A gutted T62 bulldozer tank marked the furthest point of Russian advance. From the open driver’s hatch a flame-bleached skeletal arm thrust skywards. On the engine deck, frozen by fierce fire into a rigid stance, stood the corpse of a Russian officer. Clothes burned away, ribs exposed where grilled flesh had fallen from them, only the pistol locked in his furnace-welded grip betrayed his status. The flaring ammunition that had engulfed him had obliterated his face and robbed him of his identity.
At the head of a long straight street Thome signalled a halt. The men dropped their packs with scant regard for the nature of their contents and began to stuff the rocket warheads and explosives into a thirty-foot section of broken gas main that lay pointing down it.
Before they began to block with rubble the end containing the huge charge, Thome pushed a slab of plastic explosive inside and trailed back from it a twisted double strand of wire.
He smiled at Andrea. ‘Biggest single-barrelled shotgun in the world.’
‘It’ll burst.’ Revell had tried to calculate the total amount of explosives packed into the twenty-four-inch main and gave up. There was at least four hundred pounds and he knew there was no way the thin walls of the already damaged pipe were going to withstand those sort of forces.
‘Of course it will. I want it to.’ Putting a double turn of wire around each terminal on a detonator, he spat pieces of insulation. ‘No point in it all going one way, I want a scattergun effect. Once we’ve finished stacking a couple of tons of rubble at the breech end though, it’s all going to scatter towards the Ruskies.’ Unreeling the wire as he went, Thorne led them back fifty yards to the cover of an overturned personnel carrier.
‘And how do you know the Russians are going to come this way?’ There was faint amusement in Andrea’s voice, but it came from humour, not sarcasm.
‘Hamburg had a flourishing electronics industry before the war, come to that it still has, of sorts. We’ve got radio intercept equipment better than that in front line use with any army. Dire necessity is the mother of invention. You know how precise, how rigid, Russian plans can be. I can tell you now that, in three and a quarter hours, a platoon of Commie assault engineers, supported by a reinforced company of infantry and a self-propelled gun, are going to come straight down there. Right on to the muzzle of that great fowling piece. We’re going to convert the whole lot of them to hamburger.’
‘Clever, if it works.’
‘It’ll work, Major. See, I’m probably the most efficient mass-murderer you’ll ever meet, because the way I kill, it sure isn’t war.’
With the taking of the Soviet Air Force’s main base in Afghanistan, at Bagram, by the Mujahideen, the position of the Russian garrison in Kabul now appears hopeless.
Only strenuous efforts by the few remaining ground attack aircraft have deterred the encircling freedom fighters from launching a final assault. They have already rejected several appeals from the commander of the garrison for the acceptance of a conditional surrender.
It is likely that the Russians will decide to fight to the last man, rather than allow themselves to fall alive into the hands of the Mujahideen who are extracting a bloody revenge for past Russian atrocities, the worst of which are only now coming to light.
From a peak strength of 110,000 troops, the Russian forces had been reduced to under sixty thousand by the drafting of units to Europe to reinforce sectors of the Zone. Another twenty thousand were air-lifted out when the population rose against them, before aircraft losses became unacceptably high. Only a handful of the remaining forty thousand are thought to have reached the border and crossed safely into Russia.
Behind them the Soviets have left vast quantities of arms and ammunition, including thousands of vehicles, among which are whole regiments of tanks and self-propelled artillery.
With the retaking of Kabul the abandoned Russian troops will have been killed to a man.
EIGHT
Through the image intensifier Revell could see the enemy troops filtering into the street. Those with bulky packs would be the engineers. Behind the troops came the squat bulk of a self-propelled gun. The squeal of its tracks and the crunch of stone and brick being crushed carried clearly.
To either side of the APC the rest of Thome’s men had dug in. They crouched below their rubble parapets, waiting for the device’s detonation, to open fire immediately afterwards on any survivors.
The nearest Russian was only yards from the mouth of the pipe. There was a faint whirring sound as the handle on the detonator was pulled out to its fullest extent, and then a whine as it was pushed home.
Bricks and concrete smashed into the far side of the APC, as a portion of the charge blew back, but most of it belched forward, bursting apart the last ten feet of the pipe as if it were a paper straw and scattering rocket warheads down the length of the street.
Masses of secondary explosions marked their impacts and the road was lit like day. As the echo of the last died away, Revell looked out round the side of the APC. He didn’t need the intensifier. Flames were coming from the front-mounted engine of the self-propelled gun and illuminating the scene. Every fitting had been blasted from the vehicle and both its tracks were broken. Smoke boiled from holes in the armour, but there was no sign of the crew.
And there was no sign of the Russian engineers or infantry either, at first. Of the hundred and fifty men who had been there, not one remained on the road. The few bodies that were visible were draped over mounds of rubble or heaped against walls some distance off.
Shouldering his obviously unneeded shotgun, Revell brushed the dust from his sleeves and shoulders, and as he did saw that Andrea was still sitting down. Thome was bent over her, examining a long gash in her thigh.
Revell thought his heart had stopped as he saw the blood oozing sluggishly from the wound, and then flowing faster as the limb was pulled away from the jagged spear of metal projecting from the armour of the APC. The piece of rocket motor casing had been blown back to penetrate the armoured troop carrier’s floor and almost its roof, finding Andrea’s leg as it lodged in the thick aluminium that had failed to stop it quite soon enough.
‘It’s severed an artery.’ The field dressing that Revell applied only slowed the flow, it didn’t stop it no matter how much pressure they applied.
‘We’ll use my transport. There’s a hospital on the corner of Altonaer Strasse that won’t be too busy at this time.’ Thorne picked the girl up and started back to the Jaguar.
Revell followed, and almost tripped at every other pace. He had eyes only for the arm she had thrown round Thome’s neck. In him was fear for her and hate for him, and both grew stronger with every step.
Over a thousand casualties had been packed into the boiler room and the adjoining store. Several hundred more had to take their chances above ground, lining the corridors and entrance hall on the ground floor and covering every inch of space in the administration offices.
New cases were being admitted all the time, and were put into one of three categories: those who could be patched up and sent on their way, those who needed surgery that would require a period of immobilisation afterwards, and those for whom no treatment could hold out any hope.
The terminal cases were sent straight to the hospice across the street where everything possible was done to make their passing easier. Patients who fell into the other two groups were allotted a place on the surgeons’ lists. On admission Andrea went immediately to the top of the list and was given a local anaesthetic within a minute of being carried through the doors.