Hunter Killer Part 4

The house was ahead, he could see movement close by it. Clarence felt relief, another hundred yards and then he'd be able to enjoy a cup of the disgusting, stomach-' rotting coffee that York brewed. Strange, it wasn't getting any closer. Making the effort to bend in his bulky clothing he looked down. His legs weren't moving. That was silly, why had he stopped? It was only a little further, a hundred steps, but he couldn't get his legs to make one. There was a numbness in them that was spreading to the rest of his body. An overwhelming tiredness washed over him.

He was locking solid, his strength had gone, sapped by the cold that crept through him, leeching his will. Just a few more paces, just a few. Why? Why a few more steps, where was he going? Silly to go on, why not just lie down, have a rest, sleep for a while. When he woke up he'd feel better, remember where ... or was it what? It didn't matter, nothing mattered...

SEVEN.

'Solid as a b.l.o.o.d.y rock.' Burke jabbed the stick into the fuel tank. 'Petrol's frozen. What do I do now, light a fire under it?'

'You do and the major will light one under you, if you don't blow yourself up first.' Dooley stopped work and looked up from his chest-deep excavation. 'The first three feet it's like going down through concrete, keeps you warm though.'

'But what the f.u.c.k do I do with this?' Not wis.h.i.+ng to add to his work load, Burke resisted the strong temptation to kick the generator.

'You'll have to s.h.i.+ft it inside, won't you?' Using pile-driver force Dooley drove his pick into the bottom of the trench, twisted it and then reached in to haul out a lump of half-frozen earth that must have weighed fifty pounds.

'You're joking. It took four of us to get the b.l.o.o.d.y thing here, and now the runners are welded to the s.h.i.+tty ground.' 'Why aren't you working, Burke?' Hood thrown back, his artificially precise hairline accentuating the featureless expanse of his face Hyde looked unreal, like a watery painting of a portrait by a child too immature to put in any but the simplest of details.

'Can't do any more outside, Sarge. It'll have to go inside if we're to have a chance of keeping it in action.'

'Alright, you heard him, Dooley, up out of your pit and give a hand here.' 'The major said I was to finish this before I did anything else.' 'You should have done already. Now if you'd pretended you were digging up one of the old women you like poking you'd have been down six feet already.'

'Heads I lose, tails I can't win.' Using the pick as a grappling iron, Dooley hauled himself from the hole.

'Give the runners a clout first, to break them free. A clout I said,' Hyde had only just ducked in time as the wildly swung pick whistled back between him and Burke, 'not an attempt at b.l.o.o.d.y wrecking it. Alright, we'll pull, you push.'

Ripper and Libby appeared and added their efforts. The heavy piece of equipment began to move, thrusting a wall of snow before it that constantly had to be shovelled aside.

'This weather is really something.' Almost sprawling as his foot slipped, Ripper prevented himself from going over by grabbing at Dooley.

'Gives you the urge to pull Dooley's pants down, does it?' The enjoyment Burke got from the scene was of short duration as he almost fell himself.

'Aw shut it. No, I mean the cold, it really gets to you. I reckon I'd have been a solid lump of ice by now, if I hadn't been too busy sweating, trying to get that foxhole dug.'

Standing back as Libby scuffed another bank of snow aside, Hyde looked out over the still countryside. 'It's not a night for standing around, that's for certain. Not that I'm likely to let you. Alright, now three more heaves and we'll have it lined up with the kitchen door. One last effort, and we're in.'

'I bet the lieutenant is regretting he was so fast to volunteer now. Him and Clarence must be wis.h.i.+ng they were back here.'

Libby nodded agreement. 'You're probably right. No fun in being out there at the moment, no fun at all.'

'Radio batteries are OK, Major. My sets use only a fraction of the juice those tubes do. Even if the generator is no good, used sparingly I can keep us in contact with the big outside world for two or three days.'

Revell had asked the question almost for the sake of something to do. He felt like the spider sitting at the centre of an intricately constructed web, waiting for his prey. The work was done, and the hours until the first of their Russian targets appeared would be long, and seem even longer. This wasn't the sort of war he liked. The real war was what you saw in the sights of your rifle, or felt at the end of a bayonet. Hanging around a command room, unable to move far from it, unable to do anything in it... that might be war for staff officers, for generals, it wasn't for him.

To fill in, to give himself something to do, he could have gone outside, lent a hand with s.h.i.+fting the generator, but the interference might not have gone down well with Hyde. He suspected that inside the British NCO there still lingered a residue of resentment at serving under an American officer, at having lost the independence he'd enjoyed as leader of a crack British anti-tank team.

There were times when Revell wished he was just a sergeant, with nothing more than his squad and himself to worry about. It'd be good just to get on with the fighting, to go out and do the d.a.m.ned job and to h.e.l.l with the political consequences. While the Russians fought without constraints, his every action was hedged about by the need to avoid civilian casualties, or damage to property, or offence to other NATO partners. Rules, regulations guidelines ... a Communist officer had none of those, he'd have an objective and perhaps a deadline and the fear of the consequences of failure ...Revell could still hate the savagery with which the Soviet forces obtained their victories, while 'envying the freedom of action they were given to gain them. But it was a strange sort of freedom the Russian commanders enjoyed. Ten, twenty thousand civilian casualties didn't matter to a Warsaw Pact general as he drove his regiments towards their goal, but if he delayed by so much as an hour, then even if his primary objective was still achieved his removal was certain. A Russian's freedom was the freedom to butcher, to slaughter, but never to deviate from his observance of the strict orders he'd been given. It was that inflexibility that had cost the Communists outright victory at the start of the war, when none of their army commanders had dared even to attempt to plug the gaping holes in their advance caused by widespread mutinies among the East German and Polish units.

The NATO Staffs had rightly diagnosed that inflexible command structure as a weakness in the enemy, but had never got round to recognising as deadly a failing in their own strategy. When faced with an opponent prepared to resort to every dirty trick, to employ the full range of horrific modern weapons of ma.s.s destruction, half-measures to contain them could only resort in half-victories, or more usually half-defeats.

That Lance missile, standing out in the snow waiting for him to transmit the coded command to commence its near instantaneous firing sequence and launch, was a good example of NATO's, or rather the West's mentality. Four separately targeted warheads nestled within the sharp nose of the missile. Their fuses precisely pre-set, they would detonate above a Swedish Air Force base, a vital hydroelectric power station, a coastal patrol craft complex and a garrison town. Spectacular though their kiloton warheads would be, that would be the limit of their effectiveness.

It was a half-measure. If the Swedish parliament was as nervous as the Western a.n.a.lysts believed, and if it was still in permanent session at that time, it was possible it might over-react, declare on the NATO side before all the facts were gathered and the discovery made that in reality no damage had been suffered. But it was more likely to do what it had been doing for two years, dither and talk and let the moment pa.s.s in frightened and confused indecision. Then the West's only hope would be that a local commander with a few coast defence missiles under his control might not wait for orders, might retaliate instantly to what he saw as a Russian bombardment preceding an a.s.sault. What a way to fight a d.a.m.ned war...!

York and Cline were preoccupied with their respective electronic equipment. Outside, Revell could hear Hyde exhorting the men to greater effort. The generator being b.u.mped against the wall and the shout of someone whose fingers were between the two. From upstairs came the rare loud groan of one of their causalities. Andrea was up there ... he should go and see how the injured were faring, he hadn't checked on them for several hours . . .

'Go down and get yourself a coffee. I'll be up here for a while.'

The young gunner-medic made a fussy last adjustment to the bandage he'd been replacing, then went out. His footsteps echoed back to Revell from the uncarpeted stairs.

It was darker than the fire-control room. Only white or very light coloured objects stood out in the breath-misted gloom. Bandages were clearly visible, as were the pale hands and faces of the men wrapped in their life preserving silver chrysalises. The hard rasping breathing of a chest case was the only audible sound.

Andrea was over on the far side of the room, struggling to fully fasten the zip of a silver coc.o.o.n. Carefully, Revell stepped between the bodies to go and help her.

'It is done.' With a last effort Andrea sealed the body into its crinkling shroud before Revell reached her. 'He is the first, others will follow. I think that one is next.'

Revell followed her pointing finger to where a sc.r.a.p of white cloth blended imperceptibly into the deadly pallor of a face it didn't entirely cover. 'I don't know how he's lasted this long. He lost a lot of blood when his arm was taken off. I'll have the body moved as soon as the men have finished s.h.i.+fting the generator.' There were other matters Revell wanted to talk about with her, but in the darkness he couldn't be sure all of the casualties were sleeping.

He'd never managed to be alone with her for more than a few moments. Not that he'd ever been really conscious of her manipulating it that way, but on reflection he felt sure that she had. Never very communicative, she immediately stiffened and backed away from contact with any man she sensed showing an interest in her. With her looks, that kept her perpetually on her guard. The skills she displayed at holding men at a distance, and generally taking care of herself, were considerable; the way she managed Dooley was ample proof. Revell couldn't tell whether the big man got anything from the relations.h.i.+p, other than having, and enjoying, the prestige of having her near. Several savage slap-downs he'd received in public suggested there was less than truth in many, perhaps all, of his private boasts.

d.a.m.n it, Revell had never felt so protective towards any woman, not since the early days of his marriage to the b.i.t.c.h, and that had soon been beaten out of him by spite and neglect and contempt. And now he had this irrational urge to take Andrea under his wing, a woman more able to take care of herself than any other he'd ever known. It was stupid, irrational, when he'd made up his mind to treat her no differently from any of the men. And it was dangerous as well. Dangerous because his preoccupation with her could affect the efficient running of the unit, because it could cost some or all of them their lives unless he could come to terms with it.

From where it lay on top of a pile of rags, Andrea picked up her scarred and chipped M16. The fat tube of the grenade-launcher below the barrel gave it a clumsy and ill-balanced look. 'When do I use this? I am not a nurse, this is not where I belong.'

'Perhaps you won't need to. If the mission goes according to plan then we do the job and get out without firing anything but the heavy artillery. Command won't be too happy if we start a big fire-fight with Swedish patrols. Why do you think they sent such a small escort group, with so few support weapons? It's so that if we do start trouble we can't cause too much of it.'

'The West does not deserve to win this war.' Andrea turned to the window, and stared out. 'They expect their soldiers to die, but do not want them to win.'

'That about says it.' Revell moved to stand beside her. He liked her clipped German accent. Her manner was sharp, he could visualise an affair with her being very one-sided. She would dominate any man, he imagined her being very strict, very severe ... No, he backed away from the thought. That was a speculative road he didn't like to travel. There was a darkness at its end he didn't care to pierce, for fear of what he might discover about himself.

The snow covering the island gave the landscape a strangely two-tone, two- dimensional effect. There were no greys, no shadings to give depth or texture to any object. After a few moments the weird monotony of the scene began to play tricks with his eyes. A log, or it might have been a rock protruding above the snow, almost seemed to be moving. Of course it couldn't be, there was nothing alive out there, G.o.d had shut shop for the winter, even Clarence would find nothing to kill...

'Come on.' Revell didn't think to, didn't have time to, define what prompted him to jump and stride over the close-packed casualties; but intuition or some sixth sense told him that shapeless dark hummock he'd dismissed as a log was one of his men. His boot rapped against an improvised splint and elicited a groan from the man he'd almost stepped on, then with Andrea close behind he was out of the room and taking the stairs three at a time. He was shouting for the medic even as he raced for the front door.

At ground level everything looked very different, but he had a bearing and snow sprayed ahead of him as he ran. There was an icy feeling inside him that had nothing to do with the cold.

'The lieutenant thought you ought to know about it.' There was an intense cramping pain in Clarence's fingers and toes as circulation gradually returned. He could feel the soup in his stomach radiating warmth through his body, and breathed in the steam that rose from the can he held clumsily between clenched fists, not feeling the hot metal burning into his blue knuckles.

'And that was all you saw? Just three men and a woman moving supplies of some sort into the old tower.'

'We tracked them from the boat. It looked like an old wreck, as if it shouldn't still be afloat, but it was, and its motor sounded alright. After they'd got out of sight we took a chance and had a look inside. We had to give them a bit of a start, there's not much cover up that end of the island.' 'Did you find anything?'

'Nothing. I got the impression the hull and mechanics had been well maintained and the rest of it allowed to go to h.e.l.l. Funny, you'd think anyone who owned a big yacht would have taken care of it.'

'Can't get the petrol, no point.' Hyde had been listening. 'There must be thousands of beautiful boats rotting away along this coast.'

'But then why look after the engine, why keep it in good running order? Sergeant, take Ripper and two others and find Lieutenant Hogg. If he hasn't got positive proof that bunch are harmless -1 don't know, maybe a group from a university or something - then go in and grab them. Something about that set-up isn't right, and I want to know what.'

'I'm getting something, Major.' York settled his headphones more snugly. 'This is weird. My gear isn't directional so I can't tell where, but I'd say somebody on this island is transmitting.'

'What language?' Revell picked up the spare headset, plugged in and held it to his ear.

'Swedish. s.h.i.+t, it's gone.' After a minute spent trying every frequency, York took off the headphones. 'Not there anymore.'

'On your way, Sergeant. We both know where that must have been coming from. Tell Lieutenant Hogg to take whatever action he has to, I want an answer to this d.a.m.ned riddle, and fast.' It wasn't until he'd turned round that Revell saw who Hyde had selected to go with him beside Ripper. Dooley and Andrea were pulling up the hoods of their snow-suits. It was an intelligent choice he couldn't argue with, the pair worked well together. Clarence wasn't fit to go anywhere for the time being, he wasn't prepared to trust their Russian that far from his sight, and Libby and Burke were busy with the generator.

The door closed behind the trio, and Revell resisted an urge to rush to it and call Andrea back, to replace her with Libby. There was a better than evens chance he was soon going to make a fool of himself over her, unless he made a greater attempt to curb his feelings, -or at least the emotions they gave rise to. A loud crash from the kitchen broke into his thoughts, which were then swept aside by the voluble swearing that followed the heavy metallic noise.

'You f.u.c.king clumsy s.h.i.+t bag. First you f.u.c.king near rupture me and chop my fingers off when we were lugging the bleeding thing in here, now you're trying to break me sodding toes.'

Libby's low-key reply to Burke's tirade wasn't audible in the control room. Revell heard their driver's follow-up, then the argument petered out into various angry mutterings.

Cline was making the routine contact with the gunners at the various launch sites, meticulously logging each call, looking at his watch each time and noting the exact minute and second. He cleared down the last connection, rubbed his eyes, squared his pencil and notebook, polished the air-watch radar screen, pulled his rickety leatherette-covered dining chair closer and checked the surface radar display.

'Er, Major. I have a second unidentified trace, a vessel.' 'Another launch?'

'Er, no, sir. This is in the thirteen to eighteen thousand ton cla.s.s, and it's coming out of the Sound.'

'That's not possible, the Ruskie wars.h.i.+ps won't reach there for another ten hours according to the last satellite update.' There was an image. It had crept into existence as a fuzzy green ovoid at the bottom of the screen. The computer quietly hummed to itself as it waited for sufficient data to calculate she s.h.i.+p's course and speed.

'Could it be a cargo boat, a small tanker maybe?' Cline jotted the event down in the inevitable notebook.

'No, no chance. The Swedes stopped all their coastal traffic a week ago, and all the other neutrals have sense enough to know this is not the time to sail. Whatever that is, it's Russian. Punch up a course prediction.' Revell watched a broken green line sprout and grow from the blip to skim past their island. 'So, it's big, it isn't friendly, and it's coming straight at us.'

EIGHT.

'It's the right size for a Moskva cla.s.s anti-submarine cruiser.' It was too good an opportunity to miss, Cline used it to show off some of his knowledge. 'Only I thought those things never moved without a swarm of escorts.'

'Size is about the only thing that is right. They only built two of those brutes, Leningrad Leningrad is somewhere in the Med, is somewhere in the Med, Moskva Moskva herself is at the bottom of the North herself is at the bottom of the North Atlantic' Again Revell looked at the printout of information endlessly and repeatedly marching along the base of the screen. 'The d.a.m.ned thing's speed is what's got me foxed. I expected those surface units to come out of the Sound going h.e.l.l for leather, this s.h.i.+p is doing barely eighteen knots. How long before we get it on visual?'

'Forty-three minutes, at present speed.'

'Good, we should have the generator functioning again by then, if Burke can prevent it from making more batches of petrol cubes.'

Cline decided to have a last try. 'Could it be a decoy, to flush us out?'

In his mind Revell had already considered and dismissed such a possibility. 'I don't doubt the Ruskies have got a few time-worn hulks they might risk for that purpose, but their admiral's have been a bit short on subtlety and initiative lately. Anyway, the loss of the tonnage might not matter to them, but they're short on experienced ratings and artificers. Their lives wouldn't matter, but their skills would take time to replace. No, whatever that is, we can take it at face value.' He turned to York, who'd been listening to the exchange, and rather enjoying the shooting down of the bombardier's pet theories. 'Get on to Command, ask them what it is.'

While the message was tapped in, and the b.u.t.tons pressed to encode, scramble and condense the text for a transmission of barely a second's duration, via satellite, to Command HQ, Revell watched the imperceptibly moving trace. The wait was surprisingly short.

A burst of muted chatter from the printer, and York tore off the strip it disgorged and handed it to the officer.

'Either they don't believe us, or they haven't done their homework. We'll risk another transmission. Tell them we've got a blip that's big and real and heading our way. I want to know of any Warsaw Pact vessel of that size that's been reported anywhere between here and Bornholm in the last ten days. The d.a.m.ned s.h.i.+p can't have materialised out of nowhere.'

The wait was longer this time, and when the printer did come to life it did so fitfully, as though the information from the retrieval system the other end was feeding the various pieces of information to them one bit at a time, as it unearthed them in its comprehensive banks.

Four vessels were listed on the ribbon of paper that Revell almost s.n.a.t.c.hed from York. The facts as they were presented were cryptically stark, but his memory, supplementing that of the computer, filled in the ugly detail. Two were tankers, the survivors of a convoy of fifteen that had run the gauntlet of NATO air-attacks and long-range bombardment, from an East German port to the Russian and Hungarian forces occupying the Danish islands: Both had been sunk on the return journey, along with the last of their corvette and frigate escorts. The third vessel on the short list was the Polish floating crane VK27, which had been towed, to Copenhagen to speed the clearance of the last of the scuttled British and Dutch cargo s.h.i.+ps from the harbour.

Number four, the last, was a Polish grain carrier, whose crew had loaded it with family and friends and attempted to reach the West. They had failed when the s.h.i.+p, crippled by a NATO mine and dead in the water, had been sunk by sh.o.r.e-based Russian aircraft. NATO naval units, too late on the scene, had only been able to take bodies from the water, after beating off the MIG's that had spent an hour repeatedly strafing the lifeboats full of women and children. Revell's mind was crammed with such facts, an endless catalogue of horror and brutality. No wonder the press back home had stopped reporting every incident of that type committed by the Communists. After a while it had become overwhelming, and the people had started to disbelieve. So now they got a ration, only one or two such stories a week, and those chosen not for their truth, but for their variety and plausibility. The worst they never heard; would never have believed.

Crumpling up the paper the major balled it in his fist and hurled it into a far corner. 'According to the Staff and their all-knowing computer we have a ghost s.h.i.+p coming at us.'

'I don't believe in ghosts, Major, not ones that register on radar. Who ever heard of thirteen thousand tons of ectoplasm?'

'Let's get Boris in here, he can start to earn his keep properly.' While York went to fetch the Russian, Revell stepped outside. In the house it was cold enough, but in the open ...like jumping into freezing water, it took his breath away. He'd told Cline to cover the temperature monitor. Now it had gone so low that it could only be of academic interest. It would have been good to take a deep breath, flush the smell of petrol and oil from his lungs, but the air was so sharp, so biting and numbing that he did it by degrees, exhaling and inhaling slowly through pursed lips to warm the air before it reached down into his body.

Within the house the generator coughed and spluttered into reluctant life, to expire a moment later. Second and third attempts to start it met with no success and were followed by swearing from Burke.

Revell thought of the gunners huddled in their tents close by their charges. They'd been marvellous so far, the survivors doing the work of twice their number. What they'd be going through out there would be a further hard test of their mettle. They knew only as much as they could glean from the brief periodic exchanges over the land lines. Apart from that fragile contact with the house the artillery men were totally on their own, as they would be when the action started. Then they would have to leap from, chilled lethargy into instant sweating action, traversing and elevating the launchers in accordance with the instructions that would flash on to the 'black boxes' attached to each one. Then, when the ma.s.sive projectiles had gone screaming on their way, in expectation of a counter strike against which they'd have virtually no protection, they would have to hurriedly reload and go through the whole mad process again, and again, until an enemy missile registered on their site or no more targets were presented.

'They, and Revell, knew which was by far the most likely alternative. Mobility was the artillery's only protection on the modern battlefield, arid the towed launchers had none without the tractor. Enemy radar would pick up the rockets in flight and, by computing their path, track back along to their place of origin. What happened then depended only on the armaments of the vessel involved.

The command centre at the house shared the danger, not simply because of the Russian tactic of blanket retaliation, but because of the ma.s.s of electronic emana- tions which would come from it at the height of the battle. On the latest detector equipment it would stand out like a flas.h.i.+ng sign in the frozen landscape. Since most of the enemy s.h.i.+ps were brand-new or fresh from extensive refits, they would have that latest equipment and the weapons systems to go with them.

'That ghost s.h.i.+p is coming into range of our cameras. Shall I switch on now, Major?' Cline let his hand hover over the controls. 'Give it a moment longer. Another mile or so and we'll get better definition. No point in wasting juice and straining our eyes trying to make out a blur.' In the kitchen Revell could hear Burke's successive attempts to start the generator. Each time the recalcitrant engine would turn over for a few seconds, then fade, sometimes with a subdued fart-like backfire. 'OK, let's see it now.'

'There it is.' With the co-ordinates already supplied and fed in from the radar, Cline's screen immediately picked up the s.h.i.+p. 'Range is five miles, and it's reducing speed. Down to ten knots, Major, and still slowing.'

Revell examined the angular grey outline of the amphibious warfare vessel. Every detail showed clearly, from the 76mm mount on the raised bow, to the pennant flying from the rear of the stern helicopter pad. The number '120' was painted large, in white, on the bow aft of the stowed anchor. He knew the number, and knew that Cline's frantic thumbing through identification lists would not find it, but he needed to confirm what was much stronger than a suspicion. 'Boris, come here. Can you make out the name, it's just below the rear platform?'

Taking a pair of wire-framed bifocals from a zipped pocket, the Russian laboriously hooked them to his ears, then peered over the top of them at the screen. Very slowly he raised and lowered his head to take advantage of the different strength lenses in turn. 'The rust does not make it easy, but it looks like Ivan Ivan Rogov.' Rogov.'

'He's got it wrong, must have.' Cline had failed to find the s.h.i.+p listed, even on the stapled update page he'd added shortly before leaving Bremen. 'We sent that tub to the bottom four months ago. I saw it on the newsreels.' 'I saw that footage too, she took half a dozen hits off Copenhagen, very spectacular, but unless we're about to revise our disbelief in ghosts, that is the Rogov.' Rogov.' Revell could see the bow wave and white water created by the s.h.i.+p's Revell could see the bow wave and white water created by the s.h.i.+p's pa.s.sage was diminis.h.i.+ng. 'Alright, Boris, get back to your station. Pick up what you can. I want to know what the h.e.l.l that battered scow is doing here.'

At three miles, the s.h.i.+p stopped in the water and dropped anchor. There was a plume of mixed spray and broken ice as the chain-towing metal struck a floe. Several areas of the vessel had a patched and repaired appearance, as if the work done on her had been finished in a hurry. Large sections were painted only in primer.

'What the h.e.l.l is an LPD doing in these parts? Landing platform docks carry a battalion of marines and forty tanks or trucks. Why the h.e.l.l would they be stopping here? This is the wrong place to start an invasion of Sweden.'

Try this for an answer, Major.' Reading the strip as it came from the printer, York hesitated before tearing it off and handing it over to the officer. 'I don't think you're going to like it.'