Final Mission: Zion - A World War 2 Thriller

by Chuck Driskell

  “How about that,” he muttered to himself as he stopped before the assembled group of Heer soldiers.

  “Where do you want us, sir?” an old, craggy-faced noncom asked.

  “I’m going to make my way down to the crossing. After I do, I want you to tactically follow, but halt about five hundred meters before the crossing. From there, you’ll fan out in intervals ten to fifteen meters wide to the west side of the tracks. Essentially, you’ll make an arc,” Neil said, scratching a diagram on the ground next to the train. He showed them where Falkenberg and his four would be, on the eastern flank, warning the soldiers not to confuse them with an enemy. “Go ahead and assume that there will be resistance, but do not shoot first. If you do see gunshots, be mindful of Falkenberg and his men to the east. With that in mind, your job is to cut our aggressors to shreds.”

  A young soldier, probably no more than eighteen, looked around at his comrades, his voice high with tension. “So we’re going to just kill our fellow Germans? Our fellow soldiers?”

  Neil nearly answered but waited. Instead, the craggy-faced noncom—he looked forty going on sixty—answered the soldier in a raspy smoker’s voice. “Didn’t you hear what Falkenberg said earlier, boy? He offered this man’s bounty money and you didn’t turn back then.”

  “Well…” the young soldier stammered. “The fighting part didn’t seem real then. But now he’s talking about us fighting our own soldiers.”

  “The SS aren’t soldiers,” the noncom shot back. “And the longer you serve, you’ll learn that the only place they belong is in a prison, nasty pack of hoods they are.”

  After waiting for the NCO to finish, Neil spoke to the young soldier. “If you don’t want to be a part of this, hand over your ammo and head back the other way. You don’t have to participate, but,” he glanced at his watch, twisting to see it in the moonlight, “we’ve got about thirteen minutes before the train starts moving and we have to be in place well beforehand.”

  Without much deliberation the soldier stepped back into ranks. Neil asked who was senior and, again, the craggy-faced NCO spoke up.

  “Fine,” Neil answered with a courteous nod. “Give me a few minutes’ head start. Move tactically as you proceed…I’d use the ditches to prevent showing your silhouettes. Fan out when you get to five hundred meters and stay locked, loaded and on full alert at all times. The SS could already be here for all we know.”

  As the men set about preparing their weapons and grenades, Neil began moving forward, using the darkness to the right of the road. As he moved, loaded with his equipment and cooled by the chill night air, he felt as if he’d gone back twenty-five years in time. His feet touched the earth with only a whisper. With every step, even in the darkness, his vision seemed to grow more acute, discerning minute differences in color and brightness. Inside of five seconds he evaluated all facets of the border crossing, scanned the entire starlit sky for aircraft, and calculated the countless permutations of his plan. Neil could have easily been back in California, a teen in the bosom of the Shoshone, playing hide-and-seek with his summer friends, his body nothing more than a floating shadow.

  The Pale Horse ran again.

  He heard the thud of hand drums in the distance. He felt the touch of the elder’s hand, gently guiding him, teaching him. Don’t just let your instinct come to you; listen for it; summon it; grasp it.

  Neil could hear his spirit’s iron guidance, as loud as if someone were yelling the instructions in his ear. Jink left. Duck right. Go to ground and crawl.

  When he was only a hundred meters out, he checked his time. There were eight minutes until the train was due to move. Things were looking good. Neil scanned the area, seeing no one else. Perhaps he would get a break on this night. Maybe Aying was well behind, or couldn’t get his airplane, or simply went home and went to sleep.

  Doubtful…

  He stopped, focusing on the lighted border crossing.

  For a moment there was nothing. Then two men appeared from behind the small building. They were talking. Neil couldn’t hear what they were saying, but their conversation seemed relaxed. Just two bored men pulling all-night guard, simply trying to stay awake, the tales getting deeper as the night wore on.

  Neil closed his eyes for a moment, recalling the highest canon of his training at the hand of the Shoshone.

  Peace.

  It wasn’t always a possibility, but he was taught to seek it whenever possible.

  Neil turned his eyes back to his left, to the railcars, focusing on them. After a moment he saw the faint movement of a hand moving side to side. Falkenberg. He looked to the rear, up the tracks, unable to see the remainder of soldiers but trusting that they were in position.

  His eyes turned back to the crossing…

  When one of the guards was lighting a cigarette and the other was leaning against a wall on the verge of dozing, Neil dashed through the shadows and leapt onto their platform, aiming two of the cache’s inky Walther pistols, one at each man. The guard leaning against the wall saw Neil first, straightening as one hand went to his sidearm while his eyes went to the phone on the brick wall.

  “Don’t move, gentlemen,” Neil said in soothing German. He cocked both pistols with his thumbs, western style. The guard who was smoking developed a case of slack-jaw, sending his cigarette tumbling to the ground. The other one still held his hand on his holstered pistol, his eyes alternating between Neil and the phone.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Neil said to the one with his hand on his pistol. “And it won’t work. Just getting that holster open will take at least a second, by which time you will be down on the tracks, on your back, replete with several unnecessary entry and exit wounds.” He turned to the other man. “And you, you’ll see me shoot him, and you’ll try to duck for cover. And even if you make it, there are fifteen soldiers covering us right now. They’ll burn you to the ground if you try to run.”

  The one guard removed his hand from his holster. The other put his hands up without being asked to do so, mimicked by his friend.

  “Very good, gentlemen. It’s time for you to leave your post.” Neil stepped closer. “Stand face-to-face, a half-meter apart. Go ahead. Good. Now, clasp your raised hands as if you’re going to play a game of mercy. Very good, boys. They must put the sharp ones out here on the border. Now, don’t move yet, or my friends might start shooting.” Neil removed two sets of cuffs from the four he had stashed in his bag. He cuffed the guards’ hands together, disarming them afterward.

  “Okay, boys, the mother of all firefights might just take place here, so I want you to start walking down these tracks, toward Yugoslavia. Keep walking until you’re well away from here.”

  “What if a train comes?” one asked.

  “Then I’d suggest you get the hell off the tracks. Move out.”

  The two men, face-to-face, made their way off the concrete platform and down onto the tracks. Neil could hear them arguing and the gravel crunching as they walked to the south. He leaned inside the shack, finding the lights, blipping them three times before leaving them off altogether. He yanked the phone from the wall, hiding it under a desk in the shack, and then he went to work.

  Neil placed the cans of Amatol on each side of the tracks, down in the adjacent gravel ditches. There were five cans altogether, so he placed two on the eastern side and three on the road side, linking them all together by detonation wire and attached to the pre-drilled blasting cap in the top of each can. He took special care to thread the det-wire under the tracks in case the train went by without his needing to fire it. Using the fast-reel spool, Neil backed across the road, finding a suitable spot in the high weeds as he twisted the two leads onto the friction detonator. He checked his watch.

  Four minutes.

  ~~~

  “Sir, there’s the train tracks and the border crossing,” the co-pilot said, pointing.

  Aying could see it, two kilometers away to the north, the only lighted building in the area. Suddenly the light a
t the crossing flashed three times before the crossing went dark.

  “Reuter!” Aying bellowed, punching the back of the pilot’s seat.

  “Who, sir?”

  “Kill your engines.”

  “But, sir…”

  Aying jammed the pistol into the co-pilot’s neck. “You’ve got more than enough altitude and your load is light. Now, kill the engines and land dead-stick on that adjacent road or I’ll do it.”

  The Junkers slowed as the engines wheezed and went eerily quiet. Aying turned to the soldiers and said, “When you exit this aircraft, shoot anything that moves.”

  ~~~

  Neil surveyed the area from his position in the high grass, able to occasionally see the German soldiers under the NCO’s command still fanning into the last of their positions. Unable to go back any farther due to the detonation cord’s length, Neil motioned the closest soldier forward. The soldier who arrived was the young complainer from before. Neil, frustrated at the young man’s earlier hesitation, did his best to be enthusiastic at the soldier’s presence.

  “Ever fired one of these before?” Neil asked.

  “No, sir,” the post-teen answered, staring wide-eyed at the detonator.

  “You grab this handle and spin it as fast and hard as you can. Can you do that?”

  The boy nodded.

  “Good. And don’t do it, under any circumstance, until you hear me yell…” Neil searched for a word, his eyes scanning the area. “What’s a good code word I can yell to you that we won’t hear out here otherwise?”

  “Todeskuss,” the soldier answered immediately.

  Neil translated it directly in his mind as “kiss of death.” “Perfect,” he answered. “Even if we move, you stay down and stay here, got it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Neil clapped the boy’s back before he stood to run to the soldiers behind him, hoping this was all a pointless exercise. As he was reaching a prone soldier fumbling with his rifle, a whooshing sound could suddenly be heard. Neil turned to see a tri-motor airplane, its black German cross visible in the moonlight, gliding in to land on the very road where he had just stood. It was landing to the north, and passed the guard station with only feet to spare. Puffs of smoke erupted as the tires barked their brief protest upon a rather rough touchdown.

  Aying.

  Neil stifled a curse, realizing that, had he blown the Amatol at the aircraft’s passing, all that would be left of the airplane would be a massive fireball and a few shards of scrap metal. But because it had come in dead-stick, he hadn’t heard it till it was too late.

  Rotating his head side to side, Neil viewed the young men cinching their rifles to their shoulders, each here only because of his blood money. He felt nauseous and, in an effort to fight the sickness, he began to move. Snippets of wartime memories flashed through his mind as he ran. Neil remembered the horrid images of bodies flying, cartwheeling through the air, missing hands or feet. He saw men rushing across a field, brave snarls on their face, replaced in an instant by expressions of despondency as bullets pierced their bodies. The old saying was “war is hell,” and whoever coined that phrase had almost certainly served in a trench.

  And now the war was back.

  As the aircraft rolled farther up the road, Neil found the grizzled senior NCO and slid down next to him, using the high grass as cover. “The men on that airplane are here to kill us. I hope you know that.”

  The NCO turned to him, his voice low and hard. “I got no problem shootin’ my fellow Germans, if that’s what you mean, as long as they’re SS.”

  “You and your men pick them off as they file out of the airplane. Wait for my shot.” Neil nestled the new Gewehr rifle into the crook of his shoulder, grumbling as the aircraft continued its roll.

  “They’re going to be out of our range,” the NCO said, watching helplessly.

  The aircraft was still moving even though the engines were off—probably a tactical decision if they’d seen the soldiers awaiting their arrival. Knowing the SS couldn’t yet hear him, he yelled to the NCO’s group of soldiers to close the distance. Everyone got to their feet and trundled forward.

  “Wait for my first shot!” Neil shouted as he rushed through the damp knee-high grass. When he was two hundred meters away—which might as well been have two hundred miles with an un-zeroed rifle—the men began boiling from the two rear doors of the Junkers aircraft like ants doused in vinegar.

  “Damn it!” Neil grunted. Either Aying knew Falkenberg’s men were already out here, or the SS made a habit of disembarking all aircraft with strategic haste. Neil grudgingly scored one for the Schutzstaffel. They were almost certainly highly trained and would be a game opponent.

  After six SS had made it out, Neil knelt and began to pepper the aircraft with semi-automatic fire. Shots began to ring out across the way, marked by orange dots as Falkenberg had moved his own group north and pinned down the six who had already emerged. Another two SS came out of the aircraft and one paid his life for it, crumpling onto the black strip of asphalt. The SS man screamed, holding his hands to his face before quickly going silent.

  “Who’s got that rocket launcher?” Neil yelled to the old NCO. Orders could be heard being barked to Neil’s left. He saw a man bouncing forward with a long tube, taking up a belly position twenty-five meters ahead. Neil kept laying fire toward the rear door, doing his best to keep the remaining occupants inside the would-be death trap.

  He reloaded as quickly as possible, eyeing the soldier with the rocket launcher. Fire the damned thing.

  His wish was granted, marked by white light and a whoosh. Neil watched as the rocket shot forward, guided as if on a wire. It struck the tail of the Junkers, blowing it off in an explosion of sparks and ripping metal. The aircraft spun, doing a half-turn. Since the rocket struck the back of the aircraft, there was no effect on the fuel. Neil watched as the remaining occupants rolled out of the now wide-open back of the airplane, scattering immediately.

  Instead of killing the remaining SS, the poor shot with the rocket launcher had provided them with an easy escape from the confines of the airplane.

  Neil rushed forward, followed by the NCO and his men. Moving under the cover provided by Falkenberg’s group, they managed to pin down most of the SS. One tried to make his way forward to a large dirt mound using a low-crawl, but a bullet from a shooter to Neil’s left knocked his helmet off. A second bullet from Neil’s rifle ended the man’s life.

  The other SS were getting organized, working themselves into a full circle perimeter, shooting outward in their own arc of responsibility. Their efforts began to pay dividends. After a bullet whizzed by Neil’s head, he heard screams to his left, seeing one of his Heer men stand, frantically holding his spurting neck before a second shot silenced him forever.

  “We need to pull back and somehow get them into the kill zone by the tracks,” Neil said to the senior NCO. “Tell your men to start pulling back toward the border. I’ll stay here and lay down cover fire.” Two rounds impacted in front of Neil, throwing dirt and debris into his face so hard it opened cuts. He wiped his face and said, “Once you’re in position, open up a firestorm and I’ll pull back.”

  The old NCO slid backward, shouting clipped commands. Neil reloaded, waiting. When the men began to pull back, he began firing carefully aimed shots at each of the SS men in the perimeter. By now, they were more than a hundred meters away, but Neil’s vantage point was partially hidden and slightly above them—an ideal location. He thought he hit one man, seeing him begin to roll violently. After that, Neil noticed a figure in the center of the perimeter, crawling person to person. Neil focused on the man…

  It was Anton Aying.

  Cinching the rifle into his shoulder, Neil took deep breaths. He paused, aimed carefully, squeezed off a round. A flash of dirt flew to the front and right of Aying. Neil’s rifle was un-zeroed, meaning it was Kentucky windage time. Neil lifted the rifle a degree, moving it slightly to the left. Just then, the senior NCO and hi
s men must have gotten into position as a high volume of cover fire from Neil’s right began to cause the SS men to adjust their position. Neil remained focused on the man he thought to be Aying. He was moving on all fours, but Neil tracked him, aiming high and left. He squeezed off a round, watching as the man crumpled, holding his arm and screaming.

  Gotcha, you bastard.

  Score one for Jakey.

  The SS soldiers must have been aware that the remainder of the men had pulled back, because once they saw the next round emerge from Neil’s location, two stood and began to charge. Neil fired at once, making one man dive for cover. The other was coming hard, his boots pounding only twenty meters away as Neil rotated to him. Just as the SS raised his machine gun to shoot, a bullet from the right sent him careening. It wasn’t a kill shot, but it did the trick. Neil squeezed off a finishing round, hitting the SS man in the side of the head. Knowing he had but seconds to pull back, Neil stood and sprinted in a curving direction around the cover fire, watching frenzied tracer rounds streak by in both directions.

  Once Neil reached the grizzled old NCO, he pointed out fire now coming from behind the remaining SS men. It had to be from Falkenberg. He and his group had continued flanking to the north and now approached downward, pushing the SS soldiers from behind.

  A light appeared behind all of them.

  The train.

  “Cover me!” Neil yelled as he crouched and moved laterally to the soldier with the friction device. Neil crashed into the dewy weeds next to him, wiping sweat from his face and saying, “Don’t blow it until I tell you to. We need to make sure as many of them as possible move into that kill-zone, because we only get one shot at this.” Neil hurriedly reloaded. “When you twist that device, get your head down because the gravel in those ditches is gonna fly like hot shrapnel.”

  The young soldier never answered him.

  As the firefight raged, Neil turned to the silent young man. His rifle was still aimed north. From his position, he’d probably fired the shot that had saved Neil from the rushing SS soldier. He tilted the young man’s helmet back, seeing where a round had struck him through the eye.