The Military Megapack

by Harry Harrison

  “No,” said Pavlovitch. “No. I know.” He turned to Feodor. “I don’t know how—I got—on my horse. Maybe—I think—my horse was blown down too. I—think—I—got on him while he was still on—the ground. When it was all over—we headed for—home.” He smiled weakly at the thought of home. “Home,” he murmured, as though it were a sacred word. He went on: “We were getting—along—all right—until we met Nazi guerrillas. They shot at us—at me. I heard their leader—tell the men—not to kill the horses. He didn’t care what—they did—to me. They called him—Captain Von Starheim.”

  “Von Starheim!” gasped Mickey. Turning to Feodor he shouted: “Do you know what this means? It means that Von Starheim had followed that horse here . . .”

  But Feodor was not listening to Mickey. He was listening to machine gun fire outside the cave. Mickey realized what was happening. Von Starheim and his gang of Nazi killers had found the hideout of the Russian guerrillas and they were attacking it.

  “To arms! To arms!” shouted Feodor. But he could have saved his breath. His men were already blasting at the Nazi invaders and machine gun fire raked the pass from both ends.

  Hand grenades blasted at the mouth of the cave.

  Mickey drew deeper inside. Then he saw the hundred boxes of dynamite. One little stray bullet, and the mountain in which the cave lay, would blow apart.

  Outnumbered four to one, the Russians had little hope of destroying this band in open combat. There was a small passage in one side of the cave which led to the other underground hideout in which the horses were kept. There was just room enough for a man to stand up stoop-shouldered.

  “Help me get the wounded into the other cave, Tanya,” he said.

  * * * *

  Those wounded who could walk struggled through the passage. The others were carried on stretchers to the stables, tied to the back of some of the horses, and led out of another passage into the daylight at the rear of the mountain. He urged them to make their getaway.

  “Come with us,” they insisted.

  “No,” said Mickey. “My place is here with Feodor Koslovitch. You people cannot help us. Go down to the valley behind Pyatigorsk. Friendly hands will take care of you all there.”

  “What about Pavlovitch?” the woman asked.

  “He’s dead,” said Mickey. “Get going,” he ordered.

  The woman mounted one of the horses and Mickey handed up her youngster. They whipped up the horses and disappeared into other passes which led them in a roundabout way toward the valley behind Pyatigorsk.

  Mickey returned to the stable. About twenty of the guerrillas were mounting their horses for their getaway.

  “Where are you going?” he asked of the mounted men.

  “Koslovitch ordered us to evacuate while we still can,” one of the men replied. “We cannot win. We are outnumbered four to one. He is wounded: the others remaining with him are wounded and cannot escape. But you— Come with us, Comrade.”

  “No, thank you,” replied Mickey. “My place is here. I have no orders yet to evacuate. But you go while you can. Take the back pass. Follow your wounded comrades and protect them.”

  Mickey picked up two submachine guns lying on the stable floor. Those men were not running out, Mickey knew. If Feodor had insisted they save themselves while they could, the plight of the little guerrilla band must be hopeless. At least, he could get a shot or two in before they were all finished off; one good shot and that one in the rotten carcass that was Von Starheim.

  The American doctor slouched through the passage that connected the stable cave to the cave used by the Russian guerrillas as quarters. As he neared the passage, he observed a sudden quiet. The deadly fire had ceased. The two machine guns he held in his hands were knocked out of his grasp as he emerged into the larger cave. A flashlight was thrown in his face and momentarily blinded him as he emerged from the dark of the subterranean passageway. When he could see clearly—he saw that he faced the grim, dark barrel of a Luger pistol. And it was held in the hand of the Nazi Oberst—Von Starheim.

  VI.

  “How nice, Doctor Tchekov,” smirked Von Starheim. “Fancy meeting you here.”

  “Not very original, are you, Von Starheim?” smiled Mickey. “I think I said that once before somewhere.”

  “I don’t think I’ll have any occasion to use the phrase to you in the future, Doctor Tchekov,” scowled the Oberst. “For you—like your band of Russian guerrillas—there is no future.”

  “What have you done with the boy, Feodor Koslovitch?” asked Mickey hurriedly fearing the worst.

  “Shot him,” replied Von Starheim. “As he deserved for blowing up that ammunition train—he and his band—last night and with it five hundred of Germany’s finest infantrymen.”

  “I can see where the ammunition would be a loss,” smiled Mickey with satisfaction at hearing that five hundred Nazi smudge pots went up in smoke with the ammunition. “But as for the men,” he added, “they can mean nothing to your inferior Fuhrer judging by the number he keeps sending into the muzzles of the Russian guns to be slaughtered like diseased cattle.”

  “Silence!” shouted Von Starheim in a fury. “You will not long live to see much more of that Russian luck.” With a wave of the Luger in the direction of the mouth of the cave he motioned Mickey to get outside. As he started for the entrance, two or three shots outside made him halt. He turned to Von Starheim, enquiringly.

  The man smiled fiendishly. “The coup de grace,” he explained, guessing what was on Mickey’s mind. “We don’t like to leave wounded Russians to suffer unnecessarily”—his eyes narrowed, his lips curled significantly as he added—“we don’t take prisoners.”

  “Knowing you as well as I do, Von Starheim,” said Mickey bitingly, “I can understand that.”

  “That applies to you too,” added the Nazi, smiling.

  “I didn’t think I would be immune from your Nazi form of civilization,” retorted the American. “I wasn’t fooling myself for a single moment.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” said Von Starheim, “because I have saved you for myself. But first, I want you to witness a small ceremony.”

  They emerged into the light of the pass. As Mickey looked about him for the body of young Feodor, his eyes fell upon eight of his guerrilla comrades lined up in front of the wall of the pass. Their hands were tied behind their backs; their machine guns lay at their feet temptingly, but they could not reach for them even if they were not tied for they were faced with a row of Nazi submachine guns in the hands of Von Starheim’s men.

  Mickey’s eyes widened. He was about to turn to Von Starheim when he heard the man cry in German: “Take aim!”

  “Von Starheim!” Mickey cried. “You can’t do that! You can’t kill men in cold blood like that! It’s murder!”

  Von Starheim merely laughed.

  “Blahadaryoo, Doktarah!” cried the doomed Russians to Mickey. “Praschaheeteh!” They were thanking Mickey for all he had done for them and their stricken comrades; and they said goodbye.

  * * * *

  Mickey’s eyes filled as he smiled and waved a trembling hand at the brave men who waited for death. They smiled back at him, grateful that there was one friend to see them make the last great sacrifice.

  “Fire!” cried the Nazi Captain Von Starheim. The German machine guns raked the bodies of the Russians until the weight of the lead, added to the loss of life that made it possible for them to stand so courageously up to the Germans, brought them down and they fell across the guns with which they had laid so many of the Huns so low.

  When the smoke from the guns cleared in the draft of the pass, Mickey saw the inert body of young Feodor lying about twenty feet above the opening to the cave. He turned to Von Starheim: “These people were my friends,” he began. “I don’t expect you to do favors for me; but like your own men, they still were soldiers and deserve, if not a soldier’s burial, then a spot where the carrion birds won’t thrive on the men who gave their lives to defend t
heir homes and their land. Will you let me put their bodies inside the cave?”

  Von Starheim grinned: “The indomitable Tchekov asks me for a favor,” he said. He shrugged his shoulders. “Well, why not? We were classmates in Breslau. And this is a last request. Make it snappy and don’t keep me waiting too long.”

  Mickey did not stop to thank his enemy. He stepped across the still bodies of his friends to where young Feodor lay. He stooped down and picked the boy up in his arms; gently he carried him inside the cave.

  With his handkerchief, Mickey wiped the blood from the boy’s face. With a torn sheet taken from the bed on which he used to sleep, he covered the silent body as a tear fell from his cheek and baptized the little hero.

  One by one Mickey brought the fallen Russians into the cave. Von Starheim accompanied him on several of his trips to see that he did nothing other than that which he had requested permission to do. The other Nazis climbed up the side of the hill in which the cave lay and threw themselves down to wait for Mickey to finish.

  Mickey took another man into the cave and, as with the others, laid him on the bed he occupied in life. This man he carefully carried to one of the beds near the piled-up boxes of dynamite. Von Starheim, satisfied that Mickey was resigned to his fate, and that he would not attempt to escape, did not follow him into the cave. This was what Mickey wanted. As he laid the dead man on his bed near a box of time bombs, the Yankee guerrilla doctor grabbed one, set the fuse for five minutes, placed it in a box of dynamite the cover of which had been ripped open before, and stepped hurriedly out of the cave.

  * * * *

  There was one more man left to put in his bed. This took Mickey another minute for he laid the man on some straw near the cave opening.

  Quite calmly Mickey stepped over to the waiting Von Starheim who smiled at him as he approached.

  “I’m ready, Von Starheim,” Mickey said. “Let’s get it over with. Call your men.”

  Mickey waited for Von Starheim to call his men.

  “Oh, please don’t be silly, doctor,” said the man sarcastically. “That is my privilege. That is an honor I have looked forward to for many years. I want the pleasure of killing you myself—and alone. Only I shall enjoy your great death scene. I have earned it with patient waiting. It can mean nothing to the others.”

  “Very well,” said Mickey. “You have your Luger ready. Why don’t you use it?”

  “Not here,” said the man. “But down there.” He indicated a cluster of trees below in the valley about a thousand feet from the cave.

  Mickey glanced slyly at his watch. There were still three minutes to go before hell would break loose under unsuspecting Heinies on the hill. Mickey smiled inwardly as he hurried down the hill toward the valley.

  “You seem in a hurry,” noted Von Starheim.

  “I don’t like prolonging anything good or bad,” Mickey replied. He turned back to Von Starheim, who was following close on his heels. “Don’t shoot me in the back, will you Von Starheim?”

  “What!” replied the Nazi, “and lose the satisfaction of seeing the expression on your face when my bullets tear through you? Of course not! That would be foolish.”

  Two minutes to go.

  Mickey kept talking. “It’s a beautiful day for a murder, isn’t it rat?” he asked.

  “What do you Americans say about sticks and stones?” asked Von Starheim sarcastically.

  “You’d be surprised,” said Mickey.

  They reached the cluster of trees Von Starheim had ordered Mickey to.

  “Where do you want me to stand, you Nazi bootlicking killer?” asked Mickey. He knew the man couldn’t take much of that.

  One minute to go before the blast.

  * * * *

  The taunt didn’t seem to move Von Starheim. He seemed so intent on the sadistic enjoyment that awaited him when he would behold his Luger steel lay low the American he hated most in the world. He ordered Mickey farther into the cluster of trees.

  Thirty seconds to go.

  “I wonder what all your schoolmates at Breslau University would think if they could see the disgraced and yellow classmate of theirs, Captain Von Starheim of Hitler’s Heinie Rats about to murder a man in cold blood,” asked Mickey.

  “Donnerwetter!” cried the man as Mickey touched off the spark that made the Nazi storm. “This is it!” he screamed. Being reminded of his expulsion was more than even he could take under the circumstances. He raised the Luger muzzle to the line of Mickey’s heart. He could see the cold perspiration gather on the American’s forehead as he waited to receive the hot steel.

  “This is it!” screamed the Nazi again. And as he was about to press the trigger, it was as though he himself had given the signal. Fire flashed from the muzzle of the Luger. But the detonating sound did not seem to come from the pistol but from the hill above.

  The whole earth seemed to rise under their feet; a huge rent in the soil opened up a few feet away, as the sky suddenly blackened above them. The blackness was streaked with an orange flame. As the explosion reverberated through the valley, both men were lifted clear off their feet and thrown about twenty yards by the concussion.

  Von Starheim’s bullet went wide. His gun flew out of his hand and drove for a cluster of brush where it disappeared. There were only two great blasts, but the concussion left both Von Starheim and Mickey limp for almost fifteen minutes.

  When they both came out of the daze, they glanced off to the mountain and saw most of it blown away. The dirt and laughing Heinies that were blown skyward together, now lay quietly in each other’s bosoms.

  Von Starheim and Mickey were not immune to the falling debris. They were covered with it and had to dig themselves out. The German looked for his gun but it was nowhere in sight.

  Mickey was the first to speak.

  “Looks like fists again, rat,” he said.

  Von Starheim was pale from the blast; the threat of a physical beating made him take on a jaundiced appearance; his face turned yellow. His eyes took on a frightened expression.

  “No,” he murmured. “No. You can’t do that to me.” He recalled other beatings administered by Mickey at Breslau. “You can’t do that to me,” he repeated.

  Mickey rose to his feet. He painfully strode over to where Von Starheim was still sitting on the ground. The man tried to crawl back and away from the disaster he knew was about to befall him.

  “Get up you filthy swine,” he gritted. “You’re a brave man facing an unarmed man with a gun in your hand. You’re a brave man when you’re with other dogs like you who you order to shoot men with their hands tied behind their backs. Get up! I’m going to polish you off and this time do a better job of it than I ever did at Breslau.”

  He reached down and lifted the Nazi to his feet; then, in his best pile-driver fashion, sent his big fist crashing into the man’s mouth, driving the Nazi’s front teeth down the back of his throat.

  Mickey followed this by a left to the man’s nose. He felt the bone crush under the impact and the wine flowed as it had never flowed in any wine cellar in Germany. The murderous Nazi face was crimson; the mouth that gaped black with a huge toothless cavity, screamed for mercy.

  “What mercy did you give those Russians?” asked Mickey now in a red fury himself.

  “Help! Help!” cried Von Starheim as Mickey pounded on the man’s chest and ribs until they cracked under the trip-hammer blows.

  “Don’t call for help,” cried Mickey. “God himself wouldn’t listen to you—and right now there isn’t anyone else who could hear you.”

  He continued to beat the man into insensibility. But before the Nazi passed out, Mickey, hysterical himself now, screamed at him in a frenzy: “I set off that explosion, you dog! I blew your Nazi band to pieces! I did it!”

  He felt the German collapse under him as he shook the life out of the man to impress him with the fact that it was Mickey who destroyed his band of killers. He let him go and the man fell unconscious to the dirt-covered grass.
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  Mickey himself dropped to the ground, exhausted; weeping bitterly with anger, and at the loss of his young friend Feodor.

  There was nothing weak in his tears. No stronger man could have helped cracking under the gigantic strain. Mickey Tchekov was an ordinary human, like any other ordinary human with an average human’s courage.

  Calmed, his strength recovered, three hours later he walked into the camp of the escaped guerrillas carrying the badly mashed Von Starheim over his strong young shoulder. He dumped the man to the ground and turned him over to his comrades.

  “There he is,” he said. “This is what is left of Von Starheim.”

  “Why didn’t you kill him?” asked one of the men.

  “No,” replied Mickey. “I’m a doctor. I’m supposed to save lives; not destroy them. That’s your job.”

  “But Feodor was your friend,” reminded one of the men significantly.

  “He was your leader,” recalled Mickey.

  “He is right,” said another of the Russian guerrillas, a giant of a Cossack. “The doctor is right.” He leaned down and lifted the now whimpering Von Starheim as though the one hundred and sixty pound German were just a child. He swung him over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and headed for the rear of the barn on the farm where the guerrillas had found haven. Other of the men followed him.

  * * * *

  Mickey walked off toward a small scrub pine that grew in front of a taller growth of pine trees. It was so symbolic of young Feodor and his guerrilla band of men, that Mickey felt it was a silent memorial to the boy and his faithful followers.

  His hand caressed the pine needles and stopped suddenly as a number of shots rang out on the otherwise quiet air about the farm. There was no expression of joy on his face at the sound. He knew it was all over with his old enemy; but he knew, too, that it was all over with his young friend.

  “It won’t be—it isn’t over,” he murmured. “I’ll always remember that kid as I knew him—not as I left him. He was brave, unselfish, and fine. I’m proud to have served under him—even if he was years younger than I. Boy though he was; he was every inch a man. I hope, when I go, my friends will be able to say as much for me.”