Sky Strike Read online

  Thick black smoke began to billow about the signal cabin and drift across the tracks towards the squad, as the heavier fuel started to burn in earnest, showing a curling angry red at the base of the pall.

  An arm-waving figure appeared at a doorway in the otherwise blank walled base of the cabin. Chased by a flurry of hastily aimed shots, it dived back inside and the door slammed shut.

  Cline was the first to reach the building. He fired a burst from his Colt Commando at the now closed door, forcing the others to dive to the ground to find shelter from the wild ricochets that whined and bounced from the thick metal and its strengthened surround.

  ‘Mad arse.’ Dooley was astounded to look up and see the bombardier still in one piece. ‘Shit, you should be more full of holes than a fucking colander.’ ‘All of you. Take cover. Libby, get us in there.’

  Libby took a wad of plastic explosive from his pack and worked it in his hands to make it more pliable, before pulling it apart, and moulding each of the chunks against the door’s exterior where experience told him the bolts were most likely to be. He used a fuse with the shortest possible delay, and barely had time to join the others behind an angle of the structure before it blew with an eardrum-punishing roar.

  Hyde had to barge dine aside before he could toss the concussion grenade through the opening. Dust and smoke swept back into his face and the major used the second it took him to recover to pass him and go in first.

  Half -hidden beneath the flattened door lay the partially dismembered body of an East German railwayman. His blood had made the floor slippery and Revell almost fell as he reached for the splintered handrail and started up the concrete stairs three at a time, with Cline hard on his heels.

  A single fluorescent tube still lit the windowless room. As it swung, its flickering light made weird shadows of the rack upon rack of relays, switches and other electronic equipment. Another flight led to the control room. The door at its top was closed.

  Shouldering his assault shotgun, Revell fired twice and even as the gouged and shattered door crashed back, was racing up to, and through it.

  A single hand frantically waving a soiled handkerchief was the only obvious movement among the huddle of four figures in a corner. There was a woman among them, as white-faced as the men, her eyes staring from behind thick lensed glasses.

  ‘Down.’ Revell demonstrated his meaning by jerking the barrel of his 12-gauge towards the floor. The cabin staff understood and dropped as if pole-axed, laying stiff and un-moving. ‘Set the charges, I want this place ready to blow in ten minutes, and get Boris up here. I want to find out how many of the others have made it down safely.’ Leaving dine to guard the prisoners, he took advantage of their elevated position to try to get some idea of what was happening in the rest of the yard.

  There were several big fires around the perimeter of the area, but whether they were the results of the efforts by other assault groups, or simply marked the sites where choppers had crashed in, it was impossible to tell. A handful of smaller blazes had started among the long rows of rolling stock, and a large cloud of oily smoke was beginning to rise from the direction of the machine shops. That had been a prime target, it had to be the result of demolition.

  ‘I cannot raise any of the other groups, Major.’ Before reporting that fact, Boris had taken the precaution of checking that the radio was working perfectly. Forestalling the officer’s inevitable question.

  ‘Probably too busy to answer, that’s all. Keep trying.’ A burst of machine gun fire came in through the window above Revell’s head, and he hunched up to protect himself from the shards of glass that rained on to his helmet and shoulders. ‘How’s the work going? I want us out of here.’

  Having used his bayonet to prise off the access panels beneath the room-wide diagrammatic train indicator board, Libby was placing lumps of explosive against the thick, variously coloured, multi-stranded cable runs threading their way through the floor. Fuse wire linked them to those already set beneath the switch- laden control console. ‘Almost finished here.’ Gathering the wires together, he began to lead them towards the stairs. ‘I’ve saved some for those racks in the room below. When this lot goes they won’t be controlling any more trains from here, not for a long time. Be easier to start fresh than unscramble the fry-up I’m planning.’

  All the time he’d been working, Libby had been conscious of the fact that the East German cabin staff were watching his every move. One of them, he couldn’t tell which, but thought it was the oldest of the men, had urinated. A yellow puddle spread sluggishly over the boot-imprinted floor.

  ‘These dumb buggers are shit scared.’ dine stood over the prisoners, his rifle aimed at each in turn.

  ‘So would I be if I were them.’ Stripping the insulation from the ends of the wires, Libby started splicing them together. ‘Fifteen minutes ago the poor sods were non-combatants in cosy reserved jobs, now they’re front line cannon fodder and probably think we intend to leave them here when we blow this lot.’ A thought struck him, and he glanced at Revell. Will we?’

  ‘No, the orders say minimum civilian casualties. We’ll herd them clear before we go.’

  Burke clumped up the stairs, not coming all the way into the room, but stopping about halfway, so that his face was on a level with the floor of the control room. He ducked as a spent cannon shell crashed through the last intact pane, pounded a dent into the top of the indicator board and bounced to the floor, to spin to a stop inches from his nose. ‘This place is a ruddy death trap. How soon before we get out? I’d rather take me chances in the open.’

  A heavy explosion rocked the cabin, sending a hail of metallic debris clanging off the outside walls, and tumbling Burke back down the stairs. As the thunder of the shock wave passed, his aggrieved voice floated up to the control room, his words bracketed by obscenities.

  ‘And then again, maybe not.’

  FOUR

  ‘Didn’t get far, did they?’ As Ripper watched from behind the cover of the pile of prefabricated gantry sections, one of the East German signal cabin staff staggered to his feet, trying ineffectually to stem the gush of blood from the stump of his left arm. He tottered a few steps away from the fragment-slashed and mutilated bodies of his companions, violently spewed an arc of bright red blood and collapsed!

  ‘Perhaps they are better off like that.’ Andrea had seen the grenade burst among the group. Lobbed by an unseen hand from behind a hopper wagon, it had exploded at shoulder height, tearing them apart. An eyeless head decorated the top of a junction box and sightlessly contemplated her disembowelled torso through broken spectacles. ‘Better that than be rounded up by the KGB after this is over. Their involvement would have been assumed automatically. Their deaths would have been as bloody but not as swift.’

  The rapid series of explosions had cracked the walls of the signal cabin, and from the long fissures and its roofless top came flames of every colour as cables and electrical components burned, the copper and plastics running molten down the concrete.

  ‘Don’t bother watching for the second wave.’ Revell knuckled his eyes in an attempt to counteract the itching caused by the sulphurous smoke. ‘They must have seen the beating we took, sustained heavy losses themselves and turned back. We’re on our own, and the word is that includes finding our own transport home.’

  ‘Has Boris been able to make contact with any of the other groups?’ The reams of figures that had been thrown at them during the briefings came back to Hyde. ‘We can’t be the only assault group on the ground. There were thirty choppers in the first wave, that’s better than three-hundred and sixty men.’

  ‘Maybe there’s a few others milling about down here, but listening to Sky Control, and reading between the lines, I’d say we made one of the better landings.’

  ‘Is there to be no pick-up? We are stranded here?’

  Revell could read the fear in Boris’s face. The Russian had good cause to be terrified. For the others in the squad, if they were taken prisone
r, it would be a quick bullet in the back of the neck, or if they were lucky, if that was luck, six or seven months of forced labour in a Soviet mine or quarry before they died of malnutrition and mistreatment. For the Russian deserter it would be worse: given the skilful barbarity of the Communists, immeasurably worse.

  ‘Right first time.’ Having stripped the protective seals from the tube ends of an M72 rocket launcher, Dooley extended it and flipped up the sights. ‘You saw the shit we came through, and then they were just warming up. They’ll be thoroughly awake now. Those flak and missile battery crews would just love another crack at our whirlybirds.’

  ‘I wasn’t expecting this to be a milk run, but Christ…’ Replying to a short burst of submachine gun fire from the vicinity of a burning refrigerated wagon, Burke was gratified to see a brown-clad body topple forward and start to steam in the heat of the conflagration close by…someone, somewhere has screwed us good and proper. We flew over a couple of complete air defence regiments at least. How come they hadn’t been spotted and the warning passed on to us? I tell you, it’s like fucking Arnhem all over again.

  ‘Forget the history lesson, though maybe for you it ain’t history, you’re old enough to have been there: what I want to know is where do we go from here, and how soon?’ Putting down the launcher, Dooley used the M60 to send a spray of bullets towards the roof of a distant warehouse ‘Shit, missed the bastard.’

  Taking a little longer to aim, and firing only a single shot from his Enfield Enforcer sniper rifle against Dooley’s twenty, Clarence brought down the Russian.

  The man held on to his binoculars as he fell the sixty feet, legs kicking wildly, to land out of sight. Another who had been climbing along the ridge to join him, panicked, lost his grip, and disappeared over the far side.

  Their Russian radio-man was still waiting for an authoritative answer. Revell could feel Boris’s eyes on him, could feel their intensity like a physical thing. ‘They would just be throwing the crews’ lives away.’ ‘What of our lives, what of ours?’ Boris thumped himself in the chest, striking hard with the inside of his closed fist. ‘They sent us first, to test the danger, and now they leave us... don’t they know what that means?’

  ‘Take it easy.’ Revell had to hold the frightened man down when he would have leapt to his feet. ‘OK, so we’re not going home by the quickest route, but I still intend us to get there.’

  ‘Hey, you kidding us, Major?’ Ripper ignored Cline’s attempt to stop him from butting in. ‘This is Indian territory, and we’re plumb in the middle of it. Apart from the lil’ ol’ fact that an army of Reds must be surrounding us by now, and starting to close in, we’re a hell of a long way from the Zone, let alone our own lines. We’ve the best part of a hundred and fifty miles of badlands to cross. By the time we’ve made it I’ll have worn my boots down to the stumps of my ankles. That’s if we ever do.’

  ‘That layer of dirt on the bottom of your feet ought to be good for at least twice that distance.’ Bombardier Cline couldn’t resist the opportunity offered.

  A bullet whined past Revell, cutting the netting on his helmet. He ducked lower. ‘First thing is to get away from here while there’s still a chance of finding gaps to slip through. After that, we’ll have to keep moving, think on our feet. It won’t take the Commies long to figure out a few of us have got away, and then they’ll start a hue and cry that’ll have every member of the GDR Politzie, every militia man at a bridge or checkpoint and every Red in and out of uniform keeping a watch for us.’

  ‘Be better if we scouted for the openings, rather than all charging about, making ourselves conspicuous.’ Hyde attempted to inject at least a degree of planning.

  ‘OK, take Burke with you. He’s good at wriggling out of work, let’s see if we can apply his talents elsewhere.’

  As the NCO and driver departed, Libby detected a movement under a railway wagon a hundred yards off. The third burst he put into the Russian machine gun team wasn’t needed. He felt a hand on his arm.

  ‘Take it easy.’ Revell withdrew his hand. ‘There’ll be lots more targets yet, save some for them.’

  Deep inside him Libby felt his emotions whirling in confusion. The ordinary ones of battle were there, the ones he always experienced in combat; fear and excitement among them, but there was another, a new one that kept rising to the fore, swamping all else.

  It was a strange burning hatred that was making him kill and want to kill in a way he never had before. Gone was the control, the calm reason that had brought him safely through two years of fighting in the Zone. Replacing it was. a growing anger and, mixed in with it, an intense loathing that was aimed not at the enemy, but at himself.

  He’d tried, oh God how he’d tried, but he couldn’t wipe from his memory that last night of his leave. At most he’d only had a couple of beers, well maybe three, but he hadn’t been drunk. No, on that night he had been as cold, as calculating as ever he had been in the heat of battle. All of the old skills had been employed to pick-up the woman, and from the moment he’d begun the familiar process of talking and joking and flirting he’d known what it was he was planning to do.

  The marshalling yard wasn’t around him any more, he was back in the car, crushing her body with the urgency of his need to come. Every detail was there. It was as far as he could go in satisfying the urges that had grown inside him since Helga had been swept from his reach by the war.

  In focusing on her he’d come to detest, to hate other women, because of the temptation they presented. The girlie magazines had fed that hate, and in the car as much as anything else he’d wanted to defile the woman, pumping the product of his massive orgasm on to her clothes to stain and soil them, and doing it there as if to tell her she wasn’t worth doing it inside.

  There were times, he hardly dared admit it to himself, when the thought had been in his mind, though he’d always suppressed it, that it would have been such a relief to end it all. Forget the search, forget the war and all its horrors and discomforts. He had the means, a choice of methods was all around him. A grenade, or that souvenir Hungarian pistol, either would have done the job... but he couldn’t do it.

  It wasn’t that he was afraid of death, provided it came quickly and cleanly; he’d seen many others willingly accept, almost embrace it, and he could understand why. There was a limit to what the human spirit could take, and the pressures he’d been under, both external and of his own making, had been gargantuan, more than anyone should ever have had to bear.

  But he hadn’t done it, he’d kept going. And he would continue to do so as long as there was a chance, however slight, that Helga still lived. The day, the second, he had irrefutable proof that she was no longer alive he would pull the pin or the trigger, and for a moment experience happiness again before it was all over and he went to join her.

  The jump back to reality was abrupt, as a fragment of grenade casing crashed against his helmet. He joined the others in firing on an attempt by a platoon of mixed Russian artillerymen and East German militia to rush them. The last of them to go down were close enough for him to see their faces, and he watched their changes of expression as he went for belly shots.

  ‘Tight as a noose, Major.’ Hyde dabbed at his cheek. A bullet had slit open the flesh to a depth of a quarter of an inch, but only speckles of blood showed. The exposed tissue had the same pink rubbery appearance as the graft-patched surface of his face, ‘We did spot another group of our blokes, passed the every-man-for- himself message and invited them to join us, but they weren’t interested. They had the same idea as us, to get out and get out fast, figuring a small group stands the best chance. They should have come with us though, the Commies put down a mortar stonk on their position just after we left.’

  ‘Have you told him my idea about the transport?’ ‘Shut it, Burke, I’m making the report’ Burke shut it.

  ‘What transport?’

  Sergeant Hyde hesitated. ‘Well, it’s a bit of a long shot. We found an old shunting loco’. It’s h
ad a couple of lumps knocked off it, but it’s ticking over and seems to be OK.’

  ‘You got to be joking.’ Dooley heaped scorn on the idea. They ain’t like tanks you know. You have to go where the tracks take you. Good chance that’d be straight on to the muzzles of Russian cannon.’

  ‘Eh, Major.’ Ripper had been listening with growing interest. ‘I got this uncle, he’s a switcher with AmTrac, and I used to tag along sometimes. I reckon I know how it’s done, if that baby don’t go the right way I’ll just spike a few blades and make sure it do.’

  ‘It’s all we’ve got, let’s give it a try.’ A nagging doubt had occurred to Revell. ‘Can you drive a locomotive, Burke?’

  ‘Don’t know, never tried.’ He thought he’d better inject a more optimistic note. ‘But I’ve never found a vehicle I can’t manage somehow. If it works, I’ll shift it.’

  ‘This war is crazy, fucking crazy.’ Dooley sent an antitank rocket at a Russian scout car nosing out from behind the shell of the signal cabin. It stopped and began to burn. ‘We spend half the morning blowing apart the GDR railway system, and now we’ve got to pray a good chunk of the fucking thing is still working. I tell you, fucking crazy.’

  ‘No, leave the wagons coupled. The average Ruskie infantryman is as dumb as they come, but if all he sees is a loco’, that’s what he’ll aim at. If he has a whole train trundling past he may waste shots all along its length.’ Hyde pushed Cline up into the already crowded cab when the bombardier tried to be the last to board.

  Burke flexed his fingers over the controls, like a concert pianist warming up for a recital. ‘This must be the brake.’ A loud hiss of escaping air confirmed his guess. ‘Let’s see if I’m as brilliant with the rest. This’ll be the first time this crate has been out on the main line, quite an adventure for it. Reminds me of a story I read as a kid, about this…’

  ‘We’re not on the main line yet, and I don’t want to hear about Ivor the Engine, just drive.’