Sky Strike (18 page)

Carpet bombing, saturation chemical attacks, super-napalm drops, all had contributed towards the utter sterilisation of the landscape. Hardly a plant grew, and the few trees that survived were gouged and splintered by the bombs and shells that had embedded thousands of metal fragments in their bark. The transformation had been so violent it was virtually impossible to tell where the countryside had ended and town had begun. Now the two merged into one, an endless series of crater-scarred low hills.

At the side of the road sat hundreds of burned-out trucks and cars of every description, most of military origin. They lay rusting where the engineers had dumped them, some showing the marks of the heavy bulldozer blades that had shoved them aside when route clearance had become more urgent than salvage.

‘Off the road.’ Even the slamming of the heavy hatch behind him failed to drown out Dooley’s shout as he ducked inside.

Burke didn’t hesitate, wrenching the steering over and sending the APC into a lightly cratered field that was criss-crossed with the gouge marks of hundreds of sets of tank tracks.

Even as the back wheels hit the mud-surfaced loam, the road behind them erupted in pounding flame as a salvo of air to ground rockets ploughed into it.

‘Get us air cover.’ Revell had to bellow at the top of his voice to be heard by Cline, as the Soviet helicopter gunship banked and rippled another twenty rockets at them.

Fragments rattled and banged against the armour as the close spaced shock waves threatened to push the speeding vehicle over. Having overshot, the chopper had to go into a wide stalling turn to bring it back on target again, and this time Burke was able to watch its head-on approach.

At the first spurt of flame from the launch pods on the gunship’s stub wings, their driver put them into a turn that for a moment threatened disaster as they side- swiped a wrecked Abram tank. As the grating sound of the long scraping contact died, he sent them the other way and into the mass of smoke and slowly settling debris from the near misses,

‘Hell, don’t be stopping now.’ Ripper looked around at the others, expecting the same reaction from them as their driver slammed on the brakes and slewed the vehicle to a sharp stop then turned off the engine.

Pushing his head up into the turret, Revell slowly cranked it round to take a look at their situation. Their driver had achieved the near impossible, found them a place of concealment in that featureless terrain.

Under cover of the smoke, Burke had parked them between a pair of damaged armoured personnel carriers: on one side a West German Marder, on the other an Ml 13 with Canadian markings. The little group of which they formed the, hopefully, anonymous centrepiece was among a concentration of twenty or more other similar wrecks.

‘Shit, what do we do now. Wait for them to fry us?’ Shifting position, Ripper tried to move nearer an escape hatch.

‘If they do, it will not be yet’ With nothing to do while Cline distrustfully worked the radio single-handed, Boris alone found time for the young American. ‘The gunship will for the moment have lost us among the battlefield litter. If it is a recent model, one of those that has been pared of sophisticated equipment in order that the Communists might indulge their love of numbers above all else, then there is a chance it may not find us before it is forced to break off.’

‘We’ll know soon.’ Stopped further back, and driven in among the gutted remains of a convoy, Revell was relieved to see that the Land-Rover seemed to have entirely escaped the notice of the gunship, which was continuing to beat back and forth above them. He turned his full attention back to it, in time to see it launch one of its four wire-guided antitank missiles.

By the flare at the base of its tail, Revell was able to track the fat-bodied rocket and saw its devastating detonation against the hulk of a burned-out Luch eight- wheeled armoured car. Already leeched by earlier fires of everything combustible, there was no chance that the strike would satisfy the chopper’s weapons officer. Without spotting a fire he would know he had not hit his target.

Twice more it circled, and at the end of each turn made a pass over the battlefield and sent down another missile; but lacking the ability to distinguish the live target from the wrecks, only succeeded hi further demolishing a pair of already unsalvageable armoured ambulances.

‘He’ll get tired of pissing about and bugger off in a minute.’ Lounging back in his seat, Burke jumped violently as a cannon shell exploded against the roof above his head.

In frustration the helicopter crew opened a near continuous fire with their gatling-type fixed armament. The chin-turret mounted weapon sent torrents of shells towards the ground; between bursts they released the last of the 57mm unguided rockets, most of which did no more than turn over ground that had already been churned to a fine filth by explosives.

‘The bastard is trying to flush us out.’ Dooley made a great show of nonchalantly cleaning his nails with the tip of his bayonet, but spoiled the effect when even he jumped as another round disintegrated on the turret top, and sliced into the tip of a finger. ‘If that fucker runs out of gas and has to land, I’ll fucking have him.’ He squeezed the base of the finger until its tip went pink then red, and a large bead of dark blood rose from the deep cut.

They listened as the helicopter circled once more, growing fainter as it did so, then at the moment the beat of its motors was on the threshold of their hearing, it began to grow louder, and louder.

‘I think he’s having one last go.’ Revell watched its head-on approach, saw its last anti-tank missile spurt from its rail, underslung from the end pylon on the starboard stub wing, saw the light glint briefly on the wires unreeling behind it.

This time he couldn’t see the tail flare, only the dark outline of the rocket against the shimmer of its exhaust heat. It took him an instant to realise why the view was so different from those before. He was seeing the warhead not as it homed in on some other target, but as it came at them.

There was no other action he could take. Shouting a warning he dropped to the floor of the compartment and huddled close to it, tucking his head into the crook of his arm.

A giant hammer blow shook the eight-wheeler as the Ml 13 alongside took the full force of a direct hit by the powerful warhead and was moved bodily sideways to crash into the APC. The fireball enveloped all three vehicles and their every external fitting was ripped off by the massive blast.

Feeling the sudden roasting heat on his back, Revell looked up. All trace of the turret had gone. It had been plucked out neatly, leaving just the ball race and part of the traverse mechanism.

White-hot shafts of molten explosive and metal had sought out every corner of the M113, and discovered a still intact fuel tank. Raised instantly to its flashpoint as it gushed from the leaking container, the fuel now fed a roaring furnace that licked over the squad’s partially roofless transport.

Using the top hatches was out of the question, a moment’s exposure to the flames would have incinerated them, and the side doors opened only a fraction before making contact with the wrecks between which they were parked.

Flickering tongues of red and yellow played past Burke’s vision port as he crunched the APC into gear to drive it out from the clutches of the trap. He pushed the power higher and higher as the machine strained to escape the vice-like hold of the wrecks between which it was now so tightly held. He tried reverse, and the hope the few inches of movement brought was immediately dashed as the vehicle locked solid once again.

The air was becoming unbreathable, and the luxury interior fittings that until now had added a welcome touch of comfort to the usually spartan interior, became an added danger as their varnished finish or foam filling began to heat up, and give off strong fumes.

Packs stowed against the wall licked by the adjoining fires began to smoulder and had to be tossed out through the open roof, some of them to add their content to the fires.

Sergeant Hyde could feel his throat closing, could feel it being constricted by the rasping bite of the poison-filled, oxygen-leeched air. He’d been through this once before and had escaped the flames, though at the terrible cost his deep-burned face revealed: but having cheated the fires once, he wasn’t about to let them get him now.

Drawing the pins from the two grenades he’d saved, he reached up until the skin of his hands was being peeled by the fire flaring over the roof, then dropped the steel-wrapped explosive down the carrier’s side.

‘Forward, hard forward.’

Only half-hearing the NCO’s order, Burke was already shifted back to first, and as he floored the accelerator two explosions blended into one beside the hull.

Like an animal freed from a trap, the APC bounded forward as the force of the detonations pushed the walls of armour apart, but they were taking some of the fire with them. Two of the huge centre tyres were alight and from each spun blobs of burning rubber and shreds of tread. Passage through a series of puddles failed to quench the twin blazes, the clinging mud peeling away with the softened rubber.

In a last desperate attempt Burke took the APC across the road and on to a patch of flat ground covered with a carpet of low green moss-like plants. Cascades of stinking slime and foul, brown water rose higher than the vehicle’s roof as it plunged across the flood. Broken crescents of steel mesh-reinforced concrete crunched under the steaming tyres as they rode over the fragments of the bomb- shattered sewage pipe.

The raw effluent extinguished the flames but brought a torrent of obscene condemnation down on Burke as he steered them back on to the road. Much of the filth thrown up by their wild progress had found its way in, and the stink of the cordite had been replaced by another stench more powerful and more obnoxious.

Some of the mess had dripped on to Libby, but he was hardly conscious of it, only making a half-hearted move to brush it off. Sitting deep in one of the bucket seats he could see out through the open top and, high above the vision-blurring haze of the permanently suspended dust particles, he saw the interwoven contrails of the helicopter’s fighter escort.

It barely registered with him, but that portion of his mind still functioning on a professional level, told him the number of escorts was just too many for a single helicopter. He would have mentioned it, but felt the battle was no longer any business of his, he was taking no more part in it.

Cline repeatedly struck the top of the radio, with his clenched fist before reluctantly letting Boris remove the side panel to examine it. There were beads of bright fresh metal hanging frozen from most of the components, where solder from the circuit boards had begun to drip in the heat from the tyres immediately below the vital equipment.

‘Did you get the major his air cover?’ Libby wasn’t really interested, just asked for something to say, to break the isolation he felt growing about him.

‘I don’t know. They were receiving, but I didn’t get an acknowledgement’ Cline entered the fact in his log, brushing aside the charcoal black ashes that spread from the edges of the small page across its neatly lined surfaces. He had to cover himself, nothing that went wrong was going to be down to him. The Russian, that was it, if there was an enquiry he’d blame it all on the enemy deserter. ‘What’s your interest, I didn’t think you cared any more, thought you were packing it in?’

For a reason he didn’t understand, Libby found that funny. That was a good one, him not caring, not caring. The trouble was he cared too much; much too much. ‘There’s no need for me to pack it in.’ Standing, Libby stood looking out of the gaping hole where the turret had been, feeling the wind buffet past him as their driver piled on all the speed he could. The Land-Rover was following them again, though now keeping an even more respectful distance, sometimes out of sight half a mile behind them.

Libby felt the laughter rising inside him once more, and fought it down. Him, pack it in? Oh, Cline could be so stupid, so ready to talk first and think afterwards! What need was there for him to give up, or give in? All he had to do was wait and others would do it for him. He had no need to end his battle, when the battle was about to end him.

As he saw them skimming towards the APC at zero feet, their pylons loaded with masses of lethal ordnance, he felt like throwing his arms open wide to welcome, to symbolically embrace the four Soviet Hind helicopter gunships.

Closing his eyes, Libby turned his face to the sky and waited for the obliteration of his existence. Helga was in his mind, on his lips...

SIXTEEN
Now they had broken from cover it no longer mattered whether or not the Soviet gunships had a hulk-discrimination capability. The APC marked itself out from all the other armoured vehicles strewn about the war-destroyed landscape by being the only one moving.

His hatch had jammed, and Revell had to leave his seat and move back down the compartment to stand and look out through the circular hole where the turret had been. He did so in time to see the helicopters close to two thousand yards and move into line astern to commence their attack run. No manoeuvre their driver could throw the clumsy vehicle through could shake them off. They had only one chance.

‘Bale out and scatter.’
Even before they stopped, the escape hatches were crashing open. This time it was Boris’s turn to be helping someone else, as with assistance from Hyde and Andrea he pushed Libby over the side of the hull, and joined with the others in dragging the protesting man away from the personnel carrier.

From behind the inadequate protection of a curled length of T72 track, Revell could see the front seat weapons operator in the lead gunship hunched over his sights. At any second he would unleash a mass of steel and explosive towards the APC and surrounding area. He knew that by abandoning the carrier they had not avoided death, merely changed its timing and nature.

Not wanting to see their moment of firing, Revell turned his attention to the weaving contrails high overhead, and saw the silver cruciform tip of one transformed by a fireball into a smoke-towing collection of odd-shaped sections of bright metal. Another went the same way. A third Soviet aircraft tumbled from the enveloping smoke of a near miss with dark smoke billowing from its shattered cockpit as it went into a flat spin that, by the violence of the centrifugal forces it imposed, began to wrench first the control surfaces, and then the wings from the stricken aircraft.