A geyser of mud and river went up a hundred feet, and four more oil- drums later Clarence found another.
Sergeant Hyde had kept a tally, as accurately as he could when some of them were obviously selecting the same target. ‘I don’t think even the Commies could make that many duds. By my reckoning about one in five is live. The rest must just be weighted dummies, to make life harder for us.’
‘They’re bloody succeeding.’ Burke gripped the controls tighter and hunched himself into the smallest shape possible as he saw an oil-drum that had been riddled with small arms fire and stubbornly refused to sink, bear down on them and, still only partially submerged, pass under the front of the ride skirt.
‘What’s the old guy beefing about now?’ Ripper swore under his breath to conceal his annoyance as a shot he fired almost missed and succeeded only in pounding in the top of a hooped metal barrel, without piercing it. ‘He’s only got to die the once, ain’t like being wounded. And sure as hell if we hit one of those lil’ ol’ parcels, he’s gonna die.’
‘I bloody know that, you thick hick. ‘Course I’ve got to bloody die. It’s the fucking where and how I’d like to have some say in.’
Hyde came on the intercom to put a stop to the chatter. He was tempted to use his own rifle from one of the ports, but those to which there was easy access were already in use. The heaps of ammunition boxes and various other stores in the middle of the floor restricted movement and would have made it virtually impossible to take up a firing position at another. Instead he squeezed through to the back to check on Boris.
He wasn’t happy at having the Russian in so sensitive a job. Maybe he was alright now, at this very moment, in action; he had to do a good job or he’d perish with the rest of them, but they were well inside the Zone now and there was much in these craft that the Communists would have loved to get their hands on. With so few having been made, every one lost in action could be accounted for, and so far they could be certain that not one had fallen into enemy hands in any condition other than that of a maniac’s jigsaw scattered over several acres. So far Boris had played it straight, passed all the tests, but they were a devious and poisonous bunch, the Commies, maybe he was just biding his time, waiting his chance...
Their miniature teleprinter chattered a slim white ribbon of neatly typed gibberish. Tearing it off, Boris fed the strip into the decoder.
Watching, Hyde wondered what ‘I’ Corp would do to Revell if they found out he’d put the renegade in this position. He’d seen the standing orders regarding the do’s and don’ts of having Russian deserters in your unit. Although a handful were now finding their way into combat units, none that he knew of were ever given anything other than pioneer, pick and shovel, work to do. Most of the Commies who had come over were employed in the rear areas in labour battalions, and even there they were watched very carefully.
‘Will you give this to the major?’ Hyde looked at the offered message, and was tempted to tell the Russian what to do with it, but resisted the temptation. ‘You take it, I’ll watch the screens.’
It was impossible for Boris to tell the NCO’s mood by reading anything from his horror-mask face, or what had been his face; but in the sergeant’s voice he could detect mistrust, and didn’t offer argument. ‘Of course,’ He was aware that Hyde had read the message as it came out of the decoder, and knew why he did not trust him alone with the radio.
Terse to the point of being cryptic, the order ran to only ten words. Revell read them through several times, before instructing Boris to take it to each member of the crew in turn. He had no way of knowing if the Russians had them under electronic surveillance, but it was more than likely, and if the equipment in use was good enough, then use of the intercom would be as much of a giveaway as if they broadcast the message in-clear.
As it was passed around the only reaction from any of the crew was a long low whistle from Dooley, otherwise it was received in absolute silence. Revell accepted it back from their radio-man and read it through once more before rolling it into a ball and dropping it onto the floor. The word stayed in his mind when they were no longer before his eyes: ‘Seek and destroy source of mines. Radio silence until completion.’ Looking back along the interior he saw the sergeant was ostentatiously securing the radio.
Vibration rippled through the hull as the Allisons were run up to full power and the ride height was increased to the maximum. As speed picked up they began rapidly to draw away from the body of the convoy. Over the intercom came Burke’s voice, raised, as much as his gruff tones would allow, in song. As they sped towards the next belt of enemy defences he worked his way through ‘A-Hunting We Will Go ...’ to ‘Run Rabbit, Run Rabbit, Run, Run, Run ...’ but Hyde put a stop to the impromptu concert when their driver reached the chorus of ‘Oranges and Lemons say the bells of Saint Clements ... chop, chop, chop off their heads ...’
Shells and tracer rounds of every calibre flashed past them, but only a few rounds of machine gun fire actually found their target, rapping on the sides of hull and turret without noticeable effect.
‘We’ve caught the buggers on the hop.’ Burke was enjoying himself. For the first time since they had started out he was able to use the machine’s remarkable performance to the full, now that he no longer had to pace himself by the slow-moving transports and rafts of the convoy.
Their turret gunner was not enjoying himself. For Ripper it was bitterly frustrating. He’d done plenty of shooting, but not once had he seen the target. Usually he’d been firing in support of a landing, firing into a cloud of smoke or at a spray-shrouded bank. He didn’t count the barrels, that was no different from popping off at tin cans in his own back yard. So the Rarden cannon was a mite more interesting than a BB rifle, it still wasn’t war, not the sort he’d expected. ‘Major, just what the hell are we looking for?’
For the fourth time in as many minutes he had to hold his fire and let the chance of engaging juicy soft targets go. Mostly it was just trucks unloading ammunition, but Revell even refused him permission to open up on a pair of field cars surrounded by a crowd of gaping Soviet officers.
‘We’ll know it when we see it.’
They rounded a bend in the river, and for the first time, in the extreme distance, Revell could just make out the skyline of Hamburg. It had a jagged, uneven look. He wondered what it would be like closer to, after a year or more of siege by the Warsaw Pact forces. Only for an instant did it hold his attention. There was something closer to hand of much more immediate interest.
Ahead lay a long wharf, and towering over it the rusting skeletons of conveyors and cranes and other coal-handling equipment. They in their turn were dwarfed by the stained sheer concrete walls of a derelict power station.
But it wasn’t the ugliness of the abandoned industrial scene that had caught Revell’s eye. He was watching the activities of Russian pioneers as, closely supervised by stick-wielding officers, they manhandled heavy loads from the wharf, across a precarious plank walkway constructed over barges moored out into the river and on to a floating platform at their end.
The loads were barrels and oil-drums, and even as the Iron Cow closed the range fast a dozen were pushed from the platform to start their havoc-creating journey downstream.
‘Oh boy, sitting targets.’ Ripper’s rebel yell died away as a multiple-barrelled Russian flak gun opened fire on them from the flat roof of the power station.
A torrent of fast-moving tungsten-tipped steel tore the river surface into a wild cauldron of spray all about them.
TWO
‘Take us in closer.’
Burke didn’t question the officer’s order, just corrected the turn he’d been starting to make and put the Iron Cow back on course for the wharf.
Their turret gunner had also been fast to identify the potential advantage and held his fire.
Hastily reloaded, the flak mount sent another hurricane of shells towards the hovercraft, but this time they all struck the river well behind it.
The compact design of the Rarden cannon enabled Ripper to elevate it to engage the flak gun when it was no longer able to depress sufficiently to reach them.
His first clip punched a line of holes in the concrete lip at the edge of the roof, the second group of three rounds tore into the four-barrel weapon and its crew.
A limp body flopped over the side of the building to be impaled on the projecting ironwork of a crane-cab, a hundred feet below, and no other member of the gun’s crew returned to it to tackle the spectacular blaze in one of its big magazines.
The pioneers, oblivious to the threats and blows being aimed at them by their officers, were streaming back across the walkway; an officer who tried physically to stem their panic, stepping into their path and waving his revolver, was brushed aside by the stampede, falling, with the two men he had shot, into the water.
Ripper helped them along by firing at a stack of drums on the platform, setting off an explosion that had an effect beyond that he’d intended or expected.
Thrown about by the blast, the barges strained at their moorings, and as one anchor chain gave, the walkways commenced a fast progressive collapse. Many of the Russians fell even before the planks beneath them gave as they were pushed aside by stronger or more determined men. Some managed to jump into the barges, but more tumbled into the water between them and were smeared from existence as the walls of steel came together.
Switching his fire to the wharf, Ripper used three clips of mixed armour- piercing and incendiary rounds against the stacks of drums, without doing more than smash them down and cause showers of sparks.
‘Maybe they’ve used up all the ones that go ‘boom’.’ Using a Colt Commando sub-machine gun, Dooley sprayed a cluster of drums that had rolled from the dock. Two began to sink, others spun lazily, fans of droplets rising from hoops and projecting end seams.
‘Try the pile by the shutter door.’ Making a fresh appraisal of the boxlike main building of the power station, Revell had noticed that several broken windows had been patchily repaired, and all of them covered in a thick coat of dark paint.
It was a difficult angle. Ripper could see the barrels referred to, but they were only partially visible behind a forest of crane legs and conveyor supports. When he did fire off a whole clip he thought he’d done pretty well to get a single shot past the tangle of struts and girders. He saw the tracer hit square on the top container, saw it jump and start to fall backwards, and then the whole side of the building was drenched in brilliant white light that sent spikes of smoke-tinged flame higher than the roof of the structure.
‘Hey, I got the jackpot.’
‘Very clever.’ Poising his hand over the throttle, Burke waited for the order to turn about and rejoin the comparative security of the convoy. It didn’t come; he gave the officer a moment longer. ‘Right, we’ve done the job, how about going home then?’ His fingers hovered above the control, almost touching it.
‘The major is wondering if we really have.’ Damn it, Andrea seemed to be reading his mind again. But she was right, that was exactly what he was wondering.
Now the smoke had drifted clear the power station appeared hardly to have been damaged at all. The doorway was a larger and less neat opening than it had been before, and the walls right to the top of the building were streaked with soot. Not more than a thousand pounds of explosives had been consumed by that single blast; he just couldn’t believe they’d come on the place at the very moment the Russians had exhausted their stocks of real mines, not when there were still so many of the bogus examples littering the area.
‘Take us in. We’re going to check.’
For Burke, it was a revenge of sorts to see the officer have to grab for a secure hold as the Iron Cow leapt forward under maximum acceleration.
There was a flight of concrete steps set into the wall of the dock. Burke set course for those, settling the craft onto the water just short of them and letting it drift in the last few feet until the front edge of the hull bumped gently against the cabin roof of a submerged launch. ‘Close as I can get.’
‘Right, soon as we’re off, take her back into midstream and wait for our signal. Keep zig-zagging. We don’t know who’s watching.’
‘Go teach your grandmother to suck eggs.’ Saying it under his breath, Burke hardly waited until Revell, Dooley, Andrea and Clarence were out before hitting the switch to actuate the closing of the front ramp and turning the HAPC in its own length to regain the centre of the river.
They could feel the heat radiating from the shattered surface of the wharf. Long cracks ran up and across the wall of the power station, and closest to the site of the blast it was bowed inward and shattered into hundreds of pieces held together only by the web of reinforcement rods inside it.
There was a mass of twisted ironwork to negotiate before they reached the opening, and in places the ground and some of the fallen cranes’ girders were made slippery by dripping human remains. The smouldering insulation on crushed and broken electric motors and wiring filled the air with the stench of burning rubber.
Little of the blast had passed into the vast building. Much of the generating equipment had been stripped out long ago, and walking was made more difficult in the gloom by the many projecting bolts in the floor, where machinery had been.
A heap of bodies lay against a wall. Revell glanced at them. They showed no external sign of injury, but he could tell by their blue-tinged lips, and bulging eyes that they had been killed by the wave of super-compressed air from the explosion. Beside them was a large beer cask, crushed and split open by its impact against a stanchion. It looked like no explosive he was familiar with.
Clarence bent down and rubbed some powder between his fingers. ‘I know what this is...’
Cautiously peering around an angle of the wall, Dooley beckoned the others to join him. ‘What’s this, the cook house?’
Lining either side of a wide aisle were stack after stack of plastic sacks. A few had split and from them a white powder had spilt to the floor. Every few yards stood an open barrel; some were partially filled, others were empty with more of the sacks stood beside.