‘Are you saying we… you can’t work with them? ‘No, sir, that’s not what I’m saying, it’s just that…’
‘Listen, maybe we’ve been too insular, too self-contained for too long. Take a real look at our men; Dooley and that mercurial temperament of his, and Nelson with that doll…’
‘His mascot, sir.’
‘…and Cohen, he believes in Martians.’
‘He says that’s because he’s given up believing in the human race, sir.’
‘You get my point though. The main thing is these British are good, damned good or they wouldn’t be coming with us. Now let’s get this briefing over with.’ Revell eased his aching backside off the rough wood of the crate and followed the sergeant. Well, this would be the last of the preliminaries. In twenty minutes they would pull out, to have the benefit of last light when they passed through their own lines and then he would be doing what he did best, fighting.
Dooley was forced to admit, at least to himself, that the driver of the Iron Cow was good, damned good. Private Burke might be an all-time record gold-bricker, but Jesus, could he throw that thing around. For the first time since the major had told him he’d be travelling with him and Cohen in Hyde’s skimmer he began to feel less unhappy. If he had to be going into battle again, and with the major they always seemed to be, then he might as well go in with a combat driver good enough to get them back out again.
The interior of the vehicle was lit by a dull red glow from a single bulb over Howard’s radar console, and more faintly at the front end of the compartment by the pale green glow given off by the screen of the driver’s image intensifier.
With most of the mission’s stores on board, stacked in the narrow centre aisle, there was little room for the passenger’s legs. Libby and Cohen had their feet up on cases of incendiary grenades.
There was little talking among the men sitting cramped together on the benches. The salient was behind them now. Ahead lay thirty miles of what was a free-fire zone after dark. Surveillance radars, intruder alarms and sophisticated night sights having made fighting after sunset a practical reality, had also just about brought it to an end.
At night the battlefield belonged to the technicians. One man at a console could do the job of fifty sentries, and could call down in seconds a weight of fire sufficient to halt and smash a regiment of tanks.
So Howard sat at his board, watching for active radars focused on them, ready to jam any he found, and monitoring the compact but powerful electronic devices the Iron Cow carried to blanket her own emissions and avoid their detection by enemy passive detectors. Most of the tasks were handled by the on-board computer, but the equipment could fail and then his speed of action would be their only protection.
Science had given Burke the means by which to drive at approaching the vehicle’s top speed at night, but it could do nothing to smooth the route they were forced to take if they were to avoid the Russians’ most likely points of concentration. War in the Zone was a giant game of hide-and-seek with a deadly booby prize for the losers.
And so the three carriers wove a complex snaking course through the fields and woods, sometimes taking to the beds of streams for a distance, mud and water splashing up their hulls and turning to puffs of steam in the exhaust from their turbines. At other times they would use a stretch of road or lane, and the hurtling trio would skim through an abandoned village ®r past a huddle of refugee shelters and slew back on to the fields beyond.
And that was the final horrific ingredient of the Zone. Few of the civilians whose homes lay within it had moved out. Areas existed where rural life went on much as before, but they were shrinking green oases in a dying landscape. Many would willingly have gone, a lot had tried, but the population beyond the Zone’s boundaries feared contamination; from the chemicals they knew were being used, from radiation brought about by the many small-yield tactical nuclear weapons that had been used, and most of all from the mythical bacterial weapons that featured so strongly in each new rumour: and so the civilians caught in the Zone were literally forced to stay.
It was worst in the big camps in the north of the Zone. There civilisation had collapsed and even the armies avoided them, save as now when the Russians were using a settlement as cover for activities they didn’t want disturbed.
Revell had been watching Clarence take the cartridges from a spare Enfield magazine and clean them one at a time, before inspecting and replacing them. He reached across and took one of the long slim bullets from the cloth in which they nestled, and held it up against the light. Two small nicks were visible, just below its pointed tip. ‘How long you been using dum-dums?’
Clarence went on with his work, not bothering to look up. ‘Since I found out the Russians were using them, about three months. You don’t approve?’
‘My men have known a bit longer.’ Revell handed the round back. ‘We’ve been using them nearer six.’
Tucked up in a corner, his slight frame wrapped in cumbersome body armour, Abe Cohen closed his eyes and tried to sleep. It wouldn’t come. Hell, he felt awful, like his stomach was about to climb his throat and hurl itself out of his mouth complete, in one great heave. It was worse than being seasick. At least at sea there was some sort of regular motion; it was still horrible but at least you knew what was coming. These skimmers were something else. He hugged his arms across his stomach, not that he could feel the contact through an inch of laminated fibre-glass and metal mesh, and tried again. He didn’t care how tough the job they were going to do was, he’d happily have taken on the whole of 2nd Guards Army if only it meant getting out of this bucking bucket.
‘There was a beam on us then,’ Howard called out. ‘Take what evasive action you have to, but stay on this general heading.’ Hyde had given their driver the order before he remembered the major. He looked to see the officer’s reaction.
Revell understood, and nodded. ‘Don’t forget we’ve got a brood bringing up the rear.’
‘Another one. The Ruskies are looking for us now.’ A tight skidding turn almost threw Howard from his seat.
If Burke was making life uncomfortable for Cohen, he was also making it very difficult for the distant Russian radar operators who were trying to pick them up and plot their course.
Hedges and fences collapsed before the skimmers’ onslaught. A small group of houses that couldn’t even be glorified by the name of village were grazed and shaken as the racing hovercrafts scraped by, using their outline as cover and to confuse the enemy radar.
It worked, but the gap had widened between the Iron Cow and the following vehicles. They chased after the British craft, almost nose to tail, as their drivers pushed themselves to the limit to keep up with Burke’s fast progress between the houses.
Seven hundred yards from the hamlet, from a spot not quite within the fringes of a plantation of pines, there was a rapid succession of stabs of light as a multi-barrelled Russian ZSU-23 anti-aircraft tank opened up with all four of its 23mm cannon. Tracer arced through the night towards the ill-spaced file of NATO machines.
THREE
A fifty-round burst of mixed explosive and armour-piercing shells struck the side of a brick-built tractor shed in front of the leading American skimmer. Part of the structure’s corrugated iron roof was blasted off, and the second vehicle of the racing pair had to plough through an avalanche of falling bricks and beams as the decayed fabric of the building collapsed into its path.
The enemy gun-layer made a fractional adjustment to his aim, and his second burst caught the tail-end vehicle of the file as it turned into a narrow alleyway between a row of houses and a church.