Clarence didn’t see or hear the others until Hyde nudged him with his boot. ‘Yes, alright, I’m coming.’ Reluctantly he pulled back from the sight and hurriedly began to pack. He hated having to leave without witnessing the effectiveness of his shot. All that he’d been able to see was a frontal view of the mount, its four barrels locked on him and unmoving. As they’d fired he’d drawn mental diagonals between the corners of the square marked out by the muzzle flashes and put a bullet into their imaginary intersection. If his memory of the captured guns he’d seen held good, then he’d put that bullet into the gun-layer’s upper chest, a fraction below his voice box.
A series of sharp explosions made them stop and look back at the workshops. Each detonation came faster and louder than the preceding one. With a tremendous roar the whole huge yards-thick roof of the tank repair shed rose up on a pillar of boiling flame, punching effortlessly through the lightly constructed false roof of the camp and going a hundred feet into the night sky. It hung there for a moment, flame-trailing tank turrets cart wheeling through the air about it, dangling tassels of red-hot reinforcing rods, then fell back to complete the work of destruction.
Every inch of the refugee encampment was lit like day, as mushrooms of orange and yellow fire came out of the gaping crater where the workshops had been.
Revell prodded the others into movement, forcing them to tear themselves away from the spectacle. Fie knew that every minute it took them to reach the skimmer was a minute less darkness for their journey back. And every passing moment also gave the nearest Russian units time to sort themselves out, figure what had happened and start to do something about it. They had to put distance, a lot of distance, between themselves and the havoc they had wrought on one of the Soviet Command’s favourite outfits, and fast.
Libby was thinking along the same lines. ‘That was a hell of a thorough job we did, what’s the betting the Ruskies will do as thorough a job on us if we’re caught.’
Maybe it was just because they had started downhill, but Hyde noticed an immediate and marked increase in the pace.
‘If we hadn’t spent so much bloody time dodging trigger-happy Russian patrols on the way back to the Iron Cow we’d be bloody home by now.’ Burke thumped the bulkhead with his fist.
Dawn had caught them still six miles from their own lines, and with its coming a Russian Hind helicopter gunship had found them. It was the last of the relays that had sought them throughout the night.
Coming at them from behind, out of the rising sun, the first they had known of it was a near miss from an unguided air-to-surface missile. Ten more had plastered the ground around them as they bolted for the cover of a patch of devastated woodland. Four times the Hind made low level high speed sweeps across the area, blasting it with salvos of 57mm rockets, chewing up the trees and ground with long bursts from its gatling-type cannon.
‘I can’t get a shot at him through these damned trees.’ Fragments from more of the powerful warheads forced Hyde to duck back into the comparative safety of the turret’s armour.
Libby, with his leg strapped stiffly, had been unable to get into the turret seat, and now he fumed and fretted as the sergeant took over his job.
‘Wouldn’t do any good anyway.’ At least he could offer advice. ‘Those buggers have titanium armour on the bits that matter. Best you could manage with that machine gun is to knock a few unimportant chips off him. You’ll have to get in a good solid hit with the Rarden to bring him down.’
‘That’s no cruddy learner out there.’ Dooley listened to the rattle of the 20mm cannon firing and the sound of the trees as they fell. ‘He ain’t gonna come low enough or slow enough for you to get a poke at him with that.’
Revell had been keeping a count. It wasn’t exact, but he reckoned the Hind still had more than half its one hundred and twenty-eight unguided rockets left, plus the four big Swatter anti-tank missiles. If they stayed where they were, with the methodical pattern the Hind was working, it was only a matter of time before he scored a hit or a crippling near miss. If they left cover and made a run for it, he would have all the time in the world to put one of the devastatingly powerful anti-tank missiles into their hull, and that would be it.
Sunk down into his flak jacket, now slowly beginning to recover from the nausea of the long night ride, Cohen appeared to have shrunk. ‘So what do we do, sit here and wait for him to get lucky, and us to run out of ours? Please, don’t think me pushy, but a way out of this shit I would like to hear.’
Despite the noise and the danger, Andrea had fallen asleep on Clarence’s shoulder. After two attempts to gently push her off the sniper had accepted the situation, even drawn a spare jacket over her. He had raised no objection when Hyde had mounted to the turret in his place.
Revell fought down an impulse, but couldn’t completely subdue the urge he felt to separate them. It surged to the fore whenever his eyes strayed that way. ‘If we can’t beat them, perhaps we can con them.’ He grabbed a signal pistol and box of flares. ‘Get everything burnable outside and I want two belts of machine gun ammunition; and somebody get me a couple of gallons of whatever it is this bus runs on.’
Whipping the branches with the fierce downdraught from its five whirling blades, the gunship executed a tight turn at the end of its latest strafing run and began a sixth. Flame-tailed rockets flashed from the two pods slung from pylons beneath each stub wing set just behind the cabin, and the snouts of the cannon barrels below its nose showed a continuous blur of ragged-edged yellow as they maintained their high rate of fire.
The woods heaved and shook at the hammer blows. Revell crouched by the side of the skimmer and waited. A rocket detonated among a clump of holly bushes only twenty yards away, transforming the rich green leaves into flaming cinders that were scattered along with the branches. Debris still falling about him, Revell ran to the pile of kerosene-soaked rags and fired a flare into them. He felt the sudden heat on his face as the bonfire instantly ignited, sending black smoke billowing up through the trees. For good measure he flung the box of flares into the fire, then sprinted back to the skimmer as ammunition in the belts began to cook off and send multi-hued tracer in every direction.
‘He’s buying it, the fucker is buggering off. No, he’s not, what the hell is he doing?’ Dooley watched from the doorway as the helicopter did a half turn, and then hovered. ‘The bastard, he’s coming down, he’s going to drop off infantry to come and make sure of us.’
‘Full power!’
Burke had already anticipated the major’s order, and the craft was surging forward even as Revell jumped on to the ramp. With it still lowered, the skimmer thundered through the trees towards the spot where the chopper was coming down, and reached it as the first of a squad of heavily armed Russian infantry was preparing to jump from its side door even before the wheels were on the ground.
Burke threw the motors into full reverse thrust and the Iron Cow slewed to a stop only fifty yards away. Hyde opened up with the Rarden. All of the first clip were hits, one shell plunging in through the side of the machine just below the weapon operator’s forward cockpit, and two more scoring direct hits on the main cabin. At the same time Revell and Dooley hosed light automatic fire from the ramp and cut down two Russians who had fallen from the cabin doorway and were making frantic wild jumps to get back on board as the gunship soared up beyond their reach.
At maximum elevation Hyde managed to score one more hit, on the port engine housing, just to the rear of the pilot’s cockpit. Oily smoke poured from the damaged turbo shaft’s exhaust stack and the machine began to pitch nose down.