by James Rouch
‘There should be many more fires.’ Andrea scanned those quarters under attack. ‘It must be that there is little left to burn.’
Within a minute Revell had lost count of the number of incoming shells. He watched an impressive display of fire control as all the artillery fire ceased abruptly, and then shortly after recommenced with its entire weight falling on a single location that was instantly hidden behind flame and smoke. If the Russians were short of replacement uniforms, they weren’t short of ammunition.
A stray explosive round fell short and pounded the riverbank behind them, sending a large piece of the nose and fuse through the parapet ahead of them in a shower of stone and cement dust.
They stepped up their pace to get clear of the exposed position as quickly as possible, breaking into a run when two more shells followed, impacting on the wreck of a railway bridge alongside, cutting the last ribbons of rail with which it connected both banks.
Too late Revell saw the wire and grabbed for Andrea to stop her. There was no time to dive for cover, all he could do was lunge forward to try to shield her with his body.
A brilliant flash blotted out their vision as a vividly bright fireball blossomed on top of the parapet. Revell felt himself being lifted and the thought flew through his mind that he was being blown over the side of the bridge, into the poisonous depths of the Elbe, then he struck the other parapet, and everything went black.
He didn’t hurt, not badly. There was a violent buzzing inside his head and his body felt like it had spent a whole day being tossed about inside a cement mixer, but there didn’t seem to be anything broken.
Opening his eyes, or trying to, transformed the buzzing to an agonising ringing. All he could see was a white mist, and he risked the pain he knew it would bring to shake his head to try to clear it.
Gradually the pain subsided to a pounding ache, and he tried again. Through a milky haze, blurred vision began to return. As it did, the first thing he made out was the group of men standing close by. Visible only in outline he could see the silhouettes of Russian helmets, and at the same moment he saw that Andrea was hemmed in by the group, and had been disarmed. One of the men was reaching towards her…
SEVEN
Through the lenses of spectacles that appeared to be half an inch thick, the old man scrutinised their identity cards. Although he held them up close to his face, he still kept a tight grip on the sub-machine gun.
‘I can see why they gave him a short-range weapon. He can’t see far enough to use a rifle.’
If the old man’s sight wasn’t perfect, his hearing was in no way impaired, and he glanced from the pieces of card to scrunch his wrinkled features and glare at the major.
‘We may not be young,’ he indicated the other oldsters who made up the bridge defence group, ‘but we can still teach you something about war.’ He pointed to a mound of artificially arranged rubble. ‘There are six Communist assault engineers in there. We taught them about war; and you, how did you like your flying lesson?’
The memory of the booby-trap blast grenade was too recent, and its aftermath too much still with him for Revell to say anything. He caught the card flicked back at him, and as he fumbled to catch it, noticed the old man carefully hand Andrea hers, and give her hand a squeeze as he did. ‘How do we rejoin our unit?’ Holding on to Andrea’s hand, the old man very deliberately took a long time before answering Revell. ‘You do not. We have no time for such niceties. You report to the Office of Reserve Manpower. It is on Adolphsplatz, near the stock exchange. Go by the shortest route. If you bump into your unit on the way then it is your lucky day, if not…’ He shrugged. ‘Have you eaten?’ ‘No.’ Revell was surprised by the sudden concern. ‘Then you had best get a move on. They only serve one meal a day there, in thirty minutes.’
‘Thanks.’ Revell’s assault shotgun had been retrieved by a member of the senior citizen’s equally ancient squad, now the old man who held it reluctantly handed it over.
As they made to leave, the major felt a hand on his arm. It was the oldster with the sub-machine gun. ‘You are one of those who came up the river?’ ‘Yes.’
‘I hear there were not many of you, only a handful of tanks and a few supplies.’
Revell thought of all the casualties they’d taken on the way, but he said nothing about that. ‘We’re just an advance guard, there’ll be a lot more coming.’ The old man shook his head. ‘I do not think so. Until now the Russians were expecting an attempt by land, or even by air. Now they know better and will not let it happen again. We have been fighting them a long time, we know what they are like. They live in fear, for your success some of them will die, others will not let you jeopardise their lives. No more convoys will get through. The Communists will die fighting rather than be tortured and executed by the KGB for not having tried hard enough.’
Gnarled hands enclosed his, and Revell saw tears in the oldster’s eyes.
‘We have done all we can, we thought others would now take the burden but we see that we must finish the task ourselves. But thank you for trying. Thank you.’
He went back to help his squad rig a fresh trip wire and replace the blast bomb. His step was unsteady and the weapon and spare magazines seemed to weigh him down.
Like the Englishman down the sewer, Revell recognised a man who was near the limit of his endurance. It was a miracle the old boy had survived this long. Many half his age must have succumbed to disease, or cracked under the nervous strain. Revell was learning a lot about Hamburg, but he was learning a lot more about its people.
‘I’ve no idea where they are.’
The clerk spoke very loudly when he answered Revell’s question about where his unit might be. He was about to leave the table when the clerk leant forward and whispered.
‘Couldn’t say anything while others were listening, it’s bad for morale. I did hear something. The colonel’s fire-brigade took a lot of casualties in a scrap with some Commie tanks. Seems the Reds sent a weak force forward to draw the fire, then sent in a full squadron. Must have been a real rough-house. The count was four T72s brewed up and a couple more disabled. Sorry though, no idea where the colonel is now. You’ll just have to go wherever you’re wanted now.’
Revell rejoined Andrea sitting against the wall halfway along the platform. The underground station was packed. Every inch of space, even between the tracks, was occupied by people sleeping or queuing or gathered in small groups to talk or play cards. A few, those lucky enough to be near one of the few low power bulbs, were reading.
A cross section of humanity was there. All types, all classes were represented. In one corner a passionate young man was earnestly talking to anyone he could get to listen. He was being watched by a pair of middle-aged civilian police officers, who began to sidle closer as the youth tried to press leaflets upon unwilling people who had not been as oblivious to the presence of the officers.
In the queue waiting for new passes stood an elderly couple who had known better times. They tried, unsuccessfully, to distance themselves from those about them, holding their Antler luggage tight and making withering looks at anybody who brushed past or knocked against them.
From an alcove at the extreme end of the platform came a bellow of raucous laughter. A group of Turks were trying unsuccessfully to be inconspicuous. They were a small remnant of the mass of immigrant workers who had mostly returned home at the outbreak of war. Those who remained were the ones too poor to make the journey back to their homeland, or those wanted there by the police or draft boards, or who were engaged in some illegal racket so lucrative, like drugs, that they had been unwilling to pull out until the last moment, and then had left it too late.
Now they huddled close together in the recess, shushing each other to silence as they forgot their purpose for a moment and laughed too loud at a joke, or celebrated a winning hand too noisily.
The people they were avoiding were the armed men and women wearing blue armbands, who roamed through the crowds selecting thos
e they needed for various tasks.
Somewhere among the throng a baby began to cry. There were few children on the platform and everyone stiffened at the sound and all conversation ceased immediately. It was as if the people’s nerves were so finely tuned, stretched so far, that if the jarring noise went on a moment too long they would snap.
It stopped, and the relaxation of tension could be felt. A pause, only of a second or two’s duration, but seeming longer, then the hubbub restarted as loudly as before.
‘You have plenty of ammunition for those?’ Revell was surprised at being spoken to in English, and even more so at the fact that the speaker wore the remnants of a British army uniform, bearing the insignia of a major in the Royal Engineers. He noticed just as quickly that he wore a blue armband. ‘Enough. What’s your interest?’ Revell felt a strong twinge of irrational jealousy as he noticed Andrea making a frank and thorough appraisal of the almost effeminately handsome officer. But the boyish good looks and quite diffident manner were belied by the mass of weaponry he carried, in the shape of a pair of holstered pistols, a silenced Patchet sub-machine gun and several grenades that hung from his belt and webbing.
‘I’ve got a bit of a job on and I’m a little short on firepower, had a few losses recently. I need a couple of good hands to ride shotgun, rather appropriately.’ He tapped the barrel of Revell’s 12-gauge.
‘We were hoping to rejoin our own unit, if it still exists. Can you tell us what the task is?’ Revell made a point of placing himself between Andrea and the stranger.
‘You must be new. Off the convoy? Of course you are, silly question, you couldn’t have come from anywhere else. Actually I don’t have to tell you. The rule is, if you’re picked, you go. No questions, just do it, or…’ He didn’t add any more, just indicated the police.
‘I’d still like to know.’
‘I’ll tell you as we walk. ‘Without looking to see if they were followed, he climbed down onto the track, and taking a torch from a pocket, led them into the gaping black crescent of the tunnel.
‘The name’s Thorne. I lead a group of odds and sods who specialise in suckering the Reds into traps. We’re getting quite good at it, but we tend to use rather a lot of ordnance, more than our few explosives plants can turn out, so we get what we want from Ivan’s Gift Shop.’
‘It has been mentioned before, what is it?’ Thorne stopped and flicked the torch beam on to Andrea’s face, letting it linger a moment until she put up her arm to shield her eyes. ‘You’ll be there in a couple of minutes, then you’ll see for yourselves. Hope you’ve got strong nerves. I’ve been there dozens of times, and it still gives me the willies. We make a detour here.’
A hole had been smashed in the tunnel wall, and from it a smaller hand-hewn branch sloped upwards. After thirty feet it opened into a trunk sewer. In this one, though, there was hardly any smell, just an acidy tang, like that from a goldfish bowl overdue for cleaning.
‘Not the prettiest of routes I’m afraid. But then the city isn’t all that much to look at now.’
Thome beckoned them to move to the wall and they clung to its crusted surface as three handcarts were trundled past. The first was piled with an assortment of non-ferrous scrap, the others with barrels whose slopping contents gave off pungent fumes that Andrea and Revell recognised from their journey through the docks.
‘Be grateful, you could have been hooked out for a job like that. I’ve heard that some of those people don’t see daylight for months at a time. Like the burial squads, they get extra rations, but then I wouldn’t like to do that either. Here we are.’
Rungs set into the wall led to a heavy steel cover. Climbing to its top, their guide rapped three times on its underside. After a short wait there was a creaking, rending noise and the cover began to rise, admitting a growing wedge of light.
They clambered up and into a brightly lit underground car park. This one was intact, the Russian gunners and bomb aimers had failed to find or penetrate it, and it was just as well. Stretching away between the supporting pillars were long, massively strong, trestle tables, their undersides braced with thick wooden props or angle-iron.
On the benches were variously sized wooden cradles, but it was what those cradles held that caught Revell’s attention. Each pair of them supported a bomb or rocket. Most were partly dismantled, many of them were badly battered, and all of them were clearly of Soviet or East German origin.
In a far corner a steam generator hissed and bubbled, and not far off a stack of gas cylinders was coated with a crust of frozen lox.
‘Our stuff is over there.’ Thome led the way to where some men sat on and around a camouflage-painted Jaguar XJ saloon.
The car’s sunroof had been folded back, and a machine gun fitted to an improvised mount above the windscreen. On a trailer behind the car, that might once have been the chassis of a caravan, were a stack of artillery and anti-tank rocket warheads and slabs of off-white explosive.
‘Best if we get going right away. These places have a habit of going bang occasionally. There was one over on Wexstrasse, took a direct hit. The whole shift and half the street went with it. They’re still trying to recruit back to full strength.’
Revell had noticed the strained looks on the yellow faces of the few men working there. One of them crossed himself every time he picked up a different tool or removed another panel from a cluster bomb’s casing.
‘Seemed a pity to waste all the duds the Commies kept chucking.’ Thome got into the driver’s seat after ushering Andrea and Revell into the back, then with a member of his group standing on the front passenger seat manning the machine gun, and the others piling on to the trailer, he sounded the triple-tone horn to signal for the blast doors to be swung open.
Another fanfare was sounded as they swept out and up the ramp. ‘Sorry about that, I can never resist it. Always wanted a Jag, and now I’ve got one, no point in having it if no one notices.’
‘Just so long as the Russians don’t.’ Revell let himself lean against Andrea as they swerved round a corner towards the Stellingen district.
‘Oh, they know all about us. It’s just that they never know where we’re going to do our dirty work next. And the horn has its uses. Last week we took a wrong turn and found ourselves behind the Russian lines. All I did was keep it blaring away while I turned about and raced back. We’ve caused them a lot of casualties in the past, you should have seen them get out of our way. Only lost two men and the spare wheel, plus they made a few more holes in the bodywork.’
Several times they had to slow and negotiate chicanes in substantial barricades, and after each one the townscape became more derelict, and the number of civilians to be seen diminished. When they passed the wrecks of several American tanks, part buried by collapsed buildings, Revell knew they were getting close to the front.
A final roadblock of hefty concrete slabs festooned with spikes and rusted barbed wire, and then Thorne drew the car off the road and parked it beneath a sagging camouflage net. ‘From here it’s on foot.’
The trailer was unloaded and divided into individual burdens for the men. Only Andrea and Revell did not have to shoulder a share. When the column moved off they flanked Thorne in the lead, and had to work hard to keep pace.
There were no obvious landmarks to be seen, everywhere was the same featureless vista of ruin and desolation. Roads and paths had been hidden by bomb-blown debris and in places large missiles had blasted sections of water and gas main to the surface. It was impossible to tell if a shattered wall they passed was the front or back of a building, and whether or not they saw it from the inside or the outside.
Bodies, or parts of bodies, protruded from the rubble. Each supported a noisy colony of flies and maggots. The burial squads did not come this far forward, there was no point. A corpse they buried today might be blown back to the surface tomorrow, and if they just left it there was a good chance it would either be buried beneath a fresh fall of masonry or burst to a thousand tiny fragments
by a direct hit.
A gutted T62 bulldozer tank marked the furthest point of Russian advance. From the open driver’s hatch a flame-bleached skeletal arm thrust skywards. On the engine deck, frozen by fierce fire into a rigid stance, stood the corpse of a Russian officer. Clothes burned away, ribs exposed where grilled flesh had fallen from them, only the pistol locked in his furnace-welded grip betrayed his status. The flaring ammunition that had engulfed him had obliterated his face and robbed him of his identity.
At the head of a long straight street Thome signalled a halt. The men dropped their packs with scant regard for the nature of their contents and began to stuff the rocket warheads and explosives into a thirty-foot section of broken gas main that lay pointing down it.
Before they began to block with rubble the end containing the huge charge, Thome pushed a slab of plastic explosive inside and trailed back from it a twisted double strand of wire.
He smiled at Andrea. ‘Biggest single-barrelled shotgun in the world.’
‘It’ll burst.’ Revell had tried to calculate the total amount of explosives packed into the twenty-four-inch main and gave up. There was at least four hundred pounds and he knew there was no way the thin walls of the already damaged pipe were going to withstand those sort of forces.
‘Of course it will. I want it to.’ Putting a double turn of wire around each terminal on a detonator, he spat pieces of insulation. ‘No point in it all going one way, I want a scattergun effect. Once we’ve finished stacking a couple of tons of rubble at the breech end though, it’s all going to scatter towards the Ruskies.’ Unreeling the wire as he went, Thorne led them back fifty yards to the cover of an overturned personnel carrier.
‘And how do you know the Russians are going to come this way?’ There was faint amusement in Andrea’s voice, but it came from humour, not sarcasm.
‘Hamburg had a flourishing electronics industry before the war, come to that it still has, of sorts. We’ve got radio intercept equipment better than that in front line use with any army. Dire necessity is the mother of invention. You know how precise, how rigid, Russian plans can be. I can tell you now that, in three and a quarter hours, a platoon of Commie assault engineers, supported by a reinforced company of infantry and a self-propelled gun, are going to come straight down there. Right on to the muzzle of that great fowling piece. We’re going to convert the whole lot of them to hamburger.’
