Civilian Slaughter Read Online Free PDF

“Of course, I should have known. One minute you're fucking up the truce, next you're having a sing-song around the campfire.”
    Revell was waiting to see the photographs. They were becoming gradually more crumpled in the colonel's grasp. “So is it ... rucked?”
    “See for yourself.”
They were aerial shots, with the slightly grainy effect that showed them to be unenhanced frames from a sequence obviously taken by an RPV. All ten were of the convoy ambush. It was the recorded time printed in white in the top left-hand corner of each that interested Revell most.
    “See the HAPC in some of the shots? Know whose it is?” “I'm not denying it's ours, Colonel. We've got the only one in this whole sector. I presumed that was why we were chosen to carry out patrolling up until the last moment.”
    “Precisely my damned point.” Accepting the return of the prints, Lippincott crammed them into the breast of his jacket when he couldn't get them into his pocket. “You were to patrol, not do a cannon-armed simulation of the caped crusader at work. Who the hell told you to cream that Russian outfit?”
    “Nobody said we couldn't.” Absently Revell watched their cook dragging a soil encrusted tree stump toward the pit. “Those timings, on every picture, show my men turning away before zero hour for the cease fire.”
    “Yeah, but thirty fucking seconds. I've been in action, Major,” Lippincott waved the empty sleeve of his jacket. “You can't tell me that in the middle of a red-hot action your vehicle commander was doing some sort of crazy NASA countdown.”
    “Whether he was or not, they finished in time. Are the Russians complaining?” “Don't they always; never known a people for bellyaching like they do. This time, though, you got lucky. Again. As we were flying in I heard over the radio that the Swedes who are policing the truce caught some of the sneaky sons of bitches trying to extricate supplies after the deadline. That about makes us even by all accounts.”
    “So why the visit?” Turning, Revell half sat on the stone balustrade. He knew there had to be more coming. The colonel was very much a hands-off commander, only made special visits for special reasons.
    Taking a pencil from a top pocket crammed with them, Lippincott began to chew, keeping up a spitting hail of pieces as he gradually reduced its length. “You know your outfit isn't liked by the big chiefs. They're still beefing about 'private armies' and dilution of resources. If I didn't get you the odd mission too mucky for the Guards or the Air-Cav to tackle ...”
    “Seems like all our tasks are like that.”
    “As I was saying, if I didn't volunteer the Special Combat Company for a few of the more distasteful jobs I wouldn't be able to justify your existence. Right now, though, they're after blood. I've made my peace by saying we’ll do penance ...”
    “I get the feeling most of it is going to be done by my men.”
    “What the hell do you expect?” Lippincott pushed himself to his feet with the stump of his arm against the back of the bench. “You knew the form. You were around for the other truces, you know how fragile the damned things are. Only takes one stupid mistake and it's total war again. We need this breathing space. Sure, we've been chasing the tail of the Reds for five weeks, they're on the ropes, but I tell you, so are we.”
    Revell remained sitting as the colonel stalked back and forth on the neatly interlocked slabs of soft-coloured sandstone. “The men reckoned, I do, that one last push and we'd have had them back over the East German border, maybe well on the way to their own.”
    “You don't see it, do you? All you've got is your own little slice of the action. To the top of the next hill, the end of the next street, that's your war. Well it's bigger than that, there's a lot more to it.” Lippincott snatched out one of the photos.
    “This Russian engineers outfit you burned up. How many of the vehicles used to be