by Leo Kessler
Greul nodded sombrely and flicked off the torch with which he had illuminated the little sketch in the snow. At first he had sniffed contemptuously when Stuermer had explained that the pass was defended by women. He had urged an all-out attack from the right, where his own force, still unspotted by the Russian women, was located. But the second snow blizzard, and Colonel Stuermer’s description of the enemy position, had now made him more cautious. ‘What do you suggest then, sir?’
‘We’ve no chance at all of taking the pass by direct assault, Greul,’ Stuermer answered, selecting his words with care. ‘A flank attack by your people might well have some initial surprise success. But remember the terrain and the depth of the snow up there. They would have time enough to recover and exposed like they would be, your men would be sitting ducks.’
‘Not at night,’ Greul objected.
‘Agreed. But they would still take heavy casualties and I cannot afford any more serious losses. In the last seventy-two hours we have suffered over twenty-five casualties and God knows what else faces us once we have cleared the pass. I need all the men I can find.’
‘I understand, sir. But what are we going to do?’
‘This.’ Swiftly Stuermer explained the plan that had been forming in his mind over the last hour, as he had wrestled with the problem of clearing the pass without any further losses.
For a moment Greul said nothing when Stuermer was finished. There was no sound save the howl of the night wind and the odd crack of rifle fire from the other Stormtroop position. Then he said slowly and thoughtfully, ‘It’s going to be hell, sir.’
‘Yes, hell — and then some,’ Colonel Stuermer was forced to agree.
SEVEN
Sergeant Lermintov sipped her black tea, liberally laced with vodka, and stared down the mountainside. It was a beautiful dawn. The sky above was a hard, glittering blue and the slope below was an eye-blinking, perfect white. But the cropped-haired Sergeant had no eyes for the beauty of the summer morning; her gaze was fixed on the dark motionless shapes, capped here and there by a mound of snow, which were the Fritz dead, with, beyond, the little occasional spurts of scarlet that indicated the enemy was still firing back but was not making any attempt to out-flank their position.
‘Well, Comrade Sergeant?’ petite, baby-faced Ilona Serova, who had brought her the canteen of tea, asked, as they crouched together in the firing pit next to the machine-gun.
‘I was just thinking, my sweet Ilona,’ the Sergeant growled in that gruff masculine bass she had begun to affect as soon as she had donned the earth-coloured uniform of the Alpine Corps in ’41 and had been able at last to display her true sexual inclinations, ‘that we have the Fritzes by their short and curlies.’
The girl giggled. ‘The expressions you use, Comrade Sergeant!’
‘I could use others. But no matter,’ Sergeant Lermintov said, obviously very pleased with herself, and finished her tea with a flourish. ‘All right, Ilona Serova, I’m off back up to the caves. And keep those pretty eyes of yours peeled — or some hairy Fritz’ll be up your knickers before you know it.’
Again the girl giggled, while Sergeant Lermintov eased her enormous bulk through the snow towards the cave from whence she would radio the captain in Elbrus House that all was quiet on the Chotyu-Tau Pass front.
It had been a murderous climb. The four of them — Stuermer, Greul, Ox-Jo and Jap — had started out in yet another blizzard, the heavy wet snow melting and trickling through every gap in their clothing and sticking to their boots in huge clumps so that they had been thoroughly miserable, their leg muscles burning with pain, by the time they had arrived at the bottom of the ascent.
By then it had stopped snowing. That had been a blessing. The only one, for as Stuermer had predicted to Greul, the ascent was ‘hell — and then some’. He had led himself. Reaching up, he had found a hold in the darkness and heaved. The ascent had commenced. For a while everything had gone well. He knew it was madness to climb an unknown mountain in the middle of the night. But somehow the challenge of the unknown had brought to full flower his skill, revealing to him capabilities and knowledge that he thought he had lost long before in his youth. Then they had run into shale, covered by wet snow. A sixty-five minute miserable slog had commenced, agonizing step-by-step up the treacherous slippery surface, with all four of them falling every few minutes, slithering down into the darkness, muffling their curses and the noise as best they could, their bodies bruised and slashed by the sharp edges of the shale.
At five Stuermer had been forced to order a rest. Gratefully Ox-Jo eased the mortar tube off his bruised shoulders and lay full length in the snow, as if he were lying on a down quilt. Within minutes he was snoring, while the other three had huddled there on the ledge in miserable shivering silence.
At five-thirty, knowing that they could rest no longer, Stuermer had ordered them to begin climbing again. This time Greul took the lead, while he brought up the rear, carrying the mortar tube across his back now.
Now the going had been even worse. They had run into a couloir, a deep V-shaped fissure in the mountain side, its rocky walls almost sheer, with here and there the face choked with high mounds of frozen snow, shaped by the bitter wind into fantastic shapes.
It had been a murderous, back-breaking business to conquer the couloir. Greul had displayed all that talent which had made him Germany’s best young climber before the war, hammering in spike after spike, leading them ever higher with seemingly tireless ease. But even his talent failed him when they came to the snow mounds. The snow crust had been too thin to bear their weight so that at every step they had broken through and sunk in — sometimes up to their waists. Repeatedly they had been forced to stop and use their axes to remove the huge balls of snow that had collected under their boots and made their every movement as ponderous as a deep-sea diver’s.
By six, just as the first ugly white of the false dawn had begun to flush the sky, they had overcome the couloir. But they had still not completed that terrible ascent. Before them lay perhaps some two hundred metres of almost sheer rock. Now Stuermer had taken the lead again, handing the mortar tube back to Ox-Jo, while Greul, carrying the bombs strapped to his soaked back, brought up the rear. After a couple of abortive attempts, Stuermer found the crack he sought. It ran in a slanting fashion across the rock, but it did go upwards. Time was running out and Stuermer knew he could not afford to look for anything better. It would have to do.
What had followed had been a nightmare, a brutal, lung-rasping nightmare, with the wind and the occasional bitter flurry of snow, tearing at their faces and trying to rip them from the surface of the rock face to which they clung like pathetic human flies, dwarfed by the might of that majestic mountain panorama.
It had been an interminable burning agony of hanging on with muscles which were afire, and toes and fingertips which felt as they might fall off at any moment, taking suicidal risks that no mountaineer in his right mind should ever take, hammering in spike after spike, repeating the same double-hitch, and crawling centimetre by centimetre up the sheer face to the ledge which seemed to be a million kilometres away.
One hour later, with the first rays of the sun casting a blood-red hue over his sweat-lathered face. Colonel Stuermer slid over the edge of the cliff, collapsing there in a spent shapeless heap, his body racked with pain, his breath coming in great hectic rasping gasps, unable to hear, see, think for what seemed an age.
Then, like an old, old man, he raised himself, forcing his body to forget the murderous burning pains, aware again of the steel ring of climbing boots against rock and spike, telling himself that his comrades had not yet completed that terrible climb and that he must help them.
Using his last reserves of strength, he plucked the mortar tube from its straps on Meier’s broad back and heaved it over the top. Next moment he had helped Meier himself over the top, where he flopped face forward into the snow, gasping with relief. The mortar shell-box on Greul’s back followed and even the arrogant National Soc
ialist major did not disdain a helping hand this time. Jap brought up the rear and on this occasion the descendant of generations of Himalayan porters and Bavarian cowherds was as exhausted as the rest of them: the ascent had taken full toll of the wiry yellow half-breed’s normally indefatigable staying-power. The little team was beat to the world.
It was now an hour after dawn. Stuermer had forced them all to eat a little of their hard dried meat, washed down with a mouthful of melted snow. They had protested that they weren’t hungry, just exhausted. But he had insisted, knowing that they needed new energy for the task ahead. Then, like a careful mother rewarding her brood for some particularly good deed, he had solemnly handed each one of them a piece of dextrose sugar. The sweet tablets, he knew, would flood swift energy into their bloodstreams.
Slowly they began to rouse themselves from their lethargy, while Stuermer, lying full length in the snow, surveyed the women’s positions below.
Ox-Jo crawled to him, dragging the mortar tube. ‘Heaven, arse and twine, sir!’ he cursed in awe when he saw the Russians. ‘Women — a good dozen of them — in the middle of nowhere and us poor troopers without any of that good stuff for days on end. What a waste of talent!’
Stuermer sniffed. ‘You might be right. There could well be some better use for their charms. But I’m afraid at this particular moment, those Russian women simply spell trouble for Stormtroop Edelweiss.’
Ox-Jo grinned hugely. ‘Let Mrs Meier’s little boy get down there among them, sir, and I’d soon show you how to deal with them. Club them over the head with a certain blunt instrument.’
Stuermer smiled faintly and then his smile vanished as the full impact hit him of what they must do next. There were no two ways about it: the women would have to be eradicated if the Stormtroop were to pass to Elbrus. ‘All right, Meier,’ he snapped, ‘start setting up the tube.’ He squirmed round and commanded, ‘Jap, get that base plate over here.’
Swiftly the four men began setting up the 47mm mortar, Jap laying the base plate, while Ox-Jo screwed in the tube. At their side, Major Greul shucked the bulbous deadly winged bombs out of their cardboard cases and laid them next to the mortar in the snow. For his part, Colonel Stuermer estimated the distance and made the necessary adjustment to the range metre and the angle. Like the trained, veteran team they were, the four of them were ready to fire within a matter of brief minutes. Stuermer nodded to Greul. ‘You take over the firing Greul. You’re our best shot. Immediately I give the word, fire — don’t hesitate!’ He nodded to Ox-Jo, ‘You can load, and remember to keep them coming, once the firing commences.’
‘Right, sir.’
‘Jap, you come with me.’
Quickly the two men squirmed through the deep snow until they were directly overlooking the women’s positions some one hundred and fifty metres below.
‘All right, Jap, we’ve got to smoke them out of those holes. And we’ve got exactly six bombs to do it with. So we can’t afford to make mistakes. We’ve got to panic them into running into the open. Then it will be our job to—’ He left the rest of the sentence unsaid.
Jap nodded. ‘I understand, sir.’
‘On no account must they be allowed to bury themselves into those holes of theirs. Then we’ll never get them out. We’ll be marking time in front of this damned pass until Doomsday. All right, here we go!’
The red flare hissed into the hard blue sky with startling suddenness. Everywhere the Red Ravens turned in their holes to stare at it, their handsome faces bathed a blood-red hue, their abruptly damp hands clutching their weapons in frightened tension.
‘What the dev—’
The words died on Sergeant Lermintov’s abruptly dry lips. There was an obscene thick belch, followed an instant later by the stomach-churning howl of a mortar firing. She caught a glimpse of the little black bomb hurtling slowly into the sky and then it had gone, and she knew from her experience on the Moscow Front the previous winter that the bomb was swooping down on their positions faster than the eye could see.
‘The pricks have got behind us!’ she yelled. ‘Down, everywhere!’
Her curses were drowned by the earth-shaking explosion of the mortar bomb. The ground came up and slapped her hard in the mouth. Her nostrils flooded with the acrid choking stink of cordite. Shaking her head violently to rid it of the ringing, she blinked her eyes several times and stared about her. The shell had scored a direct hit on Ilona Serova’s foxhole. Now it was a smoking mass of fresh brown soil. There was no sign of the girl. Then Sergeant Lermintov saw it, and caught her scream just in time. The thing rolling slowly across the plateau which looked like an abandoned football was Ilona Serova’s head!
But Sergeant Lermintov had no time to indulge herself in shocked emotionalism. Above them on the height which overlooked the pass and which she had thought was unscaleable, the mortar spewed scarlet flame again. Another bomb sped into the sky until it had achieved the necessary height before beginning to fall upon the panic-stricken women at a tremendous speed, trailing its obscene frightening howl behind it. She ducked her head. In that same instant, the bomb exploded right in the middle of the plateau. Fist-sized, gleaming-silver fragments howled everywhere alarmingly. She felt something strike her helmet a glancing blow. Red and white stars exploded in front of her eyes. For an instant she thought she was going to faint. By a sheer effort of will, she fought off the dark wave of unconsciousness that threatened to swamp her. Instead she raised her machine pistol and fired a wild burst at the height, watching with a feeling of helplessness the slugs striking the snow impotently, below where the German mortar was located. Their weapons simply did not have the range. And then the whole plateau was engulfed in a hot, choking, earth-shaking, furious barrage and the Krupp steel was ripping, gouging, tearing, slicing their soft female bodies, leaving their foxholes a smoking horror of mangled, limbless bodies, swimming in their own thick hot red gore; and the survivors were up streaming wildly across the red snow, throwing away their weapons in their mindless panic, blind and deaf to her warnings, running directly into the German machine-gun fire.
Far above, Stuermer shook his head, his lean face white with shock at the way the women had run straight into their fire, leaving their young bodies sprawled across the snow-covered plateau like abandoned bundles of rags. Slowly he let his smoking machine pistol sink, his shoulders slumped with weary despair. Why had the women to die? But he knew there was no answer to that overwhelming question. He might as well have asked why there should be war. ‘Cease fire, Jap,’ he commanded, his voice filled with an almost unbearable weariness. ‘Cease firing — the pass is ours!’
Summoning up the last of his strength, trying not to see the still black shapes below, he raised his flare pistol and fired the green Verey light, which signalled their victory to the men waiting below. The battle for the Chotya-Tau Pass was over…
SECTION FOUR:
THE RED RAVENS
ONE
Colonel Stuermer picked up a handful of the loose snow, which covered the edge of the glacier and let it melt in his parched mouth. He fought off the temptation to swallow it — he knew that would result in diarrhoea. Instead, his burning thirst quenched a little, he spat out the snow and stared wearily at the task that now confronted his tired mountaineers, who were slumped in the snow all around him.
All that morning they had been climbing through a raging blizzard. Heavy wet snow had swirled around them in a thick blanket, sifting down inside their tunics and mountain boots, blocking their eyes and mouths, turning their hands into leaden lumps of ice which could hardly feel their alpenstocks. Now the blizzard had ceased, but he knew as he stared at the glacier which barred any further progress that the going was bound to continue to be just as difficult and back-breaking.
The glacier stretched as far as the eye could see, gleaming a dull menacing grey in spite of the lack of sun. He sucked his teeth, which ached constantly at this height, and told himself that there were sure to be crevasses, some of them proba
bly covered over with a light, treacherous roof of snow; and with visibility the way it was, it would be difficult to pick out the usual telltale warning signs that indicated the presence of a crevasse. The prospect before him and Stormtroop Edelweiss was definitely uninviting, but there was no other way up Mount Elbrus. It had to be taken or they would have to turn back.
‘All right,’ he croaked through cracked, parched lips, wishing as he spoke that he could simply lie down in the soft wet snow and go to sleep and forget his raging headache and his aching teeth, ‘rope up. We’re going on.’
Slowly, with fingers that felt like clumsy sausages, his weary mountaineers began to comply with his order, while Stuermer gave his final instructions to Major Greul who would follow him as number two onto the glacier. ‘I know the old rule — never go two on a glacier, Greul, but there is no other way to do it. We’ll keep a distance of — say — ten metres between each man. That way if anyone goes into a crevasse, he won’t drag his neighbour in with him.’
Greul nodded his understanding.
‘We’ll also ensure that there is enough spare rope to use for rescue purposes, in case an accident happens.’
‘I suggest about twenty metres!’
‘Agreed.’
The men were ready now, but Stuermer had one final instruction for them. ‘Use your Prusik slings,’ he commanded.
Obediently, the men attached the device to the rope which linked them together, one sling near the body, its loose end passed through the waist loop and tucked into the pocket of their tunics, the other thrust along the rope until its free end was within easy reaching distance.
‘Good,’ Stuermer praised when they were finished. ‘All right, you men know the drill. Watch the man in front of you all the time — don’t worry about the surface of the glacier. I’ll guide you over that. Don’t let your section of the rope go slack, and have your axe ready for a quick belay in case of trouble.’ He took a deep breath, feeling the icy air slice into his strained lungs painfully. ‘Follow me!’
