Angel, Archangel (11 page)

Herries checked off everything he would need for the march ahead.
He had three grenades, four clips for the MP40, his compass in his pocket and he had the maps - accurate German maps, as well as the Soviet charts they had found in the jeep.
Food would be a problem, but the SS training school at Bad Tolz and three Russian winters had taught him how to live off the land.

Another long look at his men told him that they were asleep.
It was time to go.

* * * * * * * *

Dietz’s eyelids flickered open when he heard the slight rustle.
The cold grey eyes followed Herries as he slipped from his post into the impenetrable gloom of the surrounding forest.
The sergeant’s upper lip curled in a sneer at the thought of Herries’ discomfort as he squatted in the dark forest.
If the officer’s dysentery kept up like this, it would kill him.
Then he, Dietz, could lead the others back to their own lines and get the promotion that was long overdue to him.

The last embers from the fire threw out just enough light for him to catch a glimpse of the stick that tumbled and spun as it arced through the night air towards him.
Dietz knew what it was even before it landed in the middle of the group of bodies on the other side of the fire.
It was too far for him to reach it and hurl to safety, so he rolled away, trying to scramble to his feet so that he could launch his body that few extra metres from the centre of the blast.
But his feet caught in the blanket and he was trying to pull it free when the stick grenade exploded.

The flash momentarily turned night into day, but Dietz did not feel the shrapnel that tore through his shoulder.
His mouth gaped as he tried to refill his lungs with air that had been squeezed from his body by the vice-like pressure wave that accompanied the explosion.
Something heavy fell across his body, pinning his back to ground; and then all was still.

When Dietz came to, Dyer’s headless body was still twitching on top of him as the blood pumped from the neck and coursed over his face.
Then with one last spasm it writhed and rolled onto the ground beside him.
The warm stickiness that covered his face made him want to get up and run forever from that place, but his survival instincts told him to stay down.

Despite the ringing in his ears, he heard the figure draw near, he felt the breath on his cheek and he wanted to scream as the boot lashed into his ribcage.
But still he made no sound or movement.

Soon all he could hear was the ringing again.
Then he knew that Herries had gone.

Herries moved swiftly down the hillside, trying to put as much distance as he could between him and the camp before the Russians arrived on the scene.

Not that it really mattered.
To Ivan it would just be a case of another faulty grenade going off and six fewer SS terrorists to worry about.

And they were all dead, there was no doubt about that.
It wasn’t even necessary to put a bullet into Dietz just to make sure.
The bastard must have lost half his bodyweight in blood judging by the mess that covered his face and body.

* * * * * * * *

Almost seven kilometres away, Malenkoy heard the distant rumble of the pressure wave as it rolled through the valleys towards his position.

His first concern was that one of the Siberian platoons had been ambushed in the same way that he had been earlier that afternoon.

He flicked the radio on for clarification from his men in the field, but the airwaves were jammed with the excited cries of his officers as they reported the explosion and, more importantly, the direction from which it came.

Malenkoy dipped the transmit button and bellowed for silence.

“Malenkoy to patrol leaders.
Turn back and head for the source of that explosion.
I don’t know what’s going on out there, but it has to be them.
There are no other patrols reported in the area.”

The three officers acknowledged that they were proceeding in the direction of the sound of the detonation.

Then he was out through the back of the lorry and making for the nearest of the patrols.
The trouble was, if he could pick out his own troops by the light of their torches, so could the SS.

CHAPTER NINE

They stopped by the lake on their way to the Underground station at St James’s Park.
A group of boys were sailing their homemade boats by the water’s edge and she paused to watch.
Penny seemed lost at the sight of the toy yachts with their delicate paper sails as they bobbed precariously among the geese and ducks.

“They’re coming home,” she said.

“The birds?
It’s still winter.
Feels like it, anyway.”
Kruze turned to face her.

She laughed.
“The children.
They’re returning to London.
Perhaps it really will all be over soon.”

The youngest boy, a scruffy child, with dirty hands and a face that had not seen soap in days, splashed his friends with muddy pondwater and ran off laughing as they chased him across the park.

“You mean you’ve missed all that noise?”
The Rhodesian asked.
“I thought you English frowned on kids who misbehaved in public.”

“Don’t be so stuffy,” she smiled.
“This hardly sounds like the man who was sitting anxiously at Billy’s bedside this morning.”

“We were just talking.”

“No you weren’t.”
She smiled.

Kruze shuffled, as if to get some circulation back into his frozen feet.
“He was just a frightened kid responding to a friendly face.
As you said, it could have been anybody.
We just happened to be there.”

She touched his arm.
“A good try, Piet.
It’s not against the law in this country to show emotion, you know.”

“I thought you’d probably seen quite enough of that already.”

“That was something quite different.”
She took his hand and moved towards the path that led to the station on the other side of the park.

The late afternoon sun was slipping behind the trees.
Despite the cold, they walked slowly, her hand resting lightly on the crook of his arm.

“What was she like?”
Penny asked, suddenly.

“Who?”

“The girl you told Billy about.”

He laughed.
“I never said she was my girl.”

“I’m afraid you didn’t cover your tracks very well, my darling.”

Kruze lit a cigarette.
“We were very different.
I was young and so was she.
End of story.”

Penny shook his arm lightly.
“She hurt you.
I’m sorry.”

He shrugged.
“A little.
I hurt him more.”

“Your grandfather?
He meant a lot to you, didn’t he?”

“Yes, I suppose he did, the stupid old so-and-so.
After my parents died, he raised me as his son - and that’s not easy for an old man.
My father had no brothers or sisters and his own wife had been long gone, way before I was born.
It was just him and me, from my early teens to the day I left the farm in Mateke.
Looking back, they were good years.”

They reached the edge of the park and paused to get their bearings, before plunging down a darkened side street that led to the station.

She said: “Don’t you think they were for him too?
If he was the man I think he was, he would have understood.”

“Penny, how can you know?
He was a Rhodesian, born on the family homestead and buried there seventy-six years later.
A tough, sinewy old man who’d seen three-quarters of a century filled with nothing but heat, a business that just about broke even and a social life that consisted of having the neighbours over for a drink at Christmas, so long as they could be bothered to make the two-hundred-and-fifty mile round trip.
You don’t find people like that in the towns and villages of Kent or Gloucestershire.”

Her eyes flashed.
“I know what he was like.
He was honest, professional, sometimes moody, proud, arrogant even.
He’d be awkward, a fish out of water with people of his own kind, but he would enjoy a drink with the boys after a day’s work.
He’d be hard with anyone who didn’t pull his weight, but he’d walk through hell to save a man who was good and true.”

He had not seen her this angry, even on the Ministry steps the day before.
The memory of it made him smile.

“Damn you, Piet.
I’m right, aren’t I?”

When he spoke the smile was gone.
“I take it all back.
How did you know?”

“Somehow I knew he would have been just like you.”

He paused in the street for a moment and looked into her eyes.
“You’re a remarkable woman, Mrs Fleming.”

“I believe guilt is a wasteful, destructive emotion.
And if I’m right about your grandfather it’s a luxury he would never have allowed himself.”

“You seem to know him better than I do.”

“I want to get to know
you”
she said, urgency and frustration in her voice.

They rounded a corner and he saw the dim glow of the sign for the Underground station almost at the end of the street.
The journey was almost ended and she didn’t even know when or whether she would see him again.

“You’ll be going back when this is all over, I suppose,” she said, turning the question away from the immediate future.

She thought it ironic that in under two days she had probably got behind his eyes as no one had in a long time, yet a moment before they parted, she didn’t know the answer to the one question that mattered most to her.

“This place, the air force, they’ve been home for five years.
What’s there to go back for?”

She stopped him by the entrance to the station.
“I’m surprised at you, Piet.
The one way to assuage any remorse you may still have would be to go back and run that farm.”

He walked over to the window and bought two tickets, one for Waterloo, the other for Marylebone.

“I belong here, now,” he said, turning to face her.

“Is that what you really believe?”

They passed through the barrier and paused at the point where their paths divided.

“Don’t run away, Piet,” she whispered and kissed him lightly on the cheek.

She disappeared down the steps, the sound of her fading footsteps drowned by the sudden approach of her train.

* * * * * * * *

Dawn was breaking over Chrudim when Malenkoy’s platoon found the Freikorp’s last camp.
One of the other patrols had stumbled across the clearing several hours before and had guided Malenkoy and his Siberian search party to the spot over the radio.

The young officer who had first come upon the scene had described the situation to Malenkoy, but he had not prepared the major of tanks for the carnage that surrounded the long-extinguished camp fire.

Malenkoy fought to control his heaving stomach as he surveyed the mutilated bodies of the SS terrorists.
Two of the five corpses had lost limbs, a third had no head.
The sight of it chilled his body beneath the thick sheepskin polaschubuk he wore over his uniform.

He strolled to the middle of the clearing and raised his head to the clear, ever-lightening sky, trying to suck in cool mountain air that was not polluted by the stench of death that already pervaded that lonely place.

SS shits.
Whatever had happened, they deserved it.

His bitterness came not from his own brush with them the day before, but from the memory of what the SS had done to the people of his country, especially in the two years that it had taken to retreat from Stalingrad to the edges of Berlin.
Malenkoy looked quickly down at the cadaver of the youngest.
He looked like any one of his fellow graduates from the academy all those years ago.

Malenkoy glanced up at the sky once more and muttered an oath that went unremarked by a group of Siberians who were standing nearby, joking together in some unintelligible tongue.
To what depths had the human race sunk over the last four years!
It was obvious, even ten years ago at the academy, that war would come to Europe, but the totality of the conflict had not been imagined by anybody at the time.
He had thought about it before, but now the feeling boiled in him so strongly that he wanted to shout it out.
How could men do this to each other?

A lieutenant appeared and handed him a muddy, bloodstained piece of cloth, ripped from the tunic of one of the SS.
Malenkoy wiped away the grime to see the faded, but unmistakable colours and pattern of the British flag.
He let the badge fall, grinding it into the mud with his heel.

He had heard tales from comrades who had fought along the front about the exploits of the Britische Freikorps, but he had dismissed the reports as the exaggerations of men who had been too long fighting a tough and ruthless enemy.
Now he could scarcely believe that the soldiers who had attacked him on the forest track were men whose brothers were fighting the common Nazi enemy less than seventy kilometres from where he now stood, according to the latest reports back at HQ.
Total war.
It had got to the point at times where he was uncertain who the enemy really was.

Malenkoy left his thoughts behind and returned to the present.
A nagging feeling told him that it was not over, that there was something very wrong about the scene before his eyes.
He turned to the officer who had escorted him to the clearing.

“Search these bodies for papers.
Anything that gives further clues to their identity, I want to see it.”

The younger man screamed, waving his PPSh sub-machine-gun excitedly at his troops who immediately set about searching the pockets of the dead.

Was it possible that these were not the men who had attacked him yesterday?
It had to be unlikely that there were other SS units operating in the vicinity, but where was the one who had stood unflinching in the road while he had fired off a whole magazine in blind terror?
It had to be the headless one.
Malenkoy walked over to the monstrous form and looked it over from the boots to the shoulders, trying not to let the Siberians see his revulsion.
He thought hard for several minutes, before calling over the junior officer who had just barked the orders.

“How tall would you say this man was, Comrade Lieutenant, taking into account, of course, that he was once in possession of a head.”
The junior officer flashed a glance at Malenkoy which showed he did not know how to handle his superior’s sarcasm.

The lieutenant looked at the body hesitantly, sensing a trick in Malenkoy’s question.
He answered nervously and in a low voice, worried that Malenkoy would show him up in front of his troops.

“About one metre seventy-five, sir.”

“That’s what I was worried about.
It means, then, that we have at least one man still on the loose.”
Malenkoy once more saw the figure standing astride in the middle of the road.
He had been tall and broad across the shoulders.
This .
.
.
thing by his feet had been a much smaller man.
He winced at the thought of having to report the news to Nerchenko at HQ.
A platoon was hard enough to locate in a densely forested area twenty times the size of Moscow, but one or two men would be next to impossible.

Malenkoy heard the rough cough beside him and saw the sergeant with the Order of the Red Star pinned on his quilted telogreika who had been standing there for the last few minutes, not daring to interrupt the thoughts of his senior officer.
Malenkoy turned to face the lieutenant, who was holding some documents up to him.

“Yes, Comrade Starshina, what is it?”
He had tried to hide the weariness in his voice.

“One of my men found these, Comrade Major.
They were in a pocket on that man over there, sir.”
He pointed to the broken body of Wood.
“They’re the papers of a Red Army Rifles major.”

Malenkoy took the bundle of documents and began to leaf through them.
The face in the photograph, slightly obscured by a large bloodstain, was someone he knew.
It belonged to Paliev.
So that was how Yuri Petrovich had met his end, poor son of a bitch, ambushed by this outfit.
There had been much speculation among his comrades back at HQ as to what had happened to Paliev since his disappearance a few days ago.

At least this was one piece of positive news that he could bring back to Nerchenko.
Rumour had it that the General had been very upset by the loss of his personal aide.

* * * * * * * *

Even though it was still about ten miles away, Fleming could see the column of smoke billowing up from the airfield and he braced himself for the reception they would receive when they came into Rostock.