Free Killing Ground by James Rouch Page B

but not in that stark warren with its hollow sounds and the perpetual thumping of the air conditioning.
    Satisfied he’d done all he could, he sat on a pile of boxes containing more of the ice-encased steak, shifting to an upturned pail when the cold struck through to him. In under an hour they’d be trying to’ fight their way out through a tightening ring of communist armour and artillery, groping almost blindly in closed-down APCs from one desperate situation to the next. And then there was still the river. At least the Bradley’s’ new water-propulsion system might give them a chance in the strong currents, if the bridge was down, as by now it most likely was. In the elderly M113s they wouldn’t have had a hope. Pushed and spun by the currents, they would only have been target practice for Warpac gunners on the banks.
    Shuddering at the thought, Scully tried to blank it from his mind, but failed. All he could see was the cramped inside of that horrid aluminium box as they were tossed and drenched and hurt and gradually sank. ‘God, don’t let me die in one of those tin cans.’
    ‘I know exactly how you feel.’
Scully hadn’t realized that in his abstraction he’d been staring past the sergeant at the first of the Bradley APCs to be brought above ground, and had spoken out loud.
    ‘I learned to hate them a long time ago.’ Tentatively, Hyde put his fingertips to his face. The scar tissue and layers of grafts meant that he sensed rather than actually felt the touch. It was unreal, not a part of him, feeling as it might have done after a local anaesthetic. Only he lived with that sensation all the time. He gave a start as fat spat loudly in their improvised field kitchen. There was a slight tremor in his right eyelid. That always came on when he was exceptionally tired.
    Hyde looked for a distraction. He walked down a pathway between the church and a house whose ground floor appeared once to have served as a small general store. From that side of the hamlet a narrow road ran between unkempt fields and pastures to the slopes beneath the castle. It then climbed steeply through a series of hairpin bends to the gate of the ancient fortification.
    Looking that way, he could see the West German countryside as it used to be and could imagine himself back in time. Back to when you could drive all day and not see a single burned-out tank, a ruined town or masses of decaying bodies. A time when men were not astounded by green leaves on trees, a time before shells, nukes and chemicals had transformed almost every part of it into a land fit only for the warriors of hell, and him into one of them.
    Revell wasn’t in the least surprised when the lieutenant drove the unissued Range Rover staff car straight up to the castle. He’d been more than half expecting it.
    The steep and twisting approach road was the only way to it. With a sheer drop of at least a hundred meters on every other side, combined with the building’s massively thick walls and commanding situation, it certainly had an air of impregnability. But it had been constructed in another and far distant era. It was possible the architects might have envisaged future wars when ways might be discovered of delivering blows against the fabric from a greater distance off, but in their wildest dreams they could never have imagined the power of those new projectiles.
    They drove through a narrow double gateway and into a small courtyard. Voke was the first to alight. ‘If you will come with me, Major.’
    ‘You two stay with the transport.’ Revell made to follow the Dutchman. ‘And Dooley, don’t go wandering off on one of your famous scavenger hunts.’
    ‘Who, me?’ Dooley adopted his hurt look, but at the same time could not resist casting a speculative eye over the property.
    Andrea didn’t even bother to acknowledge the order. Pulling the hood of her rain cape forward over her helmet like a monk’s cowl, she cradled her rifle and, not bothering to take