Free Sky Strike by James Rouch Page B

armoured regiment in full cry would have stopped. She’s the most beautiful bloody thing I’ve ever seen; I nearly went to help her.’ Hyde couldn’t keep the bitterness from his voice. ‘Next time you want her to do something like that, send her with someone else, not me. I got a face that still upsets nurses in plastic surgery wards. I don’t want to see what I can’t have.’
    Hyde turned away, then back. ‘Oh yes. When the truck stopped she jumped on to the step and cut the driver’s throat from ear to ear. He’s still in there, that’s why she rode on the front.’
    They had turned off before what looked like a security checkpoint about a mile ahead, and on the quiet side road were now making better speed, and at last heading in the right direction.
    Ripper had fastened the general’s pennant to the front of the APC, and the few military vehicles they met coming the other way on the narrow road went to extraordinary lengths to get out of the way. In the case of an Airforce truck that included a hundred-yard detour through a freshly ploughed field.
    Their better progress was having a therapeutic effect on Boris. He still looked ill, appeared to have aged ten years in the last few hours, but had now gathered himself sufficiently to try mumbling apologies for his previous behaviour to any- one who would listen.
    ‘…you do not know what it is like,’ Boris kept shifting position so that he could keep looking Clarence in the face, ‘to live every moment of your life in fear, and then after once making a decision that takes courage, to find yourself hurled into the clutches of the monster that gave rise to the terror in the first place.’ He caught hold of the sniper’s arm, to prevent him from moving away, and then had to nurse the bruised hand that was knocked aside by a sweeping blow with a rifle barrel.
    ‘I am sorry, it is just that I want you to understand. I deserted during an air-raid. It is likely that I am listed as killed. If I now fell into the hands of the KGB, then my family... my family...’
    Clarence watched the Russian as his head dropped into his cupped hands and he broke down and cried. He put his hand forward, to touch the man on the shoulder; for him, so loathing physical contact, it was an unnatural action. His fingers stopped just short of contact, and went no further.
    The poor devil. Clarence had been wrapped in his own memories of sorrow and thirst for revenge for so long, he had almost forgotten that the war, the Zone, had brought the same to others. Perhaps for Boris it might even be worse. Clarence had already suffered his loss, there was nothing else that could touch him after that Russian bomber had crashed on his wife and children, nothing that could inflict greater misery, greater torment of mind. But Boris, he knew the Communist system, knew what it could inflict, and knew that he could be the cause of those horrors touching his loved ones. It was a cruel refinement, worthy of the KGB itself.
    ‘Everybody to your position.’ Revell left his seat and went back to the Russian. ‘There’s some sort of traffic snarl-up ahead. Looks like a queue waiting to cross a bridge. I want you up front. If there’s any talking to be done then it’s down to you. We’re relying on you.’
    The members of the squad stationed themselves at the firing ports either side of the hull, as they slowed to stop fifty yards short of the tail-end of the waiting line of mixed civilian and military transports.
    The single lane pontoon bridge across the Elbe had been blocked by a field car that had jumped the guide rails, and now hung over the swirling muddy water, in imminent danger of falling in.
    A recovery crew had backed a truck as close as they could, and were in the process of securing a tow-rope, while the endangered vehicle’s driver was being pushed and prodded to the far bank under armed guard.
    Burke had closed down his front port, and now with Boris looked out at the scene through the