Court Martial (44 page)

'What a load o' shit,' mumbles Tiny, getting up to help the ancient man. Before he gets to him he is thrown deep into a snowdrift on the far side of Party HQ. Porta is blasted vertically into the air, like a shot from a mortar, and lands behind the remains of the potato trench.

The barn is torn to pieces. All of the shells which were hidden in it have been brought to explosion, and the blast wave which follows sweeps away everything in its path.

'What in the world was that?' pants the Old Man, climbing out of a deep hole into which he has been thrown by the blast.

'Porta and Tiny going up!
C'est le bordel
,' says the Legionnaire, wiping blood from his face.

Has an hour, a day or a year passed? I have no idea. My head is aching as if it had been split open by an axe. Dimly I remember something about a colossal explosion and huge flames. I try to rise to my feet, but a heavy kick sends me down again. A guttural voice brings me completely to my senses. Now I remember clearly what has happened.

They come from the kitchen, a party of small, powerful men with flat Mongolian features and broad NKVD shoulderstraps.

I turn my head cautiously. A little way from me lies Gregor, tied up like a sack. He looks dead. A little further off the Old Man and Barcelona are sitting, tied back to back. The Westphalian is hanging head downwards, tied to a beam like a smoked ham. Round about I can see the rest of the section. All are bound. Porta, the Legionnaire and Tiny are not there. Probably already dead.

An NKVD soldier stands by the smashed door, with a
Kalashnikov
in his hands and a cigarette hanging from his mouth. From a beam over by the staircase swing five hanged bodies. Three men and two women. The civilians have obviously been summarily treated. On the cellar door someone has been crucified. Who it is I cannot see. But he is not dead yet. His body twitches occasionally.

A wiry little officer kicks me hard in the side.

'You saboteur,' he snarls at me in bad German. He bends over me so closely that I can smell the vodka and machorka on his breath.

'Speak Russian?' he asks.

'Njet,' I answer.

'llgun
66
', he screams, exposing a row of white teeth. 'You speak Russian! You say
njet
!' He turns to a sergeant for confirmation. Without waiting for a reply, he goes on: 'Was
you
blow up Nova Petrovsk?'

'
Njet
,' I answer.

He spits, and slashes me across the face several times with his
nagajka
.

'Admit,' he roars, wildly. We tear tongue from throat! No confess, no use for tongue!'

Again the
nagajka
whistles through the air, tearing the skin from my neck and throat. He waves to two Siberian soldiers and gives them an order in a dialect I do not understand.

The soldiers return with a heavy box, of the kind tinsmiths use to carry their tools in. With a grin the officer takes a pair of long-handled pincers from the box and snaps them at us threateningly. With practised movements the soldiers tear the clothes from Barcelona and the Old Man.

The officers repeats the questions he had put to me.

'Get fucked,' answers Barcelona, staring at the little officer with hate-filled eyes.

'We soften you,' smiles the Russian, wickedly. 'Who lead section?

'Piss off,' snarls Barcelona, contemptuously.

'I break German balls, if no answer,' promises the Russian, his eyes vicious slits.

A long, wavering scream from the cellar interrupts him. Only a human in terrible pain can scream so.

'Now find one who will talk!' smiles the Russian officer. 'Hang them up!' he orders, brusquely.

A soldier puts a thin rope around my throat. He ties the other end to a beam. I have to stand on my toes to prevent myself from being strangled.

The officer begins to flog the Old Man with his
nagajka
.

'Who is leader?' he asks, after each stroke.

He is a specialist in the use of the terrible Siberian whip, Each stroke opens the skin. Blood streams down the Old Man's body.

In a short while the Old Man's screaming stops. He has collapsed completely, as if he were dead.

I have heard that it is possible to kill a man with three strokes of the
nagajka
, and having seen a
nagajka
in the hands of a Siberian NKVD soldier I do not doubt it.

I look at the Russians around me. They look tired and worn out. Their faces are covered with frost sores, as are ours. One of them is asleep on his feet, with the Mpi hanging loosely against his chest.

'You saboteurs,' decides the little officer, running the
nagajka
caressingly over Barcelona's naked torso.

'No we're
not
, you shit,' roars Barcelona, raging and straining at his bonds.

'What you do here?' asks the Russian, with
a
dangerous smile. 'You hunt reindeer?'

'We're here to piss on
you
!' shouts Barcelona, viciously.

The
nagajka
whistles, splitting the skin of Barcelona's face.

'I whip you dead,' promises the little officer, the black eyes burning in his flat, Mongolian face. 'You hear,
svinja
?'

'Son of a whore,' shouts Barcelona, hoarsely.

The officer seems to go amok. Blows from the
nagajka
rain on Barcelona. He gives out a long, rattling scream and goes unconscious.

'What about this Finnish pig?' asks a sergeant, coming up from the cellar.

'We'll take him to Murmansk and plaster a cell wall with him,' answers the officer.

The room fills up with Siberian soldiers. They throw themselves to the floor and roll up like dogs. Five minutes later they are snoring loudly.

One of the sentries lets me down from the beam enough to allow me to sit down. Despite the pain from my hands and feet, I fall into a strange, disturbed sleep.

A faint sound wakens me. The trap in the floor opens and the Legionnaire's sinewy body sneaks up from the cellar and crawls like a snake towards the half-asleep sentry.

Faster than thinking, the piano wire is around his throat. Two powerful tugs and the sentry is dead.

Porta creeps from the kitchen and takes the Siberian sergeant, who is sitting by the window. He too is garotted.

Tiny's tough features appear from behind the stuffed bear, his teeth bared in a murderous grin. Like a doll he picks up the sleeping officer from the floor and presses his head against his mighty chest. There is a sound like cardboard being crushed.

Heide comes tip-toeing down the ruined stairs. Half-way down he stumbles over a pack and rolls on into the room with a terrific racket.

Like lightning the three others are over by the wall with machine-pistols at the ready. Nothing happens. A Russian complains in his sleep, demanding quiet.

From out on the square we hear a buzzing of voices. The sentries are changing. They do not bother about the noise, either. We are so far behind the front line that they cannot imagine anything happening.

The guard commander enters the door, yawning, throws his machine-pistol down on a table, stretches his arms towards the ceiling and yawns again, noisily, like a tired horse. His mouth stays open. With a surprised expression he stares down the muzzle of Heide's Mpi.

Heide smiles satanically and salutes with one finger to his cap-brim. Before the guard commander can close his mouth the Legionnaire's wire is round his throat. His tongue sticks out from between his frost-cracked lips, and slowly his face goes dark blue.

A corporal enters the room and immediately catches sight of the dead guard commander, who is lying in a heap on the floor. He stiffens and opens his mouth, but not a sound crosses his lips.

Tiny kills him with one blow across the throat from the edge of his hand. Quickly and quietly as a cloakroom girl accepting a hat from a guest.

'Come death, come . . .' hums the Legionnaire, softly.

'Rookies,' sneers Heide, contemptuously.

Porta gives the butt of his Mpi a loud slap.

'Up on your feet, you sad sacks,' he roars, in a ringing voice.

Tiny fires a burst at the beams of the ceiling and one of the hanged women falls to the floor with a thud.

Confused and sleepy, the NKVD soldiers scramble to their feet. With looks of utter foolishness on their faces they stare at the four grinning German soldiers lined up by the wall. One of them fumbles for his Nagan. The Legionnaire throws his knife. It bores into the reckless man's chest right up to the hilt.

'Watch it,
tovaritsches
,' grins Porta. 'Don't even wobble on your feet, or you'll have sat on the pot for the last time!'

'Throw your weapons over here,' orders Heide, in a tough voice, 'don't try anything we might misunderstand or off these go!'

'We're on
your
side,' says a sergeant, his voice shaking.

'Now you tell us,' says Tiny, cheerfully, giving him a blow on the neck which sends him flying across the room and half into the fireplace.

'Kick his balls up
in
his throat,' suggests Porta, with a broad grin. 'They get me so piss mad, these whining shits who change sides soon as the fat's in the fire.'

In a moment the rest of us are free, but we are hardly on our feet before an Mpi stutters and the whole room is filled with acrid cordite smoke.

Two of the prisoners sink to the floor.

'What the hell did you do that for,' shouts the Old Man, accusingly, at Heide.

'They didn't know the fighting was over,' answers Heide, coldly, bringing down the heel of his boot on the face of the nearest of them.

'Don't stand there starin',' roars Tiny at a sergeant. 'Do somethin' or other so's I can shoot the life out of you!'

'Off with your clothes!' orders the Old Man. 'You can keep your underclothes and socks. Everything else into the fire!'

The fire burns up, and a stench of burnt cloth and singed fur spreads through the room.

'We'll freeze to death,' protests an NKVD soldier, banging his hands together.

'Of course,' Heide laughs sarcastically, 'but comfort yourselves with the thought that death from freezing is quite pleasant. If it had been up to me, you lot of rookies would've been dead by now.'

'We'll meet again,' promises a corporal, sending Porta
a
look of hate.

'You a prophet or something?' asks Porta.

'I'm telling you,
Gernzanski
, I'll be
seeing
you,' snarls the corporal, furiously.

'Wooden soldiers are lucky,' grins Porta, patting the corporal on the cheek, 'they can't drown!'

'
Pjors
,'
67
snarls the corporal, spitting helplessly after Porta.

'Frost in your whiskers, nose all blue,
Furs all white, and your army socks too.

sings Porta, jeeringly.

'Grab your kit,' orders the Old Man. 'Let's get away from here in a hurry!'

Porta and Tiny go round, solemnly, and shake hands with every one of the prisoners in parting.

'Those wicked
Germanskis
certainly got hold of the arses of the
tavaritsches
this time, didn't they?' grins Porta, delightedly. 'Sit down nicely in the corner, now, and think over carefully what you're going to say to your bosses when they turn up one day to have a chat with you.'

'
Malltschal
,
+
you devil of a German,' shouts one of the prisoners, viciously, throwing a piece of firewood after Porta.

''Ave fun, mates,' chuckles Tiny, and waves as he goes out of the door.

'We should've shot them,' complains Heide. 'If they've got any brains at all they'll soon be after us. If a stupid Eskimo can knock up a pair of skis out of what's lying around, and pinch the clothes off a seal, one of Stalin's NKVD men ought to bloody well be able to! Let me go back and liquidate 'ern!'

'You stay here,' answers the Old Man, decidedly. 'We're not murderers!'

'Hell, but it's cold,' complains Porta, knocking
his
hands together.

'We're up in the Arctic,' grins Gregor, weakly.

Wherever we look the scene is cold and
deserted
, with nothing living in sight. After a while the high spirits, our escape from the hands of the NKVD soldiers has created, begins to ebb.

We call a halt in a hollow. It is doubtful if the Finnish captain can live through the trip home. His feet have begun to smell like rotting meat.

'Gangrene,' confirms the Old Man, briefly.

'We must amputate,' mumbles the Legionnaire.

'You do it?' asks the Old Man, doubtfully.

'
Par Allah
, if we do not get back within forty-eight hours he will be dead,' prophesies the Legionnaire, gloomily.

'Let's put a bullet in 'is neck,' suggests Tiny, practically. 'The Finnish Army's got no use for 'im, an' 'e's a burden on
us
. So what else
can
we do with the bleeder?'

'Shut it, you wicked sod!' snarls the Old Man, angrily.

We look towards the captain. He is lying on a wooden sled which we take it in turns to pull. There is fear in his face. More than likely he has heard Tiny's cynical suggestion.

'We'll just have to get him back as quick as possible,' says the Old Man, resolutely. 'Are there any morphine tablets left?'

'Not a one,' answers Sanititsgefreiter Brandt.

We begin the ascent in the wavering light, but are not even half up before the Old Man has to order a halt. The section is completely worn out.

In a moment we have all fallen into a deep sleep. It is that deadly dangerous sleep which goes directly over into death, and which has struck down so many in the Arctic.

After over twelve hours' sleep the Old Man gets us on our feet again.

'Shut up,' groans Porta. 'How I'm longing for to Finnish sauna and some regulation military cunt!'

'My prick's like a little frozen button,' shouts. Tiny. take at least twenty of the fattest kind of quims in existence to thaw 'im out again!'