Free Lace II by Shirley Conran

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    Mark’s panic surged back as soon as the shutter clicked, and he watched the other three men in the shell hole work to wipe out the enemy position, grimly aware that this was their only chance of getting out alive. One soldier loaded the first slim missile down the launcher’s muzzle, and the officer watched his tracking device as it hurtled forward in a high arc.
    From the hillside ahead, another shell roared over the shell hole as the angle of the missile launcher was lowered and again fired at the mortar emplacement ahead, which was tucked under a rocky overhang behind a wall of sandbags.
    Mark forcused carefully on the intent faces around the launcher. These men would have no chance of leaving this crater alive unless they could get a rocket into the eighteeninch gap between the rocky overhang and the sandbags to blow out the gun and the men manning it.
    Another adjustment to the weapon, another rocket down the spout, another retort as it was fired. This time, no answering shell screamed back from the hillside ahead.
    The Sydonite officer ordered another round and again there was no response.
    The air was harsh with heat, smoke, and the sweetly pungent stink of war. Now Mark fought relief with the same intensity that he had earlier fought panic. Cool it, cool it, for Chrissake stay cool, stay down, stay alive. Mark had often seen men jump up in elation, believing they had been snatched from the jaws of death, only to be mown down by an enemy who understood that his last chance would be the other side’s carelessness.
    The young officer ordered his two remaining men to crawl forward, one by one, taking advantage of every rock and every rise in the cracked earth, as they snaked forward, until they were below the rocky hill.
    They started to scramble upwards. When they were closer to the enemy mortar emplacement, a grenade was thrown into the gap from which the gun barrel still projected. Caution saved them. With a howl of pain, a man’s body was catapulted out by the blast. Behind the billowing pall of dust and smoke, Mark saw the machine gun whipping to and fro on its tripod.
    “Better use the back door,” said the officer. “Grenades may have weakened the roof of that cave.”
    They crawled out of the heat into another opening in the rock, part of an interconnected labyrinth across a limestone cavern, packed with stores which looked like the usual guerrillas’ jumble of substandard or obsolete arms and explosives. Over a hundred crates, containing 1000-gram sticks of TNT were stacked by polyethylene bags, each containing 24 sticks of gelignite. Beyond was a box of safety fuses and a crate of No. 27 instantaneous aluminum detonators, half-hidden by a tangle of Cordtex detonating cords. Further back in the cave were a few primer sticks of TNT and two boxes of TNT flakes. The hot dessicated air of Sydon had preserved the arms from rust, but nitroglycerin had soaked through thewax coating of some of the cartridges, so the pile was liable to explode at the slightest impact.
    “Why did we bother?” the young officer was cheerful as he spoke to Mark in his correct, but guttural English. “One cigarette would have done our job for us.” It was a weak joke, but to the four survivors of the fourteen-man platoon which had set out that morning, it was hilarious.
    Bright sunlight slid through slits in the rock and illuminated the interconnected caves as Mark wandered below the stack of old equipment. Seeing that some of the crates were marked in Cyrillic script, as well as English, Mark used his Swiss army knife, the only weapon he ever carried, to lever out the nails. The crate was full of Russian MUV igniters, for use in priming booby traps.
    Further back in the cave, Mark found crates of Kalashnikov rifles, Chinese grenades, 122mm BM 21 Katyusha rockets with 20 kilo warheads and a Goryunova SG-43 machine gun. The inner cavern was a treasure trove of Soviet arms, and, unlike the elderly Western supplies near the