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junction box and sightlessly contemplated her disembowelled torso through broken spectacles. ‘Better that than be rounded up by the KGB after this is over. Their involvement would have been assumed automatically. Their deaths would have been as bloody but not as swift.’
    The rapid series of explosions had cracked the walls of the signal cabin, and from the long fissures and its roofless top came flames of every colour as cables and electrical components burned, the copper and plastics running molten down the concrete.
    ‘Don’t bother watching for the second wave.’ Revell knuckled his eyes in an attempt to counteract the itching caused by the sulphurous smoke. ‘They must have seen the beating we took, sustained heavy losses themselves and turned back. We’re on our own, and the word is that includes finding our own transport home.’
    ‘Has Boris been able to make contact with any of the other groups?’ The reams of figures that had been thrown at them during the briefings came back to Hyde. ‘We can’t be the only assault group on the ground. There were thirty choppers in the first wave, that’s better than three-hundred and sixty men.’
    ‘Maybe there’s a few others milling about down here, but listening to Sky Control, and reading between the lines, I’d say we made one of the better landings.’
    ‘Is there to be no pick-up? We are stranded here?’
    Revell could read the fear in Boris’s face. The Russian had good cause to be terrified. For the others in the squad, if they were taken prisoner, it would be a quick bullet in the back of the neck, or if they were lucky, if that was luck, six or seven months of forced labour in a Soviet mine or quarry before they died of malnutrition and mistreatment. For the Russian deserter it would be worse: given the skilful barbarity of the Communists, immeasurably worse.
    ‘Right first time.’ Having stripped the protective seals from the tube ends of an M72 rocket launcher, Dooley extended it and flipped up the sights. ‘You saw the shit we came through, and then they were just warming up. They’ll be thoroughly awake now. Those flak and missile battery crews would just love another crack at our whirlybirds.’
    ‘I wasn’t expecting this to be a milk run, but Christ…’ Replying to a short burst of submachine gun fire from the vicinity of a burning refrigerated wagon, Burke was gratified to see a brown-clad body topple forward and start to steam in the heat of the conflagration close by…someone, somewhere has screwed us good and proper. We flew over a couple of complete air defence regiments at least. How come they hadn’t been spotted and the warning passed on to us? I tell you, it’s like fucking Arnhem all over again.
    ‘Forget the history lesson, though maybe for you it ain’t history, you’re old enough to have been there: what I want to know is where do we go from here, and how soon?’ Putting down the launcher, Dooley used the M60 to send a spray of bullets towards the roof of a distant warehouse ‘Shit, missed the bastard.’
    Taking a little longer to aim, and firing only a single shot from his Enfield Enforcer sniper rifle against Dooley’s twenty, Clarence brought down the Russian.
    The man held on to his binoculars as he fell the sixty feet, legs kicking wildly, to land out of sight. Another who had been climbing along the ridge to join him, panicked, lost his grip, and disappeared over the far side.
    Their Russian radio-man was still waiting for an authoritative answer. Revell could feel Boris’s eyes on him, could feel their intensity like a physical thing. ‘They would just be throwing the crews’ lives away.’ ‘What of our lives, what of ours?’ Boris thumped himself in the chest, striking hard with the inside of his closed fist. ‘They sent us first, to test the danger, and now they leave us... don’t they know what that means?’
    ‘Take it easy.’ Revell had to hold the frightened man down when he would have leapt