At three o’clock in the morning, when Operation Byliny had already been under way for nearly six hours, he turned on his car radio, but all he could get was Bruce Springsteen singing The River and crackly country-and-western. He wished to God that he had been blessed with the foresight to buy himself a few sandwiches and a bottle of whiskey. He didn’t even have a razor, and he was beginning to feel very sore and prickly and derelict.
He decided to move on. Maybe when he reached Toronto he would be able to find himself an all-night diner, and somewhere to shave. Out here in Oakville, in the middle of the night, there was nothing but the stars and the lake and the pattering rain, and the huddle of neat suburban houses.
He was about to start the LTD’s engine when he noticed a black Ford Tempo waiting under the single street-light at the corner of the dead end. He leaned forward in his seat, so that he could examine it more closely in his rear-view mirror. He was sure that it hadn’t been there earlier, when he had first parked here. It must have arrived some time in the past two hours, quietly; and now it was waiting for him.
He started the engine, and switched on his lights. Still watching the Tempo, he backed slowly into the nearest driveway, turned around, and made his way towards the main road again. His interval-wipers squeaked against the glass of his windscreen, leaving smears of reflected streetlight. He paused as long as he dared, but he couldn’t see anybody sitting in the Tempo. Maybe his imagination was investing the world with ghostly pursuers. Maybe his guilty conscience was creating fantasies of fear. He turned towards highway 5 again, and kept an eye on the Tempo as he drove away. He took a sharp left across Mississauga Drive, and still the Tempo remained where it was.
As he approached highway 5, however, driving alone on the wet, wide street, he saw headlights turning out of the dead-end, and following him. He couldn’t make out if it was the Tempo or not, but what other car could it be? He pressed his foot harder on the gas, and the headlights speeded up to keep close behind him.
He felt cold, sticky sweat on his back. He drove towards highway 5 at nearly 60 mph, the raindrops hovering on the side windows of his car, the windscreen wipers groaning, hesitating, and groaning. The Tempo was so close behind him now that he was dazzled, and he knocked his rear-view mirror askew so that he could see what he was doing.
Instead of taking the ramp that was signposted to Toronto, he sped right under the highway until he was 50 yards out on the other side of it. The Tempo was right behind him. Without warning he spun his steering-wheel and yanked on his handbrake, and the LTD slid sideways and U-turned across the slick wet street, its tyres screaming like run-over cats, its tail almost breaking out of David’s control and spinning around for a second time. But at the last moment, he caught it, and straightened it up, and then released his brake and slammed his foot back down on the gas, so that the LTD screeched back under the main highway again in a cloud of rubber-smoke and steam.
The Tempo hesitated, skidded, stopped; and then more cautiously crossed the median strip and came after him. David accelerated straight down Mississauga Drive, ten after three in the morning, and the Tempo accelerated after him, until the two cars were streaking through the wet at over 80 mph, rousting up high fountains of spray, hurtling over intersections and crossroads, bouncing over dips and bumps in the pavement, telegraph poles slashing past them one after the other, slash, slash, slash, careering over wet shiny railroad tracks, lights rocketing past them on either side, and then taking a wide left hand curve, almost unmanageable at this speed, their tyres right on the edge of losing their grip.
David yanked the LTD’s handbrake again, and the car spun right around and skidded backwards straight across the highway. He saw headlights, street-lights, a chain-link fence. It was no good turning the steering-wheel, the car was aquaplaning with its wheels locked, completely out of control. It banged loudly into the curb on the opposite side of the road, spun around again, and then stopped. David saw the Tempo flash past him, travelling too fast, and released the handbrake again, heading back towards the main highway. He had almost reached the ramp when he saw the Tempo’s headlights flashing and dipping in his rear-view mirror.
He jammed his foot down on the gas, and the LTD screamed protestingly up the ramp. When he reached the main highway, however, he slowed down, and took a sharp left turn, so that he was driving south-westwards on the wrong side of the road.
It was early in the morning, but the highway was already busy. Trucks came roaring towards him through the rain and the darkness, their lights blazing and their horns moaning like slaughtered dinosaurs. But David continued to drive south, gripping the steering-wheel tight, straining his eyes ahead of him to pick out the first glimmer of headlights coming towards him in the opposite direction. He was driving at well over 70 mph, • and if anything came towards him at even half his speed, the closing impact would be 105 mph. Most of the trucks were travelling at well over 50 mph, which meant that if he hit one head-on, he would be plastered over the front of it like a smashed can of Chef Boy-ar-dee bolognese sauce. Instantly.
He almost lost his nerve. But then he glanced up at his mirror again, and he could see the Tempo coming after him, its headlights glaring as a warning to oncoming traffic. He pressed his foot down as far as it would go, and the LTD’s engine strained to take him up to 90 mph. The car just wouldn’t travel any faster, but then what could he expect from an untuned six-cylinder rental?
Gradually, the Tempo began to overhaul him. The rain drove even harder now, and every now and then a truck or a car would come hurtling out of the spray, its lights flashing, its horn yelping, and David would have to swerve or change lanes. Soon the Tempo was almost alongside him, and the two cars drove at 90 mph neck-and-neck the wrong way along highway 5, passing signs for Appleby and Burlington, gradually approaching Hamilton. David was so tense that his ankles began to cramp up, and his shirt was chilly with sweat.
Now the Tempo was right alongside him, although he didn’t dare to take his attention off the road even for one second to see who was driving it. It began to edge in closer, until the spray from its front wheels washed over the side of his windscreen; and then suddenly he felt the first jarring shock of a collision. The LTD slewed, and skidded, but David managed to keep control. They wanted to kill him, whoever they were; the same way that they had killed Esther; and the same way that they would kill anybody who showed too close an interest in GRINGO, whatever GRINGO happened to be.
David looked up ahead: and then, to his total horror, saw that two massive trucks were approaching them, side by side. Only the fast lane was clear; and that was occupied by the speeding Tempo, which was now hugging close beside him like a hungry shark. The Tempo swerved again, and there was a shriek of metal as their two hubcaps scoured against each other. David twisted the wheel around, first left, then right, but he couldn’t stop the LTD from skidding madly from one side to the other. His windscreen was blurred with truck headlights and rain; he could hear the truck klaxons blasting at him but the LTD had completely lost its grip on the highway now, and was slowly spinning at 90 mph.
He thought: God this is it, I’m going to die.
It happened like a well-choreographed ballet. The LTD, as it spun, struck the rear end of the Tempo. The Tempo, deflected, skidded out of the fast lane, straight into the path of the oncoming trucks. David’s LTD skidded the other way, into the median strip, into gravel and grass and scrubby bushes, and at last with a spine-jolting collision into the steel crash-barrier, crushing the front fender and shattering the windscreen, dumping fragments of broken glass into David’s lap as if they were bucketfuls of crushed ice.
He didn’t even have time to turn around to see what happened to the Tempo. There was a noise beside him like a thousand agonized monks shouting out the Kyrie Eleison; and that was the noise of a Kenworth TransOrient’s airbrakes clutching desperately at 18 hurtling wheels and 22 tons of tractor and trailer and canned salmon. Then there was a bang as loud as a bomb going off, and there were pi
eces of car flying through the rain, curved segments of fender and wheelhousing, and a sudden drenching of blood-red rain.
David shakily forced open the LTD’s door. He stood in the wet, next to his shattered car, and knew with some relief that all he had to do now was wait for the police to come and get him. The Tempo had been smashed open; and only its seats and its rear wheels clung to the front of the truck which had hit it, crushed and black like fragments of insects. The dead bodies of the driver and his passenger lay sprawled on the pavement more than 50 yards away, with that blotchy, butchered look common to all victims of accidents and assassinations.
The truck driver came over to David. He was six feet three inches tall with a big moustache and a face as white as wedding-cake. ‘You crazy bastard,’ he told David, in a tight, high voice. ‘You crazy bastard, I saw what you done.’
David looked up at him, the rain dribbling down his chin. ‘I did what I had to,’ he said, tiredly.
‘You did what you had to? Those guys are dead. Those guys are stone cold dead.’
‘Yes,’ said David. He closed his eyes, and let the rain soak his hair and his face as if it might cleanse him. A long way away, he heard the whip-whip-whip of a police siren.
‘You crazy bastard,’ the truck driver repeated. ‘They ought to lock you up.’
Twenty-Four
At dawn on Sunday, Soviet reconnaissance helicopters flying over West Germany were witness to the greatest motorized exodus in modern history. The bright summer sun rose gradually over the woods and fields of Lüneberg and Hanover; and sparkled as it rose on the rear windows of thousands and thousands of cars, all heading westwards along the autobahns and trunk roads. Every road was jammed solid. E-8 was a glittering river of Mercedes and BMWs and Volkswagens all the way from Braunschweig in the east to Osnabrück in the west, a distance of more than 100 miles. E-63 was solid from the Eder to the Ruhr.
When they had planned Operation Byliny, the Soviet General Staff had taken into account the fact that the West Germans owned more private cars than any other nation on earth, and they had expected heavy congestion on the roads. But they had never anticipated anything like this. One Mi-4 pilot flying over the south Teutoburger Wald east of Paderborn said, ‘Every road is crammed… I have never seen so many cars… they are pouring through the forests like lava.’
To General Abramov, who had left Zossen-Wünsdorf shortly after five o’clock that morning and moved to a forward headquarters at Helmstedt, still on the eastern side of the border, the traffic was a serious tactical setback. A fast-moving blitzkrieg had suddenly become bogged down in a logistical situation which could only be compared with the Long Island Expressway at a holiday weekend. Abramov sent as many tanks as he could across country, but West Germany’s thick afforestation made progress frustratingly difficult and slow – added to which, every minor road which the tanks attempted to cross was blocked solid with cars.
On E-3 between Hamburg and Bremen, T-72 tanks of the 3rd Shock Tank Army were completely halted by private cars. Their divisional commanders first attempted to clear the autobahn by ordering the West German drivers off the road, but this took so long, partly because of the language difficulty and partly because of the Germans’ extreme hostility and stubbornness, that eventually the infuriated Russians tried simply pushing the cars on to the verge with their tanks. This only made matters worse: the highway was so congested that they succeeded only in blocking it even more effectively, locking together scores of damaged and immovable cars in rafts of tangled metal. By mid-morning, they had to bring up huge tracked obstacle clearers to pick up the wrecks by crane and dump them on the side of the road.
Under the terms of the Copenhagen Agreement, no shots were to be fired by the Soviet Army except in self-defence, and so the tanks were unable to blast their way through with missiles or armour-piercing shells. Somehow the Germans sensed that the invading troops were under considerable restrictions, and did everything they could to make the advance more difficult. Farmers blocked open fields with lines of combine harvesters and immobilized tractors, and tank after tank was brought to a halt with broken or damaged tracks; the casualties of spades and paving-stones thrust into their wheels as they ground their way almost at stalling speed through villages and suburbs.
Chancellor Kress had decided that without the Americans and the British, any attempt by the Bundeswehr at fighting back would be catastrophic. ‘It is a bitter decision,’ he said, on morning television. ‘But I am not prepared to preside over the third massacre of German youth in a single century.’
He had lodged a formal complaint with the United Nations, and would try by ‘every means available to me’ to oblige the Soviet Army to withdraw.
At the same time, France, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and all the Scandinavian countries had expressed ‘shock and disgust’ at the British and American withdrawals from West Germany. All had called for urgent meetings; but the President and the Prime Minister had both responded with nothing more than a one-line reply which had been prearranged between them. ‘The joint decision of the United States and the United Kingdom to withdraw their military forces from Western Germany is irreversible and not open to discussion.’
Much previously-unflexed strength was applied by both governments during the first day of Operation Byliny. Anybody who had imagined that Britain and the United States had a free press was rapidly disillusioned by the very earliest reports from Europe. ‘Peace At Last!’ was the headline chosen by the Daily Express for its 2 a.m. Monday-morning edition. The Daily Telegraph said, ‘Soviets Take Over West Germany – “Permanent Peace” Promised After Benign Invasion.’ The Daily Mirror proclaimed ‘Comrade!’ and showed a large picture of a Russian soldier shaking hands with an old German pensioner in a Tyrolean hat.
On both sides of the Atlantic, the tone of television reports was equally cheerful and approving. In the United States, a networked editorial from CBS spoke of ‘a new era in world peace… a masterly and deeply responsible re-division of the world’s land-masses… to relieve the pressures of the past, and meet the demands of the future.…’ The President appeared smiling on television, and said, ‘I want you all to know that today is the first day of a happy and secure tomorrow. To those of you who have relatives and friends in West Germany, I want to say that I have received from the Kremlin this morning a written reassurance… and here it is… holding up a piece of paper ‘… that the rights and property of all citizens of the Federal German Republic will be respected.’
The President paused for a moment, and then he said, more seriously, ‘In political terms, all that has taken place in West Germany today has been a change of management… one security force has been replaced by another… but the implications in terms of world peace are of course far greater than that… at last, we can sleep easy at night… at last, we can look ahead with complete confidence to the prospect of bringing up our children, and our grandchildren, and our great-grandchildren.
‘My fellow Americans, today a great shadow has been lifted from the face of the world. The curse of the twentieth century, the nuclear bomb, has at last been lifted.’
The President finished his address by promising that fresh nuclear disarmament talks had already been arranged with the Soviet Union, and were expected to start ‘momentarily’.
In northern Europe, Sunday afternoon was warm but overcast. Gradually, the Soviet Army pressed forward, and by seven o’clock they had managed to advance as far as the Weser. In the south, they had managed to clear most of the civilian traffic off E-4, and push through the Fulda Gap as far as Hanau, on the eastern outskirts of Frankfurt. General Abramov decided not to enter any major cities until daybreak the following day, because of the risk of freelance snipers and vandalism.
He reported back to the Stavka that the day’s progress had been ‘disappointingly slow, because of unforeseen traffic conditions, and because of the political restrictions placed upon the Army’ but that it had been comparatively uneventful, with
few casualties. In all, 72 Russian soldiers had died, and 109 had been injured, almost all of them in traffic accidents.
As the sun began to sink, the fleets of Russian tanks and BMP infantry fighting vehicles came to rest; on heathland, in wide fields of spring wheat, in silent villages and deserted towns. The evening air was heavy with dust, and with the sharp smell of burned diesel and gasoline fumes. There were more than 6,000 BMPs in the Group of Soviet Forces Germany, and their high-output engines had been blaring all day. There had also been hundreds of tanks, and hundreds of trucks, and scores of self-propelled howitzers; as well as literally millions of private cars. More fuel had been consumed in West Germany in a single day than was normally used throughout the whole of Europe in two weeks: 140 billion barrels.
Refugees flowed westwards all through the night, although the retreating British and American forces had done everything they could to persuade German civilians to stay in their homes. The refugee problem had been discussed at length in Copenhagen, and it had been agreed that a huge disruption of the civilian population would be unavoidable, especially since the Russians would not be permitted to land SPETSNAZ parachute commandos ahead of their principal line of advance. However, once the refugees had realized that the Soviet Army was going to occupy the whole of western Europe, it was expected that the majority of them would return home. There would be nowhere else for them to go, except to Britain. And Britain had already showed her indifference to the refugees by forbidding the landing in the United Kingdom of any Lufthansa aircraft; quite apart from the fact that all of her air-traffic controllers were out on strike.
It was a day of little bloodshed, but enormous fear. The fear crossed the European continent like a dark wave across the ocean, and that evening, as the Soviet tanks at last came to a standstill, everybody prayed.
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