I doubt that means armed combat, he told himself, but I’ll bet dollars to donuts the Red bastards are trying to throw their weight around again in a big way.
Back in his jeep, he raced to the Berlin motor pool, where the convoy of tankers they’d just escorted were unloading their gasoline. He found the motor pool sergeant, an old maintenance chief and good friend named Stanislav “Stash” Strinski, in the streetcar garage the GI mechanics had taken over as a maintenance facility.
“Well, if it ain’t Hitler’s worst nightmare,” Strinski said, climbing down from the front fender of a deuce-and-a-half. “How the hell are you doing, Sean? Kill any of them Red bastards yet?”
“I’m working on it, Stash…and funny you should mention that because I need your help.”
“Name it, buddy.” The u in buddy had a distinct oo sound to it; growing up an immigrant on the tough streets of Chicago had never fully erased the Polish pronunciations from his acquired English.
Sean pointed to a Sherman tank on the far side of the yard. “That Zippo over there—what’s wrong with it, Stash?”
Strinski made a guttural sound of disgust and then said, “Some damn fool tried to drive the main gun right through what he thought was only a brick wall. He didn’t figure there was a steel girder inside. The muzzle’s all gouged up…the tube’s ruined and needs to be changed out. Nothing I can do about that here, so I’m waiting on a work order to move her to the ordnance depot.”
“How about I take her off your hands, Stash?”
Strinski looked interested but skeptical. “How are you gonna do that, my boy?”
“First off, you got a transporter for her?”
Still skeptical, he replied, “Yeah…”
“Well, a couple of these fuel tankers are gonna be here for a while before it’s their turn to be unloaded. We’ll take one of their tractors and pull that flatbed transporter back to the tank barn in the GI zone. We’ll bring the flatbed back and pick up the empty fuel tanker tonight or tomorrow.”
“We still gotta have paperwork for all that, Sean. I can’t have anybody accusing me of losing a tank.”
“Hey, Stash…I’m convoy NCOIC, remember? I got me a map case full of paperwork in the jeep. All we need is a convoy serial number from Frankfurt, and I can cook one of them up over the phone.”
Strinski was more amenable now. “Well, that covers my ass, I suppose. But what do you want the Zippo for, anyway?”
He looked shocked when Sean provided the answer. “You mean you’re planning a standoff with the Russians right out there on the autobahn, Sean?”
“Just a little show of force, Stash. And speaking of force, are all her machine guns still on board?”
“Yeah….”
“Did they come with ammo?”
“It’s locked up in my storeroom.”
“Then how about we unlock it, Stash? Those rounds got signed into your custody as part of the Zippo, right?”
“Yeah…”
“Well, I’m gonna sign them out as part of the Zippo.”
Strinski still wasn’t comfortable with it. “We’re kind of working off the book here, Sean.”
“Stash, there ain’t no book no more. Everything we do is a little free-form at the moment.”
Strinski couldn’t argue with that. Every GI was struggling with Ike’s mutually exclusive mandates: support and manage the German populace while somehow coexisting with the Russians, who had little interest in coexisting with anybody. In fact, they were throwing every monkey wrench they could into the American efforts. Ike’s book that detailed occupation policy was based on lofty political fantasy. Down at the troop level, the realities of occupation existence required original thinking on a daily basis. If you kept to the book, you’d spend most of your time spinning your wheels and getting fleeced by desperate, conniving Germans and ornery Russians.
There was one more hitch. Strinski asked, “Doesn’t an officer have to sign off on the convoy forms?”
“No problem, Stash,” Sean replied. “Lieutenant Bennett will do it. As a matter of fact, he’s the one who brought up the idea of using tanks as convoy escorts in the first place.”
“Now ain’t that convenient?” Strinski replied. “Sounds like a plan. And Sean…one more thing…”
“What’s that, Stash?”
“Save a Red or two for me.” He was waving a big crescent wrench like a club as he said it.
“You got it, old man.”
Back on the phone at the Berlin CP, it took Sean all of three minutes to get a convoy serial number from Frankfurt HQ. What he proposed—using a deadheading vehicle to transport armor in need of repair—smacked of such efficiency that it never occurred to the officer on the other end of the line to question whether this request had anything to do with that confrontation on the autobahn.
But when Lieutenant Bennett showed up at the CP and heard what Sean was putting together, he went white. “A show of force, Sergeant?” he asked Sean. “Do you really think that’s a good idea? I mean, it’s against regulations!”
“Negative, Lieutenant,” Sean replied. “Open conflict is against regulations. The regs don’t say nothing about putting on a little show, though. The Reds are doing it every damn day. All they understand is force.”
He slid the clipboard with the authorization form across the table to Bennett. The lieutenant hesitated, unable to put pen to paper.
“Our boys need our help, Lieutenant,” Sean prodded. “It’s gonna take almost an hour to get to them. So what’s it gonna be, sir?”
“There’s got to be some other way, Sergeant…”
“Oh, there’s plenty of other ways, Lieutenant. We could sit here dreaming them up all damn day. But we’re the closest help those boys got. Now, are you gonna sign or what, sir?”
Bennett relented. But as he was signing the form, he asked, “What if we run into a Russian tank or two, Sergeant?”
“If they still got one that actually runs good, I kinda doubt they’ll be wasting it cruising the autobahn, Lieutenant.”
A half hour later they were through the Soviet checkpoint and back on the autobahn. Convoy QM7-11-5 was a small one, consisting of Lieutenant Bennett’s jeep in the lead, five empty fuel tenders, one semi-trailer tank transporter carrying the Sherman from Stash Strinski’s motor pool, and Sean’s jeep bringing up the rear. They’d jockeyed drivers around so the two men in the cab of the flatbed’s tractor were also qualified tank drivers. Sean would need those tankers to man the Zippo with him when it came time to roll her off the carrier and put her to work. Wasting no time, Bennett nudged the convoy’s pace a little beyond the Soviet-imposed fifty-miles-per-hour speed limit. He would have pushed it even higher if not for the tank transporter with its heavy load laboring to keep up.
“Coming up on kilometer marker one hundred,” Bennett told Sean over the radio. That was the spot they’d picked to dismount the Sherman. The confrontation would be about a mile farther down the road.
With the convoy now stopped on the shoulder of the autobahn, Sean and his two tankers cranked up the Sherman and drove her down the flatbed’s loading ramp. Once the tank was rolling down the road, an assistant driver from one of the fuel tenders drove Sean’s jeep onto the flatbed and then climbed behind the wheel of the semi. With the Sherman leading the way, the convoy started to roll again at a sedate twenty miles per hour, near the tank’s top speed. He told his tankers, “Let’s have no fucking mistakes with the thirty cals. Keep off the triggers until I say different.”
Perched high in the commander’s hatch atop the turret, Sean had a good view of the confrontation ahead before they’d driven five hundred yards. There were two deuce-and-a-halfs off the road at haphazard angles on opposite sides of the pavement. One was toppled over, nose down in the roadside drainage ditch. The other was upright but the driver’s side appeared to have been sideswiped, with dents and scrapes extending the length of the vehicle.
Stalled in the lane behind the sideswiped truck—the lane headed to Berlin�
��was the rest of an eastbound American convoy, a dozen deuce-and-a-halfs in all. Their path was blocked by two Soviet armored cars turned broadside to the flow of traffic. A dozen Russian soldiers were scattered like sentries at irregular intervals along the column of American vehicles, submachine guns slung across their chests; they circled their posts aimlessly, a behavior common among troops who don’t understand their task. Standing well off the road, a platoon-sized knot of GIs milled around as if detained behind some invisible fence. Their carbines were slung over their shoulders, pointed skyward and not at the Russians.
Typical SNAFU, Sean thought. Nobody knows whether they’re supposed to shit or go blind.
The tank drew close to the blocked convoy now, close enough to see the faces and rank insignia of the Russians. An officer stood boldly in the Sherman’s path, hand raised, silently commanding it to advance no farther.
“What do you want me to do, Sarge?” the tank driver asked over the interphone.
“Don’t even fucking slow down,” Sean replied.
Then he turned around in the hatch and motioned for Lieutenant Bennett to lead the rest of their little convoy straight through the bottleneck.
Looking forward again, he watched the face of the Russian officer change from an expression of stern authority, to uncertainty, and then to outright fear he was about to be flattened by the Sherman.
He jumped out of the way, shouting in English, “HALT! YOU ARE ORDERED TO HALT!”
As the tank rolled past him, Sean yelled back, “OR WHAT? YOU’RE GONNA SHOOT?”
They left the officer in a cloud of exhaust smoke from the Sherman.
“Pull up to that armored car on the right,” Sean told his driver. “Looks like a BA-64. We should be able to crush it like a tin can if we want.”
“How close do you want me to get, Sarge?”
“So close that nobody can walk between them.”
The rest of the convoy from Berlin—with Lieutenant Bennett still in the lead—rolled on through, despite the frenzied, arm-waving protests of several Russian sergeants. Per the plan, once they were a mile farther down the autobahn, they’d stop and wait for Sean and his tank.
The Sherman came to a stop as commanded, its bow just inches from the side of the BA-64, its main gun hanging over the little armored car like a finger poised to thump it on its head. The Russian officer had caught up and was standing beside the tank, banging a clipboard against her hull. Red-faced, he was screaming up to the turret, “I WILL SEE YOUR TRANSIT PAPERS NOW.”
Sean climbed down to the ground and started walking toward the clustered GIs. He ignored the Russian officer who chased behind him, making one demand after another.
It was only then that Sean realized the truck on its side might have been an American-made deuce-and-a-half, but it had Soviet markings.
Fucking lend-lease…
When he reached the GIs, Sean said, “You look like a bunch of sheep in a pen. Who’s your shepherd, for cryin’ out loud?”
A staff sergeant made his way slowly forward. A PFC with a gash on his forehead followed him.
The Russian officer pointed to the PFC and said, “This man caused accident. He is unsafe driver. I will take him into custody. You will order him to come with me.”
“I don’t think so, pal,” Sean replied.
“It is required,” the officer said.
“No, it ain’t, Ivan.”
The PFC relayed a different take on what had happened. He told Sean, “The fucking Reds in that deuce of theirs tried to force me off the road, Sarge.” With a touch of pride in his voice, he added, “Didn’t work out that way, though. My truck got a little banged up, but at least it can still go.”
Glancing across the road at the toppled truck, Sean replied, “Yeah, I see. How’s your head?”
“I’m okay…just got bounced off the door post a little. They would’ve probably hauled me away already, but the Sarge here”—he nodded to the staff sergeant—“kept me in the middle of our guys so they couldn’t get at me.”
“Yeah,” the staff sergeant added, “the Reds are afraid to force their way in. Won’t pull their weapons, either. Ain’t enough of them yet, I guess, even with the MGs on those armored cars. By my count, we outnumber them two to one. We’ve been sitting here almost three hours, and this is the most troopers they could come up with.”
“Nice job, so far,” Sean said to the staff sergeant. “Now let’s get this over with.”
The Russian officer was still babbling about arresting the GI. He was beginning to fondle the butt of the pistol in the holster on his belt, too.
Sean waggled a finger over his head, a signal to the Sherman driver to get moving.
Then he asked the officer, “Hey, Ivan, your guys in that rolled-over truck Uncle Sam was nice enough to loan you…are they okay?”
Before the Russian could answer, the Sherman’s engine revved and it began to inch forward. With shrieks of metal-on-metal, its bow made contact with the much smaller armored car. The tank continued to creep forward, pushing the Russian vehicle sideways into a slow, ninety-degree pivot toward the roadside. It wouldn’t take much to push it and the other armored car off the pavement and into the ditch.
Sean repeated his question: “I asked you if your guys in that deuce got hurt. What’s the story? Maybe we can help each other out here.”
The detained GIs were cheering the tank’s bulldozing efforts loudly. The Russian officer’s head kept swiveling from this American mob to the spectacle of his vehicle being forcibly repositioned. Pointing to the Sherman, he said, “You must stop that immediately.”
“Sure. Just as soon as we make ourselves a little deal.”
The armored car was halfway to the ditch.
“What kind of deal?” the Russian asked.
“Answer my question first, Ivan. You got anybody injured?”
“Yes. Two men.” He pointed to the two sprawled on the ground across the autobahn. Even from a distance, they looked like they’d taken a serious beating.
“And shouldn’t you be getting them to the damn hospital? They’ve been laid out over there for hours. You don’t want them to die out here, do you?”
“They will not die.”
“I ain’t so sure of that, pal. They look like stretcher cases to me.”
The armored car was off the pavement now. Its right wheels were just feet from the roadside ditch.
“You didn’t even try to evacuate these guys, did you? I tell you, Ivan…if you were an officer in my army, we’d be having a little party for you.”
The Russian replied, “You know I am not supposed to shoot you, even though I want to very much.”
“Yeah, I know the drill, Ivan. Nobody can shoot unless the other guy shoots first, right? Well, here I am, trying to talk reason and help you out from under this fuckup you and your men caused. But I don’t think you understand reason, my friend.”
“We are not friends.”
Sean winked at him. “Yeah, you got that right. Just a figure of speech, you know, pal?”
“Besides,” the Russian continued, “I am senior lieutenant. You are only a—”
His words caught in his throat. One wheel of the armored car was dangling over the edge of the ditch. It only took a quick glance at the Russian’s face to know he’d be in more trouble with his superiors if he lost an armored car than two of his men.
“All right,” he said. “We talk. What is this you say you will do for me?”
Sean gave the stop signal—a raised fist—to the Sherman driver. The tank creaked to a halt. The armored car tottered for a moment, then settled against the tank’s bow, three of its four wheels still on level ground. Then he said to the Russian, “Here’s the deal. This convoy here’s going to start moving toward Berlin right now. That’s the closest medical help. Load your wounded guys on that second truck. We’ll take them to your docs in the city. You got a medic that can ride with them?”
The Russian shook his head.
; “Well, we happen to have one riding shotgun with this convoy.” He pointed to a GI in the crowd wearing a red cross armband. He’ll be glad to tend to them. Kind of a shame, actually, since he could’ve been tending to them all along—”
The Russian officer cut him off with a raised hand. “No,” he said. “I am in charge here, not American cowboy. This convoy does not move again until—”
As he spoke his hand wrapped around the grip of his pistol.
Sean cold-cocked the Russian on the spot.
“Oh, geez,” the American staff sergeant said. “We’re in for it now.”
“Bullshit,” Sean replied. “Gimme a hand dragging this Ivan out of the way before he gets his ass run over.”
Then he yelled, “ALL YOU MUTTS GET IN YOUR VEHICLES AND GET MOVING, ON THE DOUBLE.”
The officer would be punch-drunk for a few moments more. Only one of the Russian soldiers—a sergeant standing alongside the sideswiped deuce-and-a-half—saw what had happened. He began to yell to his soldiers—to rally them, no doubt—but they were too far away to understand what he was saying.
Then the Russian soldiers saw the surge of GIs headed toward them. They didn’t know they were running to their trucks; they thought they were being stormed.
So they turned and ran for the cover of the ditch on the far side of the road.
The American convoy was rolling within seconds.
Just as quickly, Sean was back on board the Sherman. She roared away down the autobahn, past the startled faces of the Russian soldiers now huddled in the ditch. Passing their two injured soldiers, Sean gave them a hey, I tried gesture: arms bent upward at the elbows, palms out. His radio message to Lieutenant Bennett was simple: “On our way. Be ready to roll, over.”
Sean traversed the turret rearward as the Sherman plowed down the autobahn, a meaningless threat as the main gun, with its damaged muzzle, was useless.
But at least the coax thirty cal still works if we need it.
It took almost three minutes to reach Bennett’s parked convoy. Sean could see the lieutenant pacing the road by the tank transporter. As the Sherman was being stowed on the flatbed, he demanded, “You better tell me what the hell happened back there right now, Sergeant.”
This Fog of Peace (Moon Brothers WWII Adventure Series Book 4) Page 5