Rage of Battle wi-2

by Ian Slater

  * * *

  Watching the swarm of gulls over Tallinn’s Number Three dock, the birds diving and rising above the giant gray gantries screeching so loudly that his driver did not hear him telling him to stop, Malkov marveled at the principle of internal organization that must be in operation to prevent the birds from colliding with one another. Malkov’s small, two-cylinder car was flanked by four armored personnel carriers. This much force he knew might not be necessary, but better to arrive with too much man too little. Nothing focused the mind more effectively than a.50 machine gun. For some, the stocky, brutish build of the captain and his rough informality were enough to make them feel intimidated, the joke on the docks being that Malkov had been chosen for his looks more than for his brains. Others said that becoming an MOP chief made you look like that anyway.

  The simple fact that Malkov’s car stopped ten yards farther on than he had intended meant that a dirty-boiler-suited riveter, his huge riveting gun slung over his shoulder like a small, silver lamb as he headed toward the tool shed, and his apprentice, who walked with him, were selected as hostages rather than two other men farther back who were just coming on shift. The captain’s maritime troops had already sealed off the docks, and he had ordered two Pauk-class patrol Corvettes to pry the harbor fifty meters offshore in the event that anyone trying to evade questioning might attempt to swim farther down the docks. When the 230 workers, all but 21 of them men, had been assembled, the captain mounted a weather-worn dais used for new launches from the Tallinn yard. The gulls were increasing in number as more fish boats came in from the gulf, the birds’ screeching now so loud, the captain was obliged to ask an NCO to fetch a megaphone from one of the armored personnel carriers forming themselves in a semicircle around the workers. A row of troops from the APCs flanked the dais near the edge of the wharf, where crates of ordnance were awaiting shipment.

  “I will be brief,” said the captain. “Sabotage has been committed against the Soviet navy — the navy which protects your children from imperialist aggression.” He heard someone in the crowd making a guttural coughing noise, getting ready to spit.

  “I want information,” Malkov told them, switching from Russian to fluent Estonian. “Now! I should tell you we have Mustamäe Apartments surrounded.”

  There was a murmur, a sudden shift in the crowd. The captain’s inference was clear.

  “Come here!” the captain ordered the riveter and his apprentice. Reluctantly, a marine trooper pushing them with his rifle, the two men walked up the four steps to the dais, the apprentice stepping over a puddle from the rainfall dumped by an early morning shower that had washed the air so clean that for a while the rusting, polluted aspect of the docks had taken on a clean, sparkly look. It was all illusion. The riveter looked at the captain defiantly; the apprentice tried to do likewise but was clearly afraid that if he did so, he would be shot on the spot.

  “The first choice of hostages,” said Malkov, indicating the two men, “has been from the docks. Future hostages will be taken from Mustamäe.” He looked at the sullen crowd of workers, his eyes seeming to take in every stare and turn it back on itself. “I will be in the dockyard office.” With that, he walked down the four steps of the dais and, passing through the flank of troopers, nodded to the NCO, handing him back the megaphone. His car started up and a volley of shots rang out, blowing the riveter and apprentice off the dais.

  The crowd of workers were stunned, surged angrily, then, under a long burst of machine-gun fire from the armored personnel carriers, stopped, yelling and screaming at the Russian troops, their voices mingling with the screeching of the gulls, several of which had also been hit by the machine-gun bursts, their lifeless bodies tumbling down through the gantries. Here and there, feathers fluttered like bloodied snow, eventually to fall softly on the wind-ruffled harbor.

  * * *

  At Mustamäe they were already loading the trucks now that the lists of whose family lived where had arrived from the docks. Priority in the roundup was being given to teenagers, as Malkov knew from his experience as an MOP officer in Riga that the elderly were not worth the trouble. They were easier to round up at the beginning but prone to die on you in the cells, which only stiffened resistance among the workers rather than weakened it. Younger hostages were by far the best bet.

  An MPO corporal returned to apartment 703. On his copy of the list, it said, “Family Jaakson.” When she opened the door, the woman, Malle Jaakson, remarkably well preserved for her age, he thought, was wearing spectacles and had a book in her hand. “You told us,” the corporal said, glancing down at his clipboard, “that Edouard Jaakson was at school.”

  “He isn’t,” the MPO corporal said.

  Either the woman had been telling the truth and the boy had left for school early, then hopped it, or he was in the apartment. The corporal brushed past her, through to the small nine-by-nine living room, his head turning, his concentration absolute as he checked the four small rooms of the apartment.

  Another Hitler, Malle thought. She had been gripping the book so tightly, she could feel her fingers going numb from the lack of circulation.

  The corporal stopped and looked back long and hard at her. She blushed; the man’s eyes were not accusing but rather roving over her trim figure, ill defined beneath a loose-fitting, rust-red cardigan but obviously more alluring to him for that. Instinctively she pulled the cardigan closed about her as if to shut out his view. Immediately she realized it had been the wrong thing to do, as if she were in fact showing herself off. Even worse, it might occur to him that she was trying to divert his attention. But then, if she could divert his attention—

  “Would you like some coffee?”

  “Real coffee?” the corporal asked, his surprise total. Like most of the troops, he was clearly fed up with drinking the bitter ersatz stuff made from barley and chicory.

  “No,” she said. “I’m sorry. I don’t care for the artificial kind either. But I have some tea. I imagine you must be tired. You could do with a cup, I expect.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Thank you, Mrs. Jaakson.”

  She smiled nervously as she picked up the kettle. “Is that a Ukrainian accent I detect?” she asked as if she liked it.

  “You can tell?” Though she had not turned around from the gas stove, she sensed from his tone that he was pleased. She could feel him relax, as if the very air had changed, and heard him unbuckle his webbed belt as he sat down at the table. Filling the kettle, she could see outside that the troopers were still surrounding the building, some trucks, packed with civilians, leaving, and others, empty, arriving. But even the line of soldiers seemed more relaxed, their circle around the apartments sagging in places, confident now that no one had gotten out who shouldn’t.

  “Have you been posted in Tallinn for long?” she said lightly, turning up the gas, the stove’s yellowish-blue circle of fire hissing softly, comfortingly.

  “In Tallinn,” he said, “a year. I like it. You can buy more things here. Not so good now, of course.”

  “No,” she said, reaching for the tea and spooning it out carefully into the pot. She thought she heard a noise, possibly from the bedroom, and feeling herself stiffen with alarm, rather than let him see her reaction, took her time replacing the lid on the tea jar and putting it back on the shelf above the gas ring. She heard the noise again and quickly turned the tap full on, topping up the kettle, though it was already half-full, not daring to look at him for fear he might see the alarm in her eyes. “You have a family?” she asked, concentrating on the kettle.

  “Yes,” said the corporal, “I’ve been married now for three — four years. My wife’s name is Raza.”

  The noise sounded again, like the rustle of a curtain.

  “You must miss your family.”

  “I have no children. But yes, I miss my wife.”

  “Yes.”

  When she turned to face him, she gasped, almost dropping the kettle — his erection purple, swollen and rising like some huge
fat earthworm, the most disgusting thing she had ever seen. He nodded toward the bedroom with a crooked grin. “I’ll take the boy off the list,” he said. She was transfixed.

  “I don’t care if he’s joined the Lesnye Bortsy za Svobodu,” he said, meaning the Forest Freedom Fighters. “Or with relatives, whatever. I’ll take him off the list.” He paused. “But you must be nice. Like you enjoy it, yes?”

  Stunned, Malle lifted the kettle, which was so heavy it splashed, almost extinguishing the gas ring, making a loud, steaming noise.

  “I can’t hear you,” he said.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Through the mist, the silence after the shelling screamed its presence, the pounding of the heavy guns having pummeled eardrums so badly that only the high tones were left, their ringing so intense that the sound of the dawn birds’ song was lost to David Brentwood as he lay, muscles aching, his whole body tense, hands still gripping the squad automatic weapon, his eyes adjusting to the bronze dawn of his goggles until he took them off. The glare of the sun-infused mist was hurtful to his eyes, but now at least Brentwood had a wider field of vision across the cratered landscape, which he remembered from the aerial reconnaissance photos had once been a meadow backed by a wood of Lombardy poplar. The wood was now gutted, the few remaining poplars blackened and splintered, leaning at impossible angles, looking like burned Christmas trees, leaves that had no doubt once flickered gold in the autumn sun now gone, one of the starkly naked trees that remained reminding him of the gaunt “lynching trees” he’d seen in old movies, stripped of foliage, charred, only one leaf still defiantly attached, a hundred yards from him. It was on this leaf that he focused, at once amazed and buoyed by its resilience against all odds. Or was it less resilience and more sheer luck?

  There was a flash to his right, sun on steel. He swung the SAW up and around, its burst driving the butt hard into his thigh, the gun now silenced, squashed into the mud and guts of the corpse next to him, the long, razor-sharp blade of a knife at his throat, motioning him up — the Russian, if he was Russian, in a long, black, zipped-up jumpsuit and black balaclava, frightening the hell out of him, the man’s eyes almost impossible to see, and his hot, sour breath on Brentwood’s face.

  “Up!” he told Brentwood. “C’mon, quickly!” The ease of the man’s English, its purely American sound, devoid of any foreign accent, was the next thing David noticed.

  The craters were now alive with the black figures moving forward. He counted at least fifty of them as he was hurriedly taken back toward Russian lines, escorted by relay, stumbling dizzily at first, his muscles still tight from the trauma of the shelling. A quarter mile farther on, he passed over more heavily cratered ground littered with the rotting corpses of what had been the American airborne, whole bodies the exception, limbs savagely amputated by the 120-millimeter shrapnel — from friendly fire. Stomachs literally blown apart, unrecognizable organs and intestines were scattered all over the battlefield in various hues of decomposition, some invisible in the mud except when revealed as a moving mound of maggots, others surrounded by crows pecking almost disinterestedly, waddling like ducks, so gorged they were too heavy to fly. And over it all the revolting burnt-chicken smell of death.

  But for all the horror, worse than anything he’d seen during Freeman’s raid on Pyongyang in Korea, the thing that struck David most was the catlike grace with which the black-suited Russian commandos moved, up and over the deep craters, taking no notice of the human detritus about them, or if they did, not showing the slightest sign, pausing only at the butchered chunks that still had heads attached or stopping where a severed head lay encrusted with mud, bending down, removing the airborne’s dog tags, which were sometimes still attached to the neck or pressed into the mush that had been a face. Now and then he saw one of the black jumpsuits pause, raising his hand moments later with a clutch of ID tags. A runner, one of the Poles brought up from the support battalions, would dash up, grab the tags from the Russian, and then head back to the Russian battalion’s headquarters in a thick stand of pine, where David now sat silent with the other two-hundred-odd prisoners, a few British but most of them forlorn remnants of the disastrous airborne drop.

  It was only after they took his own dog tags that he realized why he hadn’t been killed on the spot. A very fit, no-nonsense, English-speaking Russian NCO in army greatcoat ordered them to remove their uniforms. Walking behind him was a private, his arms festooned with wire coat hangers, one for every prisoner, and a small plastic garbage bag for personal effects. A British private, peeling off his brown-and-green-splash combat tunic with the British Army of the Rhine shoulder patch, offered David a cigarette. David normally didn’t smoke, but he took it. The Englishman, a cockney, brushed a sprig of sticky pine from his sleeve. “Don’t want ‘em all messy, do we?”

  David looked puzzled.

  “When they cut your throat,” said the cockney. “Makes a mess of the uniform.”

  David nodded. His ears were still ringing so that the Englishman’s voice seemed to come from a long way off and as if he were talking underwater. Putting the cigarette in his mouth, still dry from fear, he reached over to steady the cockney’s hand as the Englishman flicked his lighter, but David found his hand was no steadier, both of them trembling.

  David was surprised how good the tobacco tasted. He took a piece of the loose weed from the tip of his tongue and flicked it to the ground. “Could’ve—” he began, but his throat was so parched, he had to begin again, and only now, as he took off his trousers to put on the hanger, did he realize his thigh was wet not so much from the blood of the corpse against which he’d cringed during the barrage, but also from water that had leaked from his punctured canteen. The bullet had penetrated halfway up the canteen. He took a sip from what was left, offering the rest to the Englishman. “Could have strangled us, though,” said David. “Taken our uniforms there and then. Why march us back?”

  “Nah, mate. You shit yourself then, see? If they strangle you. Have to wash your duds out. No — they want ‘em Persil white.” The Englishman paused. “Reminds me of when I was a kid: ‘I’m no fool, I use Persil on my tool.’ “ He shook his head, forcing a grin, and put out his hand to the American. “Fred Waite’s the name.”

  “David Brentwood.”

  “Schweig doch! “—”Shut up!” shouted one of the guards, a Stasi, from his red-gold-black shoulder patch, walking toward them on the soft, brown needles of dead pine, and coming from a command truck that was only now visible to David through the camouflage netting. “Schweig dock!” the German repeated, and David saw the shadows of others guards in the nearby pines looking over at them.

  “Bit late now, Fritz,” said Waite. It was clear that it wasn’t only their talking but the apparent friendship between the American and Englishman which annoyed the guard. It was as he had been told: the British and Americans had no respect for authority. From Waite’s response, he appeared to think the two prisoners hadn’t understood his order and so switched to English and gesticulations, his English broken and not at all like that of the sleek, fluent jumpsuits, the first of whom were now returning after their quick foray into the crater zone, where Polish contingents were taking up positions, digging in.

  “There is to be no talking already,” said the guard.

  David saw the guard was about his age, maybe a few years older, midtwenties, his eyes tired but awake with suspicion. Waite, sitting on his haunches, leaned forward, arms protruding from the poncho that, apart from their regulation khaki underwear, was all the half-naked prisoners had to keep them warm. He held up his hand, like a schoolboy asking permission.

  “Ja?” said the guard.

  “Listen, Fritz. What’s going on?”

  “My name is not this Fritz.”

  “What is it, then? Your name?”

  “Asshole!” called out someone from the twenty or so POWs in a clump that was being guarded near one of the eleven-man Russian armored personnel carriers.

  “Who s
aid this?” demanded the Stasi, swinging about. “What is this name?”

  “It’s an expression of endearment,” said one of the British Army of the Rhine, shivering in the cold under his poncho.

  “Yeah,” put in one of the Americans next to him. “Especially in San Francisco.”

  There was a round of laughter, some of the British in another group opposite David and the cockney clapping their appreciation.

  The young guard, red-faced, unslung his AKM, right hand snapping back the sideways-folding metal butt, and stepped to within a foot of the twenty or so prisoners. “It is strictly forbidden to — to be abusing socialist soldiers already.”

  “Stop fucking around!” It was one of the black jumpsuits, a bunch of dog tags in his hands. In German he curtly told the guard to check if any of the prisoners still had their ID tags. No one said anything; the jumpsuit officer, a man of at least six feet, lean and wiry-looking, was one of the toughest men David had ever seen. As the guard snapped to attention and immediately began checking everyone’s neck for dog tags, the officer unzipped and removed his boiler suit, folding it with such dexterity, it was clear to the NATO prisoners of war that it wasn’t the first time he’d done it. Someone murmured something about a strip tease, but the weak ripple of laughter quickly died. He was standing in a well-worn uniform of an American airborne lieutenant, complete with dog tags.

  “They get caught doing that,” murmured Waite, “they’ll be shot as spies.”

  “Maybe,” agreed David, “but I’ll tell you something, Ted.”