by Jack Hayes
Walker swallowed hard. When he spoke, his pitch was higher in tone.
“I want to formally go on the record as opposing this plan.”
Maddox raised an eyebrow.
“Don’t be so bloody stupid,” he said. “And get in the back of the truck.”
Walker stood in silence for a few seconds.
He bit his lip.
He then nodded and wandered to the covered flatbed.
“Sledge!” Maddox bellowed.
“Sir?” a hollow, metallic voice resonated through the truck’s frame from the rear.
“Get your arse up here,” Maddox replied. “You’re riding in the front with me.”
With a scraping of boots and an ‘oof’, McKlenna jumped down and jogged around to the cabin. He clicked open the door and climbed inside next to the major.
“Everyone in?” Maddox asked.
“All settled.”
Maddox put the truck in gear and pulled down the bumpy road.
“Right,” he said in a low hush so that he couldn’t be overheard by those in the back, “let’s talk about your team.”
“My team?” Sledge replied, glancing nervously both ways.
“Carter picked you, Walker, Shield and Conley to come on this mission,” Maddox said. “I’ve known that bastard a long time. One of you has been asked to prepare a separate report on this mission specifically for him upon your return. That person is, effectively, a spy for Carter.”
“And you want me to tell you if I know who it is?”
The engine protested as Maddox changed gears, picking up speed.
“That would be nice,” he replied.
“Well, that’s easy,” Sledge replied. “He asked all of us.”
The truck bounced as it rode over a large pot hole, eaten through the tarmac by the jaws of winter.
“All of you?”
“He asked,” Sledge replied. “Naturally, I told him to shove it sideways up his jacksie. I’ve worked with you before. You may be unorthodox – but in the field, you look after your men and your crazy methods seem to work. You can’t ask for more from a commander than that.”
“And the others?” Maddox replied.
“No idea,” Sledge said. “The carrot dangled was pretty persuasive. A safe posting as a trainer at Camp X. There was also a bump in pay. He told me he was putting the same package on the table to each of us – first one to take the offer, had it. Either I took it or someone would.”
“Nice deal,” Maddox frowned.
“Not good enough for me to turn nark,” Sledge replied. “I couldn’t say if one of the others bit the bait.”
The truck growled as it continued on its way.
“That’s okay,” Maddox said. “I know exactly who it is, now.”
CHAPTER 34
Nieder stood over the top of the trench his men had dug along the road’s edge.
It was good work. Hidden behind the first row of trees, the soil mounted along the street side, it offered both protection from bullets and a measure of camouflage.
“Take the fallen branches and embed them in the embankment,” he said. “It’ll hide you even more.”
With the five of these in place, the camp stood a good chance of holding off an assault from along the track. The back of the base was protected from tank attack by the sharp cliff, into which the mine entrance was cut. The only way up or down was a narrow path barely big enough for single file travel – certainly unsuitable for a tank-led Soviet advance.
The flanks of their position were protected by snow banks, frozen lakes, bogs and forests.
Any attack had to come along the main road.
A shout went up.
Several of the privates digging the trench looked up.
Were the Russians here?
More shouting.
Laughter.
Cheers?
From the camp.
“Follow my orders,” Nieder said to the men, “and stop dawdling. When the Russians arrive, you’ll wish you’d worked faster.”
He started walking quickly back toward the tents.
But he could see in between the rows of canvas, Beck was running – almost dancing – as he charged down the slope, heading for Nieder’s position.
“What is it?” Nieder called out.
“We’ve found them!” Beck shouted. “We’ve found them!”
“Found what?”
Beck, face beaming, arrived breathless beside the major. His chest heaved up and down and he bent forward, resting his hands on the filthy knees of his trousers as he caught his breath.
“Diamonds,” he croaked, between gasps of air. “Blue ones. We’ve found them.”
CHAPTER 35
Maddox slowed the truck as they approached the village; it wasn’t a matter of choice, the dead bodies lying across the streets made it impossible to drive around them. Maddox sucked in air through gritted teeth. The only way forward was to push the truck over the top of the corpses and he wasn’t prepared to do that without at least a few moments of reflection on the scene before them.
“Jesus,” Sledge muttered.
“I hope Aku got as many people out as he could,” Maddox agreed.
Smoke rose from lingering fires visible through the ruins of the structures. Some of the buildings looked like they’d been demolished by simply ramming the tanks through the walls.
A white flag fluttered like a joke that had gone flat from a pole on the one wall of the public house that remained standing.
“What do you think happened?” Sledge asked. “Did they just kill them for the sake of it?”
“With Russians, it’s hard to say,” Maddox replied. “They may have feared an ambush – or they may have actually been ambushed. All it would have taken is a couple of farmers with their shotguns taking a pop at the tanks and the Russians might have gone into overdrive. How many men have they lost to snipers out here in the wilderness?”
“You almost sound approving of this carnage,” Sledge said.
“Good God, no,” Maddox said. “It’s a war crime. That said, you and I both know that if it were our convoy travelling down this road and trying to get through and some yokel fired at us, things could easily get out of hand. We wouldn’t flatten an entire village and slaughter the occupants – we’ve been in that position before and never done it.”
“Many times,” Sledge agreed.
“But we could both see how it could happen,” Maddox replied. “That doesn’t make it any less disgusting. Once you’ve shot the guy with the gun, it takes a special kind of nasty to obliterate everything.”
He glanced through his window, his eyes moving onto the still body of a young girl, perhaps six or seven years old. Her pink floral dress, stained with splashes of blood and mud, flittered as the wind whispered across it. Under one arm, a teddy bear lay alongside her,
A single paw reached out to hug her in an eternal, ever-loving embrace.
The second, guttering on that same breeze, mockingly seemed to be waving goodbye.
Maddox stared at his feet for a second.
He couldn’t help but think of his own son.
“You take over the steering wheel,” he said.
“What?” Sledge asked.
Maddox’s jaw hardened.
“You drive,” he said harder, and opened the door.
He slammed his fist on the metal partition with the back of the truck.
“Everybody out,” he yelled.
“Where the hell are you going?” Sledge replied.
“It’ll only slow us by a minute or two,” Maddox said.
“We don’t have time to bury them,” Sledge said.
“Of course not,” Maddox said, hopping down onto the icy pavement. “But we are going to pull the bodies to the side of the road. I’m not simply rolling straight over the top of them.”
He slammed the cab door shut and hammered once more on the flatbed.
“Out,” he yelled. “The sooner this is done, the sooner we�
�re on our way.”
CHAPTER 36
Beck plucked an unremarkable piece of gravel from the grease-belt and held it aloft.
The stone, half the size of Nieder’s thumbnail, was covered in tarry oil.
“See?” Beck asked triumphantly.
Nieder shrugged.
“The oil on the belt repels water,” Beck sighed with the weariness of a man who’d explained this many times before to his commander. “Since the gravel soaks up water from the sluices, it is also repelled. The diamonds, however, don’t absorb it so remain stuck.”
He gestured along the leather conveyor at the dozens of grains that remained, held fast to its surface.
“I know all this,” Nieder replied. “How do you know that one is blue?”
Beck thrust the stone into a bucket that contained detergent. The tar lifted from its surface in clumps. He shook his hand vigorously, causing a bubbly forth to form. When he pulled the gem out, it remained a dull and unremarkable sight.
“It looks like a worthless pebble,” Nieder shrugged.
“Exactly,” Beck smiled. “If it were a white diamond, it would also look pretty rubbish but would at least be somewhat clear – like a dirty lump of quartz. But there’s no quartz or amethyst or other similar stone in this hole in the ground. The only thing left for this to be is a blue diamond.”
Beck removed his magnifying eyepiece from his pocket and held the stone to the light. With a theatrical air, he turned the diamond slowly between his fingers. As the sun’s rays passed through the gravel, Nieder could see it took on a glassy note. It was transparent.
And glowed with the eeriest shimmer of cyan.
“See it now?” he asked and passed it across.
“Yes,” Nieder laughed, “yes I do.”
“It may not look like much now,” Beck said, “but it’s the real deal. Cut and polished, that’s our ticket out of here.”
“How many do we have?” Nieder asked.
“I can’t be sure,” Beck said. “These lumps could be normal diamonds, but if someone hit one on the walls of the mine, the rest of the shovel load should contain some too. However there’s no way to know until we empty all of the sluices out onto the conveyor whether the ore this diamond came from is already on the belt or happens to be somewhere else in the troughs. The hope is that if we find one, there should be more – but there’s no guarantee; they’re impossibly rare unless someone somehow hit a nodule of the damn things.”
“Then empty the sluices and load it all onto the belt,” Nieder replied. “Wash and check as much as you can. We’ll be out of here as soon as you’re done.”
The explosion blew one of the tents into the air.
Nieder and Beck reflexively ducked, drawing their pistols.
There was a distant rattle of machine gun fire from the trenches hidden in the forest.
Nieder heard the rumble of engines.
The Russians!
He could see now the nose of the first tanks, surging along the road at top speed, its mighty cannon pointed directly in their direction.
“What now?” Beck screamed as a second blast pounded from the weapon.
Nieder glanced at the armoured vehicles as they churned along the road between the trees.
“Wash what’s on the belt,” he yelled. “If it’s blue bag it. If we get lucky we might have enough to not need what’s in the sluices.”
“How many is enough?”
“A handful – as many as you can – I don’t know,” Nieder shrugged. “Just keep checking them.”
A whistle as the shell flew.
A deafening explosion threw mud and soil into the sky.
A scream as a soldier running barely fifteen yards from them was blown to smithereens.
“There isn’t time,” Beck said.
“Just do it,” Nieder replied.
Another blast from the tanks rocketed into the ground.
“You keep working,” Nieder said. “I’ll hold the Russians off as long as I can.”
Nieder sprinted down the slope towards the attacking tanks.
CHAPTER 37
Maddox kept his foot to the floor, pushing the truck as hard as he could.
It hadn’t taken long to shift the bodies aside and drive though the town but shifting each of the corpses out of his path had given him a fresh impetus to catch up with the Russians. Hopefully, given the amount of time they must have wasted obliterating the village, they weren’t far ahead of them.
Sledge had the map spread across his lap. The compass needle lined along the folds jolted nervously with each bump in the road.
“Just up ahead there’s a track off through the trees, according to this,” he said. “Swing into it and take it for a mile.”
“Then it’s everyone out onto skis,” Maddox agreed. “If Jouhki’s indications were anything to go by, we should intersect with the German base very quickly from a blind spot along the escarpment.”
Although the map was out of date and the path through the pines was hidden by dense bracken, it was exactly in the right location.
“Perfect,” Maddox said, swinging the truck off the main track. “We’ll take these bastards down yet.”
CHAPTER 38
The Opel Blitz bounced roughly as Aku Jouhki drew to a halt on the icy track. The engine grumbled lightly as it ticked over. Beside him, Ros sat gently caressing the hair of their son and daughter, one on each side of her, their heads nestled up against her body as she cradled them.
“What now?” she asked.
“Well, we’ve taken the disused backtracks as far as we can,” Aku replied. “We’ll have to return to the main road from here. We should have skirted far enough away from the main highway to avoid the Germans, the Russians and the English.”
“You think it’ll be safe to get back onto the road?”
Aku looked both ways along the highway’s length. It was empty as far as the eye could see.
In the back of the lorry, twelve others had joined them in their evacuation. While Aku was soulful that so few of the villagers had joined them, at least the number was small enough that they could all fit – even though it was a squeeze – in the back of a single vehicle.
“Yes,” he said, after careful consideration. “From here, it’s all plain sailing south, to Helsinki.”
“And a new life,” Ros said. “Just as soon as this damned war is over.”
Aku nodded and sighed.
He pushed the Opel into gear and accelerated away to freedom.
***
Beck glanced down at the misshapen lumps on the conveyor.
He had no idea which ones, covered in heavy grease were blue diamonds – if any. He grabbed a fistful of grime, the mechanical ooze squelching through the gaps in his fingers as he plunged his hand into the bucket of water.
Another Russian shell landed barely ten yards from him. Soil was flung high into the air and began to patter on his head, face and back as it tumbled from the sky.
A German soldier, running through the tents to his right, dodged as his position was raked by more machine gun fire from the attackers.
Swishing his hand vigorously in the water, a froth of bubbles floated to the surface. He could feel the grit grow coarser against his skin. He pulled his palm out and opened it.
Success.
He could instantly see among the gravel, five gem stone lumps.
Three were blue.
He eagerly plucked them out and dropped them in a small pouch.
He clasped a fresh handful of grease and repeated the process.
Gunfire sounded all around.
A ping as a bullet hit the generator driving the belt and rebounded.
With a crunching whirr, the leather conveyor ground to a halt.
Beck didn’t care. There were either enough gems already hidden in the muck or there weren’t. He washed the stones and quickly checked his bounty.
Nothing.
“Pah,” he tossed them aside with disgust.
<
br /> Rough diamonds clattered as they skimmed across the rocky ground.
Another fist of gunk.
“Come on,” he hissed.
The froth in the bucket was beginning to subside as the detergent struggled to keep pace with the oil.
Another one.
A shout.
He looked up.
Russian labourers had managed to break free of their guards in the mine and were pouring from the entrance out across the land. The soldiers in the encampment shifted from their positions, moving closer to the conveyor.
“No, no, no,” Beck whispered.
As the slaves sprinted down the slopes toward their comrades in the tanks, the Germans raised their submachine guns and began mowing them down.
The Soviets in the tanks weren’t about to let their countrymen die so easily.
Three tanks turned their turrets to face the conveyor.
Beck ducked beneath the level of the belt, using the machinery for cover.
With an earth-shaking “boom” the tanks all opened fire on his position.
CHAPTER 39
“Attack!” Komelkov screamed as his tanks opened fire on the German positions.
His T34 veered violently to the right as it crushed one of the Nazi defenders under its mighty bulk. Through the narrow slit in front of his eyes he could see five Germans pop out of a conifer-covered trench and begin firing at their tank tracks.