Chieftains

by Robert Forrest-Webb Bob

  Podini was already firing as the men dropped, the crisp sounds of his Remington echoing from the high walls on either side. Bullets from the automatic rifle were ricochetting from the brickwork.

  The boy was shouting again, his words punctuating the rifle shots.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Ginsborough swore beside Browning, ‘the lousy little fucker.’

  Browning’s German wasn’t much good, but he’d understood enough to hear the boy yell that they we Russians and still alive. If they were supposed to be Reds and someone was firing at them, then whoever was at the other end of the rifle was likely to be a friend. He called out, ‘We’re Americans… Americans…’

  The shooting ceased but then nothing happened for a few moments until a voice said, ‘Stand slowly. With your hands up.’

  ‘Real slow,’ Browning warned the crew. He stood, cautiously. Out there in the darkness someone: had him in their sights. A slight twitch of a finger and he would be blown away.

  ‘Put your weapons down,’ said the voice.

  ‘They’re down.’

  There was movement. Browning thought he could see several men at the far end of the alley. A barrel glinted in a window a few meters above them.

  ‘Walk forward.’

  Browning and his crew did so.

  The boy had scrambled from behind the rubble and now ran past them. He spoke quickly to the soldiers. One, a lieutenant, walked over to Browning, keeping a rifle aimed at his chest. He said a few words whish Browning assumed to be Russian.

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand you. We’re American… Black Horse Cavalry. Our tank’s out of action… the battle near the river, this afternoon.’

  ‘Be quiet.’ The lieutenant spoke to one of his soldiers. The man searched Browning, and then the others. ‘No… don’t move. Keep your hands up.’

  The officer looked through the identification papers, then shrugged. ‘These don’t mean anything. There are plenty on the battlefield.’

  Adams said: ‘Shit, man, you think I’m Russian?’

  ‘You could be Cuban, Angolan.’

  ‘Assholes… that’s worse than being called nigger.’

  ‘Steady Mike,’ warned Browning. If Adams lost his cool then everyone was likely to end up dead; and Adams was particularly sensitive about his nationality.

  ‘Who’s your commanding officer?’

  ‘Mickey Mouse,’ answered Podini. He was angry with the way the man had spoken to his friend.

  ‘You know we can’t tell you that,’ said Browning. ‘How the hell do we know you aren’t Russians?’

  ‘We got a stand-off situation,’ added Ginsborough. ‘Only we ain’t got guns.’

  The boy spoke from behind them, excitedly.

  The officer levelled his rifle at Browning’s forehead. ‘One of you still has a pistol… which one?’

  ‘None of us,’ answered Browning. He hoped he was right.

  ‘The boy says you all had one; he has found only three.’

  ‘I gave mine away.’

  ‘Lying is a good way to die.’

  Browning spoke quickly. ‘It’s the truth. I gave mine to the woman who was with the boy. You can check.’

  ‘Why would you do that?’

  ‘I was sorry for her.’ It didn’t sound convincing.

  The lieutenant spoke to the boy who turned and ran from the alley. ‘We will find out. Now move.’

  They were led into the barn and then down a narrow flight of steps to a cellar. At the side of a stack of boxes was a narrow door partially concealed behind a concrete pillar. They were pushed inside. The room was lit by an oil lamp. Resting on benches along its length were more than a dozen infantrymen, Bundesgrenzshutz, their faces worn and tired, filthy with camouflage and the dirt of battle. Their weapons were across their knees or resting on the ground beneath the seats. Several looked up as Browning and his crew entered, but most ignored them. The lieutenant pointed to the far end of the room with the barrel of the rifle: ‘Go sit there.’

  Browning and the crew did so.

  ‘What now?’ asked Adams.

  ‘What the hell what now? Why d’you always ask what now?’ grumbled Podini. ‘How the hell do I know what now?’

  They waited for several minutes, and then one of the soldiers who had been outside in the alley came into the room and handed the German lieutenant Browning’s Remington. He said a few words to the officer, then left. The lieutenant examined the pistol, did out the magazine and worked the round from the breech. He examined the bullet slowly, turning the case in his fingers close to the light.

  ‘It’s a live one,’ said Browning. ‘You can test it.’

  ‘On your head,’ suggested Adams.

  The lieutenant grinned sheepishly, and for the first time sounded friendly. ‘I believe you. No one but an American is going to be so stupid as to give his only weapon away. Chivalrous… but stupid Don’t forget, Sergeant, the Russians have been in Germany before; our women learnt how to survive. A pistol, for them, is the shortest route to the execution ground. And if you were a soldier of the Heer, such a generosity in wartime could get you shot. However… thank you for the gesture.’

  ‘So okay,’ said Adams. ‘Now what about my gas cutter?’

  Browning explained about the XM1’s track, and how they had become isolated after the battle.

  ‘And what will you do if your tank is repaired?’ asked the lieutenant.

  ‘Get back to our unit, if we can. Try to find a place where the Russians are thinnest, and break through, rejoin the war.’

  ‘You have enough fuel?’

  ‘We’ve a three hundred mile range; we topped-up before the attack.’ Browning studied the German’s face. The man was very young, not much more than twenty-five years old. He looked like a student.

  ‘We will help you. We know the village. We can find the equipment you need.’

  ‘Once we get the Abrams repaired, maybe we can give you guys a lift someplace,’ suggested Browning.

  The lieutenant grimaced, then shook his head. ‘We’re staying. The Russians will be back to consolidate the area, and we will be waiting for them.’

  Lieutenant Colonel Studley had blacked out, fainted with the pain when one of the guards stamped on the wound in his calf, but it was the agony which dragged him back to consciousness, pulsing, searing, encompassing his entire body.

  Studley heard himself scream, and the sound horrified him. There was still only darkness, and the sounds which came from his throat were uncontrollable, unreal, making him feel disembodied. Once, in childhood, he had broken an arm and been taken to hospital to have it set. He awakened on the operating table while the doctor was still manipulating the bone, and there had been the same combination of pain and sound… but then it had ended abruptly with the introduction of more anaesthetic, and became nothing more than a nightmare he remembered later. He tried now to find reality but for a long time it refused to appear, drowned by the spasms which shook his body and mind.

  The bright glow was a small light above his head; faces blurred. He thought at first he must be in some medical centre where they were tending his wounds; his head throbbed violently. He found his arms were pinioned, pulled backwards so far his spine was arched away from the ground beneath him. His legs were spread wide.

  There was a voice, persistent, questioning, It echoed inside his head, distorted, strident. He was being forced to concentrate on the words, the threats. He remembered.

  ‘You have no more chances. I warned you it would become unpleasant. You throwing your life away for no purpose.’

  I am not here, thought Studley. He tried to blank the recent past from his mind. This is not reality; reality is Jane… brown eyes, long dark hair slipping between my fingers… her gentle body.

  The agony returned, electrical, twisting at his bowels, jerking at strained and torn muscles, contorting his body and exploding like a thousand white-hot needles in his brain.

  ‘The code, Colonel Studley… only the code�
�� the code… the code… only the code.’

  The code? What code? There wasn’t any code… isn’t any code. The word doesn’t exist. Nothing I am experiencing exists in my real world; only Jane exists. Jane… dear God, Jane.

  He felt her lips on his neck, and the round warmth of her breasts against his body. He could smell the scent of her hair. She was gripping him tightly, her thighs clasping him… he was losing her… the pain tearing her from his grasp.

  ‘The code, Studley… a few simple words…’ The agony and the shouting repeated a hundred times, gathering momentum until all his senses spun together in confusion.

  The screams — they were no longer his own and he found he could ignore them. He could see her face again… the gentle mouth smiling, her eyes moist.

  He realized his arms had been freed; it was part of the dream again. He refused to allow himself to be tricked. He was upright; body sagging, legs useless, his head lolled as if the neck muscles had been severed. Hands supported him, controlled him

  He heard the voice of the GRU captain, but didn’t understand the words. The light had gone, his feet dragged across rough ground. Cautiously he allowed his mind to return; it was reluctant.

  He tried to shake himself free of the hands, attempting to support himself, but there was little co-ordination yet in his movements; it was returning slowly. There were voices beside him, unintelligible.

  He began to recognize his surroundings, the woods. He was stumbling through beds of autumn leaves, over fallen branches, trunks. He could not distinguish between the night sky and the dark outlines of the trees.

  They let him drop. He felt the damp ground beneath him, and pushed himself on to his hands and knees. He saw the flash of orange fire from the muzzle of a gun a meter away; a deafening burst of sound as he fell sideways, rolling, tumbling down a steep incline.

  He knew they had shot him; he was dying. He lay on his back, and he could see the stars above him. He recognized the Great Bear; found the beacon of infinite north, the Pole Star. He wondered how long he would be able to watch it before his senses faded. And what then? Perhaps he would still be able to see the stars. Perhaps, after all, something followed death. It would have been better to have died somewhere else. Beside a good river; in the warmth of a summer afternoon. There was no romance about death in wartime; that was the myth old men told the young, a lie to feed violence… religion… was there even a God? It was all very convenient, a God to control the people while they were alive, blackmail them into submission with threats of godly vengeance… provide them with an after-life to remove the fear of death, and what did you have then? A disciplined army who would fight.

  If there is a God, thought Studley, if you are up there and can hear me, just remember please that all I want is Jane. Not now, but in time.

  Max would want her, too. How would a God solve that problem?

  There was a dark shape beside him, the fallen trunk of some great tree. He could smell it rotting; the fungi. We’ll rot together, he decided, here in this hollow in the ground. The beetles and the worms will share us. You didn’t die peacefully either, tree, but you probably took longer. Perhaps you took fifty years to die; more than my lifetime.

  He closed his eyes for a time, and tried to conjure warmth; it wouldn’t come, nor would the images of Jane. It was almost as though he had expended them while he was resisting the torture. There was satisfaction in that… in the endurance. He had won, and the GRU captain had lost. It had been a small individual war between them, and the knowledge the Russian would have to live with defeat pleased him.

  The Great Bear had moved a little, tilted slightly towards the heads of the pines. Studley wriggled his hand sideways until he felt the soft bark of the dead tree. It took him several seconds to realize he had done so. He clenched the other hand and felt it grasp moist earth.

  Experimentally, he lifted his head.

  No one survived a close-range burst from an AKS-74, and that was what he remembered the guards carrying. He thought he had felt the blow of the bullets, their impact throwing him sideways down the steep bank through the undergrowth until he pitched against the tree trunk. Soviet 5.45mm bullets had the reputation of going in small, but doing a lot of damage on their way out. If he attempted to move too much perhaps he would burst apart, spilling his blood and entrails beneath him. He cautiously flexed a leg, and the pain from his calf wound was startling, seeming to awaken every nerve in his body.

  He collected together his memories of the past hours; his capture, interrogation, torture. He set them in order. Miraculously, he was still alive. Alive? Why? How? He tried to understand, and realization brought a strange bitterness. He had meant nothing to the soldiers who had been ordered to shoot him; an insect to be squashed. They hadn’t even bothered to make sure they had done the job properly. He was of no importance, simply rubbish for disposal.

  He pushed himself upright and into a sitting position, his back against the fallen trunk. The exertion made him dizzy and sick. Carefully, he examined his face with his fingertips, by touch. It was unrecognizable, swollen and tender. His teeth were broken stumps, and his lips torn, caked with congealed Mood. He could not open his jaw. The cracked ribs in his side ached as he breathed, a reminder of the blow from the guard’s rifle butt.

  His leg was throbbing, the rough bandaging over the wound seeping blood. He tightened it as best he could in the darkness. There was some sort of injury to his upper back; he couldn’t tell what, it was painful but it didn’t prevent him moving his arms.

  They had wanted him to give them the code, and he had refused. They had tortured him and then tried to kill him, and he had survived. The thoughts strengthened him. He would get away; he would drag himself deeper into the woods, find somewhere he could hide out during the daylight, clean and examine his wounds. When he was stronger, he would work his way south-west and attempt to find a way through the lies, perhaps into Switzerland. If not, he would seek out one of the guerrilla groups that would certainly have been formed. Somehow, eventually, he would get back to Britain and Jane.

  He thought of the GRU captain; the man’s angular face becoming more twisted by fury as Studley had remained silent. He would torture others who came into his hands, For Studley, the de would change at midnight, but for the GRU captain there would always be a new daily code to be broken along with the will and bodies of his prisoners.

  Studley remembered his own words to his officers less than a week previously. ‘We will be outnumbered… perhaps by as many as five to one… a lot of us won’t survive. But we can hold them, if we make it too costly for them to win. Fight like hell… to the last shell or bullet or man. Never surrender… take out as many of them as you can. It’ll be bad, bloody bad, but it all depends on us. It’s our job to stop them’

  Stop them. That was what it was all about. Fighting until you couldn’t fight anymore. Then what the hell was he doing smugly assuming he had done enough? Just because he had been wounded and got himself battered didn’t relieve him of any responsibility. Just because he’d managed to survive for a few hours didn’t permit him to believe his war was ended. What of the other men? His men. They would still be fighting somewhere… wounded or not, they’d damn well fight on. So must he.

  He had crawled the steep slope above the fallen tree, to the point where the guard had shot at him. His movement had been slow and painful, but it was easier to crawl than attempt to walk at the moment.

  He could hear the sound of an engine, a generator in the distance through the trees, and worked his way towards it. The sky was brighter, the moon rising beyond the tall horizon of the woodland. A few feet to his left leaves rustled; he froze, then relaxed as a terrified rodent scurried away through the undergrowth. There were other hunters in the forest beside himself.

  He could smell diesel fuel, exhaust fumes, and the throbbing of the motor was louder. There were men beyond the clumps of bracken and bramble that skirted the clearing. He could see the head and shoulders of a guard
patrolling the edge of the woods. He knew there must be others concealed throughout the forest.

  It took a long time to inch his way forward until at least be had a clear view of the encampment. The clearing itself was almost empty, but there were vehicles parked close to the trees on the side farthest away from him, and bivouacs beside them. He recognized the radio vehicle, with its dish aerials, seventy meters ahead. A few meters from it was the BMP in which he had been imprisoned before his interrogation; the GRU officer’s truck, the BTR command post, was on the left of the clearing, isolated.

  There was a lot of activity. The radio vehicle was operating, a dim glow showing though its open doors. A group of cooks were working in a halo of mist around a hid-kitchen beneath the trees, and there was a small queue of infantrymen waiting nearby. Camouflage was being improved over several of the BMPs, as though the men intended to remain in the present position for some time.

  To his left, beyond the BTR command vehicle, was a slit trench. He noticed it only because one of the guards paused and spoke to the men inside, before continuing his patrol. Studley crawled towards it.

  He was only a few meters from the trench when one of the men it contained stood, stretched himself and then climbed out. He said a few words to a man below him, laughed, then walked away across the clearing. Studley watched him go. The man joined the end of the queue waiting by the field-kitchen. Studley wriggled his way closer to the trench. He could see the helmet of another guard; there might be a third man stretched out beside him, but it was a chance Studley realized he would have to take. He had already decided that if something went wrong, then he would fight with his bare hands until they killed him; they would shoot him anyway if he were captured again. And this time there would be no carelessness.

  He slid closer, keeping low in the shadows of the thin scrub. The man was an arm’s length away now, and if he looked over his left shoulder would be staring into Studley’s face. Studley pushed himself silently to his knees. The Russian infantryman was sitting on a box behind a machine gun. His head was cupped in his hands, the strap of his helmet was beneath his chin.