Operation Vampyr

by David Bishop

  "This is nothing to do with pride," Erfurth snapped. "This is about experience and tactics. If we form a Kessel, we will be destroyed. We must break out. All Panzers, follow me to the east."

  "Panzers, ignore that last order," Ralf shouted. "Fall back to the battlefield. We can use the wrecks of the Rumanians' own tanks as cover, create a defensive ring to protect each other."

  "All Panzers, this is Feldwebel Erfurth. You will ignore the transmissions of Obergefreiter Vollmer. Not only does he not lead this division, but if this battle is won he'll face a court martial for gross insubordination. Now, you will all follow me to the east!"

  Erfurth sent his Panzer into oblivion, unaware that none of the others were obeying him. A single shot from a T-34 tore the tank apart, killing its crew outright. Ralf watched the tank's sad demise through the rear vision ports of his cupola as the fourteen surviving Panzers returned to the battlefield.

  Hans had got halfway to the nearest German artillery position when he realised its guns were a sitting target for the Rumanian tanks. He started sprinting, frantically waving to the loaders and gunners who were still busy celebrating. "Run!" he shouted. "Get away from the guns! It isn't-"

  The first shell blew apart the middle gun, the explosion sending a wall of shrapnel in all directions. Those standing nearest the blast were slain in an instant, shredded where they stood. Others were less fortunate, their injuries not enough to kill them outright. Death came in a form of a T-34 driving over the top of the artillery position. It crushed both men and guns beneath its twenty-eight ton weight. Those who tried to run were machine gunned ruthlessly. Hans escaped this by throwing himself to the ground when he saw the silhouette of a T-34 approaching.

  He heard a rumbling, clanking sound and looked up to see one of the vampyr tanks almost upon him, its tracks about to crush his body. Hans rolled sideways into a groove created by the Panzers that had dragged the German guns into position. As the T-34 passed over him, he had the presence of mind to pull a stick grenade from his waist belt. He armed it and shoved the wooden shaft between the tank's wheels. The mechanical monster continued toward the battle until its left track exploded a few seconds later. Hans clambered up the tank's back and opened the turret porthole. He glimpsed two vampyrs arguing inside, then shoved the barrel of his Luger into the gap. "Say hello to Sergeant Witte when you see him in hell!" Hans emptied his pistol into the tank's interior, listening as bullets ricocheted around until they found targets. He jumped clear of the T-34 and ran to the battlefield, intent on reaching it before the encirclement was complete. If he died that day, he wanted to be alongside his comrades, fighting for what he believed in.

  In the sky the Bf 109s were dog-fighting brilliantly, the finely honed skills of the twelve Luftwaffe pilots accounting for dozens of enemy Hurricanes. But sheer weight of numbers meant the vampyrs could not fail to hit one of the Messerschmitts eventually.

  Horst Lang was first to die. He had flown as escort for Klaus on numerous sorties, his cheerful optimism a source of comfort in many grim situations. His plane was strafed by enemy fire, flames blazing in the night sky. Lang got a final message off before the end. "Lang to Vollmer, I'm going down. Hals und Beinbruch!"

  Klaus watched as his friend flew the dying Bf 109 into one of the enemy planes. Away to the east another of the Messerschmitts fell from the sky, its impact creating a fireball on the ground. Their defeat was only a matter of time now. Klaus called his Staffel into formation behind him. Fifteen Stuka lined up to bomb the hell out of the vampyr ground forces. "Begin your bombing runs now!"

  All the remaining Panzers had pulled back to the battlefield, but the wrecked hulls of the T-34s only provided cover for half a dozen of the German tanks. The rest formed a defensive wall round the edges of the battlefield. When they were lost, their shattered hulks would form another barricade, another obstacle for the vampyr to overcome.

  Ralf watched from his vantage point in the centre of the killing field as the first of the outer circle exploded beneath the onslaught of the T-34s. Then the men inside the ruptured Panzer started screaming, howling for God, for mercy, for their mothers. Then there was only the sound of battle to crowd the ears, the sight of carnage to fill the eyes. Many more men would die before the end, but all of them would die fighting.

  Hans gathered fifty German infantrymen, most from his own unit. He split them into pairs. Each duo was issued with a machine gun and all the ammunition they could carry. The Kessel was collapsing in upon itself, the vampyr hordes circling around them, compressing the survivors into an increasingly small circle. Hans spaced the teams evenly round the perimeter, telling them to use anything they could find as cover - wrecked vehicles, shards of shattered armour, even the corpses of their fallen comrades. "Don't waste your fire on thin air. We have limited supplies of silver-tipped rounds, so make each bullet count."

  The wolves came first, feral animals that bounded across blood-soaked soil towards the German positions. When none of the machine gunners fired, Hans realised they hadn't seen the vampyr transmute themselves into different forms, different shapes. "Open fire!" he screamed above the cacophony of battle. "If they get close enough they'll tear you apart!"

  The first wolf bounded across the no-man's-land that was forming round the German defensive circle, leaping over the impromptu barricades to savage a two-man team. Hans ran across and shot the animal dead. As he did, it exploded into ash and dust, like all the other vampyrs when they died.

  "Now do you see what we're up against?" he shouted. "Do as I say. Open fire!" The other teams needed no more prompting. They began strafing the circling pack of wolves, each animal giving an unearthly shriek as it died. After considerable losses, the four-legged vampyrs slunk away into the darkness, giving those on the ground a moment to regroup. The T-34s opened fired again, targeting the Panzers that formed the Kessel's edge. They exploded like fireworks.

  Another wave of Stukas plunged from the sky, dive-bombing the vampyr forces. Each plane accounted for a T-34 or devastated one of the cavalry companies, but as they soared back into the sky, the Stuka pilots were dismayed to discover a wall of Hurricanes waiting for them. The last of the Messerschmitts had fallen, wiped out by the superior numbers of vampyr planes in the air. From now on, the Stukas would have to fight their own battles. Klaus made his orders short and simple. "Use whatever weapons you have. Use your bombs, your machine guns, your planes if you have to, but we must protect those on the ground."

  After the wolves came bats, swarms of winged vampyrs flapped like a cloud across the moon before they dived upon the German infantry. Hans screamed at the machine gunners to fire into the sky. Each bat exploded when hit by a silver-tipped bullet. So many of them died that the air became a choking dust cloud of stifling ash. Then the bats retreated and a mist began creeping across the battlefield towards the valiant German fighters.

  Hans quickly recognised the threat represented by this translucent vapour. "Activate your stick grenades, then throw them into the centre of the mist!" he yelled, leading by example.

  His Stielhandgranate flew over the ring of exploding Panzers to the centre of the mist. A death shriek filled the air when the device detonated. Further cries followed as the other infantry hurled more stick grenades into no-man's-land. The vampyrs responded with another pack of wolves, and a colony of bats attacked at the same time, confusing the German tactical response. Little by little, each wave of enemy insurgents was whittling away at the defenders, creating gaps in the circle, weakening their numbers.

  The last Panzer in the outer ring perished. Its hull burst apart like wet fruit beneath the T-34s' onslaught. Shrapnel from the exploding tank showered the machine gunners close by, driving them backwards, collapsing the Kessel still further. The inner ring of Panzers kept blasting away, each silver-coated shell accounting for a small pocket of enemy troops. The vampyr cavalry made its first charge. Black steeds raced fearlessly toward the German machine guns. Flecks of white foam fell from the animals' mouths. A hu
ndred horses died in the first attack wave and as many in the second. And still they came, charging to their deaths, driven on by the remorseless Rumanians. The battlefield was a scene of carnage and devastation, the air thick with the stench of blood and ash, cordite and chaos.

  In the sky, Klaus was among the last of the Stukas still flying. The German Staffel had accounted for all but a few of the Hurricanes, but the aerial victory had come at a terrible price. Only four Ju 87s remained in the air, and that number was halved less than a minute later. One of the Stuka, out of ammunition and trailing black smoke across the clouds, lured two of the Hurricanes to their doom by engineering a three-plane mid-air collision. Another Stuka dove directly into the last of the T-34s and destroyed the final remnants of the vampyrs' armoured columns.

  Only Klaus and Bruck were left of the forty-eight German pilots that had started the aerial battle.

  "Theodor, how many bombs do you have left?" Klaus asked.

  "None, and I'm out of ammunition for the machine guns too. You?"

  "The same, and I'm flying on fumes."

  "The sun will be up soon," Bruck said. "I'd like to see the sun once more before I die."

  "Me too," Klaus agreed. "It would be-" He stopped transmitting, a sudden realisation halting him in mid-sentence. "Of course! We don't need to win this battle, we only need to keep the vampyrs fighting until dawn. The rising sun will save us!" In the distance the first faint glimmers of light were beginning to soften the sky above the horizon, black slowly becoming blue again. "Bruck, we can do it, we can make it."

  "I'm not so sure," the other pilot replied. "Something's coming up to meet us."

  Klaus tipped his wing over to look down. A black cloud was rising from the battlefield, like a choking black fog, but pulsating and alive. "Oh, God," Klaus gasped.

  The cloud was made of bats, dozens of them swarming towards the two surviving Stuka.

  "Evasive action!" Klaus peeled his plane away from the rising throng. Bruck did not react as quickly. His Stuka flew directly into the vampyrs. His engine stuttered and died as a curtain of bats covered every inch of his aircraft. The propeller stopped and the plane fell into a death spiral.

  "Our Father, who art in heaven," Bruck prayed, transmitting his final words into the ether. "Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be-"

  The Stuka exploded as it hit the ground in no-man's-land. The fireball incinerated nearly a hundred vampyr cavalry and their horses. Ralf watched with grim satisfaction from the cupola of his Panzer, knowing the end would not be long for him and his crew. May we take as many of these bloodsucking bastards with us when we go, he vowed silently. The tank had all but exhausted its supply of shells and the machine gun ammunition would not last long either, once the vampyrs got close enough to shoot. "Helmut! Where's our reinforcements?" he shouted.

  "I still can't get through," the radio operator admitted. He had used every frequency, every trick he knew to try and get a signal out, but without success. "Something is jamming us."

  "Something? Or someone?" Gunther asked, his usual cheerfulness bled away in the bleak reality of the battle. "We never had a chance."

  "Nobody admits defeat inside my Panzer," Ralf snarled. "We fight to the death."

  "But how do you kill a foe who is undead?" Martin asked.

  "With courage, with heart and with your head," Willy replied. "When all that isn't enough, you give up your life to take theirs. Better we die stopping them than survive to see them prosper."

  "He's right," Ralf said. "This isn't over yet. We can still..." His voice trailed off, his head tilting to one side, his face a mask of concentration.

  "We can still do what?" Martin asked.

  "Quiet!" Helmut snapped. "Listen."

  The rest of the crew stopped and listened. An eerie silence had fallen outside the Panzer.

  "I don't hear anything," Martin whispered.

  "Exactly," Ralf replied. He reached up to open the hatch above his head.

  Willy grabbed his commander by the leg. "Is that wise?" the gunner asked.

  Ralf shrugged. "At this point, what have we got to lose?" He opened the hatch and peered outside. "They've stopped," he said with surprise. "The vampyrs have stopped attacking." The others scrambled to the nearest escape hatches and opened them to look out.

  Klaus peered down at the battlefield. A single horseman was riding across no-man's-land towards the circle of besieged Germans. All the other vampyrs had assembled in a ring around the circle, three-deep in places but much diminished from when the battle had begun hours earlier. Even the bats had left the sky and returned to the ground, while the only remaining Hurricanes circled harmlessly below the Stuka. The battle had paused, but why?

  "What the hell is happening?" a bewildered Satzinger asked.

  "I was wondering the same thing myself," Klaus replied.

  Hans watched as the lone cavalry rider stopped in the middle of no-man's-land, perhaps ten metres away from the German positions. Hans could not see the rider's face, but the upright posture and gently billowing cape suggested a single name: Constanta.

  The vampyr lord had not been able to resist the lure of the battle, the chance to see his enemies wiped out in a single, bloody engagement. So much for reports the Hauptmann had been occupied visiting the outskirts of Leningrad. That must have been another lie, another deception. One more among so many.

  "Men of the Wehrmacht, I salute you," Constanta called. "You have fought well, upholding the honour of your Fatherland. You can be proud of what you have achieved here. Nevertheless, your defeat is close at hand. I offer you the chance to surrender, to survive this battle and continue your fight for the Führer and the Reich. Join us and you will become ageless and all but immortal. With your courage and our blessing of eternal life, you would be a fighting force to rival any seen in this war or any other."

  A murmur of disbelief spread among the Germans. Could the vampyr be offering them a way out of this death trap?

  "Some of you will doubt this offer, but I have never lied in my long, long life. I consider my word to be a sacred bond. My Sire rewards loyalty with eternal life and I offer you the same. Join us and live forever, or die here on this battlefield, alone, unheralded and unsung. The choice is yours. I give you one minute to make up your minds." Constanta remained where he was, drawing a fob watch from a pocket on his uniform to take note of the time. His horse nodded its head up and down, as if approving his offer.

  Hans spotted Ralf and the rest of his crew nearby, glaring at Constanta from the hatches of their Panzer. He ran across to them, clambering up the hull of the mighty tank to talk with Ralf. "He's lying. Why would the vampyr offer us a chance to join them? They have sacrificed hundreds of their kind to kill us."

  "That could be the reason," Ralf replied. "We have wiped out so many of them, they need us to fill the gaps. But I've no intention of becoming Constanta's cannon fodder."

  "There could be another reason," Gunther suggested, pointing at the horizon. "The sun will be up in a few minutes. If the vampyr don't leave before then, they will all die. If we can survive until sunrise, we've won."

  Helmut had been relaying Constanta's message to Klaus in the sky. "Your brother says he can see the sun already, that's why the bats have come back down to the ground."

  Ralf folded his arms. "That settles it."

  Hans gestured towards the waiting vampyr leader. "What about him?"

  "That Scheisse?" The Panzer commander smiled. "We'll hit him with everything we've got."

  The Germans opened fire on Constanta's position, bombarding him with the final few shells from each Panzer, a fusillade of machine gun rounds and stick grenades. When all the noise and explosions had cleared, the vampyr lord was still standing. His horse had been blown apart, but the Rumanian remained apparently unhurt.

  "I can't be killed," he sneered at the Germans. "I can resurrect myself from the smallest speck of dust. That is the power of my Sire, the gift that you have spurned. Remember that on
your way to hell."

  Klaus felt his Stuka engine cough and splutter, its strength failing as the last ounces of fuel were exhausted. Behind him Satzinger had resumed praying, all too aware their time in the air was at an end.

  Klaus nodded, wishing he believed in anything any more. "I'm glad you got to fly once more, major. If we have to die, better it be in the sky, doing what we've always loved."

  "Amen," Satzinger replied. "It's time for our last dive, Vollmer. Choose your target and make it count." The Stuka fell silent, the only sound to be heard was the wind whistling past.

  Klaus smiled as he aimed the plane's nose at a single figure on the battlefield below. "I'm coming for you Constanta!"

  Hans and Ralf watched their brother's plane fall from the sky, the Stuka giving one last scream as it plunged to the earth, falling short of the vampyr leader's position. Constanta was still laughing at this heroic failure when one of the Ju 87's propeller blades sliced off his head. He exploded into a cloud of ash, a faint gust of wind carrying it away into the sky.

  At the death of their leader, the vampyr hordes gave a wail of dismay, but it was as nothing to the cacophony that greeted the sun as it broke the horizon. A shriek rose up, louder and more terrible than any noise the German survivors had ever heard. On and on the cry went, rending the air, deafening in its volume, horrifying in its ferocity. The encircling vampyrs exploded, one after another, bursting into flame and ash, crying out to their dark lord.

  Then they were gone, their last echo dying away on the wind. The undead army was reduced to a ring of ash on the bloody soil. Hans and Ralf looked at each other, disbelief clouding their faces. They were still expecting another attack, another wave to rise up and engulf them.