All the men, pioneers and combat company, stood in the village street, turned to look at the castle. There was something else they were looking for as well, but it didn’t appear. A man had been posted to watch, to signal with a flare if he spotted the ambush group on their way back.
Handing the detonator box to Voke, Revell knew it could not be his act that sealed Andrea’s fate.
Voke lifted the safety cover. ‘It is a pleasure to do this for more than the reason you might think, Major. The castle was marked as an auxiliary storage facility for the main dump. Once it is destroyed I shall have no difficulty explaining what happened to a great deal of clothing and equipment. I shall write it off as lost in battle.’
Five minutes past the hour, and still no flare, nor any diminution of the cannon- and automatic-weapon fire. If anything it appeared that the tempo of the exchange was increasing.
‘It must be done, Major.’ Voke looked to the American for confirmation. He waited for an answering nod before crushing his thumb down hard.
There was a delay, a short one, as the impulse ran through the great length of wire. To Revell it was an eternity. A thousand times he’d wished he could be free of his obsession with Andrea, and now with this he was, and in his heart he knew it wasn’t what he really wanted. With this he was not just cutting himself off from her, he was signing her death warrant.
A long plume of dust was driven violently from an upper window of the castle. It came out horizontally, its formation making no concession to the wind and rain until it had sprouted fifty meters from the wall. Then in rapid sequence it was joined by a dozen more. Feathers and bursts of the same leaden cloud gouted out from between tiles on the roofs.
The crack of the firing of the first charge was lost among the ripple of others that followed. With an almost absurd slowness a massive featureless slab of wall began to bulge as turrets began to collapse. It burst outward and a monstrous pall of dust rose to engulf the whole structure. As it rose it was stirred to wild turbulence by turrets and towers plunging to destruction inside it.
It did not rise far, beginning to spread in the wind and be beaten down by the rain before it was twice the height of the now-scattered walls. Lighter particles fanned out to merge with the storm clouds; most of the airborne debris began to roll down the vertical walls of rock, following the huge slabs of shaped stone and giant splintered roof beams that were already settling at their foot. A dull rumbling was all that had accompanied the spectacular avalanche, and that died quickly, without echo.
Standing aside from the others of the audience, Boris pushed his balled fist against his mouth and bit hard on his knuckles until they bled.
He felt as though his mind were going to explode, it was in such a turmoil. Overriding everything though was fear. That was it: sheer, stark-naked terror. Always until now the communists had been in front of them in attack, or more often behind them in pursuit. With this action they had deliberately cut themselves off, locked themselves into a position that, no matter what delaying tactics were employed, would shortly be surrounded.
His hand went to his holster and unconsciously he unfastened it and felt the comforting bulk of the Browning automatic. He pulled it out and released the magazine. Ignoring the blood running down his fingers, he thumbed a round out, rolling it between his stained fingers. Deliberately he put the bullet into his breast pocket. He would save that one for himself.
THIRTEEN
From the scanty concealment of the litter on the road Sergeant Hyde watched the Soviet combat engineers working to clear the mines. Smoke from burning vehicles masked much of their activity, but twice he saw fountains of dirt that marked where two of them at least had not been using sufficient caution.
He could have slowed the process even more with a few well-directed bursts, but that would have drawn attention to him and his section. As it was, the T84s sometimes came uncomfortably close with the random suppressive shelling of their side of the river.
‘I think they’re doing that on a ‘just in case’ basis.’ Hyde spat soil that stank of raw explosive. ‘If they thought they were really facing an opposed crossing they’d have called down artillery support by now.’
Coming forward in short rushes from cover to cover, a squad of assault engineers reached the bridge and, edging along hugging the low parapet, they reached the back of the bus. The last few meters they came on more confidently, walking on the bodies of the dead. They all froze, and then laughed when one of their number slipped on a blood-covered arm and landed abruptly on his backside, without triggering any mine or booby-trap.
‘They’re getting a bit cocky.’ Burke checked that he had a round chambered in his rifle, then took out another magazine and laid it by his side.
Timing was everything. Hyde subdued the strong urge to trigger the fuel-air device immediately, and waited. It was then they heard the dull rolling rumble of the castle’s destruction. There was quite literally no going back now.
A Russian engineer climbed into the bus and worked his way forward, threading between the stacks of mangled seats and bodies. Reaching the front, he scanned the rest of the bridge, then called on the others before jumping down and making for the mill.
His squad followed, passing gingerly between the jagged projections of metal and plastic that was all that remained of the passenger vehicle’s front third.
By this time their attitude was casual, almost light-hearted with relief at another dangerous task completed, and they stopped and took out cigarettes.
They sat on the parapet, legs dangling above the broken remains of a bar mine. Split open by flying wreckage, its contents lay scattered and useless.
Grinding and rumbling its way past the battle tanks came the huge angled ‘dozer blade of an armoured engineer’s vehicle. The turretless machine lurched through a turn, and as it reached the bridge, elevated a powerful-looking hydraulic arm. As it extended, it deployed a four-pronged grab that swayed wildly from side to side. A final, less violent, course correction and its tracks bit into and climbed onto the civilian corpses, tearing them and crushing them into the road surface.
The T84s moved up behind it, waiting to cross, and with the mines in the woods at last neutralized, more APCs threaded their way between the ruins of those that still blazed and were decorated with the burned remains of their crews.
‘Looks like a lot of our stuff down there.’ Burke noted the several captured NATO transports among those backed up at the rear of the tanks.
‘So the major was right.’ In a row beside her, Andrea placed five 40mm grenades. She hesitated before returning one of them to her belt. Long before she had taught herself that overkill was wasteful, but it was a lesson that by self-discipline she had to keep drumming home. ‘If the Soviets are using captured equipment in the front line, they must be suffering shortages that would make the capture of the valley very tempting.’
Casually, not out of suspicion or interest, a Russian strolled to the wall concealing the pressurized container. He looked around, then swung over the wall and, planting himself with feet apart, began to unfasten to relieve himself.
Hyde threw the switch and then dropped the box to grab the glasses from Burke, snapping the strap. A moment to refocus… and there it was.
A gushing cloud of sickly yellow vapour enveloped the Russian and he collapsed from sight. It expanded, doubling and redoubling in circumference. It grew to the height of the mill and to a breadth that encompassed the bridge and the leading tank.
‘It ain’t gonna work.’ Ripper watched the rapid expansion of the fuel-air mixture, saw it start to spill over the sides of the bridge.