‘Not really my province, I’m not really privy to the master plan, if there is such a thing. I suppose, though, the ships’ crews will be formed into labour battalions and the armour and infantry held for the big breakout, whenever that may be. I’m only processing units that don’t really fall into any definable category. If that answers your question...?’
‘It tells me we won’t be out of the shit when we leave here.’ The brittle laugh was of even shorter duration this time. ‘Very good, yes ... Do you have torches? No? Oh dear, I was going to say that you could use the sewers and the underground railway tunnels to get to where you’ve got to go, but you’d need flashlights...’
‘Just mark it on my map. We’ll take our chances on the overland route.’ Revell held out his already crumpled piece of paper.
‘Here, the university building on Bundes Strasse. Can’t imagine what they want you there for, the Reds have never tried anything from that direction. Still, whatever it is, good luck.’
Sergeant Hyde held back a moment as the others filed out. ‘You don’t take up much room, couldn’t you find somewhere else to work, somewhere healthier?’
‘I expect so, in fact I’m sure I could, after all there’s fewer of us each day. We’re down to less than half a million, plenty of elbow room now, but I’ve got my reasons.’ He stirred his foot in the filth and provoked a series of large bubbles that doubled the strength of the pungent odours filling the tunnel. ‘The Reds haven’t used gas yet, they know there’s still a lot of neutrals trapped in the city, embassy staff and the like. It wouldn’t look good if they started using chemicals. But they might, eventually they just might.’ Again he dragged his foot through the glutinous stream. ‘If I really tried, I could generate a lot of gas of my own, I might be able to produce sufficient overpressure to keep the Commies’ muck out.’ The laugh came again.
He was quite mad. Sat here on his own he had gone quietly insane. Hyde left him to his wild theory. As he went, the man was taking a small piece of greyish bread from a dirty cloth and chewing on a corner of it. He splashed his feet in the sewage and watched the slow-motion rise of the bubbles about him. The laugh followed the NCO as he negotiated the route back to the car park and into the open street.
‘…No, honest, my great uncle Frank, he worked in the sewers most of his life, said it never did him any harm, even claimed it were good for him.’ Ripper took in all the disbelieving faces around him. ‘Hell, you guys don’t ever believe anything I tell you. I ain’t kidding, forty years he worked down the sewers, he’d still be working down there if he hadn’t broke his watch.’
There was suspicion written large in Dooley’s expression. ‘I’m going to regret this. What’s breaking his watch got to do with it?’
‘Everything. See, he were down there doing overtime on a Saturday night and he kinda lost track. He sorta got caught when the commercials came on.’
‘Leave him, Dooley.’ Revell stopped him from delivering a second pile driver blow to the top of Ripper’s helmet. ‘One day he’ll choke on his own lies.’ ‘Only if I don’t choke him first.’
‘I said forget it, Dooley.’
‘Forgotten, Major, whatever it was.’ Grinning, Dooley was very pleased with himself at having got in the last word, until the butt of an assault shotgun landed between his shoulder blades and sent him reeling forward to sprawl on his hands and knees.
‘Anything else to say?’
Dooley took the point, he shook his head. As they scrambled over a pile of masonry from a wall that had collapsed across the road, Revell saw that the girl was watching him. He would have given anything to be able to read what was in her mind, know what she thought of him. Andrea had not attached herself to anyone since Libby had deserted.* If she was going to, and on past form she would, he could only hope it would be him. He had never been able to determine what it was that guided her choice, so it was no good putting on an act, he could only be himself.
Be himself. That was a laugh, what commander in wartime could ever be himself. Everything he did was an act, for himself, for others. The war was his play, the Zone his scene, Hamburg the set. At times it all seemed unreal, but the danger and sometimes the pain helped bring reality.
A salvo of heavy mortar bombs blasted buildings away to their right, starting a fire among the upper floors of two. Molten metal and glass dripped in cascades down their facades as the evening breezes fanned the flames.
Caught by the draught a spark flew and landed on Revell’s cheek. The ember bleached a blister into his sunburnt skin, and reality was restored with a vengeance.
THE OTHER SIEGES.
WEST BERLIN
With the defection of General Shpagin, who was Commandant KGB Forces East Germany at the outbreak of war, a more accurate picture is emerging of the last days of the NATO troops in the city. Until now the only complete version of events has been the official Soviet account and that has conflicted on many points with information gained from radio intercepts at the time. The Soviet line has always been that mopping up was completed on the third day. General Shpagin states that elements of the American 3/6th Infantry, with a self-propelled howitzer of C Battery, 94th Artillery, and an M60 tank of the HQ platoon, 40th Armoured, were still tying down large numbers of Russian troops on the twenty-second day. In the British Sector men from 247 Provost Company and 229 Signals Company held out in the Olympic stadium until the afternoon of the twenty-eighth, after the British HQ nearby, in which they’d previously barricaded themselves, had been set on fire by an air attack. General Shpagin has told his British interrogators that all Allied prisoners, including wounded, were executed on the direct orders of the Soviet President. Also that Allied civilians who were rounded up after the city fell were not sent to camps on the Black Sea, as the Soviet press announced, but to the closed city of Gorky where many have died of disease and malnutrition while working as slave labour. Large numbers were killed during, and executed after, an abortive rebellion in the camps, made in protest at the harsh treatment. At present General Shpagin is helping compile a list of Soviet officers, officials and Communist Party members who will later be tried for war crimes. It now appears that the stubborn resistance by the NATO forces in West Berlin was a major contributory factor in the breakdown of the Warsaw Pact advance into Western Europe at the outbreak of war. Outnumbered ten to one, the NATO garrison prevented the Russians from redeploying over 90,000 troops, with armour, who could have been used to fill the gaps left by mutinies among the front-line East German and Polish units. Only the abandonment of their neutrality by the French, allowing Russian troops to pass through their sector and attack the lightly defended British flank, prevented the NATO Berlin Field Force from holding out much longer and possibly changing the whole course of the war. Attempts by the French government to suppress, and by the French press to discredit, the general’s statements, have failed to stem the rising tide of anger in that country, and across the world, at the betrayal. Allegations that the decision was made by the French commander in Berlin have been strenuously denied by the officer concerned, and cabinet papers that have been ‘leaked’ strongly suggest that in fact the course was decided on at the very highest level.
FIVE
‘Fucking students are a pain in the arse.’ Burke unslung his rifle and took a pick-handle in its place. ‘Naive lot of silly sods. Like bloody sponges they are, soak ‘em in a silly idea like Marxism and they suck it in without thinking, then they keep dribbling it over everyone else.’
‘You finished?’ Revell gave his assault shotgun into the care of a civilian police officer, but declined to take one of the clubs. ‘Right, they’ve planted the flag on the roof. The police want it down before it gets light and the city wakes up and thinks it’s been taken.’
‘Are any of the shits still up there?’ Ripper twirled the pick-handle like a baton.
‘Could be. We’ll know soon enough.’
As they walked towards the entrance Revell noticed a tall blonde standing half in the shadows across the street. She wore a light-meter slung from a cord around her neck and held a complex long-lensed camera. Revell swore to himself as an electronic flash ruined the night vision he’d been so careful to preserve. Everywhere he looked all he could see was a milky echo of that searing white light.
The main door was barricaded, and the major led the squad round the side of the building to an emergency exit. It was locked, but two ounces of plastic explosive dealt with that and it swung open at a touch when Revell tried it.
A service stairway took them up two floors before they came upon the obstruction. Filling the whole of a landing were Formica-covered dining-room tables and metal-framed chairs. Tight packed together they were a more complete barrier than a tangle of barbed wire.
‘It would be easier to find another way.’ Giving a chair leg an exploratory tug, Boris succeeded only in wedging the whole mass more firmly together.
‘He’s right.’ Clarence had already come to that conclusion. ‘Use a small charge and the heap will settle back pretty much as it is. Tackle it with sufficient to tear the stuff apart and there’s a fair chance we’ll bring down this whole wing.’
Ripper made his contribution while the major was making his own inspection. ‘I guess what we really need is a bulldozer.’ ‘Or a dozy bull.’ Revell beckoned Dooley forward. ‘Get at it.’
Without pausing to survey the jam of canteen furniture, Dooley swung his pick-handle and brought it down on a green-flecked white table top. Shards of laminate struck the walls of the stairway and at that single pounding blow the table folded almost in half. A dozen more attacks of similar ferocity and whole chairs and broken pieces of enamelled steel tubing were clattering back down on the others.
He didn’t stop until he had smashed a track through the debris to the next flight of stairs, then, using the pick-handle like a stick, leant on it while he regained his breath. ‘What you waiting for?’
They had reached the fourth floor without further problem when they encountered the first resistance. A bottle fell from above and, missing them, went on to shatter on a lower flight. Fluid that burst and splattered from it gave off clouds of fumes as it ate into the concrete.
‘Here we go again, playing by the bloody rules while Commie-loving shit breaks them and then screams brutality at us.’ Burke was beginning to lose his temper. It was bad enough to make it to Hamburg and not get a word of thanks, but this was adding bloody insult to injury.
‘You fancy doing something about it?’ Hyde was taking his gas mask out.
‘Too fucking true. I had enough of fucking acid bombs in the Bogside without being able to do a ruddy thing about it. I’m not bloody standing for it here.’
‘Just two of us can clear the stairs, Major, so long as we can count on back-up the second we hit the roof or wherever the buggers are going to make their last stand.’
‘You’ve got it.’ Revell had too much respect for the British sergeant’s ability to even consider rejecting his plan. The NCO had been chomping at the bit for some time now. This slice of independent action might settle him for a while.
‘We’ll come when you call.’
‘Right, stay a flight behind us.’
It felt good to be running his own show again, even if it was only for a few minutes and against nothing more than a bunch of ignorant, arrogant students. Hyde pulled on his mask and fastened the straps tightly. He nudged Burke.
‘Gloves.’ His voice was muffled and came back at him inside the rubberised micro-particle-proof respirator. Again he nudged the driver, and this time just jerked his hefty club upwards.
Side by side they started up, and immediately came under a deluge of missiles and devices. With his hand Burke warded off another of the acid containers to send it tumbling all the way to the ground floor.
Chairs, table legs, drawers from filing cabinets crashed about them and still they kept going. A plastic bag filled with a white powder burst and smothered them with its contents. They didn’t even break step as they wiped the quicklime from their eyepieces. A whole desk landed immediately in front of them showering pencils and pens and paper as its locks burst. Short ramming blows from the clubs and it was left behind them, a splintered wreck hung half over the railings.
A crowd of youths blocked the top of the last flight, all competing with each other to hurl the biggest item with most force. Hyde edged ahead and as he did a wild kick was aimed at his face. It was the chance he’d been hoping for.
With all the strength he could muster he thrust the blunt end of the club forward as far as he could, and rammed it into the student’s crotch. The others had to grab hold of the victim as he collapsed clutching himself, and the disruption of the defence line gave the sergeant his opportunity.
Two sweeping blows he delivered swept the legs from a pair of defenders trying to push a complete filing cabinet over the top, and they went down with it on top of them.
Burke used his pick-handle like a quarterstaff and propelled another against the wall, bringing his knee up into the pinned student’s groin.
Surviving members of the group had Hyde surrounded in a corner and were cautiously closing in, avoiding the savage jabs he made at them with the razor sharp end of a metal chair back. The circle of figures could only be seen in outline in the darkness, and grew larger and more menacing as they drew nearer. Something hit him a sharp blow on the shoulder, and then his attackers were gone, borne down and buried under a furious attack from behind as the rest of the squad arrived. It was over in seconds.
‘This what you wanted?’ Revell handed the roll of red cloth to the German colonel.
‘Ja, danke schon.’
He unfolded it and examined the crudely stencilled hammer and sickle in one corner.
‘Have we passed the test? That was a test, wasn’t it?’ Keeping the irritation from his voice demanded a considerable effort from Revell. ‘It had to be, why else give a combat group a task that could have been handled by the civilian police.’
‘You are mistaken, Major. It was not a test, not in the sense you mean. Around you are my men, look at diem.’ The colonel indicated the thirty or forty variously armed soldiers and civilians sleeping or resting in the alleyway. ‘We formed this unit at Christmas. If all the men who had joined it had survived then I would have a battalion by now. Instead I have one depleted platoon. Tomorrow it may not even be that. Together we have been through hell many times. It was they who needed to see your men in action. Now they are satisfied, and will be happy to eat and fight with you.’