There was no outward reaction from the sergeant. Collins watched, waiting for the answering blast and string of charges. None came.
Hyde shrugged. ‘You can always stay and wait for the next one if you want. Suit yourself.’ With that, he climbed out and began to walk away.
Clarence went bright red. He whirled round, aiming at Hyde’s back. His finger tightened on the trigger and, as it did, he jerked the barrel upwards and pumped five fast shots into the sky over the sergeant’s head. Hyde never flinched, simply kept on walking. The action appeared to dissipate the sniper’s rage, and after a moment he reluctantly tagged along at the back of the file as the others left the trench and followed their sergeant.
By putting on a spurt Collins caught up with Libby. ‘How come the Sarge lets him get away with that?’ He kept his voice low. ‘I’d have gone inside for the rest of me natural for one tenth of that back at basic training camp.’
‘Takes a lot to get the Sarge going, in fact I’ve never seen him lose his rag yet. He don’t frighten easy either, he hasn’t got a nerve in his body.’ Libby didn’t bother to copy the precaution of whispering. ‘As for Clarence, I reckon he’s off his head, a bit at least. Has been ever since a flak-damaged Tupolev came down on his wife and kids in married quarters in Cologne. He was on his way there on a forty-eight hour when it happened, arrived home just in time to pull out what was left of them. He doesn’t talk about it, must have been messy. Anyway, now all he lives for is killing Ivans. He’s good at it.’ He called back to the sniper. ‘How many is it now, Clarence?’
‘One hundred and ninety-two.’ There was no hint of pride or boasting in the matter-of-fact announcement. The sniper went on slotting fresh cartridges into a magazine.
‘See what I mean? He’s good.’
Back in the trench it had come as a shock to Collins to hear the torrent of obscenity from the usually quiet and reserved man, but this… Of course he knew his speciality, but he’d never realised… nearly two hundred… it was incredible. Clarence, with his neat and fussy ways and his quiet distaste for the crudities of army life… nearly two hundred!
‘…was due to go on an officer-training course, but he had a breakdown and was lucky to stay in at all.’
Collins realised with a start that Libby was still talking. He made non-committal noises to give the impression he’d heard every word. ‘…Now when he gets leave, he goes back there and sits all the time in the garden of remembrance where their ashes are scattered. One week of grief keeps him killing for six months.’
Their skin was prickling, and their eyes watered and smarted with the concentration of chemicals in the air. Even up-wind of the saturated area, and despite the prophylactics they had taken, the noxious substances still affected their respiration and made breathing both difficult and painful. It was a temptation to run, to get to the sanctuary of their air-conditioned transport as quickly as possible, but that would have been fatal with the high level of toxic material in the atmosphere.
Whole chunks of the landscape through which they trudged looked as if they had been bleached. What little greenery there still was had a blotched and leprous look.
The sky, filled with the dust and smoke of two years’ bitter conflict, was a uniform dull red that betrayed no hint of the sun’s position, but trapped its light and spread a meagre portion of it across the alien landscape.
The angular turret-topped hull of the skimmer was a welcome sight when they reached the gorse-shrouded gully. Burke, their combat driver, was waiting.
‘Burke by name, and Burk by bloody nature.’ Hyde dropped his pack heavily on to the older man’s feet. ‘You might have turned it round ready for a quick getaway if it were needed. Or doesn’t your weary old brain stretch to such mind-boggling initiative?’
Burke scowled, and heaved the kit through the open door set in the hovercraft’s front, beside the driver’s position. ‘I might have done, but an Ivan sky-spy was pissing about overhead earlier, so I thought I’d better keep the Iron Cow as cool as possible, in case it was doing an infra-red survey.’ He patted the faded name painted on the starboard hull front.
‘You’ve always got a ruddy answer, haven’t you?’ The sergeant’s sarcasm made no impression on Burke. He clambered aboard to take his seat.
Last to board was Corporal Howard. He carefully stowed the field-radar set, before threading his way down the narrow single compartment of the craft’s interior to the built-in radar console at the rear. The instant he activated the complex electronic systems and put on his headset, the front ramp lifted drawbridge-like to seal the doorway and the twin Allison turbofan engines on either side of the crew compartment whined into life.
Burke tapped a proportion of their combined two-and-a-half-thousand horsepower for the lift ducts, and the concertinaed skirts about the hull’s lower edge straightened, bulged and rose from the ground as they lifted the fifteen-ton machine.
As the skimmer whirled round almost in its own length, Libby hauled himself into the cramped cannon-armed turret set in the centre of the roof. Hyde sat immediately behind their driver in the command seat, while Clarence leant back on a bench and began to clean his rifle. Only Collins sat bolt upright in the approved and official manner, feet firmly on the floor, heels against the locker under his seat, rump pressed back hard into the angle made by the metal wall of the compartment and the thinly padded bench top. The general-purpose machine gun he’d been given the dubious honour of carrying and caring for was between his knees, butt on floor, barrel tip beneath his nose. His satchel of demolition charges, still intact, rested on the seat beside him.
Unlike Clarence, Collins had not been unhappy to see the Russian tank so comprehensively destroyed. He wanted more time to get used to being in action before he took on the task for which he’d trained, finishing off disabled enemy tanks capable of being salvaged and sent back into battle.
After a casual glance at an external contamination monitor, Clarence turned up the air-conditioning to one and a half pounds of positive pressure. ‘The wind must have shifted. It’s as thick as porridge out there.’
Collins managed to eliminate most of the discomfort by swallowing hard several times, but his ears continued to ‘pop’ at irregular intervals. Looking forward, he could see the tattered remains of the wiper blades scraping clear arcing tracks across the thick front-vision block.
‘There’s a beam on us.’ Howard’s shout echoed through the alloy cocoon, adding fresh discomfort to their ears.
‘Identify.’ Hyde’s response was as punishing. ‘Acoustic.’
Several actions in the cramped compartment blended into a single confused tangle of movement. Clarence grabbed a pair of garishly painted grenades from a rack and fired them in rapid sequence from a short barrelled discharger set in the roof behind the turret: Hyde hurled himself towards Collins, shoved him aside and smashed his fist down hard on a large orange stud, one of a colour-coded row.
Simultaneously, the nose of the craft dipped as Burke lifted the forward edge of the skirt to gain every ounce of speed. The skimmer surged ahead in response as the engines screamed up to full emergency power.
The feeling of tightness in the muscles of his face, the sudden dryness in his mouth, had nothing to do with Collins’ fear of the consequences of Burke’s manic evasive driving. He knew, as did the others, that somewhere out there a Russian infiltrator had spotted them and was, at that very moment guiding down on their heads an anti-tank missile or shell. There were only seconds…
Hyde’s urgent action had released a knobbly fibre-glass box from the outside of the hull. It tumbled down the camouflage-painted metal, bounced from the engine pod to the puffed-out wall of the ride-skirt and landed on a tangled mat of rotting vegetation. An instant later it came to rest. Telescopic aerials lanced from it and began to broadcast a blast of white noise that would continue until its power pack was rapidly exhausted, or until it successfully decoyed an enemy warhead riding down the beam focused on the Iron Cow.