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for his artillery, but he did have two dumps he hadn’t used until them, so he emptied them, threw the whole lot into the camps and at any civvies who got in the way. We know that one of the dumps held chemical weapons, nerve gas shells, defoliants, toxins, you name it…’
    ‘And the other?’
‘No one has any idea, at least no one in the west. Must have been batches of experimental weapons. Inside of a week just about every disease you can name, and a lot that haven’t even got names yet, was killing the civilians in the hundreds of thousands, All we could do was cordon the sector, treat the few who made it to our side.’
    ‘I never read anything about it in the press back home, you sure you got your facts right? Since I’ve been with your crowd, I’ve heard some awful tall tales.’ 
    ‘And spun a few yourself.’ Hyde tapped the medical kit making a prominent bulge in a readily accessible pocket in his jacket. ‘It’s true enough, we were issued with these just after it started. Why it never made the papers God only knows. Probably because we’re not so slick at manipulating the world’s press, or perhaps some boot licking toady in the British foreign office thought it might upset the Russians, make the negotiated peace that much harder.’
    ‘The only thing that happened far as I can see,’ Burke thought it time he restored some of his authority, ‘is that we got turned into ruddy pincushions by all those booster shots we started having. Not that I’ve got any faith in the damned things working, it must be like a bloody germ soup in there. You won’t catch me going near the place. If the medics want those injections given field trials they can send some other mug, I won’t even go and have a peep over the perimeter wire.’
    ‘It ain’t right, leaving good land to rot; why don’t somebody have a go at it with napalm, or phosphorus, clean it up.’
    With Burke retreating to a quiet spot to drink his tea, Dooley was happy to shift his attention to Ripper. ‘Because it’d take forever. We’re not talking about a chunk of land the size of a football field, it’d J>e like trying to sterilize a couple of decent sized counties.’
    A thousand feet overhead a pilotless sky-spy droned for a while in large circles, chased by lines of flashing orange tracer from the ARV’s anti-aircraft machinegun. None of Hyde’s squad made any move to copy the aggression and, unharmed, the remotely controlled miniature aircraft went on its way.
    ‘Waste of ammo.’ With casual interest Hyde tracked the Russian craft, noticing how rarely the tracer came within even a hundred feet of the small camera equipped plane. ‘On a live firing range back home I watched a whole battalion of armour take turns to have a go at one of those things. For an hour, on and off, it whizzed about sounding like an amplified dentist’s drill. They all missed it.’
    ‘If the major doesn’t get us off this crappy job, and soon, I’ll be popping off at the fucking things myself, just to relieve the boredom. Come to that, I’ll have a go at anything that beats the monotony of trotting about this truck graveyard.’ Pulling a face as he tasted his drink and realized it was coffee, Dooley slung it away. ‘Are we out of the decent stuff again? You know I can’t stand this old ladies brew.’
    ‘Heck, now I just can’t figure that at all.’ Taking the precaution of stepping beyond Dooley’s reach, Ripper displayed his pale green teeth in an ingratiating smile. ‘From what I hear it kinda seems as how you find the old ladies themselves pretty tasty.’
    Also expecting retaliation, but far enough away to not to have to take avoiding action himself, Burke waited and watched for it to happen, then swore loud and long as a battle-scarred armoured vehicle came clattering down the road toward them, to provide a distraction and diversion. ‘Bloody hell, I thought I’d seen everything this war had to offer.’
    The last to do so, even