Killing Ground Read Free

entering. ‘Now you ain’t bringing them in here, boy.’
    ‘Don’t fuck about. It took me bloody ages to catch this lot.’ Supported in both arms Dooley carried a highly ornate gilt cage filled with a mass of twittering bright blurs.
    Shrill cheepings and showers of multi-coloured feather and millet husks accompanied his attempts to push it inside ahead of him.
    Other voices joined Ripper’s drawl in protest and Dooley reluctantly backed off.
    ‘You miserable load of cruds. Don’t you ever tell me I haven’t got no soul again. Shit, I’ve got more feeling in my head than you’ve got in your little fingers.’ For a moment, at the back of Dooley’s mind there lurked the doubt that he’d got that a bit wrong, or at least not quite right. ‘Oh sod the lot of you. Someone sling me an empty kit bag then.’
    Catching a bundle of frayed and stained canvas, Dooley crammed the cage into it. In the process he almost disappeared within a screeching cloud of flying plumage. With elaborate care he fastened the bundle to a broken tool rack on the hull’s exterior.
    Sluggishly the tired hydraulics closed the ramp and sealed the troops within their armoured cocoon. With a bellow from holed exhausts and some misfiring, the old battle-worn APCs pulled out of the square, the last in the line starting off with a jerk as its towline tautened.
    As they clanked and crunched over the rubble their passengers fell into an exhausted sleep. Only Dooley stayed awake. He stared at the spot where only a thin slab of aluminium armour separated him from his prize. For a moment the hell that was the Zone could be forgotten, and he smiled, to fall asleep with a look of smug satisfaction on his face.

    TWO
    They were too late, by just a matter of seconds. The bridge was blown even as they came in sight of it.
    At first, for a few tantalizing moments, it had seemed as4f the charges had failed in their work. Revell had urged their driver on, but even as Burke had floored the pedal without consideration for the surge of fuel consumption by the straining motor, the long pre-cast concrete structure had twisted, sagged and fallen to ruin in the broad churning river far below.
    There was no time for the luxury of self-recrimination. With dawn only an our away Revell knew they had to find a crossing, to find shelter beneath the protecting umbrella of the main forces anti-aircraft defences. This side of the river they had no chance. Once light they would be unable to move by road, and on foot it would only be a matter of time before they were mopped up by Warpac recon units.
    Even as the last massive chunks of steel-reinforced debris were plunging beneath the turbid waters, Revell was turning the column in a fresh direction.
    The heavy overcast was holding back the morning, but it was growing perceptibly brighter when they topped a hill overlooking the river once more.
    ‘It hasn’t been blown, yet.’ Scanning the lattice steel structure, Hyde first used binoculars and then an image intensifier.
    ‘So? It is still of no use to us.’ Andrea sat beside the sergeant on the edge of the roof hatch. She leaned an arm on the barrel of the TOW launch tube and rested her cheek against the cold wet metal. ‘That is not a bridge. It is a long slaughterhouse.’
    Revell hardly heard her. Barely a kilometre away, the bridge might as well have been a hundred. Its full length and the approach roads were choked with an unmoving jam of military and civilian transport. Tanks, APCs and armoured cars were inextricably mixed with every nationality and type of soft-skin transport, and between every one of them were locked masses of refugee carts. There were even one or two civilian motor vehicles, doubtless their gas tanks holding the last few dregs of carefully hoarded and precious fuel. But nothing was moving.
    As he watched, Revell saw a pair of Hind gunships sweep the length of the stalled traffic with cannon and rocket fire. They took no evasive action during the