THE OFFICE WAS warm and well-lit with electric bulbs, suggesting a generator somewhere in the compound. There was another door in the opposite wall. Vadim figured it had once been the office for the commander of the TA unit stationed here. It was neat and ordered. It was obvious Kerrican had added the framed picture of Otto Skorzeny, a Waffen-SS officer who some credited with being the father of modern special forces operations. Vadim was not one of those people. Kerrican followed Vadim’s gaze.
“Old Otto, he was a lad, wasn’t he?” Kerrican asked, grinning. Three of his soldiers had escorted Vadim into the office. Kerrican nodded to one of them, who slung his SLR and went back onto the walkway to watch the end of the pit fight. The other two, both armed with double-barrelled shotguns, remained in the office, keeping an eye on Vadim. He assumed they knew how to kill him, or they wouldn’t have lived this long, and the shotguns were good tools for the job in close quarters. Instead of answering Kerrican, Vadim turned his attention to a rifle hanging from a hook, along with two canvas pouches, each containing three spare magazines.
“Like that?” Kerrican asked. “That’s an StG 44, one of the first assault rifles ever made.”
“Came in towards the end of the last war,” Vadim said. He couldn’t shake the feeling that Kerrican was trying to impress him. He wasn’t. “Still didn’t save the Nazis. I thought Britain had very strict rules own gun ownership.”
“Yeah, and they were just about to get tighter,” he said with distaste. His accent was very different from the locals. Vadim was no expert but he was pretty sure he was from London, or its environs. “Some of us had licences, mostly for the bolt-actions. Some of the deactivated weapons weren’t too difficult to reactivate if you knew what you were doing, but you’d be amazed at how much of this stuff was just left hanging around, if you knew where to look. Add to that a few shotguns off the farms” – he nodded towards one of Vadim’s guards – “and what they had in the armoury here, and...”
“You’ve got all you need to equip your little army,” Vadim said. A nerve over Kerrican’s left eye twitched at the goad. Kerrican sat down behind the desk. Vadim’s weapons had been laid out on top of it. The captain was losing count of the mistakes these guys were making.
“So what are you, then? Other than dead, I mean,” he asked, looking up at Vadim. “KGB? GRU? VDV?” Vadim tried not to flinch at the mention of the hated KGB.
“Spetsnaz,” Vadim told him. Kerrican wasn’t looking at him; he’d picked up Vadim’s NRS-2 knife.
“What’s that when it’s at home, then?” he asked, only half paying attention. It made sense that he hadn’t heard of the Spetsnaz, very little was known about them in the West.
“Think of us as the Russian SAS,” Vadim told him. That got Kerrican’s attention. A shadow seemed to cross his face at mention of the SAS, as though he didn’t want to hear their name. Vadim wondered if Kerrican had failed selection, perhaps on psychological grounds.
“Yeah, I don’t think so, mate,” he said. “But I’m guessing you’re some kind of smart, Kremlin super-zombie sent over here to infect us with this plague, right?”
If I was, it would be foolish to let me get this close, he thought. Kerrican pointed at him.
“Ha! I knew it!” He turned to the guard to the left of his desk. “Ralphy, what’d I fucking tell you?”
“Aye, you were right enough, Stevie,” the guard said.
Kerrican turned back to Vadim. “Before the Wartime Broadcasting Service stopped working, we heard that your lads had invaded down south.”
Again Vadim said nothing.
Kerrican leaned back in his chair. “So I’m assuming you want something. What’re you here for?”
“I want my people, the ones you took on the beach,” Vadim said. “And get the two men in that pit out of it right now.”
Kerrican appeared to be giving this some thought.
“So you came on the ship?” he asked. “Always wanted to go to New York; you see it in all the films, don’t you? Well, maybe you don’t. Problem is it’s full of spicks, niggers and chinks, isn’t it?” Vadim tried to keep his naked contempt off his face. “What do I get?” the Englishman continued. The guard behind him chuckled.
“What do you want?” Vadim managed.
“If you’re just off the boat, then I don’t think you’ll have much sway with the occupying forces.”
“I’m a colonel in the USSR’s equivalent of the SS,” Vadim lied. The KGB were much more like the SS – and the Gestapo – than the Spetsnaz were. “Let’s assume that I’ll have more pull than you. Will you make me repeat my question?”
“All right, mate, calm down,” Kerrican said, leaning forward, raising a conciliatory hand. “I think the world would have been a much better place today if Hitler hadn’t broken the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. He shouldn’t have gone to war with the Soviet Union. You’ve seen what I’m capable of with next to nothing. I want control of this zone, ultimately under your command, but with autonomy to run it how I see fit. There’s gas fields offshore, a refinery, there’s people on the island who know how it all works. We could get it up and running for you. You give us the resources, we can take back Barrow-in-Furness, which means you get the dockyards.” He sat back in the chair and looked up at Vadim, expectantly.
The little speech reminded him of Gulag’s fantasy of carving out a kingdom. This is what it would look like: sad, pathetic and built out of other people’s misery. Even for Kerrican to be talking to him about this was clutching at straws; Vadim could have been anyone with a Russian accent. Kerrican was accepting him at face value because he wanted it to be true.
“And for this, you’d turn on your own people?” Vadim asked, intrigued now. Kerrican shot to his feet. He dropped the knife he had been toying with and slammed his palms down on the table.
“I didn’t fucking turn on them! They fucking turned on me! First the niggers in the ’fifties! Then the fucking Pakis! But oh, no! It’s all right for young Stevie Kerrican to go and watch his mates get killed in Ulster, get fucking chewed up in the Falklands. I deserved a Victoria Cross for what I did down there, but you know what I got instead? Fucking binned, mate, that’s what! And meanwhile the country’s turning a funny colour!” Vadim wasn’t following every word but he was getting the gist of it.
“Calm down, Hauptsturmführer,” Vadim said. He didn’t like using the man’s assumed rank, but if he gave a little, he might be able to walk out of here with all the civilians. Then it would just be a case of exterminating these fools. “As you can imagine, our supply lines are somewhat stretched at the moment, so we would be grateful; and will reward any collaboration. I assume that you have worked out that we are in satellite communication with command? We can see what can be arranged.”
Kerrican smiled and nodded. “See, what did I tell you, Ralphy?” he said.
“Sweet,” Ralphy said.
“Of course, I’ll need my people back,” Vadim said.
Kerrican gave this some thought. “That’s not a problem,” he said. “But the nigger stays in the pit.”
“Why?” Vadim demanded, trying to keep a grip on his temper.
“Because he offends me.”
“How did he offend you?”
“No, he offends me,” Kerrican said. Vadim silently apologised to Harris. He would get the policeman out as soon as he could. “Anything else?”
“Let the women and children go,” Vadim said. Kerrican’s eyes narrowed. It had been a long shot, and straightaway he knew he’d gone too far. Suspicion was written all over Kerrican’s face. The guard standing to the right of the desk, Ralphy, shifted, bringing the shotgun up, but the so-called Hauptsturmführerraised his hand to stop him.
“Why would you want me to release the leverage I have over the people here?” he demanded. “Who’ve you been talking to?”
“It didn’t take us long to work out what was going on in here. You give people nothing to lose and they fight back. You want to control them, subjugate them, they
need something to live for.” Vadim put both hands on the desk and leaned across it towards Kerrican. “And because this isn’t the way that soldiers behave.” He felt the twin barrels of Ralphy’s shotgun pressed against his temple. He was quite surprised his head hadn’t been sprayed all over the wall already, but it had been worth it. He’d managed to palm his knife off the desk and slip it up the arm of his jumper. He could feel it, pressed against the cold dead flesh of his forearm.
“No, mate,” Kerrican said, shaking his head. “Wars are won by those who have the will to do what others will not. Look at what your lot did in Berlin in Nineteen-Forty-Five.”
“Because having the will to do what others won’t worked so well for your heroes in the last war,” Vadim pointed out.
“Because they were fucking betrayed!” Kerrican was on his feet again. “One of the most shameful things this country has ever done. We should have been marching lockstep with the Germans. Instead the loony-left somehow took control and we fucking betrayed our whole race!” He pointed towards the prefab huts on the other side of the yard. “We’re doing these children a favour. We’re finally going to make Britain great again! All those women are doing is their fucking duty, for once! Breeding the next generation!” The madness was blazing in his face, now, panting and red. Vadim was struggling to control himself.
“What happened to Captain Schiller?” he asked through gritted teeth.
“He wouldn’t kneel, would he?” Kerrican told him. His eyes seemed to glitter. “He told me he’d made a mistake as a young man. He’d been conscripted, found himself in the engine room of a Kriegsmarine battleship. I told him that the only thing wrong with that was that he hadn’t volunteered. He said that the biggest regret of his life was that he hadn’t joined the resistance, fought the Nazis.” Kerrican took a knife from a scabbard on his belt: a Hitler Youth knife. “See that? Blut und Ehre. Blood and honour, as in your fucking friend the captain had none. He was a race traitor!”
“So you cut his ears off?” Vadim asked, looking at the grisly necklace around Kerrican’s neck. He could hear the sound of an engine now. Shouting from the gate. Kerrican glanced in that direction and then back, apparently unconcerned. He noticed Vadim looking at his necklace and held it up. Two of them, presumably Schiller’s, looked very fresh, the rest were blackened and old.
“You like that?” Kerrican asked grinning. “Just like Vietnam, yeah? See I was 3 Para, proper green-eyed-boy me.” Vadim had no idea what the colour of his eyes had to do with it. Kerrican was shaking the necklace of ears now. “Mostly Argies on here, but some of these belonged to American mercenaries. There’s even a couple from Ulster.”
“3 Para?” Vadim said, wracking his brain. Kerrican and Ralph were looking at his face, not his hand, and he slowly cocked the lever on the right hand side of his concealed knife’s hilt. He’d heard the gates creak open. “Didn’t they very bravely fight at Arnhem? Operation Market Garden?”
“Yeah, so what?” Kerrican said.
“And were nearly wiped out by the 10th SS Panzer division?” As Vadim clicked the knife’s safety off he saw it in Kerrican’s eyes, just for a moment: guilt. Then it was swept away by the excuses, the hate, the fantasies that had twisted the young man’s mind.
“You are a disgrace,” Vadim told him. “You deserve to wear that uniform.” Outside the office, he heard the Saracen drive into the compound. There was no cry of warning. The fake SS soldiers were too stupid to make sure that it was their own patrol returning. “This is going to happen very quickly,” Vadim told him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
0019 GMT, 25th November 1987
Vickerstown, Walney Island, North-West England
VADIM HEARD THE rockets in flight. The building shook, windows shattering, as the two Tiger tanks exploded, destroyed by the squad’s remaining RPG-18s. The world turned orange. The fragmentation grenades were almost lost among the noise.
The explosion, not surprisingly, distracted Kerrican and Ralph. Vadim raised his left arm and pulled the trigger on the NRS-2 knife, firing the 7.62mm bullet out of the blade’s hilt at Ralph. The recoil drove the blade into the dead flesh of his forearm, but a small hole appeared in Ralph’s forehead and he started to fall back. Vadim grabbed his saperka from the desk with his right hand, swung round and threw it at the other guard. The sharpened edge of the entrenching tool caught him in the shoulder and he stumbled back, dropping his shotgun.
Vadim swung back to find Kerrican hooking the Hitler Youth knife in towards his head. More out of instinct than design, Vadim stabbed out with his own blade and caught Kerrican’s knife arm with it, driving it back against the wall. Vadim tore the blade along the arm, opening it up, and the Hitler Youth knife dropped from nerveless fingers. Kerrican howled.
The door to the external walkway was kicked open and the guard with the SLR came through firing, almost hitting the screaming Kerrican. Vadim threw himself sideways as the rifle stitched a line of holes in the wall. He landed on Ralph’s corpse, scrabbled for the shotgun and rolled over. The guard fired the SLR again, hitting Ralph’s body; Vadim let him have both barrels, driving backwards out of the doorway and over the rail, into the pit.
“I’ll fucking have you!” Kerrican screamed as he clawed awkwardly for his holstered Walther with his left hand. Vadim heard gunfire outside as he rolled to his feet. He hit Kerrican in the face with the butt of the shotgun, breaking his nose.
“Ow! You cunt!” he screamed, but it distracted him long enough for Vadim to grab the pistol and toss it away.
He retrieved his knife, stabbed it into Kerrican’s leg and tore it downwards. The so-called Hauptsturmführer sat back down hard in his chair, trying to hold the wound in his leg together, shouting obscenities. Ignoring him, Vadim holstered and sheathed his weapons, before grabbing the StG 44 and the pouches of spare magazines. The guard with the saperka in his shoulder was trying to crawl through the doorway. Vadim crossed the room, kicked him screaming onto his back, tore the entrenching tool out of his shoulder and brought it down on his skull, almost bisecting it. He dropped the dripping saperka back into its loop on his webbing, then turned toward Kerrican.
“What are you gonna do?” Kerrican demanded. He was wary but not exactly frightened. Vadim strode back across the room, shoved the desk out of his way and picked Kerrican up. The Englishman thrashed ineffectually with his left arm as the captain carried him out onto the walkway.
Vadim took in the scene. Next to the gate he could make out the gutted remains of one of the Tiger tanks, torn open by the explosion. It looked like the 40mm fragmentation grenades he’d heard going off had hit the tops of two of the guard towers. Skull was limping as fast as he could towards the lorries parked against the rear wall, looking for higher ground to shoot from, and Gulag was running towards the prefab building that held the child-hostages. Once this would have worried Vadim, but not now, after what the Muscovite had done for Gloria and the Carlsson boy.
He caught a glimpse of Princess disappearing into the Joy Division prefab. The Fräulein was firing the MG 34 machine gun into the stands, using the Saracen for cover, belts of ammunition draped over her right arm. Nazis were tumbling into the pit, and Vadim saw tracers spark off the metal scaffold poles and fly into the night air. Such had been the ferocity of the attack that the re-enactors hadn’t even started firing back yet.
Vadim dragged Kerrican to the edge of the walkway, over the zombie corral. The dead were already in a frenzy, feeding on the men falling to them under the Fräulein’s onslaught. The so-called Hauptsturmführer could see what Vadim was about to do.
“I’m gonna come back!” he screamed. “I hate, like you do!” Vadim threw him down into the corral. Kerrican didn’t even try to save himself; to hold onto him, or grab for the rails.
The zombies descended.
“You’re nothing like me,” Vadim muttered, even as bullets impacted all around him. He could see Harris and New Boy in the makeshift arena. They had harvested weapons from fallen Naz
is; New Boy was dispatching the injured.
At last the fake SS started returning fire, if only sporadically. Bullets sparked off the Saracen’s armour as the Fräulein took cover behind the APC. The shooters were on the ground floor of the hall beneath Vadim and in the prefab housing the barracks. The Fräulein turned the MG 34 on the prefab as Vadim shouldered the StG 44 and headed back into the office, in time to see the interior door opening.
Vadim dropped to one knee next to a filing cabinet, and watched the barrel of a rifle slowly push the door open. A stray bullet flew in through the window behind Vadim and put a hole in the interior wall. The door opened enough for Vadim to see another SS uniform; the man’s eyes widened as he saw Vadim, and the captain squeezed the trigger on the StG 44. The rifle hammered into his shoulder, the recoil worse than an old AK-47, making the barrel climb as it stitched three neat holes in the enemy rifleman’s chest and face. He fell back, and Vadim heard panic on the other side of the door. He could use panic.
He crossed the office in a few strides, and was through the door onto a mezzanine floor above a large hall stacked with looted supplies. He saw leather sofas, huge televisions and stereos, VCRs, crates of alcohol, fridges and freezers, all presumably powered by the as-yet-unseen generator.
There were about twenty of the re-enactors down in the hall, firing through the windows facing into the compound. They were probably all aiming for the Fräulein, but their inaccurate, undisciplined fire would be sending stray rounds into the prefab huts where the refugees and the local women and children were. There were three other SS men on the stairs up to the office, and they had been smart enough to have another two covering them from the floor of the hall.
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