Killing Ground by James Rouch Read Free Book Online

of the camouflage cloth covering his helmet, and the part of the brim that felt brittle, and broke into dark flakes at his touch. It was a reminder of how close a twenty-millimetre cannon shell had come to scattering his brains. The cloth still held the pungent tang from its brush with the tracer base of the shell.
    ‘If I was feeling charitable I’d say that Klingenberg got separated by accident from his wagon-load of civvies.’ While he was speaking Revell did not for an instant take his eyes from the narrow path he followed. ‘But having had to deal with that old louse a few times, I’d say it’s much more likely he ran out on them.’
    Speculation on the fate of the civilians, though, Revell knew to be pointless. What mattered now, all that mattered now, was getting the survivors of his company back to the new NATO defence line. Wherever that might be. But still he could regard it as some small mark in his favour, a sign that there remained a spark of humanity within him, that he could feel a fleeting moment of sadness at what might be the fate of those civilians.
    Death, fast and painless if they were hicky. If they were not, then months of gradual starvation, disease and lingering death in a squalid refugee camp. And there were a thousand gradations of suffering and degradation between those two unsought options.
    ‘So that’s what they were!’ Almost saying it to himself, Revell filed one more snippet of knowledge of the Zone into his mental survival kit. The white objects that had puzzled him were bones. Not with the readily recognizable outline of human shape, but the scavenger-scattered remains of several boar. The automatic killing devices that had slaughtered those lumbering wild hogs had not been triggered again by the foxes, rats and carrion feeders that had alighted on the feast.
    ‘A little more speed and he might have got away with it.’ Thorne had reached the edge of the shallow crater that marked the end of the tire tracks.
    ‘I don’t think so.’ Clarence pointed to a dull-coloured tube supported on tripod legs.
    The blast from the explosion had blown camouflage from it and now the off- road mine stood fully revealed.
    Scanning the slopes on either side of the road, Revell identified ten more of the sophisticated self-activating weapons, and as many claymore mines. Several trip- wires criss-crossed the road and laced the trees on the lower slopes. Immediately beyond the crater, at random intervals, slim antennae marked the position of more buried mines. They waited only for the brush of a tank’s belly plates passing overhead to unleash their huge charges and the semi-molten slugs of super-hard steel into the weakly defended underside of the fifty-ton machines. Igniting ammunition and fuel, they worked with devastating effect.
    ‘Get Carrington up here.’ For Revell it had not been a difficult selection to make. No other among them knew as much about mines, but Carrington had another, special talent. He appeared not to have a nerve in his body. Revell had seen others spring the most diabolical stunts on him, in an effort to make him jump, or lose his temper, or show some reaction, but they’d always failed. Even a thunder flash under his bunk had failed to elicit much of a response. According to Dooley, who’d been present, if not the actual instigator, Carrington had opened his eyes, watched the thick smoke drift to the ceiling, then turned over and gone back to sleep.
    ‘Problem, Major?’ With the tip of the barrel of his Colt Commando, Carrington scratched his tangled black beard.
    ‘You might say that. We need to get past this lot, fast.’ Borrowing the binoculars, Carrington examined the various evidence of the extensive minefield. ‘Very amateur. What we are faced with here is a massive overkill situation. That makes it harder. A regular minefield would be more logical and so predictable, give or take the odd new wrinkle some genius manages to introduce.’
    ‘So?’ Revell