Overkill. Part 10

'If your second bonce is no improvement on the first, in looks or brain power, I wouldn't bother if I were you.' Burke signalled the finale of the obscene double act with a thundering fart that almost lifted his backside off the ground.

Dooley just had to top that, and lifting each b.u.t.tock rapidly in sequence contrived to turn a long burst of pungent wind into an almost recognisable tune.

'If you two carry on for much longer, then the Communists are going to think we are using poison gas.' Boris sniffed the air.

'Take care, mate, one whiff of that and you'll be pus.h.i.+ng up the daisies.'

'Can the rest of you not smell it?'

'I hesitate to ask, but smell what?' Cautiously Clarence sampled the evening breeze, taking care to first check the reading on the chemical level indicator attached to his belt.

'Food, no not just food, meat, cooking meat.'

'Our pet Ruskie is going off his trolley.' Clarifying his meaning by tapping the side of his head, Burke suddenly stopped, and began to copy the others who were also testing the air. 'Christ, I must be going dotty as well. It must be the hunger.'

'Then we can all smell it. Either we're down wind of a Russian officer's preparations for a private party, or they've come up with a new stunt to drive us all crazy.'

'Not very likely, Clarence.' Revell was also enjoying the aroma of roasting meat. 'The Reds gave up subtlety long ago.'

A green star sh.e.l.l burst overhead and bathed everything in a ghastly light that turned healthy flesh a putrid colour.

Ripper held out his hands to examine the effect. 'Can't say I'm keen on what it does for me, but on Burke I reckon it's an improvement.'

'Silence from now on. We're moving up to our start line, that was the signal. There will be a barrage of sorts to cover the noise of the move, but the guns are short on ammo and we can't count on its smothering everything, so if you've got any last words, out with them now.'

'Or forever hold your...' A look from their NCO and Burke cut it short. '... Amen.'

'Can I just say you might have used a better form of words, Major.'

Corporal Thorne was unimpressed when Hyde turned his disfigured face to him.

Revell let it go. He could afford to, there was scant chance that the sapper would come through the night of fighting that lay ahead. Only the order to take up positions for the breakout had saved him from being handed over to the military police on a string of charges. But he was paying a price for that reprieve. The satchel he carried contained five homemade limpet bombs. Utilising a shaped-charge principle they were to be used to finish any disabled armoured vehicles that continued to resist, or any pill-boxes the flame throwers could not subdue.

From close behind them a battery of field guns opened a steady if none too rapid fire, managing to send another sh.e.l.l on its way as the echoes of the previous died.

There were other groups moving through the dusk. Some, like themselves, were armed with an a.s.sortment of weapons, a supply clerk's nightmare; others were equipped exclusively with Patchette submachine guns, or anti-tank rockets, or engineers' stores. Most of it had been produced in Hamburg's own underground factories, and much of it, long held back against this day, was being tried for the first time.

Down a side street they pa.s.sed several M60 and Challenger tanks. They were far too precious to be thrown blindly into the first a.s.sault on the enemy forces. The infantry and engineers would probe the Russian defences first, and then, and only then, when the ground was known and the enemy anti-tank weapons accounted for, would the tanks be unleashed.

The same did not go for some improvised armoured machines that stood hidden under thick camouflage netting immediately behind the start line.

Multi-wheeled civilian commercial vehicles had been fitted with rudimentary armour over their cabs and vulnerable tyres, and where their cranes or cement mixers had been there were now quick-firing cannon of every calibre.

Two huge bulldozers had also been fitted with sheets of plate and now waited with their accompanying engineers for the order to advance. Most poignant of all among the strange a.s.sortment of vehicles in which so much faith was being put, was a tiny Daimler Dingo scout car of World War Two vintage. Retrieved partially restored from some enthusiast's garage and fitted with a single general purpose machine gun, it was going to lead.

They were directed into a house whose suspended floor had been removed by fuel scavengers long before, and settled to wait again.

Spiders and other bugs and insects came to bother them, making them itch and adding to their cramped discomfort. Revell hardly noticed them. As he looked around his men his greatest satisfaction was that Andrea wasn't there. She was safe elsewhere, like Inga.

Those two were so different, so completely opposite each other in every conceivable way that it was impossible to imagine any grounds on which they might come together.

One by one the guns were falling silent, leaving as the only sound the far distant boom of some Russian heavies firing on another part of the perimeter. It was clear the Russians had no clue as to what was about to be unleashed on them.

The attack was planned to go forward and peel away the successive rings of enemy positions, pus.h.i.+ng them back and away to either side to widen the gap until it was impossible for them to re-close it. Then they would dig in and hold that cleared ground until they got help from outside. There would be none until then.

The NATO High Command had not been told of the breakout, there had not been the time to involve them, or the wish to take the security risk of the lengthy communications that would have been necessary.

It was the desperate plight of the city that prompted so desperate a plan. The toll in human lives had been terrible so far; with the food situation becoming chronic it was going to get rapidly worse. They had nothing to lose.

FOURTEEN.

The old man noted the readings, and made a pencil dot on the plastic cover of the map. With irritating slowness and deliberation he took a ruler from a shelf, dusted it on his sleeve, and used it to join the last two marks. Halfway along, the line he made intersected another, and he ringed the junction.

'Now we must get the police.' He peered at the girl over the top of his cracked gla.s.ses.

'There is no need. Wait here, I will deal with it.' Andrea climbed from the back of the radio location vehicle and breathed deeply to clear her lungs of the foul smoke the operator's pipe had been giving off. She had not asked him what he was burning, she could guess.

The building so clearly indicated by the search aerials on the van's roof looked to be severely damaged, virtually uninhabitable. Slowly, to make as little noise as possible, she climbed the rubble-strewn stairs. A stray c.h.i.n.k of light escaped from beneath a soot-stained door. She leant her rifle against the wall and unholstered her pistol. A gentle push confirmed that it was locked, but a glance at its charred surround gave her reason to believe it might not be all that strong.

Taking a step back, and preparing for the pain that would come when for an instant her damaged leg took all her weight, she took a deep breath and kicked out at the wood just below the lock.

Pain was forgotten as it crashed open and Andrea levelled her pistol at the only person in the room.

'I do not have a gun.' Inga reached for the headphones and carefully took them off, letting them fall on to the radio that had been pulled from its place of concealment beneath the sofa.

'That is a great pity, I had hoped you had.' Without taking her eyes from the blonde, Andrea reached for her rifle, and used it to wedge the door shut. 'But now I think that this is best. Did you learn much from him?'

'From your Major Revell? No.'

'What did he do with you, I want to know all the details.' Andrea took the girl by the wrist and pulled her in through the open bedroom doorway. The sheets had not been changed, they were near transparent with the oil that had soaked into them. 'I see you played games. Now, everything. Tell me everything.'

Revell led his men at the head of the second wave, and they met little opposition as they pa.s.sed through the first belt of defences. Broken guns and bodies lay everywhere. Sandbagged positions burned along with the machine gun crews that had manned them, and there were screams coming from a burning armoured bulldozer.

The tiny Daimler had driven into a crater, and now the spitting barrel of its machine gun, firing over the rim, marked the furthest point of advance.

A monstrous eight-wheeler had been knocked out close by, but while its pulverised cab meant that it would be driving no further, the automatic weapons firing from its cargo platform were doing b.l.o.o.d.y execution among Russian troops trying to escape from isolated trenches where they found themselves trapped.

The hold-up was caused by a pair of anti-tank guns flanked by a complex of zig-zagging trenches from which enemy riflemen were keeping up a heavy protective fire against any infantry attempt to take the guns.

At fifty yards from their objective the squad had been forced to go to ground, and it seemed the attack had stalled. Every second's delay gave the Russians a longer breathing s.p.a.ce in which to make hasty preparations for a counter-attack that must succeed if the Hamburg forces were caught in the open.

'We've got to have the tanks up in support.' Revell was trying to make himself understood over the radio, but he wasn't the only one calling for help, and the Russians were already beginning to jam many frequencies.

'They're waiting for us to get those guns first.' Hyde watched the muzzle flashes of the 122mm pieces as they proceeded to systematically destroy every vehicle that came within their range.

'And we need them to do something about those trenches before we can close enough.'

'Major.' Thome crawled to join officer and NCO. 'If I can blow the guns, will you drop the charges, let me stay with this outfit?'

'You sure there's nothing else you want? OK, you got it, good luck.'

Thome ran off, dodging mortar bursts and sprinting between the lines of tracer.

'We'll not see him again.' Snapping off a shot, Hyde brought down a Russian gunner who had been careless enough to show himself around the side of a gun s.h.i.+eld. The action brought a storm of retaliatory fire that forced the men to hug the slight cover the low mounds of rubble offered.

Gradually the incoming fire grew in volume as the Russians became more confident of holding the position, and began to feed men back into it.

A high revving engine became audible, and the Daimler leapt from the crater, tossing into the air the lengths of steel mesh that had a.s.sisted its escape. Hyde expected to see it turn and race for cover, leaving the battlefield to more thickly armoured vehicles, but it didn't, instead it picked up speed as it weaved and jinked towards the guns. Heavy calibre sh.e.l.ls flashed past the darting scout car, small arms fire beat a tattoo on its thin armour. As it churned through the tangle of barbed wire fronting the weapons' pits a figure leant over its side and slapped block-like objects on to the steel walls of its hull, then with the driver threw himself out.

The driver was caught by a burst of automatic fire even as he jumped, Thorne went the other way and tumbled into a foxhole on top of a Russian sergeant.

Only the sapper reappeared.

Leaping a trench, using the rampart fronting it as a ramp, the Daimler crashed through the sandbag wall about one of the guns and came to a stop nose down among the split sacks only a yard away from it.

Several explosions ripped through the pit as the limpet bombs detonated, killing the weapon's crew and starting fires among its ready-use ammunition.

It was too much for the men on the other anti-tank gun. They ran. Seeing that they had been abandoned, the enemy infantry decided to follow and the jams their panic created at the exits from the trench system made them easy targets for the men who stormed the fast disintegrating defences of the second line.

There was no stopping them now. They kept close on the heels of the fleeing Warsaw Pact troops, giving them no respite, driving them on to create more confusion, more uncertainty further back.

And now the tanks came forward and added their long-range firepower to that of the handheld ant.i.tank weapons that had been all they had available so far, and they arrived just in time to engage the first Russian armour to appear.

T72s and T84s were stopped and began to burn as the powerful cannons of the British Challengers and the 152mm combined gun and rocket launchers of the M60s punched rounds through their armour as fast as they appeared. An M60, worn out by long months spent racing about Hamburg to bolster weak parts of the defences, threw a track, and instantly the infantry formed a defensive perimeter about it while the repair was effected. And while that was going on the tank's main armament and cupola machine gun continued to give support fire.

When they reached an abandoned, carefully camouflaged anti-aircraft missile site, Revell knew that they were almost through. Beyond that lay a last major ring of defensive works, but they faced the other way, were intended to fend off NATO attempts to relieve the city, and by now the number of men available to man them would be far fewer than was necessary to make their interlocking fields of fire truly effective.

Mopping up was still going on, the flanks of the corridor that had been punched through the encircling armies would have to be consolidated, but they would be able to put to excellent use the many defences the Russians had spent so much effort in making.

'The whole f.u.c.king world's gone mad.' Dooley plonked himself beside the major after completing a scavenging expedition to secure as many souvenirs from the dead enemy officers as he could. 'I just been talking to a guy who's waiting for the stretcher bearers. Him and his pals spotted this Commie field kitchen and thought they'd try the cabbage soup, see if it was as foul as they serve in Hamburg. They get right up to it and wham, the Ruskies fight to keep it like it was the steps of the Kremlin. Then you know what they do, when they seen they're gonna get beat, they blow it up, and themselves as well. Soup and bread and meat everywhere.'

'Did you say meat?'

'Sure I did, Sarge. You been too close to the guns? Your hearing going?' 'There ought to be a field kitchen near that missile battery. We're not needed for the moment, shall we take a look?'

Major Revell didn't have to make the invitation a second time.

Although they'd not yet encountered any themselves, they'd seen others walk on to mines, and took care to retrace a route they'd already found to be safe.

The site was completely deserted. There were some signs that hurried preparations had been under way to destroy the missiles, their launch vehicles and a.s.sociated truck-mounted radars, but little of it had been completed, and none of it carried out. Demolition charges lay scattered about the open back of a truck and more were in cases aboard it. That was why it had not disappeared like all the other light weight vehicles such a large unit must have had. Plenty of dry skid marks showed where field cars, motorcycles and command cars had taken off in a hurry. A burning motorcycle combination in the distance revealed that not all had made successful escapes.

'It's here. Two b.l.o.o.d.y great wagons, with trailers ...' Bullets cut the air close by and Burke had to dive for cover.

There was a look of semi-permanence about the site. Camouflage had been done very thoroughly, and the usual tented accommodation had been supplemented by three small wooden shacks. It was from the middle of those that the fire had come.

'Good job that trench were there.' After some difficulty getting out, Burke crawled back to join the remainder of the squad who had taken cover behind a holed and rusting oil storage tank at the rear of what might once have been a small engineering works. 'Bloke they dug it for must either be b.l.o.o.d.y tall, or a heck of a coward. It's all of six foot deep.'

'Try a grenade on them.'

The only one among them with any left was Boris, who had to work his way close enough to toss the fragmentation bomb under the slightly raised floor of the cabin.

Lifted off its foundation piles by the explosion, the wooden structure settled back with its walls all at angles and its doors blown off. The floor had been gouged and splintered by slivers of metal that had penetrated it to wound the men inside.

A spray of automatic fire finished the Russians who were groping for their rifles, but as Boris moved forward to look inside, Clarence's shouted warning came only just in time. From between the trucks came a long gout of flame that belched into and over the cabin to set it ablaze.

Its operator got no second chance. Bullets fired under the vehicles brought him down and as more finished him the snout of the flame gun dribbled fire on to his chest.

'I smell meat again.' Ripper inhaled deeply. 'Yeah, of course you can. I see the ribs barbecuing from here.' Dooley returned from another treasure hunt. 'You know these missile guys had some real strange notions about how to dig trenches. There's a load more of those deep foxholes round the back.'

The shack in the middle was well alight, but it was still possible to approach those on either side, though their splitting and cracking walls would be a part of the conflagration soon. Revell opened one, to see rack upon rack of meat hanging to dry. He slapped Ripper's hand away when he reached for a piece.

'Something you should see, Major.' Hyde led them to a huge cast iron stove. Once perhaps the pride of some trendy person's fitted kitchen, now the bright red Aga stood beneath a corrugated iron canopy with a crooked chimney made from lengths of drainpipe, surrounded by broken floorboards and furniture intended as its fuel.

A fire still burned in it, and Hyde used a piece of cloth to open the oven door to reveal an almost done roast. 'And there's something else, one last thing.' Again he led, this time to a pit well away from the kitchens. Taking a sc.r.a.p of paper he lit it, and let it flutter into the depths.

Ripper threw the contents of his stomach after it, extinguis.h.i.+ng the light. 'Why'd he do that, what's the matter?' Dooley sauntered over to the group and peered into the pit.

Gritting his teeth was the only way that Hyde could stop from joining Revell and Thorne who'd also begun to heave. His words came out through them. 'You thick sod. Those aren't b.l.o.o.d.y trenches, they're b.l.o.o.d.y graves. These s.h.i.+ts were starving, so they used the only food source they had left to them. Think about it. What's there always plenty of in war?'

'You mean they... they have been eating their dead?' 'Yes, and ours. That's why they've been trying to destroy the evidence.'

But Dooley wasn't listening any more, hands on his knees he was retching uncontrollably as his empty stomach went through the ritual of straining to eject something that wasn't there.

Standing back Clarence took care to stay beyond the range of smells from the ovens and the burning huts. He watched Boris stagger away clutching at his stomach and reeling from dizziness and nausea. It had hit the deserter worse than any of them, and he could feel sorry for the man. For some reason he hadn't expected the major to react the same way as the others. Not that he considered the officer to have no human traits; he clearly had, as his pursuit of Andrea testified; but he'd always thought of him as harder than most men. Perhaps it was an act, or maybe something that happened to him while he was away from them that had changed him.

Finally Revell managed to bring himself under control, though the urge to retch remained and was doubled when he heard the others doing it. He was glad Andrea wasn't there, to see him like this. d.a.m.n it, he wished he could stop. He tried to take a sip from his flask but his body's reaction was instantaneous, throwing it back the moment it touched his throat.

And Inga too. He could only hope that there was someone else who could be sent to take the pictures that would inevitably be wanted for propaganda, and eventually for war crimes evidence.

The siege was almost lifted, the Russians were on the run and nothing could prevent them completing the task now. The city was safe, he was glad the girls were too. He would have to choose between them, there couldn't be room in his life for both. But he wouldn't choose yet, he would wait, and see what happened.

'He did that because you told him to?' Andrea had listened to the recounting of the night Inga and Revell had spent together, not making any comment, showing any expression, only asking questions now and then. 'Yes. I made him do it four times, he seemed to want me to.' Throughout the recital Inga had been aware of the pistol's unwavering barrel pointed straight at her. 'What are you going to do with me?' She tried not to show her fright. With a man it would have been easy, but with this cold woman she could not tell. She tried to smile, to make light of her situation, effect nonchalance, and was surprised to see an answering smile.

'I have not thought that far. Do you think I am attractive?' 'Yes.' Inga answered as boldly as the question had been posed. 'Undress.'