Angel, Archangel (31 page)

The steps stopped.
The cloud held.
And a new fear gripped him.
Herries would bound out from the small ravine and be spotted in an instant.
He cursed his stupidity.

The sentry was almost on him.
Above the noise of his pounding heart he heard the man’s breathing, the creak of his leather boots.
The patch of ground before his face began to glow, its luminescence increasing as the veil slipped from the face of the moon.
There was a sudden rush of movement, a muffled cry of animal surprise, then the hands were on him, rolling him over.

Herries looked down on him, a knife between his teeth.
Kruze, eyes wide in amazement, drew breath to speak, but Herries silenced him with a hand across his mouth.
The traitor jabbed a thumb in the direction of the rock and Kruze slowly got to his feet.

The sentry lay in the middle of the pool of light, an obscene red mouth stretching from ear to ear beneath his jawbone.

Herries sheathed the knife and slipped down towards the rock, gesturing for him to follow.
Kruze’s legs wanted to buckle, but he forced them on.

They worked their way around the outcrop, Herries stopping to listen and sniff every few steps, before he disappeared behind the crag.
When he, too, rounded the rock, Kruze saw what it was that Herries had smelt, even though to him, there had been nothing unusual to permeate the air, save the essence of the pines and the mustiness of the earth.
Herries had told him that in the forest he was king; now the Rhodesian believed it.

Five bodies were huddled round the smouldering remains of a camp fire.
There was no movement, the brief struggle that had just taken place having been shielded by the single monolith jutting from the ground between them and the sentry’s station.
Herries let out a low, almost imperceptible moan, and rolled back against the rock, his face like a death mask.
Kruze followed him back to the body of the sentry, by this time wanting answers.

“What is it?”
he hissed in the traitor’s ear.

“We’ve got to move fast,” Herries whispered, his eyes as wide as the thin slits would allow.
“We’ve got to get away from this place.”
He found what he was looking for beneath the body of the German; a peaked forage cap.

“They’re asleep, Herries.
Calm down, for God’s sake.”
Kruze had mastered his nerves.
He felt elated that he had been allowed to live, to be free, granted a reprieve to carry on with the mission.

Herries waved the cap in front of Kruze’s face.
“These aren’t ordinary soldiers.
They’re Gebirgsjäger, crack mountain troops of the 13th SS Gebirgsjäger Battalion.
They could find a pin in this forest with their eyes shut.”
He pointed to the body.
“When they find him .
.
.”

Kruze felt his blood go cold.
He slid after Herries, putting new care into his every stride, as they slipped down towards the valley.
It wasn’t merely the troops he had just seen that worried him; somewhere on that mountain there would be a whole battalion of Gebirgsjäger.

* * * * * * * *

It took them another two hours of stealing through the Gebirgsjäger positions to get to the valley floor.
Herries was so good, Kruze thought, that they only saw one other patrol on the mountainside, one that they easily avoided thanks to the traitor’s well-developed senses of sight, hearing and smell.

They were poised behind a rock, watching the traffic on the road a hundred yards below.
Every now and again, Herries, seeing more headlights through his Zeisses, swore under his breath.
There was transport galore, hundreds of Kampfwagen jeeps, armoured personnel carriers and lorries on the road, but all of them were going the wrong way, fleeing Munich for the mountains.
To Kruze, Staverton’s theory about the Alpine Redoubt now looked horribly real.

“So what happens next?”
Kruze asked.

“We have to take one of those vehicles,” Herries said, still looking through the binoculars.
“And that isn’t going to be easy.”

“Make your plan soon, Herries, because when that body is found, this place is going to go up and us with it.”

Herries let his binoculars swing from their strap.
“What do you suggest we do, pilot, just go down there and thumb a ride?
If we are searched they will find you without papers.
They will shoot you, and me with you, for desertion, or espionage - take your pick - no questions asked.”

“You have papers?”

“Provisional ones, yes.
Not good enough to get us into the airfield, just basic identification documents.”

That devious shit Staverton had let him keep his Reich service papers, Kruze thought.

“Then go down there and requisition a vehicle for your very own KG unit,” Kruze said, the urgency in his voice steel-hard.

“What are you talking about, flyboy?”

“If this place is as chaotic as you said it was, no one’s going to think twice about you stopping a truck and forming your own KG squad - only in this case it will just be you, me and the troops in the vehicle.”

“You think they will obey me, one man against all of them?
When I said Germany was the closest thing you would find to chaos, I meant chaos with a capital ‘C They would just shoot us and carry on their way.”

“Not if you stay authoritative, leave them no other choice.”
He saw Herries thinking hard.
“The alternative is to stay here until those mountain troops hunt us down like dogs.”

Herries suddenly seemed to stir himself into action.
“Then we wait for a Wehrmacht truck and pray that it hasn’t been requisitioned by the SS.”

They slid down the last stretch of scree to some foliage beside the road.
A heavy six-axle truck rumbled past them every thirty seconds, to their desperate dismay each one bearing the emblem of the 12th SS Panzergrenadiers.
Herries bit his lip impatiently, throwing glances alternately between the vehicles and the mountain behind them.
They needed a regular army unit, one which would quake at a bit of a typical SS bullying, but they needed it before the Gebirgsjäger came for them.

After half an hour, the Panzergrenadiers gave way to trucks from the 2nd SS Das Reich Panzer Division.
Kruze battled to keep his eyes open, but the fatigue of the last few hours began to spread from his limbs to his head, numbing his mind even to the drone and vibration of the vehicles grinding their way along the roadside a few feet from where they lay.
He closed his eyes, no longer caring about the Gebirgsjäger, or the rendezvous they had to keep with the watchmaker.

He saw Herries leave the ditch by the road and wave down a truck.
He watched, biting his knuckles, as the traitor remonstrated with the driver, but he could not hear their words.
At last, the driver nodded, Herries smiled, and then the tailgate fell away and the mountain troops dropped to the road, their machine-pistols unslung, pointing at him.
Rough hands pulled at him, while he struggled to find his automatic so as to put one bullet through the laughing face of Herries and a second through his own temple.

The hands shook him until he woke up.
Herries’ face was not full of mirth as it had been in the dream, but desperation.

“For God’s sake, wake up, this is it.”

He pulled Kruze from the ditch and into the road.
Down the valley, Kruze saw the two slit beams of light approaching.

“The last two trucks have been from the 4th Panzer Training Division - regular army - it couldn’t be better,” Herries said.

Kruze shook the bitter taste of the dream from his head.
“As long as they weren’t strays, sandwiched between more SS units.”

But Herries wasn’t listening.
“Shut up.
Don’t say another word till we get to Munich.
If anyone asks about you, or talks to you, leave the explanations to me.”

Herries stepped into the middle of the road and held out his arms.
The brakes squealed and the gears crunched as the vehicle slowed.
Kruze looked sidelong at the motif on the cabin door, his heart in his mouth: he could make out a crude stencil of a tank and the number ‘4’.
Herries’ gamble had paid off.

The driver, a Gefreiter, could not have been a day over seventeen.
He blinked every time Herries barked at him and once tried to step down from the cab to verify something with a superior in the back, but Herries was not having any of it.
Herries’ was an awe-inspiring performance, his ranting punctuated with words that Kruze could understand, like ‘urgent’, ‘orders’, ‘disobedience’ and ‘reprisals’.
He was pure Aryan bully, arrogance itself and utterly convincing.

Herries waved Kruze aboard.
The Rhodesian slid up into the cab, next to the driver, while Herries went round to the back of the truck.
He saw the youth’s hands tremble as Herries’ orders to whoever was behind them boomed in their ears.
No one dissented.

Herries clambered in beside Kruze and hit the dashboard.
The driver pushed the gears tick forward and they began the slow turn that would take them into Munich.

CHAPTER TWO

There was a lightness in Malenkoy’s step as he walked from the site of his regular morning ablutions, a backwater of the mountain stream that ran through Chrudim, to his tent, pitched between the sides of two bogus T-34s.
As he traced the path through the centre of the town, past the tanks of his phantom army, he kept one eye on the lightening skies and one ear cocked for Luftwaffe reconnaissance aircraft.

In the silence of the predawn and the unnatural tranquillity of the maskirovka encampment, the major’s mood drifted into despondency: there was not an aeroplane engine to be heard; nor was there the buzz of anticipation that usually preceded a new offensive, because his armoured regiments were manned, not by troops charged with adrenalin, but a skeleton crew waiting to offer a realistic response when the Luftwaffe came sniffing.

He fumbled his way past the T-34s that stood like leviathan sentries on either side of his tent, tripped on the guy ropes and groped for the flap.
When he pulled it back, the familiar, sweat-soaked smells of the interior mingled with something that had not been there when he had left half an hour ago.

The match flared and illuminated the stubbled face of a man he had never seen before.
Malenkoy reached for his pistol.

“There won’t be any need for the gun, Major.”

The voice carried an authority that Malenkoy responded to instinctively.

“Who are you?”
he stammered.

“The name’s Shlemov.
I’ve come from Moscow.”
He lit the lamp and threw the match onto the ground.
“I’ve been looking for you all night.”

“What do you want with me?”
Malenkoy asked, suddenly afraid.
Shlemov didn’t have to say what unit he was attached to, Malenkoy just knew; he reeked of NKVD.

“I just want to ask some questions - routine questions.
And Comrade Major, there is no need to stand, we are of equal rank.”

Malenkoy sat at the opposite end of the blanket that had kept some of the ground’s stored coldness off his back during the night, realizing how preposterous it was that an NKVD Major should come all the way from Moscow to ask “routine questions”.
Fear clogged his mind.
He could only think it was something to do with his parents - perhaps they had been caught uttering anti-Soviet sentiments and now the NKVD were coming to take him away for their sins against the State.

Shlemov put his hands up to the lamp and rubbed them gently.
It had been a long night, indeed, especially after the gruelling journey of the day before.
Having flown from Moscow to Ostrava in a large twin-engined transport, he had been able to persuade a liaison pilot to take him from Ostrava to a forward airstrip close to the front lines only by showing the man Beria’s warrant.

Upon his arrival at Branodz, late the previous evening, he checked in with the local NKVD detachment and, without divulging the nature of his mission, had found out that Malenkoy was the only local officer, outside his own little group of suspects, with whom Shaposhnikov was known to have made contact.
The major of tanks had been spotted with the Marshal “deep in conversation” outside the HQ.
It was an encounter that had not gone unremarked among the thousands of troops - and NKVD infiltrators - milling the square outside Konev’s headquarters.
For Shlemov, that was a good enough place to start, but it had taken him the rest of the night to make his way to Chrudim and find Malenkoy’s hovel in the maze of dummy tanks.

Having established that Malenkoy was a simple Georgian, no more interested in overthrowing the State than Shlemov was in getting a transfer from Moscow to the front, the NKVD major decided to unfurl part of the truth.
If it became necessary to cover his tracks later, Malenkoy could simply be removed.

“I’ll be candid with you, Comrade,” he began.
“General Nerchenko is under suspicion of anti-Soviet behaviour.”
He let the words hang for a moment, long enough for their significance to permeate Malenkoy’s consciousness.
“Well, Comrade Major, what do you have to tell me?”

Malenkoy looked up from the ground and into the hard features of the NKVD investigator.
The import of Shlemov’s statement was still masked by fears for his own safety.
“Then this is nothing to do with me?”
he asked.

“No, it is purely a security matter regarding your superiors,” Shlemov smiled.
“Comrade Stalin wants nothing to darken the efforts of the Red Army in this, the moment of our triumph.”

“Comrade General Nerchenko, you say?
There has been nothing, Comrade .
.
.
I’m sorry, your name, it escapes me.

“Major Shlemov,” he added softly.

Malenkoy seemed to relax.
“There has been nothing unusual here, Comrade Major.”

“But you have had dealings with Nerchenko, have you not?”

“Yes, but -”

“Then I fail to see why you hesitate,” Shlemov cut in quickly.
“I am telling you that the General is under strong suspicion in Moscow; you tell me that you have had day to day dealings with him - but you have neither seen, nor heard anything unusual.
I find that hard to believe.”
His voice had suddenly become that of an interrogator.
“What duties have you performed for the General since your transfer here?”

“This maskirovka,” Malenkoy stuttered, suddenly thrown off-balance by the major’s soft and hard approach.
“I built it on the Comrade General’s orders.”

Shlemov held his hands up before the lamp once more.
“Then at last we are getting somewhere,” he said.
“So you have simply been engaged in fabricating these .
.
.
ghosts all that time, nothing else?”

“No, nothing else, Comrade, that is the truth.”
He racked his brains and thought of something and it chilled him.

“Not quite the whole truth, perhaps?”
Shlemov prompted.

“Something very small, hardly worth mentioning.
The sector was infiltrated by fascist commandos, a small band, but they threatened the maskirovka.
Comrade General Nerchenko asked me to lead a clean-up operation, which took just a few hours.
That is all.”

“I see,” Shlemov said.
He had hoped for more, somehow.

Malenkoy remembered the counter-insurgency operation, the carnage of the SS camp, the headless corpse and the bloodied papers of his friend, Yuri Petrovich Paliev, that he had found there.
He nearly sat on the information, knowing that there was no way Shlemov need ever find out the details of the conversation he had had afterwards with Sergeant Sheverev at the motor-pool.
Yet he felt as if he was under suspicion, too, and the unsolicited offer might be a way of ingratiating himself with this NKVD major.

“The Comrade General sent a squad of Siberians to hunt down an officer by the name of Paliev - it happened almost a fortnight ago,” he said in a small voice.

Shlemov sat up, realizing that Malenkoy was trying to tell him something that he thought was significant.
“Go on.

“The General claimed that Paliev was a deserter - that was why he put the Siberians onto his trail, but they never caught him; the fascists did instead, the ones who threatened the maskirovka.
I showed the General Paliev’s papers, which we found on the body of one of the SS commandos, not knowing that he had already put a price on Yuri Petrovich’s head.”
He stopped, searching for the right words.

“And?”

“He was shocked, I mean, really shocked when I told him that the fascists must have killed him.
I found out later about the Siberians and what the Comrade General had asked them to do, but it did not tally with his reaction that day ...
it was as if he was really scared of something, something that I had uncovered.
Something to do with Paliev’s defection.”
He screwed up his eyes and pinched the top of his nose.
“He was particularly anxious to know whether we had found anything else of Paliev’s on the fascists.”

“What?
Anything particular?”

“Yes, papers and plans, he said.”

“Who was this Paliev, exactly?”

“A major of signals - also the General’s aide.
He was no deserter, Comrade Major.
He was the most loyal officer the Red Army could have - a real patriot.
And the General wanted him dead.
It just doesn’t add up.”

“And I thought I had been sent here on a wild goose chase,” Shlemov whispered to himself.
The scent had suddenly become strong enough to choke him.

“I’m sorry, Comrade Major?”

“Nothing,” Shlemov said suddenly.
“You’ve been most helpful.
Incidentally, what were you talking about to our illustrious Chief of the General Staff, Comrade Shaposhnikov, last night?”

“He was congratulating me on the maskirovka.
It is complete now, ready for the final phase.”

“And Nerchenko spoke to you at the same time, did he not?”

“Yes, but.
.
.”

“Relax, comrade, I am not trying to implicate you in anything here.
It is purely General Nerchenko that I am interested in.”

“He asked me to get some men and help off-load equipment that had just arrived at the Front, that was all.
Humping crateloads of sanitation fluid is not my usual line of work, Comrade Major,” Malenkoy said.

Shlemov’s eyes narrowed.
“What did you say?”

“I’m a major of tanks,” he said, “I don’t perform those sort of duties.”

“No, before that.
Something about Nerchenko asking you to off-load sanitation fluid.
How much of this stuff was there?”

“Twenty trucks’ worth,” Malenkoy said, indignantly.
“Me, a major, having to supervise the removal of almost a hundred tonnes of delousing liquid for the General, with that smug Colonel Krilov just standing there, looking on.”
He laughed, shaking his head.

Shlemov’s ice cool facade cracked.
He grabbed Malenkoy by his uniform and pulled him out into the crisp, dawn air.

“Have you got transport?”

Malenkoy nodded.

“Then you’re going to take me to see this sanitation fluid, right now.”

“But what about my maskirovka?
I’m needed here.”

“Your damned maskirovka can wait,” Shlemov shouted.

* * * * * * * *

As the Focke-Wulf lifted off from Altenburg and headed south-east, Hauptmann Rudi Menzel had a strong feeling that it was the last mission he would ever fly.
It was not a sentiment that came to him as any great surprise.
He had been resigned to death, or capture - in Russian hands, they were synonymous - for weeks.

There were only two FW 189 Uhus still left in the Staffel, their last mount having been shot from under their arses a few days before.
Lutz, the gunner, had died in the forced landing and their pilot, Klepper, had been so badly wounded that he was now languishing in the field hospital at Altenburg.

As for the airfield itself, he didn’t have to be a master tactician to appreciate that it was thirty-six hours away, at best, from being overrun by the Russians.
His own promotion from Oberleutnant the previous day had only served to heighten his utter misery, for the sole responsibility of running the Staffel, or what was left of it, had been given to him.

And he wasn’t even a pilot, just the most experienced airman alive on the Staffel; but in the Luftwaffe of spring 1945 that was enough.
He glanced back from his position in the nose of the Uhu at the pilot, a blond, spotty Leutnant called Ritter, who sported a wispy moustache to make him seem a little older to the ground crew.
He had arrived on the Staffel three days before straight from C-Schule, where they rushed multi-engined pilots through training in a few weeks in a pathetic attempt to keep up with losses on both fronts.

Their own FW 189 had to be the last SIGINT variant left to the Luftwaffe’s Tactical Reconnaissance Command, which was particularly bad luck for them, since orders had come down from the Aufklärungsgruppe HQ in the early hours of the morning for a Uhu to be sent over Ivan’s 1st Ukrainian Front on a signal intelligence mission of the utmost importance.
Ivan’s radio traffic was building up, a sure sign that a new offensive was imminent.

Menzel had also been told to get pictures since on his previous mission to the target none of the photographs had come out.
Some stupid technician in the photography lab had over-exposed the film.
Menzel had been tempted to draft the idiot as one of his crew members for the return flight to teach him a lesson he would never forget.

Their gunner, a Gefreiter recruited from the almost redundant flight maintenance shop on the airfield, uttered bullish oaths every few minutes about how many Yaks he would cut down under his twin-MG 81 machine guns and Menzel had not moved to silence him even though he knew the teenager would be lucky to spot a Russian fighter, let alone hit one, before the Uhu went down in flames.