“You fell off?” Rosa demanded hoarsely in horror.
Alan Hannay realised that he had stopped feeling like an idiot.
“Well, now that I think about it I think I was more ‘blown off’. I landed on a pile of floats, cork-filled things that had just been spread all over the deck by a shell that must have gone straight through the stern without going off…”
Rosa shut his mouth with a new, gently lingering kiss that went on and on and on until the lovers had no choice but to come up, gasping for air as if they had been holding their breath under water for several minutes. Her fingers cautiously roved his misused torso, and then hesitantly, his loins. His hands responded, moving wonderingly over her breasts and belly but were strangely shy of delving lower until she guided his fingers between her thighs. Thereafter, things happened of their own accord. He seemed impossibly hard as she sought to draw him inside her. Momentarily, it seemed neither he nor she could couple. She squirmed onto her back and he entered her, sank inside her and she held him.
Their pains went away.
Later they lay together beneath the sheets, melded as one, breathing the same breaths, safe from the nightmare of a war which had so nearly torn them apart before they had ever had a chance to discover what was meant to be.
And then they slept the sleep of the young and the pure of heart and the just.
Chapter 48
“Stop looking at your bloody watches, boys!” Colonel Konstantin Yakovlevich Kurochnik, the commanding officer of the 51st Guards Airborne Regiment barked with jovial brutality. Already the stars twinkling between the drifting clouds of smoke were beginning to wink out; soon the pre-dawn twilight would lighten the darkened airfield. It would not have been lost on the men manning the forward defence line that their commanding officer had walked arrogantly across nearly a hundred metres of completely open ground — as if he personally ‘owned’ every millimetre of those one hundred metres — to join them in their shallow entrenchments. A show of bravado went a long way even with seasoned regulars; officers who failed to, or were unwilling to lead their men from the front had always been a waste of space in the Red Army.
Kurochnik was a solidly build man who shrugged off the onset of early middle age with the rugged pugnacity that he commanded his elite paratroopers. He had trained the men around him harshly, mercilessly but the ferocity of his training regime was the reason most of the men around him were still alive. Every one of his veteran troopers was a match for five or ten of the lazy, indolent amateurs the Iranian Army had clumsily and incompetently thrown at them. It was only in the last couple of hours that the enemy had given any real indication of an understanding of the fundamental principles of manuever and concentration and belatedly brought up armour to support his conscript infantrymen.
Everybody around Kurochnik instinctively ducked at the whistling passage of a 105-millimetre round from the long gun of one of the Iranian’s British supplied Centurion tanks. The shell slammed into the control tower five hundred metres to his right.
“Fucking idiots!” He snorted contemptuously. If the numerically superior Iranian forces massing in the buildings beyond the southern fence of the air base had known what they were doing they would have started lobbing mortars into his positions by now. What was the point of bringing up tanks if your infantry commander had still not taken his thumb out of his arse? If the enemy had the balls to attack now they would lose a lot of men but they would quickly over run his lightly held outer perimeter. Konstantin Kurochnik had no respect for enemies who were afraid to die.
Ten minutes ago his men had put a shoulder-launched rocket propelled anti-tank round into the turret of a Centurion that had been so unwise as to expose itself. The explosion had been satisfyingly loud and bright in the night but the tank had been undamaged and backed into dead ground a minute later.
Centurions were bastards to take out!
If he had learned anything that night it was that Centurions were two times as tough as they had any right to be!
At a guess twice as hard to knock out as a standard T-62.
He had read the reports about the way the British had fought their Centurions back in the Korean War; not really believed what he was reading. But now he had actually seen a Centurion in anger with his own eyes. How the fuck could a twenty year old design handled by such imbeciles still be so fucking hard to knock out?
Another 105-millimetre round whistled past to harmlessly demolish another section of the abandoned control tower.
“In eight minutes!” Kurochnik yelled. “At zero-five-five-eight hours shoot your last RPGs and empty your mags into the enemy lines, throw out a screen of smoke grenades and run like fuck through the inner perimeter line and don’t stop running until you reach the pick-up point!” He took another breath. “Any questions, boys?”
There were no questions.
Kurochnik waited a few seconds before climbing out of the trench and marching, as upright as if he was on parade in Red Square on May Day towards the rear.
His men did not know how hot this place was going to get in a little over a couple of hours time. But his boys were nobody’s fools; they guessed that time was running out.
A single bullet pinged on a slab of nearby tarmac.
Colonel Konstantin Yakovlevich Kurochnik did not break step.
Chapter 49
The bunker was cool, dank and stank of sweat and worse. Electric lights had been hurriedly installed and the faint stink of a diesel generator chugging wearily in the darkness outside the entrance seeped into the depths of the old, half-forgotten bomb shelter reactivated less than twelve hours ago to accommodate sleeping quarters and additional ‘secure’ working spaces for the joint Anglo-American operations staff set up by Air Vice-Marshal French and his United States Navy counterpart Vice-Admiral Clarey.
The British had started excavating the sections of the nearby Lascardis War Rooms complex below Valletta which had been collapsed by the B-52 strike in December a couple of months ago; mainly to recover the bodies of the dead rather than in an attempt to bring the warren of tunnels and caverns back into use. In the mean time other long neglected and shut up bomb shelters had been surveyed and readied in case of need. Sections of Bomb Shelter No. 3 had been condemned just after the 1945 war and permanently closed off with concrete plugs; but the caves remaining were still capable of housing and sheltering — albeit for brief periods — several hundred people.
“You must rest, husband,” Marija decided.
Peter Christopher was too exhausted to argue; even had he been of a mood to argue with his wife. In his as yet short married life he had already worked out that he would not be arguing overmuch with Marija, not now, not ever, about anything in particular or general.
Finding a gloomy, private corner Marija had laid one of the blankets they had been handed at the entrance to the shelter on the rock floor. Stiffly, she had lowered herself into a sitting position with her back to the wall. She patted her lap and her husband obediently lay down so that she could cradle his sore head. Despite the discomfort of the uneven floor he had slept almost immediately, unaware of the blankets spread over him by women from the section of WRENS in charge of the shelter.