In the distance a gunship beat fast across country. It trailed a tail of black smoke from its cabin. Too far away to identify, Revell knew it had to be a Warpac machine. No NATO helicopter in trouble would be heading in that direction. The source of the smoke suddenly showed a bright speck of flame and the chopper dipped from sight behind a ridge. Moments after, a puffball of dark smoke rose to be lost among the rain clouds.
‘Look, Lieutenant, you’ve been trying to impress me and you’ve succeeded, but – and it’s an insurmountable but – you’re basing your defences on the castle. That makes it a non-starter. That great pile is a dream target for any gunner, and it wouldn’t take long for some commie missile battery observer to pass the coordinates back to his commander, and then they’d bring the roof right down on our heads.’
At the sound of a light footstep Revell swivelled around to level his combat shotgun. He checked himself in time. It was Andrea. He was frightened, relieved and angry all at the same time. ‘I told you to stay with the transport.’
‘It is as well I did not; there is something you should see.’
Halfway back to the castle’s postern door a body sprawled across a pile of rubble. Its legs made a partial dam to the water sluicing mud down the steps in a series of tinted cascades.
‘Spetsnaz.’ Andrea made the word an obscenity and rolled the corpse onto its back with her heel.
The man’s head lolled at an unnatural angle and blood still pulsed from a gaping neck wound so deep a sliver of spinal column showed between the parted tissue.
‘I was following you down when I saw him. He came from one of the little towers. He was too intent on watching you to notice me. Come, there is something else.’
They stepped over the body. Rain was washing spattered blood from its face, revealing Slavic features and eyes still open wide with the shock and terror of sudden death.
Retracing their route, Andrea indicated the interior of a tower. ‘Look in there.’
Jutting in a half-circle from the rock, the structure was in better condition than most. Clambering over the rotted remains of its broken door, Revell entered. It was dark inside and lightened only gradually as his eyes adjusted to the gloom. The two floors above had rotted through and their crumbling remnants littered the floor. By the sparse illumination shafting through an arrow slit he saw that the defence work had been built around a fissure in the cliff, which had been widened to form a small room.
Andrea pulled aside a debris-covered ground sheet. Beneath it lay a rolled sleeping bag, a stack of Russian ration packs, ammunition, and a radio. Quickly checking that it was not rigged with a booby trap, she flicked a switch. Turning the tuner, all that came through was a selection of oscillating whines.
‘Those jammers of theirs are pumping out so much power it’s even queering their own channels.’ A heap of dead branches in a dark corner caught Revell’s attention and he pulled them aside. ‘I thought I might find one.’
His actions revealed a small microwave dish complete with transcriber unit and headphones.
‘What does this mean?’ Voke examined the bowl of the satellite link.
‘With this he could have kept in constant touch with his base. So long as he kept transmission time to a minimum there was virtually no chance of detecting him.’ Looking about, Revell went to a corner that appeared largely free of the rotten boards and joists. He dragged his boot back and forth, raking up the deep layer of compacted rubbish. At the second attempt he exposed the crushed remains of empty ration cartons and cans.
‘There’s a lot of them. So, Lieutenant, it would appear the Reds know all about Paradise Valley, and have done for a long time. That Special Forces man of theirs must have been hanging around to report on the movement of supplies and additions to the defence measures. If they’ve been taking that sort of interest, then I can tell you why that billion dollars’ worth of gear hasn’t been bombed. It’s because they want to capture it intact, for themselves.’
Voke almost had to run to keep up with the major. ‘Knowing about the minefields is not the same as clearing them.’ He got no response. ‘Wait, Major.’ He grabbed Revell and held him back at the postern door. ‘I know how vulnerable the castle is while still whole. The first task I had in the field was salvage work at Anholt castle, almost on the Dutch border. That Canadian battalion took shelter there during the second advance by the Soviet Second Guards Tank Army. We pulled out only two or three alive, out of six hundred.’
‘Then you see why this place is a death trap…’
‘Yes, Major. That is why the top floors are already rigged with several thousand kilos of explosives. The ground and first floors have walls up to seven meters thick. On top of that our demolition will put a layer of rubble of not less than the same depth.’
‘Twenty feet of solid stone?’ Even after years on the continent it still took Revell that moment of time to convert from metric.
For an instant Voke’s hopes soared, then plummeted once more as the major’s next question veered to a tack.
‘How have you got the valley rigged for destruction?’ Revell recalled the huge caverns filled with unfuelled transport. ‘There’s several acres of storage down there. Have you been as thorough with that?’
‘We have had only six days. The fuel and ammunition dumps presented no problems but they are a long way from the transport and other less flammable equipment…’
‘So if you tried to hold out and failed, the Reds are going to get a present of sufficient goodies to re-equip most of their front line in this sector.’
‘Not necessarily. Like the captain, I resorted to unconventional measures. I ran a pipe from the Av-gas tank at the landing ground to the air-conditioning inlets.’ Voke allowed himself a weak smile, even though he felt sure he had lost his argument over defending the valley. ‘Turning a valve wheel will flood every part of the complex with aviation fuel. We have wedged all the fire doors open; you may have seen that. Ignition will blast open the floor of the valley and turn it into a sea of fire.’
TEN
‘Have you a large-scale map of the area?’
With a reluctant sigh, taking a hand from the wheel, Voke reached into his jacket and handed one over. ‘Keep it. I shall not be needing it.’
No one spoke as the Range Rover left the courtyard, negotiated the tight turn onto the road and started down. Voke because he had failed in what he’d hoped to do, Andrea because that was her way. Dooley’s silence had yet another reason. When Andrea had gone off after the officers he’d spent some minutes in searching several of the castle’s lower rooms, and found nothing worth looting.
Revell studied the map, making notes on the soiled margin, having to brace himself against the vehicle’s roll on the steeply cambered corners in order to keep his writing legible.
For Dooley, even the sight of the three exhaust-pluming Bradley’s in the village street, bringing with them the prospect of their being off soon, did not cheer him. He stayed sullen, head bowed. He’d thought the great castle would have held a fortune in valuables. Instead it had been stripped as bare as any refugee shanty town after an enforced move. Shit, how the hell was he supposed to build up funds for when he finally got out of the army? That creep Cohen* had been full of bright ideas, but he’d bought it before it could do him any good. So he’d lasted longer, big deal. His wealth at that moment amounted to maybe ten thousand in back pay and a handful of rings, gold teeth and assorted scrap gold jewellery worth perhaps another two thousand. Fuck it, if he ‘was going to batten on some rich old dame in Miami then he’d need at least three times that for some smart threads, a flash car and the right sort of watch and accessories. He was jogged from his thoughts by their arrival back in the village, and the smell of cooked meat.