A figure, yes—
A brown-robed Pathan slipped on all fours onto the grey ribbon of the road, rolled something, then ducked back into the drainage ditch. Hyde held his breath. He was captive and captivated. Four seconds, then the grenade exploded beneath the scout car. Flame billowed around its flanks and wheels, but died almost at once. The scout car appeared undamaged, apart from scorch-marks on its olive-drab paintwork. Hyde lowered his binoculars in disappointment. Miandad nudged him, and pointed.
Dandelion clocks. He focused his glasses. Dandelion clocks. They floated, orderly, delicate, innocent, down from the lowest rocks towards the vehicles on the road. One BMP had turned, the other straddled the highway while undoubted and furious radio contact continued between all four vehicles. The trap was dawning upon them. The grenade had been some kind of signal—? Perhaps just a piece of bravado.
The dandelion clocks—
Suddenly, he knew what they were. Soviet RKG anti-tank grenades, hand-thrown and capable of penetrating five inches of armour. The BMP armour was 14mm thick, that of the scout cars 10mm. The white patches which had reminded him of dandelion clocks were the small stabilising drogue parachutes which ensured that after the grenade was thrown, its shaped charge struck nose-first.
One of the BMPs launched a Sagger missile with a bright, spilling flame. Rock and snow and dust flew away from the suddenly obscured hillside above the road; above the Pathans, too. Boulders began to roll towards the lower slopes. The echoes of the noise deafened Hyde.
The first dandelion clock struck, then the second. One detonated on the surface of the road, the other on the trailing scout car's back. The armour erupted like a boil, then split as if the vehicle had been unzipped. Something staggered from the ruin, ablaze, and fell to a whisper of rifle fire. Hyde could not hear screaming at his safe height. Other grenades struck one of the BMPs. Flame, noise, the tearing of armour. Hyde had never realised the hideousness of the noise of splitting armour-plating. It seemed to cry out on behalf of the occupants of the troop carrier.
Another Sagger was launched by the undamaged BMP. The cannon atop the first troop carrier also opened fire. Rock and hillside boiled and shattered. The narrow gorge filled with smoke and raging noise. The surface of the grey river was pattered into distress by falling rock and metal. Uniformed men running — others lying still, sprawled down the sides of vehicles or by the caterpillar tracks or on the slush and grey tar of the highway. Hyde could hear, though he could no longer distinguish, the firing of both 73mm cannons from the BMPs. Flame lit the smoke and dust cloud from within — flickering flames from the shooting, steadier flame from one of the scout cars, burning.
The roar of the hillside being torn by another missile, the chatter of a machine gun. Then the noise of only one of the two cannons and a newer, brighter source of light within the cloud of smoke and dust.
Miandad nudged him, leaning his head towards him. "It is time for us to make a move!" he yelled. "Otherwise, there will be no one left alive to question!"
Hyde blanched as he looked down into the boiling, dense cloud garishly lit by flame. He could not, for a moment, shake off the distance between himself and the action below. Then he nodded. Together, they scrambled down the loose-surfaced slope, entering the cloud of smoke and dust. Hyde wound his scarf around his face, coughing violently, his eyes watering. He could see Miandad only as a shadow beside him.
"Where?" he shouted, inhaling a mouthful of acrid smoke. He could smell burning petrol, cordite, and flesh. He clambered out of the ditch — he could hear the screaming now — blundered against a Pathan tribesman, and then he was on the road, crunching over the rubble of metal and rock.
"This way!" Miandad grabbed his arm and pulled him to his left. Hyde followed the Pakistani. A gout of flame shot up somewhere ahead of them and he felt its heat against his skin. Other Pathans slipped past them, a uniform blundered near, but it was alight and Hyde ignored it. Only minutes, and he began to think it was already too late. "The other side of the road, yes?" Miandad shouted against his ear. Hyde nodded.
The leading scout car was wrecked and on its side. A body spilled out of its forward trapdoor like a leakage of fuel. Miandad bent by the meaningless form, then looked up. Hyde could see his eyes gleaming, their whites intense.
"What—?" he yelled.
"Some got out — some must have got out!"
"Where?"
A burst of machine-gun fire from close to them whined off the overturned body of the scout car.
"There!" Miandad yelled.
A deep, rumbling explosion, followed by the clatter of hot fragments and slivers of metal on the road around them. One piece sliced and burned Hyde's sheepskin jacket, another scorched his hand. One of the BMPs had exploded. There couldn't be many left now. A turbanned Pathan staggered against the scout car and fell on top of Miandad. The Pakistani almost fastidiously pushed the body away. In a moment of silence, Hyde heard someone screaming like a rabbit. Then the machine gun opened up again, raking the road away to their left. Evidently, the officer who commanded it had decided that anyone still likely to come out of the maelstrom of smoke and dust would be an enemy. And if not, better to take no chances just for the sake of one or two raw conscripts.
"Come!"
Miandad moved away to the right and Hyde followed him in an awkward crouch, moving as swiftly as he could. The edge of the road appeared, grey changing to earthen brown sand and filthy slush. Then they were in the wet ditch, the snow soaking through Hyde's baggy trousers and sleeves.
To his left, Hyde could see — in the moment when he heard its renewed chatter — the flickering flame at the muzzle of the light machine gun. There was little other firing now. Sufficient lack of concussive noise to make movement audible; screaming audible, too.
Dying men everywhere—
Close.
Hyde grabbed Miandad's arm in a panic of fear. Ahead of them, no more than twenty yards away, the machine gun had stopped firing. The cloud, too, seemed to thin. Struggling men. The group who commanded the machine gun had been found, were being killed—
Hyde ran, Miandad a pace behind him, both of them blundering along the uneven, rock-strewn ditch. A blank-eyed face stared up at them from the edge of the road. Hyde did not even register consciously that there was little that remained of any human shape below the shoulders. Then he was among the struggling group. Someone knocked him aside. He saw a military bayonet flicker like silver, then a curved knife at its business. Miandad blundered against him, then seemed to dart to one side. Hyde's head moved from side to side in growing desperation. He was looking for something as small, as insignificant, as collar tabs or shoulder boards. He needed an officer.
Miandad was struggling with something on the ground, dragging it along the ditch, resting it against the roadside slope. He bent to lift the unmoving legs, and as he did so a Pathan emerged from the thinning cloud, rifle at his side, knife in his hand. He hesitated only for an instant as he saw Miandad struggling with the Russian's limp legs, and then he raised his knife. Hyde did not know whether the man assumed Miandad was being attacked — a fellow Pathan — or whether he did not care. He had time only to move a single pace and swing the butt of the Kalashnikov. Its rigid plastic stock struck the Pathan just above the left eye, and he fell away from Miandad and the Russian, dropping his knife as he did so.