Black Operations- the Spec-Ops Action Pack

by Eric Meyer

  He looked bleak, but didn’t answer.

  “Why don’t we use more artillery? We could break the back of their attacks with some well aimed barrages.”

  He blew on his cold hands. "If the artillery were able to help they would. They’re short of ammunition and short of guns. Short of crews, too, probably. We’re all stretched very thin here, Roth. You’ll just have to do your best, I suggest you get back, they’ll be coming again soon. No retreat.”

  I saluted and left. When I got back to the my unit I had a talk with the other platoon leaders, we had to try something different. After some discussion we resited the machine guns, moved the men onto the flanks, and put the MG34s into the centre. The Russians would probably hit our centers first, the weakest points, the machine guns would be a nasty surprise to them. There’d be no chance of us launching our own counterattack, the best we could hope for would be to live to fight another day. We only had a short time to wait. The whistles blew, men shouted, guns roared and they came against us once more. Again they died horribly. We’d waited until the great mass of them was pressing in upon the centers and then gave the orders to fire. They ran straight into our sited machine guns where they expected only men with light weapons. The Russians were stopped dead by the massive rate of fire, some started to fall back. The distant chatter Russian machine guns sounded as the NKVD blocking units opened up, the attackers were caught between two streams of fire. It was time to finish off this attack, Hauptsturmfuhrer Werth, the second in command of our sector blew his whistle and we moved out and around the flanks of the stalled attack. The snow was packed hard, frozen on top except for pools of dark blood where the wounded and dead had left their mark. We had a chance to achieve a significant victory, if we could only keep the pressure up long enough. Their line began to bend and writhe as they tried to contain us, and then it wavered as we fired clip after clip into their ranks. The noise was deafening and the triumphant war cries of the Soviets turned to shouts of alarm and pain as they broke and fled. Suddenly they were all gone, only their dead and badly wounded were left to litter the snow and blood covered ground. Our success gave us some much-needed rest, the Soviets did not attack again for the rest of the night and during that time my men slept for the first time in three days

  The next morning was even colder, so icy-cold that men were despairing of ever being warm again. The temperature on that February morning was minus fifteen degrees. Leningrad in 1942 was just snow, ice and death. Shortly after dawn they relieved us in the line and we pulled back to our quarters in the town of Kolpino for a rest and some food. I gulped down the coffee I’d drawn from the cookhouse less than five minutes before, it was already cold. Five bodies swung slowly in the morning breeze, our commanding officer had ordered them to be hung the previous day, they were captured partisans. The order from the Fuhrer was unambiguous, commandos and partisans were to be executed. Partisans especially, fighting in civilian clothes they had no protection from any convention of war. Goethe came out of the miserable isba we used for a billet. The isba was a peculiarly Russian invention, a wooden hut that most of us in Western Europe would be loathe to use for the storage of garden tools. With no windows, a bare earth floor and rats running around as if they owned the place, it was yet another reason to doubt the sanity of our invasion of the Soviet Union. What had we come here for? Even the Russians hated it. Goethe stamped his feet to restore the circulation, in the past week a score of men from the battalion had reported sick with frostbite, it was as deadly a threat as the Red Army. I looked again at the bodies. Two of them were women, in life they had been vibrant teenage girls, slim and attractive. Despite their insistence that they were merely girlfriends of two of the men, Sturmbannfuhrer Kurz had insisted on their execution. They were no longer attractive, their faces purple and mottled.

  “What’s the plan for today?” Goethe asked. “Do you want me to drag the lazy bastards out of bed?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve heard nothing, Scharfuhrer, you may as well leave them alone, they’ve all had a rough time. There’s hot coffee over there.”

  I nodded towards the battalion cookhouse, he grunted and walked over with his tin mug to pour himself a cup. He walked back drinking greedily, anything hot on this front was a rarity, not to be wasted. I saw myself reflected in the side mirror of our truck. The face was stretched and lined, I looked ten years older than my age. At five feet ten inches tall, with blonde hair and blue eyes, I should have looked like one of Hitler’s ideal stormtroopers. I’d once been very fit, proud of my athletic achievements when I was younger. Now, I looked like a ragged, emaciated scarecrow, as did most of the troops on the Leningrad front.

  Before Goethe reached me, the short, wiry figure of the CO appeared at my side. Even at this time of the morning, in the arctic cold, Erich Kurz had obviously found time to clean up and change after the action of the previous night, he was immaculately uniformed, his short hair cropped close to the skull. Everything about him was short, Erich Kurz was not a tall man, to his eternal regret. He made up for it with his ego and ambition, without doubt he would have given Napoleon a run for his money. Some said he even resembled a thinner version of ill-fated French emperor.

  “You’ll need to rouse those troopers again, Obersturmfuhrer Roth. I know they had a hard night fighting off those attacks but we’ve got new orders.”

  “Yes, Sir. Someone said the Russians have broken through at Demyansk, is that true, or has High Command formulated a plan to beat them”

  The German juggernaut had been unstoppable since the invasion began in June of 1941. That is until December, when the Red Army had staged a massive counterattack in front of the gates of Moscow and sent our forces reeling back more than one hundred and fifty kilometers. It had been a serious blow, but our generals assured us it was nothing more than an oversight and we would be knocking on the door of the Kremlin very soon. For many of us reluctant ‘volunteers’ in the SS, an end to the icy wastes of the Eastern Front could not come soon enough. First of all we had to beat the Russians, at the moment they seemed to have seized the initiative and we all wondered when our commanders would take it back.

  “Damn the High Command, we’ve got a more immediate matter to take care of.”

  I noticed that Goethe had returned to stand nearby, he was behind Kurz, listening intently.

  “What do they want, Sir?”

  “A senior SD intelligence officer was travelling with one of our units, a battalion from Waffen-SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. They were unfortunate enough to find themselves caught in the path of an entire Soviet Army. Most of them were wiped out, this particular officer escaped with a single company and headed this way, towards Army Group North. The Reds found out who this man was and sent two NKVD companies after him, he got as far as Ryabovo. There they ran into part of a Soviet Division, a detachment from the First Shock Army that was moving up to the Leningrad Front, now our men are surrounded, poor devils. They want us to send in a small squad to lead them to safety. Someone who has experience of operating behind enemy lines.”

  “Someone like me, is that it?”

  He smiled thinly. “Exactly, Obersturmfuhrer Roth, someone like you. Scharfuhrer Goethe, I suggest you make the platoon ready, you leave in one hour.”

  Goethe’s face was a picture of dismay as he doubled away, cursing under his breath. I had to work hard to stop myself from smiling. The brutal sergeant major, Sturmabteiling bullyboy and bank robber had finally met his match here on the Eastern Front. Neither the Sturmbannfuhrer Kurz, the Red Army nor the Russian winter were as easy to overcome as he’d found the helpless Jews of the Reich were after Hitler’s ascendancy to power and the passing of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935. These laws were introduced at the annual Nuremberg Rally, they enshrined the ideology of scientific racism and anti-Semitism. For men like Goethe, they were the perfect justification to go out and break heads and rob Jews who were unable to fight back. He was a huge tough man, as able to intimidate with his physical appearance a
s with his huge fists. Not far short of two meters tall, everything else about him was large, his huge, cruel face, topped with hair as close cropped as the CO. Unlike the CO he had thick, bushy eyebrows and a thin moustache, giving him the look of a man of low intelligence. That may have been true, but whatever he lacked in mental ability he mad up for with a clever cunning always backed by his weightlifter’s physique. He was a tank. I was wary of him, although we had an uneasy agreement that we needed to cooperate. I knew the agreement would end the second that Walther Goethe thought it suited him. I had little doubt that one day I would have to kill him.

  I was jerked back to reality as I realized what Kurz had said. One hour!

  “Sturmbannfuhrer Kurz, I don’t even know where this Ryabovo is. One hour is not enough time for me to...”

  “You will leave in one hour, Roth. The town of Ryabovo lies approximately one hundred kilometers south of here, you’ll be able to make good time traveling openly in one of our vehicles. The last twenty kilometers is, shall we say, contested territory, Ryabovo and the surrounding area is held by the Soviets. You’ll need to make your way more carefully when you get there. If you leave shortly you’ll be in position to cross the lines at nightfall.”

  “Who exactly is this SD officer, Sir?”

  “His name is SS-Standartenfuhrer Manfred Heydrich, he is a cousin of SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhardt Heydrich, Deputy Leader of the SS and head of the SD, second in command to Reichsfuhrer Himmler. If this officer fell into Russian hands it would be a disaster. For all of us, Heydrich is not known to be a forgiving man.”

  “I’ll do my best, Sir. Do you know why Standartenfuhrer Heydrich was with the Leibstandarte, it seems a strange place for an SD Colonel?”

  Kurz paused and looked around, he seemed to be embarrassed. It was not like our tough Battalion Commander.

  “Do you remember that mission you carried out behind the lines last year?”

  I nodded.

  “It seems that the Fuhrer has a strong interest in ancient relics. He even uses an astrologer, some say he plans to win the war with black magic.” Kurz smiled. “Of course, those rumors are nonsense, nothing more.”

  “Of course they are, Sir,” I replied. “How could anyone be that crazy?”

  He gave me a sharp look. “Hmm, well, yes, you’re right, it is crazy. Perhaps there is some symbolic value in these old relics, maybe they’re valuable works of art, I don’t know. The Fuhrer heard of one such relic and asked Himmler to get hold of it for him. It seems that the Reichsfuhrer has taken this to heart, he’s determined to please Hitler and acquire his relic. He assigned Standartenfuhrer Heydrich to chase it up, apparently they thought it was in a Communist Party vault outside Demyansk. It turns out it wasn’t there, but they were ambushed while they were returning.”

  “I see.” I didn’t see, at all. “What is this thing, do you know?”

  “Yes, I do.” He looked around, but no one else was stirring on this frozen morning. “It is the Robe of John the Baptist, given to Jesus Christ when he embarked on his ministry. You must keep it to yourself, Roth. I don’t want half of Russia to know what’s at stake.”

  “Of course, Sir.”

  It was yet another mad quest on the orders of a lunatic. How could Hitler or Himmler have risen to the height of power in the Third Reich and yet have such absurd ideas? This Robe was a fake, of course. It had been said there were enough pieces of the True Cross in circulation to build a battleship. And enough nails from the Cross to fasten it together. This Robe of John the Baptist could only be one more in a long line of absurd inventions of the febrile mind of some long-forgotten Persian market trader. Yet Hitler and Himmler believed in it. Still, no matter how idiotic their ideas, it would not do to make a gift of this Nazi bigwig to the Soviet propaganda departments.

  “It would help us to take the half-track, the Sd. Kfz 251. The terrain is hard going to the south and if we’re to get there before nightfall, we don’t want to spend time digging a truck out of the mud.”

  Kurz nodded. “Very well, but try and bring it back, we only have the one. Anything else?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so, I’ll leave the half-track well hidden, we can pick it up on the way back. What about the men who are with Standartenfuhrer Heydrich?”

  “They will have to do their duty and keep fighting while you bring him out, you’ll need some cover when you’re withdrawing.”

  I felt stunned. “It’s a sentence of death. There could be a hundred men there, good SS boys, and we’re to leave them to die?”

  He shrugged. “If necessary, yes. I have no orders to the contrary. Just do your best, Roth. Good luck.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  I saluted and he walked away. “You can come out now, Goethe.”

  My Scharfuhrer stepped out from a narrow, dark alley that he had been sheltering in.

  “Did you get it all?”

  He nodded. “Enough to know that they’re sending us on another idiotic mission to get our arses shot off. It’s really easy though, we can just drive halfway to this Ryabovo place, wait a few days for the Russians to overrun them and finish them off, then come back and say we couldn’t make it.”

  “And leave a hundred of our men to die?”

  He did at least have the grace to look guilty. “Better them than us.”

  I shook my head. “We’re going in to save this cousin of Heydrich’s and pull out those Leibstandarte boys at the same time. As for this Robe, I’ve no doubt they’ll want it located. If they’re that desperate in Berlin for a flea-infested robe and they ask us to do get it, we can steal one from a peasant and send them that instead, they won’t know the difference.”

  Goethe looked dubious, his heavy, battered face creased in a frown. “Do you think it would work?”

  I knew Goethe well. What he meant to ask was whether it would be a good, moneymaking scam for the future.

  “Between Joseph Stalin and Heinrich Himmler, I’d just worry about staying alive, Goethe. Get the men moving and order one of the men to locate the half-track.”

  It took slightly more than an hour before Blomberg and Brenner came roaring through the gates in the half-track, the Sd. Kfz 251. Commonly known as the Hanomag, the Sonderkraftfahrzeug 251 half-track was an armored troop carrier. It was the largest and best of the wartime armored half-tracks, widely used by our panzer grenadiers to carry them into battle where they could keep up with the Panzers. How the CO had managed to acquire this one I had no idea. I did not put theft past him, or even murder. One of my new men, Ludwig Wasser was driving. I wasn’t quite sure about him, he’d been sentenced for trade union activities, like me his politics were left wing. But he seemed too secretive, never willing to discuss anything, almost as if he was hiding something. Before the war he’d been a truck driver for a short time, then he served a term of imprisonment in Munich. He was very short and stocky with a crew cut and dark hair, always well combed. Some said that with his blunt, muscular features he reminded them of Reichsleiter Bormann, although in miniature. His eyes were dark brown and brooding, for some reason I didn’t trust him completely, although for the time being I had to give him the benefit of the doubt. Soldiers were too few to pick and choose.

  He pulled up next to the stores and began loading weapons, food and equipment. Ernst Dagmar was dragging wooden crates of ammunition for the MG34s, passing them to Wasser who stowed them away. Dagmar was one of my replacements, he was of Czech Moravian descent, pale and mysterious. He didn’t say a lot and the men didn’t talk to him much, even his appearance was slightly odd. I thought of him as the ‘Grey Man’, nothing about him was prominent. He was of medium height and medium build. His skin was, well, medium, as were his eyes, an insipid blue, a little like the Fuhrer’s but without the blaze of fanaticism. He’d have made a good spy, once seen he’d be immediately forgotten. He was the grey man, anonymous, forgettable. But he did his job well enough, I had no complaints.

  Blomberg and Brenner were making certa
in there was plenty of food, where we were going there would be nothing but hostile, frozen Russian wasteland. And mud. Kurz returned with maps and a written order for me.

  “There’s nothing about Sturmbannfuhrer Heydrich in there, of course. If you’re captured, it’s a straightforward rescue mission. The map should be quite accurate, it shows the route to Ryabovo clearly.”

  We both knew that most of the Russian military maps were best used as guidelines, they did not always reflect the actual roads that existed. They were more wishful thinking of the Soviets than reality, possibly roads that they would like to exist and at some date in the future may get around to building.

  “The road leads to the south, towards Moscow,” he continued. “It’s the direct route, there’s no time for a subtle approach.”

  We shook hands, I tightened my steel helmet and climbed aboard. The driver gunned the engine and we roared out of the camp.

  We made only ten meters before an artillery barrage started and Wasser swerved into the shelter of a clump of trees. A railway track ran alongside the Moscow road, it seemed that they were aiming to destroy the road and cut the track at the same time. The route south to Ryabovo would be blocked. Kurz had been watching, he walked out through the gates and came towards us. He was not wearing a steel helmet, he just strolled casually through the hailstorm of steel until he reached the half-track where we cowered inside the armored hull.

  “Roth, it’s time you were leaving, you need to reach Ryabovo before nightfall.”

  I stood up, pride dictated that I couldn’t stay undercover while my CO stood apparently untroubled in the midst of the bursting shells.

  “I was concerned not to lose the half-track, Sir, so I thought it would be best to wait until the artillery barrage ends.”

  “I think not, you need to move out now.”