From where it lay on top of a pile of rags, Andrea picked up her scarred and chipped M16. The fat tube of the grenade-launcher below the barrel gave it a clumsy and ill-balanced look. ‘When do I use this? I am not a nurse, this is not where I belong.’
‘Perhaps you won’t need to. If the mission goes according to plan then we do the job and get out without firing anything but the heavy artillery. Command won’t be too happy if we start a big fire-fight with Swedish patrols. Why do you think they sent such a small escort group, with so few support weapons? It’s so that if we do start trouble we can’t cause too much of it.’
‘The West does not deserve to win this war.’ Andrea turned to the window, and stared out. ‘They expect their soldiers to die, but do not want them to win.’
‘That about says it.’ Revell moved to stand beside her. He liked her clipped German accent. Her manner was sharp, he could visualise an affair with her being very one-sided. She would dominate any man, he imagined her being very strict, very severe… No, he backed away from the thought. That was a speculative road he didn’t like to travel. There was a darkness at its end he didn’t care to pierce, for fear of what he might discover about himself.
The snow covering the island gave the landscape a strangely two-tone, two-dimensional effect. There were no greys, no shadings to give depth or texture to any object. After a few moments the weird monotony of the scene began to play tricks with his eyes. A log, or it might have been a rock protruding above the snow, almost seemed to be moving. Of course it couldn’t be, there was nothing alive out there, God had shut shop for the winter, even Clarence would find nothing to kill…
‘Come on.’ Revell didn’t think to, didn’t have time to, define what prompted him to jump and stride over the close-packed casualties; but intuition or some sixth sense told him that shapeless dark hummock he’d dismissed as a log was one of his men. His boot rapped against an improvised splint and elicited a groan from the man he’d almost stepped on, then with Andrea close behind he was out of the room and taking the stairs three at a time. He was shouting for the medic even as he raced for the front door.
At ground level everything looked very different, but he had a bearing and snow sprayed ahead of him as he ran. There was an icy feeling inside him that had nothing to do with the cold.
‘The lieutenant thought you ought to know about it.’ There was an intense cramping pain in Clarence’s fingers and toes as circulation gradually returned. He could feel the soup in his stomach radiating warmth through his body, and breathed in the steam that rose from the can he held clumsily between clenched fists, not feeling the hot metal burning into his blue knuckles.
‘And that was all you saw? Just three men and a woman moving supplies of some sort into the old tower.’
‘We tracked them from the boat. It looked like an old wreck, as if it shouldn’t still be afloat, but it was, and its motor sounded alright. After they’d got out of sight we took a chance and had a look inside. We had to give them a bit of a start, there’s not much cover up that end of the island.’
‘Did you find anything?’
‘Nothing. I got the impression the hull and mechanics had been well maintained and the rest of it allowed to go to hell. Funny, you’d think anyone who owned a big yacht would have taken care of it.’
‘Can’t get the petrol, no point.’ Hyde had been listening. ‘There must be thousands of beautiful boats rotting away along this coast.’
‘But then why look after the engine, why keep it in good running order? Sergeant, take Ripper and two others and find Lieutenant Hogg. If he hasn’t got positive proof that bunch are harmless -1 don’t know, maybe a group from a university or something – then go in and grab them. Something about that set-up isn’t right, and I want to know what.’
‘I’m getting something, Major.’ York settled his headphones more snugly. ‘This is weird. My gear isn’t directional so I can’t tell where, but I’d say somebody on this island is transmitting.’
‘What language?’ Revell picked up the spare headset, plugged in and held it to his ear.
‘Swedish. Shit, it’s gone.’ After a minute spent trying every frequency, York took off the headphones. ‘Not there anymore.’
‘On your way, Sergeant. We both know where that must have been coming from. Tell Lieutenant Hogg to take whatever action he has to, I want an answer to this damned riddle, and fast.’ It wasn’t until he’d turned round that Revell saw who Hyde had selected to go with him beside Ripper. Dooley and Andrea were pulling up the hoods of their snow-suits. It was an intelligent choice he couldn’t argue with, the pair worked well together. Clarence wasn’t fit to go anywhere for the time being, he wasn’t prepared to trust their Russian that far from his sight, and Libby and Burke were busy with the generator.
The door closed behind the trio, and Revell resisted an urge to rush to it and call Andrea back, to replace her with Libby. There was a better than evens chance he was soon going to make a fool of himself over her, unless he made a greater attempt to curb his feelings, -or at least the emotions they gave rise to. A loud crash from the kitchen broke into his thoughts, which were then swept aside by the voluble swearing that followed the heavy metallic noise.
‘You fucking clumsy shit bag. First you fucking near rupture me and chop my fingers off when we were lugging the bleeding thing in here, now you’re trying to break me sodding toes.’
Libby’s low-key reply to Burke’s tirade wasn’t audible in the control room. Revell heard their driver’s follow-up, then the argument petered out into various angry mutterings.
Cline was making the routine contact with the gunners at the various launch sites, meticulously logging each call, looking at his watch each time and noting the exact minute and second. He cleared down the last connection, rubbed his eyes, squared his pencil and notebook, polished the air-watch radar screen, pulled his rickety leatherette-covered dining chair closer and checked the surface radar display.
‘Er, Major. I have a second unidentified trace, a vessel.’
‘Another launch?’
‘Er, no, sir. This is in the thirteen to eighteen thousand ton class, and it’s coming out of the Sound.’
‘That’s not possible, the Ruskie warships won’t reach there for another ten hours according to the last satellite update.’ There was an image. It had crept into existence as a fuzzy green ovoid at the bottom of the screen. The computer quietly hummed to itself as it waited for sufficient data to calculate she ship’s course and speed.
‘Could it be a cargo boat, a small tanker maybe?’ Cline jotted the event down in the inevitable notebook.
‘No, no chance. The Swedes stopped all their coastal traffic a week ago, and all the other neutrals have sense enough to know this is not the time to sail. Whatever that is, it’s Russian. Punch up a course prediction.’ Revell watched a broken green line sprout and grow from the blip to skim past their island. ‘So, it’s big, it isn’t friendly, and it’s coming straight at us.’
EIGHT
‘It’s the right size for a Moskva class anti-submarine cruiser.’ It was too good an opportunity to miss, Cline used it to show off some of his knowledge. ‘Only I thought those things never moved without a swarm of escorts.’
‘Size is about the only thing that is right. They only built two of those brutes, Leningrad is somewhere in the Med, Moskva herself is at the bottom of the North