by Colin Gee
The M-8 Greyhound crew and their companions waited for signs of anything worth a bullet.
The 60 was setup and Hanebury acted, moving his unit forward and up the concealing slope.
In the base of fire position, Corporal Gardiner used his liberated German binoculars to watch the tree line.
A pink object sprang into view, needing a focus adjustment to interpret as a face… and a…
“Jesus H! Hit the fucking tree line now!”
The .50 immediately spat its heavy bullets in the direction of the copse, the gunner adjusting his fire, walking the stream of metal into the undergrowth.
‘Not close enough!’
Gardiner shouldered his Garand and pulled the trigger until the metal clip sprang clear.
Whatever it had been that the enemy soldier had been holding, and it sure looked like a panzerfaust at the time, was now held by bloodied and dead hands.
Other weapons sprang to life around the edge of the copse, themselves starting a chain reaction from the encircling force.
The mortar’s first shell missed by a hundred feet, but the adjustment was good, and the rest went on the money.
Hanebury quickly spent every round from the 42 and swapped it for his M-1 carbine, then changed his mind, and grabbed for one of the Winchesters.
The .50cal behind him was deafening, but he enjoyed the effect it was having upon the small wood.
A small smokey trail marked a panzerfaust shot, but it went near nothing of consequence and served only to draw attention from the firebase.
Coordinating with Stradley, Hanebury moved forward, the two forces arriving at the treeline together, Stradley to the north, Hanebury to the south.
Both NCOs shouted the normal warnings about possible friendlies ahead.
The firebase ceased pouring shells into the site, but remained active, watching over the battlefield.
The distinctive sound of .30’s betrayed a Soviet attempt to move west. The attempt failed.
Nave was left with the vehicles and the rest spread out. Moving into the tree line.
A groaning off to Hanebury’s right drew attention, not the desired sort, as Rickard put three .45s into the wounded man.
He slipped the Colt back into his waistband and took a firm hold on the BAR again.
A flash of movement made him involuntarily scream.
The impact was heavy, but not enough to disturb his balance.
Continuing the scream of fear into one of intimidation, he swivelled and fired the BAR at whatever it was that had thrown the knife.
Vetochkin had lost his left arm above the elbow, courtesy of .50cal rounds fired from the firebase.
He had also taken a bullet in the right ankle, as one of Gardiner’s shots deflected and painfully wrecked the joint.
He had thrown the Puukko at the nearest American, knew he had hit him, and still had time to be incredulous that the man turned quickly and fired.
Rickard, having smashed the Russian’s body to pieces with heavy rounds at close range, pulled the Finnish knife from the stock of his BAR, knowing how close he had come to death.
Hanebury gave him a moment.
“Reek, check ‘em over for intel… then close up when you’ve done.”
‘Lucifer’ plunged on as an explosion marked some sort of action to the north.
Ahead he could see the shape of some sort of building and…
“Cover!”
The NCO shouted as he threw himself off to one side, the rest of his small group following suit.
With hand signals, he passed on information, and rose slightly to check again with his own eyes.
On first sight, he had seen two enemy soldiers, waiting behind a machine-gun.
From behind the small tree stump, his second view revealed two American bodies and a severed bough.
Relief flooded over him, followed by other, more bestial thoughts.
The corpses were identifiable as Buzzy and Hartnagel.
‘They may have been useless bastards, but they were my fucking useless bastards.’
“Covering fire!”
Garands and carbines threw bullets at the building as Lucifer visited himself upon the enemy.
On the north side of the copse, things had gone a little worse. One of Stradley’s men was face down in the mud, his life taken by a burst of SMG fire.
Stradley’s jeep was burning gently, a panzerfaust having destroyed it only twenty yards short of the tree line.
The only casualty of that strike, Stradley himself, nursed a bloody boot that presently disguised the rough amputation of two toes by shrapnel.
None the less, he pushed his group forward.
Bullets swept through the wooden sides of the building, more than one striking soft flesh within.
A scream made Akinfeev look up, just in time for the first surge of arterial blood from Urusov’s shattered thighs to wash over his face.
His NCO died before his eyes, the large arteries spilling his lifeblood in seconds.
Akinfeev resembled the stuff of nightmares, his face and upper body bathed in blood and human detritus.
He screamed, clawing at his hair and face, desperately trying to remove the horrors found there.
Screaming again, he unnerved the few men left in the building as he ripped off his tunic and used the destroyed garment to wipe himself.
One man rose to leave.
“Stay here and defend this position!”
“The battle is lost, Comrade Kapitan, we should save ourselves.”
The unhinged officer grabbed for his pistol, intent on shooting the mutineer, until Lucifer entered the room.
As Hanebury moved up, slipping from cover to cover, he became more and more angry, finding another of Smith’s men here, two more there.
The support fire slackened and then stopped, conscious that their leader was almost on top of the building.
Some moved forward to support him, but the First Sergeant kicked open the door and swiftly moved inside.
When the American Army had first brought the pump action shotgun to war in Europe, their First World War adversaries, the Imperial German Army, had declared the weapon illegal and threatened to execute any man carrying such a weapon, so devastating was it in the fine art of trench clearing.
In the right hands, the 12-gauge Winchester was also the most perfect weapon for removing any hostile intent in a room.
Lucifer had the hands for the job, and the Winchester blew the intended mutineer off his feet and spread parts of him over the already stressed Akinfeev.
The Soviet officer went into rapid meltdown.
Hanebury’s reflexes made him swivel and pump in one easy fluid movement, directing a stream of shot into the three men who started moving to attack him. Each went down and stayed down.
Hanebury brought the weapon back round, but the strap momentarily caught on the muzzle of a propped rifle, which gave Akinfeev time.
The unhinged officer brought his pistol up but, before he could fire, an explosion unbalanced him, buying Hanebury the extra half-scond he needed.
The Winchester deposited its contents in Akinfeev’s exposed left side, stripping away flesh, and flaying the stomach and hip area.
Thrown against the wooden wall, Akinfeev somehow retained enough understanding to raise his pistol towards Hanebury, even as his innards started to spill from the horrendous wound.
Akinfeev had no strength, and the pistol sagged away.
His mad eyes, fired with pain and hatred, looked at his killer, and saw only death therein.
Lucifer put the last 12 gauge in the middle of the Russain’s chest, and brought instant end to the man’s suffering.
Dispassionately examining the horrendous wounds on his victims, Hanebury slid more shells into the Winchester.
Hearing a small whimper, Hanebury dropped behind a table and brought the Winchester up ready. Curled up in the corner was Smith, his own emotional breakdown in its advanced stages.
Relaxing, Lu
cifer noted the approach of two of his men.
“What the fuck happened to you, Rodger?”
His 2IC stumbled in, clearly in pain.
“Someone put a faust on my vehicle, Top. Seems I left a little bit behind when I bailed out.”
“Let’s get that seen to. Medic! Medic!”
Stradley tossed his head in the direction of the gibbering wreck in the corner.
“What’s with the laughing boy there, Top?”
“Guess he just couldn’t cut it, Rodger. Medic! Medic!”
They actually didn’t have a medic, but Sergeant Ringold knew his way around battle wounds, so to him fell the task of reassembling Stradley’s foot.
“Right, let’s get this area secured a-sap. Call the Greyhound team in closer. Leave the firebase for now. C’mon, let’s move it, boys!”
Gradually, the MP unit made sense of the scene and recovered the bodies, friend and foe alike.
Those of their unit were laid out and covered, ready to be transported back to civilisation.
Those of the enemy were simply laid out, with all the horrors visited upon them on display.
Nave walked up, having repositioned the command jeep, chewing on a Hershey bar as he inspected the Soviet corpses.
“Jeez, Top. I take it these here are your handiwork?”
Hanebury shrugged, the Winchester sat nestled in the crook of his arm.
“Damn but that thing can fuck up your whole day and then some!”
There was no arguing with that.
Corporal Collier strolled up and mimed taking a chomp out of Nave’s Hershey.
“Get ye the fuck!” shouted Nave, his Arizona accent doing its best with the Scottish expression they had frequently been exposed to when camped alongside a Highland regiment in England.
None the less, he extended the bar and Collier nibbled a portion off.
“Top, second sweep is complete. Area is secure. We have eighteen bad guys here, all dead.”
“Nineteen.”
Both Hanebury and Collier looked at Nave in puzzlement.
“Eighteen,” Collier corrected, sure of his figures.
“Come down here a ‘ways.”
A few yards down the track, Nave stopped and pointed upwards.
“Now, I don’t know exactly what that is, but I’m guessing it isn’t a fucking bird.”
It certainly wasn’t, but it was the very devil to get down.
Eventually, the limbless torso was nudged out of the branches and fell into the undergrowth below.
Hanebury searched the pockets for intel before allowing the body to be piled with the others.
He examined the two items quickly and decided he would look at the map and booklet properly later. For now, he just wanted to get his unit secured and the whole affair reported.
1021 hrs, Monday, 18th March 1946, The Kremlin, Moscow, Russia.
Nazarbayeva was quite thankful that she had arrived early for the meeting, as she and a number of other senior officers were presently queuing to get into the building where the meeting was to be held.
Since the failed attempt by Makarenko, security had been tightened up, and no weapons of any kind were permitted within the main buildings, except those carried by the Kremlin Guards and authorised NKVD troops.
Having already been searched twice, Nazarbayeva was now in a line of some fifteen senior ranks, waiting to be sent through the latest acquisition intended to protect the lives of the General Secretary and his entourage.
A large but extremely effective Geffchen & Richter metal detector, stripped from a factory in Leipzig, obstructed the main stairs at ground floor level, leaving no alternative for anyone wishing to go upstairs but to walk through it.
It was a slow process, as there was seemingly no-one without something metal that set off the device, from belt buckles to watches to pens. Those attending had already been warned not to wear their awards, so it was a curiously unadorned group of generals and admirals that waited patiently for their turn.
Zhukov, leading the queue, removed his watch and belt, before stepping through to a relieving silence.
Accepting both back on the other side, he nodded at one or two in the queue and moved off, having ‘reassembled’ himself.
Marshal Hovhannes Bagramyan ceased his animated conversation with his frontal aviation commander, Major General Buianskiy, and followed next, as behind him the growing queue become a virtual who’s who of Soviet military talent.
By the time Nazarbayeva got to the device, most of those waiting understood what would and what wouldn’t set the damn thing off, and most already held belts, pens, drinking flasks and a plethora of personal artefacts ready for open inspection.
Nazarbayeva passed through.
‘Meeeeeeeeep.’
She searched her pockets again, but immediately understood what the issue was.
“My left boot, Comrade Mayor.”
She slipped the boot off and, in one deft movement, flicked it to the feet of the NKVD officer. A number of those present took the opportunity to inspect her left foot, or rather, the absence of it, an injury she had suffered whilst fighting in the Crimea.
Steadying herself on the metal detector, she hobbled back round and through.
The Geffchen & Richter detector remained silent.
Picking up her boot, the NKVD Major in charge of the process slipped his hand inside, immediately finding the L-shaped metal support that helped Nazarbayeva to walk properly. He quickly looked the boot over inside and out.
“Comrade General.”
He held the boot out to the GRU officer, who took it, dropped it to the floor, and had her ‘foot’ inside it in the blink of an eye.
Moving on, Nazarbayeva found herself much in demand, as both Bagramyan and Zhukov descended on her for the very latest information.
1100 hrs, Monday, 18th March 1946, The Kremlin, Moscow, Russia.
Everyone who was anyone in the upper echelons of the command apparatus seemed to be present to hear the delivery of the GKO approved plan for the coming months.
Whilst not totally on board with all its details, Zhukov had managed to steer Stalin and his committee away from some of the more disastrous ideas.
After receiving the most up-to-date information from the various intelligence agencies, projected figures for reinforcements and manufacturing output, expectations on oil production and personnel training, Zhukov started to paint a picture of a Red Army still capable of winning the present conflict, albeit with much more difficulty than had been presented to the same assembly before the tanks had started rolling westwards again.
To a man, and woman, the listeners were sceptical on the promises given about air cover, and how the struggling Red Air Force would start to combat Allied supremacy in the air and provide an umbrella under which the army could operate effectively. Much was expected of the new generation of aircraft, and a speeded up training programme for flight crew.
Novikov, commander of the Air Force, started quoting figures for available aircraft that resembled pre-war levels, and boasted of new types of jet aircraft that would soon be knocking Allied piston-engine craft from the skies.
His hands, like those of Zhukov and others, were tied, and he either went with the GKO plan exhibiting confidence and enthusiasm, or he would be counting trees in Siberia at the very best.
The master plan involved a great deal of maskirovka, as was to be expected, with formations demonstrating their hostile intent on the Norwegian border and Iran.
The upcoming insurrection in Greece would be provided with as much materiel support as possible, ensuring a further diversion of Allied resources.
Soviet forces working alongside the Japanese would be encouraged to be more active, something that Vasilevsky had railed against until his position was almost untenable.
Yugoslavia’s position had been clarified by a secret trip, undertaken by Molotov himself, and it was Yugoslavia herself that would offer most of the support to the Greek Communists.<
br />
However, whilst volunteers would continue to serve with the Red Army, there would be no change in Tito’s stance, meaning that Yugoslavian borders would be heavily policed and any violations would not be tolerated.
NKVD and GRU reports were careful to state what was known and what was surmised, and both drew conclusions that enemy eyes were mainly focussed on the Baltic States, although evidence of an intensification of the bomber offensive across the whole of Europe was clear.
Stalin, knowing that she would not be able to stop herself, asked Nazarbayeva what she thought was planned.
“Comrade General Secretary, all the evidence and suspicion would point towards Northern Norway and the Baltic States for some sort of military offensive operations, although the former can only be limited in size and nature. There are other clues that simply don’t fit into the whole but, our comrades in the NKVD agree, the best interpretation of all the intelligence we have received is that there will be an invasion of the Baltic States. When, we don’t know, but there are no indicators to suggest that any action is imminent.”
Admiral Isakov chipped in with his contribution, assuring the ensemble that the coasts of the three states, as well as higher up the Gulf of Bothnia, and the Polish coast, had all been extensively mined, and that his small but veteran fleet was ready to resist any invaders.
A question on the state of the Finns drew Molotov into the discussion.
“The Finns are and will remain neutral, to all intents and purposes. They have reiterated their stance to us, and the Allies, and Admiral Isakov can confirm, have further mined their coastline to protect from any incursion. Comrades, Finland is neutral for now.”
Then it was the turn of the Swedes, and Nazarbayeva was invited to speak.
“Comrade General Secretary, the Swedes appear to have been very active in protecting their borders, and there have been confirmed sinkings of Allied vessels, and shootings down of aircraft. It would certainly seem that the Swedish intend to remain neutral.”
