The message, though not delivered by Andrea with any grace, or in a friendly tone, had the effect of calming the women. One or two even managed a coy smile at Revell.
Hyde hadn’t expected any of them to try their allure on him, and he was right, they didn’t. One thing did please him though, he noticed a subtle change come over the major when he started to deal with the women. It wasn’t much, a slight softening of his manner and an almost imperceptible shading of his aggressively American accent. Well, well, well; so the stiff bastard did have a weakness, fancied himself as a ladies man, did he? He had to admit though, it did appear to be working. Although Revell had in most cases to work through a third party, he still contrived to give the impression that he was talking intimately and secretively with each of the whores. Not that Hyde felt himself in any position to criticise or comment on another’s man’s technique, not with the sort of silly-arse games he had to play before any but the roughest drunken scrubbers would have anything to do with him.
‘Any good, Major?’ The interest was genuine, but it wasn’t simply that which prompted Hyde.
‘You know it wasn’t. They say they don’t know a damned thing, that they’ve never heard of the 97th.’
‘They probably haven’t. The Ruskies who come up here are after a good screw or whatever else it is they fancy, not polite conversation. Did you ask them if they’d heard any movement at night?’
‘Of course I damned well did.’ A note of irritability had crept into the officer’s voice. ‘They’ve heard trucks and tanks, but that doesn’t mean a thing; the Reds do all their re-supplying and troop movements at night, same as we do. Could be anything.’
‘So where do we go from here?’
Revell jerked his thumb at the ceiling. ‘Up, into the roof. We’ll knock out a couple of roof tiles and see what we can from there. As soon as we’ve got a rough idea of the layout, we’ll sketch out a plan and you can go back for the others.’
‘What about this crowd?’
For a moment Revell gave it consideration. A leer he noticed on the face of one of the East Germans helped him to make a decision. ‘Get Libby in here. We’ll put the deserters on look-out. We don’t owe them anything much, no reason why we should lay on an orgy for them.’
‘What about her?’
Andrea looked up sharply, ‘I go where I like, when I like.’
It was a temptation, ridiculous but strong nevertheless, to Revell to put her over his knee and give that tight wrapped backside a couple of good hard slaps. Just the thought made his palm tingle as though he had, adding an extra thrust to the erection the scantily clad whores had already begun to excite. In any other than this dangerous situation he’d have found an excuse to get her alone for a while but there wasn’t time for that now. Shit, why was it that every attractive, and a lot of the not so attractive girls made him feel like that. His wife had told him his needs, his demands, were one of the main reasons for the break-up of their marriage, though she’d not had the courage to cite them as grounds. Well now she’d got what she wanted, a nice steady twice-a-month-and-have-you-had-a-bath-since-your-last-eh-eh-time-of-the-eh-month-dear. Was he over-sexed? Damn it, it was no time to be pondering that again.
One of the women on the floor had been trying hard to catch Revell’s eye. So far he’d avoided it, but when Hyde went out, followed shortly afterwards by Andrea, he had no one to talk to and nowhere else to look.
She was in her late thirties he guessed, with a face that was beginning to show heavy pouches under her eyes, which combined with too much liner made them startlingly dark and intense. A loosely tied gown revealed an ample cleavage, the big orbs jostling against each other at her every movement. The gaping garment didn’t meet until it had also revealed the upper of what looked like several rolls of flab about her middle. Her knees were partially drawn up in front of her, and the instant she saw she had the major’s attention she slowly parted them to expose a luxuriant mass of pubic hair that hid any detail.
When she realised Kurt was also getting a good look, the limbs were hurriedly clamped together and the quilted gown once more draped across.
The elbow that poked into his side was Kurt’s. The smell of unwashed flesh and dirty underwear made Revell take a pace to one side, not that the Grepo noticed the involuntary reaction, be was far too busy ogling the women. ‘Sehrgut, eh? Sehrgut.’
Laughter from the other men greeted Kurt’s crude pantomime translation as he put a hairy-backed hand to his crotch and simulated a masturbating motion.
In a way though Revell agreed. In different circumstances the whore might have been attractive, but her lifestyle had aged her. To Kurt’s tastes doubtless she still was ‘very good’, not for him though. Not with the risk of disease she carried, and the record of the thousands of gross obscenities she had performed with regiments of men etched into her face.
Another of the whores, the oldest one, with the beginnings of a moustache, was turning on her dubious charms for his benefit. To avoid having to look at the flaccid flesh being rearranged and heaved into view for his delectation he went to the door and called out to Hyde. As he did he heard Kurt’s throaty chuckle leading the other men into laughter. He suspected it was aimed at his back.
‘Sergeant Hyde. I want Libby in here now. Get a move on.’ Sat on the floor a little way along the corridor Andrea was checking the contents of four spare magazines for her submachine gun. She looked up at his shout.
As her beautiful eyes flickered over his face Revell felt certain she could read his thoughts, understood his real reason for coming out of the room. What she said tended to confirm that impression.
‘There are ugly people in the Zone. Not all of them are Russian.’
TEN
‘I love these.’ Dooley unsheathed the bayonet and held it up, so that the shafts of sunlight filtering in glinted on the mirror polished blade. ‘They make a fucking lovely sound as you pull them out, sort of a sucking noise. You can’t always hear it because of the fuss the crud you stuck it in is making, but sometimes the shits go dead quiet,’ he nudged Jango with his elbow. ‘You get it, dead quiet; dead… dead quiet. Hey, that’s a joke. You like it? I just made it up.’
‘We’d never have guessed.’
‘Go back to mending the tellie, Cohen, I weren’t talking to you. What was I saying?’ No one prompted him, but he managed to pick up the thread on his own. ‘There ain’t no other noise like it. Best one was when I stuck it in a fat Cossack captain…’
Dooley had been droning on, rambling from one subject to another without pause, for almost an hour, and for the others in the skimmer, having failed to stop the monologue, it had now become just background noise, like the birds, or Burke’s atrocious wind.
‘It’s not my bloody fault.’ Their driver admitted responsibility for the most recent succession of rude sounds, after an indignant scowl he’d directed at Dooley had not succeeded in putting the blame for them elsewhere. ‘These bloody rations do it.’ He kicked at the litter of wrappers on the floor. ‘How do they expect a bloke’s digestion to work properly on muck like that; plays havoc with my gut.’
‘Don’t do our noses any good either.’ Jango flapped his hand in front of his face to waft away the smell.
Collins had been watching Dooley as he burnished the bright killing edges of the bayonet. ‘Shouldn’t that be blued, or something, to stop it catching the light?’
‘What’s the point.’ Dooley’s face creased in another grin as he discovered another pun. ‘Hey, how’s that. I made another joke.’
With a sigh of exasperation Cohen paused from re-securing a warped panel on the side of the console. ‘A clown you may be, a comic you are not. I tell you, if wit were shit you’d be constipated.’