by Leo Kessler
Jap stared at the group in drunken bewilderment. What the hell were they sitting up for at this time of the night, listening to a lecture? Any right-thinking man was in the hay with his woman by now, and if he was of good moral character, he’d be busy slipping her a link, he told himself. That was only fair. Women liked that kind of salami-spiel. You couldn’t disappoint them if you were any kind of real man. All the same, he was fascinated by the sight. In three devils’ name, what could they be talking about? He screwed his head round and tried to get a better look at the sketch. He puffed out his lips in a gesture of contempt. He couldn’t make head or tail of it. A long oblong with a couple of arrows drawn at each end of it. What was that shittingly well supposed to mean?
He forgot the girl he had come to make love to. He seemed hypnotized by the low drone of conversation from within, although he could not understand a single word of it. He followed the Starost’s every gesture, as he explained whatever he was talking about in lengthy detail, licking his dry lips in envy every time one of the tribesmen raised the pail of vodka.
And then the Starost began to draw a familiar shape in the dust with his dirty long finger and it was suddenly quite clear to him what this strange meeting in the middle of the night was all about. His drunkenness vanished in a flash. The Starost was drawing a Schmeisser machine pistol on the floor, with the loving attention to detail of a Rubens, shaping in one of the mighty, red-tipped breasts of the fleshy nudes the Dutch master delighted in, almost drooling in anticipation, as if he could not wait to get his skinny yellow paws on such a beautiful weapon. When he was finished, he looked up at the tribesmen’s expectant faces, rapacious and menacing in the flickering candlelight. They responded as he had anticipated. They sighed with awe, and one or two of them simulated a soldier firing the machine pistol, swinging an imaginary Schmeisser from left to right, lips chattering like the high-pitched hiss of the weapon.
Jap needed to know no more. All thoughts of the girl had vanished now. He was stone-cold sober, aware suddenly of the wind hissing about his naked rump and the danger of his present position. Cautiously, not taking his eyes off the yellow light, he started to back to the rope ladder.
He didn’t quite make it. He stumbled into one of the crude cages in which the tribesmen kept their pigeons. A dozen pigeons squawked in sudden alarm. The door flew open. Pigeons flew out in a white blur with a rattle of wings. ‘Stoi!’ a hoarse voice croaked. A tribesman was staring at him, ancient rifle coming to his shoulder.
Jap was quicker off the mark. His heart thumping like a trip-hammer, he darted forward. His naked knee slammed into the tribesman’s stomach. He gasped like the air escaping abruptly from a punctured balloon, and jack-knifed. Jap’s knee rammed into his chin. He shot backwards over the wall, arms flailing wildly, screaming at the top of his voice. And then Jap was swinging down the ladder, his hands burning as he slid down, while from above him there came the sudden sounds of confusion, rage and alarm. Next moment he was pelting down the dusty street, his rump a white blur in the glowing darkness.
‘What was that?’ Lieutenant Haas asked in sudden fear, as the stillness of the night was broken by the first wild snap-and-crackle of rifle-fire.
‘Well, it wasn’t New Year fireworks, sir,’ Sergeant-major Meier answered easily.
The young officer felt that familiar bunching of his arm-muscles and the tightening of his hands to claws, as if his body possessed independent volition. An uncontrollable tremor gripped his right leg. Fear overcame him once more.
Meier, standing at the head of the little six-man patrol, looked up the road as if bored; as if mysterious shots in the middle of the night were very much routine to him: something not worth mentioning.
Haas gulped and forced himself to speak, attempting to control his voice, but failing lamentably. ‘What…what do you suggest we do, Meier?’ he quavered.
Meier unslung his machine pistol and shrugged. ‘You’re the officer, sir. It’s always the officers and gents who make the decisions in the Greater German Wehrmacht.’ His tone was casual, and offensive; all the same, his keen eyes were searching the darkness for any sign of trouble. The Chinks might just be celebrating by letting off a few wild shots like they had that afternoon, he told himself. But they might be up to something else. You just couldn’t trust foreigners.
‘But Sergeant-major, you are a veteran — experienced —’ The plea died on Haas’s trembling lips.
A wild figure was pelting towards them, gasping something in what appeared to be German.
Instinctively Meier dropped to one knee and clicked off his safety.
‘Don’t shoot…don’t shoot,’ the figure yelled. ‘It’s me…me!’
‘Freeze!’ Meier commanded, while Haas fumbled fearfully for his pistol with fingers that felt like thick, swollen sausagees.
‘I can’t shittingly well freeze,’ the running figure cried breathlessly. ‘They’re after me!’
‘It’s you — Jap!’ Meier exclaimed, as Jap came running full-tilt into the little patrol. His eyes flashed down to the little corporal’s naked lower half. ‘What’s this, you dirty little perverted banana-sucker? Don’t tell me you got caught on the job with your skivvies down?’ He threw back his head and bellowed with laughter. ‘What’s up? Some nasty big tribesman after yer with a sharp knife?’
Jap, his chest heaving violently, tried to control his wild breathing. ‘You’ll be laughing on the other side of yer mug in a minute. They’re after me!’
‘Who?’
‘The Karatski — and they’re coming to attack the barn. The shits are after our weapons…. They’d been planning it all along. That’s why they got us all pissed last night.’
‘The turds!’ Meier cried angrily, and spinning round on the patrol, he ordered, ‘All right, you farts, don’t just stand there. Take up your positions. I’m going to smear those treacherous bastards all over the wallpaper when they start coming down this street.’
Lieutenant Haas suddenly woke up to his danger. Already he could hear the soft shuffle of their naked feet in the darkness. He remembered what the C.O. had said about the tribesmen’s habit of emasculating their enemies, and a sudden terrifying vision of his own grotesquely mangled body flashed before his mind’s eye. ‘No, Sergeant-major,’ he cried, ‘we’re too weak to stop them here. We’d better get back to the others.’
‘But once they get us all in that barn…!’ Meier began to protest.
Haas was not listening. Overcome by a great all-consuming fear, he cried, ‘Come on — everyone back to the barn! Quick!’
And then he was running the way they had come, followed by the rest of the men. From the darkness came cries of triumph. Slugs started to howl off the walls next to Meier. He cursed, and slung his machine pistol. ‘Come on, Jap, get the lead out of your butt. Shit, the C.O.’s going to rupture a gut about this!’
Behind them the tribesmen began to close in, knowing now that they had successfully sprung their trap on the Germans.
FIVE
‘Damn it, Haas, why the devil didn’t you stay in the street and stop…’ An angry, red-faced Colonel Stuermer ducked as the first slug slammed into the open door of the barn and showered the gasping men filing through it with wood-splinters. ‘All right, Haas, get inside quick! It’s too late.’ Stuermer crashed the door to as the first tribesmen started to come into sight, firing as they came.
He swung around at the tousled-haired, hungover mountaineers who had been wakened from their drunken sleep so rudely and were now frantically searching for their clothes and weapons, ‘Get those lights!’ he bellowed above the rising crescendo of the small-arms fire from outside. ‘And, man those windows. At the double!’
Ox-Jo didn’t wait for the rest. He barrelled his way through the confused throng, and smashing the glass of the nearest window, fired a rapid burst into the gloom. There was an anguished yelp of pain, and then the tribesmen’s combined fire swamped the wooden barn.
The thin planks shattered like matchwo
od. Bullet holes appeared everywhere. Wood splinters flew through the air. Here and there a mountaineer was hit and cried out in pain. ‘Down — to the ground!’ Major Greul yelled hastily.
The veterans flung themselves flat on the dirt floor. With the butts of their carbines and their sharp-bladed mountain knives they started to hack firing-holes in the base of the planks. Lying full-length, with the bullets singing over their heads only millimetres away, they began to return the enemy’s fire.
Crouched behind one of the broad trestle tables, which was of thick oak and offered satisfactory protection from the tribesmen’s slugs, a worried Colonel Stuermer took stock of his position hurriedly, while the snap and crackle of small-arms fire mounted in intensity.
The barn was surrounded on three sides, where it faced the street. Its fourth side was built up against a sheer rock wall. Indeed, at this moment he could feel the coldness of the stone against his own sweat-soaked shirt. Presumably their attackers thought there was no way out for them that way, since so far there had been no fire from above on that side.
But what were the tribesmen’s intentions? Suddenly he spotted Jap crawling back and forth among the mess of equipment and clothing. For some reason known only to himself he was naked below the waist. ‘Corporal,’ he called above the frantic racket, ‘over here!’
Jap crawled hurriedly to the cover of the upturned trestle table, his skinny rump moving like clockwork, with the slugs cutting the air dangerously close to it. Under other circumstances, Stuermer would have found the sight funny, but not at this particular moment. ‘Jap,’ he said urgently. ‘You were outside just now, though God knows what you were up to, half-naked like that. No matter. What happened?’
In short chopped sentences, Jap told him what he had seen, raising his voice to almost a shout whenever the racket got too loud.
‘Thank you,’ Stuermer snapped when he was finished, ‘All right, get off and find yourself a pair of pants, for God’s sake! You’d not make a very military-looking corpse at the moment.’
Jap laughed and scuttled away to continue his search.
So that was it, Stuermer told himself. They wanted the Stormtroop’s weapons to replace their own ancient pieces. They had planned the whole thing right from the start, to lull the mountaineers into a false sense of security. Now it was obvious that they were prepared to kill in order to obtain those weapons. Suddenly a very alarming thought flashed through a worried Colonel Stuermer’s head. They wouldn’t want those weapons destroyed, and they certainly weren’t going to throw away their own lives purposelessly in all-out attack on the barn. After all, the mountaineers were trapped in the ricketty structure. There was no way out for them. So how would they obtain the precious weapons intact? The answer to that particular question made Colonel Stuermer shudder involuntarily with sudden fear. It was obvious. They would burn them out!
The woman, standing on the dark heights far above, lowered her night glasses, and the scarlet stab and spurt of the soundless fire-fight below vanished from the bright circles of glass.
Sergei, standing attentively at her side, her sole companion, since she had left the partisan unit forty-eight hours before, looked at her handsome face inquiringly. She said nothing.
He flashed her one of his gleaming stainless-steel smiles, his narrow youthful face lit up by the first blood-red rays of sun, which was now beginning to rise over the snowy peaks.
She became aware of his presence. ‘You have done well, comrade,’ she said. ‘You guessed right that Bandit would do anything for weapons, even to accepting advice from Moscow’s running dogs.’
‘Yes, first the pigs wanted to slit my throat, and then they fed me and gave me to drink as if I was one of their own greasy selves, after I had explained about the weapons the Fritzes were bringing with them,’ the young partisan said, obviously very pleased with the success of his mission to the Karatski.
‘Let them enjoy their moment of triumph, Sergei. In due course, we will reckon with them. Then they will learn what kind of bill Moscow will present them with.’1
‘And now?’ Sergei asked expectantly. He had been alone with the woman from Moscow for forty-eight hours as they had wandered through the mountains. ‘Now their mission, as far as he knew, was completed. She was a handsome woman and in spite of his stainless steel teeth, he was generally regarded by the girls of the collective farm, from which he had fled to the partisans, as not without charm. He was young, they were alone, and the sap was rising. He knew of a mountain hut where the two of them….
‘Now,’ the blonde woman cut into his fond picture of what they might do together in that lonely hut. ‘Now you must go back to your unit, my dear Sergei.’
‘But—’
‘No buts,’ she said firmly, but there was a smile on her lips as she spoke.
‘And you?’
‘Me?’ She swung round and pointed to the far peak, gleaming a cold pink now in the rising sun. ‘I have other duties…’
‘Up there?’ Sergei asked incredulously.
She didn’t answer his question. Instead she said, her hand fumbling at her belt, as if she were in a hurry to be gone. Perhaps you would help me with my rucksack?’
‘Yes, comrade,’ Sergei said grumpily, cheering up a little at the thought that he might get a feel of her magnificent breasts as he helped her on with the sack. He bent and seized the straps. In that same instant, she pulled out her pistol and aimed it at a spot directly behind his right ear. Just as Sergei grunted and prepared to lift, she fired. The shot broke the silence of the mountain. Somewhere a startled bird flew shrieking with alarm into the still blue air. Sergei’s skull shattered in a red flurry of blood and bone. He slumped over the rucksack. Calmly, completely unaffected by the murder she had just committed, the woman planted her foot in Sergei’s ribs and pushed the limp body to one side in the snow. Easily she lifted the heavy rucksack and swung it over her shoulders. Without even another look at the dead boy, whose stainless-steel teeth gleamed grotesquely against the bloody snow, she turned and began her long climb to the far peak. Down below, the first fire bombs started to hit the barn.
Tinder-dry and resinous, the shattered planks started to burn. In the sudden thick choking smoke, mountaineers ran back and forth, dragging the wounded out of danger and searching around for water to extinguish the flames, while others, wreathed in smoke, tried to keep the fire-bombers at a safe distance. Meier, his broad face streaked with sweat and black stains, sprang from hole to hole, firing at every new bomber he could spot, as they darted forward, burning pitch torches in their hands, within throwing distance of the barn.
Haas, crouched in the far corner of the barn, could not move. His eyes were fixed on the body of a mountaineer, impaled on the splintered wreck of one of the trestle tables, a ghastly, mangled caricature of the man he had once been: decapitated, horrible, and totally frightening, with the blood dripping steadily from the purple hole in his neck.
Haas had been afraid many times before, but never like this. No one around him could even imagine the waves of panic-stricken, nauseating fear that flooded his body over and over again and threatened to take over his whole nervous system. Any moment, he knew, he would begin screaming. He was keeping control of himself by a mere hair’s breadth. Yet he knew he had been the cause of everything. He had heard the shooting behind them that first day when they had left Cherkassy, and he hadn’t reported it. He had panicked in the street, and instead of throwing a barrier across the road until the men in the barn had been alerted by the firing, he had fled, and allowed the trap to close upon the Stormtroop. Now all these good brave men were going to be burnt alive because of his cowardice. He shuddered as yet another pine-resin torch exploded with a great whoosh as it hit the wooden boards to his right. A mountaineer fell back, hastily beating out the flames which threatened to engulf him.
Haas swallowed and sobbed out loud, ‘No…no!’
Two metres away, Greul, his tunic singed and holed, his face black, paused in between sho
ts and flashed him a look of absolute, bottomless contempt, and Haas knew he had been discovered at last. His fear had been spotted. What of his self-respect? Sick and spent, moaning aloud in self-loathing, Haas staggered across the burning room, blundering over the slumped bodies, ignoring the ricochets howling from shattered wall to wall, blindly trying to find the only man he had ever trusted, Colonel Stuermer.
Stuermer knew that he must act — and act at once. Time was running out fast for Stormtroop Edelweiss. He could surrender. But he knew what the result would be. Bandit and the tribesmen would massacre them, once they had surrendered their weapons. He had no illusions on that score. But what was he to do? He glanced around the room. He had already lost ten men and there were perhaps a dozen wounded, sheltering as best they could behind the burning tables, coughing and choking in the thick acrid smoke which was beginning to fill the barn. He had only a matter of minutes left.
‘Meier!’ he yelled above the racket.
The big NCO, his tunic ruined, revealing singed brawny arms, scuttled across to him. ‘Sir.’
‘On my shoulders!’ Stuermer ordered.
‘What?’
‘No time for explanations. Do as I order.’
Stuermer bent, and dropping his Schmeisser, Ox-Jo clambered on his C.O.’s back. Stuermer groaned involuntarily under the NCO’s weight. But in spite of his lean figure, Stuermer possessed tremendous strength. He straightened up so that Meier’s head was just beneath the wooden roof. ‘Make a hole,’ he ordered through gritted teeth, the veins standing out a deep blue at his temples, the sweat running down his forehead and threatening to blind him. ‘Quick!’
Meier didn’t hesitate. He knew there was no time to remove the planking. He smashed his big shaven head against the planks. They snapped. He crashed his skull home once more. They gave altogether and suddenly he was breathing fresh, cold air.
