of help, were brushed aside.

Over his headphones Libby heard the discussion between Revell and Hyde as to their best course of action, and then the sergeant’s swearing as their driver reported they were now boxed in by a tank transporter that had pulled up behind them.