My Immortal The Vampires of Berlin (24 page)

They’re early
.
That’s strange,
Federov thought as he waved their orders in the air.
Tokolovskii won’t be happy to learn that his tank will lead the attack
. “Halt!” he shouted.

But the tank didn’t halt. In fact, Sebastian wasn’t entirely sure how to stop a Russian tank—he had barely figured out how to get the damn thing to start. The other problem was the T-34’s notoriously poor visibility. Strategically, this affected the driver’s ability to use the terrain to his advantage. Practically speaking, Sebastian couldn’t see shit. Federov had to dive out of the way at the last second to avoid getting squashed by the tank treads.

Twenty meters later, Sebastian found the brakes and the steel monstrosity ground to a noisy halt. Federov fumed as he got up. What had been a spotless military tunic was now covered in mud. As he picked up his Ushakov combat medal from the ground, a few soldiers laughed openly.

Federov was furious—he decided to hold the crew accountable. He would lose his lead tank, but it would be a powerful demonstration of the importance of discipline in the Soviet Red Army, a lesson that would save the lives of other men in the fighting that awaited. He took a hammer from his belt. “Get out! Get the hell out of the tank!” he screamed.

When there was no response from within the tank, Federov pounded on it, growing angrier with each strike of the hammer. The only question in his mind was whether or to allow Tokolovskii to publicly apologize before he shot him.

Inside the tank, the men were strangely calm and even found humor in the situation. “Subtle communication system they have here,” Axel said.

“Major, what does the
Wehrmacht
field manual say to do when you are in a stolen tank and surrounded by hundreds of enemy soldiers?” Sebastian asked.

Wolf laughed. “It says to tell the angry guy with the hammer that we’re not filling out paperwork today.”

Federov continued to pound on the tank as the surreal banter continued inside. Angry at being ignored, he screamed at soldiers who were gathered around the tank. “You men! Get these incompetent assholes out of this tank—I will court martial them myself! The entire crew will be shot if any of them have so much as a drop of alcohol on their breath!”

In response, a grinning soldier from Tajikistan jumped onto the tank with a crowbar.

“Uh-oh. They found a can opener,” Wolf announced. He knew that if the Russian got the hatch open, their tank excursion would not end well.

Then the tactical situation suddenly got worse—Yuri showed up. The driver grabbed Federov and pointed at
his
tank. Federov looked at Yuri, then back at the tank, then back at Yuri. Then he pushed Yuri out of the way and pulled out his pistol. Game over.

“Fire,” Wolf said.

Axel froze.

“Please pull the trigger,” Wolf said as the crowbar scraped against the hatch.

“Axel, pull the fucking trigger!” Wolf screamed.

Axel closed his eyes and pulled the trigger.

The checkpoint exploded! The soldier with the crowbar flew off the tank and men dove for cover everywhere. Federov dropped his hammer and just stood there with his mouth open as a thick black cloud enveloped the street.

“Gun it!” Wolf shouted as he slammed another round into the chamber.

Sebastian hit the gas and the T-34 roared forward, belching exhaust fumes and causing Federov to dive out of the way for the second time. Angry Russian soldiers struggled to make sense of the pandemonium and started shooting, whether or not they had a target in sight. Hundreds of rounds pinged off the tank as it rolled down the street.

“Fire!” Wolf shouted.

Axel pulled the trigger and the powerful 85 mm sent the façade of a bank crashing down onto a platoon of dazed Russian soldiers. The T-34 swerved around a concrete barrier and crashed through the remnants of the checkpoint, sending wood, metal and men everywhere! Yuri emerged from the dust cloud and ran away as fast as his legs would carry him, never to see his beloved tank again.

Federov screamed and gestured wildly at another tank, a KV-85. “Regroup! Regroup! Fucking Regroup! Kill them!” The massive KV-85 roared forward, its exhaust fumes adding to the dust cloud. Just as it passed Federov, it fired its massive cannon, causing a street lamp to launch into the air and crash to the ground right in front of the T-34.

“They almost got us! Turn the turret! Turn it!” Sebastian screamed. “Hurry up! “

“Take them out!” Wolf yelled.

Although the T-34 had a high velocity gun and sloped armor, its Achilles heel was its thin turret armor. Wolf knew that if they didn’t get another shot off before the KV-85 did, they were probably as good as dead.

Up the street, an astonished detachment of
Volksstrum
watched the two Russian tanks slug it out as
Panzerfaust
shells swished through the air around them.

“
Achtung
!” came the cry. “Finish them both off!” The German gun crew pulled the camouflage netting away and their deadly 88 mm gun roared to life.
Boom!

The resulting explosion violently rocked the T-34. Eva screamed as the side of the tank lifted into the air and crashed back down.

Wolf slammed another round into the chamber and prayed that the treads hadn’t been destroyed. If they got stuck in the kill zone of the 88, they were finished. “Fire!”

Axel pulled the trigger and the ground in front of the KV-85 erupted. He panicked when he realized that he missed. “Damn! Reload! Reload!”

The KV-85 responded with cannon fire of its own and the T-34 shook violently, as if it had been hit with a giant sledgehammer. Flames shot out of the back.

“We got hit! We’re on fire!” Wolf shouted.

“Give me one more shot!” Axel screamed.

“Screw it!” Wolf yelled as he slammed a shell into the chamber. “Fire!”

Axel pulled the trigger one last time. It was a direct hit—the KV-85 exploded!

With their most immediate threat eliminated, Sebastian turned the burning T-34 towards the German lines at full throttle. Fifty meters later, another explosion rocked the tank. He wasn’t sure where the shot came from, but it didn’t matter—everybody was shooting at them.

“Hold on!” he shouted. Then he crashed the flaming tank into what used to be a department store.

Smoke and orange flames engulfed the tank. “Get out! Everyone out!” Wolf yelled.

They jumped out of the tank and sprinted through the burning building. The upscale store had long since been looted of merchandise, but bomb damage and debris made it very difficult to navigate.

Suddenly, the tank exploded behind them. The force of the blast knocked them down in front of a row of mannequins. They got up and scrambled for the exit as the flames spread throughout the building.

Two serpent-like eyes followed their every move from a dark corner of the burning store. Rodika licked her lips and waited for the opportunity to strike.

56

The squad ran out of the store as explosions rang out behind them. Then they stopped dead in their tracks.

“Holy shit,” Wolf said. In front of them, an apocalyptic scene of death and destruction. Destroyed vehicles littered the street. The bloated and decomposing bodies of German soldiers swung back and forth on nooses hung from the lampposts. Crude cardboard signs around their necks labeled them as deserters.

“We’re killing our own now,” Wolf said as he plugged his nose from the unbearable stench.

“When is this lunacy going to end?” Sebastian asked.

Eva pointed at a little boy who knelt on the sidewalk and desperately tried to open a small package. “
Boy is hungry
,” she whispered.

When the boy noticed everyone staring at him, he scurried away through a hole in the wall, leaving his precious package behind.

Sebastian picked the package up and ripped the brown paper away to reveal a small loaf of bread. The thought that they scared the boy away from what little food he could find made him sick.
The kid was starving
, he thought.
He couldn’t have gone far.

The squad crawled through the hole in the wall. It didn’t take long to find the child; he was huddled next to his mother in a corner of the building. His mother’s leg was purple and oozing pus, compliments of a badly infected shrapnel wound that she got while standing in a bread line. She couldn’t be moved, so they decided to remain there until the bitter end. Which for her, was soon.

Sebastian offered the bread to them, but the scared little boy pushed it away. “We won’t hurt you. Please, take it,” he said, still holding the bread out.

“Get the hell away from us,” his mother replied. “We don’t need food or anything else from you. The Russians will kill us if they find you here.”

“Get out!” the boy yelled.

“We just want to help you,” Wolf replied.

His mother looked at her son, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Look around you, soldier.
You
did this to Germany. This is
your
fault. Haven’t
you
helped us enough already?”

Sebastian sighed and put the bread on the ground. “Let’s go,” he said. As the men backed out of the room, Eva sat down next to the injured woman.

“Go with your friends, dear,” the woman said. “His father is dead and I am not long for this world.”

“
Shhhhhhh
,” Eva replied.

“You don’t understand, sweetie. We have nothing to offer you. Nothing at all.”

Eva put her hand on the woman’s badly infected leg and smiled. The garlic-based drugs that the Gestapo had pumped into her system were starting to wear off.

57

Wolf led the squad through the ruined Berlin cityscape as fighting raged in the distance. Graffiti in red paint on the wall of a bombed-out café held an appeal from Goebbels.
“Every German will defend his capital. We shall stop the Red hordes at the walls of our Berlin.”

“The nation pays the price in blood, but Hitler never looked,” Wolf muttered to no one in particular.

“What are you talking about?” Axel asked.

“Hundreds of thousands of German civilians have been killed in the air raids, but Hitler never visited Hamburg. He never visited Cologne. He never looked at the suffering that his war caused. In fact, he had the windows of his train painted black so he could travel through our bombed out cities without having to look at anything. We gave Adolf Hitler power—Adolf Hitler gave us
death
.”