that held it were smooth, and the long nails were painted a pale pink. There was time only to notice that the one-piece suit she wore was pinched in tight at the waist above a flat belly and slim thighs, and then the precarious path down the rubble ramp took all his attention. When he reached level ground and turned to look back, she was gone.
Kirchdorf was only a name on out-of-date maps. A few stretches of road between swathes of churned ground indicated that there had once been something there, but the scattered heaps of rubble gave no clue as to what.
A few distorted electricity pylons, a handful of fire-scorched telegraph poles; those were virtually the only reference points in a landscape as devoid of them as any desert. Only one cluster of shell and bomb damaged structures retained any semblance of their former condition, gave any clue as to their original purpose. The half-spans of bridges, pockmarked columns and precariously supported broken sections of elevated^ roadway marked where an autobahn interchange had stood.
They took up positions in trenches and weapons’ pits that others had dug and fought and died in. The evidence was everywhere. Not all of the burial squads had been thorough. Lumps of putrefying flesh, fragments of bone, hanks of hair, even an eye attached by the shrivelled cord of its retinal nerve to a quarter of a skull, littered the bottom of the excavations.
All of the earthworks looked to have been abandoned long ago. Most had partially caved in and the floor of each was thick with powdered dust and ash. To Hyde, the gun pit he was working to rebuild had a familiar appearance. On another battlefield he had seen something strikingly similar, the way the collapse was all on one side, the scorching on the other, and the patterns in the dust, as though it had been swirled round and round by miniature tornadoes. Nearby heaps of rubble reinforced the feeling as he saw glitter from beads of shining material, as if the very stone and steel had for an instant begun to melt and drip at the moment of the building’s collapse and had refrozen to their solid state with the swift passing of the incredible forces that had done it.
Retrieving his pack from a corner, Hyde took out a small drab-painted box with a dial set in its front, and uncoiling a wire from its back, pushed the probe attached to its end towards the dust at his feet.
‘Major.’ Wiping it clean, Hyde capped the survey meter probe before replacing it in his pack. ‘I’ve just run a check. There’s more than just background radiation around here.’
‘How much more?’
‘Hard to tell, there’s a lot of variations. Generally it’s in the region of a hundred Rads. We can take that, but there are a few hot spots close by where it goes right off the scale.’
‘Mark them and warn the others.’ Revell had already noticed the same evidence of ground and air nuclear bursts. Judging by the appearance of what was left of Kirchdorf, several high sub-kiloton weapons had blasted and seared it.
No wonder the colonel had described the area as suitable for tanks. It was possible, even likely, that the Russians had not been aiming at any specific target when they smeared the suburb, military or otherwise. Perhaps, having become irritated by the grindingly slow pace and expense of fighting through built-up areas they had decided to tailor some ground to suit themselves.
And there was something else about the place that made it tank country. Only men sealed inside a filtered air-conditioned environment behind thick armour could be sure of crossing it without danger of contamination and be certain of being fit to fight when they reached the far side.
For Revell, it was already too late to take any precautions. He was caked with the dust. It seeped inside his clothes, he could taste it in his mouth. Even if the Russians did not come, if the tank attack didn’t materialise, death was already creeping up on him.
SIX
They allowed the Soviet
Kirchdorf was only a name on out-of-date maps. A few stretches of road between swathes of churned ground indicated that there had once been something there, but the scattered heaps of rubble gave no clue as to what.
A few distorted electricity pylons, a handful of fire-scorched telegraph poles; those were virtually the only reference points in a landscape as devoid of them as any desert. Only one cluster of shell and bomb damaged structures retained any semblance of their former condition, gave any clue as to their original purpose. The half-spans of bridges, pockmarked columns and precariously supported broken sections of elevated^ roadway marked where an autobahn interchange had stood.
They took up positions in trenches and weapons’ pits that others had dug and fought and died in. The evidence was everywhere. Not all of the burial squads had been thorough. Lumps of putrefying flesh, fragments of bone, hanks of hair, even an eye attached by the shrivelled cord of its retinal nerve to a quarter of a skull, littered the bottom of the excavations.
All of the earthworks looked to have been abandoned long ago. Most had partially caved in and the floor of each was thick with powdered dust and ash. To Hyde, the gun pit he was working to rebuild had a familiar appearance. On another battlefield he had seen something strikingly similar, the way the collapse was all on one side, the scorching on the other, and the patterns in the dust, as though it had been swirled round and round by miniature tornadoes. Nearby heaps of rubble reinforced the feeling as he saw glitter from beads of shining material, as if the very stone and steel had for an instant begun to melt and drip at the moment of the building’s collapse and had refrozen to their solid state with the swift passing of the incredible forces that had done it.
Retrieving his pack from a corner, Hyde took out a small drab-painted box with a dial set in its front, and uncoiling a wire from its back, pushed the probe attached to its end towards the dust at his feet.
‘Major.’ Wiping it clean, Hyde capped the survey meter probe before replacing it in his pack. ‘I’ve just run a check. There’s more than just background radiation around here.’
‘How much more?’
‘Hard to tell, there’s a lot of variations. Generally it’s in the region of a hundred Rads. We can take that, but there are a few hot spots close by where it goes right off the scale.’
‘Mark them and warn the others.’ Revell had already noticed the same evidence of ground and air nuclear bursts. Judging by the appearance of what was left of Kirchdorf, several high sub-kiloton weapons had blasted and seared it.
No wonder the colonel had described the area as suitable for tanks. It was possible, even likely, that the Russians had not been aiming at any specific target when they smeared the suburb, military or otherwise. Perhaps, having become irritated by the grindingly slow pace and expense of fighting through built-up areas they had decided to tailor some ground to suit themselves.
And there was something else about the place that made it tank country. Only men sealed inside a filtered air-conditioned environment behind thick armour could be sure of crossing it without danger of contamination and be certain of being fit to fight when they reached the far side.
For Revell, it was already too late to take any precautions. He was caked with the dust. It seeped inside his clothes, he could taste it in his mouth. Even if the Russians did not come, if the tank attack didn’t materialise, death was already creeping up on him.
SIX
They allowed the Soviet
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