Hard Target (13 page)

‘What about her?’
Andrea looked up sharply, ‘I go where I like, when I like.’

It was a temptation, ridiculous but strong nevertheless, to Revell to put her over his knee and give that tight wrapped backside a couple of good hard slaps. Just the thought made his palm tingle as though he had, adding an extra thrust to the erection the scantily clad whores had already begun to excite. In any other than this dangerous situation he’d have found an excuse to get her alone for a while but there wasn’t time for that now. Shit, why was it that every attractive, and a lot of the not so attractive girls made him feel like that. His wife had told him his needs, his demands, were one of the main reasons for the break-up of their marriage, though she’d not had the courage to cite them as grounds. Well now she’d got what she wanted, a nice steady twice-a-month-and-have-you-had-a-bath-since-your-last- eh-eh-time-of-the-eh-month-dear. Was he over-sexed? Damn it, it was no time to be pondering that again.

One of the women on the floor had been trying hard to catch Revell’s eye. So far he’d avoided it, but when Hyde went out, followed shortly afterwards by Andrea, he had no one to talk to and nowhere else to look.

She was in her late thirties he guessed, with a face that was beginning to show heavy pouches under her eyes, which combined with too much liner made them startlingly dark and intense. A loosely tied gown revealed an ample cleavage, the big orbs jostling against each other at her every movement. The gaping garment didn’t meet until it had also revealed the upper of what looked like several rolls of flab about her middle. Her knees were partially drawn up in front of her, and the instant she saw she had the major’s attention she slowly parted them to expose a luxuriant mass of pubic hair that hid any detail.

When she realised Kurt was also getting a good look, the limbs were hurriedly clamped together and the quilted gown once more draped across.

The elbow that poked into his side was Kurt’s. The smell of unwashed flesh and dirty underwear made Revell take a pace to one side, not that the Grepo noticed the involuntary reaction, be was far too busy ogling the women. ‘ Sehrgut, eh? Sehrgut.’

Laughter from the other men greeted Kurt’s crude pantomime translation as he put a hairy-backed hand to his crotch and simulated a masturbating motion.

In a way though Revell agreed. In different circumstances the whore might have been attractive, but her lifestyle had aged her. To Kurt’s tastes doubtless she still was ‘very good’, not for him though. Not with the risk of disease she carried, and the record of the thousands of gross obscenities she had performed with regiments of men etched into her face.

Another of the whores, the oldest one, with the beginnings of a moustache, was turning on her dubious charms for his benefit. To avoid having to look at the flaccid flesh being rearranged and heaved into view for his delectation he went to the door and called out to Hyde. As he did he heard Kurt’s throaty chuckle leading the other men into laughter. He suspected it was aimed at his back.

‘Sergeant Hyde. I want Libby in here now. Get a move on.’ Sat on the floor a little way along the corridor Andrea was checking the contents of four spare magazines for her submachine gun. She looked up at his shout.

As her beautiful eyes flickered over his face Revell felt certain she could read his thoughts, understood his real reason for coming out of the room. What she said tended to confirm that impression.

‘There are ugly people in the Zone. Not all of them are Russian.’

TEN
‘I love these.’ Dooley unsheathed the bayonet and held it up, so that the shafts of sunlight filtering in glinted on the mirror polished blade. ‘They make a fucking lovely sound as you pull them out, sort of a sucking noise. You can’t always hear it because of the fuss the crud you stuck it in is making, but sometimes the shits go dead quiet,’ he nudged Jango with his elbow. ‘You get it, dead quiet; dead ... dead quiet. Hey, that’s a joke. You like it? I just made it up.’ ‘We’d never have guessed.’
‘Go back to mending the tellie, Cohen, I weren’t talking to you. What was I saying?’ No one prompted him, but he managed to pick up the thread on his own. ‘There ain’t no other noise like it. Best one was when I stuck it in a fat Cossack captain…’

Dooley had been droning on, rambling from one subject to another without pause, for almost an hour, and for the others in the skimmer, having failed to stop the monologue, it had now become just background noise, like the birds, or Burke’s atrocious wind.

‘It’s not my bloody fault.’ Their driver admitted responsibility for the most recent succession of rude sounds, after an indignant scowl he’d directed at Dooley had not succeeded in putting the blame for them elsewhere. ‘These bloody rations do it.’ He kicked at the litter of wrappers on the floor. ‘How do they expect a bloke’s digestion to work properly on muck like that; plays havoc with my gut.’

‘Don’t do our noses any good either.’ Jango flapped his hand in front of his face to waft away the smell.

Collins had been watching Dooley as he burnished the bright killing edges of the bayonet. ‘Shouldn’t that be blued, or something, to stop it catching the light?’

‘What’s the point.’ Dooley’s face creased in another grin as he discovered another pun. ‘Hey, how’s that. I made another joke.’

With a sigh of exasperation Cohen paused from re-securing a warped panel on the side of the console. ‘A clown you may be, a comic you are not. I tell you, if wit were shit you’d be constipated.’

Pleased that in Collins at least he had an attentive audience, of sorts, the big man ignored the remark. He turned the weapon over to give it a final buff.

‘If I ain’t using it, it’s in here,’ he patted the sheath, ‘and when I am using it, I like the Commies to see it coming. Some of them freeze when they see it, makes it easier to stick ‘em. So why hide it, and anyway it slides in nice and smooth when it’s like this; as well as making that lovely slurping sound as it comes out.’

‘I thought this was going to be a push-button war.’ A loud bellow of laughter from Dooley brought an immediate rebuke from the others, and even he was taken aback at the volume he’d produced.

‘Laugh quieter, you fat-arsed crud.’ Cohen looked at his watch. ‘Will I be glad when the major gets back, so maybe he can shut you up.’ ‘I kinda get the impression you’ve amused our lump of lard.’ Jango had to pound Dooley on the back since he appeared in danger of choking.

‘It is a fucking push-button war, or hadn’t you noticed.’ He made a quick recovery.
‘Then why are we out here?’ Collins was puzzled. ‘What are we doing with these?’ He held up his assault rifle and bag of demolition charges.

‘What a fucking innocent.’ Dooley had his audience back. I’ll tell you how it works. The Heap Big General in Washington, the Pentagon no less, he presses a button on his desk and his aide comes in. The General gives him a three-line order to send out. The aide goes out, presses a lot more buttons and the order goes off. It travels through maybe thirty or forty different command centres and headquarters and the like, and at every stage more buttons are pressed and a load more words get added. Finally it reaches our battalion, only now it ain’t three lines, now it looks like the New York telephone directory. Our CO reads the bit that’s for him, about sixty pages, and presses a button for our platoon commander. He reads his ten pages and presses a button to send for me. I go charging over, all keen and excited, he looks me in the eye, pokes me in the belly button and says ‘attack’.’

Dooley sat back, pleased with the effect of his complex recitation, and looked smugly about him in a manner that suggested he was expecting at the very least a standing ovation. All he got was a thundering fart from Burke.

‘I’ll be glad when this waiting is over, when we know what’s going to happen.’

‘Listen to me, kid.’ Leaning forward and lightly resting his hand on Collins’ knee, Cohen put on his fatherly act. ‘Enjoy the waiting; to be bored is to be sure you’re still alive. It doesn’t feature in heaven or hell. As for what’s going to happen, the best we can hope for is .that we know what is supposed to happen. If we knew what was going to happen, we could cut straight to the end of the war and save a lot of misery.

‘I still wish I knew where Hyde and the others were right now.’ ‘You could always ask your friend Clarence.’ Jango tapped the feet which perpetually shuffled round and round on the gunner’s chair.

Since a fighter-bomber had screamed across the tops of the trees at about midday, their stand-in turret gunner had abandoned the Rarden with its limited forty-degree elevation, and manned their anti-aircraft machine gun instead.

‘Man, he’s gone round so many times he’s just got to be in a trance by now. Ask him if he can see into the future.’

Collins didn’t take up the black’s suggestion. Nor did Clarence respond in any way, though Jango had deliberately uttered the words loudly, for his benefit.

‘You don’t need crystal balls or trances or any of that junk.’ Between puffs at his cigarette, while watching the large clouds of blue smoke slowly spreading to fill the upper regions of the interior, Dooley had come to the conclusion that here was yet another subject in which he could join. ‘I know where they are and what’s going to happen. I bet you any amount they’re in a whore house, they’re screwing everything in sight, and we’ll get there just in time to be told it’s time to be moving on.’

‘What an imagination.’ Cohen poured scorn on the big man’s prediction. ‘Those three might well have their hands full, but it won’t be of tit and bum. But since you’re so sure I’ll let you win some of your money back. I’ll take you on. Fifty says not one of them has so much as seen, let alone had, a handful of whore. How’s that, is that fair?’

There was a loud smack as Dooley crashed his palms together in satisfaction. ‘You’re on, fifty bucks.’

‘It’s a bet’ Cohen made a record of the wager in a notebook taken from one of his many pockets. ‘It’s almost a shame to take your money. Does anyone else want to back Dooley’s wishful thinking?’

‘No way, brother, no way.’ Rinehart gave up his attempts to administer a drink of water to Nelson. ‘I know why you wear that armour. I’ve seen you poke more cash and loot in those pockets than I thought there were in the whole of the Zone. I ain’t about to add another bulge to it. Mind you, I’m tempted to take you on. Maybe it’s stupid, but I got this hunch that there’s just a chance friend Dooley might be right for once. Who knows, maybe he’ll even take a few bucks off you yet.’

A momentary look of doubt flickered across Cohen’s tanned features. It didn’t last long. What was he worrying about? Since when had he ever bet on anything other than a sure thing? Dooley already owed him four hundred and fifty, this would make it a nice round number. So maybe he’d never make general, but with a little more luck, god willing, he’d come out of the war with enough cash and goodies to make a three-star’s retirement plan look like peanuts. He patted the multitude of flap secured compartments in the flak jacket’s front in turn, and checked that each was buttoned down, lingering a little longer over the one with the diamonds in it.

That fifty bucks was as good as his already. There was no way Dooley was going to win, no way.

‘Sit down. SIT DOWN.’ Libby shouted at the old scrubber. With ill grace she plonked back down, turning off the act immediately she was rebuffed, as the three before her had been.

Libby knew what they were up to. They wanted out, the same as the East Germans, and if anything their reasons were stronger. After the attack it wouldn’t take the Russians long to figure out who had visited The Farm and, with suspicion and brutality an inbred facet of their nature, they would be sure to turn on the girls. The whores knew that, hence the clumsy, continuous attempts at seduction.

All he had to do was mime his needs and there’d be a rush to fulfil them. The thought revolted him. In such a struggle, bound to be heard by the others, he’d have little to say in which of the tarts got to him first, and the older ones with their layers of ill-matched cosmetics’ and flaccid bodies nauseated him. Old women always made him feel ill. Elderly female relatives had thought him ‘cold’. He had thought them hideous, and had been obliged to force himself to give even the briefest of pecks on cheeks when it had been customarily expected of him on special occasions. Even now, the recollection of that oft repeated and much loathed duty made him cringe.

‘I told you to bloody sit down.’

This time the woman didn’t choose to be cowed so easily. Though she could not have understood the words, their tone and the action that accompanied them had been abundantly clear. The insinuating smile she turned on was complemented by a deliberate loosening of a bow at the neck of her already gaping nightdress. Her body oozed from the threadbare material, and a large brown nipple with hairs sprouting around it was shoved into plain view by the weight of a balloon-like breast.

‘I said sit down, get back.’
She kept coming, while the others looked on, leaning forward to see what would happen.

A million thoughts, images, emotions flashed in rapid sequence through Libby’s mind. Oh God he hated this place, this war, the Zone. Helga, that was all he wanted, just to find her, then none of this would matter any more. He’d desert, go East, West, even stay in the Zone just so long as he could be with her. He needed her, hadn’t been with another woman since the war had taken her from him, swept her out of his reach. Frustrations that masturbation had done little to relieve were welling up inside him. All those hours over the last two years spent in finding moments alone and then frantically working himself to a climax.

‘You like this?’
A hand was pulling at his trousers, expertly unfastening them, seeking his erection.
‘It is wet. You want me?’

Waves of sickly sweet perfume filled his nostrils, and through the several layers of clothing he felt the twin hummocks of flesh dangling to the woman’s waist rolling against his own stomach. A fat sweat-sticky leg was thrusting between his thighs.

‘NO.’ He hadn’t meant the shout to be so loud or the blow so hard.