The Fall of the Father Land

by D. N. J. Greaves

  He was about to turn away when he caught sight of movement to his right. It looked like two men, struggling to make progress, running and crawling through the undergrowth. They were getting closer, no more than a hundred metres away. He was just about to call out when suddenly the sound of aircraft engines somewhere above the clouds reverberated through the trees. Several screaming whistles revealed that a clutch of bombs was falling earthward. In a flash four explosions rent the air, followed by a series of concussive blast waves that slammed through the trees, crashing up against the blast doors and flattening the surrounding area. Hartmann had just enough warning to jump quickly back into cover before the shock waves hit. The sudden rise in air pressure lifted him off his feet and forced him backwards, popping his ears and thumping him into the side of the main tunnel. Then mercifully the compression waves were gone. He gasped and struggled to his knees, his back aching where he had hit the tunnel wall. Some of the guards around him were groaning. One of them held his arm at a strange angle, another clasped his head. Blood was oozing out of a cut on his face. Two more lay still on the tunnel floor

  Hartmann managed to stand up, somewhat shakily. There was a buzzing noise in his ears, and spots swam in front of his eyes. He swallowed. At the same time something clicked inside his head, and then his hearing improved. He suddenly found that he was better able to focus on his surroundings. Ignoring the scene of confusion behind him, he stumbled forwards to the gap in the doors and looked out. It was like a scene from Dante’s inferno. Fires were raging throughout the woods, especially where the camouflaged railway had been. One of its tracks was curled up, pointing at an odd angle to the sky. The rest of the detail was difficult to make out, mainly due to the clouds of smoke and failing light. Hartmann was about to turn away when blurred movement over to the left caught his eye, and a man in a dirty, charred uniform stumbled into view.

  ‘Quick, over here!’ He shouted. The figure caught sight of him, and staggered his way over to the blast doors. It was Förster, the NCO in charge of the reconnaissance detail he’d sent out earlier. Hartmann caught him as he stumbled and fell. There was blood on his face, and a dark wet patch along his back.

  ‘I beg to report, sir…’ The NCO gasped, as Hartmann laid him gently down on the floor of the tunnel entrance, cradling the younger man’s head. ‘…The railway’s gone, smashed up in the bombing.’ He began to make gurgling noises in his throat, his chest heaved, and a gush of dark red blood welled out of the corner of his mouth. Hartmann fished a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped the bloody mess away, but at the same time noticed that Förster’s lips were starting to turn blue. He was getting more short of breath now, his chest labouring heavily. Something from Hartmann’s first aid training echoed dimly in his mind, something about how to treat a casualty with a chest injury. There wasn’t much time, he realised. He had to act immediately. Quickly he grabbed Förster by the shoulders and, ignoring the NCO’s groans, levered him up into a sitting position. The bloody patch along his back was spreading, but almost instantly at least Förster’s breathing began to become less laboured. Hartmann then leaned him over onto the injured, wet area, hoping that his emergency measures would give the man more time.

  He turned to the other guards, most of whom were in various stages of recovery. ‘Quick, get me a doctor over here, now!’ One of the guards hurried off to find the resident medical factory officer. He turned back to check the NCO again. Förster was looking marginally better, but for how long?

  ‘Heinz, Is there anything else you can tell me?’

  ‘Yes, Standartenführer…’ Förster paused to catch his breath, gasping for air. ‘Road’s heavily cratered…so is the railway.’ He stopped for a moment, then resumed. ‘Felder and Pfannenstiel were killed just after we reached the road…A bomb blew them to pieces…They were only fifty meters from where I was standing. Poor bastards…never had a chance…Where’s Stumme?’

  ‘I don’t know, ‘Hartmann lied. Stumme was most likely a victim of the last bomb load. ‘Were you able to check the transmitters?’

  A shake of the head. ‘…No…couldn’t get near…too many bombs…’

  Försters’ eyes closed, and his head slumped down onto his chest. Hartmann immediately felt for a pulse. It was still there, weak and thready, not a good sign. But there was nothing else he could do here. He had no equipment or specialist first aid training. Förster would have to take his chances until medical help arrived.

  Carefully he stood up, grasping the wall for support. The ache in his amputated leg reminded him that he was not quite as mobile as he used to be, but he had more urgent considerations on his mind. Berlin needed to know what was happening, and that there was going to be a change of plan. The first rocket should have launched earlier today, according to his instructions, and the second soon after. But that was clearly impossible now, thanks to the enemy bombers. Did Berlin realise that the secret was out, that it now seemed likely that the Allies had located the position of the factory? How could he get in contact? The nearest place with reliable communications was Nordhausen, but it might equally be under attack. One thing he knew for sure – there was little chance of launching anything until the skies were less unfriendly, and railway movement was now out of the question. At least he had enough road launchers to get the rockets away from the factory and in the air, if the roads were negotiable. Maybe he would get a chance tonight. The enemy air forces always seemed to take a break in the evenings, tea-time or whatever the British called it. Then at least he could fulfill his duty. He hoped it would be enough to make sure that Erika and the girls would be safe.

  Rybalko knew he couldn’t take much more of this. The long hours of intense physical labour, the appalling rations, the random beatings - all were beginning to take their toll. He’d only been here a few weeks, but it felt almost like a lifetime. He’d lost count of the numbers of fellow workers, Slavs, Jews and others who had succumbed to the harsh regime in the short time since he arrived. But the Germans couldn’t care less – worker’s welfare was the least of their concerns. Fresh batches of prisoners would turn up every few days to replace those that couldn’t last the pace, and the back-breaking grind carried on remorselessly. It was a wonder to him that he’d managed to last even this long. His weight had dropped substantially, possibly ten or even fifteen kilograms since his capture, he estimated, and he was more tired than he could ever have imagined a human being could be. Conditions were poor - there was no daylight, just the constant glare of underground lights and the noise of a factory at work. You were lucky to find a spare cot to rest on. Usually it was just a space on the dirty floor. First come first served was the overall principle. The occasional fist fight and scuffle were necessary to claim a prized spot, but most of them now were too hungry and tired to bother – just get your head down, anything to get away from brutally hard labour and a lashing from the guards.

  They’d not treated him too badly at first, not after his capture at the end of January. There were several interrogations by local Wehrmacht officers, none of them too unpleasant – all they wanted to know were details of the latest deployments of Red Army rocket artillery units, and some idea of when and where the next round of attacks would take place. The occasional blow, nothing too painful - Rybalko could cope with that. He’d given them a few insignificant details, nothing of any great importance. After all, he was only a middle grade officer, not privy to the major operational movements and planning that went on at Front HQ. It seemed to be enough to satisfy them, at least for the moment. But after the first few weeks things became less civilized

  The Germans wanted to know more. His interrogators knew that he belonged to the Rocket Artillery Corps. Maybe he could tell them about the latest advances in Soviet rocket science. The Soviets had started it all off several years ago with the invention of the Katyusha, the truck-mounted rocket launcher. Little Kate, as they called her, was a devastating weapon, well capable of saturating any battlefield with multiple rocket salvos. Althou
gh small she packed a punch well beyond her size. It had come as a nasty shock to the German Army. Sure enough, the Wehrmacht quickly followed suit, copying the idea and developing its own rocket artillery. But surely if the Russians had taken the lead in this field, then by now they must have moved on to bigger, more powerful delivery systems – bigger rockets, longer ranges, more deadly payloads?

  He was transferred further to the rear, for more thorough and intensive interrogation. That’s where the real nastiness began. Rybalko would never forget his sessions with a couple of Gestapo thugs dressed up in leather coats. He’d heard enough about their sort to realise that he was now in the company of hardened professionals, as compared to the relative amateurs who had worked on him previously. He knew from the moment he saw them that he was in real trouble. They had just as fearsome a reputation as the experts on his side, the specialists who worked in the NKVD cellars. Their activities were something best not discussed in public, but that didn’t stop the whispers and stories. Those were the boys who really knew how to extract a confession. There was nothing a victim wouldn’t say to stop the relentless pain and bring a merciful release to the unending agony. You’d swear that your own mother was the devil herself just to please the interrogators. And the Gestapo were every bit as skilled as their opposite numbers in the Lubyanka, and wherever else the NKVD found a need to be.

  There was another man with them, smartly dressed in civilian attire, cool, detached, and quite impervious to his protestations that he simply did not know the answers to what his interrogators were looking for. This man was the picture of calm, studied deliberation, several steps above the more physical side of things. He took detailed notes, made reasoned suggestions and comments, and with a nod or a flick of the hand brought on the different phases of coercion. Nothing was too distasteful for him. The beatings were expertly applied, almost like a scientific experiment – the right lever in the right place at the right time. The process would unlock his tongue, and liberate all that knowledge and memories behind the protective wall he had built to shield them. It was all done dispassionately. There were no shouts or raised voices – if anything, it was conducted in an almost friendly, reasonable way.

  Spare yourself the pain, they said. Nobody can resist it. Every man has a breaking point, and sooner or later we’ll get to yours, so why make it difficult on yourself? They left his face and fingers alone, as well as his genitalia, something he was grateful for later, though at the time it terrified him that they were reserving these areas for the next round of persuasion. No, it was his kidneys, legs and feet that took the brunt of their displeasure. Each session was preceded by a pep-talk, a little exposé into what type of pain lay ahead. Their favourite was something they called ‘bastinado’, a relentless assault on the soles of his feet. Nobody, they assured him, could take that sort of agony for long.

  And ultimately they were proven right. He told them all he knew. It did not matter that he fainted several times during each session. A bucket of icy-cold water soon brought him around again. Finally, they must have decided that they had achieved all they could, short of beating him to death. His defences were laid low and they had picked him clean, the way a pack of vultures do to a decomposing carcass.

  And a few days later – or was it a week? - all in solitary confinement, still unable to walk much and passing blood in his urine, they loaded him on the back of a lorry and dumped him at a place called Buchenwald. He’d heard about some of the death camps the advancing Soviets had come across as they liberated large parts of eastern Poland during the previous summer. Although this place was not a dedicated extermination facility it still reeked of the horror of what the Nazis had perpetrated elsewhere. The degradation and torture was less immediate, more gradual, but just as brutal in the long run. And from there he had graduated here – literally, out of the fire and into the frying pan. There was no explanation for the transfer. Perhaps it would be a long, slow grilling.

  The clock on the main tunnel wall told him it was 2015. He’d been working since 0600, with two fifteen minute breaks to wolf down the disgusting mess they called food. A few sips of oily water, and then back to work. His shift was due to finish at 2330, another few hours of back breaking work to go, but he no longer thought about it. Something was different today, something had changed. The guards were on edge, more so than usual. They appeared fretful, even nervous at times. What was happening outside? They could all feel the occasional tremors in the tunnels that shook them from time to time. Sometimes the lights flickered, and on several occasions showers of dust and chalk cascaded from the tunnel roof in which they were working. Someone, maybe one of the French prisoners who was working on his detail, had whispered that it was the Allies bombing, that liberation could not be far off. It was just possible, he told himself – could it be that the Red Army had broken through the Oder line and was streaming into the central Germany? Or could it be the British and Americans, advancing from the West? Either way, the fact that the guards were paying more attention to the disturbances outside than what was immediately in front of them might give him a chance.

  Take the rocket in front of him – he had never seen anything so big, so technically complicated. The motor housing Rybalko had been detailed to work on all day was fascinating, the degree of sophistication well beyond anything he’d ever seen before. He knew the Red Army Rocket Corps had secretly performed experiments with large scale rockets at the testing grounds near Lipetsk, but that was nothing compared to the scale of what lay stretched along the main tunnel in front of him. It was huge, maybe thirty meters or more from needle tip point to the stabilizer fins at the rear on which it stood, presumably, before launching. It was bigger than the others he had seen before, but why? For some reason the fuselage panels on this one were painted in alternate black and white quarters, although most of the others he had previously seen at the factory were covered in a matt olive green paint. And now all the access panels were now closed, bar one section near the nose. What was its purpose? The Germans appeared not to have packed what looked him to be the weapons area with high explosive, or anything else so far. And what was its range? He could only guess, but from the size of the fuel tanks, and the special steel containers that housed the propellant, he estimated a distance of maybe two thousand kilometers, possibly more – enough to reach easily England, perhaps, or maybe even Moscow itself.

  The thought made him shudder. Rita his wife and his son Oleg, who was now no more than nine months old, lived there with his elderly father. Their house was located in the suburb of Zdhanov, only a few kilometers from the city centre. Was the Kremlin and the top Soviet leadership a target for whatever diabolical weapon the Nazis had in mind? Would the rest of Moscow also suffer a similar fate? A conventional warhead, filled with even the most destructive explosive, would only damage a relatively small area, not even enough to significantly harm the Kremlin citadel. The Germans would need to launch multiple missiles to achieve that scale of destruction. But did the Nazis have something more ambitious, more widespread in mind, a weapon that was much more insidious and lethal. Perhaps it was some sort of special poison, a deadly toxin, or maybe even a plague?

  ‘You!’ The shout disrupted his thoughts. A guard was pointing at him. ‘Get up to the control section.’ He pointed to where a couple of white-coated figures were working. ‘They need some help. On the double!’

  He nodded subserviently and hurried as fast as he could towards the top of the rocket. One of the other workers took over the task he was working on. Rybalko soon reached the area where the two German technicians were working. Rybalko’s German was not fluent, but from the way their conversation was being conducted it was clear to him that the two scientists were having a considerable difference of opinion about something. One of them turned to him angrily.

  ‘Hold this,’ he ordered, glaring at him. The German pointed to a large spring-loaded compartment door deep inside the housing. ‘Keep this open. I’ll be back in a moment. Hans, keep an eye on
him!’ The other scientist nodded

  The first German turned and walked quickly away towards the nearest workshop area, leaving the two of them alone. The other German shrugged his shoulders and carried on working on a complicated series of dials, at the same time glancing at a flip chart in front of him. It was clear that he was setting some parameters of some sort, possibly targeting information. Rybalko squinted out of the corner of his eyes, trying to look at the chart that lay upside down from where he was looking. The figures looked like latitude and longitude information, and the technician was loading them into the destination data. He took a closer look at the area just behind the compartment door he was holding up. Yes – those were gyroscopes. He’d recognise their type anywhere. Even if they were a far cry from the primitive ones the Russians used for guidance on the battlefield, they still looked familiar. If he could just alter one of the settings when nobody was looking, then maybe that might just be enough to throw the rocket off course and sabotage its mission.

  The second technician was finished. He checked his adjustments one last time, then put away his tools with a look of satisfaction. His job was over. Something made Rybalko look up, back along the length of the missile. The first German was returning, followed by two workers gingerly carrying a large steel cylinder. It looked heavy, with a complex series of fins and baffles running along each side. Both the German and the guards following the group wore face masks, but none were available for their prisoners. As they drew closer, Rybalko could make out ‘GEFAHR’ written in large black stencils along the side of the cylinder, and an image of a skull and crossbones next to the script. Danger! The warning signs told him all he needed to know. This was the weapon, possibly some sort of toxin. He needed to act now. There would not be any further opportunity.

  A heavy tremor suddenly rocked the tunnel. The lights flickered for a moment and then went out. Immediately there were cries and shouts. Somebody ordered ‘quick, the emergency generators!’ There was confusion all around. Rybalko seized his opportunity. He slid his right hand back to where he knew the automatic gyroscope controls were, felt the series of circular cogs and levers, selected one, and moved it forward two notches. That should work, he hoped. The rocket would deviate off course just enough to miss its intended destination. Anything more than that and someone would notice. His hand slid back to its former position.