Hunter Killer by James Rouch Page B

bright-eyed young staff officer back at the Pentagon was already pushing such a proposal ...but as he stood beside York surveying the cabin, he was well aware it was an experiment they dare not try here and now. As it was, in this frozen landscape their every move would stand out like a neon sign. The odds stacked against them were long enough already, there was no reason to help them lengthen.
    Eight dead and nearly twice that number injured, with the severity of their wounds varying in degree from Lieutenant Hogg’s broken nose to the gunner who’d lost his forearm. Revell knew the calculations as to the minimum numbers of men necessary to carry out the mission had been finely worked out. Now there was a double, a triple workload for those still fit to do it. As he turned into the wind, felt his face smart and his eyes start to water, he could only hope that the worst misfortune likely to befall them before they went into action was now out of the way.
    It was their sniper, Clarence, who blamed a malevolent God for everything that went wrong. Not that he had much time for religion himself, but Revell had a feeling that in this war God was neutral, had seen the horrors of the Zone and washed his hands of it. There were many mere mortals inside the Zone who wished they could do the same.
    ‘I’ve had it. I’ve fucking had it up to here.’ Burke picked up a piece of track plate and shied it at the growing pile of broken weaponry. ‘You just wouldn’t fucking credit it, would you. I get dropped from the back of a ruddy plane, watch blokes getting smashed to bits all around me. I flog meself to bleeding death carting the poor sods to cover, get dragged out into the wilds of bloody Scandinavia to hunt the sledges before I’ve even had time for a sodding fag, and now I bloody find the reason I’m bloody here in the first place don’t ruddy exist any more.’
    ‘The rocket launchers and the electronics equipment is intact, that is all that is important.’ Andrea had hardly paid any attention to the shattered remains of tractor unit. She was sorting through the scattered debris of the sled and its load, joining the others in search of the squad’s support weapons and ammunition.
    ‘We’re lucky the whole lot didn’t just go up on impact.’ Dragging aside a .twisted girder that had braced the underside of the sledge, Libby scrutinised the battered contents of a crushed ammunition box by torchlight. ‘If this stuff alone had gone off,’ he removed a mangled anti-tank missile from the tangle of two others, ‘the Swedes or their Commie mates would have been down on us like a ton of steaming shit. They’d have had us pinpointed in seconds.’
    Burke took in the overturned tractor and the splintered remnants of its packing case load, sticking out from beneath the broken track-festooned wreck. ‘Sod it. What am I going to do?’ To Burke’s mind the sole redeeming feature of a mission concerning which he’d always had the very deepest misgivings had been torn from him. He wasn’t about to find consolation in Libby’s words.
    ‘How’s about you stop blubbering over that old bus that you can’t put together again anyhow, and start giving a hand with some of the chores. This stuff gets kinda heavy after the first three.’ Staggering under the weight of the cased ammunition already in his arms, Ripper had to accept a fourth heavily-dented box from Hyde before he was allowed to totter off towards the house.
    ‘It’s no good, Sarge.’ Hardly bothering to glance at it, York tossed a machine gun on to the stack. ‘This is just a waste of time. What wasn’t mashed on impact got bent when the tractor broke loose and turned over. Look at it.’
    He held up one of the decoy mortar-discharger?, all six barrels were now decidedly oval.
    ‘Keep looking. Everything repairable must be salvaged, and everything else must be gathered up into one place, so we can get it ready for effective demolition. We can’t go round